All Together Now

Until last night, Ben ate in his highchair in the kitchen, and I basically gave him one thing at a time as I made it, and Andy and I ate dinner after we put Ben to bed. But lately we'd been wondering whether a slightly later bedtime might result in a slightly later wake-up time (5:30 AM = so not fun for all), though the idea of losing even half an hour of our precious grown-up time in the evening was painful to contemplate. (We'd been putting Ben down between 6:30 and 7, and going to bed ourselves around 9:30 or 10.) But then it occurred to me that Ben is ready -- way past ready, in fact -- to join us at the table for dinner, and that we could solve all our problems by having dinner earlier, all together. (So that while we put Ben down later, we don't then have to spend any time making dinner for ourselves, so we have about the same amount of leisure time.)

So we did it last night for the first time, and the dinner part, at least, was a success. It was a bit of a scramble getting everything ready together, even though I was only making frozen pizzas and a Greek salad. But Ben hasn't warmed up to salad, and needed more than French-bread pizza to eat, so I made a standard Ben dinner while Andy finished the salad and wrangled the boy-o and fed the dogs, and we managed to sit down to a relatively civilized dinner, all three of us. It was very nice.

Sleeping, oy, no such luck. I don't know whether it was even related to the change in schedule, but the kid had a really tough night with several wake-ups, none that he went down easily after. He did sleep about half an hour later, though, but what with all the wackiness overnight, I don't consider it good data. So we'll see.