Out of sync

For the last few months we’ve been going through something tricky. Tess usually sleeps in the morning from 10am for a few hours, and then she has another nap at about 3 for another hour or two. Rose, however, has one nap a day, starting at 1pm and lasting an hour and a half.

See what I’m getting at? Someone is usually asleep. Hardly ever at the same time.

So we either have to stay home all day, or go out anyway and put up with the crankiness. When I’m on my own I usually run our days like a military operation. Consider the following:

8am-9am: Rose, Tess and Mum at the park
9.30am – 11.30: Tess asleep in bed, Rose and I playing in the living room, or messing around in the back courtyard, or riding her bike up and down the back laneway
11.30: Everyone has lunch, then off to the park for another quick play
1pm: Rose to bed, Tess I play in the living room
2.30: Tess to bed as Rose wakes up, Rose more playing in living room
4pm: all go to the park

It’s working out pretty well. But on the weekends we’re following a ‘divide and conquer’ system where one of us goes out and does chores or nice things with one of the girls while the other stays home with the sleeping kid. It’s fine, but we’re not spending much time together as a family. And it feels like Chris and I aren’t seeing much of each other, either.

Some days, of course, we just all go out and let the girls nap in the car or in the stroller. But usually there’s crying involved when one of them doesn’t get enough sleep. And problems getting the tired one to go to bed at night. And, after months and months of sleep craziness on Tess’s part, it’s actually really nice to have some certainty and regularity to the sleeping. So I guess by and large that we’ll have another few months of this scheduling craziness to put up with and then we can get Tess to drop a nap, and get everyone on more or less the same routine.

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