The Dog Days of Parenting

It’s 100 degrees outside, baby’s sleep pattern has gone to s***. Yep, these are the dog days of parenting.

In Major League Baseball, the “dog days of summer” refers to the time period after the July All-Star Break up until the point when playoff races really kick into gear (around late August). The weather is hot and the 162 game schedule begins to feel interminable. If your team is not contending, supporting your club becomes brutal; if your team is contending the finish line is not quite yet in sight, so it’s too early to really get excited.

Right now, we’re going through the dog days of parenting. It all started two weeks ago when I came home from a tiring three day business trip hoping to catch up on some sleep (sidebar: why do all hotels only have super puffy pillows?). If there’s one thing I can say about parenting, it’s that Murphy’s Law is undefeated. And true to form, Maya woke up crying at 1AM that night. Turns out, she came down with a fever. Thankfully, it was nothing serious and it ended up subsiding in a few days with no lingering cold-like symptoms (e.g., congestion, runny nose, cough, etc). One of the residual effects of a baby getting sick is that her sleep pattern (that you probably worked so hard to establish) goes to shit and you have to grind through additional nights because of it. We’re slowly re-establishing a sleep routine, although her sleep time is now around 9PM instead of 8PM and she is now fighting it (unlike in the past).

Add record breaking heat on top of all this and we’ve pretty much been in a 24/7 malaise the past few weeks (which is probably why I haven’t posted in a while). Back in the day, we’d binge watch the entire season of House of Cards over a weekend. Now, we don’t even have the energy to watch a single episode on most nights.

These are the dog days of parenting.

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