The super short summary of March is: one week of sunny, nice days bookended by some seriously wintry weather.

If you read last month’s post, you’ll know that we hit rock-bottom, sleep-wise. It was the kind of experience that left us a little shell-shocked. I don’t want to call it PTSD but after that experience, just hearing the baby at night, even for a second, was enough to send our blood pressure and heart rates sky-high. What a wild trip.

So we pulled the rip cord. We started sleep training on March 2, which involved kicking the kid out of his bassinet in our room, and putting him in his crib in his own room. The crib has Dad’s stamp of structural approval.

We knew Atlas had nearly all the tools and skills he needed to sleep on his own, but he just kept waking up so much at night. We were right. It took barely two nights of sleep training before he was sleeping through the night without any intervention from us. We, on the other hand, were still waking up about 3 times a night because old habits die hard. No one told us that we would need to sleep train ourselves!

Anyway, that went GREAT. It was an option that we were really avoiding, but it went so well. One of the hardest parts was moving Atlas so far away from us. We’ve lived in such tiny homes over the past few years, where everything is just a few steps away, it was mentally challenging to have the baby so far away from us at night. That’s certainly something I never expected!

Now, since we solved the night sleep, you’d think that would be the end of it, right? No, absolutely not. We’ve got two engineering degrees in this house and we still can’t figure out the math for naps. Wakeup time, wake windows, nap length, number of naps, bedtime, total sleep, total waketime…honestly, ignorance would probably be much easier than how much reading we’ve been doing about wake windows and naps. Every day feels like a massive calculus problem, a game of trying to get the naps to match the wake windows, and Atlas is definitely not on our team.

This is literally a daily discussion. “Okay, so he woke up from Nap 1 at this time. We really can’t put him down for Nap 2 until this afternoon, but that’s going to be pushing his wake window too far. But if he takes a nice long nap we might be able to make it. But we know he’s not going to take a nice long nap. We could just let it happen how it happens, but we risk a really early bedtime, and then what if he wakes up at 5am tomorrow?! Maybe we should just contact nap him so we can help him sleep long enough. But I need to get work done. Can we squeeze an extra nap in? No, then we won’t have a long enough wake window before bed.”

It’s maddening. As in, it’s driving us both absolutely crazy. Let’s stop talking about sleep. I already talk about sleep too much.

My mom had a birthday, and we had the family over to celebrate. We took advantage of the good lighting and extra hands to get some family photos taken. Atlas is 6 months old!

Amy made an amazing chocolate cake with orange curd. It was nice to have a reason to celebrate.

This kicked off our week of beautiful weather. First we had a day with decent temperatures and calm wind, and I finally checked off a bucket-list drone flight: the canal between Lake Cadillac and Lake Mitchell. The Clam Lake Canal has its own Wikipedia page due to the winter phenomenon: first the canal freezes over, then the lakes freeze and the canal thaws, and remains open water for the rest of winter.

A couple days later, it was nearly 60°F and sunny, and calm! It was also St. Patrick’s Day. I asked the internet if any parades were happening, of course those were only on the weekends, but the brewery in Frankfort was offering green beers. So with about twenty minutes until the next nap started, we quickly ate some food, packed up the camera gear, and hopped in the car. Another bucket-list drone flight: the coast of Lake Michigan + Frankfort lighthouse! We started at Elberta Beach, where I maxed out the drone’s distance from the controller and then the drone height. Truly nerve-wracking to do on a snowy day over water.

Then we drove down to the beach by the lighthouse for a second flight. The ice floes really added some dynamic interest to these shots.

The water clarity is impressive, considering how much debris seems to be floating around – you can see the shadows of the ice floes on the sandy bottom! On such a sunny day, these photos looked almost black and white due to the glare on my phone screen, so I was shocked to look at them later and see so much color!

After those successful drone flights, we headed to the brewery to celebrate. It’s the second brewery we’ve gone to since Atlas was born.

It was so gorgeous out. I soaked up all the sun I could, Michigan winters are so dark and gray.

We had one more sunny day before the clouds took over again. Kyle got the bus out and we took the baby for his first bus ride!

After that, the weather got really gross again. We did have one bright spot – Kyle’s mom came to visit! She had not seen her grandson in a while, and he had lots of new tricks to show off.

I know I keep harping on this, but once you get a taste of spring it’s hard to handle winter weather again. So when we got an ice storm on March 30, we were all in a deep funk. The next day, it snowed.

In the last few days of the month, I got buried in a backlog of freelance writing assignments. It’s hard to get excited about writing “for fun” when I’m spending every minute of free time writing writing as much as I can about various other topics. It’s been hard to get this one done. Also, right after I wrote this, my dad texted me to ask when I was going to get this blog posted. Hi Dad!