Tag: toddler sleep

Oregon Trails (Part Three)

On By VeeIn Family, Parenting13 Comments

Okay guys, as painful as it is, we’ve gotta keep moving through this Oregon saga.  Somehow, there is still a lot more to cover! Check back on Day 1 and Day 2 to catch up if you missed those.

So if you read yesterday’s post, you know that Ell-Bell got sick at the end of Saturday, and lots of vomit ensued.  I was really hoping it was just a two-vomit bug (is that a thing?).  Read ahead to find out if my hopes were in vain.

Day 3: Sunday, May 13 (Mother’s Day)

Ah yes, Mother’s Day.  A complicated and emotional day for so many.  And for everyone else, a day of breakfast in bed, mimosas, trips to the spa, and posting angelic pictures of your children on Facebook.

Well, let’s get real.  My Mother’s Day was not of the breakfast-in-bed variety.  Instead, it began with Ell-Bell waking up at 3:30 in the morning.  Again.  Fuuuuck.  There was lots of crying, but blessedly, she eventually went back to sleep and snoozed on until 5:00 a.m.  Of course, her 5:00 a.m. waking was punctuated by her throwing up all over herself, the bed, and yours truly.

“Cool,” I thought to myself.  “Well maybe that time was the last time.”

Twenty minutes later, she threw up again.  Dang it!  So it was going to be that kind of day! Perhaps at this point, we should just switch to bullet points, because I’m exhausted just thinking about what happened next.

  • On our way over to a Mother’s Day breakfast at my sister’s house, we stopped in at the grocery store to pick up some bacon.  K-Man had a screaming meltdown on the floor as soon as we walked in, because I refused to carry him.  I eventually had to bribe him with gummy bears so that I could move on with my life.
  • In the middle of the Mother’s Day breakfast at my sister’s, Ell-Bell let out another warning burp.  I raced her to the bathroom, where an impressive 30% of her vomit made it into the toilet.  This particular vomit was filled with milk curds and smushed up raspberries (you’re welcome).  So yeah, my breakfast was ruined.  Luckily, my sister came to the rescue to help me clean up, and she even lent me a shirt to wear for the rest of the day.
  • Next we drove about 45 minutes away to a waterfall for a nice picnic lunch.  About 5 minutes into the drive, Ell-Bell threw up all over herself and the borrowed car seat again.  I had to pull over and perform another clean up.  Baby wipes to the rescue once more!
  • While we were playing in the little lake by the waterfall, K-Man announced that he had to pee.  I was like, “cool, I’ll take you to the bathroom” and he was like, “nah, I’m just gonna pee in my shorts right here.”  I only had sweatpants for him to change in to, but it was a hot sunny day and he was already playing in a bunch of water.  So yeah, I’m that mom who let her son keep running around with pee all over his shorts.
  • At some point, K-Man ran off to a playground about 50 yards away and, under my not-very-careful supervision, decided to shed his shorts.  I was quite horrified to discover, when I was finally paying more attention, that my son was running around the packed playground in his undies.  He refused to put them back on, and I was not about to pin my son to the ground and force his shorts on in front of 50 happy people.
  • When we all decided it was time to go, everyone headed back to their respective cars.  Except I was left behind with the task of retrieving K-Man from the playground.  And that little buttface would. NOT. COME.  I begged.  I pleaded.  I bartered.  I pretended to leave without him.  Nope.  Finally, I swallowed my pride and army crawled through a damned play tunnel with my sick baby strapped to my chest so I could get within arm’s reach of that little turd.  I grabbed him like a maniac, forced him down the slide with me, and started dragging him away from the playground.  Because K-Man was fighting back and we were making the most horrid scene, I finally just picked him up and carried both kids back to the car.  I reunited with my family and they were all like, “what took you so long?”
  • On the drive back to our hotel, I heard some suspicious noises from Ell-Bell and pulled off the rural highway to investigate.  She wasn’t vomiting, miracle of miracles!  But then K-Man looked at me and said, “I’m just gonna poop in the driveway right there, I’m not gonna poop in my seat.”  Um, what?  I urgently asked if he needed to poop, and he repeated his desire to poop in the “driveway.”  I asked him to hold on and promised we would find him a potty, but then he said very casually, “I’m just pooping right now.  A lot is coming out.”  Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME? So I got back out of the car, pulled K-Man out of his seat, and started the clean up process.  And I’m sorry for the TMI, but it was NOT a healthy poop.  I used another mountain of baby wipes to clean poop out of the borrowed car seat, and then made my poor son stand pantsless on the side of the road while I de-pooped him.  You’re welcome for the show, rural Oregon!
  • After some rest at the hotel, I packed the kids back in the car to head out for dinner with my family.  En route to the dinner, I caught a yellow light that made me hit the brakes a little harder than usual.  And as I did, something flew from the backseat and bumped heavily into the back of my seat.  What on earth? I turned around quickly, completely baffled as to what I had left loose back there.  And as I turned, I saw … my son’s sweet little hand wrapped around my seat.  He was on the floor, looking up at me with shock all over his face.  Oh my god! I had forgotten to buckle him in to his seat!  And he wasn’t hurt, at all, but something seriously bad could have happened!  Holy shit did I feel like the worst mom in the history of everything ever.
  • Dinner, at my sister’s urging, was at a fancy Thai restaurant.  A place with no kids’ menu, and not many kid guests.  I ordered my kids $20 worth of food that I knew they wouldn’t touch, and then tried to play zone defense.  As predicted, when the food arrived, K-Man had no interest.  And he wouldn’t stay in his damned seat; he was crawling all over the restaurant at this point.  Meanwhile, Ell-Bell was also antsy and losing her mind.  Her crying escalated, and other guests started to stare.  I could feel my own family getting tense.  Finally, I’d had it.  Three days of mental and physical exhaustion, three days of trying to keep it together through catastrophe after catastrophe, and I was just done.  I picked up Ell-Bell, grabbed K-Man’s hand, and told my mom that I was just going to wait outside.  I left her my credit card to cover my meal, and then as soon as my face hit fresh air I started to cry.  Embarassing!  At one point, my sister came out and tried to take my place so I could go back in and enjoy my meal, but there was no way I wanted to go back in to that restaurant.
  • Back at the hotel, it took another hour and a half to get my unexplainably hyper kids to fall asleep.  After they eventually passed out, I sat in the dark and finally indulged in my very cold Drunken Noodle dinner.

