A Day in the Life…
@ 12 am – Finally shut my brain off and relax enough to fall asleep
1:53 am – Mary crying. I stumble to the door of her room and listen for a minute to see if she will go back to sleep on her own. No luck. I go in, give her the binky that she threw out onto the floor and sit next to the crib while she goes back to sleep. She lies there quiet, but awake, watching me.
2:25 am – Not exactly sure when she actually fell back to sleep as at some point I drifted off while sitting there on the floor, but I wake up and go back to bed.
4:15 am – Mary crying again. I make it downstairs without tripping over my own feet to make her a bottle. I go into the kids’ room to find Drew sitting awake in the middle of the floor and Mary crying while staring at him. Guess I know why she’s awake. He wants to sleep on the floor in Tommy’s sleeping bag. I tell him to go back to bed. He starts screaming for the sleeping bag. His screaming causes Mary’s to get even louder. I tell him that the sleeping bag is put away in Tommy’s closet and I can’t get it right now. He climbs back into his bed and screams while I deal with Mary, who is by now shrieking at the top of her lungs. She and her bed are both soaked from a leaky diaper. I pull her out and change her…note that both children have been screaming for several minutes now, but husband Sean is still in bed. I finally get Drew quiet and tucked back into bed and Mary clean, but I can’t put her back in her bed as I can’t change the sheets one-handed and she will go ballistic again if I set her down. Give up and take her back to bed with me.
4:30 am – Mary drinks her bottle and proceeds to demonstrate how wide awake she is by trying to crawl around the bed. Sean just rolls over and ignores the whole situation. I get up and try to rock her back to sleep.
5:00 am – Still awake
5:30 am – Lay her down with Sean so I can go pee…takes all of 1 minute, in which time she bangs her head on the wall and starts screaming bloody murder. Idiot Husband realizes he’s about to get his ass handed to him and ever so generously offers to get up with her so I can “get some sleep.”
5:55 am – He brings her back. “She’s tired now.” Hands her off to me and goes to get ready for work. So much for that sleep he thought I should get.
6:25 am – Mary finally falls asleep.
6:30 am – Sean leaves for work. Keep in mind that his office is only about 30-40 minutes away, particularly this early in the morning before rush hour. You will understand this later.
6:40 am – Tommy’s alarm goes off.
6:45 am – Tommy didn’t get up, so I try to ease out of the bed without waking Mary and drag him out of bed.
7:19 am – Get Tommy out the door to catch the bus and decide to try to go back to sleep.
8:02 am – Drew comes stomping into my room, saying “WAKE UP!”…which of course Mary immediately does, grinning at her partner in crime. Time to get them up, bathed, dressed and fed, change dirty sheets in Mary’s crib and let them destroy the living room and watch too much TV because I’m basically a zombie.
8:45 am – Drew puts his foot in Mary’s face and tells her “smell my foot!” She bites it. He freaks out and whacks her. She cries. I comfort her and then put her back down. She finds the TV remote and changes the channel while randomly pushing buttons. Drew freaks out and grabs it back from her. She screams. This is pretty typical of their interactions all day.
9:00 am – I put Mary in her play pen so I can take a shower. On days when I have nothing to do, I’ll wait until her morning nap. Other mornings we might have MOPS (My favorite mornings, but sadly only twice a month), story time at the book store (free), music class at the public library (also free), basically anything I can find that is free and keeps the kids occupied. Usually only manage to occupy 2 mornings a week though…which is good because like today, I’m pretty much half-dead most mornings and I don’t drink coffee.
10:00 am – After several meltdowns, Mary goes down for a morning nap. I contemplate exercising, but I don’t have enough energy to do more than 30 crunches before I give up and go do laundry, a never never never ending chore in this house. Here is the problem with this…I am overweight. I lost all my baby weight and then some when I was nursing and on anti-depressants, but then I stopped nursing a few months ago and the anti-depressants ran out and I didn’t go back to the doctor because it is too expensive and I’d rather feed my kids. All the weight came right back. Now I hate the way I look and the way my clothes fit (or rather, don’t fit), which just makes the depression worse. Between that and the lack of sleep, I never have enough energy to exercise the way I need to and my tired body craves crap food…which I usually end up giving it. It’s a recipe for body disaster that I desperately want to fix, but can’t seem to get motivated to do. I can comfort myself that at least I haven’t put on as much as my husband.
10:10 am – While I am trying to clean up some of the disaster area that is our living room after a morning of play, Drew yells “My penis hurts!” I tell him to try going potty and it might feel better. He does, and then I hear from the bathroom “it worked!” He then proceeds to run around bottomless until I catch him and put his underwear and pants back on.
10:30 – Finally give in and play Mario on the Wii with Drew. He’s been begging me all morning and the laundry is in progress, dishes are done and Mary is asleep, so I do it. I should probably do something more educational, but at least we are playing together.
11:30 am – Mary up from her nap. Cranky as all heck, like she wasn’t really ready to get up yet.
11:35 am – Run out to pick up something I claimed on Freecycle. I get a lot of stuff this way since we are on one income. I don’t tell Sean about much of this stuff because he’d yell at me for wasting gas. He happens to call me while I’m out though, so I have to explain what I’m doing. He doesn’t freak out this time, probably because we got into it last night about him spending so much time at work lately and it feeling like he was avoiding being at home.
