Time Management

It's been a long time (comparatively!) since my last post and I feel obligated to get something down today to mark Jake's one month birthday. This got me thinking that your sense of time changes as you grow up. Just in the last four weeks, we've had to switch from talking about Jake's age in days to weeks and as adults you measure in years and then early, mid and late decades. It's interesting, however, that when you talk to parents of toddlers, they still measure their child's age in months rather than years. For example, my cousin came to visit last weekend and brought my lovely first cousin once removed (what we believe the relationship between me and her child to be). We hadn't seen them for a while so I asked her age and was told 20 months. I guess it makes sense instead of saying 1 year 8 months, or almost 2, and it seems to be standard across parents of very young children. My question therefore is at what point do you start to measure your child's life in years? Quite probably when it becomes a hassle to convert it into years: "Yes, Jake is now 132 months old"

Whilst I'm talking about time, it's amazing how quickly you settle into a routine and rhythm. Even Jake is starting to get in on the act, and while we're still feeding him when he's hungry, you can still be sure that once it gets to the evening, he'll sleep for around 3-4 hours which makes planning our nightime shifts a little easier. It's a hard one to work out, because at the end of the day, someone has to get up and feed him at 2 am and neither of us are keen to do so. However, the system we currently have worked out is that he's my responsibility before 12 and after 5am, meaning that Kelsey gets some downtime in the evening when I get home from work, I get some rest so I'm not a zombie at work and Kelsey gets a "lie-in" after the 2am shift. It seems to work as a system, especially as Kelsey is slowly re-discovering the joys of daytime napping.

It also means that I get some quality Jake cuddles before I go to work. Once you've got past the screaming blue murder as if you've not fed him for days, he looks so content when he feeds, especially as we keep him swaddled up till Kelsey wakes up. In theory, we're trying to make it so that during the night, we change and feed him and then put him straight back to bed so he gets used to sleeping when it's dark out, but at the moment it's light when he feeds at 5. The house is quiet, the world is restful, he's very warm and snoozy so we often sit for a while before I take him back to bed. It's a very peaceful experience whether he has fallen asleep in my arms or is awake and looking around (and sometimes at me) and easily one of my favourite times of the day.