The harness is off and we might hire help

Yay!  The harness is officially off!

And ever since, Tina has become very talkative.  Just cooing and chatting away with giggles and rolling over while hanging out on my tummy.  Usually when I hear these noises, it's Charlotte.  They sound just alike.

K is still trying to figure out how to get out of so many closing shifts, but last night we had some issues.  He was doing the overnight shift he's been stuck on once a week for the last couple of months.  Well, the window of drowsy hit the girls around the same time and I put all my effort into getting Tina fully down before tending to Charlotte since Tina has been the difficult one lately.

By the time I was able to feed, bathe, and rock Charlotte, the window was long gone and she was upset.  She did that screech that we haven't really heard from her for a while.  It was horrible.  Her face all red, little eyes bugging out, and she just sounded like she was in so much pain.  I started to get scared and around midnight I called K and told him I was getting desperate.  He was scheduled to work until 2:30am but I was totally at the end of my rope.  He told me to give her some Tylenol and call him back if she was still going in 20 minutes.  So 30 minutes later, I called him back because she was still going.  I believe what I screamed was "Tylenol doesn't fix over tired!" and when he asked if I was desperate I told him "I called you when I was at my wits end.  I'm now 45 minutes beyond my wits end."  So he came home.  The house finally got quiet around 1:30am.

If K had been home in the 9-10pm hour, we would have been able to catch both their windows and had them down no later than 11pm and all would have been well with no gut wrenching screeching.

Even though we can't really afford it, I've sent an inquiry to a local nanny service about hiring a mothers helper for those nights that K is closing.  Part of the reason I haven't wanted to ask for help is because some nights things are really easy and I feel like an ass having someone there to do nothing.  But then there are those nights when everything goes to hell, but I don't know how bad it sucks until after 10pm and I would feel like an ass calling anyone that late.  Maybe if I had a mothers helper from 7pm-11pm on nights that K closes, s/he could help out when the nights suck, and on the good nights, maybe she'd be able to cook a meal or two to freeze for later in the week or help me catch up on laundry and dishes.  It would also be nice to have someone I could call when I'm offered a video job and don't yet know if K will be working that day. I could take the job knowing that I have someone available to babysit if he's working.

I really don't want to hire help.  What I want is for K to work reasonable hours and be here in the evenings.  But that doesn't seem to be happening any time soon and we can't go on with the three ladies of the household being miserable for a few hours of every night.

Crossing over

It looks like the days of me freezing obnoxious amounts of breast milk may be over.  We're going to start crossing over from freezing the extra to dipping into the stash.

Last week I produced a total of 362oz.  The girls ate a total of 343.6oz.  When you figure that an ounce or two goes down the drain every now and then, I didn't have any extra last week.  My supply hasn't changed at all, they're just catching up to me.  We're now prepping 5oz bottles for Tina and 5.5oz bottles for Charlotte.

I did the math a few weeks ago and as long as I produce 40oz a day, between that and my freezer stash, I can anticipate having enough for the girls through their first year and probably won't need to buy any formula before they are fully on food.  I'm still producing 50-55oz a day.  Intellectually, yeah, I know I'm fine.  But there's still that emotion and sense of fear when we start thawing milk instead of freezing it.  Totally irrational, but there you have it.

In other news, Tina's harness should be coming off tomorrow.  I'm sooooo glad!  I hate that thing!  It interferes with her ability to strengthen her legs at all.  Charlotte likes to play "up down" where she pushes her legs and has me hold her standing up until she collapses her legs and sits back down on my lap.  I can't play that with Tina yet.  We just come across a dozen little things like that which the harness interferes with.  I can't even bicycle her legs and press her knees to her chest to help her fart when she has gas.  We're anticipating a much happier baby overall after tomorrow.

The cat figured out how snuggly the feeding station is.

Her head is still a bit deformed though.  We're trying to get her to rest facing the left in order to take weight off the flat spot and put it on the pointy spot in hopes that we can naturally round out her head but I'm not seeing a lot of progress.  It's gonna suck if we have to put a helmet on her shortly after taking the harness off.

Sleep - we're going to have to start waking the girls up at 11am or so because they've let me sleep past noon a couple of times now.  We've been getting up twice during that 12hour stretch to feed them.  When one wakes us up, we attempt to dream feed the other as well.  Apparently it's been working a little too well.  So if we start getting them up at 11am now, and then when the clocks roll back in a week or two we'll change that to 10am (so no change according to the babies perception), we should have a much more reasonable schedule around here.  I'm hoping that getting up a little earlier will help them go to sleep a little better at night and nap better during the day.

Charlotte is doing a great job of grabbing at the dangling toys in her play gym.  Tina still hasn't quite figured out the whole grabbing thing yet.  It has me a little concerned.  I try to remember that every baby is different, but that really seems like something she should have figured out a long time ago.  Maybe when the harness is off and she has a little more power over the movement of her body in general, she'll start exploring these kinds of things.

