Epic Mom Update

I don't know how I manage to get myself so busy. I feel like I have to compartmentalize and yet even in doing that everything just bleeds together. Charlotte's first birthday is in two weeks. I feel the need to take this opportunity to gain some perspective. A year ago, I was in a very crowded one bedroom apartment, it was probably hot like it's been lately, and I was huge and extremely uncomfortable. I guess not much has changed other than instead of being in a cramped one bedroom apartment, I'm not in a cramped 3 bedroom house. 

Every night I nurse my baby when she wakes up and every night I imagine what it will be like to nurse her in her own bedroom rather than on the living room couch with fleas jumping on my ankles. Lately we've been really trying to get some money paid on our debt so we have fewer bills after we buy our house. The problem as that paying down debt makes me feel so stagnant. Our savings hasn't grown in two months. And the bigger problem is that no matter how many credit cards we pay off, it pales in the face of my student loans. Sallie Mae is now my leeching sibling who requires mass amounts of money every month and calls me several times a day when I cut her off. Bitch.

Charlotte is developing like a boss. I have such a hard time knowing how to react to her interactions with other people. Most everyone loves her and when she walks up to strangers and waves I feel all proud of her for being so cute. But every once in awhile she fails to charm and then I feel bad that I let her pester them. I feel guilty when she's around other babies that are twice her size and far less engaging. I can't help but love that my baby tends to be the center of attention being the extrovert that I am. There, I admitted it. Now you will all see through my attempt at modesty. 

With Charlotte's birthday coming up I've been a bit more over-the-top with the planning than I probably should be. I can't help myself, I've never thrown a first birthday party and it's really fun and exciting, especially when it's rainbow themed! So far, I've made a cake to work out any kinks I might encounter. Typically when I attempt something that seems so complex it turns out kind of messy. The cake turned out great though and I think with a few tweaks it will be really tasty. I also couldn't resist sewing a rainbow dress for her. I was just going to put her in her clothes that happened to be rainbow colored, but I was at the fabric store and I got this great idea and...that's kind of how I end up being so busy all the time. Anyway, I'm using fabric quilt quarters to make a sort of handkerchief dress. Considering how much work her quilt was, this isn't so bad. 

Mommying is getting to be more manageable and enjoyable now that I'm finally getting sleep. We finally seem to have a schedule down that affords me about 5-6 hours of solid sleep. It helps that Charlottes getting better at expressing what she wants and her digestive issues are getting far better. She rarely spits up anymore, I only nurse her once at night, she eats mostly things that I can find when we're out and about so it's not too hard to feed her and keep her happy. I'm going to try out the ergo carrier to see if I can't fix her requiring so much attention whenever I'm in the kitchen. I'd say the biggest obstacles we have left are that she likes to get into the dogs dishes and dump all the water all over the floor, and that she likes to pull everything off the end tables and laptop desks...which means glasses of water, bowls of food, and generally things that make messes or could cause bodily harm. Other than that, I'm finally starting to love being the mom. It's kind of nice to have reached this zen!

Back to Normal?

I realize now I haven't posted in a very long time. The truth is that I've been really busy. Like, crazy busy. I can break down my major time consumers (besides being mom) into a pretty simple list:

1. teaching at Wilson
2. teaching at Putnam
3. class reunion planning
4. wedding planning
5. singing

Putnam is my newest venture and has been the most consuming of my time and energy lately. This wouldn't be much of an issue normally but it's thrown an childcare kink into the mix. At Wilson I teach after school and I have wonderful girls that watch Charlotte so I can take her with me. I'm sure there would be wonderful girls to watch her at Putnam but I teach there during the day. This means Charlotte has to be home. Which means that so does someone else. The cheapest option is Paul. If he's on swing or graveyard shift it isn't too difficult for him to watch her until I get home. They days I go to Wilson get long though.

On Wilson days, I get to Putnam at 8:30am, leave round 11:30 to go home, eat lunch, pack up and then go to Wilson from 2 until between 5:30 and 7 depending on the day. This is quite a bit of car time for baby. Throw into this mix that we've started down the path of weening and that Charlotte is fully bi-pedal and we have a pretty cranky kid.

