How Is It Going?

I figure that I am bound to post blog entries when I'm full of angst about my difficult transition from one to two kids so I should post when I'm feeling pretty good about it too.



Monday (yesterday) was Chris' first day back to technically full-time work (although he works from home and always has opportunities for short breaks and flexibility of when he does his work, so I can't claim to have it as rough as women whose husbands are actually gone from the house ten hours a day, or military wives whose husbands are really gone). I felt like I was back on my own "with training wheels."



I set very low expectations for myself, just planning to be productive in the cracks, and the day went well.



1) I got dressed "to the shoes" (a la Fly Lady), including makeup. I got John dressed by mid-morning.

2) We had some play time outdoors.

3) I swept leaves outside.

4) I did let John watch probably four sessions of TV, which is icky, but it has been worse (a lot worse) on some of these postpartum days.

5) I washed and folded four loads of laundry.

6) I washed dishes.

7) I wrote thank you notes.

8) I cleaned the cat box.

9) I heated up dinner (a meal prepared by a church lady) and cooked a side dish.

10) John had only three or four tantrums and I survived through them.

11) I nursed Mary countless times and changed more than a dozen of her diapers. (I had taken a break from cloth diapering toward the end of my pregnancy, but now have Mary in cloth and hope to work back toward having John in cloth. I want to make sure I can handle the flow of laundry.)



Mary is still sleepy, but her wakeful times are stretching longer and longer, now two to three hours. She seems to be in a pattern of having one last wakeful time lasting about two hours anywhere between 9:00 p.m. and midnight, after which point I finally get to fall asleep. Then she has an early morning wakeful time around 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., after which she falls asleep again. Under other circumstances, I could get more sleep as well, but John wakes up at 6:00 a.m. (on the dot!), so then I'm on duty with him.



Last night Mary technically slept through the night (five hours in a row is the definition): 11:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m.! This is joyous news because I don't think John "slept through the night" by that definition until the last month or two (maybe 22 months old). (Seriously. I'm not kidding.) Despite Mary "sleeping through the night," I'd had only five hours of sleep and was exhausted by her ninety minutes of fussiness by the time John woke up so I asked Chris if he would do morning things with John so I could sleep more. Chris went above and beyond by also taking Mary with him. I didn't think that would work since Mary was cluster nursing and fussy, but she promptly fell asleep with Daddy and I got to sleep for 90 more minutes. Chris then went even more above and beyond by cooking us a fabulous breakfast: grits with cheese, pumpernickel bread, eggs, and bacon! Golly, I should hand off both kids and sleep in more often! Just kidding, of course. Thank you to my very thoughtful husband for giving me a treat.



Today represents a new challenge: Chris is at a meeting away from home for about four hours, which will be the longest stretch I've had both kids truly alone. So far, it is going fabulously. Mary is asleep at the moment and I even got John to fall asleep for a nap very easily. I haven't been on going-to-sleep duty with him for a couple of months, so I worried that I couldn't do it. Let's hope I have this kind of success on Friday night when Chris is going to attend a Catholic event and I'll be trying to put John to bed myself while caring for an unpredictable newborn.

John's acceptance of Mary is improving daily. He is increasingly showing her occasional affection: smiling at her, patting her hair, saying she is "cute." He is testing his parents and having more tantrums, but he has not shown aggression directly at Mary (which is not unusual, I hear). He threw a toy at her once, a few days after birth, but never since, so we hope that continues. In the meanwhile, Chris and I have realized that we have to start giving John notice of time transitions, e.g., we're going to turn off his television show, dinner is in a few minutes, we're going to stop playing outdoors soon. It is so much easier for us (who know the transition is coming) to just tell him, "such-and-such is ending right now," and expect instant obedience. But that's not fair, as John is older now, enjoys doing his own activity, and is completely unaware that it's about to be yanked away. In the past few days, we've started experimenting with ways to alert him to upcoming transitions and we think it is really helping and decreasing the tantrums.

So, that's the update in a nutshell. I know it is funny for me to be analyzing so much how to learn to take care of two measly kids. Chris and I know so many families--friends and acquaintances--who have medium-, big-, and giant-sized families: six kids, eight kids, a dozen kids! But I figure those moms were struggling to transition from one to two kids at one point, so I hope they don't giggle at me too much as they watch me learn!