So, more talk about less sleep…

After my last blog I had another two nights that were pretty rough. So did Adam. In between feedings I heard Adam in Ben’s bed trying to get him to stop screaming at the top of his lungs at the ungodly hour of 3am.

Why do babies sleep ‘butt up’ like this? Looks so uncomfortable!

Both twins have now developed a thing where they cry out a few times after Anjelica or I have put them to bed every night. I usually go in and pat them on the back until they fall back sleep.

And Sam has developed an early morning, well more like middle of the night, wake up time. Sometimes around 3 or 4 in the morning he just wakes up and starts talking to himself. Loudly. Which wakes up Aaron.

As my friend Morgan pointed out, it’s probably time to do some more sleep training.

As far as the twins go, that means training Sam. If it weren’t for sharing a room with his twin brother, Aaron would be my only kid to sleep through the night with no training. He is such a calm, easy baby that I’m thinking perhaps he was switched at birth.

I remember how to sleep train for babies. Still, it goes against every instinct I have as a mother to let a baby cry. Even as I refused to pick Sam up last night when he woke up an hour after I fed him, I still walked into the room every 10 minutes in the middle of the night to make sure his foot wasn’t stuck somewhere.

I have no clue how to handle the older boys. At the point they can call your name and have the freedom to leave their beds, sleep training is lost on me. How do you get a kid to stop waking up in the middle of the night and screaming? I refuse to lock them in their rooms. I remember many years of running to my sister’s bed in the middle of the night for comfort. I was a real scaredy cat. How awful would it have been to be confronted with a locked door instead?

This morning I turned on the sound machine while the twins FINALLY napped together. I’m not sure if the sound machine works on Sam or the early wake up exhausted him but instead of his usual 45 minutes, he slept 2 hours. I woke up after an hour nap confused. I wasn’t waking up to any crying but naturally. It felt great. I take back my comment to Adam this morning, when I asked what kind of vacation time this job had, because I was ready to take mine.

Some weeks I go around feeling like super mom. I can’t believe how well I can function on relatively few hours of interrupted sleep. And still keep up some semblance of normal. I cook, I clean, I shop, I keep the laundry and garbage from overflowing.

This past week has been testing my limits, though.

I think the lead up to Halloween kept me going, my tank was empty from lack of sleep but I was burning on adrenaline fumes. Now that it’s over, I’ve noticed the social calendar keeps going but I no longer have the energy to keep up with it.

It doesn’t help that the twins haven’t slept a nap at the same time in over a week, making it impossible for me to sleep during the day. Also the past couple of nights have been worse than normal. (And our normal is pretty bad to start with.)  At one point two nights ago Jack and Ben were up from 2:30 to 4:30 in the morning. Adam covered that one, but I laid in bed next door, awake, listening to the whole thing. Until it was time to get up and feed a twin, that is.

This morning I woke up to see that both our bed and Jack’s were soaked in pee. Add another six loads to the normal two or three that I do every day. I knew I was overwhelmed when the thought of it made me want to cry.

Being this tired makes me nervous whenever someone asks me to do something social. I never want to commit because I never know how tired I’ll be feeling until that day. What if I commit to a play date then the twins sleep at the same time? It could be the one time I get a chance to nap.

Happy Birthday Laurie

Still it’s not fair for your friends to sit around waiting for your flaky butt to commit to something, so I try my best to make a decision and stick to it. I did need a little pep talk from my friend Cindy yesterday, though. I had plans to meet the girls for a birthday dinner date at Balena. By 3pm I was fading fast and I called to try to weasel my way out. Instead Cindy talked me back into it. She’s in sales. In hindsight should have called my friend Jennifer who is a doctor and has twins. She probably would have ordered me on bed rest.

In the end I was glad I went. It was a lovely evening with friends. So nice to escape the house for a bit. To be served nice wine by the glass and good food. To chat with your friends. To forget about all those chores piling up at my house.

And with a new day brings new hope, Maybe, just maybe the twins will nap a long nap together and I’ll get some sleep.

