Schedules: A much needed change

There are some families out there that don’t need a strict schedule, they “go with the flow”, “live in the moment”, and “wing it”- we are not one of those families. To get what I mean you have to understand that Brian and I are pretty… uptight (sorry Bri but you know it is true). We love routine, me more than Brian, but still in our house routines are good. When we had Mikey we knew this had to change a little bit, some adjustments and compromising (I don’t think you can call it that) were going to be in order. When he first arrived I didn’t know what to do, there was no routine, no schedule, no planning ahead, it seemed like every moment was crisis control- I didn’t like living in the moment. For the first two months I thought I was going to lose my mind, and I tried everything to bring order back to our lives. I wanted to be able to plan when I was going to go to bed, I wanted to know that if I needed to run an errand that there was a time of day and brief window to do it, I wanted to know that if I tried I could get ready for my day before lunch never mind eat lunch. I couldn’t sleep well, not knowing if I was going to sleep 10 minutes or an hour made me frantic and crazy, not knowing if I would eat made me panicky, you get what I mean, going from a scheduled life to life with a newborn was well… rougher than I expected. I tried everything to create a schedule, and the harder I tried it seems the harder Michael pushed back. I tried everything from crying it out (fail) to co sleeping and babywearing (major fail), nothing worked, then one day …it clicked. From the beginning I assumed that Michael would like routines, which is why I pushed them so hard, I figured that any child of ours would have a little bit of an anal retentive side even from birth, I think that the characteristic is just a little too strong in both his parents for him to be totally laid back, and I knew from experience with CJ (yes the cat) that given time we could train him to have a routine, just getting there was the issue. So like I said one day things started to get better… one day when he weighed about 12 pounds and decided that eating every two hours at night was interfering with his ability to sleep. So bedtime was born and with it his nightly routine (which I think he likes). Slowly, ever so incrementally slowly a schedule for the rest of the day has fallen into place, and life is peachy. Now I know approximately what time he will go to bed, wake up, get cranky and need a nap, want to eat, and be cheerful. That magical time period where we can go run errands has slowly emerged, naps are starting to occur- although we do still fight those, and my sanity is returning. The schedule isn’t perfect, and there are some days when parts of it go by the wayside, days when he wakes up too early, skips a nap, wants to eat more often, or is ready for bed at 5pm, but for the most part it works, and as happy as I am to have a schedule, I think Michael is 10,000 times happier- come to our house around 7:15pm on a night when we haven’t started getting Michael ready for bed and you will see how much he wants to be on his schedule. So we’re going to be the scheduled family, you know the annoying ones that say things like “oh yeah he’s crabby because it’s naptime”, or “we need to go because it’s bedtime”, or “can we wait to start the movie until we put him down for the night", you know those people… the sane, happy people.