Well that sucked

Woke up bright and early with the girls this morning around 9am.  It's K's day off and normally he takes care of everything until I wake up on my own and meander out into the house.  Knowing today we were going to try to accomplish a few things, as well as go for much longer stretches of awake time with the girls, I opted to get up with him this morning.

K still did the vast majority of parenting today.  His back was bothering him and I had some stuff to do for my pottery shop so it made sense for him to sit and play with the girls while I ran around and accomplished stuff.

Around 11am, they got cranky.  Normally this would mean nap time but we're trying the new schedule so we kept them up.  They stayed cranky.  Shortly after noon we couldn't stand it anymore so we put them down even though we were planning to hold out until 1pm.  We were hoping for a solid 2-3 hour nap, but Middie Biddie was fully awake by 2:30 and it took another half hour for Teeny Tiny to wake up too.

They were cranky and throwing tantrums ALL DAY LONG!  We were going to hold out until 8pm for bedtime but by 7pm the whole family was just done.  Teeny Tiny had major droopy eyes, both were quick to cry, and the parents were just white knuckling to get through the day.  They were in bed by 7:15pm and Teeny Tiny went right to sleep.  Middie Biddie took a quick nap and then babbled for over an hour.  Not sure if she was awake or talking in her sleep.

It was just a crappy day all around.  I'm hoping that once they get accustomed to only having one sleep opportunity during the day, they'll take that opportunity to get the full amount of nap sleep that they need.  For one nap, it really should be in the 2-3 hour range.

I did manage to get the new car seats installed and all of the laundry done though.

One thing I realized after the girls went to bed, it really is difficult to do ANYTHING when the kids are cranky.  I don't mean that it's difficult because they require attention or take up your time, but rather your brain does not fully function when it's hearing the cranky happening.  K was fully in charge of the kid care today and I needed to figure out how to take photos of the Christmas ornaments I'm going to be putting up in my shop.  While they were cranky, I just couldn't figure it out and the pictures I ended up with sucked.  Once they were in bed and my brain wasn't being assaulted by whining, I just thought "duh!" and figured out how to get it done better.  I just suddenly figured out how to stage them better, how to get the lighting better, and how to fix what I thought was a broken camera.  These aren't edited to be shop ready yet, but just look at the difference from my first set when I was listening to horrible unhappy kid noises and then the set I took after they went to bed -

My kids are awesome, but I swear they suck the IQ points right out of me.  It's like there's only so many to go around and when they are awake, several get allotted to them and I lose out.