12:20 pm – Stop at Noodles and Co to get lunch for me and the kids. I was surprised Sean agreed to let me go, but again, I think there was a guilt factor, of which I took shameless advantage. I LOOOOOVE Noodles and Co. I always get Pesto Cavatappi without mushrooms and a flatbread. It’s amazing and I only get it once every few months.
12:50 pm – Get home, drag everything in the house and feed the kids the Mac and Cheese I picked up at Noodles. Mary eats twice as much in Drew in half the time. I have to actually feed him myself in order to get him to eat enough.
1:05 pm – Despite only being up for an hour and a half, Mary is in full tired meltdown mode. I put her down with a bottle and kill time with Drew until she is asleep enough for me to go in and put him down. He dances around the living room, tearing stuff up while I try to cram down my food.
1:35 pm – Go to put Drew down and realize Mary is not asleep. She is laying quietly though. Hope they both go to sleep without a fight.
1:50 pm – No such luck. Mary is now screaming and poopy. I pick her up and change her and then go back to my room to rock her for a while.
2:10 pm – Lay a drowsy Mary back in her crib to fall asleep on her own. Drew is already zonked out. Decide to try to take a little nap.
2:55 pm – Tommy gets off the bus (unless it’s Wednesday, when he stays for Cub Scouts. Then I pick him up at 4 and motor across town to the Church for his CCD class at 4:20, which I also teach...I must be a glutton for punishment because some of the boys in my class are enough to make me contemplate murder – in a church no less!). The cat, which had been lying at my feet on the bed, goes running down the stairs to meet him. She is our guard kitty. I get Tommy started on his homework and give him instructions on what to do when he is done.
3:05 pm – I doze on and off for a while, interrupted by Tommy getting angry with the game he plays when his homework is done and by my own overactive brain, which reminds me of all the things I should be doing.
4:45 pm – Mary gets up. I am more tired now than before the nap; my eyes actually hurt. I try to figure out what to do for dinner while Tommy and Mary play. Drew is still asleep. I contemplate waking him up, but figure there is less fighting when he is not in the mix.
5:15 pm – Drew hollers down that he is awake. I change him out of his diaper and back into underwear. He goes to play with his siblings. I pull out my laundry from earlier and put in a new load. The screaming between brothers starts before I even make it back upstairs. I call Sean to find out when he will be coming home and get no answer on his work or cell phone.
5:55 pm – Sean finally returns my call to say he’s on the way home.
6:10 pm – Start dinner. Mary is freaking out and I realize she won’t be able to wait, so I go ahead and feed her. She shovels the food in her mouth as fast as she can, like she’s afraid I will change my mind and take it away.
6:40 pm – I see Sean pull in just as I am finishing dinner. I scramble to get the kids’ toys picked up before he comes in as he hates to see mess on the floor when he gets home.
6:44 pm – Sean comes in the door and it’s immediate chaos. For the kids, it’s like God himself descended from on high. Mary stands at the baby gate and screams for him. Drew is pulling at his legs and Tommy is bouncing around like he’s on crack. I disappear in the background as I get dinner on the table. Wish they ever got that excited to see me.
7:05 pm – Dinner is over and Sean and I work on Mary’s walking. We get her to walk back and forth between us, taking one or two steps at a time. Tommy keeps getting in the middle and distracting her. Sean keeps yelling at him to go sit down, which of course he ignores. We watch X Factor for a little while and promise to play a game with the boys once Mary goes to bed.
7:15 pm – The boys pile on Sean and start wrestling and rough housing. Mary pulls herself around the coffee table and gets into the rest of Tommy’s dinner that he left there while they are distracted. I have no idea how she is so tiny; she’s a bottomless pit.
7:50 pm – Tommy goes upstairs to do his nightly reading while we let the younger two wear themselves out playing. I download some songs that Sean has requested. Although he never seems to update his iPod, so I don’t really know why I am doing it. Mary starts to hit the wall, but Drew seems like he could be up until midnight and be fine. Where does he get this energy?
8:00 pm – I get all the kids into pajamas, brush their teeth and give them their assorted medicines and vitamins. I give Mary her bottle and put her to bed. Sean puts away the last few dinner dishes. The rest of us reassemble downstairs to play a family game before bed.
8:45 pm – Kids’ bedtime. Drew has a temper tantrum, screaming “I’m not tired!” I tell him that’s fine, he can be “not tired” in his bed. He whines to go sleep in my bed. I refuse. He eventually calms down, but wants me to put him to bed instead of Daddy. Sean bitches at me for putting a bowl in the sink instead of straight into the dishwasher. I ignore him and go turn the dryer on to make sure Tommy’s jeans are dry for the morning. For some reason, I can’t convince him that he can wear his jeans more than one day before putting them in the hamper. Sean and I watch TV; him on the couch while also messing around on his computer, me on the ottoman. He inevitably falls asleep on the couch. Pretty much a nightly occurrence.
Sometime between 10 and 11 pm – Bedtime. Sean starts snoring within five minutes. I lay there wide awake, trying to sleep. My brain won’t shut off. I keep thinking about things I need to do, or things I worry about, random thoughts floating around. I read until my brain relaxes enough to shut off. Zzzzz…
Lather, rinse, repeat. This was my life. Every day. It was frustrating, repetitive, and lacking in personal achievement, but I had something precious that I did not truly appreciate…time. Time with my babies, the most important things I could ever do.
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