Chapter Ten: Routine
Having a baby is disruptive. The sooner you develop a newborn’s schedule for eating and sleeping, the more time you will have for your principal pastime, worrying. My mother told me, among other things, to bathe the baby at 10 a.m., feed her, burp her and put her down for a nice long nap. The added bonus was that it would give her a sense of security to know that certain things happened at the same time each day. I believe that. It sounded like a chaos-limiting move, and then one day I found myself dangling a naked 3 week old over the bathroom sink watching the clock tick 9:57, 9:58, 9:59… I was not a well woman.
