Most nights, Anand is…

Most nights, Anand is sleeping from around 6:30 - 5:30 these days, or even a bit later. That isn't as good as it sounds, because what it really means is that on a good night, he wakes up every 2-3 hours, drinks milk for ten minutes, and then goes back to sleep. (That does let Kevin get a fair bit done, since he has the night shift.) On a bad night, he only sleeps for 20 minutes at a time for most of that period, and requires carrying in order to stay calm for a good chunk of it. Still, it's a vast improvement over how things were. I go to bed at 8 and get up at 4, and it means that I usually have a fairly reliable 1-3 hours in the morning now, so it's no longer just a race to try to get myself relatively clean and fed, but I can actually accomplish things then. Like yesterday, two hours of grading which badly needed to be done. I was drowning in grading, but now I've crawled out from under the worst of it, and shouldn't be hit again until the next set of papers are due, around March 30th. A brief reprieve.

One thing that's made our lives a lot better is minor tidying up. Kevin can now, most nights, do whatever dishes are left in the sink before he goes to bed. And I have time in the morning to pick up any leftover toys, straighten cushions and fold couch throws, clean up scraps of paper, etc. and so on. It only takes about 10-15 minutes to make a sweep through the first floor of this small house, but oh my god, what a difference it makes to my morning sanity. If I do it early, I get hours of a relatively clean house before Kavi wakes up, and even once she's up, the toy chaos is more manageable. Once Anand wakes (and I'm no longer afraid of kitchen noise waking him), I can usually wipe down the kitchen counters and stove too, and if Kevin didn't manage the dishes the night before, I can take care of them.

I think I got into this habit when we were having house showings every day, and had to keep the place relatively neat, but it seems to be carrying over now -- and I love it. Hooray for the ten-minute clean-up! Ten minutes of cleaning = many hours of pleasure.

(Why, yes. It is easy to please me these days. My standards are low, but that's a good thing.)