Spring Thaw

We’re starting to thaw out here in Western Massachusetts. This was my second full winter in New England, and it was relentless. Last year’s winter was milder, though we had one huge snow storm. This year we didn’t get any blizzards, and none of the storms dropped more than a foot of snow, but it was crazy cold, with weeks without the mercury rising above freezing and many sub-zero nights. So the snow we did have never melted and each storm dropped a few more inches, adding to the feet already on the ground.

But now spring is upon us, both on the calendar and in the air. The forecast for the first day of spring has temps in the fifties with sunshine. There have been a few warm days in the last couple of weeks, but they were rainy. (Something I’ll never get used to here on the East Coast—when it’s cloudy it is warm and muggy, when it’s sunny, expect cool temperatures and a nice breeze.)

The days are much longer. The piles of plowed snow on the side of the road are melting away. The robins are bouncing around in the puddles, looking for worms.  The squirrels scamper around the hillside behind our apartment. The nights are still cold, dropping below freezing and icing up all the snowmelt, and there’s still a threat of snow, but now it should melt within a day or two.

One of the more grim reminders of spring’s arrival is all the vultures circling around. As the snow melts it reveals all the little creatures that didn’t make it through winter, squirrelsicles and possum-pops. The vultures obligingly clean up what winter has left behind. I saw two floating around on a draft near our apartment, which is expected, since we live between a mountain and a river with lots of green-space for the scavengers to peruse. While in Greenfield yesterday, April and I saw a wake of vultures that numbered at least twenty. (We’re looking to move to Greenfield. I hope this isn’t a bad omen.)

So spring has sprung; birds singing, trees budding, but vultures gliding by remind us of Eliot’s dictum: April is the cruelest month. March can also be pretty bad. 

Truman Sleeps

Well, most of the time.

We’ve tried to keep Truman on a fairly regular sleep schedule. April likes the 2-3-4 nap strategy: Truman’s first nap would start around two hours after waking up in the morning, his next three hours after he wakes from his first nap, then four hours of Truman goodness before going to bed at night, usually around seven. At night, we wanted Truman to get about twelve hours of sleep so he’d wake up around seven in the morning. Getting him down also required a set routine. (Routine, I’ve been told, I’ve read, I’ve absorbed, is the key to all child rearing.) So he gets his bath around six, a book, a light boob snack, then down in bed, not asleep, but nearly there, by seven. Nap time means lying in his rock’n’play as one of us rocks him while staring into a screen of some sort. At all times sleepy we have some type of noise machine running, a track on the phone playing white noise on repeat, or our Dohm noise machine. 

The universe, of course, conspires against us. While Truman is good for one nap a day, that second one can be elusive. And there’s no guarantee that any nap will be a good one. Sometimes Truman will go down for two hours. Sometimes twenty minutes. If we leave the house he’ll usually drop a nap. He will fall asleep in the car, but he won’t stay asleep once we get home. So he’ll doze off during the fifteen minute drive from the grocery store, but as soon as we stop the car, he’s up and he won’t go back to sleep once we get inside.

Outside of Truman’s own finicky sleep habits there are other factors to deal with. We try to get him out of the house, but during the winter we've been restricted to indoor, scheduled activities like Mother Goose on the Loose at the library, Mom and Baby Yoga, and now swimming at the Y. As fun as all these activities are, they will invariably interrupt a nap. So do we expose him to the world and risk throwing his sleep routine into chaos, or do we keep him at home so as soon as he signals his sleepiness we can put him down to bed?

Don’t get the wrong idea. Most of the time our ten-month-old is pretty good about sleeping, or at least not too bad. We the parents are winning the sleep war, but there are some battles, boy, are there some battles. We took some casualties during the switch over to daylight savings time. For the last five months it was pretty much dark by five. But now light seeps in around the curtains during the bedtime routine. Truman can tell something is not quite right. He’s always been a suspicious baby. The biggest casualty was the rock’n’play itself. Truman is just about too big for it and has taken to sitting up in it and rocking himself. While lying in it recently, he sat up, grabbed a piece paper that was hanging off the table, and pulled it toward him. Usually this would garner some praise (good grabbing!), but this piece of paper was acting as a coaster for a glass of orange juice, which tipped over and poured down onto Truman and soaked into the rocker. We may be able to save it. The cover has been washed, but the support underneath may need to be unstitched so some plastic can be removed, then re-stitched once it is cleaned. Truman has been able to nap in bed, so we might be done with the rocker after all. Truman didn't mind at all being drenched with orange juice.

Night time sleep has been shaky as well. With his teeth coming in, he wakes more frequently and won’t self-soothe. He’ll fall back asleep if I lay him on my chest, but the trick is getting back down into bed without waking him back up, which he really doesn't appreciate. Me being able to soothe him back to sleep is a small victory, especially for April, since she doesn't need to nurse him back to sleep as often and can get a good block of mostly uninterrupted sleep.

So the battles continue. We’re starting Truman on some solid foods, and we've heard that this will also help, but I’m skeptical. An update on his eating will be posted soon.

And sorry for my absence during the last month or so. I blame the weather. And True Detective.