I know I went on and on about how Tuesday was the first day of the rest of my life. Well, forget all that, today was the real big day: the first day my wife went back to work and Lucy and I fended for ourselves. To add to the pressure of the day–as if taking care of a helpless child wasn’t enough–I’m also getting slammed with work. I wrote about yesterday’s work load on my other blog if you’re interested. Anyway, the point is that I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire work-wise. Add to all that taking care of a kid and the fact that the three of us are leaving for New England later tonight which will effectively take me out of the game for most of Friday and next Monday and there’s a lot of pressure.

So how did it go? Well, Lucy didn’t go to bed after her morning feeding with my wife, so I got up and hung out with her as the missus got ready for work. I know all of this is really hard on her, but hopefully knowing I’m here with Lucy helps out. After she left, I rocked Lucy for a little while on the rocking chair my father was rocked on and she dozed off. I swaddled her, put her back in her cradle and we both got a few more hours of sleep. Thanks Luce!

After that, though, things were a little rough. For one thing, I didn’t set up a bottle for her before going to bed, which was stupid on my part. My wife has been pumping for a while now so we’ve got a pretty good stockpile in the freezer, but frozen milk doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. I was told by our midwives to just put some hot water in a container and put the frozen packets in there, that will do the trick. And it did, but it would have worked a lot better had I done it last night or this morning. I’ll have to work on my timing with these sorts of things, but it was crap today. Nothing’s worse than carefully thawing out and pouring milk into a bottle, trying not to waste a single drop while your baby is red-faced from screaming.

Bottles aside, Lucy decided not to take much of a nap today, which made actually getting work done rather difficult. I can’t really hold her and type much more than an email and I haven’t gotten a good sling yet. Sometimes, I lay her on her back next to me on the couch which works, but won’t once she starts getting a little more mobile. I also put her on her playmat for a little while, but that didn’t last long. She’s thankfully sitting quietly in her bouncy seat right now, but that didn’t work much throughout the day.

She did go down for a few short naps, which was great, but it’s funny how priorities change when you’ve got a baby around. Should I shower during this nap? Write up an article? Send a bunch of emails? Enjoy the quiet for a minute and maybe do something non work related? Pack for our trip? It’s too much to do during 15-20 minute naps. I still managed to get a good deal of work and packing done, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.

There were a pair of things I had hoped to do today, but those goals turned out to be too lofty. I wanted to go out and grab lunch with Lucy, but her short naps were all around lunch time, so that didn’t quite work out. I also wanted to take a shower, but opted to write, pack, make and eat mac and cheese and a few other things when Lucy dozed and she was wanting to be held when awake.

So, I might be kinda stinky and might not have gotten as much work done today as I intended, but the baby’s still in one piece, my wife’s almost home and I’ve got a long weekend just ahead of me, so altogether the day was a success!