I haven’t written in a while because, frankly, life’s been kind of hard around here lately. Here’s the good news: for the last week, Ryan has slept at least 6 hours during the night, usually from 11-4 or 5. This is quite impressive for a 2-month old. The bad news is that we apparently exchanged nighttime sleep for daytime naps. That’s right — he rarely naps now, and when he does, it’s for maybe an hour at most, unless we’re driving around or something. Oh, and when he sleeps, it’s not in his bouncy chair or bassinette; it’s usually on one of us, in his sling or just laying on us. And to top it off, the person holding him usually has to be moving or he wakes up and cries. There is no break-from-baby time during the day.

So, he is, to quote our pediatrician, “high-maintenance.” Yesterday he got his first round of vaccinations and was understandably a bit more fussy when we got home. I had him in his sling and was walking around, but he still wouldn’t settle down. So I went upstairs and turned on the vacuum cleaner (no joke), sat on an exercise ball that was up there and bounced up and down on it. Sure enough, he went right to sleep. But the second I turned off the vacuum — you guessed it — the little bugger woke up and cried. We tried this routine three times, until I realized that if I gradually moved farther and farther away from the vacuum and then had Mason turn it off, he’d stay asleep.

I realize this will be high-larious in hindsight. And you can bet that when Ryan is a teenager and tells me I never do anything for him, I will most certainly mention the time I bounced on a exercise ball next to the vacuum cleaner just so he could get to sleep. But right now it just means that we have to accept that our house will be messy for a while and that we won’t get to eat a meal together for a while. I keep telling myself that this is temporary and sooner than I think, he’ll be napping and sleeping like normal. That makes it bearable.