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Stumble out of bed due to 16 month old kicking, hitting and fussing to be changed and fed. Make my way to substandard coffee grinds of which there is only enough for 1 cup, not the usual two. 3 year old wakes up and decided to smash a leggo into the door instead of opening it like a normal human being. Recently grumpy husband sleeps.
Make 3 varieties of breakfast for the little ones, french toast a hit with the littlest and categorically refused by the oldest. Sugar laden "Grape Drink" is instead demanded by said 3 year old and emphatically refused by me.
Then on to "damn tooth brushing" time while I struggle to remember if I have eaten anything and decide that I sort of have. Make a mental note to eat more. Fight to brush two sets of little teeth. Wrangle cranky children into new clothes. Grumpy husband continues to sleep.
A glance outside reveals gray skies, more rain. More stir crazy boys desperate to run around, great. Make a cup of Yogi tea since I want to save the last cup of coffee for tomorrow (or do I?) Fortune on tea bag string says:
"Your destiny is to merge with infinity"
Decide that I don't like the sound of that, it sounds a little foreboding which gets me thinking about my dream last night of which the number 30 glowed brightly 3 times. It was such a vivid dream I separate the boys, putting each one in front of a different tv babysitter and look up the meaning of the number 30.
Perhaps no single number more fully embodies the essence of the rhythmic fluctuations which characterize human affairs than that of the number 30. Its significance to the realms of finance, economics, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and religion is integral to a full comprehension of each field, and almost mystical in its import....While the number 30 has many significations, its most fundamental significance is the fact that it is the number of the circle, or cycle. The circle, it will be noted, is the geometric expression of absolute completion and infinity.
In doing that just now I noticed for the first time it talks about infinity. Ok, that is a little weird. Mental note to ponder all of that later on, hopefully with nice cold beer in hand.
Anyway, morning chugs on. Husband wakes up, doesn't seem too grumpy and does me the great favor of taking 3 year old up to the preschool. Poor little brother is so sad he can't go but I ensure him this means he gets full reign of the toys in the house, especially his brother's prized Cozy Coupe of which we have only 1 (so far).
Check some e-mails, relax a bit and decide to make another cup of tea. Fortune this time says:
"Old age needs wisdom and grace"
Which at first makes me annoyed because although I feel so much older I am only 29. Then I reread it and decide it is an ok one. I can't resist one peek at the next bag in the box though:
"May this day bring you peace, tranquility and harmony."
Now that is a fortune I can look forward to. 10 am and I am hoping this ugly/strange morning has taken a turn for the better. Even if I have to base that assumption on a cup of tea and the fact that the house is half empty and no one is screaming at me.
Note to readers (if I have any) possible reflective post on dreams from last night to come later today...
I wrote a whole long blog on how terrible last night was sleep wise and how I was going to try and train Harlan to sleep in his own bed and blah-blah-blah. Luckily I had to do stuff midway through and by the time I came back to it (right now, 6 hours later) I decided I am done with complaining about not sleeping and really want to write about something that has been a huge part of our lives for the past few years, the first home we bought and also the first (and last!) home we had to give back to the bank a few months ago.
E and I met in the Bay Area. I grew up in Alameda myself, right across the bay from SF and right next to Oakland, he grew up in Florida but came to live in California. We had a lot of fun dating because of all the great shows and bars and things to do in the Bay but when we had Dustin and got married we decided we wanted to buy a home. That was in 2006 which was about the top of the market for California and all the homes we looked at in the Bay were in the 500 or 600, 000 range. We only qualified for 320,000 so we were priced out of the Bay. We joined a legion of people who bought homes in the Central Valley.
We managed to purchase our first home only 7 months after Dustin was born and only a year after we got married. I still will never know how E finagled it because he is self employed and we had to go for a no down, no document loan. Many, many phone calls back and forth between the lenders and him and we had our house in a tiny Central Valley town about an hour and a half from Oakland.
For the first year we rented it to a crazy old lady but we couldn't rent it to her for our mortgage because of the going rates in the area. The money spiral downward began. We packed up our stuff, moved to a 1 bedroom (in order to afford the gap between her rent and our mortgage) and made plans to move out to our home in a year. Then I got pregnant again. Thankfully that was right before we were planning on making the move to our home and the timing couldn't have been more perfect. I went on maternity leave hoping to come back via telecommuting. We brought my mom along to help with the mortgage (huge mistake I won't even go into) and we moved.
It was ok, for the first 5 months we enjoyed the little town. Then I lost my job and my husband couldn't get work. The housing market tanked. Somehow really crazy people kept getting dumped in the town. We now had 2 kids, no job and faced a $2000 a month mortgage on a home that was now appraised at $155,000 when we had paid $320,000 for it. We needed a fence, we were on a busy street and if anyone ever forgot to lock the door the kids could have been killed.
This is the whole point of the blog, trusting your intuition. E and I looked at our situation and said we had to get out of there. We had to leave and we had to do it now. There was no work, we wouldn't have been able to re-sell for years, probably about 10 to get what we paid for it. We had to go before the little bit of money we had ran out and we wouldn't have been able to afford to move at all.
We sold everything we didn't need. Our minivan went, tons of his audio and visual equipment, kids stuff, you name it. We took a trip up to the area we live in now, found a home we fell in love with, qualified to rent it and bolted. We had to leave stuff that wouldn't fit in the UHaul and that was really hard for me. Leaving at all was hard but we knew we had a tiny window because we were running through our money.
Today I was tired and slightly morose because of the terrible weather and I looked up our old home on a whim because we knew it had gone into foreclosure. I found it listed for $99,900. That works out to less than $700 a month in mortgage. They had pictures of the way it looked, the dead lawn, the dead roses and orange trees we had so lovingly planted when Harlan was born.
