Bedtime

Posted on by Jordan

As Hannah’s eighth week draws to a close a few patterns are starting to emerge. I think about these a lot, given that it is my job to put her to sleep each night.

I have thought about this enough to provide a helpful chart of the bedtime process:

bedtime

Sometimes we skip that initial “Upset” blip, but almost never do we skip the “end of the world” cry before passing out.

On a very positive note, she has slept through the night for the past three nights. We hope this is the start of a trend, but it’s too early to know for sure.

On a final note, waking up is really cute right now:

 

-Jordan

Gear “Wins”

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so maybe someday I will find myself detailing the pros and cons of a diaper bag. Today is not that day.

What I do want to talk about are a few items I owned pre-baby that have proven very useful with an infant in the house.

First up, a tablet computer. Now it’s a bit of a stretch to say this was a pre-baby item, because I used the impending birth of our daughter as the excuse I gave myself to justify spending all my post-gift buying allowance on a single item. I purchased a Nexus7 from Google. I don’t know how I would feel about the tablet if Hannah hadn’t arrived about a week after it did. Without a child in the mix I don’t find surfing, or playing little time waster games all that engaging when I have a real computer 20ft away.

That all changes when you have a baby in one arm. The tablet is wonderful for keeping up with light reading online, or doing real basic e-mail etc. The N7 is light enough to easily work one handed, although you need a second hand to do much interaction. I haven’t had much time with an IPad, but I think in this use case, the smaller tablet is probably more useful, simply for the one-handed option. Little time waster games or random online reading make it a lot easier to wait that extra five minutes to make sure Hannah is really asleep before trying to lay her down at night.

The second device that has come in handy is my Kindle. I wasn’t using it a lot early on, in part because I was so sleep deprived I was afraid my retention would be so poor as to make the reading completely useless. I don’t know if that really would have been true, but whatever the case I am not so sleepy now and have really enjoyed reading books again.

The place where the kindle shines, much like the N7 is one handed operation. The kindle is truly a one handed device, where the N7 only kind of is, and a book really isn’t when it comes time to turn the page. One of the other advantages the kindle has over the N7 is being a more paper-like screen so I can light the room with a soft lamp instead of blasting myself in the face with a bright screen. This may sound trivial, but it’s hard to peek down and see if Hannah’s eyes are close when your eyes aren’t actually adjusted to the rooms ambient light.

I suspect this may be the least interesting aspect of a new baby for anyone reading this… but so far I haven’t distilled much else down to an idea for a post yet. 🙂

-Jordan