When Jay put Max down on the floor, he just meant to let him fuss for a moment and show him we-do-not-kick-daddy. I was too sleep deprived to understand that at 3am.
Max is doing better. A little. He is waking one to three times a night and taking a regular nap. I just need to figure out how to lengthen his naps and periods of night time sleep. Oh and I need to move that mountain while I am at it.
…so desperate that I will give up sleep for a few days to see if I can improve on things around here.
Max has been going to sleep pretty well. We have the bedtime routine down pat. Teeth, Book, Nurse, Bed. Then I sit by the Pack and Play while he goes to sleep. If he gets up or goofs off, I leave the room and he gets all mad, but when I come back after a couple minutes, he is ready to lay down and go to sleep. It usually takes very little time, and I can sit by the door and read by the light of the hallway lamp. It even works at naptime!
But staying asleep is another story. UGH!!! Once he wakes up from the first stretch of sleep, anytime between 11pm and 1am, he will nurse, kick, toss, turn, and generally make it impossible for anyone to sleep besides him. And his sleep isn’t all that restful. I am so done.
So last night he went to bed like a dream. He stayed asleep until about the time I was dozing off at 11:20pm (yes, I stayed up too late, shame on me – but Good Eats was on.) and then he woke up.
I nursed him in the rocking chair, then put him back in bed. He was not appreciative.
So I started the bedtime thing. If he was laying down, I stayed right by the bed, when he got up, I went out and let him fuss. Sometime around 12:45, I began to get really tired of this.
Thankfully Ben was sleeping in the girls’ room, so I crawled into Ben’s bed and Max fussed on and off with my trying to get him to lay down, occasionally getting up to pat his back, get his pacifier when he threw it, etc. He began to doze on and off around 1:30 (!!!!) but didn’t get fully to sleep until about 2. (Yawn.) So I crashed in Ben’s bed. Finally. Sleep.
Max woke up, sincerely unhappy that he was still in his bed at 4:44am. Oh good grief. I was so delirious with sleep deprivation by this time, I just took him into our bed and tried to lay down and get back to sleep while nursing him. Max had a quick snack and decided he would much rather wrestle, which resulted in my getting the head-butt-of-love directly to the mouth. Grrr… now I was getting grouchy. I have had precisely 164 minutes of sleep so far and now I am injured as well. Talk about adding injury to insult.
I roll Max over to Jay’s side of the bed, in hopes that, in his sleep, he has somehow known about my hellish night and can pin Max down and get him to sleep. Nope. Max kicks Jay. Jay puts Max down on the floor and rolls over to go back to sleep.
Should I let my crabby one year old wander the house unsupervised at night? Nah, didn’t think so. So I get up and start the whole bedtime thing again. Only now it is 5am and the sun is starting to come up. We may have room darkening shades, but any dummy can see around the edges. My chances are slim. Max lays down, I lay down in Ben’s bed. Can I grab a few more minutes of sleep? No. Max freaks out since he can’t see me. (Even though I am whispering calming things to him the whole time, things like, “Mommy’s right here,” “Hush, it’s okay,” and “Go to sleep or I will throw you out the window.”) So I move the pillow and blanket and lay down right next to the pack and play on the floor. Max is still freaking out unless I hold my arm in a really awkward possition to that my hand is on the mesh and he can put his hand on it.
His hand slowly droops down. Dare I hope he is asleep? I take a peek.
He is sitting up playing. Sigh. Yawn.
I guess that 164 minutes was it for me. Max is up for the day. He should be ready to take a nap around 9am, just about the time my day has plunged into full-speed-ahead mode.
I’m going to bed at 7 tonight.
I didn’t think it could ever happen. It seemed too remote and unreal.
Max slept through the night.
Ahhhh. I feel so good! I put him to bed at 9pm last night, way overtired. We heard him crying (in Ben’s room where he has been starting the nights) at 4:50am. So I got unbroken sleep from 10:30pm to 4:50am. That is almost 6.5 hours in a row!!!!
That pile up and take me down. I handle big things just fine (well, mostly!)
1. the night before last, max was up from 1am-3:30am. Jay was out of town, I weathered this alone and got up at 5:30
2. Last night, Max woke up every 1.5 hours. All. Night. Long. Jay was exhausted from his trip out of town and was heading out of town this morning, I handled this one alone.
