It gets worse before it gets better.

That “bring a laptop to work” plan? Sure, it helps with the writing (and general sanity), but I have a short lunch break, and it flat out hasn’t been enough to cover for the otherwise increased demands on my time.

Granted, the worst is probably over: my son got a cold and it passed on to my girlfriend and then on to me, and so I ended up losing a week and a half of writing time first by caring for my family, and then by being sick myself. That’s dealt with (until the next inevitable sickness – did you know babies normally catch about ten different colds during their first year of life?) but, well, that’s a third of the month gone.

Beyond that, the fourth month is a hodgepodge of time-eating progress (my son wants to play more, he talks more, and so on – all awesome stuff that’s a nightmare to a regular writing schedule) and tantalizing visions of eventual increased freedom. I see hints of him wanting to play on his own, he’s rapidly outgrowing milk as a sole source of nutrition (the glorious four-bottles-a-day nirvana is fast approaching)…

But at this stage, they’re still just hints. And so it’s yet another day of having maybe an hour and a half of free time spread over the entire day, and of maybe scrounging another minute or so (we no longer have to sterilize the bottles – a dauting three-minutes task off the list until the next baby!)