My apologies for the lack of posting lately (though I’m not sure if anyone is reading this blog yet!). I do have a third part in my Adulting So Hard series about half drafted, but want to spend more time on it before it goes up.

It’s been a strange time in my life. My days always end up filled, yet I never quite know where the day went. I have no idea what day it is if it’s not Sunday (when I go to church) because I have no standing appointments or obligations the other days of the week. So I thought it would be interesting to account for how I’m spending my time. In rough order (most-to-least time spent):

1. Baby, obvs.
   • Our daughter is actually sleeping through the night at this point (hoo-rah!) but not sleeping a ton during the day (sad trombone). I’ve read babies in the 1-3 month range usually sleep 16-18 hours a day. (Our little one was 2 months exactly three days ago.)
   • Our baby sleeps from about 8 p.m. – 11 p.m., gets a “dream feeding” (where they don’t entirely wake up) and sleeps until she wakes us up at about 4 a.m. – 5 a.m., gets a big feeding then and will sleep until 7 or 8 a.m. By my count that’s about 11 hours (8p – 8a minus one hour she’s she’s usually awake in the early morning feeding). But after that, she’s only been napping for maybe 90 minutes the rest of the day in a few different stretches of 20-30 minutes. That means we’re probably missing 3 – 6 hours of additional downtime.
   • As a result, we’re spending a lot of time “entertaining” – that is, playing, reading, doing baby exercises, and just holding her. (She takes after my wife, in that our baby likes to be with people, and gets cranky when her people are nowhere to be seen.)
   • Also, the usual: changing diapers; locating lost pacifiers; trying to go out to dinner but disrupting everyone else’s experience so we leave in shame before ordering (also known as my birthday dinner); trying to stage cute photos for Facebook; and enduring wails that last for several consecutive minutes during “tummy time.”
2. House chores. I offered Alicia that if she’s going to maintain full employment and pay for the house, I’ll at least take responsibility for keeping the darn thing clean. (Of course, Alicia does her fair share and then some, so how there’s always so much to do I don’t know. Babies are like a mess-making machine.) Once Alicia goes back to work, all of the laundry / cooking / grocery shopping / cleaning is on Yours Truly. I’m sure she will still help, because she doesn’t want to eat Kraft mac-n-cheese every night.
3. Holidays and Birthdays. It isn’t just Christmas, although house decorating, shopping, presents, family and the associated holiday accoutrement were ever present. In our family, we have five birthdays between my last day at Security Benefit and now. I’m not complaining; one of them was mine. 🙂
4. Writing. I don’t have any stories “in the pipeline” that are ready to submit, so I’ve challenged myself to get 12 stories in first draft form by end of January that I can start workshopping. I’m almost done with #3, so still quite a way to go.
5. Critiquing. Getting my own pieces workshopped means I need to be workshopping others. (Those are the rules of the writers’ workshop I’m in.)
6. Reading. I’ve enjoyed spending chunks of time reading lately, and as I had heretofore committed the unpardonable sin of “not having completed the Harry Potter series before,” I decided it was high time to check that off my reading bucket list. I had finished Goblet of Fire in late summer, so I burned through Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince back-to-back, and now I’ve started Deathly Hallows. (Yes, I know what happens, I’ve seen all the movies, but you know as well as I do it just ain’t the same.)
7. Exercising. Getting out of the house once a day, either for a walk, the gym, or some kind of activity is important to me.
8. Xbox-ing. Alicia got me an Xbox One for Christmas, the Halo: Master Chief Edition. (She is a vile temptress. She knows the Halo series is easily my favorite FPS. As if I have time for video games!) I started Halo 5: Guardians last night, but I will need to play through all the Halo games on this amazing magic machine. In other words, our baby better start napping again, and fast.

I know writing, reading, Xboxing and the like makes it sound like I have a pretty cushy life. I do, make no mistake about it. But our baby is my priority, so those other pleasurable pursuits come in short bursts of 15 minutes, or after she’s down for the night, or even while I’m feeding. (I can read Harry Potter to my daughter in one hand with a bottle in the other. I’m Super Dad.)

(I just hope she’s not confused, having started in the middle of Book 5.)

Hope you’re all having a fine Christmastime and/or break, and you’re enjoying time off as much as I am.

-CM