Exhibit A:
The babies had no afternoon nap yesterday, went to bed at 7:45 PM, then woke back up at 8:15 PM. Claire went back down at 11:30, while Katherine fought until 1 AM. She then woke back up screaming at 5 AM, and by the time I got upstairs to get her, she'd woken Claire up too. Neither of them really went back to sleep, despite our efforts to juggle them in and out of our bed.
Bedtimes have been getting worse and worse lately, and I'm about to the point where I'm tempted to do cry-it-out. They (usually, last night excepted) stay asleep once they've gone down, but I cannot get them to go down in the first place until 10 or 11 at night. They won't go to sleep by themselves any more but insist on holding and rocking and nursing, pop awake when you try to put them down, and wake the other baby with screaming. I've ascribed it to the 9-month sleep regression and to teething, but with no teeth appearing and going on six weeks of bad bedtimes, I'm getting increasingly frustrated.
Exhibit B:
Katherine's been sick with some unspecified viral fever thing, and during all her comfort nursing, she managed to give me yet another blister. She chewed me up pretty thoroughly last night during the seven hours I spent trying to get her back to sleep, and by the end of the evening, I was starting to develop a plugged duct. Today, it's like I stuck a sack of heated marbles under my skin, and the only reason I'm not officially calling it mastitis is because I haven't gotten a fever yet. I'm sure it's probably coming, though.
Exhibit C:
Our house is now on the market, and I did some aggressive yardwork last week to get it all ready. Somewhere in the process of trimming the wax myrtles, digging up a mostly-dead juniper, and tearing down a cat briar infestation, I also managed to get into poison ivy/oak/sumac. It's all over my hands, arms, torso, and legs, even a bit on my neck and jaw. I finally broke down yesterday and started using steroid cream, which is helping, but it's been a miserably itchy ten days or so.
Exhibit D:
I'm getting the medical runaround with regards to my knee. Dr. Busybusy, my orthopedic surgeon, made me wait three hours last time to see him, and told me to do physical therapy. When the physical therapist did some strength testing and said that PT wouldn't help my knee stability, Dr. Busybusy said to go do it anyway. I'd do it if I thought it would help, but when the PT tells me it will only be a waste of time and money, I'm inclined to believe her. I've been doing some strengthening exercises on my own at home, but I can't tell that they're helping any.
My followup with Dr. Busybusy isn't until July 30, when I would doubtless wait another three hours to argue with him about the usefulness of PT. Since each appointment gets me approximately 3.5 minutes of his time, I think it'll take another two or three appointments to come to any useful decision. So I've decided to switch to another practice instead, but it seems to require an act of Congress to get my medical records sent over to the other practice, which won't see me without them because of how recently I've had surgery.
Meanwhile, the knee is getting worse by the day. It's going wonky on me (giving out or hyperextending) at least once a day, and I've taken several spills. Something got twisted funny in it yesterday, and I couldn't straighten it for a couple hours, until I finally moved it just so and whatever-it-was settled back into place. I worry that I'm going to fall on the stairs while carrying a baby; I've done it without carrying a baby, and had a close call or two with a baby. I worry that I'm going to break an arm or hurt something other than my knee, in one of those falls.
And this is shameful to admit, but the times that I have fallen, I've caught myself hoping that the ligament will just go ahead and tear the rest of the way. It's not like it's working anyway, and if it's a complete tear, we can stop dicking around about whether to reconstruct it. I haven't had a functional knee for a year at this point, and I am getting so very tired of it.
3 comments:
I'm so sorry. Sounds more like a bad week! I remember I used to envy you because your girls slept so well but now I think we're better off because we've never had it good so we have nothing to miss. Can't really give you any sleep advice because it's so rough at our house. Only thing is, have you tried stomach sleeping yet? That made a world of difference at our house for the put downs especially.
Hope things improve soon. Can you believe our babes are 10 months old?
Oh, that does sound rough. I hope that the babies start sleeping better soon (Ant was waking at 4:30 for three or four weeks, but seems to have settled back into the much more respectable hour of 6am these days... I did do a little bit of CIO, I would go to him if he was really screaming HARD, but anything other than the most heart-rending cries I would leave him alone for, and it did seem to help.) I feel for you on the nursing too, I hope that the mastisits goes away quickly (if that's what it ends up being).
Yikes! It always seems like everything goes wrong at once. Oliver sleeps the same way - going down around 10 or 11 and waking a few times a night. Hopefully they'll all grow out of it soon!!
Sorry its' late but happy 10 month birthday, girls!
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