thank you!

Thanks, loyal blog readers! I got an outpouring of support after my last post. It made me feel so much less isolated - I knew I wasn't actually alone before, but it was a nice reminder that I truly do have a lot more support that I tend to use. I'm really going to work hard on utilizing my support network more often, whether it's for help with Rose (thanks, Marsha!), help around the house (thanks for the offer, Mom and Dad!), or help at work (thanks, Mike, for letting me work late yesterday! thanks, Helene, for letting me vent!). I'm starting to surface again and it feels so much better.

falling behind

Everything seems worse when I'm sleep deprived. I already have a tendency to catastrophize, and this is only heightened when I'm running on fumes. As a result, I now feel like I'm falling behind in everything.

I'm falling behind at work. I'm in such a rush to leave by 3:30 every day to pick up Rose that I never get fully caught up. I brought home six reports to finalize this weekend (in an attempt to make progress on getting caught up) and I couldn't find the time to read them all over.

I'm falling behind at home. I haven't vacuumed in forever. I need to balance the checkbooks. I have piles of my laundry to put away. We end up eating frozen pizza more often than this girl who loves to cook and bake would like to admit.

I'm falling behind as a mom. Some days I get so resentful of the hours (literally hours) that it can take Rose to fall asleep. I love her soooo much, but I wish I could explain to her that I need just a little Steph time each day. I'm not asking for much! If she would actually go to bed at 7:30, I would have a whole 90 minutes to myself (and my to-do list) before I have to start my bedtime routine. I just need a little time to wind down each day, in order to be fully present and appreciative of the wonderful time I do have with her!

I'm falling behind as a wife. I'm snapping at Mike for things that aren't his fault. I don't do this (at least, not nearly as much) when I'm well rested. It's certainly not helping our relationship and then that just adds to my stress level.

I'm falling behind in self-care. I don't even want to tell you when I last flossed my teeth. If I didn't have to walk to pick up Rose from school, I basically wouldn't be getting any exercise at all. And when Rose takes forever to get to bed, I end up inhaling my dinner which certainly isn't good for my digestion or my general health.

I'm falling behind at blogging. This is such a release for me, and when I don't get time to write then things get bottled up and I go crazy (and get more likely to snap at Mike). I was hoping to post Rose's 19-week photos today, and I also want to post a summary of our Labor Day weekend. I know it's only Labor Day itself right now, but our weeks get so crazy that if I didn't do it by now that also contributed to me snapping at Mike earlier this evening.

I'm falling behind in relationships. I feel so rushed and so stressed all the time that I'm not calling the people I love (sorry, Mom and Dad, for not calling you back today!) or writing to the people I care about (sorry, Jane and Sara and Dotty and everyone else whose emails have gone unreturned!). Please believe me when I say I think of all of you often, even if my actions don't support that.

I'm falling behind at taking care of my emotional well-being. Maybe this is just part of self-care, but it seems a little different. In addition to blogging, I also need time to myself.  Pre-Rose, I read about one book per month. I knew the pace of my reading would change, but I didn't expect it to dwindle to less than a chapter per month now that I'm back at work. I need an escape! Reading rejuvenates me, just like blogging is cathartic.  I just don't know how to build that into my day, on top of everything else that I need to be doing. In the list of things that need to get done each day, making "Steph time" keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. But I know that doing this first would actually help out everything else that I'm feeling stressed about. (What's that I tell my patients? Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others? Hmmm.)  I signed up for a mindfulness meditation class on Tuesday evenings starting in a couple weeks, and I'm really, really looking forward to having that time to figure things out in my head. If that doesn't help and things don't start improving, I'm going to have to find a psychologist because I can't keep getting stressed and taking it out on Mike, and I certainly don't want to get to a point where I'm not able to enjoy my time with Rose.

Ahhhhhhh. I just re-read everything I wrote. Amazingly, I feel like I have just a bit of breathing room as a result. So with that breathing room, I'm going:  to let go of all the household chores that don't really need to be done, choose to put of blogging about this weekend until later this week or next weekend, get to work 5 minutes early tomorrow so I can figure out a plan for getting more caught up by the end of this (short) week, and now get ready for bed (including flossing!) and read for 15 minutes before going to bed 15 minutes early (in the hopes of catching a little more sleep). Sounds like a plan, Stan. Here's to greener pastures tomorrow.

Ah, sleep. Dear, dear, sleep.

