Tuesday, April 20, 2010

LOL

Kyle's 3 months old and up until now has basically just been giggling a little here and there. Never for me, of course. Up until last week he still hadn't laughed out loud. Then on Friday he did it! And I was able to scramble and grab the camera in time.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

It was the best of times

I think I've finally figured out part of the reason I'm often resentful of Craig. He always gets the best of the kids.

Tonight - just like last night and the night before - the kids were MISERABLE. It's becoming an all too common thread in this house and Craig is never around to see it. When Craig's home, it's morning, the kids are refreshed from a good sleep, they've been fed, and the whole day lays in front of them to explore and enjoy. Craig will often play outside with them while I'm making lunch. After lunch Craig walks Shaun to school while I put the little kids down for a nap. On rare days Shaun will be crabby about going to school or Ian will be crusty and whiny right before his nap but for the most part it's relatively smooth every day. Craig is usually leaveing for work right around the time the little kids are waking up. That's when our 'real' children come out to play.

Ian needs to nap longer than he does. No question. Shaun is often tired when he comes home from school, too. Kyle has about 3 hours straight of the typical 'witching hour'. All this begins around 2:30 and continues until they're all tossed in bed.

I've always appreciated Craig's straight afternoon shift because we got to spend the majority of the day together. Now it just makes the day feel VERY long. It's so busy we barely have time to kiss one another good morning before someone needs attention and then I get to deal with all the whining and crying on my own once he leaves for work. Not to mention baths for everyone, pyjamas, stories, goodnight. It would be much easier to start my day a little earlier so I could send Craig off for a 6:30AM shift start and have him home to help during the toughest part.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Word Vomit

This is going to seem like a mangled mess but I have neither the time nor desire to organize it into nice little paragraphs. Read away...

I have many updates to delight everyone with. I'll start with the easy one and work my way up... or down, depending on how you want to look at it.

Kyle is now 3 months old. I know, three months! When I looked at the calendar yesterday and realized it was his 3 month birthday I couldn't believe it myself. Just for shits and giggles I weighed him and he's a whopping 16 pounds. Nearly double his birth weight already. I haven't had the chance to check his length yet. Perhaps I'll find the time sometime in 2011. He loves to smile and coo at anyone who will give him an ounce of attention. The boys have been having a great time trying different ways to entertain Kyle and make him smile. He giggles sometimes too, although never for me. Kyle loves having his legs gently tickled and his fuzzy head softly stroked as he's drifting off to sleep and the milk is dribbling out the side of his mouth. My baby sleeps through the night. And not just this, "my baby sleeps through the night 5 hours," kind of sleep. No no, it's a complete 12 hours straight. Well, maybe 11 1/2. Okay, okay, it's 11. But seriously, it has been wonderful. He eats last at 7:30, right after I put the big boys to bed, and then I don't hear a peep out of him until 6:30 the next morning. Just in time for me to feed him and stick him back in bed before the big boys get up at 7:00. It makes for an early morning for me but it's much easier trying to make breakfast for Shaun and Ian without a baby attached to my breast. Speaking of the breast, Kyle actually does pretty good with a bottle. So far we've only put thawed breastmilk in his bottle but the dozen or so times he's needed one he hasn't blinked an eye. He's even accepted a bottle from me. Shocking, because Ian was at least 4 months old before he would even accept a bottle and he still had to hold the bottle himself. Even then he couldn't catch sight of me otherwise he'd demand to be nursed. Overall, Kyle is a much easier baby than Ian was. He's similar in personality to Shaun but I think since I had so much time on my hands with Shaun, it just felt a lot easier in general. Kyle still doesn't really enjoy tummy time. I find it's very difficult to even find time for it, as sad as that sounds. By the time he eats, half an hour has passed. Sometimes it's even more, because the poor little guy rarely gets to eat off both breasts back to back. I'll feed him on one just to satisfy his hunger, and then I'm off and running to finish lunch, change a poopy diaper, wipe sticky hands and faces, put a kid in bed, pack Shaun's backpack, use the toilet, etc. Then I'll head back to finish nursing Kyle on the second side. Then he needs time to digest before being placed on his stomach otherwise he'll just barf everything back up again (and have you ever tried to get fatty breastmilk out of carpet? It ain't coming out!), and often by the time he's had time to digest, he has the hiccups. Once the hiccups are finally gone, he's starting to make the "I'm Tired" squawk and off we go, back to bed. I can totally see the benefits to having a baby sleep on his tummy. There just aren't enough minutes in the day for tummy time unless he's sleeping while he's doing it.

