For the past several weeks, Lemon has been waking up like clockwork every morning at 4:15 a.m. Once he's awake, he comes to find me. Since I'm still sleeping on a bed in Lime's room (because Lime is still nursing every 2-3 hours), once he finds me, he finds and wakes his brother. And, we're all up and ready to start the day by 4:30 at the very latest. Morning treatment is done by 5, and we've had breakfast and are downstairs doing Play Doh by 5:30 or 5:45. I will now compose a short list of the people in our family for whom this schedule is working well: .
As you can see, it's a pretty short list. Lemon is a wreck. He's a wreck when he wakes up, he's melting down by 7 a.m., and can't stay up much past 6:30p.m. Lime is exhausted, too, and is ready for his first nap of the day around 6:15 a.m. When Papa Bear is around, I tend to take a little nap myself when Lime is ready to go down . That 45 minute snooze between when Lime goes down and when I have to get up for work is basically my salvation right now. And, with Papa Bear out of town to attend Great Grandma Virginia's funeral, there were a few salvation-free days this week.
I think what's waking him up is hunger. He's up the earliest on nights where he doesn't eat a good dinner, and comes into my room talking about breakfast and asking to start his mask and videos because he knows that treatment is a necessary preamble to breakfast. On the few nights in the last couple of weeks where he's eaten a solid dinner, he's slept later. Where later is defined as say 5:30 or so, which is TOTALLY SURVIVABLE. But it's a vicious cycle--he's less likely to eat dinner if he's exhausted at dinner time, and more likely to be exhausted at dinner time if he's gotten up at 4:15. I'd being trying to implement a policy of serving milk with dinner, rather than a Scandishake, in the hopes that a lighter beverage (where "lighter" means a 2:1 mixture of whole milk and heavy cream) would encourage him to eat more actual food. But as of tonight I officially don't care anymore. If drinking Scandishakes at dinnertime breaks the early wake-up cycle, then he can live on Scandishakes until he goes to college. And, knowing myself, I will stand firmly behind that resolution until the moment that I am well-rested enough to recover my principles, and which point we'll go back to milk at dinner and hope that doesn't re-initiate the cycle.
Just to top things off, Lemon is a little sick at the moment. Nothing that would send an ordinary parent into a tizzy, a runny nose and a bit of a cough. We've just been down this road too many times already. We're doing the vest 3 times a day and doubling up on Flonase and nasal saline to see if we can kick it. If we haven't kicked it by Friday, I suppose we'll start our new treatment plan, two weeks of oral Cipro. I'm a little discouraged that we're starting another round of this, but at the same time glad that we made it through the entire month of January without incident. That counts for something, I suppose, and it's only 8 weeks until April.
Also, I made a really great cinnamon swirl brioche. Because even when things are a little bit insane, you have to live.
For the past several weeks, Lemon has been waking up like clockwork every morning at 4:15 a.m. Once he's awake, he comes to find me. Since I'm still sleeping on a bed in Lime's room (because Lime is still nursing every 2-3 hours), once he finds me, he finds and wakes his brother. And, we're all up and ready to start the day by 4:30 at the very latest. Morning treatment is done by 5, and we've had breakfast and are downstairs doing Play Doh by 5:30 or 5:45. I will now compose a short list of the people in our family for whom this schedule is working well: . 
Just to top things off, Lemon is a little sick at the moment. Nothing that would send an ordinary parent into a tizzy, a runny nose and a bit of a cough. We've just been down this road too many times already. We're doing the vest 3 times a day and doubling up on Flonase and nasal saline to see if we can kick it. If we haven't kicked it by Friday, I suppose we'll start our new treatment plan, two weeks of oral Cipro. I'm a little discouraged that we're starting another round of this, but at the same time glad that we made it through the entire month of January without incident. That counts for something, I suppose, and it's only 8 weeks until April.
