Two sentence blog post 001

Each girl showed off two more teeth today.  Charlotte will be rocking the bucktoothed beaver look with her two top center teeth and Tina will be styling more of a down home hillbilly appearance with her two top side teeth.

Our morning routine, or, how my husband saved my life

This one is for the dads out there.  All you dads who are looking at your stressed out wife and not really understanding why they are so stressed out, or what you can do about it.

My husband is blessed with the ability to fall asleep at a moments notice.  I however, am not.  In the early weeks of parenting, my inability to just fall asleep added to my torture.  I would have about an hour before the girls would be up again and even though I was completely exhausted, it still took me about a half hour to fall asleep leaving me with only a handful of minutes to actually sleep.  Once I did, I was woken up by crying babies and that feeling of crap that you get when you've only slept a few minutes.  The cycle would feed on itself as I started fearing going to sleep because the moment I did, it meant the next thing I would know was screaming babies and the rush to prepare bottles and make the crying stop.  In a way, sleep became very unappealing.  It almost became more restful to just stay awake and futz around for those few precious moments of happy, sleeping babies.

Eventually my husband realized what was happening and came to my rescue.  He bought me earplugs.  We moved the baby monitor to his side of the bed.  He started getting up in the middle of the night to tend to babies while I slept through.  We had an agreement, if he needed me to help, he would wake me up, but if he could handle it alone, he would let me sleep.

At first, he generally let me sleep through one baby awake cycle per night and after that, I would have to get up when the babies woke up to pump while he did the feedings.  That one chunk of sleep gave me some of my brain back.  I still had issues, but they slowly started getting a little better.  As time went on, the girls would sleep longer and we both got a chunk of sleep.

We still found it unpleasant to wake up to crying babies though.  I mean really, who wants to wake up that way?  So we started anticipating their wake up times, and we'd set our alarm to wake up about a half hour before we expected them to, prepped bottles, and did a dream feed.  During this time, I would take my portable pump and would pump as we did the dream feed to minimize the time we both had to be awake.

I was still having trouble because I was still only getting bits and pieces of sleep.  So sometimes, K would get up by himself and do the dream feeds alone.  Then he started feeling the effects of all of these night feedings and lack of sleep so he would stop setting his alarm and just let the babies wake him up.  As he got more confidant that he could handle it by himself, he stopped waking me up to help and the girls started rewarding him by sleeping longer and longer between feedings.

By allowing me to sleep several hours during the night, this made it almost impossible for me to assist when I did wake up because I was so engorged that the first thing I simply had to do was pump.  The portable pump is great, but not as good as the one we rent from the hospital and when I was that full, I really needed to just sit down and use the hospital pump.  So as we drifted out of night time wakings and into sleeping through the night and just starting our day early in the morning, K was still in the habit of taking care of the morning care cycle for the girls.

This brings us to now.  Life is good and my husband is the reason.  Lately, his work schedule is often the midshift so he doesn't get any time with the girls after work.  He's often walking in the door a few minutes after I've put the girls down.  Sometimes I can keep them awake long enough for him to rock with one for a few minutes, but usually they need to go down before he gets that chance.  So he takes the morning shift with them and lets me sleep a bit longer.

Unless he has to leave early to open the store, we've fallen into a morning routine that works really well for us.  The girls wake him up somewhere between 7:30-8:30am.  Ok, I kind of wake up too, but he gets out of bed and takes the monitor with him so I can fall right back to sleep.  He gets them changed and fed and does play time with them.  They go down for a nap between 9-10am and he comes to get me up.  Depending on his work schedule, if there's time, he'll go back to bed for a quick nap and I'll do a Starbucks run and then come home and do my morning pump.  If the girls wake up while I'm stuck at the machine, he gets to work on their second breakfast (we're raising hobbits apparently).  Then we'll share in the care duties until he needs to start getting ready for work and I take over.

I just love this.  I love that he's cool with this routine and that he enjoys having some time with the girls.  I love that I have a husband who found a way to help me and does it simply because he wants me to be happy, not because he wants some sort of credit.  I love that letting me sleep a few extra hours is no longer a favor he's doing for me, but rather it's just the routine that works for us and I can count on it.  I love that I have a husband who is just as involved in the parenting as I am and doesn't need me to help him do it.  Other than a little more familiarity with their daytime schedule, there's really nothing that I know about how to care for them that he doesn't know.  I love that I don't have to encourage him to interact with his girls, or to get off the video game and actually DO something, he just does it because it's a part of our lives now.


