Papa was in Madison yesterday for his first all-day work trip since Rosie was born. Mama lined up some help, to keep things under control. And I thought it might be entertaining to log the activities of our first day with just us girls.
p{color:gray}. Photo: You can just barely see Rosie’s capped head in this self-portrait of us three Boyd ladies during our first day on our own.
*12:00 am* Mama finally puts Rosie down after a marathon cluster-feeding session. Mama goes to bed.
*12:30 am* Papa, on Rosie Duty, listens to Rosie’s snuffles. This girl is loud!
*2:30 am* Rosie is officially hungry. Mama is summoned and takes over infant-duty for the rest of the night.
*3:00 am* Mama and Rosie begin their first successful co-sleeping stretch. Mama actually falls asleep while nursing!
*5:56 am* Rosie wants some more to eat, has a hard time latching on.
*5:57 am* Papa departs for his trip to Madison.
*5:58 am* Lucy wakes up wanting a cracker. Papa and Mama are frustrated! This is the girl who normally wakes up between 7:00-7:30 am, and has been known to sleep as late as 8:30 am in the pre-Rosie days.
*6:15 am* Lucy has cracker, Rosie has some milk, Mama tries to get over her grumpiness.
*7:00 am* Diapers have been changed, Lucy has been dressed. Mama jumps in the shower while Lucy watches “They Might Be Giants videos”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000V5YOZ6/octothorppres-20 and Rosie snoozes in the bouncy seat. Mama tries to recover her patience.
*7:45 am* Mama and Lucy finish up their breakfast together while Rosie starts to wake up. We head to the futon to watch “_The Incredibles_”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0317705/ while Mama nurses Rosie.
*8:30 am* It’s only 8:30 am and we’ve watched over an hour of videos already. Is that wrong?
*8:35 am* We three girls hop in the car for an exciting trip to Whole Foods, where we buy fresh rye bread and some shower cleaner.
*9:45 am* Lucy, who has been calling for a granola bar for about forty minutes, sits down at the table and refuses to eat her granola bar. Mama unpacks the groceries.
*10:00 am* Elisa, one of our excellent babysitters, arrives and immediately starts to play with Lucy. Yay! Mama nurses Rosie in relative peace.
*11:00 am* With Rosie in the BabyBjörn, the rest of the girls work together on rolling out and baking some “glazed cheese croissants”:http://www.marthastewart.com:80/recipe/glazed-cheese-croissants?xsc=stf_MSLO-RECIPE. Lucy sprinkles the dough with flour, then has fun playing in the flour with Elisa after the croissants are all made.
*12:03 pm* Mama sneaks a Trader Joe’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Malt Ball — one in a series of many sweets ingested to soothe raw nerves.
*12:20 pm* Lunch with Elisa and Lucy. Rosie sleeps in the BabyBjorn. Lucy throws her rye bread on the floor, laughing: “Drop it!”
*1:00 pm* Elisa offers to read a book to Lucy before she goes, but Lucy just wants to play. We brush teeth, and Elisa heads home.
*1:20 pm* After reading a new favorite, “_A Good Day_”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006114018X/octothorppres-20, three times in a row, Mama puts Lucy into her crib and heads to the living room to nurse Rosie.
*1:25 pm* “Mama! Mama! Mama!”
*1:35 pm* Mama finally visits Lucy. “All done!,” she says. Mama does a “silent return to sleep,” which enrages Lucy. Screams ensue.
*1:55 pm* Lucy is quiet. Thanks be to God. Mama and Rosie settle in for a snooze.
*2:20 pm* Lucy starts to cry again, off and on. Mama thinks she might go back to sleep.
*2:40 pm* Lucy’s cries escalate. Mama has her own bout of crying.
*2:50 pm* Lucy’s “nap” is finished. Hysterical cries end as Mama walks in the room. “Cry-ring,” explains Lucy, and Mama laughs — the understatement of the year! “Funny,” says Lucy.
*3:00 pm* Buttered graham crackers for Lucy. Lucy and Mama draw with crayons. Rosie wakes up.
*3:30 pm* Nursing while watching the next installment of “_The Incredibles_”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0317705/.
*4:15 pm* Pack up to go for a short walk. Everyone is fed, diapered, and the sun is out. Mama gets some time to think and appreciate her girls. “Maybe we’re going to make it after all…”
*5:00 pm* Lucy plays outside, moving dirt from our porch steps into the shallow bird bath. Rosie hangs out in the BabyBjörn. Mama enjoys the sunshine in between brief trips indoors to make preparations for our frozen pizza dinner.
