30 Days of Thankful (Day 18)

My 30 Days of Thankful

Day 18

I am thankful for getting to sleep in until 8 AM.  With 5 kids that is unheard of.  Waking up at 8 AM (and not to screams or fighting) feels like you rode a unicorn out of your bedroom.  The rest of the day can be nothing but magical.  No work, no school just sleeping off staying up WAY too late with my husband.

No sick days and no naps!

Motherhood is one of the most rewarding endeavours of my life, but the most challenging too.


As a chef I've done 26+ hours on my feet in various banquets and thought that was difficult.  That still does not compare to the complete exhaustion felt during a feeding frenzy/breastfeeding marathon.  Or caring for a sick child who stays up all night only to wake early and cranky the next morning.


The lack of sleep is something you can never prepare yourself for.  Even now that my youngest is 1 year old he still does not sleep through the night.  Small children are so adept at the use of sleep deprivation that they must be trained by the CIA or maybe it is the CIA that took their training from a small child... 


It's been months since I have gotten more than 4 hours of sleep at night.  I am reaching the point where my body and mind are beyond exhaustion.  I cannot sit in a comfortable chair (any solid surface) for too long or find myself nodding off, only to startle awake in horror at the possibility of what my children could have done in the minutes I dared to allow my exhaustion to take over.


When morning sickness strikes, as I curl around the porcelain throne trying to keep my toes from coming up I don't get a break.  As a mom I get children at the door asking what's for lunch or shoving random things under the door. If am am lucky enough to have been able to lock the door before retching that is.  When I do not get the door locked I get two small children either making gagging noises behind my back as they tell me I am gross or get to experience the joy of fighting little hands away from playing in the toilet as I continue to dry heave.  To add insult to injury they sometimes just stand there. Their little fingers pointing at me as they laugh at the gross noises and faces I make as I expel what was the only meal I was naive enough to think I would be able to keep down.


With that wonderful puking episode that hit both my youngest kids now passed on to the oldest, I am praying these outbreak monkeys of mine don't get me sick.  I am the last person in this house that can be sick.  I get no sick days.  There is no one that will step in and do everything that needs to be done if I am too sick to move.  Sure the family wont starve and I'm mostly sure the house wont burn down.  I can guarantee that if I don't do it then it wont get done.  Laundry would be left to sit in the washing machine molding away because I didn't tell someone to do something about it.  The feral animals that I call my family would eat from every random container they could find rather than run the dishwasher.


Yes, I know how lucky I am to be a stay at home mom.  I get to spend time with my children.  Just know that all that time is not all kisses and unicorns.  I get never taking a moment off from being mom.  Being always on shift.   When someone calls out I have to answer the call. If left to dad (sorry hun I love you but this is true) shit just doesn't get handled unless distinct directions are left.  There are days I would happily switch lives with my spouse. To leave the house for up to 12 hours a day and not have to be the one to do homework, diapers, and constant death watch.  (is it just my kids or do all kids try to find new and dumber ways to attempt to kill or maim themselves?)

Dear Teething Monster

Dear Teething Monster,
Go Away!  That's right, I'm done being nice about it.  I want my sweet little boy back.  Take all your baggage and hit the bricks.

We are done with the sleepless nights.  Maxx wakes up in the middle of the night and just cries and cries.  Nothing I do comforts him and that breaks my heart.  Sometimes it is so bad that he will even go on a nursing strike.  Which that in turn scares me because with breast feeding I am constantly wondering if he is getting enough to eat.  (it's the lack of confidence in your ability to breast that you don't hear about)

I am sick of the drippy nose.  It's constantly running to the point it must be in competition with his drooling.  It doesn't help that his intense hatred of the nose suction bulb turns Maxx into a rabid Tasmanian devil at just the sight of it.  He'll instantly start spinning and swiping at my hands as soon as he sees it coming.  It's become a two man job to wrestle him down to safely suction his nose without any mishaps of him knocking it out of his nose only to make it poke him in the eye.

Everyone is frustrated with the mood swings.  It's been like living with a little bi-polar cave person.  One minute he is happily playing the next he's tossing toys and yelling or even worse having a complete kiddie meltdown.

Drooling, ugh you can keep the non stop drooling. My poor little man has to endure multiple outfit changes a day due to the constant stream of drool from his face.  I've tried bibs, but when he spends the entire time screaming and trying to rip it off only managing to get angrier when he pulls himself over instead of tearing off the bib.

This is so much worse to deal with teething without our magical Hyland's Teething tablets.  OK, so they aren't really magic, but in this house they are pretty close.  I was depressed to find out about the recall.  It's not that they were unsafe or harming anyone they didn't have consistent amounts per pill when they were spot testing.  To keep quality control at a high level they did a voluntary self recall.  I received a coupon in the mail for $7 worth of their products.

