Firstly, as stressful as unemployment was, Corey being home until Madeline was 6 weeks old turned out to be a huge blessing. He's gone now, but she's sleeping so much better at night and Benjamin has finally adapted to being big brother. We have all of the elements needed for successful Daddy-less daytimes.
Secondly, the children have aligned against me. When Benjamin goes down for a nap, Madeline wakes up. When she's ready to sleep again, I have about an hour of free time before Benjamin gets up. "Free time" meaning time to shower, brush my teeth, clean breakfast dishes... have I mentioned that this is usually around 2pm? When Benjamin has a crisis, Madeline will inevitably wake up and scream her head off. EVERY TIME. This also happens when my hands are full of Benjamin and I can't escape right away, like bath-time and really-horrible-poopy-diaper-changing-time. When Madeline gets really worked up and starts screaming, Benjamin gets upset with her and I am serenaded by a chorus of wails. I think they plan it out.
Thirdly, I'm so over my head. The minute things start to stray away from my plan, everything goes out the window. Schedules, commitments, appointments... Yeah, right. I don't expect to be on time for anything again, at least for another 2 years. (Keep that in mind when inviting me places. Probably better to tell me the wrong time.)
Our first week was chaotic only because it happened to be my finals week for school. Bad timing!! I would have loved to spend my first solo-week hiding out in my living room, watching Madeline snooze and reading books with Benjamin. That's not quite how it happened, unfortunately, and instead we spent just about every day running around in circles. I have to say, for all of the aligned-against-me talk, Benjamin has been a real trooper. It can't be fun to move from car to house to car to store to car to house again, and he did a pretty good job of obeying me. My days of activity (with brief snippets of time to try and do homework) were exhausting, and that meant no desire to stay up late doing necessary homework once Corey got home. Bad timing again! I actually stayed on top of my work this semester, despite having a newborn (hooray again for Corey being home) but I still had quite a bit to complete before classes ended. I finished out the week with an all-nighter and 2 days of sitting in class, so my "break" on Sunday didn't feel very restful.
This week has been extra special because Benjamin isn't feeling well. He's super-clingy and tired, not to mention that he's stopped eating/drinking (except milk, which he can't have). Whenever I try and pay some attention to Madeline, Benjamin gets jealous and wants to be in my arms. When he's awake, he only wants to be watching Bambi. When he's asleep, Madeline's awake. I keep looking around me and thinking "where did my day go? Why isn't anything getting done?" but it's so exhausting to have two "babies" right now.
I'm excited to some day say that we've got a routine for our day (well, we HAVE one. it's taped to my fridge and getting dusty.) and I'm hoping that my energy starts to come back as well. In the meantime, I'm feeling pretty exhausted and guilt-ridden about all of the attention that Madeline isn't getting. She still sleeps a lot, but that only means that I want to engage her for the brief periods of awake. I keep telling myself that it will get better, because really it has to. For now, I'm watching December slip past me, wondering when I'll feel on top of my stuff again, and worrying that there isn't enough of me to go around.
This turned into a real downer of a post, sorry!! Things I can't say on the baby blogs because I don't want them to someday read about my negligence :-P As an upper, here's a picture from our trip to CA. My face has been smudged out because I have the power to do such things, especially when it's a horrible horrible exhausted picture of me. Benjamin's pants are missing because he had an explosive diaper mid-flight. What you can't see is that Madeline has spit up all down my front and is soaking in it, nor can you see the masses of baggage that we got to cart through the airport (and onto the shuttle. go us!) You also can't see that it's almost freezing outside, though Benjamin's blue toes might give that away. Welcome to my life!
No comments:
Post a Comment