*5:30 pm* Our friend Lisa arrives — reinforcements for the dinner/bath/bedtime hour. Lisa and Lucy play with Lucy’s kitchen, baking “banana bread.” While the pizza is baking, Mama quickly whips up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. This is an index of the days’ stresses: Mama has needed two baking therapy sessions in less than eight hours.
*5:50 pm* Dinnertime. Lucy enjoys a colossal amount of pizza, some grapes, and succeeds in removing the entire disk of frosting from a Trader Joe’s “Joe-Joe” (their version of the Oreo).
*6:00 pm* Bath and bedtime routine for Lucy. Lisa holds the snoozing Rosie. Lucy gets her every-other-day conditioner treatment, even though her usual stylist (“Jean,” aka Papa) is out of town.
*6:50 pm* An exhausted Lucy goes to sleep without a fuss. Mama nurses Rosie and reads “a magazine”:http://www.cookiemag.com/.
*7:30 pm* Mama cleans up the kitchen briefly, then settles in for an evening of nursing and watching “_Pride and Prejudice_”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005MP58/octothorppres-20 in an effort to decompress. Papa returns from his trip and joins in the video entertainment. Chocolate chip cookies are consumed.
*10:00 pm* Mama and Rosie camp out on the futon for their first full night of co-sleeping.
While this was a challenging day, I must add that the next day was amazingly better! Co-sleeping worked wonders for everyone’s nighttime rest. Lucy didn’t wake up until 6:45 am, plus she took a nearly-three-hour nap. We all enjoyed some sunny springtime weather here in Chicago. Maybe spring will bring more of these good days — we hope so!
wow, an impressive log. I appreciate the food and film citations; baking and/or watching Pride & Prejudice to cope with stress totally makes sense to me.
You made it! That’s what counts. For every horrible day, there are plenty of good.
Maybe that is what I needed last night, some baking therapy! I felt like the worst mom in the world, when Kaia began her “you can’t tell me what to do” and then proceeded to do everything, EVERYTHING, she shouldn’t. I lost my temper and broke house rule number 1 several times (no yelling).
I’m hoping that this morning she’ll be an angel, even if she’s not a morning person, because I only get a an hour or so before she’s off to church and I’m off on a business trip.
Hope Lucy continues to adjust. The 2’s are definitely here for us!
Oh, Ann, what a day! I’m so glad the next day was better.
I hear ya sister friend!
One day at a time, you’re doing a great job…
OMIGOSh. I’m exhausted just reading this. Getting up at midnight to bottle feed lambs is much much easier. You leave them in the barn! I like the baking therapy idea. Thank God for butter and chocolate – proven mood modifiers. You are doing great.
Ann when Lucy was bigger and you were swaddling her what did you use…just a big blanket? what material? Right now we use a Halo sleepsack swaddle with Lydia (Maddy did like swaddling) but it is almost two small and they really don’t make bigger sizes. HELP.
Hey Katrina – we swaddled Ella until she was probably 9 months old or so. I did an arms-only swaddle where I would lay out a blanket on the floor (like this blanket, from babies r us http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2415407) and then put her on it about a foot or so from the left edge. I would take the upper left corner, pull it tightly over her right arm and tuck it between her left arm and torso and then underneath her. I would then roll her up in it (seriously, rolled her over until we ran out of blanket), making sure the first roll made it pretty tight around her other arm. This worked well for us.
Katrina, we made some swaddling blankets out of old sheets. I just cut them 45″ square and hemmed the edges. This was big enough for Lucy for a long time. When she really started busting out of the swaddle, we got “The Miracle Blanket”:http://www.miracleblanket.com/, which was totally worth the money and worked great.
Thank you. :-)
Ann,
I can TOTALLY relate. I was terrified to be alone with my two for a couple of months. BUT YOU DID IT! I promise it gets better. Now I actually love being with them and it’s even more normal than it was to have just one!
But it is a lot of work and some days, I am ready to climb the walls in frustration, especially when Mirai doesn’t nap and Kaden needs to be held constantly. Hang in there – I know you are a great mom!
And HOORAY for co-sleeping – if Kaden and I didn’t co-sleep, I would be really looney by now.