Easy Peasy

For all of those who think having kids is easy (these people don’t have any children, or know of anyone who does!), or those who have a child and think 2 would be better: Here is our life at 4 months post-partum: Alice is 3 1/2, still wears pull ups at night. She rarely naps, but when she does her bedtime gets shifted accordingly. Given our nights with baby, we are not pushing potty training at night yet. Alice has an eye infection and needs eye drops 3x/day. These take about 1/2 hour to do, and end up with a full on hold with her kicking and screaming. The up side is I do eventually get some medication in her eye, and the infection is clearing up quickly. I’ve been sick almost steady for the last 2 months (2 nasty colds and 1 stomach bug). Don has had a cold for the last 2 weeks, and has a sinus infection. Yesterday Alice slept for 2 hours in the afternoon (of course her nap did not coincide with Nathaniel, so I didn’t get to lay down- this by the way, has only happened twice since having baby. Yes, that’s right, there have been a whopping 2 days in the last 4 months where all 3 of us have had a nap). Last night she didn’t fall asleep until after 11pm… Once I finally got her to bed, I went to bed. At 11:30pm, Nathaniel woke for his feeding. He was pretty tired, so it was a quick feed, I was back in bed shortly after midnight. Just as I fell asleep, he woke again at 1am, go downstairs to heat another bottle. Decide not to change baby since he was just changed less than 2 hrs ago, maybe he’ll stay sleepy enough and fall back asleep right away. After feeding him, burping him, I put baby back to bed. I don’t even get out of his room before he starts squealing (his latest fun activity to do in the middle of the night when we’re not sleepy). Luckily, this doesn’t last long and he falls quiet before 2am. I go back to bed. 2:30am: Alice wakes up and says she’s hungry. I go downstairs and get her a banana. She has 2 little bites and I tuck her back in. 3:00am: Nathaniel wakes for yet another feeding. I can’t believe he’s up AGAIN! Feed baby, try to keep my eyes open, change baby. Burp baby, more squealing. How can he be so happy at this godforsaken hour? By 4:30am, he finally falls quiet. But I hear Alice coughing, so I went into her room and she was laying in bed with her eyes open; she said she couldn’t sleep because she was coughing. So I gave her a soft cough drop to help her throat so she could sleep. Then I go downstairs to the playroom to turn Don’s monitor on (Don has started sleeping downstairs so that we can take actual shifts in the night- neither of us are getting any sleep!Also, his squealing is so loud it wakes up Alice; so lately I’ve been bringing baby into bed with me during this stage of the night until he’s sleepy enough to go back to his crib). I go to bed, put my ear plugs in and go to sleep. 7:30am: Alice wakes up and says “Good Morning, Mommy!”. I need to start drinking coffee; dark, dark coffee. And Don says I should have waited to go back to work until Nathaniel is sleeping through the night. Who needs sleep???!!! Maybe we’ll get some in 17 years… So, doesn’t that sound like fun?