Divers Alarums: Birdie's Routine at 10 Months
One unanticipated side benefit of having a baby is that for most of 2021 we have not needed to set an alarm in the morning. Indeed, the days when Birdie let us sleep in to the late hour of say, 7:30am, have been so rare as to cause a certain amount of panic about her well being when we woke up on those days. Getting up to be ready for work at 9am has not been a challenge, and indeed for the last six months most days I was able to get in a 60 to 90 minute walk with her before coming back to the house, eating breakfast and showering, all in plenty of time for work.
Now that Birdie is crawling non-stop and pulling herself up on pieces of furniture, she's getting a lot more tired more quickly. This doesn't always translate to naps, but the schedule now is more like:
6:45am - M woken by Birdie.
7:30am - M wakes me up. We walk if it's nice enough, which it is increasingly not, otherwise we hang out in the living room while Birdie crawls everywhere.
9:00am - I start work.
10:00am - M wakes up and takes over Birdie-wrangling.
noon - Birdie starts a 3 hour nap.
3:30pm - Birdie gets fed solid food.
7pm - Birdie goes to bed.
10pm - We are out cold.
with all these times far more variable than they were 2.5 months ago.
Early last week Birdie actually slept quite late by her standards, to the point where we couldn't have fitted in a walk before work even if we had wanted to. As such, when I coincidentally had 8:30am meetings on both Thursday and Friday, we thought it best to set a "just in case" 7:45am alarm. We didn't end up needing either of them because she hewed more closely to her normal schedule those mornings, but it was the first time we set an alarm since her birth, and is therefore worth marking.
The last ten months is quite easily the longest stretch of my adult life to lack any alarms at all. I must say that being woken up by M or waking up on my own is far superior to waking up to an alarm. I could get used to this.
Now that Birdie is crawling non-stop and pulling herself up on pieces of furniture, she's getting a lot more tired more quickly. This doesn't always translate to naps, but the schedule now is more like:
6:45am - M woken by Birdie.
7:30am - M wakes me up. We walk if it's nice enough, which it is increasingly not, otherwise we hang out in the living room while Birdie crawls everywhere.
9:00am - I start work.
10:00am - M wakes up and takes over Birdie-wrangling.
noon - Birdie starts a 3 hour nap.
3:30pm - Birdie gets fed solid food.
7pm - Birdie goes to bed.
10pm - We are out cold.
with all these times far more variable than they were 2.5 months ago.
Early last week Birdie actually slept quite late by her standards, to the point where we couldn't have fitted in a walk before work even if we had wanted to. As such, when I coincidentally had 8:30am meetings on both Thursday and Friday, we thought it best to set a "just in case" 7:45am alarm. We didn't end up needing either of them because she hewed more closely to her normal schedule those mornings, but it was the first time we set an alarm since her birth, and is therefore worth marking.
The last ten months is quite easily the longest stretch of my adult life to lack any alarms at all. I must say that being woken up by M or waking up on my own is far superior to waking up to an alarm. I could get used to this.