So yeah, that was my Mother’s Day.  At this point, I was beginning to realize that this was no ordinary trip with two small kids.  There was clearly some cosmic design to crush my soul and discourage me from ever leaving the house again.  And it was working.  On the bright side, the trip was more than halfway over.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a replay of my 4th day in hell.

Until next time,

Vee

 

 

Oregon Trails (Part One)

On By VeeIn Family, Parenting14 Comments

A few days ago, I returned from my dreaded trip to Oregon.  You know, the one where I had to solo-parent my way through cross-country travel with two tenacious toddlers in tow.

If you read my last post, then you know I spent a lot of time anxiety-ing over all of the things that could go wrong.  I had hoped that if I planned for the worst, there would be no surprises.  I hate surprises.

So how did it go? Let’s just say that things went repeatedly and horrifyingly wrong at every turn (with, of course, a few scattered saving graces).  So wrong, in fact, that I couldn’t possibly cover it all in one post.  So let’s just dip our toes in, shall we?

Day 1:  Friday, May 11

The first day of our journey was probably the easiest.  At this point, it was not yet undeniably apparent that the whole trip was, in fact, straight-up cursed.

So things started out with a 6 a.m. flight out of our dinky airport here in Upstate NY.  We were to change planes in Newark and then take a 6-hour flight to Portland.

Because I didn’t want to wake the kids up any earlier than necessary, I cut things a little close at our local airport.  I was horrified to find a long line at check-in, and had to be one of THOSE PEOPLE who gets special treatment and cuts the line because they are about to miss their flight.  I always roll my eyes at THOSE PEOPLE because come on, get your life together.

Getting through the security line was a bit bumpy.  I was treated like a terrorist because I forgot to take my shoes off.  I was also treated like a terrorist because I didn’t take my iPad out of my backpack and put it in a separate bin (apparently I’m supposed to intuit brand new security rules).  I was ALSO treated like a terrorist because one of the milk bottles I brought was not see-through.  So finally, after all of the terrorist treatment, I had to sprint with the kids to our flight.  Gotta love that feeling when you run up to an empty gate and see “Final Boarding” flashing on the screen.  Cue heart pounding.

But then, our flight to Newark was kind of a dream come true.  K-Man was adorably narrating everything that happened out the window.  “Are we driving? Is that a plane over there? Are we going faster? Are we gonna take off? Are we flying? Is that the ground?”  I can’t say for sure that the other passengers thought his loud and persistent questions were adorable at 6 a.m., but obviously they did, right?

The layover was uneventful.  Other than the entire mile we had to walk to our connecting gate.  And the trip to the restroom to let K-Man have a pee, wherein Ell-Bell screamed her head off because she didn’t want to be in her carrier.  And the second trip to the restroom, five minutes later, to let K-Man have a poop, wherein Ell-Bell screamed her head off again.

The six hour flight to Portland — the one that gave me nightmares just anticipating — that was actually  pretty good too.  I let the kids watch as much TV on their tablets as they wanted.  I mean, I was a little annoyed that I purchased and downloaded the entire 4th season of Paw Patrol and they both suddenly decided that they have no interest in Paw Patrol.  But whatevs.

