A little funk...

Being a parent is wonderful blessing... it makes you smile every single day and there is never a bad moment!  HAHAHAHA  Okay, now that we've all had a good laugh, it's time to discuss the parenting funk we all get in every now and then.

How can you love a little person so much... and yet imagine yourself flushing them down the toilet when they act up??  I would call and ask my parents how they dealt with me, but let's be honest... I was a pretty fantastic kid, and they probably wouldn't have any advice for me! :) 

Gracie has started her grunting again.  If you're new here, and haven't had the pleasure of reading about Gracie's grunting, you can find it here!  She outgrew the grunting when she learned better ways to express herself... but apparently it's back with a vengeance!  Except now we get the grunt, the attitude, and the words to go along with it.  For example... "Gracie, finish your supper please!"  "No, mommy!!  Shush!" - Hits the table - "Errrrrrngh!"  And that's when I want to pick her up, stuff her in the toilet, and flush.  We're often on Skype with my parents when these little episodes occur... and they laugh.  Well, my dad laughs.  My mom doesn't really know how to laugh.  Her eyes close, she leans backwards like she might fall out of her chair, her whole body shakes, and she makes noises out of her nose (kinda like a snort, but also like a wheeze), but no real laugh comes out of her mouth.  Obviously (like I stated before), they find it entertaining because they've never seen this kind of attitude before!

I don't know if it's the fact that I've stopped breastfeeding, the fact that I've started back on birth control (for the first time in 3 years), or whether I'm pregnant again (JOKE!!), but I must say, my hormones are all wacky these last couple of weeks!  I'm cranky, and teary-eyed, and just feel in a funk!  I'm laughing at Gracie one minute, and swearing I'm not having any more kids the next minute.  My patience to deal with the little people has been in short supply lately. 

Danny has been off on parental leave, so I've been able to pass Gracie and her attitude off to him when I'm having an especially hard day.  I feel for the stay-at-home moms who never get the break they need!  Like I said before, being a parent is a wonderful blessing, but my lord children can be exhausting!  99% of the time we smile and patiently say all the right things when our children are acting like little hellions, but for those of us without back-up for the other 1% of the time... well, let's just say I can fully understand why 2-year-olds happen to know so many curse words! :)

My wonderful hubby has noticed the little funk I've been in the last couple of weeks... so the other day when the girls were napping (including me), he ran to the store and brought me home a little treat!

Some lovely flowers!! But the best part (because he knows me soooo well) was the fact that the flowers were accompanied by Jalapeno Poppers and sour cream & onion Pringles!  Nothing gets me out of a funk faster than cheese-filled peppers and chips!!  :)

I feel much better now... apparently it wasn't my hormones out of whack, it was junk food depletion!  I wont be letting that happen again!! :)

Sleeping like a husband!

Sleep is a luxury.  It's probably one of many things that people without kids take for granted.  And by people without kids, I mean husbands.  I'm fairly sure that people without kids realize that their sleep will be affected by kids and babies... and yet somehow, most dads didn't get the message! :)

I warned Danny that this blog was coming... his response was, "Go ahead, I'll start my own blog and tell the real truth."  I'd believe him... except he sleeps too much to keep up with it! :)

I should be fair and tell the whole truth... I'm a morning person.  Danny isn't.  So it was never an obligation of Danny's to have to get up with the kids.  It was always just sort of agreed that we don't need two sleepy parents, so he shouldn't have to get up with them.  Except that things have changed slightly from my perspective with the addition of Ella...

Gracie was a phenomenal sleeper.  She slept until 8 or 9 most mornings from the very beginning.  Ella does too... except she still gets up around 5:30 a.m. to eat.  The problem with 5:30, is that by the time I get back to bed and start falling asleep, it's 7:00, and that's when Gracie wakes up.  So I've started staying up after feeding Ella.  That means most of the time, my days begin around 5:15 or 5:30.