It's all about who you work with

As I've said many times before, K is a great guy.  Both at home and at work.  Him being a great guy at work is causing problems at home right now.

K is a retail manager asst manager of the store) and that comes with certain realities that many jobs don't have to deal with.  The main one is that his schedule is inconsistent from week to week and he often works odd hours.  For us, this often works out really well.  If I have a video gig (requires me to be out of the house for 2-3 hours and then I bring the work home to my computer), he can usually schedule around it as long as he knows in advance what day off to ask for.

For the last couple of years, he's been pretty happy at work.  He and the manager worked really well together, were generally on the same page, and it was a very cooperative environment.  A couple of months before the girls were born, corporate decided to shake things up and they split up the really good teams and spread those individuals to stores that needed to improve in some way.  So K was transferred to another store, notorious for drama, in the hopes that a solid, even tempered, non drama guy would help to change the tone there.

That's not how it's working out.  The staff at the new store has been resistant to him from the beginning.  The manager doesn't view the staff as a team, but rather as her employees that are to do what she tells them to do.  They have been so set in their ways that any change is considered a threat, even if that change would make their lives easier.  K has been doing his best to fit in and function, but things are often done so poorly or so inefficiently, he can't help but try to make them better.  His old manager has even told him of some of the bitching that his new manager has done about him, the old manager of course knowing that the bitching is pure bullshit and that a lot of what she's claiming are complete lies.  K is now miserable at work.

The big problem that's been affecting all of us is the scheduling.  Every member of the management team is required to work at least one closing shift per week.  There are supposed to be 5 managers at the store so in theory, no one should have to close more than 2 nights per week.  Guess who's been closing most nights!  Of the 5 managers, the boss refuses to close (we think at this point she doesn't even know how), one got fired several weeks back for bringing pot to work, one had to refuse to close for a while because his wife has been having pre-term labor issues and is on bedrest with 6 other kids that need taking care of, and the last one hasn't really had any long term issues, but he is on vacation this week.

In recent weeks, K's schedule has looked something like this -
Sunday - 8am - 6pm
Monday - off
Tuesday - 6pm -2am!!!
Wednesday - off
Thursday - 1pm - 9:30pm
Friday - 1pm - 9:30pm
Saturday - 8am - 4:30pm

It looks like there's practically a 3 day weekend in there, but it doesn't work out that way.  On Mondays, K is trying to rest and somewhat reset his sleep schedule so he can survive the Tuesday shift.  Tuesdays we're trying to give him a nap at some point and Wednesday he's exhausted and trying to recoup.  So all three days are practically shot.

To make it more frustrating, the next weeks schedule is supposed to be created and posted on Tuesdays.  K finally found out what his schedule will be next week yesterday (Friday).  Between Tuesday and Friday, several video gigs have been offered for next week, and I've had to let them all go by because I had no way of knowing if he would be home, and my parents are out of town so I can't count on them to come and watch the girls.  That's $900 out the window because his boss can't get her job done when it's supposed to be done.

We thought this was about to change.  His boss talked to him about the fact that because he's not there during the days, he can't get done what he's supposed to be getting done.  She said she needed to get him back working more days than nights and we thought "hallelujah!"  And then K came home last night, told me his schedule for next week, he's closing all 5 of his work shifts.  Son of a bitch!

Why him closing is so difficult on me - during the day, the girls are relatively easy.  It's 11am right now, Charlotte has been up, eaten and is taking a nap, and Tina is still asleep.  I'm glad she's wearing an alarm so I know she's alive, seriously, other than a dream feed, she's been down for 12 hours now.  I'm warming a bottle because she should be up any minute.  Anyway, in the afternoons is when things start to get difficult.  They'll both be up at the same time and will get fussy, naps sometimes only last about 15 minutes and that's after a lot of crying before falling asleep.  Somewhere around 8-9pm, it's time to do the bedtime routine of baths and cuddles and such.  I tried to make bedtime earlier but they have really decided that they will go to sleep for the night somewhere in the 10pm hour.  I can't do the bedtime routine for 2 fussy babies by myself!

By the time bedtime comes around, I'm exhausted, frustrated, and at the end of my rope.  Whichever baby is not getting the full attention will be crying and getting more and more upset until I can put the other one down to do bath and cuddles and stuff.  So then the first one gets upset.  Instead of a nice calming routine, they simply get more and more upset and it spirals out of control until K finally rushes in the door sometime after 10pm and does his best to help.  What could be a 1 hour routine if I had two sets of hands becomes a 4 hour ordeal of frustration every night.  Because I'm always on my own during the hard part of the day, when K is home, I just can't handle it anymore and he takes on 90% of the household/baby duties.  He works his ass off, does his best to take care of the girls in the middle of the night and let me sleep because he knows how frazzled I am, and that's really taking a major toll on him.

This is critical time.  This is when habits are established.  What we do now will set the tone for years to come.  I don't want to flail my way through this critical development period and pay the consequences later.

