Category: TSM

Ever since my first son was born… Scratch that. Ever since I became pregnant with my first son, sleep has been something that has eluded me. While I was pregnant, I couldn’t sleep for lack of a comfortable position and aggressive nasal congestion. When my first guy was born, we spent a lot of time up at night with him eating and me watching baseball. I’m pretty sure I saw every inning of the Red Sox west coast swing in 2018.

Eventually, we got him on a pretty good sleep schedule. Even though he would wake up in the middle of the night and call, “Mama! Where are you?” until I went and got him. All he wanted was to cuddle, and he’d go right back to sleep. 🤗

With my second guy, sleep eluded me again because I was as big as the mansion Derek Jeter rented to Tom and Giselle when they first moved to Florida. He was better at sleeping through the night, though. The first and only night we spent in the hospital — because COVID — he slept through the night. I popped up and checked him multiple times to ensure he was okay because he hadn’t woken me up. He was great sleeping in the bassinet next to our bed for the first six months. When we eventually moved him into the crib, falling asleep took playing “Tennessee Whiskey” by Chris Stapleton on repeat before he would drift off. Whenever that song comes on, he says, “You singin’ Whiskey, Mama.” 🥰

Even with all the sleep training and regression articles, I’m still never prepared for those periods. Just when I’ve gotten used to them sleeping mostly through the night, they come storming in, demanding that I wake up and play. It’s mostly my big guy. His sleep regressions turn him into a high-energy Chatty Cathy. As I write this, I struggle to keep my eyes open from last night’s foray into midnight chats about dinosaurs.

I feel like a zombie walking through the day as I play with my younger son. All I can think about is sleep. What would it be like to get a full eight hours one day? Is brain fog a permanent condition of motherhood, or is it just a temporary state that will last until my kids decide that they will stay in their bed the whole night, and discussing dinosaur attacks isn’t a pressing matter that needs to be discussed at 2AM?

I never intended to stop posting on this site for almost three years. 😬 In November 2019, I was pregnant with my second son and in the throws of chasing a very active toddler. Then the holidays. Then we switched daycares to a place that had hours better suited to working parents. Then the world came to a screeching halt. Suddenly, I was seven months pregnant, home alone with a toddler, as my husband is an essential worker. Blogging was the furthest thing from my mind.

In the last three years, like most people around the world, I worked from home. Luckily, our daycare reopened. Then, we had to find a new daycare. The daycare I was once so grateful for dismissed my oldest son as we were waiting for our appointment with a neurodevelopmental doctor to have an ASD assessment done. Here I am, three years later, now with two very active toddlers, and life is very different.

After calling 30+ daycares, we found a great one where he was happy again. After multiple assessments, he was put on the low end of the ASD spectrum and had to transition again to a new place. All this happened while my infant was happily spitting and growing like a weed.

For a while, we were in a good groove. I went into the city a few days a week for work but was mostly home. Everyone was where they needed to be when they needed to be there. Then summer vacation hit, and my company returned to the office full-time. Like most working moms in the last couple of years, there was only one choice. With no full-time care for my oldest son and daycare not returning to a full-day, pre-pandemic schedule, work was a thing of the past.

Again, we slipped into a new normal of me being home full-time for my family. The summer was hot and long. We did a solid job of keeping the kids entertained. I took my oldest to the movies for the first time — we saw Lightyear, which was very good despite all the weird press — and spent lots of time at the indoor trampoline park near our house. What better way to stay cool and burn energy?

We dodged COVID like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix for two and a half years until August, when all four of us went down. This was after my husband worked every day in a hospital, putting an addition on our house with workers on and off our property for six months at THE BEGINNING of the pandemic, and several close encounters on my end when I was going into the office. We were lucky to have only mild symptoms, and I’m grateful to my older brother for dropping off ibuprofen for the boys to help fight their fevers.

By the grace of all that is good and powerful in the world, we survived the summer, and everyone went back to school and daycare. I was finally going to have time to focus on all the projects I wanted to get done in the house. Then the bottom dropped out…again.

We received notice from our daycare, which was the best of the three we sent the boys to, that they were closing their doors. Like many locally owned and some national chains around here, they were feeling the post-pandemic fallout hard. While they gave us six weeks’ notice, we decided to pull our youngest, who is not unbelievably TWO, early to save some extra cash.

Now, unexpectedly, I’m a proper stay-at-home mom who has to plan enough educational activities for an already too smart for his own good toddler to keep him on track until he’s old enough to attend the town preschool next September.

Today marks the end of week one of this new endeavor, and all I have to say is thank God for the library!

Parenting was never going to be easy, but the last three years have been the most trying time in my life. every decision matter so much as we try to keep the boys “on track.” Whatever the hell that really means. We’re doing our best, but it feels like there is a roadblock at every fifth turn. We can’t get comfortable for too long in a routine because everything keeps changing at a breakneck pace.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but does it have to be so dang hard?

Even with the trials and tribulations, we’ve faced, I’m grateful for our physical health and that we have a roof over our heads and food on the table — don’t get me started on grocery prices, though.