Ian is 20 months old in just a couple of days. He's finally past the stage where he was SCREAMING for everything. And not just the high pitched whine. It was a full blown SCREAM, followed by very loud crying which included screaming that lasted anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. It got very old very, very quickly. He was doing it for about a month and would do it for anything. Especially if he didn't get his way. Craig and I finally decided it must have been from his new eye teeth coming in. Yes, all 4 decided to pop through at exactly the same time. And it also had to be because Ian wanted to say so much and just couldn't. Now that he's talking a lot more the crying is basically gone. Except when Shaun irritates him... I still can't believe Ian speaks as much as he does. He's putting together at least 2 words at a time, often 3. Last weekend he made his first sentence and said, "Daddy upstairs bed sleeping." As ticked off as I was that Craig was still sleeping and I was with the kids, it was pretty great that I got to be the first one to hear Ian actually speaking a real sentence. I can't even begin to count how many words he has. It has to be in the hundreds. Ian labels EVERYTHING we see and reminds us repeatedly if we don't acknowledge what he's seeing. Like he'll say, "digger," ten times until we respond with something like, "digger, yes, you saw a digger." This continues all day long. He can count up to 10 but skips over four and still isn't able to have a number represent ONE object. He'll randomly point to objects, counting as he goes, often counting the same object a few times. His favourite books are Go Dog Go and Hop on Pop. I've learned that if he's being very quiet he's probably looking at a book. Likely it's one of those two. If he's not looking at a book but is still being very quiet, he's playing in the toilet. No question. We've lost countless full rolls of toilet paper to the watery depths of the John. And it's not even like he unrolls the toilet paper. There's no time for that! He dumps the complete roll in the toilet, sometimes pushing it down with his free hand just to make it good and mushy. If there's no toilet paper to be found, Ian has discovered that Q-Tips are almost as good. And he can fish them BACK out of the toilet and do it all over again. Last week, there was no toilet paper in the regular basket in the powder room and we don't keep Q-Tips in that bathroom so Ian decided to use something else. Toothbrushes. When I found him he had all 4 toothbrushes gathered in his fist and he was dipping them in the toilet and then placing them in his mouth and sucking off the water. Unfortunately, Shaun was the last one in the bathroom that day and Shaun rarely flushes the toilet... Needless to say, the toothbrushes all got pitched in the garbage, Ian got a good smack on his hand and Shaun got a sterm reminder to always close the bathroom door AND flush the toilet.

Shaun's been doing much, much better. He still tries to command attention all the time, which proves to be very annoying especially if I'm on the phone or trying to speak to someone in person, but his behaviour at school hasn't been an issue in a couple of months. I guess it's sibling rivalry even if it's not his siblings I'm spending time with. On Good Friday Shaun and I had a whole morning planned that we were going to spend together. First we headed to an empty parking lot where he had a few great runs on his new two-wheeler. But true to Shaun's style, once he wobbled ONCE, it was all over. He's never been one to challenge himself and even having my undivided attention wasn't encouragement enough for him to get back on his bike and try again. We took a break at Starbucks and had some fancy drinks on the patio and then headed to a forest where we took an exploratory walk together. We found a pond in the woods and saw lots of different critters, including a garter snake which I tried desperately to catch. I learned I'm not nearly as nimble as I was as a teenager as I crashed through the undergrowth in an attempt to grab the snake. It was great to just spend time with Shaun, no baby on the boob or computer or phone to distract me. He was, for the most part, pretty chipper and he really enjoyed the forest trek. Shaun's been really picking up on learning to read and most of the Snuggle Books he brings home from school, he can read on his own. They're relatively simple and basically have no storyline whatsoever but it's been a huge boost to his confidence being able to do something so grown-up on his own. He has learned how to count to 100 and will recite the numbers a dozen times a day, to whoever will listen. I'm sure our neighbours have heard him at least a few times. Shaun loves to play dinosaurs and learn facts about them. He has a girlfriend at school named Vannessa. Vannessa told her mom last week that she thinks she's falling in love with Shaun. When asked what love is, Vannessa replied it's when you hold someone close and kiss them a very long time, and she's going to do that to Shaun on Wednesday in the library where it's quiet so she can concentrate. Vannessa's mom and I giggle at their budding romance. Shaun talks about Vannessa all the time at home but when he sees her at school he plays it so cool. She'll come running up to him shouting his name and he'll reply with a cool, "hey." He has this thing he does with his eyes, too, whenever he wears a button-up shirt to school. He'll look at you with a sultry gaze and move his eyebrows up and down and say, "I'm lookin' fan-cy." I almost DIED when he told me he was going to say that to Vannessa. As often as I get frustrated at him for whining about yet another thing, or misbehaving for the umpteenth time today, for the most part he's a pretty great kid. We're very lucky he isn't a troublemaker at school and makes friends and is generally pretty happy.