I think that lack of sleep has been the hardest adjustment to parenting for me. I really, really like sleep. And I really, really need some solid sleep in order to function - cognitively, emotionally, and physically. The first six weeks with Rose were such a blur: she woke to eat every three hours and it took her about 45 minutes to eat (or for me to pump), so at most I was getting about two hours of sleep at a time. I remember how marvelous it felt when I got my first three hours of uninterrupted sleep in several weeks. That blur of time certainly taught me why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.

After those first several weeks, things got much better. Rose fairly quickly (at least in retrospect) transitioned to only waking twice (then once) per night, and she made progress in falling asleep more quickly in the evening. But after I got back to work, I realized just how hard it is to be fully functional when not completely rested. I mean, it was one thing for me to be on maternity leave and to be exhausted, but it was a whole different issue to be working as a psychologist while exhausted. Not to be melodramatic or anything, but there are days when I literally keep other people from killing themselves. This is not a job to be done by someone with word-finding problems, a constant desire to doze off, persistent irritability, and the coordination of a flea! (Do fleas have coordination difficulties? I don't even know! But that's how badly my cognitive abilities have been affected recently!)

We seemed to be making amazing progress with Rose's sleep at the beginning of August. There were 3 out of 4 nights at the beginning of the month where Rose slept through the night (7:30pm to 6:00am)!!! It was incredible. Then she started waking for several nights in row, but I figured it was just because she was getting adjusted to a new week of "school." Then she did two more nights in a row at the end of the week and I figured we were back on track... but alas she started waking again. Then she did two more nights...but the last time she slept through the night was somewhere around August 17th or so. Since she's continued to wake once per night for the past two weeks, I'm afraid her streak has definitely been broken.

This is particularly frustrating because it's also been coupled with a regression in her ability to fall asleep at night. When she was a tiny baby it took forever to get her to sleep (as my parents can attest to, after they stayed until 3am one night, repeatedly rocking her to sleep so I could rest). But by July she was usually falling asleep on her first or second try, and maybe her third try at the latest. This was right around the time that she discovered how to suck on her fingers rather than her penguin (and she discovered her magical thumb in particular).  In the last two weeks or so, however, she has completely stopped sucking her hand - she now prefers to bring blankets up to her mouth or to kick her legs.  But since she doesn't get any blankets in bed and there's nothing to kick in her crib, this is apparently very frustrating for her and keeps her awake.  Sigh.

So I reached my limit the other night and Mike and I went back to the drawing board. We reintroduced the pacifier. We added a slightly longer delay before soothing her at night. And I got back to putting her down drowsy but not fully asleep.

Thankfully, things seem to be moving back in the right direction again. She's still waking once (rarely twice) per night, but now she's back to falling asleep in the evening on her first or second try. This is huge because it means I actually get an hour or so to myself at night - I can finish up any chores that need to be done, plus I get about 15 minutes to myself (to read - or blog!) before I collapse from exhaustion. This is such an improvement!

We're going to try to keep these changes up for the next couple weeks, and we'll reevaluate around my birthday. If things are worse, we'll consider adding the "dream feed" that all the experts seem to be touting nowadays (see item 4 of this story). If things are still tolerable (or, dare I even hope to say it, better), then we'll just keep sticking with our previous successes. In the mean time, please keep sending good sleep vibes our way! Rose is a rock-star sleeper compared to a lot of other babies, but since she's slept through the night a couple times I have my hopes up that she can do it again (consistently!) if we just give her the right support!

"granola" mom

Just started making our own baby wipes (!). I'll let you know how they actually work once we use them tomorrow...

P.S. Huge thanks to my friend Ryan for hunting down all the supplies with me at Target! :)

I'm a little pack rat, short and stout...

I will readily admit that I have some minor hoarding tendencies. (This is not good for someone living in an ~800-square-foot house!) This recently became apparent yet again when I realized that I've been saving all of Rose's "report cards" to date.  Mike and I both love looking at her report cards each day - they tell us when she ate, how many wet/dirty diapers she had, what activities she did, etc.:

But I'm starting to think that maybe I don't need to save them after we review the info, especially since I've never gone back to review an old report card in the six weeks that we've been getting them. Right now our my stack looks like this:

I can only imagine how tall the stack will be by the time she starts kindergarten!

The nerdy part of me is curious to graph all the data to see if there are eating or sleeping trends. (Wouldn't that be fascinating? I love statistics!) But I also realize that doing so would immediately and irrevocably  push me into "crazy obsessive mom" territory.