And then we landed in Portland and I felt this overwhelming relief wash over me.  We did it, the hard part was over! My sister and mom were there are the airport to pick us up, so I was finally ready to let my guard down and enjoy my trip.

(Let me just say here that my sister was amazingly awesome and lent me her extra car, already installed with two borrowed car seats from her local mom friends.  So that’s like an entire travel headache that I never once had to worry about. Amazingly awesome.)

We casually hung out at my sister’s for a while, and my heart swelled watching K-Man play with his two cousins.

After a bit, my mom announced she was going to go home and give her dog a little attention.  We promised to text each other and figure out dinner plans, and when I requested an “early dinner” for my kids’ sake she nodded in agreement.

After a little more time at my sister’s, I took the kids to our hotel.  I had booked a place that was a good 20 minutes away from everything because it had a suite option with two separate rooms — a sitting area and a bedroom with a wall in between.  Anyone who travels with kids knows that this convenience is pretty clutch, because those little turds will NOT go to sleep if you’re sitting there hanging in the same room as them.

So we check in, I drag my kids and luggage up to our room, and I enter to find … two beds and a sofa, with no wall between.  I was sure there was some mix up, so I called down to the front desk and told them that I had booked a room with a separated sitting area.  And then the clerk told me that I couldn’t possibly have booked that kind of room, because they didn’t have that kind of room at the hotel.

WTF? After looking back at my reservation I realized that the room description was just vague enough that it could be read either way.  So I guess I’m just a big dumbass.

After choking back a minor panic attack in response to the room situation, I decided to pull out all of our devices and get hooked up to the wi-fi.  I am, after all, a responsible data plan user (at Hubby’s repeated urging).

But the wifi, yeah, it didn’t work.  Not even a little bit.  After multiple calls down to the front desk, and repeated attempts over the following days, I never once got the internet to connect.  Which was kind of a nightmare.   Because K-Man lives and breathes those stupid YouTube kids videos.  And WTF was I supposed to do with myself after the kids went to sleep?  I had so much Facebook to scroll, and so much Jane the Virgin to watch! (Needless to say, we ran out of our data for the month before the trip was over.)

So things weren’t going so great at the hotel.  As dinner time approached, my sister and I started texting with my mom about plans.  Except my mom wasn’t responding.  For a really long time.  5:45 p.m. rolled around and my mom still was MIA.  WTF? We had talked about an early dinner, what did she think that meant?

Turns out she and her husband had taken their dog to the dog park and forgot to bring their phones along.  Old people, amiright?

My sister and I finally just made plans to meet somewhere at 6:15 p.m., hoping my mom would catch up with us when she figured her life out.  (She did figure her life out, and showed up only a few minutes late).

Meanwhile, it was 9:15 p.m. body time for my kids, after they had woken up super early for the day.  So needless to say they were completely toasted, and dinner was not so easy. K-Man was running around the entire restaurant, army-crawling up to strangers’ tables, trying to sprint out the door into traffic, asking to go pee and then refusing once we got to the bathroom.   Towards the end of the meal, Ell-Bell just sort of gave up trying.  She started wailing, and did not stop until well after we had left the restaurant.  I’m not usually one to sweat it when my kids make a scene in public, but I could tell that my mom and her husband were pretty uncomfortable with it, which made me uncomfortable.

Finally, finally, we said our goodbyes, and I drove back to the hotel.  By this time it was 8 p.m. local time, 11 p.m. body time, and I was SURE my kids would go right to sleep.  Because they had been up for freaking 18 hours.  But alas, the very-slowly setting sun was blasting through an uncorrectable gap in the blackout curtains and it was basically daylight in our room.  And my kids were overtired and wired.  And obviously they didn’t want to go to sleep with me sitting right there in the same damned room as them, trying not to make eye contact.  Ugh!

After repeated attempts (and me choking back some exhausted sobs), the kids finally passed out at 9:30 p.m. local time, 12:30 a.m. body time.

I stayed up for about 15 minutes longer, and then I also hit the hay.  “At least they will sleep in a little bit tomorrow morning,” I murmured happily to myself as I drifted off.

What a long-assed day.  And yeah, that was the “good” day.  Stay tuned tomorrow, when the saga continues.

Until next time,

Vee

 

 

 

Good Friday (Grateful Friday)

On By VeeIn Family, Marriage, Parenting, Upstate New YorkLeave a comment

I’ve been super grouchy lately.  It could have something to do with the fact that we are still very much in the endless throes of winter here in Upstate NY — is it too much to ask for the thermometer to break 40F on Easter Sunday?  It could also have something to do with the fact that I got trolled hard in a mommy group on Facebook yesterday — why are virtual peeps so mean?  Or it could have everything to do with the fact that, after four years of sweet bliss, I am finally suffering from the girl flu again.  (But can I really complain about a four-year break?  Prolly not.  Thank you, back-to-back pregnancies and breastfeeding gods).

