One of the toughest parts about having a newborn at home is the loss of routine.

As someone with autism, routines are more important to me than to the average neurotypical individual; the first six weeks of motherhood were pretty tough. However, as Sonny’s been growing and I’ve been practicing being a mom, our days at home together have coalesced into, if not a strict routine, then at least a repetitive rhythm. (Just in time for me to go back to work in two weeks — yikes!).

We wake up for the day somewhere in the vicinity of 8 a.m. If Sonny wakes up fast and hollering, he gets a diaper change and eats breakfast first, and then the dogs get breakfast and some time on the line outside (weather permitting).

If Sonny wakes up slowly, and starts making warning mumbling and “cuh-cuh-cuh” noises, I have five minutes to quickly feed the dogs and get them outside before the little prince swims to full consciousness. Regardless, Mom does not eat her breakfast until Sonny, Janey and Karma have eaten theirs.

Then, we change another diaper (in fact, if I tell you how many times a day I change a diaper, this newspaper will run out of ink) and go to the mat for tummy time. It’s important for babies to spend supervised time on their stomach to develop their muscle.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Sonny does not like being on his stomach — unless he is staring at the flashing, light-up musical keyboard thingamajig on his playmat. He’s entranced by “the itsy bitsy spider.” I’m a little worried about what this means for his future interest in screen time. At the moment, learning to hold his head up is the priority.

The dogs closely supervise playtime. Amazingly, they haven’t eaten any of his toys yet, which is more respect than they’ve ever shown me or my wife.

After about 90 minutes, it’s nap time. Unfortunately, for the past few weeks, Sonny has decided nap time is for losers and naps in his bassinet are for double-super uncool losers. And my son is determined not to be a loser. So nap time is a roll of the dice. I’m convinced that the secret to being a mom who gets stuff done during the day is having a good napper.

These days, to-do tasks fall into four categories: things I need him to be asleep in his crib for, things I can do with him strapped to me, things I can do while he’s hanging out on his playmat, and things I can do while nursing.

The final category involves phone calls, emails, paperwork, and, yes, drafting newspaper columns. Food is classified into “requires two hands” and “doesn’t.”

A couple times a week (usually for the second or third nap of the day), I strap Sonny in his carrier and bounce around the house until he dozes off before taking the dogs for a walk one at a time. I tried taking him out of the house awake in the carrier once. A quarter mile down the road, he started screaming for a diaper change. I’ve never walked home so fast in my life. Never again.

Sometimes he wakes up partway through the walk, which means whichever dog was slated to go second loses out. Fortunately, Karma has her dog walker, and Janey — well, she’s a lot older and fatter than she used to be. Some days she’s fine with just a stroll around the yard.

Sonny and I also spend a fair amount of time just sort of staring at each other and making faces. He’s not super interactive yet, although recently he figured out how to put his fist in his mouth, which was pretty big for him. Soon he may even discover his legs are attached to him. Hopefully he will stop kicking me in the gut then.

Bedtime begins sometime in the 7 p.m. hour, depending on when his last nap of the day was. You have to time sleep perfectly, otherwise you end up with a demon baby. And for about two weeks we had a demon baby at bedtime no matter what we did. It’s called “the witching hour.”

We wanted to start Sonny on a bedtime routine but we didn’t want it to consist of two solid hours of inconsolable screaming. Apparently it’s good for his development? I suspect this is an understudied area of hearing loss in adults. Fortunately, we seem to have moved that period (for now).

At bedtime, he gets a bottle of pumped (excuse me, “expressed”) milk to make sure he has a big, filling dinner at the start of the night. And nighttime is where his poor napping during the day pays off, because he is finally starting to consolidate some sleep.

His first chunk of sleep is now pretty consistently about 8 p.m. to midnight, sometimes longer. A few nights ago, I got five-and-a-half hours of sleep in a row. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

But mostly for the past few weeks I’ve gotten my sleep chunks in a three-hour, three-hour, two-hour pattern; Sonny sleeps for consecutively shorter periods in the night.

The night wakeups are usually around midnight and 4 a.m. Coincidentally, my wife also gets up for work at 5 a.m., so we get to hang out then, which is nice. Then I get him back to sleep as fast as I can before dozing off on the couch. And the cycle begins again.