A good night of sleep with a 4 month old:

This is what parenthood does. This is what a good night of sleep looks like:

5:30: Baby hasn't napped well today. Looks like he'll have a 6:30 bed time.
6:30: Wrap up household things, start getting baby ready for bed
7:00 Husband comes home with dinner. Baby is now ready for bed. Wife starts trying to get baby to sleep.
7:30: Baby wakes up during transfer from arms to crib. Mom grumbles, leaves bedroom/baby's room with baby and decides to eat her cold veggie burger while Dad plays with baby.
7:45: Mom starts getting ready for bed-- because it's clear that baby is going to take a while and anyway, Mom's bedtime is approaching. (Sign number one that having a baby ages you-- 8:30 becomes your bedtime.)
8:00: Re-do bedtime routine. Nurse baby since it's been a while.
8:35: Baby asleep! Hooray!
9:00: Successful crib transfer. Yay again!
9:45: Mom goes to sleep finally
10:15: Baby is awake, and not happy to find himself in the crib. After reading about such maneuvers for babies who don't like sleeping in their crib, Mom attempts laying next to baby as much as possible while he is in the crib (it's a cosleeper hooked to the side of our bed so it kind of works). Baby is not fooled. He knows he is not in the big bed.  He screams his displeasure.
10:40: After a quick powwow, Mom and Dad decide to let baby sleep in the bed with them... again. But at least now the baby is asleep, laying on his tummy (against SIDS safety recommendations), on Mom (not comfortable for Mom, but by God it gets the baby to sleep), in Mom and Dad's bed (also against SIDS safety recommendations). Bad, bad, bad. But effective. Mom and Baby are asleep.
1:00am: Baby wakes up for a feeding. We got 2.5 hours of sleep. It was fantastic. Also fantastic- it's been 5 hours since Little Dude ate. This means he CAN go all night with only a couple of wakings for feedings. Doesn't mean he will, but at least we know it's possible. Baby goes back to sleep on Mom's chest.
5:00am: Baby wakes up for a feeding again... 4 hours after the last time! 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep for all! Hooray! Nevermind the fact that we broke rules to make it happen. Point is, we all slept. Yay!
5:45am: Baby is (wait for it).. back to sleep! He was convinced that 5:45 IS sleep time, not wake time. We're all back to sleep until...
7:00am: Mom's alarm goes off. Baby and Dad are still asleep. Mom weighs options-- get up and have a (relatively speaking) leisurely morning before work but move Baby on to the bed or crib-- which will probably wake him up, which will wake Dad up. Or let Baby and Dad keep sleeping for 30 minutes, and (probably) have a rushed morning instead.  Another 30 minutes of sleep for Baby and Dad seems the wiser course of action.
7:30: Everybody up and at 'em for the day.

The weekend in camera photos

(this post is mostly an experiment in writing blog posts on my phone)

Mom had surgery on the 9th, (minor surgery, but still, surgery). Knowing my mom is about as bad at resting as I am, I thought it would be a good weekend to visit and try to keep mom from overdoing it. I'm not getting enough sleep these days to feel safe driving for 3 hours each way, so X and I went to Vancouver by train. It was Xavier's first train ride. And X's first time being away from daddy overnight. I took lots of pictures & videos so Kenneth could see what his boy was up to. These are out of order, but here's a little of what we did & saw.

Picking up pens when pregnant...

Xavier's sleep has been regressing lately-- I'm getting less sleep now than I did when he was 3 weeks old, although now every once in a while he'll throw us a bone and sleep for a 4 hour block of time. And both Kenneth and I are at work now full-time. Talk about exhausting. Anyway, my creativitythese days is centered on finding creative ways to sleep more. But I have hilarious cousins who write blog posts that make me laugh. My cousin Ashley is VERY pregnant right now, and wrote this about picking up pens while pregnant. Enjoy.