The good news is that it's actually better than I expected. Walking is a blessing in disguise. She's finally able to wear herself out. Her napping has been better (the days we actually do manage to get a routine) and her sleep at night is starting to get better (we usually get up with her 3 times a night instead of 5+). She's eating better and we're not in the midst of any illness or teething. It's quite pleasant really. With her able to drink juice and eat more solids I've been trying to cut the nursing down to before bed and first thing in the morning. This doesn't always fly with her, and with my being so much busier than usual she's been extra clingy. Like, screams at the top of her lungs when I leave the room clingy. But I do nurse her far less than I did before. I finally feel like I'm starting to get my body and my life back. I just hope that we can all keep up!

Sick Baby

Of all the things I've had to deal with, this is probably the hardest. I'm on the verge of packing a bag and moving to Europe. Okay maybe I won't do something that drastic.

Thursday night Charlotte started showing cold symptoms that I just chalked up to teething. After a rough night that included an overly soaked diaper, Friday and Saturday have been a roller coaster of coughing, severe diaper rash, an eternally runny nose, resistance to sleep, and drooling that would rival the big bad wolf. All this coupled with helping my brother-in-law move in the midst of an emotionally wrenching divorce, hearing about a friend who was shot in his car, and reeling from financial strain has made life almost unlivable.

So it's no surprise that Charlotte's cold is turning into our cold. Currently she is pulling tissues one at a time out of the tissue box and throwing them off the couch. Normally I would stop her, but this is preventing her from screaming in my ear or thrashing at my boobs or hitting me in the face or scratching me...so we're just going to have a big tissue mess.

I'm taking her to the doctor tomorrow. Whatever it is that she has, I hope they can make it go away. It was hard before. This is just damn impossible.

Sleeping Solutions

It seems like no matter how late it is I need to read to get myself to sleep. I'm not sure when this started, but it seems to be pretty ingrained. Last night I went to bed and realized I'd finished my book, so I pulled out The Attachment Parenting Book by Dr. Sears. I'm a fan of Dr. Sears approach to parenting and feel like I have a pretty good idea about his methods from the other books I've read of his, but this had better insight into the whole co-sleeping thing.

Somewhere along the way I decided that co-sleeping was over. It was getting more difficult to keep Charlotte asleep at night with me so close by because she wanted to keep nursing. To make matters more difficult she'd wake up whenever the hall light would shine under our bedroom door. So we decided to set up her crib hoping that if she wasn't so close to me she'd sleep better. We moved her a couple months ago and it has yet to be better. If anything it's worse.

I was so baffled by this thinking that a baby this old should easily be able to sleep in a crib on her own. I would have continued to try to keep her in her crib if I hadn't read the chapter on co-sleeping last night. I was reminded that if something isn't working you should change it. I'm willing to admit now that sleeping in the crib isn't working. I was resistant to having her back in our bed because I wake up every hour to feed her. When I really think about it, she wakes up every hour or two in her crib anyway. At least if she's in bed with me I don't have to get up and she goes back to sleep without any trouble.

Sleeping methods work different for every family but I think we should probably go back to this one. There are lots of different opinions on sharing your bed. For me, I do it to maintain my sanity! There are also ideas floating out there that it helps baby feel more secure early on and thus more secure and trusting of their parents as they get older. I'm not sure how much of this is really measurable, but it sounds good to me anyway.

Perhaps the crib will work out later on, and I'm starting to think that perhaps we moved her too soon. It should have been pretty obvious to me when she'd scream in her crib and immediately stop and nuzzle into my neck the second I picked her back up again. So I'm going to listen to what my baby wants because she is still my baby after all and it won't be long before she doesn't want to sleep with me let alone nuzzle!

Sleepocolypse 2012

A few nights ago Charlotte slept for 6 uninterrupted hours. We both woke up and thought for sure that my mom or someone had fed her and put her back to sleep, but she had slept the whole time. I thought this might be a turning point. Perhaps we had finally reached a happy place where we could all finally sleep! She is almost 9 months old after all, this should have been the case awhile ago.

Sadly the next night she was up all night with a fever. I took her to her pediatrician who told us she had a sore throat and we just had to wait it out. We managed to survive the nights by taking sleep shifts with her. She wouldn't sleep unless she was being held.

Yesterday her fever had broken and she seemed to be much happier. I figured that since she was feeling better she could sleep in her crib - I don't want her getting into the habit of thinking she needs to be held the entire time she sleeps. I managed to get her down around 10:30 and got her in her crib at 11. Surely this was success! We went to bed and sure enough, she woke up around 1. I went out to nurse her right away thinking it would calm her back to sleep and I could put her in her crib. Not so. She would relax and doze the second I picked her up, but the second I even started to put her down she'd start screaming. And this isn't just your run of the mill grunting snorting protest, this is full on ear-piercing shrieking like I'm stabbing her in the leg with a knife screaming.