3. took the kids to school this morning, got home to a surly teenager who thinks that homeschooling means laying around in your jammies playing game cube all day. Got a gallon and a half of lip, slammed doors, and outright refusal to do chores.
4. got a call from the school nurse. posy has the stomach bug. Went to get her.
5. returned home and started to make banana bread because I can’t stand that swarm of @#$% fruit flies around my counter any more, wash bananas, they seem fine, mix bread up, realize there are no eggs.
6. as I am about to head out the door to get eggs, the school nurse calls again. Yep, Ben has it too.
7. I go get eggs, throw BB into oven, load up again and go get Ben.
8. I still have not managed to fold laundry from three days ago, and can’t wash anything else until the folding is caught up as there is no where to put more clean, unfolded clothes.
If my banana bread doesn’t turn out, I may just dive off the roof. I am losing it, truly losing it. None of that even sounds like a big deal!!!! Why am I freaking out? Lack of sleep?
Ben is reacting to Amoxicillin. The kids told me on the way to school that he was covered with a rash. So I took him in to the nurse who wasn’t there. I decided to take him home since he might be uncomfortable and I wanted to get some benadryl into him.
I got home, called the Dr office who told me NOT to give him the benadryl just yet, but to bring him in and let them check the rash. No point in putting him down as having a allergy if it is something else, right? Still, that makes for an 18 mile round trip (yes, I counted it out!) at $3.15 per gallon (in our gas guzzling, 11 mile-per-gallon van) for them to tell me what I already know: penicillin allergy. And poor Ben. He has to miss Buck-a-Jean-Day for this. (He doesn’t seem terribly distraught; he settled right down into watching Dragon Tales without a lick of complaint.)
Max, that precious, happy, jabbering, baby-signing toddler, is standing on my last nerve when it comes to night time and sleep. Last night he resumed his Head-Butt-of-Love routine, giving me a bloody lip in the middle of the night. I think he blasted Jay too, but I am not sure since I was trying REALLY hard to pretend to be asleep so Jay could deal with him for a bit. (Not that he ever shirks that duty, he shares it pretty equally. But hey, I was injured, right? Don’t I get to sit on the bench for a little while for an injury?) So I consider again the idea of sleep training. But to be honest with myself, I can’t give up the rocking and nursing to sleep. It is such a peaceful, cozy, cuddly time. Except when it’s not and Max decides that even though he is drop dead tired he will fend off sleep until either his last drop of energy is spent or mine is. Then it is not so fun.
Paisley has decided that barring any formal, planned family activity, she has no use for being home, except maybe to do her laundry and dump some papers on the table. Is it really in the Teenager’s Bill of Rights that they should be allowed to go out any time there is not special family time planned? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Some kind of limit needs to be set. Especially since the rides are still coming from us. Jay and I will have to discuss this one. I think we might have some time to sit down and do that in August. Maybe. In the mean time, surly, fit-throwing teenagers don’t get rides anywhere. At least not until their attitude changes and they do some chores. Lots of chores.
James was offended that he didn’t get TWO full days off of chores and school work for his birthday. When I informed him that he was luck he got ONE full day off he exclaimed that I just didn’t understand. You betcha I don’t. I don’t claim to understand any of this anymore. Was I really this difficult? (Oh yes and then some!) But he has cleaned up his attitude a bit since then. Removing all privileges does that to a kid. Then add in the carrot of getting to spend the day with Nana (who will probably buy you lunch) and it’s all good again.
Let’s see, who have I not updated on yet? Tessa and Posy! Tessa is so very FOUR and spends all her time playing doll house and begging me to play it with her. But when I play doll house with her it is really just me playing doll house for her entertainment. I have to do all the talking and figure out what the characters are doing. She just sets up the scenes and tells me when it is morning and night. I worry that I am misshaping her idea of play by my doing this, but what is a mom to do? Never play? There is just always some way to worry about them and some new way to wreck their lives and send them into permanent therapy later.
Posy is busy and getting more grown up every day. She is 11 now, and if I remember correctly it will be sometime this year that I will look at her and she will have changed from a little girl to a young lady overnight. For now, I just cherish these last few moments of being smarter than she is and of her being willing to play and do childlike things. The hourglass is running out on childhood for her.
