Five Minute Reviews

Five Minute Review: The Four Month Sleep Regression

~ brixton ~ Leave a comment

People (and books, and the internet) warned us about the four month sleep regression.

At four months, babies’ sleep starts to change in tandem with a big growth spurt. They stop sleeping like, well, babies, and start sleeping more like adults. This is great, right? This means that they’re going to sleep 8 hours (or more?!) like the rest of us civilized people?

No. It actually means the opposite, at least in the short term.

Our son slept through the night* for the first time somewhere between 2-3 months, but has generally been what can generously be described as a reluctant sleeper.

So take our pretty difficult sleeper and add to his schedule the four month sleep regression and you get a baby who wakes up every 45-90 minutes All. Night. Long. For. Weeks. On. End. And you get parents who are so sleep deprived (or sleep interrupted) that they might as well be walking around drunk, except without any of the fun parts of being drunk.

So that is how I feel about the four month sleep regression. Two big thumbs down. Thankfully, four months is otherwise an awfully cute age AND ALSO he will never be four months old again.

*For those who don’t have kids, “sleeping through the night” is defined as sleeping 5 hours** without waking.
**Please note that I fed him at least once during this 5 hour period, so it’s not like I slept for 5 hours. Ever.

Five Minute Reviews: FitBit Surge

~ brixton ~ 1 Comment

For at least a year, I’ve been looking to replace my not all that trustworthy Garmin Forerunner 305. I kept putting off the purchase because I couldn’t find a watch in my price range that had the features I wanted: specifically, multisport capacity that included cycling.

Enter the FitBit Surge, the new high-end fitness tracker from FitBit. It promised multisport capacity in addition to the step and sleep tracker features available in the previous generation of FitBits. Lots of my friends have FitBits, so I was excited about the ability to compete for steps in addition to the training features. I set aside my Christmas money and waited for the release announcement.

My FitBit Surge came in the mail last Friday, and I happily strapped it to my wrist and started obsessively checking my steps. Here are the things I liked:

  • The watch is slick. It’s not a giant clunky thing, like my Garmin. However, it is on the big side, particularly if you’re not used to wearing a watch.
  • The interfaces for the watch, the mobile app, and the website are clean and easy to use.
  • The silent alarm is great, particularly if you don’t want to wake a sleeping baby.
  • The fitness tracker is easy to operate, even with giant lobster gloves on.
  • The GPS seemed to pick up more quickly than my Garmin, even in Hyde Park.

Things I didn’t like:

  • Multisport does NOT include cycling! !!
  • The heart rate monitor portion poked into my arm uncomfortably.
  • The sleep tracker is not granular enough to give really useful data.
  • I thought the step tracker would update automatically as I walked around; instead, I seemed to have to have my phone on me as well.
  • After 2ish days of wear, I started having small muscle spasms in my wrist in proximity to where the watch sat. NOT GOOD.

So unfortunately, my FitBit Surge is going back! Sorry, FitBit!

Five Minute Reviews

~ brixton ~ 2 Comments

I’m back at work and trying to get into the groove of professional writing, and it’s hard. My posting here has fallen off to the point that I’m still trying to get through posts about a trip we took a year ago. For the last few months, most of the writing I was able to accomplish was done one-handed on my phone while feeding the baby or in the stolen moments while he was napping and I really should have been napping as well.

I’m trying a few things to flex my writing muscles again. Most nights I’ve been able to take a few minutes before bed or before work to write a couple of paragraphs in a paper journal. I’m chipping away at the backlog of real emails during my pumping breaks. And I’ve been keeping a running list of things I want to write about here.

As an experiment, I’m going to try to write five minute reviews of whatever: books, movies, products, recipes, food trucks, etc. I will set a timer and write for five minutes, and whatever I get down (plus photos and links added after) is what I’ll post here. I’m going to try to do this weekly. Wish me luck!