Why I am soon going to be an alcoholic

Imagine that you are fresh faced young thing who is just married and setting up a home with your husband. Oh, alright maybe you’re a haggard 36 year old who is just married and setting up a home with your husband. And said home is his parents 5500 square feet home that is jammed to the gills with SHIT. Sure, some of it is pretty, and I’m sure has meaning to someone, and may even be valuable, but when it covers every available space, counter, table it is shit. And if that isn’t shit, the clothes from 1975, the wrapping paper from Christmas 1983 and the Tupperware from the early 1990s certainly are. You spend two freaking years pushing to get the house clean, which involved an estate sale, three 22-yard dumpsters (yes, three), a nervous breakdown or two and an exhausted husband. Then imagine, that just when you thought you had your house together, ready to have your babies and focus only on them you find out that for many reasons some good, some completely insane you had to move out of the house and your mother-in-law was going to move back in. You breathe, you curse your husband, fate, the world, your mother-in-law and the dog, but you get your shit together and do what needs to be done. Imagine you go to the townhouse, your mother-in-law has been living, which is owned by your husband and now needs to be put on the market. As you descend into the basement and start cleaning shit up you have an odd sense of deja-vu. But wait! Just because you have deja-vu doesn’t mean it isn’t happening again, people: She went dumpster diving and got the shit out! Dude, she went into the dumpster and took a Nordic Track Ski machine out and brought it into her basement. Don’t fucking tell me she isn’t completely insane. WWYD? Me? I would drink. A lot. And I did.

 

I’m Back

So, I decided that I miss my little anonymous corner of the world where I can navel gaze and talk about my boobs.  Time to get back to it. To catch you up in no particular order:

 

Two months?!

Has it seriously been two months since I posted. Wow! Time sure flies when you don’t have any! Let’s see what has been taking up all my time?

 

RBOC – Back To Work Edition

I’ve got a million half finished posts, and if I keep waiting for coherence it’s never going to happen so I will have to resort to Random Bullets of Crap.

 

The weight issue

I haven’t written much about weight, in truth because I really didn’t give a damn about it with everything else that’s been going on and frankly, I’m OK, no actually, I’m thrilled about that.  Anytime weight is not something I’m thinking about it’s a good thing – unless I’m not thinking of it in an escapist, “if I pretend I haven’t gain 2o lbs then maybe I haven’t gained them” way.

 

8 weeks today

LittleC slept through the night – well, I know I did, I still have to confirm that he did!  I put LittleC down in his bassinet at about 11 pm.   I think I heard him cry around midnight.  I had swaddled him in a receiving blanket and had I used either the miracle blanket or the swaddle me, I don’t think he would have woken up.  Anyway Mr. CC had the first shift and he got him down again.  I woke up feeling surprisingly rested trying to figure out what had woken me up – no alarms, no crying.  About 5 minutes later I hear crying and Mr.CC says ‘We have a hungry boy’.  I stumble into the nursery and start feeding him and realize it’s 4:30 am.  I slept for 5 hours!!  I have to quiz  Mr.CC to find out if LittleC was asleep the entire time, but I do know that he skipped his 1 am feed.  He’s done that a couple of times and it certainly makes life more bearable for me. And here I am at 6 am having a cup of tea while LittleC sleeps.

 

Silly worries

I’m doing something I swore I would never do – worrying about developmental milestones.  LittleC doesn’t really do the social smiles yet – once in a while he’ll do something that maybe, could be, if the light hits it just right, and you’re his desperate-to-believe-it’s-a-smile mother, be a smile.  There are definitely times his expression changes when he sees me and he seems to be trying to smile.  But a full smile, nope. And those goddamn emails I signed up for from babycenter.com and whattoexpect.com are driving me mad.  According to those emails, at four weeks he’s supposed to be giving social smiles.  And then I go onto the message boards on these sites and women are claiming that their two week old babies are smiling.

 

A little light

or really more sleep… Part of being a new mom and having no sleep is that it makes you unable to problem solve and everything seems like a huge deal.  I realized yesterday that for the last two weeks I’ve been doing the entire night shift, from 10pm to about 6 am.  I’m not really sure why I started this.

 

A dark place

So, I have to say this somewhere – I’m in a really tough and dark place right now.  The lack of sleep is really doing a number on me, and Mr. CC and I are not in a very good spot right now.  Without going into too much detail about private matters, he’s dropped the ball on certain things and that will put us in a very tough position in the short run.  We are going to be strapped financially and may be even incurring some debt, and we are (but mostly, I am) going to have deal with bullshit from his family that is very hurtful.

 

Sleep

…is now the holy grail in this family.  I’m beginning to get a little bit desperate.  LittleC slept from 10pm to 3pm a few (two? three? many? a life time?) nights ago and since then has not slept more than 1.5 hours at a stretch at night.  Before that he would go about 3 hours at a stretch at least.  Now he’ll sleep for a 3-4 hour stretch during the day if he’s being held by somebody, but other than that nada.  Nothing seems to work for very long.  I’m so confused about what I should be doing.