every two hours and twenty-three days

Living life with a newborn means living life in two hour increments. And the first 30-40 minutes of those increments are consumed with feeding the newborn. (Which admittedly are some of my favorite minutes...as long as no one else is demanding my attention and it's not 3am.) This two hour increment living is strange. Because time moves at its own pace and that pace is ever changing. Sometimes it flies by. I blink and its already feeding time again! And other times it drags and drags and I swear the clock is frozen in time. Mostly the days fly by and the nights draaaaag on. And I rarely accomplish anything significant with my time. 

Small tangent: Nights go a little something like this...nurse baby between 7 and 8pm. Then again around 10pm. GO TO BED. <--that is the critical step that I too often skip! Baby wakes again between midnight and 1 am to nurse. And this is where everything derails! It's my fault really. I too often fall asleep during this middle of the night feeding. And we aren't just talking nodding off for a few minutes. Nope. I fall ASLEEP! And I sleep for 60 to 90 minutes. Sitting in my rocking chair in the corner of my room with Levi nestled in my arms. Then I wake in a stupor and can't remember if I fed the baby or not so I start nursing him again. And then I fall back to sleep and the vicious cycle starts all over again! On a good night I will crawl back into bed after just an hour or two. On a bad night Levi and I don't get back in our beds until morning. It's a pretty awful routine we've gotten ourselves into and I don't know how to stop it! Well besides going to bed earlier of course. That might help. 

BUT that post-kid bedtime is so wonderful. It's completely uninterrupted. Time in which I can think and breathe. And just feel like me. Albeit a very tired me. It's when I get fun stuff done. Like these... 

Don't be too impressed with my novice art work. These little masterpieces took me nearly 3 full weeks to complete. And I'll be honest they aren't even 100% done yet.  (FYI - in case anyone is curious - the handprints are hard! Footprints are much easier.) 

I can't place ALL the blame on Levi for changing the dynamics of time. See the thing is we are waiting. Waiting for something significant. And waiting definitely makes time go slower as well. Today Joe submitted his rank order list for residency. And today residency programs submitted their rank order lists of students. All of those lists are being run through the MATCH logarithm. But we won't know the results for another 23 days. 

23 days until we know where we will be moving. And when exactly we will be moving. (Each program has a slightly different start date.) 23 days until we know if our new home will be here in Minnesota. Or if it will be elsewhere. 23 days until we know which state we will call home for the next 3 years. That's a lot to wait for. Especially when there is nothing we can do at this point to change the outcome. So we wait. 

Yep. Time is standing still. Right now 23 days feels like a lifetime. 23 days. Or more accurately 276 two hour increments.