I Love Schedules
1 Jan
When Maya was born I had no idea how to even change a diaper. Hers was the first and I did it while an impatient nurse looked on telling me to fold here and fold there. I could almost hear her thinking, “Can someone who waits until their child is born to learn how to change a diaper really be qualified to be a parent?” Well the answer, of course, is no. Oh and Nurse? I am fairly certain that five years later I am still not qualified to be a parent.
I had no idea just what I was getting myself into with a newborn. In fact, it was about one million times more difficult than I ever imagined it would be. The hardest part of all? The constant sleeplessness. I was a walking zombie because I was awake every three hours to give Maya a bottle. I swear, my child would not sleep. After six weeks our pediatrician took one look at our haphazard clothes, disheveled hair, and dark circles and said that we should try to get Maya on a schedule so that she’d sleep a little longer at night. By “longer” I think the doctor meant four-hour stretches. At that point four hours seemed like an unimaginable luxury and I was willing to do whatever it took.
She might look innocent but looks can be deceiving...
So like anybody else I turned to my computer for answers. Thanks to my background in finance, I believe that all problems can be solved with Excel. Need a pivot table? I’m your girl. Need something sorted in ascending or descending order? You got it. Can I make you a chart, a graph, or can I concatenate two cells for you? No problem. Make a six-week old stop crying and go to sleep? Not so easy. But I figured that if I can tackle everything else with Excel, why not a baby?
Don’t laugh, desperate situations call for desperate measures.
I immediately broke out my computer and got to work. Ali and I made a schedule in Excel complete with empty spaces for check marks, notes, times, and comments. What time did Maya eat? How many ounces of formula? What time was her diaper changed? How many hours had she slept? I was anxious about leaving Maya with anyone because I was scared they would feed her at a non-designated time. And when they did (which they always did) I went into a tizzy. Ali and I would open up Excel and try to revise the schedule but we soon learned that the domino effect made revisions impossible. That didn’t stop up from trying though, and the two of us stuck to the schedule like glue. We prayed for a miracle that would show us a relationship between something, anything, and Maya sleeping longer. We stared at the schedule trying to correlate. We begged the schedule to help us correlate.
The schedule never correlated.
So Maya is almost five and you’d think that I would have mellowed out a bit with the scheduling. And while some would disagree I have when it comes to Maya (lucky her), I find that I cannot stop myself from scheduling other aspects of my life. For example, even when I know I don’t have to go to work, I still wake up at 5:30 or 6 am to get to the gym. Why? Well I get nervous that if I don’t then the rest of the day will be off. Off what, you ask? I have no idea.
I am at the gym by 6 am (at the latest). Hot water with lemon at 8 am. Oatmeal at 9 am (and God help us all if we run out of oatmeal). Lunch at 1 pm. Dinner at 7 pm. Maya in bed at 8:30 pm. Tea at 9 pm. Bed by 10 pm (at the latest). You can mark my day by watching the clock. It is pretty sad, isn’t it? This is the schedule I stick to even if I have an entirely empty day stretching ahead of me.
While scheduling isn’t the worst habit to have, I would love to be considered one of those “fly by the seat of my pants” kinds of people. I’d love to be able to roll with the day and not worry about what the clock says, especially when I don’t have any reason to (i.e. a weekend or when I’m on vacation). But I cannot do it no matter how hard I try. And I have tried. I am old and set in my ways I guess.
I could write on this topic endlessly but it’s about time for tea and some chocolate so I better go. I have a schedule to stick to, you know. But before I do, I wonder, does anyone else have as close a relationship with their schedule as I do?
