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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(thanks to Not a Wasted Word for the inspiration for this post)
