Every Day Can't be the Best Day

In order to keep the blog from being an extended Christmas letter with nothing but cuteness and bragging, I sometimes like to write a post to keep it real.  Having a newborn is crazy hard for me. I love my babies to bits, but I have very mixed feelings about the first year which is hard on everyone.

The most obvious struggle is sleep. I've discovered in recent years that for me to work at optimum performance, I need 10 hours. I love to sleep in and napping is one of my favorite things to do. June is a great baby.  She's very calm and goes to sleep very easily.  She's sleeping on a predictable schedule and her soft, sweet, sleeping baby breath is like a drug to me.  The downside is that she still wakes up every 3 hours or so and mostly likes to sleep cuddled up on my chest.  I can't resist her and I let her sleep on me, which causes me to sleep even worse.  Lack of sleep of course, effects everything else; my mood, my headaches, my cravings for sweet carbs, my lack of energy for exercising or anything else.

Another major problem we have is bedtime for everyone else. I hate getting the kids to bed.  It causes probably 80% of my daily stress.  I can never get the kids to bed by the time I want, no matter how early I start.  As soon as bed time comes, they start running and screaming all over the house.  I've tried a zillion different strategies recommended by websites, magazines and books with little success.   Lily and Annie share a room and Lily still goes to sleep in my bed until I move her into her own bed, otherwise they keep each other awake all night.  Jack, I've determined, is like I was as a kid, and just has a really hard time falling asleep every night.  I'm just holding out hope that someday they'll all just figure it out.

Annie is still "The Destroyer".  One day when I thought she was asleep she was actually upstairs dusting the entire house with baby powder.  She did the carpet, the beds, the dresser, every surface she could reach, and what she couldn't, the powder managed to blow around enough to cover it, too.  It was a fiasco.  Amazingly she was easy to potty train, and managed it within a couple days with out too many accidents.  There were some poops in undies and on the floor, and once, while I was feeding June she came right over, stood in front of me, and peed directly on my foot.

Jack and Annie fight a lot. Actually it's not really fighting, they just like to make each other mad.  Jack growls at Annie and she screams.  Annie sits next to Jack and slowly pushes him with her legs until he smacks her and they both scream.  It's exhausting trying to be a referee.  They also play nicely; one day Jack was bored and woke up Annie from her nap to ask her if she would play "cats". I got there just as she gave him a confused look, rolled over and went back to sleep.

Lily is a champion, but not as perfect as she seems. She also likes to get Jack in trouble.  She sometimes fibs. She went through a phase of swiping money to buy candy at school and definitely can't be trusted with any sweets in the house.  She's also makes probably 75% of the messes because she's always busy with crafts, art, dress-ups, some kind of toy with tiny parts or cooking eggs in the microwave, which explode.

We had a really terrible week a while back.  Within one week, the kids broke the iPad, the laptop, my  $200 teeth guard (for nightly stress-induced teeth grinding), gouged my newly painted coffee table, Jack peed in the heater vent (again), on top of just a generally difficult week, all while Jared was super sick with his weird leg staff infection/ fever.

About 14 years ago he cut his leg down to the bone.  Ever since, once every couple of years he suddenly gets a really high fever and his leg gets all red.  This time was worse than ever, he could barely walk and had a fever for several days. It was ridiculous.  This picture does not even do it justice, it got so much blacker, oozier, and grosser.

 Even with all this craziness going on, there are still good days. And even in the bad days there are a lot of great moments.  June's sweet baby smiles and coos.  Annie's wacky, mad scientist hair that flies behind her when she runs.  Jack's squishy cheeks that I can kiss all I want while he sleeps. Lily so kindly helping Annie wash her hands.
(Jack is squishing Cate and Annie here for the sake of a good pose.)

I love my life and I am fully aware of how blessed I am.  It's hard to say, but I'm grateful for the bitterness, it makes the sweet things so much sweeter.

I read this article (http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-world-built-four-who-cares_p2/) called "The World is Built for Four and Who Cares?"  It's something I've thought about a lot now that we have so many kids, and I wonder what life would be like if we only had two, or none, and I wonder if I am going to be able to make it.  Here's an excerpt that I loved:

"Families are not supposed to come in neat little packages.  Families are not supposed to float down the pathways of life without leaving a trace on their surroundings.  That's the job of a painless enema, not a family.

Families are messy and loud and hard.  Families make you laugh too loud in public places, and they can make you insane.  They are filled with chaos and regret and anger that rivals the deepest loves and commitments and sacrifices.  Families grow together through tragedy and triumph, and if you plant a family in a perfect square box, its roots will twist and embrace until they explode outward looking for a way back to the soil again.

It's not a parent's job to figure out what the world is built for.  Especially because the world, like everything else, changes.  Things happen.  Death and divorce happen.  Illness and tragedy happen.  Things you could never even think to list, even if it were your job to make lists, happen.  They take your family from five to six, from four to three, from one to seven.  And if you think the point of family is numbers, then you won't know how to make the math work when those big changes happen.  No, it's not a parent's job to figure out what the world is built for.  Parents take the world they find, in whatever form, and try to make it work for their children, knowing that imposing order on family is as impossible as quantifying love."