For the month of April, Agnes went to work at 5:40 AM for her neurosurgery rotation. This early start left her no time to help the girls get ready for daycare in the morning, so the plan was for me to send the girls to daycare, and since I had the minivan with our carseats, also pick them up in the evenings. As it turns out, the routine I fell into was quite different than the one that Agnes wrote about.
When Agnes was taking care of the girls in the morning, she was getting up between 5:15 and 5:45. With the daylight savings time change on April 2nd, this shifted forward an hour. I woke up at 6:30 to start the day. Already I’d start to hear the girls stirring, but there were things that I needed to take care of first. Once I had the girls out of their cribs, I couldn’t do anything that took me out of the living room for more than a few seconds without worrying about the trouble they would get into. So, I started with my morning routine of brushing my teeth, washing my face, shaving, and combing my hair. Finally, around 6:50, I went to the girls’ room to get them.
By that time, the girls had been up for a while and were wondering where I was. Mostly, it was Eleanor. She would usually be at the end of her crib where she could see us coming in. Sometimes she had been crying for a while. Miranda was usually ready to get up as well, but she was not usually so desperate. Most of the time, I started with Eleanor.
For the middle two weeks of April, Eleanor was sick and consistently had morning diarrhea. So, I spent a good deal of time wrestling with Eleanor to get her cleaned up, which included completely changing her clothes because of a daily diaper blowout. During that time, Eleanor became really upset at me because she didn’t care if she was cleaned up–she was hungry. I fed her, put her in the Pack n Play, and repeated the process with Miranda (minus the diaper blowout).
While the girls were waiting in the living room, I quickly packed the girls’ food from the refrigerator. I then changed their clothes and put the girls in their carseats. I dressed for work, and then did a final check to make sure I had everything before we headed out for daycare.
Since the girls had clean diapers and had been fed, they were usually content to wait, but sometimes they got a little bored or impatient. Four things go to the minivan–two girls with carseats, daycare supply bag (food, extra diapers, etc.), and the backpack I bring to work. After dropping them off at daycare, I went straight to work.
Coming home from Santa Monica to pick up the girls before the daycare closed at 6:00 meant that I’ve been leaving work at 4:00. It was early, but fortunately, my work was flexible enough that it wasn’t a problem. Agnes was also getting off work early, so we met at the daycare to pick up the girls.
We fed them some solids at 6:00, bathed them at 6:30, fed them their final bottles at 7:00, and sent them off to bed by 7:30. At that point, we made dinner and prepared the bottles for the next day. Agnes went to sleep around 10:00 and I spent a few more hours catching up with work before I went to sleep.