I'm Back for a Minute

Apparently I've been on an uplanned blogging break, as evidenced by the minimal number of posts I've put up this month.  I'm definitely blaming it on the challenging three weeks of Brian working in the ICU plus the holidays plus all the snow we had earlier this month.  But mainly the ICU schedule - which meant two weeks where Brian was gone all the kids' waking hours plus one week in the middle with a noon-midnight schedule (which again left me alone with the kids in the evening, which is the hardest part of the day for me).  At the end of these days, I'm just so emotionally drained that the only thing I can manage to do is stare blankly at the TV or computer screen, and the thought of trying to put together coherent sentences for the blog is too overwhelming! Oh, and I forgot to mention that Brian was sick with "the plague" for the whole three weeks!!

Of course the difficulty of these weeks was magnified by Sarah's decision to initiate nap-time and bedtime revolts beginning on Day #1.  This meant that every time I was THIS CLOSE to having a bit of quiet, I ended up spending 20 minutes in and out of the kids' rooms asking her to stay in bed, please stop making noise, stop jumping in bed, stop kicking the wall, JUST GO TO SLEEP!

During nap-times I would finally pull Nathan out of the room (to his immense displeasure) for quiet time in the master bedroom, or I could circumvent the whole process by lying down on the loveseat until Sarah gave up and fell asleep.  And bedtime?  No good solution, which only made me more and more angry as the days went on. 

After I had completely lost my patience with Sarah's shenanigans, but slightly before I lost my sanity (somewhere in the middle of week 2) Brian and I brainstormed and implemented some new strategies to help.  Because, when I'm with the kids ALL DAY LONG, those minutes of Nathan's "quiet time" are immensely precious for me to regroup during the day, and by the time 7:00 rolls around I am grumpy with a short fuse.  So for nap time, Nathan's out of the room, no questions asked (almost always in the master).  And for bedtime the kids would go in their room around their normal bedtime, but then I would let them read or play quietly for 15 or 30 minutes or more before I turned out their light and they were expected to stay in their beds.  The bedtime quiet reading time was actually a huge hit.  After the first night, Nathan asked me to put them in their room early at nap-time and again at bedtime so they could read quietly for a long time!

Brian's been out of the ICU for a week now and things are getting back to normal.  For one, Sarah's falling asleep better at bedtimes - she must have been going through some weird stage where she needed less sleep for a week or two.  But tonight when Nathan had a screaming fit as we were getting ready for bed (thanks to almost no naps for him these days), I backslid and had to browse Pinterest for an hour and a half before I could come back and finish this post.

Whew, it really has been a pretty rough last few weeks.  But I will say that I am daydreaming about next year and the HOURS every week where I will be kid-free thanks to the amazing combo of doting grandparents and preschool.  I totally believe in "absence makes the heart grow fonder" with my kids. 

On a lighter note, the kids and I picked out helmets two weeks ago for them to wear with their scooters.  And they LOVE them!  Helmets are the perfect accessory for playing with playdough (which both kids are doing an extraordinary amount of lately)... 

...or triking inside.

And I finally remembered to get a picture of them on their scooters, though they decided to trade for some reason.

Brian and I hadn't really talked to the kids about needing helmets before they could ride their scooters outside, but the very next day after we bought them the kids wanted to ride their scooters to the library... and then to buy milk at the convenience store across the street... and then to the park.  And since then, they've scooted to church and again to the library.  Nathan started out with pretty good skills but now he's getting even better and faster.  For Sarah, she's still working on her coordination with scooting and steering, so she's being pulled/guided by an adult on our outings.  But yesterday on the way to the library Nathan was ahead of us (as usual) and Sarah told me "I catch up Na-fen" and put on a surprising burst of speed!  I was almost jogging to stay up with her! I'm thrilled that the kids love their scooters so much!

As for the blogging break, I'll probably continue posting less often for a while at least.  You've been warned.