Lists, Lists, and more lists. Check!

Hi, My name is Kim and I'm an obsessive list writer.  I write endless lists about everything under the sun.  From grocery lists to chore lists I have them all.  I am so obsessive with my list writing that I have chores broken down into different rooms or other categories.  At one time I had a checklist in my word documents of all the chores.  Each chore was obsessively scheduled for certain days too.  I had just gotten my list fully organized and divided into days I wanted to face the drudgery of the chores.  Then the horrible crash of my PC and my wonderful list was lost. I had to start all over and in the middle of the holiday season no less.

I've always had trouble falling asleep. It's just gotten worse with each child I've had.  My husband claims a mouse fart would startle me out of a dead sleep.  The loss of my master list has not helped my insomnia.  My mind runs faster when my body comes to rest. It leaps ahead to the next day tallying up to-do lists that are full of chores that always need my attention.  To quiet the fluttering of my obsessive thoughts I write them down in a spiral notebook.  The official lists(spell-checked and printed) are mostly filled with chores that need to be done.  My spiral book is also covered page after page in chicken scratches of little ideas for my blog with insights that rush at me as I lay there in the dark trying to force myself to fall asleep.

We are planning on moving in the next few months and my list making addiction is going to kick into overdrive.  It's a good thing my wonderful husband bought me a great clipboard with paper and pencil storage inside it years ago.  I've used it to contain important papers throughout many events in life. From cross country moving to keeping all the hospital papers safe and contained with not one but two of my children's births.

With the move in the next few months I have already started on my checklists.  At this point this list is growing faster than it is shrinking.  I love that feeling of checking things accomplished off my lists.  It gives me a little obsessive compulsive thrill. When the checklist is fully done I look at it and marvel at how I got it all done.  Then I realize; oh yeah, I know how.. I don't sleep enough to keep a normal human being functional.  I'm not even the worst insomniac I know.  

The Unwilling Night Owl

Early to bed and early to rise. That was my motto. Since having kids... It's changed a LOT and not willingly.
I now find myself struggling to fall asleep and once I do get to sleep it's even harder to stay asleep.

I've tried warm milk... ::GAG:: I don't like that stuff when it's cold.. it's so much worse when warm.  Counting sheep til I lost count and am really tempted to poke my eye out with a  spork.  List making to slow or even stop the thoughts that swirl through my head constantly. Mostly to do lists... As a stay at home mom to 4 kids I can always think of something that needs doing.  Warm baths seem to energize me and a shower is much worse.  What am I to do?

I catch myself spending all day yawning, but then I get to take very few naps.  The slightest noise disturbs my sleep or as my husband says, "You startle awake from a mouse fart."  Some days I can sleep in until 10 am. At the same time can it really be considered sleeping in if you aren't asleep but instead are pretending in the hopes you can trick yourself into falling back asleep?

As I type this I realize there are many factors to why I can't sleep.  I'm sure there are more but there are some that are a constant cause in my insomnia battle.

Having a new baby in the house I wake throughout the night and constantly check on him.  Maxx is exclusively breast-fed and seems to go from one growth spurt to the next with very little time between.

If only that were all that kept me from sleep.

My husband has a job that his schedule flip-flops throughout the year. Most the year he is working from 2 P.M. to 10 P.M.  but during the summer and winter school breaks from school he works 4 A.M. to Noon.  Throughout the year I stay up and wait for him because I can't sleep without him next to me.  Then during the flipped schedule I have a tough time falling asleep because he's already comfortably in bed snoring away once I finally get the house settled to bed.

With Maxx teething lately he's been up hourly throughout the night.  His constant need to soothe nurse has me worn out.  To make matters worse he's started refusing his pacifier lately.  So I have become the pacifier unless I prefer a little angry person yelling at me.  If it wasn't for Hyland's Teething tablets I would have run away to join a circus by now.  Some parents say they don't work for their children.  I pity those poor souls.  In our house they are miracle pills. My son just has to see the bottle and he perks up and opens his mouth ready for a dose.  My daughter did this too when she was little and teething viciously.

Maybe one day I will be the early bird catching her worm again.  For now I will be the content mama night owl off to obsessively check her flock "one last time".  Let's all hope I get more sleep soon or I am gonna be one nutty mama.

And for those that argue that Hyland's Teething tablets can't safe if they have Belladonna in it.. Please read this very informative post explaining their safety from a great natural mama site.

Everything Birth ~ The Safety of Hyland's Teething Tablets