If I had married one of those jerks who thinks he shouldn't ever be a parent because he goes to work every day, who gets angry when the wife just begs him to take ONE night feeding a week so she can sleep for 4 solid hours, who has to "unwind" with 5 hours of xbox after work, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have survived the early months.

I'm grateful every day that I married a real man instead of a guy or a boy.  Real men make babies and wives happy.  This is the type of thing my husband is doing when I'm stuck pumping.  That's a man my friends.

Crawling implications

No updates on the attempts to learn how to crawl, Tina is still just flailing around the blanket with an occasional scoot forward.  Charlotte is still just lifting her arms and legs and hoping to body surf to her dream location.  She's been doing it since around the first month, it's a pose she really seems to enjoy.

A few hours before Tina's demonstration of her soon to be crawling prowess, I had called to schedule a bid for new flooring in the house.  That's on Monday and I'm really excited for it.  I want the new floor NOW!!!!

So I've been thinking about the logistics of the new floor and the work that's going to entail.  Along with the new floor, we need to child proof the house.  As I started thinking about it last night, I just got this wash of dread come over me because holy crap, we have a TON of work to do around here to make sure our children don't kill themselves once they can move.  And since we're getting pretty much every bit of our floor done, we're going to have to move just about every single belonging in our house during the floor installing process.  I think K is going to need to cash in a few of the vacation days he's built up because this is going to be a major undertaking.

Off the top of my head, the bookshelf in my office will need to move or just go away all together.  The shelves aren't secure and the backing is just cardboard, and right now it stores the inventory for my pottery store.  One kid tries to pull themselves up using one of those shelves and that kid is buried in planks of wood and pottery.  We have 50 billion cabinets and drawers all below waist level that will need to be secured.  There are computer cables and other electronic cables all over the floor that will need to be dealt with.  All of the general "stuff" that we have piled everywhere (I haven't seen the top of our dining room table since the girls were born) will need a place to go.  Litterboxes will need to be moved off the floor with mini steps made so the cats can get to them but the kids are less likely to nap in them.

Oh, litterboxes.  That reminds me of one of the very few things about K that drives me nuts.  In terms of husbands, he's as awesome as they come, but he's not perfect.  Very close, but not quite.  He has this habit of only listening to the first half of what I'm telling him and reacting to that first half, totally not hearing the second half.  However, my speech patterns are such that the first half of what I'm saying doesn't make any sense without the second half.  So last night we're talking about baby proofing and I talk about getting the litterboxes off the floor.  His cat isn't very agile anymore, we've set up small steps that lead to the hope chest at the foot of our bed so she can easily climb up the steps, onto the hope chest, and then onto the bed.  So last night I'm saying to him "we'll need to find a way to move the litterboxes up off the floor and ......." and he immediately jumps in with "we can't do that, my cat won't be able to get to them".  Argh!  Let me finish my damned sentence!  "Had you let me finish before jumping in to react, the rest of that sentence was going to be.....and set up a means for the cats to get to them that the kids are less likely to climb."  I know we can't make it impossible for the kids to get to them, but we can at least make them more of a challenge so they are far less likely to do so.  "K, see how we have the steps set up for her to get on the bed?  If we come up with something similar for other areas of the house and put the litterboxes up on surfaces like that, the cats can get to them, and the girls will have trouble climbing such itty bitty steps.  Or by the time they do, I'll be able to see what they're doing and redirect them before they manage it.  Besides, since our bedroom is going to be mostly off limits to the girls, your cats litterbox can stay on the floor where it is."

K claims he doesn't stop hearing me halfway through what I have to say so I had to call him on it in the moment that he did it.

Anyway, back to the implications of babies crawling.  Here's the big one - I get to wean off the pumping!!!  YES!!!  Once they are officially mobile, I wean down to 3 pumps per day so I'm only pumping once while K is at work during their nap, and then twice a day so I never have to do it when he's not home.  I get to change mindsets and go from having the frozen stash available to supplement if I have low production days to pumping to supplement what they eat from the stash.