Spoiler alert: Sam woke up at 3:45am this morning and never went back to sleep. He has already slept a nap while Aaron stayed awake. Still hopeful though…

This morning we decided to dust off our Museum of Science and Industry membership card. They have a new Charlie Brown exhibit that I wanted to check out. The boys wanted to see their old favorites – Jack wanted the Great Train Exhibit, Ben the floating hot air balloons in the Science Storms exhibit.

The viewing of the trains was made extra special when we found out from one of the workers that there were 12 cows and the Incredible Hulk hidden inside.

The Charlie Brown exhibit was great. The kids enjoyed seeing all the cartoons on the wall, even if they didn’t have the attention span to let us finish reading them, or the understanding of some of the subtleties that Charles Schulz’s was in the habit of using. There was also a lot of cool things for kids to play with…

Creating a Zoetrope

Trick or Treating with the Piercys

The Avenger’s movie really had it’s effect this year. Fake muscles were everywhere! Other top costumes for boys were ninja’s and Harry Potter. Seems like the girls were less trendy. Princesses, a classic favorite pick, were everywhere.

The older boys stayed out a bit longer this year. They got so much candy that they filled both their buckets and the huge back pack that Adam carried on his shoulders.

As usual we held our annual Halloween party. This year we had a taco bar for the adult and mummy dogs for the kids. The mummy dogs were actually such a big hit with both adults and kids that I’m thinking of making them a Halloween staple. Cindy and Mike brought both a cookie cake and a Halloween cake which added to the spread nicely.

We emptied out the spare bedroom and put up a hanging tent. We added a bunch of ghouls given to us by Bubbie. We cracked up a ton of glow stick wands and necklaces to spread around. Finally Adam installed some flashing colored lights.

Jack and Ben ran wild. I think Ben must have eaten an entire bag of candy himself while none of the adults were watching! The babies did really well. Angelica and our friend Jackie they made sure they were carried around like the little princes they are all night.

The back room ghouls

Cindy’s cookie cake and Mike’s Halloween cake

Cake massacre (Pam and I were trying to see what was inside, but the knife broke!)

This weekend and next week is basically an exercise in candy shuffling.

Adam took a trip to Costco yesterday and bought NINE Costco size bags of candy. That’s 45 pounds of candy! To give Jack some perspective on this, I explained to him that when I weighted him yesterday, he weighted 48 pounds, or nine and a half bags of candy.

Six of the Nine Bags we bought.

This morning we stuffed bags of candy for both Jack and Ben to give out at school on Halloween.

I think Adam is the only one stuffing bags, everyone else is just stuffing their faces!

And this afternoon we trick or treated at the shops in our neighborhood, where we got back more candy.

On Wednesday Jack and Ben will bring more candy home from school. That evening we’ll give out huge amounts of candy to trick or treaters, only to have our own kids come back with bagfuls of their own candy.

I’m not sure if we buy more candy than we give out or vice versa. And I’m not sure what the winning side of that equation is either. All I know for sure is that my new diet starts November 1st.

Anjelica actually found it. It’s been there a couple of days, but it’s taken me that long to get around to photographing it.

The best thing about this blog is that, since I’ve started it, I have no guilt about baby books or photo albums. It’s all here, plus a diary of stuff that happened to the kids before they were old enough to have memories for themselves.

I wonder what will become of this blog. Will the kids look back on it for childhood memories? I can already see Jack learning to read and not appreciating my bed wetting tales, or anything else printed about him for that matter. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get there…

Jack made these when he was in pre-k too, but when he brought them home he never ate them. He preferred to display them on the mantle until they were rotting and needed to be thrown out.

But all kids are different. Ben is not a saver. If Jack gets a new sticker book, chances are he will not use the stickers because he wants to preserve them in their perfect form. Ben will rip them open and start tearing them apart right away.

And so it was with the Haunted Gingerbread House. He was even kind enough to share it with his brother.

BEFORE

AFTER