Life has been interesting lately. Maybe a bit more challenging, although I'm thankful it's coming now rather than when Grace was born, so we've had 4 months to get used to this family of 5 lifestyle. All three of our children are going through very different things all at the same time, so Billy and I are trying to work with each of them individually on very different things...anyway, it's complicated.
Grace is waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning pretty much every day, and we think it's her natural sleep cycle ending which is causing her to wake up. Ellie did the same thing, but she would usually just jabber for a little while and then go back to sleep. Grace, being a pacifier sleeper, just cries until we give her the pacifier, then she goes back to sleep. Thankfully she's not awake for a long time and it's a quick fix, but this happens at least once an hour from 4-7 am (and sometimes every 30 minutes). So I'm running downstairs multiple times in the wee hours of the morning and it's getting exhausting. She did do better last night and slept from 11 pm-6 am, and then I gave her the pacifier and she slept until 7 which is when I normally feed her anyway. I'm so thankful for that, because we had a crazy day yesterday and I desperately needed the sleep. Grace is also not nursing very well (in my opinion, although the doctor said she's fine) so that's stressing me out a little. Maybe she's a super fast eater (Piper was, but she was also a pretty chubby baby so I didn't worry too much about it)...5 minutes just doesn't seem long enough to me. We are slowly trying out solids to see if maybe she's just ready for more food.
Piper had a BAD day yesterday. She threw a temper tantrum at dinner last night which isn't unusual for her, so we put her in time out in her bed like normal. Well, she totally lost it. Screaming at the top of her lungs, banging on the crib, typical crazy toddler stuff. Then she climbed out of her crib. Like it was no big deal. We put her back in, and she immediately did it again. And did it a third time. So now we're looking at converting her crib to a toddler bed. I'm so not looking forward to this, since she's not the best with boundaries, but we're afraid of her getting hurt so we'll just have to go for it. If you remember, Ellie didn't move out of her crib until she was almost 3 and a half. So putting a two year old in the toddler bed is just scary to me. She's also ripping her diaper off every now and then, which then results in a very wet bed in the morning. I really want to potty train her but I just don't think she's ready yet, and I don't want to repeat the mistakes I made with Ellie.
Ellie is giving the terrible threes one last hurrah before she turns four in August. She's dramatic and everything is a crisis in her world (not abnormal for little ones anyway, just super annoying sometimes). She's had some attitude problems, which include disobedience and disrespect toward certain adults (mainly me) and she's thrown a handful of pretty horrible tantrums. She had her very worst tantrum in Target last week....it was so bad that I left my cart full of stuff in the middle of the store. I've never done that in my whole life, but I had no choice that day. Or rather, I did have a choice, and I chose to follow through with the consequences for her instead of giving in to make her be quiet. It was bad....so bad. I shudder when I think about it.
So, honestly, this isn't a very uplifting post. I feel like I'm screwing up my kids left and right. Like I'm a crappy mom and I don't know what I'm doing. There are days when I feel like our children hate me and how in the world will they ever know I love them when I spend so much time correcting and disciplining? They are beautiful and precious and SO loved, but they are driving me crazy.
On top of our kid drama, our kitchen faucet broke last night. I had been washing dishes, and when I turned the faucet off I heard a pop and then water started gushing out under the sink at full blast. It very quickly flooded the cabinets, so I'm yelling for Billy (who was watching the kids at the time) and trying to pull everything out of the cabinets before it got completely soaked (which happened within seconds anyway). We both searched for the shut off valve under the sink and couldn't find it, so Billy runs down to the basement while I just watch water pouring onto the floor. The shut off valve for our sink was in the basement next to the water heater....so to turn the water off to the sink turns the water off to the whole house. So we had no water until about 11:00 this morning. Thankfully dinner was basically done by the time that all happened last night and we had plenty of stuff to drink in the refrigerator. But man it created a huge mess in the basement. Our whole laundry room below was flooded and Billy had to use the shop vac to get rid of most of the water, then mopped and mopped and mopped. It still took overnight with fans blowing to dry everything out because of the humidity. Our landlord replaced the faucet this morning and it's actually much nicer than the one we had, so that's a perk. After having a cup of coffee and a shower I started feeling much better. Clean running water is such a gift.
I don't know, y'all. Life is just kinda trying right now. God is stretching us in many ways, not even considering the struggles we're facing with our children. Every time we get our finances under control something else hits us. Every time we all get well, something happens like allergies, vomiting, baby doesn't poop for 12 days, or cutting a chunk out of my hand with a broken glass (all have happened within the last week). I'm just tired and discouraged. I'm blessed and so thankful for this life, but it's just hard today. Forgive me for being such a downer? I just needed a place to get it all out. This is proof that I don't have it together (I don't think anyone thinks that anyway, but it needed to be said haha).