It's only been the last month or so that our original arrangement has started causing me some... issues. And by issues, I mean bitterness, anger, and hatred towards my husband.  Of course all of those emotions are dripping with love... and I mostly laugh while I feel them!  So it's not 100% bitterness, just a tiny little dose.

We were at my cousin's house this weekend for a bonfire, and she recently had a baby as well.  Her husband is now off on parental leave (as is Danny) and Danny asked him how it was going.  He said he gets up most mornings at 6:00 because that's when the kids get up, and my cousin sleeps in until around 8.  Danny thought that was hilarious!!

I think all of the aggression towards his sleeping started about a month ago, when I started to sleep train Ella.  I was letting her "cry it out" in the middle of the night and just getting up in the morning to feed her.  After the second night of the crying, I said to Danny in the morning "did you hear how long and how many times she cried?  I hope it didn't keep you up."  I actually felt bad.  And then the little bugger said, "no, I didn't hear anything.  I put in earplugs."  Earplugs?  EARPLUGS?!?!  Something about that made me so mad.  I guess I felt that if he didn't have to get up, he could at least have the decency to be inconvenienced by the noise!  Nope, he wears earplugs to bed now.  So when Gracie is up at 7:00 and she's in a particularly heinous mood, and throws 15 temper tantrums before 7:30, and I'm on the verge of having a mental breakdown... Danny doesn't hear a thing.  Because he's wearing EARPLUGS!!

Most mornings Gracie and I come in and wake Danny up between 9 and 9:30.  He rarely comes out on his own.  The other morning, after I had been awake already for nearly 4 hours, we went to wake him up.  We sat on the bed and played for a few minutes, then he had the nerve to say to me:  "Sammy, can you take the girls out and just give me 5 minutes to myself to wake up?"  I stared at him.  I don't think I said anything... just stared at him!  Imagine, after nearly 4 hours with the bed to himself, he needed 5 minutes to himself!  

When he came out, we had a lengthy discussion about sleeping... It started with me saying that I realized that it was our arrangement that he sleep in while I get up with the girls.  But that was before my mornings began at 5:15, and I was probably getting a little burned out since I felt kind of bitter every time the lazy bugger crawled out of the bedroom at 9:30.  He agreed about the bitter part... apparently he had noticed! :)

I said, "I think I just need like one week where I can sleep in and you get up with the girls.  Just  like 5 days."

His response:  "5 days of getting up at 5:30??  That's crazy!!"  

I think the fact that my eyebrows raised into my hairline and my mouth opened so wide and yet no sound came out was probably the giveaway that he had said something stupid.  I started laughing, and said, "you think?!?!"  He laughed too, and when I asked him if he was laughing because of how crazy that sounded, he admitted that it was.  He knows how lucky he is!!  I think the next thing I said was, "I hate you... just so you know.  And I want to punch you in the face."  I told him, "oh buddy, I'm soooo going to write about this."  He laughed.  He knew how ridiculous he sounded.  He knew he was busted!!

I have to cut him a break though.  Danny's a phenomenal dad.  He really is!  And it was my idea for him to sleep.  I really do believe that it's pointless for him to be up and tired if I can handle the girls in the morning by myself.  But the female part of me also wants to blame him for something that isn't his fault.  It isn't his fault that I agreed to let him sleep in, then get mad when he does.  It isn't his fault that Gracie has mornings where I swear she is the spawn of Satan!   But that doesn't matter to the female part of me... the female part of me comes in to wake him up after a morning like that, sees him snuggled into bed all comfy and cozy, and wants to smother the poor bastard with a pillow for having the audacity to actually sleep like I told him to!  It isn't his fault when he comes out, and I sweetly ask, "how did you sleep babe?" that I want to kick him in the teeth when he says "really good, thanks!" because I think he should have at least had the compassion to have a crappy sleep if I had to deal with screaming children all morning!

