By Dave · Dad Life · showingupdad.com

He’s almost one now. Looking back at the three-month mark, the chaos had a different texture than month one. The blur was gone. A different kind of hard had replaced it.

Here’s where we are.

Sleep training, round two of the anxiety.

He had been a pretty good sleeper. We got lucky, or we did something right, or both. Either way, we weren’t complaining.

Then we moved him to his own room.

I thought this would feel like a win. More space for us, more space for him, everyone sleeps better. That’s the theory. What actually happened is that I went from checking the baby monitor occasionally to staring at it like it owed me money. The distance between our room and his went from zero to down the hall.

Sleep training itself is fine. He’s adjusting. It’s me that’s the problem. I’d spent months calibrating to every sound he made from a few feet away, and now there’s a wall between us and a hallway and a small screen showing me a grainy black-and-white version of my kid. Every little movement had me halfway out of bed. Nicole would tell me he was fine. I’d agree and then check the monitor again thirty seconds later.

Nobody told me that the hardest part of sleep training would be training myself to stop hovering.

Nicole goes back to work.

She’s a nurse practitioner, which means her schedule isn’t a standard nine-to-five. It shifts around. Some days I’m covering more, some days I’m not. We figured out a rhythm during leave, and now we’re recalibrating.

The thing that surprised me was how much the logistics shifted. The pump parts, the bottles, the timing of everything. I was already on top of it, but suddenly the margin for error tightened. She couldn’t walk in the door and have it not be handled.

The mental load thing is real and it doesn’t go away just because the first few months are behind you. It just changes shape.

We took him on vacation. It went fine. Here’s one thing I’ll do differently.

First family trip. We drove, which was its own adventure, but he handled it better than I expected. The hotel room was a different story.

The issue is the pack-and-play. He goes to sleep, the room goes dark, and we’re just supposed to sit there in the dark until we fall asleep too. That’s not how it works for us. We wanted to watch something quietly, have a normal evening, not feel like we were also going to bed at 7:30.

The problem is light. Any light in the room woke him up. We needed to cover the pack-and-play to block it out, and the only thing we had was hotel towels. It worked, sort of. But hotel towels are heavy, they slide off, and we spent the whole night holding our breath every time one shifted.

Next time, we’re bringing a cover. An actual pack-and-play cover, sized for it, that won’t move. You can get them on Amazon for not a lot of money. It would have made the whole trip easier and I should have thought of it before we left.

That’s basically the theme of travel with a baby so far. Things work out, but the solutions are obvious in hindsight. Pack the thing you’ll wish you had. Assume you forgot something. Find a grocery store near the hotel when you arrive.

Three months feels like nothing and a lot at the same time.

He’s different now than he was at one month. I’m different too. I’m less anxious about the basic stuff and more anxious about the new stuff. That seems to be how this goes.

The sleep monitor still gets too much of my attention. The pump parts are handled. And next time we travel, we’ll have the right gear. Pro tip the sun gets poop stains out of any clothes.

One thing at a time.

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