Regardless of my grump, today is Good Friday.  Now, I’m no religious scholar, but I’m pretty sure the “good” in Good Friday doesn’t have to do with good feels (because I googled it).  But, hey, I can take some creative liberties.  So, in the spirit of good-ness, and in an effort to boost my crappy mood, here are 5 things that I’m grateful for today:

  1. Easter is upon us.  Which means Easter candy is upon us.  Now, I told Hubby the same thing I tell him every year: all I want is a freaking peanut-butter-filled chocolate bunny.  Every year he forgets.  Every year I let it go, because come on, I have 32-year-old metabolism.  But this year … this year I was cleaning out some kitchen cabinets and stumbled upon it.  A peanut-butter-filled chocolate bunny that he must have purchased behind my back, and is hopefully saving to give to me on Easter morning.  I know it’s only March, so is it too early to award him Hubby of the Year?  (Please, for both our sakes, let the bunny actually be for me.)
  2. Zzzzzzz.  Because I have no regard for my well-being, I am going to go ahead and disrespect the sleep gods here:  Ever since last week’s bitch fest about Ell-Bell’s atrocious sleep habits, baby girl has been sleeping much better at night.  I mean you guys, last night honeyboo didn’t even wake up for the first time until 5:30 in the morning! What? Of course she’s just trolling me, lulling me into a false sense of security so that I fall that much harder when she wakes up 5 times tonight.  But still, I’ll take a few nights in a row of good sleep!
  3. Things are about to get romantical.  The in-laws are coming for a visit next week.  Ugh, I know, there’s nothing romantic about that.  But of course, the silver lining is that they provide free and relatively safe-ish child care, which means Hubby and I are about to go on our first date in four months!  I am way excited, and I don’t know if I’ve ever spent so much mental energy planning a 3-4 hour block of time in my life.  I’m thinking sushi and a movie, but my god, the possibilities are endless!  (Side note: can somebody teach me how to hire a real babysitter?  I’m guessing it would be a good thing to not wait four months between dates).
  4. I’m basically an Olympian.  Okay, I’m not, at all.  I am actually that mushy-armed person at the gym who only ever runs on the treadmill — the one who everyone looks at and says, “girlfriend, you need to get off that treadmill and do some actual push-ups.”  But hey, I’ve been back to running pretty consistently for the better part of a year now and I am feeling really good about it.  I’m getting faster, I’m running longer, and gosh darnit, I might even get brave enough to run outside one of these days.  I just need a babysitter real quick.
  5. I get to spectate all the sports.  I don’t care what you say, I like to watch golf on TV, ok?  It’s relaxing.  For me, April (snow) showers mean only one thing:  it’s time to watch some golf hotties navigate the Augusta greens at the Masters.  Of course, my in-laws will be in town during coverage because OF COURSE THEY HAVE TO COME during the Masters basically EVERY SINGLE YEAR.  But whatever.  I’m also giddy for NBA playoffs and more golf and tennis tourneys on the horizon, for those keeping track.  (Holler at me if you are also secretly in love with at least half of the men’s tennis field, we might have to be besties).

So there you have it.  What’s on your grateful list this Good Friday?  Wishing everyone a happy passover, Easter, or whatever else you may be celebrating in the next few days.

Until next time,

Vee

 

 

Sweet Dreams ’til Sunbeams Find You . . . or Your Daughter Wakes You Up

On By VeeIn Family, Parenting3 Comments

You know that moment you’ve been looking forward to since you first woke up in the morning?  That moment when you finally crawl into bed and relax under your covers after a long day?  When your head hits the pillow and you prepare to surrender yourself to sweet sleepy bliss?  When every muscle in your body starts to give in, and your breathing gets deeper, deeper, and your eyelids get heavier, heavier . . .

Yeah.  That’s the exact moment that my daughter Ell-Bell wakes up screaming.  Every. single. night.  And it doesn’t even matter what time I go to bed.  She manages to pull it off whether it’s 10 p.m., midnight, or anywhere in between.  What on Earth did I ever do to her?

Am I embarrassed that my 15-month-old is still not sleeping through the night?  You betcha.  Do I feel guilty that I’m still nursing that sweet little demon back to sleep because it’s all I can do?  100%.  Is the end in sight?  God I hope so.

I remember with K-Man, we were sheepishly admitting to the pediatrician that he was still waking up in the night at his 18-month check-up.  But then a few weeks later, he miraculously started sleeping through.  And it was everything.  (Well, it was everything for four months, and then we had another baby.  That was dumb.)

So maybe my life is about to get a whole lot better?  I can do this for three more months, right?

Until next time,

Vee