What Was I Just Saying??

A good night’s sleep and some exercise??  Yesterday’s good feeling seems but a faint memory today.  Baby woke up six times last night.  Six times.  (I think he is trying to get his two top teeth in.)

This is my third child.  The older two were terrible sleepers too.  So, obviously, the common denominator is either my behavior or their genes… or both.  It lasted until about the age of 3.  Peanut, who is now 8, sleeps soundly for 12 hours every night and sleeps through most noise, including the baby waking and crying.  So eventually, I know baby will grow out of it.  In the meantime, it is very hard to deal with.  I am certain this is a form of torture somewhere, to never get more than an hour and a half of sleep at a time.  You can’t dream properly that way, and it really messes you up.

Over the years I have been given every well-intentioned piece of sleeping advice that was ever concocted.   Some of it I tried with my first child.  None of it worked for her.  She was the worst of the three by far, she was a preemie who literally woke up if the toilet flushed or the neighbor turned on their dining room light, which you could barely see through the blinds in her room.   My mom said “don’t keep the house quiet while she’s sleeping and she won’t wake up when there is noise.”  I stood there and blinked.  “So let me get this straight,” I said, “instead of laying down to sleep myself so I can keep my sanity, I should crank up the radio to eleven during her naps so that she can sleep better??”

And let’s not forget the ever popular “let them cry it out” technique.  I also tried this with my first child.  Once.  It was horrible.  And she refused to EVER go in her crib again.  I’m not kidding.  From that moment on, when we approached her crib or she realized she was in it, she screamed bloody murder.  She literally never slept in the crib again.

The real lesson I learned is that it is worse to try 10 different things and have none of them work, because you will have screwed things up even more and for a longer period of time.  Pick one thing, the one thing that you are most comfortable with, and always do that.  Your baby will associate that with sleep, and it will do you more good in the long run than trying a bunch of different things that someone else suggested, someone who, by the way, doesn’t have to listen to the baby scream or operate on five hours of interrupted sleep the next day.

The problem with all the advice is the basic premise:  that your child’s waking patterns are in your control, and that if your child doesn’t sleep through the night, you are failing as a parent.   I’m just not buying it anymore.  I believe babies wake up because they are not physically developed such that they can sleep through the night.  And besides, if we can control other people’s sleep patterns, then why can’t I get my hubby to stop getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom?  Perhaps I should stick him in a crib with bars and let him cry it out?  Or better yet, why can’t I get my cat to leave me alone in the middle of the night?  Surely there has to be a solution there?

Sorry, I guess I’m just a little cranky today.  Ah well… there’s always tomorrow.

A Good Night’s Sleep and Some Exercise

Many years ago, before kids, we were watching the movie “Clerks” with fellow bandmates (yes, hubby and I were both in a band once upon a time… more on that another day).   After an hour of watching the main character whine, the keyboard player commented “What that guy needs is a good night’s sleep and some exercise.” 

The comment was hilarious at the time, and is a something hubby and I have repeated many a day since.   I have found, as the years have gone by, that there was a lot of wisdom in that very dry remark.

Week three of being at home, and I have successfully gotten my 4-year old (Buster Brown) to take a nap when baby goes down for his afternoon nap on a few days, meaning I can catch some Z’s myself.  These short naps are helping quite a bit (along with not having to wake up before 6 am!)

Today, I pulled out the bike and trailer, dusted them off, pumped up the tires, strapped the boys in and set out in the sunny but chilly spring day for a trip to the park.  I have always loved to bike since I was a little kid.  It’s just plain fun.   I revert back to being a kid too when I ride, with a big fat smile on my face I whiz down a hill and say “Whee!”  Baby fell asleep on the way there, so I guess he liked it just fine.  Last summer with the pregnancy and the baby, we hadn’t taken the bike out once, so this was basically a new experience for Buster Brown.  When we got back to the house, I unstrapped him, and he looked at me earnestly with big blue eyes and said “I really liked that a lot, mom.  That was cool!”

Tonight, I can tell my legs will be sore tomorrow.  And I feel a tiredness that is from fresh air and movement, rather than stress and frustration.  It is a good feeling.

Sometimes, all a gal really needs is a good night’s sleep and some exercise!

Clutter

I am something of a packrat.  I like to think I’m a recovering packrat, but occasionally reality comes in and smacks me in the forehead.

When I left my job, I had cleanup to do, mostly digital.  13 years of saved emails and files, because “you just never know when you might need it.”  And on occasion, I did need to go back and retrieve an email or two.  But still… As I deleted them, I started to wonder, what did it cost me to keep all of that?  At first, I was actually glancing over each one as I deleted them, just in case it was something important that needed to be documented or passed on to someone else.  But I had thousands of emails, and even a month’s notice wasn’t going to do the job.  On my last day, I dumped hundreds of emails and files, and I could literally feel physical weight leaving my shoulders as I did it.  It was a strange feeling.  Like I had been carrying around all of these half resolved issues inside me, not just in bytes on a server somewhere.

So, having left all that behind, I wanted to come home and feel like it was a fresh, clean slate.  But there is a wee bit of a problem with that fresh, clean slate.  I also have more than 13 years of crap in this house.  And I am in it all day now faced with stuff at every turn.  It has to go. 

Ok, so I have the time now, let’s make it go.  Buster Brown wants to organize the toy room.  Fine by me, toys are a major problem.  (Technically, there is only one toy room, in the basement, but in practical terms, every room in the house is a toy room.)  So we head downstairs.  Two hours later, I realize the futility of it all.  What for me is an attempt to organize and thin out the toys is for my four year old son a treasure hunt.  Much of this stuff he hasn’t seen in months, so for him, it’s brand new!  “Oh, I was looking for this!” he says repeatedly, as each new treasure is unearthed.

