Travels: Part 2 (and sleep)

North and East

We went back to Canada in December, because my bro and his girlfriend had themselves a little wedding.  It was fun to reunion-ize with the families and traipse around the Vancouver woods.  

And get a little bit dressed up.

 

Back in WA, meanwhile, there hasn't been much snow this year, but we did have about a week where there was a pretty layer of frost on everything...

So once back from Vancouver we enjoyed the frost for a few days and then took off again for Montana to see Mike's bro, sis-in-law, nephew, and mom, stopping on the way to and from in Spokane (where Yoni had his annual carillon gig).

Eytan and I took a little walk near the river, in the quiet morning.

And after a few days we came back to Wenatchee, where Yoni and Shani stayed with us for a few days before they headed back to work and home.

Baby Patterns
I've probably mentioned this before, but Eytan seems to be a pretty chill baby.  And usually not too hard to read.  Up until he got his two-month shots, he didn't do much of the hard-to-console crying that can be hard with some babies.  Since then it has increased a little bit, but already by the time we went for his four-month shots, it was on the decline again.  Anyway, it makes it easier to identify when something's a little off.  Like when he has a fever.  Or like when we were in Baltimore for Thanksgiving and he had a night and a couple of days of lots of crying and little sleeping, which turned out in the end (we think) to be at least in part due to some good earwax build-up (we had thought it might be an ear infection, but it just seems that he produces unusually large quantities of earwax, according to the doc who cleaned it out).  Apparently (as confirmed later (and funnily) by a high-earwax-producing winery owner in Cashmere) lots of earwax can be kind of painful... I never knew...

Eytan has also been a pretty good sleeper.  Over time, Mike and I haven't had terribly much difficulty transferring him him from sleeping in our bed to sleeping in a bassinet in our room to sleeping in a separate room in a crib.  And duration of nighttime sleep has increased.  Except when I first went back to work, and Mike would try feeding him pumped milk from a bottle.  Although he had always been okay with eating from a bottle, he adopted the strategy while I was gone of eating only the minimum needed to tide him over during the day and then eating as much as possible overnight when he could get it from me.  So we went back to being awake more at night for a little while, until all of us settled better into the new pattern.

Meanwhile, we had been recommended a book about baby sleep, for increasing night sleep and regularizing naps... and with that we've been trying to adjust from doing naps on the go -- in carriers and carseats -- to having Eytan sleep more in the crib, and for longer.  It's been pretty useful, except when our timing is bad and he falls asleep on our bed just as we're about to go out for a hike.

Or when we're stubborn and go for the hike anyway (which was nice for me and Mike, but less nice for that particular day's naps).

But Eytan cheered up about it eventually, and the next day we traded and gave sleep priority over hikes.

Meanwhile, being back at work has been okay.  It has been nice to have the variety and independence of going into the office, as long as the balance works and I don't end up getting stuck there too late.  All the recent travels have made it a bit of a challenge to get everything done in the small chunks of time available, but I think it will all to settle into a pattern pretty soon.  Working from home has taken a little adjusting too -- I used to do it all the time when I was in grad school, and always found it more effective than working from an office, but I suppose there were fewer people in my household at the time.  We're settling into it, though, and I think it will start to work nicely for the couple of days a week we have planned.

Navel gazing

The swimming coach in Wenatchee (who has five grownup kids) mentioned offhand at some point something about how kids "change your life" but that it's "all worth it."  And it made me start thinking... because I don't feel like Eytan has really changed our life that much at all.  Sure, we wash more diapers now than we used to, but it's almost more like his arrival has made our pre-existing lifestyle (early bedtimes, goat-care) make more sense.  Maybe it's different when there's more than one kid, or maybe it's just us reacting stubbornly against the "your life will be so different with kids" feeling that we people seemed to be sending our way early on, but either way, I found myself wondering again why I don't really feel like that.  I wonder if in part both Mike and I already had open spaces in our lives there waiting for Eytan (or whoever) to occupy them.  We had both independently thought we'd have kids much earlier in life, and so, rather than feeling our lives were full and complete in our 20s and then changing our minds later to make space for kids, we had already had some built-in room for him.... so it required less of an adjustment.

Or maybe it's that having kids in the household tends to change your patterns a bit (fewer evenings out, more Sesame Street, that kind of thing) but because Mike and I seem to suck at establishing patterns in the first place, there was nothing to readjust... or maybe we just haven't noticed the shift because there was no steady baseline to begin with...  Not that we don't have any routines, but we both tend to change jobs or change tasks with the seasons or just end up with a stop-and-go rhythm built around episodes of traveling and whatnot (getting ready to leave, being gone, catching up, settling back down, and then starting again), that we just haven't noticed the rhythm being a bit different.

Anyway, end of navel gazing for now.  I'll sign off instead with a photo of one of the Chanukah parties we went to this year...



and with what I happen to (unbiasedly) think is a super cute video (this Eytan-giggling stage has been fun, by the way... it has also, more recently, been followed up by the squeal-yelling stage... also fun, but, well, louder).