Date Night No More

Every Christian marriage conference or premarital counseling program you attend will drive this point home: continue to date and pursue each other after the wedding day! Granted, dating your spouse is vastly different than when you were single, but it is worthwhile in keeping the marriage strong.

True to form, it gets complicated after the kids arrive, for three reasons: childcare, financing, and scheduling. Until Moses was 4 months old, we brought him along on our date night outings. When he got older, it was easy to drop him off at friends' houses on our way out. Eventually, a better arrangement emerged, where we enlisted another family to watch each other's kids once a month when we needed a night out. This worked well while it lasted, especially that we each had one child and the children were about the same age. These friends moved away to another state, halting our sweet dating program.
To make matters worse, we went and had another kid. Arrangements between families to watch each others' kids suffer when there are more kids per family to watch. And often, the more kids a family has, the better it is that childcare happen at their house, at least until the babies are older.

While family and friends can be helpful in enabling us go out once in a while, we do not want to impose on them or burden them with frequent requests for childcare. Indeed, a two-kid situation is a different dynamic than a single-kid one, and not many are prepared to handle it. Besides, it is too much of a hassle to shuttle the kids somewhere so you can go out for a couple of hours. Even if you can find a childcare provider that can handle this dynamic, they won't be cheap. A provider from care.com, for example, can charge upwards of $35/hour for two kids, effectively doubling or tripling your date night budget.

Further more, our current sleep routine does not favor night outings or other obligations after dusk. We also find that it is not worth it to interrupt our babies' evening schedules so we can get out and eat steak. The best scenario would be for someone to come to our house and do this evening routine with them while we are out on date night. Otherwise, we pay for it down the road in thrown-off sleep cycles and the effects of inconsistency, lessons learned from Moses.

So with all things considered, we decided to not do date night for a little while. Instead, we will do "date day" (need a better-sounding moniker): we'll schedule it on a day when the babies are at childcare, meaning it'll have to be during the day (most likely in the afternoon). Immediately, the time of day we go out on a date changes what it means, how it feels, what we can plan to do, and where we can go. It also means we both take an afternoon off work, which is in effect an additional cost, depending on how you look at it. We understand why many couples forgo the idea altogether, but we are determined to still make it work, as long as we can.

Engineering the Sleep Dynamic

It is true that having two kids (or more) changes the family dynamic immensely, starting with sleep. Four individuals with different sleep schedules can be overwhelming, but if you consider this an engineering problem that can be "solved", there is hope. And that's exactly how I decided to handle it: to find a way for everyone to get their sleep on without adversely affecting anyone else. We did this with Moses too, but it was simpler then.

The first dimension is the "how much" of sleep: Nelson is still on a 3-hour cycle all day long; Moses sleeps from 7-8pm to 5-6am (10 hours); Angelene needs 8 hours; and I need 4-5 hours. Night gives us only 12 hours, so the problem to solve is how overlaps will work.

The second dimension is the "when" of sleep: if Moses goes down at 7:30pm and is out for 10 hours, we won't see him again until 5:30am. For Angelene to have 8 hours of sleep, she'd have to hit the sack at 9:30pm and wake up when Moses awakes. But before she goes to sleep, she'd need to feed/change Nelson at 9pm, and set him asleep. I can get my 4-5 hours of sleep then if I go to bed at 7:30pm with Moses and wake up for Nelson's next feeding at midnight. I would do the two night feedings (midnight and 3am) with pumped milk, and he would resume normal breastfeeding at 6am.

Notice how Moses' sleep schedule is really the pivot of this whole plan, not Nelson's; if it's off, we suffer. The other key is the 9:30pm-midnight block when all 4 of us are asleep: if we miss this window, toss the plan out. But we have an advantage in the fact that I am a short-sleeper and night owl, which I can bring to bear for this plan to work.

The third dimension is the "quality" of sleep we each get, measured by how many times we are interrupted in our allotted blocks of sleep time. I reckon sleep interruption is practically worse than foregoing sleep altogether, so we want to limit that number. As parents though, we can hear our babies' squeals in our deepest sleep, and are bound to awaken thus. So our solution: Nelson care happens downstairs so that whoever is sleeping upstairs can have quiet (as in, forget the bedside bassinet). The only hiccup is the 9pm-midnight window, when Nelson is quietly brought upstairs to our bedroom (presumably already asleep). I normally do not hear much of that, although Nelson's been quite restless and loud some of the nights that I awake. Angelene then uses earplugs so she won't hear much of the midnight waking later. When I wake up a little while before midnight, I quietly take Nelson back downstairs.

The orchestration can be a hassle but it pays off when it all works. To help it work, Angelene must pump so we have reserve for the night feedings (or we'd need to use formula), and fixing two extra pumping sessions in a 3-hour cycle can be tricky. Sickness cannot happen because it throws the whole dynamic off. Outside commitments are foregone or limited to allow this orchestration to work. And we must stay on top of things at all times, including eating all meals of the day on time.

Surprisingly, this plan affords us unexpected opportunities: we can have breakfast and dinner together, since those are the junction points on which the night hinges (6pm and 7am). An early start allows me to be back home from work early enough and spend time with the family before night kicks in. The midnight-6am chunk of time (minus 3am Nelson feeding) turns out to be a great time for me to work on personal stuff, read, do some programming, etc. This is when you are likely to see responses to emails and other communication. I have sometimes taken another nap towards the morning, but I like that there is some predictability in the mayhem, that sleep depravation can be avoided with a little engineering creativity.

Meet Nelson Bwambale

We are pleased to announce the birth of our second born boy, Nelson Bwambale. He was born on Jan-19, 2016 in Colorado Springs, Colorado about 9 days ahead of his official due date. Even so, we was "fully baked", weighing in at 7lbs 13oz (3.5kg) and measuring 19in (48cm). Both baby and mother are doing well.