There is a version of me from this past winter that I can still see clearly. I would get up around 4am. For the first hour the house was dead quiet, just me and the coffee and the code, hunting the kind of bug that quietly ruins a morning: a loop that looks completely fine and refuses to behave, some indentation off by a hair, the program calmly doing exactly what I told it instead of what I meant. Around 5, sometimes 5:30, the baby would wake up and join me, and the shift changed gears. I would feed with one hand, or prop the bottle against a rolled towel when I needed both, switching between one-handed typing and talking my notes into voice-to-text to keep moving. The reason I was doing any of it was right next to me the whole time, dozing back off with the bottle still in her mouth. Then 6:30 came, my son was up, and it was pencils down to get him ready for preschool.
The news from the dugout story became a person this winter. Our second kid arrived, healthy and loud, and every abstract thing I wrote in that first post about providing got very specific, very fast. You can sit on a dugout floor asking the universe why providing for your family is so hard. The universe's answer, apparently, is a winter where you find out.
Here is the part I want to be straight about, because I re-read the origin post before writing this one. Back in that dugout, providing was a concept. A weight I carried around in my head. This winter it stopped being a concept. It was diapers at 3am, a new house that came with a mortgage and a long list of work to make it feel like ours, and a kid down the hall who still needed dad to be dad. Meanwhile, my wife was recovering from delivery. And all of it was happening while I was, by my own choice, a full-time student carrying a full load through the winter trimester.
Because that decision looks either brave or idiotic depending on the week you ask me: when winter trimester enrollment opened, knowing the baby was coming mid-trimester, I did not lighten the load. Four more courses. Operating systems, systems analysis, and two programming classes. Three of the four were technical, two of them were writing actual code, and all of them were happening on the newborn's sleep schedule.
I would love to tell you there was a sophisticated calculation behind that. There was not. There was a plan with a timeline, and every time I thought about lightening the load, the same math stopped me. Slowing down did not mean less work. It meant the same work spread across more years, more seasons of my kids getting a dad who was a zombie by afternoon, wrung out from the 4am starts and the long days juggling two kids and a wife still recovering. The fastest way through was the fastest way back to being all theirs. So I kept the load, and I paid for it in the sleep I did not get.
The fall system did not survive contact with a newborn, either. Last post I told you my study hall was preschool hours, drop-off to pickup. A newborn does not respect the preschool calendar. The daytime windows I used to study in got swallowed by feedings and naps and a house that still needed running, so schoolwork got shoved to the only slot nobody else had a claim on. That is the version of me from the top of this post, up before the whole house with a bottle in one hand and a bug on the screen. The 4am start people online wear like a badge, the rise-and-grind, look-how-much-I-get-done-before-you-wake flex, mine was nothing like that. It was not a choice. It was what was left.
Programming on newborn sleep is its own comedy genre. I went from Python in the first half of the trimester to Java in the second, and my sleep-starved brain refused to keep them straight, reaching for Python habits in Java and wondering why the compiler hated me. I learned both the way you learn anything with an infant in the house, in twenty-minute fragments, half of them interrupted, all of them ending with me typing a note to my future self that current me would not remember writing. I have a whole new theory about why programmers run on so much caffeine, and it has nothing to do with the code.
But the coursework was the least of it, and the schedule was only ever half about the baby. Under all of it, quietly at first and then not quietly, was my wife's health. By the back half of the trimester, what we had been calling recovery from the birth had stopped looking like recovery. It was slipping into something neither of us had a name for, and it did not level off. The daytime that used to be my study hall became her care and the baby's, stacked on the chores and the appointments, and I did not have a word yet for how heavy that was. I am going to write about it properly, because it deserves more than a paragraph in a post about report cards. For now I will just say the winter was heavier than the course load.
That is also the honest reason I went quiet on a lot of people this year. Texts I left on read, calls I let ring out, friends who probably think I dropped off the earth. I did. Not because I stopped caring, but because every bit of capacity I had, and then some I did not have, went to holding the house and the family together. There was nothing left to be a good friend with. If you are one of those people and you are reading this, that is what happened. I was not disappearing on you. I was underwater.
Somehow, in the middle of all that, the trimester still ended. Early April, four more courses done, an A and three A minuses. A little worse than the fall, which I blame entirely on the baby, who has been completely unwilling to discuss the matter.
But here is the number I actually care about from that winter. Eight. Eight courses done in eight months, two trimesters, both stronger than I had any right to pull off, with a career change, a newborn, a wife I was scared for, and a house that kept being a house through all of it. The first time I went to college I had nothing but time and I could not finish. This time I have no time at all and I cannot seem to stop. I do not fully understand the mechanism. I just know that when the reasons you are doing something sleep down the hall, quitting stops being one of the options on the menu.
Spring was coming. Spring is when the real test showed up, and it was not on any syllabus.