Crying baby

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Christmas 2021

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Christmas morning started with a bang - well a few of them actually. I was so busy I hadn’t looked out the window to notice all the ice that had accumulated overnight. We live on a pretty steep hill, so when my attention was finally pulled outside, there were two cars off in front of our house and a few more at the bottom of the hill.

Our neighbors were already out trying to help, but they couldn’t even stay on their feet on the road. I sent Tom out with some salt to see if it would help. For the next hour, the kids and I got to watch everything from people skating down the hill to the backhoe pulling cars out of the ditch - really if you’re going to get in an accident, this isn’t the worst place to do it! On that vein, it also helps that our neighbor’s son works for the next town over and was out salting the roads. Since our town wasn’t doing much, my neighbor got her son to do a quick detour and get our street salted.

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Minute by Minute

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So how is life with three kids?

Honestly it depends when you ask me. Every day we’ll have the sweetest, calmest moments where everything seems great. We’ll be making pancakes, sitting around the table together, and all happy. The baby will start to cry and one of the older kids will run over and cheer her up. There will be cuddles and sharing of toys and cooperative cleaning of the house. And we’ll think, yeah we’ve got this. This is amazing.

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Small Moments

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You’d think now that we have a one year old and a two year old, things would be easier. And you’d be mostly right. It’s definitely easier than a one year old and an infant. Most days we’re having fun, and have a pretty good routine.

However.

There are still those days. You know the kind. When for no obvious reason, things are just hard. We still have those days. We’ll probably always have them, but I’m hopeful they’ll become less frequent at least.

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Baby G is His Own Person

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G is a very different baby than E was. Two years in, we feel like we understand our toddler pretty well. We know how to comfort him, how to put him back to sleep if he wakes up, what makes him happy and what doesn’t. And it’s lead us to a false sense of confidence that we know babies/children in general.

But G is a very different baby.

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Bits and Pieces

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A few random stories that I want to remember, but aren’t really related beyond that:
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E has a new(ish) teacher in his room, and he has slowly but surely winning her over. She’s pretty quiet, so it’s taken me a bit longer to get to know her, and get a read on her. She was asking me a few questions about him recently which left me wondering if she was worried about his speech. I was talking to Tom about it, and mentioned that she kept asking about what he can say, and seemed surprised that he couldn’t say his name. To be clear, Tom and I aren’t worried. But the conversation led me to believe that maybe she was.

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Coffee

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Today it finally happened. After hearing about it all the time but never experiencing it, someone paid for my Starbucks order in the drive through! It's like winning the random acts of kindness lottery. You feel special and chosen, and it instantly cheered me up. And boy did I need cheering up. It was the whole reason I was in that drive through line. And in case you're wondering, yes I did pay it forward (backward?) and paid for the person behind me. You better believe I was passing on that insta-good mood karma.

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The Worst Part of Being Mama to Two

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I’ve been dreading it since G was born. I knew there would be a time when they needed me at the same time, and I couldn’t be there for both of them. I’ve been lucky so far, just skirting by, getting one calmed minutes before the next one started crying.

My luck ran out this week. The night started off great, though. There weren’t any tears on the drive home from daycare, G slept in his car seat while I fed E his dinner. It was almost too easy. But then G got hungry earlier than I was expecting. A few days earlier when I had sat down to feed the baby, E was free to run around the house while I was trapped, and it ended with him happily eating food out of the trash. So I decided to try and avoid that this time, and hearded E upstairs. We have a baby gate across the hall that blocks off both of the kid’s bedrooms, which allows him freedom to run around but stay safe and not get into too much trouble.

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Sick, We've Got It

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Oh have we got it.

Poor Bubba's had it pretty bad.  He was fighting off a virus for about a week, but seemed happy.  Then came the puking.  Oh so much puking.  At daycare.  At home.  On me.  On the bed.  On the floor.  Everywhere.  Just when he seemed like he was getting better, he got hit with another virus/cold.  Suddenly he wasn't eating, not acting like his self, all stuffy, and hit with a fever.

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The Bubba

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The Bubba is a funny creature.  Once a baby that easily startled, he's now pretty easy going.  Ice machines that used to make him cry, now make him laugh.  

The Bubba can crawl now, but he'd like you to believe he can't.  Until you leave your phone somewhere and then ZOOM! he's off to stick it in his mouth. 

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The Bad Pictures

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My boss made a comment to me recently.  "Make sure you get a few pictures of E crying too."  His point was that they'll remind us of how far we've come and all the rough times we went through, but also that they can be hilarious. 

It's true that we focus a lot on the cute and happy baby pictures.  But one of the reasons that my boss and I work so well together is that we have the same sense of humor.  So although I don't always share them, there are plenty of "bad" pictures.