Joy

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Paige-d All Night Long

Well, I haven't written much about Paige since she has been born.   That is because she is extremely non-photogenic so I have not been inclined to post pictures.  Let's just say she is taking her time to get out of those awkward newborn weeks.  She has gotten a lot better the past few days.  Not so pimply and crusty.

Paige has been a little bit of a handful.  Way more so than I ever dreamed.  Everyone always says that the third child just falls into place and blends into the family, that they are the easiest, so on and so forth.  Not so with this one - at least not yet.  You see, Paige just now started sleeping at night.  Not through the night, just at night.  You'd think I'd know how to adjust a baby's schedule by now, I have done it twice before, quickly and successfully but for some reason Paige was resistant to all my techniques.  We desperately tried the babywise method of feed, awake, sleep on a 3 hour cycle but this blob had no awake time so it was eat, sleep, eat, sleep, all day and when she wants to sleep, she's going to sleep, cold baths wouldn't even wake her for more than a few seconds.  Typically around 11pm she decided it was her awake time that lasts for a couple hours followed by a few hours of restless sleep.  Josh and I were up and down every hour to half hour with her all night every night until yesterday.   This week I decided she was old enough to let her just scream it out.  I said look punk, you are tired, (she had been awake for like 5 hours straight) you are fed, you are clean, you are safe and comfortable, there is no reason for this nonsense, and I let her scream.  She screamed for maybe 12 minutes and then fell asleep for 4 glorious hours.  She does a little better each night so we are glad for that.

Now that she is sleeping better we are all happier and I am hoping she stops gaining weight at such an alarming rate. (many nights she nursed for 8 hours straight because I was so tired and it kept her quiet)   I mean, look at her!  She is FAT.   
I ordinarily wouldn't think anything of it but the other two were so tiny for the first 3 years of their lives, I am concerned for her.  She is 5 weeks old and weighs over 11 lbs. 

Adding a third child to our family has been harder than I thought it would be.  I feel ridiculous saying this.  Obviously, there are plenty of people out there who have 3,4,7, 19 or more children and manage just fine.  I am just trying to find my groove I guess.

 Joy always asks to hold her but doesn't like it when Paige squirms or cries.
 
This week, I ran a bunch of errands with the girls all by myself (usually I do my shopping with my mom)  They were so great and well behaved, I felt so proud. We went to 5 stores, and were out for over 3 hours. The very last store we went to was Goodwill, just for fun.  I found a ton of great things, mostly books and little girl clothes.  All was well until we started to walk to the front to pay.  Then Paige decided it was screaming time.  (She had eaten not too long ago and had just woken up so there was no reason for it but to scream).  So I got her out of her carseat and tried to calm her down, she spat her pacifier on the floor and then I stepped on it.  I tried to push the cart while holding her.  Joy loves to push the cart and kept pushing it into things while I was trying to steer with one hand.  I told her to stop but then decided it was better than having her running loose while we were trying to get to the front.  I don't know what Claire was doing - not helping though.  We get to the front and of course there were 3 people in front of us.  I thought of just abandoning our cart and going home but there were a few things in there that were too good to leave behind so we stayed in line.  Claire and Joy started annoying each other and whining, Joy was on the floor.  The guy behind me was not amused by the ear splitting screams coming from Paige, Claire was pushing the cart into the lady in front of us.  I gave up telling the girls to stop because they couldn't hear me over Paige anyway. Joy started crying for some reason.   We finally get to the checker and she decides to be chatty, I was trying my best to answer her between screams but then I heard Joy shouting "Mommy!" loudly and repeatedly, so I turned around to see her hold shorts and she said "potty."  In a serious tone.  At that point I was laughing because the whole situation was such a mess.  I calmly told Joy to please wait til we got to the car, finished paying and left.  I am sure there were probably cheers from the people behind us in line after we finally got out the door.  Most of them passed us up in the parking lot as we walked to the car, went potty, loaded up, got drinks handed out and cried and complained.  As soon as we got home, everyone took a nap.  That day, I learned to stop while you are ahead...
and that nap time fixes everything. 

1 comment:

  1. There will be days like this, there will be days like this my mama says... oh, but you just don't understand until you live it! I've learned those same things too. I hope you adjust to your 3rd soon, I feel like I'm just starting to because we spent the first 8 months of Mylie's life sick! Don't worry about her weight, Logan is so much bigger than either of the other two were are are! Praying for your sleep, I need to let Mylie cry her first night feeding out, it's now a bad habit! And yes, nap time does fix everything. :)

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