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Baby: How babies change you (not How you change them, and not How you don't walk around in your jammies anymore). And -- How to go to work again?
Wed, 14 Mar 2007

Permit me to ramble; the luxury to edit a post is long gone :) If your time is short, skip to the end -- help me find a workable sleep/work schedule so I can enjoy life with my wife, and still get both of us some sleep, and properly care for the baby.

I don't think I've lead a lazy lifestyle, but more a 'just in time' one. JIT is a good thing in service delivery and compilers, so it must be good all the time right? Anyway, as a male its been easy -- shower every day, and if you need to go out its merely a 10 minute pulling on of the clothes operation. When you get married you quickly learn that the fairer sex takes an hour or more to get ready, and that you should appreciate such devotion. Maybe this is what leads to male JITness. Then you have kids, and being a little lazy seems to go out the door. Overnight you become a soccer-mom. So, future child who will never read this -- we were normal once, and you broke us in hours :)

I suppose this posting is another in my 'uncoolerer' thread, where I tell the future child that 'once we were cool, then we had you, and being a parent by definition makes you uncool.' You can no longer just-in-time when you've got a newborn around -- we pack her up to get out the door to the baby-doctor and theres a poop-explosion, or crying, or formula-preparation to ensure we've got enough. Heck, longer term -- you could always grab take-out for yourself if you run out of food at home, but when you've got a child you're on the look out for everything - enough laundry done for her? enough food? anything we need to get ready so we can leave in an hour or two?

She's nor even two weeks old, but here I sit planning on what items to move from floor to floor (since my wife is still weakened and floor-locked), and planning to get the oil changes done, and ensure I'm on top of my birth paperwork and taxes .. all these things, since time is so utterly precious in a very different way now. I used to not worry about minutia, but now it seems like we have to be on top of our game to squeeze every ounce of sleep in when we can, or eventually, to get the kids all ready for school or hockey practice on time..

Anyway, I digress. As you can see, I've come a long way since the other days panic. We're starting to get the hang of things.

Still, I've not returned to work yet. We're already not getting 'enough' sleep.. perhaps enough, but not how much we want. I know my sleep cycles are totally messed up and I'm expericing symptoms of jet lag, but it'll sort out. Of late we've been trying to hit the sack at 8-9 since we're tired, but end up chatting till 10-11 anyway since we miss each other and need to go over all the things that've happened lately. My wife falls asleep near instantly, yet I can't fall asleep until 1 or 2 am it seems.. then change and feed the tot, and she sleeps another hour or two or three and I hope to squeeze a bit in. Repeat a few times until its 6 or 7 am and then I try to actually crash and let my wife take over.. since she's now slept from 10 through 6 or so and hopefully ignored enough crying to get some rest. Since I'm totally trashed from being up a day and most of the night, I crash from 7am or so through eleven .. likely explaining while I can't sleep until 2am. But I hear every girgle and motion the tot makes, keeping me always semi-awake, and eleven through 8-9 is a pretty short day-cycle when you're used to 16-hour day cycles. Its a survival sleep pattern where the days woosh by, but we don't feel totally wrecked.. just half wrecked and in life-pattern shock.

Whats a normal sleep cycle for a couple with a newborn? ie: One works and one is home with the baby.

Some obvious options come to mind -- alternating baby duties, alternating nights so every other night one person gets a full sleep, shifts in a night so theres relatively well defined duty-periods.. any others? Requirements are 'seeing my wife so we don't just become room-mates' and 'enough sleep to survive', and nice to haves include 'getting enough sleep to actually feel good' and 'time to play games or watch TV again.' For these last few years where we were a little depressed by lack of babies, I enjoyed playing some games and reading and we enjoyed a few TV shows and such.. you know, normal people stuff. It'd be nice to have some of that too, so we don't just end up living purely for the baby, but a little for ourselves too. (Is that selfish?) Forget time to browse the web and time-killers like that :P And forget doing things off the cuff.. now it seems the baby wants one of us with her all the time, so need to tag off .. one of us can make coffee for the other, etc.

Say I work 10-6, and allow for an hour of travel on each side.. that means out of the house 9 to 7. Could work ealier or a bit later, though I'm trying to avoid rush-hour. If I want to see my wife, do I need to work those nutty hours all the other dads I work with do? 7-3 and such? urgh! Anyway, if I try for out-of-house 9 to 7, trying to get the newborn to bed by 8-9 so we have some time to ourselves for bed by 10-11, how will that work .. off the cuff:

Total guesswork: home - wake up: 8:30am
work - drive: 9->10am
work - office: 10->6pm
work - drive: 6->7pm
home - take over baby so wife can rest a touch: 7->9pm
home - put baby to bed: 9->10pm (hopefully less time?)
home - relax with wife: 9:xx->11pm (already too late.. must shift eveyrthing earlier?)
home - my shift with baby: 11pm->2am (so get 6.5 hours sleep?) home - sleep: 2am->8:30am wake up

This scheme hasn't been thought out at all, but lets check the summary for my side: Sleeping for 6.5 hours in the night, maybe squeezing some more in there somewhere.. not bad, but not ideal for sure. Seeing wife for only an hour or two.. pretty bad. I truly regret screwing around before the baby for all those years when it should've all been with the wife. Clearly, optimizing travel time would be ideal, but I _like_ driving to work and being able to show up earlier or later at leisure..

Now, what does that scheme do to my wife? She'd have the baby duty 2am to 7pm.. like 17 hours. Brutal, but maybe thats the girls job since I'll be working? She'd get sleep 11pm through 2am so a good 3 hours plus any cat-naps. Wow, insane. Note also she is still weakened from the blood loss, so getting around in the house and carrying the baby and such tire her out. We need to get her some sleep in here somewhere! Or do the mothers always get by on catnaps while the baby sleeps?

Clearly this schedule is unworkable!

We'll have to sort it out soon, and find some workable balance. I worry we'll end up with only 3-4 hours sleep a night each, and barely seeing each other, for a couple months anyway.

What have all you other parents done with your newborn, to enjoy life and survive and such while working?

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