I realize I have an awful lot to learn in this new job.  For example, never bring a four year old along to organize toys.  Unless, of course, your definition of “organize” is to “discover, play with, and insist on leaving out for daddy to see.”

I must say, though, that it’s a lot of fun to live in a four year old’s world.  He is really getting going with imaginative play, where his toy people talk to each other and have distinct personalities.  So when you assign a unique universe to each toy, I would imagine it is very hard to put it away.

So, I guess I will have to take my desire to accomplish something elsewhere.  I have a four drawer file cabinet in the corner of my office, black and industrial and defiant.  I have no idea what “treasures” lurk in the backs of those drawers.  Perhaps I shall even hear myself say, “Oh, I was looking for this!”

Taking the plunge…

I finally did it.  I quit my job to be a stay at home mom, something I never dreamed I would do. But I really had no choice.  My subconscious was literally screaming at me, telling me I had to make a change.  I was driving to work, late, as usual, when it first made itself heard. 

Baby had woken up several times during the night, I lost count of how many times.  My 4 year old son had had an accident in his sleep.  As I cleaned up his bed he looked up at me and said “Stop doing that with your eyes, mommy.”  What was he talking about?  I looked in the mirror, my eyes were little slits supported by deep, dark, bags.  “I can’t help it, honey.”

All the kids were tired, and didn’t want to be up.  Both boys had runny noses and a cough.  My husband always left before 6, working the early shift so he could pick them up in the afternoon, so I had to get all three kids and myself ready, alone.  No easy feat.  I dropped the boys off, wondering if they were going to be deemed too sick to go to daycare, feeling like a horrible mother for dropping off my sick children instead of keeping them in my own care.  The baby room teacher told me “You know, I pray for you every morning.”  What?  So, you’re saying I’m not hiding my stress very well?  That’s insanity, when a woman who faces every day with a room full of snot-nosed babies is praying for ME.

I dropped my 8 year old daughter off at the school daycare.  She forgot her shoes.  “I’m late, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to get them honey.  You’ll have to wear your boots.”  Tears.  Stress.  I left her, blurry eyed.   I resolved, for the hundredth time, to make time for a girl’s night out.  I wanted to take her somewhere special, make up for the guilt somehow, knowing even as I thought it that she needed more than one special night out.  So much more.  It seemed like this was all I said to her anymore… just Hurry up hurry up we’re late.  Hurry up hurry up we’re late…

I was driving past a Burger King, and realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast myself.  I had no time to stop though, and then traffic came to a grinding halt.  Trapped.  No place to get off the highway for a mile or so.  Trapped.  Trapped, trapped, trapped.

I turned off the radio, and sat in the quiet, something I had been avoiding.  From somewhere deep down in my gut, a scream welled up, and I just let it go.

A moment later, I looked around, sheepish, wondering if any of the cars near me had noticed.  But no one was paying any attention.  They were all in their own little worlds, drinking coffee, talking on cell phones.  I dug out my Kleenex box, and tried to compose myself.

Several nights later, I had a dream.  In my dream, we were in our home, only the house in my dream was different from our actual house.  My husband was where he usually is these days… in his basement office doing schoolwork, working on his masters.  I went up to our bedroom on the second floor, and I noticed that there were cracks in the walls, and the top of the stairs was pulling away from the floor.  The whole bedroom had shifted.  As I looked around, I realized that we had put way too many huge, heavy pieces of furniture in our bedroom.  The house simply couldn’t hold the weight.  It was starting to come apart at the seams.  I sat there, trying to figure out what to do.  In my dream, I thought, “I can’t call the insurance company, they won’t cover it, because it’s all our fault.”

I’m no Jungian scholar, but that dream is pretty easy to interpret.  I couldn’t ignore it anymore, my spirit was screaming.  I was killing it, but it wasn’t going down without a fight.

I spent weeks crunching budget numbers, talking to stay at home moms I knew, talking to my husband in the wee hours, reading books, reading blogs.  I began to start thinking “If I was at home, this would not be a problem.”  There were so many opportunities to say it, it almost became a mantra.  

I also thought about all I would be leaving behind, years of building a career in a tech field that wouldn’t be easily picked up again later, the satisfaction of learning and mental challenges of my job.  Yet, while there were reasons other than money to keep working, the money piece of the puzzle was one that just wasn’t fitting well anymore.  One night, my husband sat down with the numbers.  Finally, he looked up.  “Let me get this straight,”  he said, “You work so that you can spend 80% of your income on the costs of working??” 

Not too long later, I finally gave my notice.  I stayed another month, trying to leave things “in good shape.”  It became so…  surreal.   I wondered if I had actually given my notice or just dreamed it?   Had I actually had the guts to make that big of a change?  To set aside years of building this career to be home with my kids?  There were times I felt like I was on the outside looking in, watching with curiousity to see how this person’s life would turn out.  Like it wasn’t really me.

But it is me.  I’m starting my second week at home now.   I had another dream:  I’m in a mansion with my kids, doing normal stuff, eating dinner, taking baths, waiting for daddy to come home.  Only it’s not our house.  I keep thinking we’re going to get caught.  A woman comes in the house, I keep the kids quiet.  She looks like she’s suspicious, like she knows someone’s there.  I can tell she’s a nun, even though she doesn’t have a habit on.  (Amazing to me that after a mere 3 years in Catholic school, a nun is still the ultimate authority figure for me.)  I wake up, and chuckle to myself.  I guess it still doesn’t seem real. 

I’m still curious to see how this life will turn out.   Every day since I started at home my son has woken up and asked me, “What day is it mom?  Is it mommy day?” 

Yes, it’s mommy day!