So I guess it's time to cut the cord and recycle them, right? Oh, but it's hard to get rid of things with sentimental value, especially things with data!  What to do, what to do....

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

Just when I thought I had a routine figured out, Mommy and Daddy mixed it up on me! They kept telling me they were taking me back to Grandma and Grandpa's cabin, but I didn't really remember it because I was such a little baby the last time I was there .  Now, of course, I'm a grown up baby and can even write diary entries about my fun weekends.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Mommy and Daddy were so excited to get to the cabin that we left right after they  finished work on Friday afternoon. But I like to "cluster feed" on Friday evenings, so it was too bad they didn't consult me before they finalized that plan, because I would have told them that I wouldn't be happy to miss my evening meals. It all worked out, though, because they let me stop to eat twice during the three four hour drive up there, just like I wanted. (hee hee)

After we arrived I got to see four of my grandparents - Grandma Roles, Grandpa Fly, Nana and Poppy! What a treat! Too bad I was so exhausted after having had to beg for food for so long in the car, so I ended up going straight to bed after I had a bath. (I do like my nighttime routine!) But Saturday morning I got to spend lots of time with my grandparents. We all went down to the dock together so I could go swimming in a lake for the first time ever!

Daddy was the one who actually took me in the water. He's a lot of fun! Mommy just took the pictures, since apparently that's what she likes to do. Daddy said the water was cold when he got in, but I didn't believe him at first since the sun was bright and the air was warm.

It wasn't too bad when he put just my toes in, but when he started lowering my whole body into the icy cold, I naturally started flailing my arms and crying. You would have too, diary, if you had been there!

Thankfully Nana came to my rescue and held me out of the water so I could still look at the fish but had a little bit of feeling in my toes.

Then I got to sit on the dock with Mommy for a little while. I could tell Mommy was nervous about having me in the sun without a hat on, but she hid her anxiety pretty well. (Although I'm betting that next time she won't forget my hat, silly Mommy!)

After all that excitement on the water it was clearly time for a nap. Grandma rocked me for a while, but I wasn't fooled! I sure wasn't about to fall asleep and risk missing out on any of the excitement.

Eventually my "stay-awake plan" was foiled, however, and I did sleep for a bit. So then I was all refreshed and able to play in the activity gym that Great Aunt Janice gave to Grandma Roles. Grandma even showed me how to reach up and kick the hanging objects and that was super fun. It turns out that I love to kick! Love it!

After I got tired of the fun activity gym and exersaucer, Poppy took me outside to watch Daddy and Grandpa Fly working on the deck.

It was CRAZY - their heads kept popping up from under the ground!

 My mind was officially blown.

After all that cra-cra-craziness, I needed another nap. When I got up, Mary and Hobie were over for dinner. It was fun to see them, although I was a bit shocked by how many bottles of wine the adults went through! Mommy even had a glass of wine, although it didn't help me to fall asleep any faster. I overheard her saying that I was a little overwhelmed from all the weekend excitement, and I think she might have been right - but don't tell her I said that.  ;)

Sunday morning we all had brunch at the original Famous Dave's before everyone drove to their respective homes. Poppy took a few pictures but he hasn't emailed them to Mommy yet so I'll have to add them later, dear diary. Just take my word for it that I had a great time but am super happy to be back at home again.

Hugs and kisses,

Rose

Eighteen weeks!

Rose is eighteen weeks old!

This was a big week for me because I had a total meltdown on Sunday after feeling overwhelmed for, I don't know, weeks? months?   I love Rose sooooo much, but caring for her can be such hard work!  I realized yesterday that I really, really, really need to ask for more help. Now that Mike's psych class is over it's been so much easier, but I still need to build more "Steph time" into my week. I love blogging because it's such a helpful outlet - I can vent, I can post photos, I can brag about Rose, and I can let out all the crazy. I feel so much better now I had a good long talk cry with Mike and my mom yesterday, and I'm looking forward to more fully utilizing my support network in the future. (If you're reading this, consider yourself warned!)  :)

But enough about me. Here's the beautiful girl you came to see! As you can see, she is all about the kicking now! Those little legs are just constantly moving.

Right now Rose likes:
+ standing (with support)
+ looking around (why look straight ahead when you can instead crane your neck from side to side?!)
+ very deliberately reaching for things (no indiscriminate batting for this little girl!)

And she does not like:
- being out past 6pm, particularly on a Friday
- being in the car during evening "cluster feeding" time
- getting vaccinated