I, on the other hand, am still up and down. Far more good days than bad, and the bad ones aren't nearly as low as they were. Part of it has been because I'm getting a lot more sleep now so I don't feel like the walking dead anymore, but also it's an early spring. The timing couldn't have been better. My doctor finally officially diagnosed me with Post Partum Depression. I still don't really feel like it's as serious as PPD but I'm trying my best to continue to be proactive as far as my mental health. I am seeing a counsellor who has experience with PPD and, while she also doesn't think it's PPD, she acknowledges that I need to start focussing on myself a lot more than I do. Otherwise it WILL become PPD and my lows will become much, much lower. I left my last visit with homework. Some of it just isn't possible, like spending 30 minutes to myself once a day, every day. And it can't be on the toilet, or even in the house. She told me to get outside. I'm not even allowed to bring the dog. Not that we HAVE a dog, but she said she wants me to use that time for ME. I'll be honest, I did it once in 2 weeks and I felt terribly guilty the whole time I was gone. Guilty for leaving Craig with the kids; not wanting him to feel the same overwhelmed feeling I sometimes get when I'm with them for the 14th hour in a row by myself and everyone is crying at the same time, all for something different. When I got home, the house was still standing, everyone was happy and clean, Kyle and Ian were even having a nap. Hopefully I'll be able to make time to do that more often. Baby steps.

Lastly, my best friend: the one who was at Kyle's birth, the one who guided me through both of my miscarriages, who has been so supportive and helpful in every aspect of my life for the last 5 years -- is getting a divorce from her husband of 6 years. It hasn't been great for the last 3 years and a divorce has been looming, but it's just beginning to get very ugly. So ugly that their house is teetering on the edge of foreclosure, her husband is no longer allowed to enter the house because of his recent violent temper (he stabbed butcher knifes into their oak kitchen table and left them there for her to find when she got up in the morning), and her driver's license is suspended because she hasn't been able to afford to pay a speeding ticket she got in December. I feel like my issues with PPD are so pale in comparison to hers and I feel terrible whenever I even mention Craig because I speak about him as being a loving husband and dedicated father who sometimes irritates me. Her husband is a drunken loser who refuses to pay a dime of child support for their 3 children and continues to sleep with random women, some of which he brought into their OWN HOUSE while she was at work and the kids were HOME. I'm so, so thankful it's not me in her shoes but I ache for her and her boys.

Friday, April 2, 2010

5 Bags, 3 Boxes

When we moved just over a year ago I promised myself if I didn't use certain things within a year I was going to get rid of them. Not that I'm much of a hoarder at all; I wouldn't even be able to scrape enough stuff together for a garage sale and I think clothing at a garage sale just looks trashy.

This stuff was all clothing from my past life . The no-kids and hittin-the-club-twice-a-week past life. Clothing that belonged to the skinnier version of myself who I've accepted will never return. It was such a flood of memories going through that stuff. The shirt I was wearing the night I met Craig 8 years ago. The pants that were handed down to me from a skinnier friend while I was losing weight and was between sizes. In fact, there was lots of stuff that was discarded by friends who were getting rid of their fat clothes. There was also a ton of more dressy clothing that I've been hanging onto because I can't give it to a thrift store knowing there's women out there who need more business-like clothing for job interviews and the like. I'm on the hunt for a charity specifically for clothing like suits, blouses, and blazers. Seriously, I can't believe I wore some of that stuff. Craig and Shaun were on the bed while I modeled everything one last time: a double-breasted blazer with shoulder pads that rival Michael Jackson's on his red "Thriller" coat, my prom dress from 2000, a red leather skirt that was my go-to for the nights I'd hit the bar, and knee high boots with fat, chunky heels that I saved 2 paycheques to buy. Ahh, it's all gone. I feel so much lighter.

Now I need to get my act together and lose these last 20 pounds so I can focus on rebuilding my pitiful wardrobe.