Schedule Changes

By nature, I am a person who enjoys organization and structure and takes a certain degree of comfort in routine. This trait comes through in my teaching (while activities vary, I have a set structure to my classes), my exercise routine (30 minutes on the elliptical machine followed by10 minutes of abs and the weight machines on Tuesdays and Thursdays- at least this is what I did when I was able to go to the gym more regularly).

What is perhaps most peculiar, is that my need for organization and routine transcends into my trips to Miller Park to watch the Brewers. My buddy Bloom and I split a 20 game pack of tickets, and I always have a certain series of rituals that I go through when I attend baseball games. I always bring a bag of peanuts to the game to much on (shelled peanuts are a vice of mine) and a water bottle. On Sundays, a funny beer vendor who goes by the nickname "The Iceman" comes to our section around the second inning. I enjoy the hot pretzels at the game, but only from the concession stands (preferably the one on the field level third base side), not from the "pretzel pit," and the pretzel is always purchased around the mid-way point in the game. These little traditions and routines may seem a bit odd, but, I guess that's just how I operate. My buddies and wife sometimes get a kick out of giving me a hard time for these idiosyncrasies, and to be frank, with some of them, like the baseball game stuff, I totally deserve any flack I get. If I enjoy routines, traditions, and structure at the ball park, you can only imagine some of my oddities around the house.

Enter into the picture Hope and Grace, and my sense of routine and structure has been thrown out the window faster than a Ben Sheets fastball. For the past week, our two "snuggle sisters" have done nothing but vary their schedule daily. Jeni and I have found ourselves ad-libbing our lifestyle to keep up with theirs. Dinner in the Piper household recently has been served around 9:00 p.m., as the girls have taken to eating their "mid-evening-meal" between 7 and 8 when we'd usually eat. Sometimes the girls will feed at the same time, other times, Hope will eat first, and still other times, it is Gracie who demands to get her eat on. I find myself going to bed at 11:30-12:00 (depending on when the girls want to eat last), getting up at 3:00 a.m., then again between 5:00 and 7:00 a.m., depending on when the girls get the munchies, and then, if I don't have to go to work, returning to bed for a few more winks and getting up around 10:00 a.m. The last time I kept hours like that was when I was an undergrad at UW-Madison, and even then, there was a bit more consistency to everything! Last week I even called my parents at 6:00 a.m, thinking it was 7:00 a.m., to chit-chat and talk Brewers with my dad. Needless to say, they were rather amused by my bewilderment!

People are often asking us these days if we are getting sufficient sleep, and the truth is that we technically are in terms of number of hours, etc. but our schedule is so totally turned around from what we are used to, that we find ourselves tired in the middle of the afternoon and wide awake around the time we would usually go to bed. Go figure. Despite all of this, there is nothing I'd rather do than care for the girls. When they shriek through the baby monitor in the middle of the night, I groggily get up, turn the monitor down (so Jeni can get a few winks) stumble into the bedroom, take care of the "code brown" (which inevitably happens around this time) and then warm bottles while the girls screech. When I finally get to hold them and watch them stare up at me, I sometimes have to pause and pinch myself to make sure that these girls are really real and have made it here.