Week 211: Laborious

The summer has drawn to a close. We are about to completely upend what has been one of our more stable child-care arrangements and embark on something completely different. On Friday, we said goodbye to Rose, our morning nanny who has been with us for over a year. Tomorrow, we say good morning to Robert, a life guard and swim instructor who will be running the kids ragged between 7-8:30 every morning so that I can get a jump-start on my work day. Starting on Wednesday, I will then load both kids into either the bike trailer or the car, and take them BOTH to school. Five days a week. Amazing. We thought this day would never come, and now it is here. Of course, they're still just going to school in the mornings, so at 11:45 I will load both of them back into the conveyance of choice and return them home to our new afternoon nanny, Irma. And this is how we plan to survive the next 9 months.  It sounds sort of complicated even to me as I write it, but then again we have been living with complex, multi-player childcare arrangements for 4 years now, so why not just keep going.

Thanks to Lemon's belief that the scale in the master bathroom is a very exciting thing to stand on, I can report that his weight has continued to climb back up since we resumed the higher volume night-time feeds. He's even been eating more by mouth this past week (including a remarkable 75 bites of food at food school on Tuesday!) so I have some vague hope that perhaps the food school is helping and we are making progress.  Or it could be a random uptick like we see from time to time, it's impossible to tell at this stage, but here's hoping he keeps it up. I feel like my main goal at this point is to get to a place were he is eating about say 300-500 calories per day by mouth. That would be huge, because if he could do that we could eliminate the morning bolus tube feeding, which no one likes terribly much.

I should have known better than to mention Lime's new predilection for sleeping past 5 a.m. in writing. No sooner did I do so than he woke up at 4:30 for a few days running. And then, another molar emerged. So the two bottom ones are in. I thought then I might get a break, and I did, one glorious morning of 5:15. And then back to 4:30 today, so maybe those top two are going to come in now and then we can be done with this. I have to imagine (hope) that once he starts school he will be so tired in the evenings that he may sleep a bit later in spite of himself.

In honor of the new school year, we also attempted to take a new family portrait, because the kids' school asks that we send one in for them to hang up on a wall with the other families. As with last year, we achieved "mixed" results. By which I mean this was about the best we could do. All of us are present, are looking at the camera, and have our eyes open. That is what counts as a victory around here. 4K and 2-year-old preschool, here we come!