Them becoming mobile has always been my stopping point in my mind.  My goal is to be the best mommy I can be, and while they're immobile, that means trying to produce as much milk as possible.  But once they can move and get into stuff, I think it's more important for me to be able to react to potential danger quickly than it is to keep them completely on breastmilk.  Everything in life is a trade-off and that's one that I'm totally cool with.  Even if my supply tanks to absolutely nothing when I start cutting back on the pumping, I'll still consider my primary goal as being reached.  If we can manage to keep them on breastmilk for a year, that's kind of my reach for the stars goal.

At their current consumption, we have about a months worth in the freezer.  There's a growth spurt coming up, abut they are increasing their solids, so I just have no clue as to what to predict in terms of how much milk they're going to need between now and their first birthday.  We might make it to the stars, but it's gonna be tight.

I think it would be wise if we broke open one of the sample cans of formula that we have, start using that for their morning bottles for a week just to make sure that they'll drink formula and that it won't upset their tummies too much.  I'd hate to find out that formula doesn't work for them after the freezer stash is gone and I'm no longer producing anything.  Besides, that's 12oz of breastmilk a day for that week that we can bank in the freezer while we're testing how they do.

So right now, one last push to get as much out of me as I can for the next couple of weeks and when the girls get moving, I wean down guilt free.  Hopefully by pumping twice a day, I'll still produce a significant amount for a while, but if I don't, that's ok too.  I'm totally looking forward to no longer running into that moment when the girls need me, but I'm really needing to pump too.

Flooring

Well, it looks like Tina is going to crawl any day now.  I'm not sure, but perhaps her first official crawl was today while I was taking numerous videos, but I don't think one or two successful inch long scoots count, so I'm saying it's still a few days away.

Our carpet is gross.  And it smells.  Wanna know why?  Yeah, too many cats and the two males have been competing for territory.  Since the babies came, that big orange fluffy one in the middle has been taking at least one pee a day somewhere on the carpet.  I'm not talking a bit of marking, I'm talking puddles.  Most of the time we find it right away and pull as much out as we can then go over it with the steam cleaner but the whole house just stinks.  It's embarrassing.

A few years ago, we invested in getting all new carpet for the house.  That was a bad move.  I thought that if we started fresh, we could keep up with it and it would remain somewhat nice.  Nope.  The cats just became bigger jerks.  For a while we were able to contain it because the gray cat was consistently peeing in front of the litterboxes.  We put down washable puppy pads and are constantly washing those damned things.  But hell, at least that cat is consistent in his jerkitude.

Last month, as we purchased yet another device designed to clean up cat messes in the ever losing battle of keeping the carpet from stinking, I decided I'd had enough.  As much as I love this little spot cleaner, after a week of owning it, our floor is completely polkadotted with little scrubbed circles from all the messes we've used it on.  It really demonstrates just how much the cats have been messing up the floor and how chasing after them is a losing battle.  I thought about all of the devices and products we've spent money on in an attempt to keep the house smelling halfway decent, crap, we've probably spent near what it's going to cost to just put in a better floor.  We should have just done that in the first place and saved ourselves the money, aggravation, work, and time that all ultimately failed anyway.

We're taking out a new mortgage on the house to pay off all of the IVF credit card debts at a lower and tax deductible interest rate.  We've decided to take out a little more than we need to pay off those loans and redo the floor entirely in the house.  We're getting rid of the carpet and putting down laminate (probably).  Who knows what damage we're going to find when we pull this carpet up, probably massive amounts of urine soaked plywood (it's a manufactured home), but we're going to take care of this once and for all.  We're going to get it done right.  No more bandaid fixes.  If the entire floor has to come up and be rebuilt, so be it.  Hopefully just a good thick layer of Killz will be enough, but if it's not, oh well.  We're going to put down a cleanable floor and area rugs that can be replaced when they get gross.

With the girls poised to crawl any day now, and knowing that they're only going to grow into toddlers and kids that will spill milk and have potty training accidents, it's time.  We have a guy coming on Monday to take measurements, give advice, and ultimately sell us a new floor.  And with this, we commit to living here for several more years.