Really though, our arrangement works 99% of the time.  Danny is lucky to have a wife that is a morning person and doesn't mind him sleeping in most of the time.  And he would totally get up at 5:30 this week if I really wanted him to feed Ella (even thought he really does think 5:30 is crazy!), and he would get up at 7:00 and deal with Gracie if I needed him to.  But I don't.  I just need to vent sometimes about how lucky he is.  I need to threaten him with bodily harm, tell him he's a lazy little bugger, and swear I'm going to murder him in his sleep sometimes.  He knows I'm joking... and if I wasn't, he would never hear me coming because of the earplugs! :)

Don't poop in there!

Before we begin, I have a confession to make... my daughters have seen me naked.  On numerous occasions.  For those of you who aren't parents and think this is weird... believe me, it is not!  In fact, I don't think I've gone to the bathroom alone since the day Gracie was born.  Okay, that's not exactly true, but I do have company more often than not when I need to go!  Getting changed alone is a luxury as well.  Not to mention showering.  It's so nice to have a shower all to yourself, instead of having a little person pulling back the curtain every 3 seconds to have a chat or to make sure you're not using "my shampooooo" as Gracie likes to call it (as if I'd want to walk around all day smelling like blueberry sherbet!).  As much as I could complain about the showering thing though, I'm sure it's worse for Danny... who has to answer the "what's that?" question when Gracie peeks in on him!  The fact that I'm also a breast-feeding mother also means that, inside my home, my breasts are exposed more often than they're covered!  Cause really, who has time to tie blankets to bra straps to make sure you're covered inside your own home!  So, needless to say, Gracie has seen her fair share of naked mommy.

We're in the midst of potty training Gracie.  We haven't had to clean a poopy diaper in weeks (yay!!), and when Gracie needs to go, she always yells, "potty poop, Mommy!"  or "potty poop, Daddy!"  and off we run for the bathroom.  When we were first teaching about potty-pooping, we used to say "we don't poop in our diapers anymore, we poop on the potty!" and everytime we would run to the bathroom and still have a clean diaper, Gracie would get some praise "Yay, Gracie! No poop in there!"

So all this nakedness and poop talk is quite common place in our house these days.  And it never even occurred to me to share it with strangers... until Gracie did it for me today!!

On Monday mornings, Gracie goes to swim lessons at the pool on base.  We usually get changed in the women's locker room, but I discovered that the family changing room is actually heated... so we change in there now.  When we got changed in the female change room, I would just wrap a towel around myself and get changed under it.  Since the family change room has mommies and daddies in there, they provide you with nice little changing rooms.  Today was a very busy day at the pool.  The change room was full of mommies and daddies and babies!  After Gracie's swim lessons were over, I changed her in the main part of the room, then took her to a change room to get myself changed (I didn't want to try the towel trick in front of other daddies!).  The change rooms are actually just shower stalls with an extra wall in them, and they are thisclose to the main room.  We went in and shut the door, and since it was just Gracie and I, I dropped the towel and my swimsuit!  Gracie laughed and yelled "mommy's naked!!!!" and I heard a few giggles from the main room.  I'm not quite sure what Gracie thought I was about to do next, but all of a sudden, in her biggest, loudest voice she yelled "NO MOMMY, NO!!  DON'T POOP IN HERE!!" All I could hear was laughing from the main room, and I have to admit, I was actually embarrassed!!  Not that any adult in their right mind would think I would go potty in the change stall, but still... I felt like I had to defend myself! So I had to say in a loud voice too, "don't worry Gracie, mommy's just getting changed," to which she replied, "Yes mommy.  Poop on the potty. Don't poop in here."  At least that time was a little quieter... but I felt like I had been scolded.  When I had my pants and sweater on, Gracie came over, rubbed my leg and said, "therrrrre, mommy," like I was a good little girl for not pooping on the floor.

I can just imagine the conversation Gracie had with her little friends when she got back to daycare.  I can picture her standing there, with the group gathered around her, "you wouldn't believe what my mommy was going to do today at the pool... but I stopped her!!"

This may be the first time that Gracie has embarrassed me in public... but I'm quite sure it wont be the last!  Eeep!!