When he told me his work schedule for next week, I cried for 3 hours.  I thought this shit was about to be over and it's getting worse.  He's miserable, I'm miserable, the girls are not getting the best mommy I could be and they are sleeping through the daddy time that he's available to them.  If he were home during the difficult time, the difficult time of day wouldn't be nearly as difficult and I would have the energy to be more helpful when he's home so that less work will fall on his shoulders and we would all be so much happier.  Evenings would be the four of us playing together instead of me just trying to calm the fussy and all of us getting more and more upset as the hours tick by.

K's MO is to be the great guy, don't make waves, and he expects to eventually be rewarded.  That is so not how this company works.  We've seen total shitheads who are completely incompetent keep their jobs after obnoxious infraction after infraction, and yet he's somehow afraid of getting fired if he does anything remotely imperfect.  So last night I laid it out for him, he CAN NOT close more than his fair share.  2 nights per week, 3 if there's a real desperation in the store.  It's not a matter of "hey boss, I don't want to close very often" because that soft language doesn't work.  Others are saying they can't and they are being accommodated so K needs to say he can't and it's time to accommodate him.   I told him that if the schedule doesn't change to what he needs it to be, he's going to start catching the flu a whole lot and will be calling out sick until they figure out that no, he really won't be there when he says he can't be there, so they had better schedule around him.

It's been years that K has been doing everything asked of him and more and it's time to put his foot down and say no.  It's time for him to cash in the good will he's been building over the years.  When he brought up his fears, I told him that he's been trying it his way for X number of years, and it hasn't gotten him anywhere.  It's time to try a different tactic.  And whether it succeeds or crashes and burns, I will prefer those results over what we have going on now.  He warns me of the shitstorm that will rile up if he makes waves and I'm all for it.  Shit needs to be stirred and the bosses above his boss will side with K.  That's why they put him in this store to begin with.

Some recent financial changes have added a level of security to our household and if he were to lose his job, it would suck, especially the health insurance, but we'd survive.  And seeing the shit that other employees pull and how impossible it seems to be to get them fired, I really don't have any fear at all that Mr. Great Employee will lose his job over insisting that the people around him do their jobs so he doesn't have to do them.

He promises he's going to do it.  He's going to put his foot down and let the shit storm fly.  This is so out of his comfort zone, I know it's like jumping off a cliff for him.  But it needs to happen.  I'm crossing my fingers that he can do this.

The constant question

The girls are starting to outgrow a few things and it leads to a bit of a dilemma - what do I do with their stuff?

The twin specific stuff like matching outfits, that's easy.  Send those to the consignment store and get a few pennies for them to spend on more stuff.  Odds are another set of twins ain't gonna be showing up around here and I'm sure the consignment store doesn't get the opportunity to sell matching outfits for twins very often.  My OB has already informed me that he'll probably kick my ass if I show up pregnant with twins again.

But what about the rest of it?  The things that I've bought, the massive amount of things that family and friends have given me in hand me downs.  It makes for a constant question - will we have another baby in the future?

My instinct is always to pass it on.  A blogger buddy (hey Tulip!) is due at the end of December and it only makes sense to outfit her little girl as others have outfitted mine.  I keep shopping around my house and have to remind myself that we're still using some things, don't give them all away before we're done with them!

In my family, I'm the last of my generation, on both sides.  By quite a bit.  One cousin became a grandmother long before I became a mother.  And I missed the wedding of another cousins kid because I was busy giving birth and all.  With the exception of the newlywed, no one is likely to be having a baby any time soon, and even the newlyweds don't seem to be in much of a hurry.  So there isn't really anyone within the circle to rotate all the stuff too.

So, if I give stuff away and we do end up having another kid, I'll have to replace it all and I'll feel like an idiot.  No more freebies are available, I've currently got ALL of them from every household that's in any way remotely connected to me.  But the odds are slim that we'll have another baby, so it's stupid to just let it all sit in a closet rotting away when other babies can be using it and saving another family a few bucks.  And due to some recent events, we are likely to be in a better financial place to purchase baby items a few years from now.

Here's my decision of the day, subject to change of course -

• Overtly matchy matchy stuff will go to consignment, as will equipment that we were disappointed with (like the audio only baby monitor).  
• I will pick out a very small handful, like two or three of my favorite onesies and jammies and store those somewhere in case our family has use for them again.  Because most of those favorites are very feminine and odds are another child would be a boy, I'll pull out a handful of gender neutral staples and store those as well.  
• Anything stained that I can't fix with my oxyclean stain stick, or anything in need of repairs hits the garbage can.  
• Anything in good condition, that would only be appropriate for a girl, and isn't something that would make me cry to give away, that goes to my blogger buddy so her little girl can enjoy them.

But every day, when another outfit is tossed into the laundry bin we have labeled "Outgrown outfits", it reminds me that we have a question constantly hanging over our heads.  Will we ever try this again?