The crazy thing was losing this house had been something I knew we had to do but I hadn't come to peace with. When I saw that listing and how much the house was for sale, something clicked. I said to myself "Well, that is more in line with what that home is worth but you know what? I wouldn't even want to live there for that little." Even for $700 a month in mortgage, that wasn't the house for us and I am at peace with that.
I hope more than anything some great family buys it and it is meant for them since it wasn't meant for us. With all we have gone through in the last few years I am thankful for where we have ended up even though sometimes we didn't know how on earth we were going to make it. We did and we will.
I look forward to dreaming about our next home, the home that will undoubtedly be the home we will have forever. I don't know when that will come, in fact I don't know what tomorrow will bring at all for any aspect of our life but I am ok with that. I am happy right here right now, even without the sleeping.
I haven't posted a blog in a few weeks because for one week we didn't have propane and we were freezing cold, much too cold to be clever. The other week I was so sleep deprived I could barely hold my eyes open. Today is not much better, last night I woke with the familiar ache of some kind of flu or cold. Immediately I hoped that this whatever I have was the reason H hasn't been sleeping very well and not that he was about to get another cold/flu and we would be up for another month. Seriously, he was sick the entire month of January which is just crazy because we live in the mountains. There is one person for every 14 acres of land, yet as soon as we go grocery shopping (or when I went into the Bay Area to visit) he gets a terrible sickness. I really hate this season.
However, this post is not about colds or the flu but about what has been going through my head lately, weaning the little guy. When I had Dustin I went back to work when he was 3 months old and my supply wasn't that great to begin with. He drank more and more formula when I was at work, my milk supply got less and less and when he was about 7 or so months old I was trying to nurse him before bed and he just wasn't into it. I knew at that moment that he was done so I breathed a sigh, I wasn't even really that sad about it because with him it was such a natural evolution. At the time I knew I was getting off easy with that and I made a mental note to be thankful. That night I just held him close and said goodbye to nursing, and it was done.
H is such a different story. I found I really love nursing tea, the mixture of herbs has done so much for my anxiety, digestion and I love the way it tastes. In fact I know I will continue drinking it after H is weaned. This does not bode well for trying to get H off the booby though because my supply is so plentiful and the tea makes the milk taste so sweet. I didn't stop nursing him at a year old because we live where it snows and the nights are so cold and I thought it would be practical to be able to nurse him through that. Instead I made a decision to nurse him through the winter and then wean him.
How though? I love nursing a 16 month old because he is so much more appreciative of it. He gives me kisses on my chest, and sometimes he even says "Momma Yum" or "Yum Num" when he is done. If I take a bath with him he latches on himself and snuggles so close. Plus, it gives me a chance to take a break and hold him close since he is growing so fast so quickly. My natural inclination (being the type of Berkeley mom that I am) is to let him self wean. In fact, he already nurses a lot less during the day, maybe only twice a day unless he is sick.
It just tears me apart to think of stopping him forcefully now. The other day he fell on the concrete and busted his lip and although his mouth was filled with blood all he wanted to do was nurse. Those are the moments that keep me from starting the weaning process.
The times that make me want to do it is the middle of the night feedings. This is where I have read you are supposed to stop but that is the hardest one, mainly because I am so exhausted that nursing him is the easiest way to get him back to sleep, I don't know that I have the energy to keep him from nursing, make him a bottle and stay up rocking him to sleep in the chair. He is in a toddler bed so he just climbs out of his bed and into ours, latching on and heaving a comforted sigh. I don't mind it if it is once a night but the nights when he doesn't feel good and he is up 5 or 6 times are really hard, although I suppose he would be up then even if he didn't nurse.
I have seen there are teas you can drink that dry up your supply and that is an idea I have been knocking around in my head. Dustin stopped nursing when there wasn't enough milk so I may try that. He does seem to be making small steps and he is one of our boys in the fact that he is finding his independence now so there may be a day he just stops, who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Another thing that has been making me think is what I will do if we have another kid. I would really like to have another baby in the next few years. Ideally when Harlan is off in school as well as Dustin so I am not running around after so many little ones here. I haven't really decided yet if we will have more because frankly I am nervous about another c-section. I am worried about the lasting effects that will have on my body and wish I could VBAC but with two prior c-sections don't know if that would be a good idea or if it would invite a rupture. I also had a hard time with H's pregnancy so am not looking forward to being pregnant again.
I am also very worried about my lack of sleep in caring for another child. H has never slept through an uninterrupted night. When D started sleeping uninterrupted I got pregnant with H and I don't sleep a full night when I am pregnant, ever. That leaves me with a total of 3 years and 9 months without a good nights sleep. It is not ok, but when I am here all day with the boys it gets me by. Yet I could never go back to work, and I can't drive because I fall asleep so I am kind of handicapped. I really need to start getting sleep and catching back up, which means I really need to wean.
I digress though, I was talking about future kids. I always have to supplement nursing with formula because I don't pump and need to give bottles here and there to stay sane. I have thought a lot about this and it will be counter intuitive to the way I have raised H and D but if I have another baby I am only going to give them formula at night and nurse during the day. I know formula fed babes sleep longer at night because I have done both and as hard as it would be to not have that snuggly nursing time at night, I need my sleep to come first because I am a mommy of more than 1. I don't know why I started thinking that, but I have.
Anyway, H just nursed himself into lala land and D is watching cartoons. I think I am going to pop a beer and climb into bed hoping it will knock me out (I have the worst time taking naps despite the deprivation, so anoying). I hope D will fall asleep too, that would be perfect..