Me, I have just been trying to get enough done around the house to justify sitting down to some scrapbooking or rosary making. neither has happened in forever. This past week has been a gathering up of all my homeschool books and getting ready to sell them. I have no idea where the funding for catholic school will come from for next year, but even if that doesn’t work out I don’t think I am going to homeschool any more. It just became too much for me and I wasn’t doing a good job. I am NOT of the mindset that poor homeschooling is better than public schools. Homeschooling was good for our family while it lasted and then it just wasn’t going to work any more. Selling the books is my way of letting go. Mostly I feel good about it but there is still that panicky feeling of burning that bridge behind me.
Poor, hard working Jay. Summer has set in here with our first official 100 degree day. Since he works outside the first couple of weeks are always the hardest for him. 100 degrees doesn’t actually describe the conditions he works in, since the official temps are taken in the shade over grass. Jay actually works in the sun over concrete or asphalt. It is so much hotter for him. We have stocked up on Power Ade during that last sale but that is small comfort to him, I’m sure. But still he will suffer outside every single day so that our family can eat and live in comfort. Thank God for his sacrifice!
Thank God I was in some kind of a good mood yesterday and had some kind of a sense of humor. I might have killed someone otherwise.
James watched the littles while I ran Paisley to school. Both Posy and Ben were home from school with the newest malady yesterday: high fevers, tummyaches and sore throat. (Please let it not be strep!!!)
I dropped Paisley off and headed to Sprouts to get some fruits and veggies to snack on. Fry’s Grocery store was on the way, and Jay had asked me to stop by and pick up more Powerade (on super-duper sale, and he needs a lot through the summer months since he works outside in the scathing heat of AZ.) So I go into Fry’s and lug 51 bottles of the stuff up to the front, pay, and put them in the car. As I am loading them, it occurs to me that I think I paid too much for what I got. So I sit down in the driver seat and go over the receipt. Sure enough the register didn’t discount *31* of the bottles. (For a difference of almost $31!). So I go back into the store and bring it to the cashier’s attention. He is very nice and gives me a refund. I head back out to the car to find…
My keys are locked in the car.
Thank God I didn’t have a bunch of the kids with me or someplace to be right after. BUT, this is also a day where Jay is working all the way across the state (literally!), so he can’t just bring me his key. So a call to a locksmith, 45 minutes, and $80 later, I am back on my way.
Now all I have to do is get through a Tuesday: a new dishwasher is being installed (Yay!!!), a softball game, and a surly teenager who is acting like an unruly toddler will keep any boredom at bay.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice dental appointment where I can sit in the waiting room for a while and read a magazine in peace? 😉
The other day Tessa asked if God lives in our bodies or if we live in His. I told her that God doesn’t have a body because He is a pure spirit. She answered that He must live in all of us then.
Yesterday Tessa was visiting at a friend’s house. The mom asked her if she wanted to watch Toy Story. Tessa’s reply was, “Um, that is kind of BOYISH.”
So what am I supposed to do when it finally rains and it is such a rare sight that my 15 month old is afraid of the windshield wipers?
Could the illness be over? Everyone seems to be on the mend, although Jay’s doctor called two weeks AFTER the thick of his illness to tell him he had pneumonia. Uh, thanks. Paisey was hit with the stomach flu last and then she had her trip to Mexico to build houses just a couple of days later. I hope her stomach feels better! The puking seemed to only last for a day but the rest of us had messed up tummies for over a week! It just sounds like a miserable way to feel when you don’t have even a real bathroom. But Paisley insisted she was well enough to go…
Max has a new FACE that he makes every single time we try to take a picture of him.
All he has to do is hear the camera beep, and all traces of a normal looking kid are gone and are replaced by this super-cheesy fake smile.
He is also up on the whole digital camera thing and expects to see his picture on the back of the camera whenever his picture is taken! Kids understand technology WAY faster than anyone else!
Max is able to sign Please, More, and Eat, but he adamantly refuses to do any other signs even though he knows them, responds to them and will do them in his sleep. I guess pointing and grunting is working too well for him!
Ben brought home a poem he wrote in school:
My dad just can’t be beat.
He helps me feel the warmth and heat.
Boy, I have the very best seat!
Sitting on my father’s feet.
By Ben Groft