Ambitious Parents

Fiona's changed her sleeping habits (again). She now stays awake all the way through the morning and goes down for a nap between 12:30 and 1:00. That nap can last for up to three hours, which is heaven for us after dealing with multiple 45 minute naps for quite a while (we'd spend the first 15 minutes wondering if she was actually asleep and then the remaining 30 minutes desperately trying to get stuff done that we couldn't do with Fiona around).

She's also pushed her bedtime back to about 7:45 (it was 7, then 7:15... you can figure out how the progression worked). We've been in the habit of eating dinner after Fiona went to bed, but a 7:45 bedtime meant dinner wouldn't be until about 8:15, which meant that by the time dishes were done we had less than an hour to spare before we had to think about going to bed in case our daughter planned on exercising her lungs starting at 6am.

So we've started trying to eat dinner with Fiona at around 6:30 or so. It means we have to plan some sort of finger food dish for Fiona to eat while we eat, since Fiona is still figuring out self-feeding with a spoon. On the bright side, we have an early dinner, one of us gives Fiona a bath while the other does the dishes, and when 8:15 does roll around we look at each other in shock as we realize that the child is asleep, dinner is done, the dishes are clean, and we actually have an evening ahead of ourselves. A little slice of heaven.

This trick is a little more difficult on days when I'm at work, Andrea's at school, and Fiona is in day care. But we're committed to staying with it on the weekends.