It’s 7pm on a Wednesday night, and our house is still full of friends and their children because of an impromptu dinner party. Harvey’s teeth are hurting him & he missed his late afternoon snooze because of the dinner party, so even though it’s an hour before bedtime, I know he needs to go to bed early. I dread doing this though, because with the kids sharing rooms, it’s way easier to put them down at the same time so they can talk each other to sleep instead of the late to bed child waking up the already sleeping one. You do what you have to do though.
*****
It’s 7:15pm, and I’m rocking my baby in the dark, nursing him to sleep while I listen to the commotion of 4 toddlers running around downstairs. Harvey is nearly 9 months old now and highly distractable lately, so the quiet nursing sessions at the end of the day are really the only time he gets a good feeding in anymore, and it’s stressing me out. How is he getting enough milk at this point? I don’t want to do formula if I don’t have to. I sometimes wish I didn’t care so much about this. He is fed, and he is healthy. We are lucky.
*****
It’s 8:15pm, and our friends & their kids have just left. We’ve pushed it beyond Stella’s normal bedtime of 7:30-8:00, but I know that she needs some time to wind down before we try to plop her into bed next to her sleeping brother. Charlie goes to turn on the TV in our bedroom, but I ask him to keep it off for a minute while we give Stella a special treat – reading 2 books in bed with us.
We spend the next 10 minutes watching in awe as she “reads” the 1st book to us from memory, and we sing the nursery rhymes from the 2nd book together. This has been her favorite book for months now, and we all know the songs by heart. Stella is snuggled into bed between us, head on Daddy’s pillow, visibly soaking in this rare one-on-one time with her Mommy & Daddy. We need to remember do time like this more often with her.
*****
It’s 8:30pm, the kids are in bed, and Charlie turns on the fall premiere of one of our favorite shows. I realize I’m at 8,500 steps for the day and I really want to get to 10k, so I walk circles around the bedroom while reading Twitter on my phone and watching the TV out of the corner of my eye. This drives Charlie BONKERS as usual. I tease him that he’s mad I’m on my phone and all he wants me to do is watch the TV. Screen time or screen time… which one to choose? First world problems for sure.
*****
It’s 9:45pm, and my husband has been asleep since 9. I got my second wind after all that walking, so instead of going to sleep like I should have, I watched another episode of one of my fall shows. Now I know I need to get to sleep though, especially since I’m just recovering from a bout with a clogged duct and early mastitis the day before. I turn off the TV and snuggle in, not knowing I’m about to wake up in 90 minutes to begin a night full of comforting a teething baby and a sick toddler.
Life. It’s beautiful, even when it’s not.
*****
(thanks to Not a Wasted Word for the inspiration for this post)
All this sounds so familiar 🙂 Except for the up past bedtime. Bc as a SAHM, if I don’t max out the evening child-(mostly)-free hours, I crack.
We RARELY push past bedtime. Our friends are leaving for 6 months though, so it was sort of a special last minute get together to see them before they were gone for the winter. I agree – that post-bedtime time is crucial for all parents I think!
And Harvey is 9 months old! Holy crap that sounds old.
I completely understand how stressful it can be feeding a baby who is so distracted. Callen has a huge problem nursing in public with anyone around him, and pretty much the only way I know he’s getting a good feeding is if I feed him in his room where it’s dark, his sound machine is on and then he will eat. We bought nursing necklaces, tried nursing covers, etc and nothing seemed to help. I did notice that those days where he wouldn’t nurse much during the day, he often made up for it by waking up more to nurse at night. Not fun, but at least I felt better knowing he was getting his milk sometime. Are you noticing your supply going down because of this? The teething thing is a big one too, it probably hurts him to nurse much as well. 🙁 You are doing good, keep offering and hopefully he will go back to nursing better soon!
Yeah, I’m definitely struggling with supply big time. The problem is he also takes bottles fine when I’m gone, so I can’t keep up with my pumping output. It’s a mess. (and yes, he’s waking up more at night again now too – ugh!)
G rarely drank from a bottle, so when I worked his first year he usually got one or two good feedings between the time we got home and bed, and he’d wake up once and it’d seem like he’d be on the boob forever! My supply tanked when I went back to work and I had a hard time keeping up after the time J spent the night at his parent’s with G, against my wishes, which depleted my stash 🙁 G’s lack of interested in the bottle and then a near nil supply stressed me out to no end. I ended up having to use formula to mix in with cereal or homemade baby food because I needed whatever milk I pumped for G to have when I wasn’t around. It was hard for me to make peace with that decision.
Ugh! The distracted baby. I feel your pain there. L is worse than G was. I have to have it absolutely quiet and dark. I even have to close my eyes! He yanks his head away at the slightest noise (which, now he has 6 teeth — OUCH!) and I can’t get him to refocus. It’s a hard thing to deal with when I can’t get G to entertain himself for 10 minutes 🙂
That’s why I’m afraid of fitness trackers! Because I’ll end up doing laps around the house just trying to break the 10k mark. hahaha.
Haha, that’s what I LIKE about mine! It makes me move way more than I would without one. 🙂
This was fun and beautiful to read. Thanks for the window into your life. Loved the last few sentences the most. And sorry about the mastitis! Miserable! Are you feeling any better?
Yep, much better, though Thursday was filled with STELLA being puking sick. Rough week around here!
Great post! I would love to learn more about the room sharing thing- one of my biggest hesitations on maybe adding a 3rd child to our family is that baby and C would have to share a room. Thoughts or advice?
My thoughts – if that’s your only hesitation, then you should have a 3rd kid. 🙂 I grew up sharing a room, and we have a 3 bedroom house now, but we like having the 3rd room be guest/office, so the kids have shared a room since they were 6 mo / 2.5 yrs old, and it’s fine. Every once in awhile they wake each other up, but it’s rare. I’ve decided it’s because they sleep with “dad ears” and not “mom ears” — aka — they aren’t listening for someone to wake up. I’ll get an entire post written on this someday soon, but yeah, it’s been relatively painless for us in the grand scheme of sleep stuff!
Thanks Josey! I appreciate this and yes, please write a post on it. Glad that it’s working out so well for your two- and I laughed about “dad ears” – SO TRUE- ha!
Such a real post. By the way my hubby also just wants me to “sit and watch TV” but that drives me mad – I want to do other stuff at the same time too!
I’m sure Harv is getting enough milk. Watch his weight and diapers if you are worried.
Right? There are so many other things to get done…put laundry away, exercise, catch up on blog reading, whatever. 🙂
Harv is not taking in much milk at all, but he does eat a ton of solid food. I guess I’ll just focus more on getting well balanced food in him.
I really liked this post. So much that I’ve kept it mark unread in my reader for almost 2 weeks until I got a chance to come say so 🙂
🙂 Thanks Kasey!