Chris Lane on the Toughest Part of Parenthood for Him: 'Our Little Man Does Not Like to Sleep'

"I feel like I'm in a great place in my life right now. Career-wise and family-wise, I have never been happier," Lane tells PEOPLE

By Tricia Despres

Published on February 22, 2022 05:50 PM

As Chris Lane prepped for yet another weekend on his Fill Them Boots tour, the "Big, Big Plans" hitmaker found himself still recovering from his past weekend on the West coast.

"I'm a little tired right now," Lane, 37, said in a recent Instagram story, mere days after yet another series of headlining shows alongside openers such as Lily Rose, ERNEST, and Tyler Rich. "But I'll be ready to rock this weekend."

The tiredness in his voice is of no surprise, as Lane is not only getting used to life back consistently on the road, but he's also one of the countless people who found themselves fighting COVID over the holidays.

"It was kind of strange," Lane, 37, says of his bout with the virus just before his son Dutton's first Christmas. "I woke up in the morning and I didn't feel sick, but I had some crazy back pain. And then a couple of hours after that, my whole body started feeling super achy."

Lane would end up testing negative twice before he got his first positive test.

"The body aches and back pain was really the worst part," says Lane, who is vaccinated. "And then at the very end, I got a little congested, but that went away a couple of days after."

And while Lane did his best to keep his distance from wife Lauren Bushnell Lane and now 8-month-old son Dutton, he says he's pretty sure his wife ended up catching it from him anyway.

"I had been getting negative tests after the symptoms had gone away, so I was holding Dutton and still trying to do daddy duty, but then she started feeling bad," Lane says of his Bachelor alum wife. "She only had two days of symptoms. She never tested positive, but she 100% had to have had it. She definitely felt bad for two days and then she was completely fine after that."

After the COVID craziness, Lane says that he and Lauren were perfectly fine with keeping New Year's Eve quite chill.

"We had already decided we weren't going to do anything for New Year's," remembers Lane. "And that is exactly what we did. We did absolutely nothing. Except we did make a bomb dinner. We had crab legs and I cooked steak and lobster as well. We went all out on the food — but we did it all on our sweatpants."

Certainly, it was a sweet moment for the North Carolina native, who first hit the country music scene seven years ago with the sexy earworm "Fix." But since then, his life has done a complete 180, and the singer-songwriter says he couldn't imagine it any other way.

"Getting married and having a child definitely softens your heart in the best way," says Lane, who recently collaborated with Dustin Lynch on "Tequila on a Boat. "I feel like I'm in a great place in my life right now. Career-wise and family-wise, I have never been happier."

But Lane still admits that it hasn't always been easy.

"I'll be honest… a couple months ago we were in the mix of it," says Lane, who has snagged three No. 1s in his career and who recently released the playful track "Howdy." "It's been really hard because our little man does not like to sleep very well. He's starting to get it figured out now, but a couple months ago, we were like, 'There ain't no way we could even consider having another one.'"

Of course, the couple is already starting to rethink that statement.

"Now I understand how people say that you forget how hard those first five or six months were," says Lane, who has already had a crib built on the tour bus for Dutton. "Now I think that potentially we will do it again. We're already talking about it."

He laughs.

"Watching Lauren be a mom has been the best thing in the world," says Lane, who tells PEOPLE that Dutton is "such a mama's boy." "She's got it down pat, even when she felt like she didn't know what she was doing. She is seriously the best mom. Just when you don't think that there's any way you could love somebody more, I feel like I'm finding a new way every single day."

Lane's Fill Them Boots tour continues through April. Find further details here.