After about 30 minutes of picking her up to calm her down and then putting her back down again, I finally couldn't take it anymore. When someone screams in my face, no matter who they are, it starts to fray my nerves. I decided to let her scream it out. Surely then she'd wear herself out and sleep on her own. The problem is that this kid doesn't give up. After about 40 minutes of shrieking at the top of her lungs I tried sleeping with her. Eventually Paul had to go deal with her because I'm apparently a milk cow and this is very distracting when you're a baby trying to sleep.

Charlottes well baby visit is in about two weeks. Hopefully I can discuss her issues then. I wish that nights like we had last night were just because she's been sick, but my going to bed well after 2am after hours of struggling to get her to sleep is pretty normal. Its especially frustrating when I hear other moms say that their babies sleep not just through the night, but for 10 or 11 hours! What is wrong with my child that I can't get her to do this?!

I was warned when I was pregnant that I would lose sleep. I just had no idea it would be this ridiculous.

Double Life

Today was a very busy day and it's starting to feel like more of my days are getting to be compartmentalized and tightly scheduled. I started with Zumba, headed to the new mom's group at Andaluz, met my mom and her friend Camilla at Starbucks, came home, napped, and then drove out to Lewis and Clark for a 3 hour rehearsal.

I like keeping busy and I think the exercise is really giving me the energy I need to handle it. I just wish my sleep was keeping up with it too (blogging late at night probably isn't helping). The rest of my week is really just as busy. I added another day to my teaching schedule since I have new students now, I have two more rehearsals and a concert Saturday, and I'm sure I'm going to try to squeeze some more time in at the gym. I think when spring break hits, I'm going to try to keep my schedule empty and enjoy my time at home!

With all this busy I think I've found my threshold in terms of how much I want to be separated from my baby. I found myself missing her as I was driving out to rehearsal tonight and was happy to see her again when I got home. What I found to be even more strange was some of the weird feelings I had at rehearsal.

This concert is one where I get to sing with many friends and colleagues that I have sung with over the last several years. It was really nice to see their faces and I haven't seen many of them since before I got pregnant. I felt like I'd been on this really long journey and had returned back to my hometown full of people that had been there the whole time I was gone. It felt good to jump back in to the choral world and even better to be able to tread water on such a mentally engaging piece. Returning home to a baby that wanted to be nursed in a dark house full of people made me feel even more like I'm living a life in two different worlds. I think I like it though. I get to feel like I have the best secret!

8 Months and Getting Better

I haven't updated much because it seems like things with baby are starting to find their flow. I'm not quite as exhausted and drained as I've been for months, I feel less resentment towards being a mother, and I feel like things are going to work out in general.

Charlotte is 8 months now and has reached tons of developmental milestones. She has 6 teeth, she's crawling rather quickly, and she's very talkative and responsive. She also likes to smile and wave to people. She claps and "sings". She's a little person with opinions and interests. It's starting to finally feel like all those months of exhaustion were worth getting to this much more fun point.

The only thing that she seems to have missed in the whole developing thing is sleeping. Supposedly, she should have been able to sleep through the night for around 2 months now. That has yet to happen. At the very least Paul has switched to swing shift and is able to help me with her through the night which allows me to sleep more than 3 hours at at time. I just wish neither of us had to wake up at all because even though he gets up to deal with her, I'm still waking up every couple minutes to listen for signs that I need to take over. I've been trying to feed her more solids during the day to help keep her from waking up hungry. I think at this point it's more of a waking up lonely issue and nursing is really the only way to get her to go right back to sleep. Otherwise she really wakes up and stays up and is rather grumpy about it. Naps have kind of taken a hit lately too. She just doesn't sleep much during the day lately.

Her babysitters tell me that she doesn't nap with them anymore either, but she doesn't fuss as much and is getting to be more fun to play with. One of my students qualified for the state vocal competition this weekend. With Charlotte's being more at ease without me there all the time and with this boost to my teaching track record, I'm hoping that I can work on expanding my voice studio a bit.

This next weekend we're going to start looking at houses again. It's been about a year since the last time we looked at something. I'm a bit apprehensive about getting my hopes up because we don't have our whole downpayment saved yet, but I also feel like I want to find a house to picture us living in so that saving is a more present priority in my head. You're less likely to have what you don't dream about right?

With that, I must head to bed. Paul's rocking Toot to sleep so maybe we'll get to sleep before midnight! Wish us luck!