Or:  If You Complain About Your Child, They Will Stop the Annoying Behavior in an Attempt to Make You a Liar.

Yep…Cooper slept through the night last night.  Only one time did he scream, and that was at like 11pm and I was still up, so it only made me cringe a little (and will him back to sleep).  When I went to check on the kids for the night before I went to bed around 11:30pm, I took off my slippers and freakin’ tip-toed into his room around to the head of his crib so he couldn’t see me, people!  I was that desperate to make sure he wasn’t awake when I checked on him and added a couple blankets to keep him cozy since we were getting a nice windstorm.  And he slept.  He slept until about 7:30am with no other peeps besides the occasional cough.  Stinker.

Meanwhile, since we were getting the above-mentioned windstorm, I was up half the night…like every time it sounded as if the siding was being pulled off from behind my head.  The way our house is situated, our bedroom is on the southeast corner of the house, so we rarely hear any actual wind noise…just my wind chimes blaring away on the porch below.  The kids, however, both have their bedrooms along the north wall of the house and the wind just HOWLS past and makes a right racket.  Not to mention that I suspect that the two pieces of siding that were a bit loose from the last windstorm may have possibly been peeled off (they were up so high that we’d need a 30-foot ladder to fix, which means renting one from Lowe’s or something like that, because I am not too keen on paying someone $50 or more to just snap them in like legos when we could do it ourselves…or actually Justin could do it since I am scared of heights).

In the morning, I hear Justin’s alarm going off at 5am so that he can go work out.  I nudge him and make sure he’s awake, and he shortly thereafter gets up and ready to go to the gym.  Just as I’m dozing back off, that man turns on the overhead light and starts interrogating me about a missing white sock.  He’s peppering me with questions regarding laundry and whites, and he’s only got one white sock left, and I think he said something else.  All I know is that I whined back something to the effect of “I folded the laundry; don’t know if there’s any socks in the dryer; I suck because I don’t know what’s in the dryer; wear a black sock instead because they’re both the gold-toe brand so at least they’ll compliment each other.”  Mercifully he turned off the light and left me alone.  About an hour later he comes back in the room and calls to me, and I growl back “what?!?” and wonder how accurately I could throw the TV remote at him.  Instead of another interrogation or blinding lights, he grabs my hand and places a Grande Honey Latte in my hand.  Needless to say, all is about 99% forgiven (sorry, Justin, that blinding you gave me was pretty reprehensible!  I’m holding about 1% against you).

In other updates…you will not be seeing any pictures of Gavin in green since he deemed keeping his clothes clean and dry a non-priority on Monday.  By the time Cooper and I arrived home, that child was already in his pj’s.  So you will have to make-due with the pictures that are already there on that post. 

As for my hair, here are a couple pictures, as promised.  Please don’t laugh at my dirty mirror or my kid’s snotty face:

it actually looked a lot better 10 minutes prior…dang wimpy hair! 

But the color’s been corrected and the bad ends taken off and looks much better on my 5′1″ frame than hair 8 inches longer.

First and foremost, I need to get some Thank-You’s out there.  I’ve been a bit lax in the gratitude department.  I want to say thanks to LaskiGal at From the Cheap Seats for hearting my little blog:

I’m not quite sure who to pass this along to, since it seems nearly everybody that I regularly read has it already (and rightly so!). So I guess I will give to my entire blogroll since I <3 all of you enough to read you (nearly) daily.I’d also like to do a big ol’ shout-out and hug to Flea at Flea’s World for the Bible Story book, Nana’s Bible Stories written by Roberta Simpson. I entered her contest, and HOLY COWS (yes, plural, since I’m talking about Fred and Bessie), I actually won! Okay, really, my kids actually won. But I cannot wait to be able to read the stories to them. Hopefully Gavin doesn’t rename any more of the Biblical Patriarchs.

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I’m sure we’re not alone in this, but I’m starting to feel like a crazy woman because of it:  Cooper screams in his sleep at night.  Usually this happens when he’s overtired (read:  every night).  I’ve been trying to work with the wonderful teachers in his classroom about forcing him down for naps to help (because this rarely occurs on weekends when he gets his two naps), but it seems that this stubborn child refuses to sleep more than an hour or so at daycare with any regularity.  I’m considering spiking one of his bottles or containers of food with benadryl, but uh…thought I’d poll the Interwebs for any other ideas.  Now, for a little background:

• Cooper has never been a good sleeper, which is frustrating enough since Gavin spoiled us by sleeping through the night by 6 weeks.
• When he’s woken himself up with his own nocturnal screams, we have tried rocking him back to sleep, singing, walking around with him, and can only get him to quiet down if we feed him (and by “we” I mean “me”).
• I tried letting Cooper “cry it out” a little, but he’s already so wound up and ticked-off that he ends up waking up Gavin, too, which is no easy feat.  Then we’re all unhappy and I have two kids crying.
• They have a hard time getting Cooper to sleep at school unless he’s in one of the swings (which doesn’t help my plight at all, but hey, I’m not trying to care for 13 kids between the ages of 3 months and 12 months).  I may have to get tough and ask them to put him in the crib because at home he naps without any problems–give him his binky, a blanket to snuggle, rock him a minute or two, and lay him on his side in his crib.
• I stuff him so full of food at dinner that he sits there with his tongue all lolling out like an over-stuffed pug: 




• He usually gets up around 7 or 7:30am and goes to bed around 8pm.  I thought about getting him up earlier, but um, that would mean I have to get up earlier than I already do…and that’s just not going to happen.
• It isn’t too bad when he just gets up once per night, but the screaming in his sleep periodically through the night is a bit disruptive. 

So any ideas?…I mean, outside of drugging him or hitting him with the Baby Mallet to knock him out? 

p.s.  Um, LaskiGal…I’m such a twit…just realized that I’ve had “Laski Gal” as the name of your blog in my blogroll instead of your actual blog title of “From the Cheap Seats”.  So Sorry!!!  And thanks for hearting my blog in spite of my idiocy.

It seems that I have scared commenters away, what with my boob-talk and confessions of mixing prescriptions with wine. So to make up for it, I will not write and will instead present you with gratuitous pictures of my children. Check for updates later that include Gavin in his St. Paddy’s day green (he was already at school when I thought to pull out the camera).






Um, that’s not a reflection on Cooper…he really has that many rolls on his chest.

For some reason, I feel the need to confess that I am zoning out watching “Tommy Tiernan:  Something Mental” on Comedy Central.  I cannot stop laughing.  I don’t know if it’s just because he’s Irish, because he’s actually funny, or maybe my little Zoloft pill is mixing weird with my wine?  I’ll let you decide. 

Although hopefully you don’t decide that my last sentence made me sound like Karen Walker from “Will and Grace”.

In light of Sarcastic Mom’s Breastfeeding Carnival, I’m offering up the link to my BF’ing story for anyone who’d like to read it again or for anyone who missed it.
As a follow up, I continued to pump 2-3 times per day at work until January. By then I was tired of going into a tiny, dark, freezing-cold room to get half-undressed and pump…and pray that I might get 6 or 8 total ounces (yes…I’d pump three times and would go home at the end of the day with usually 6 ounces…sometimes a tiny bit more). By then, Cooper was drinking about 5 ounces per bottle, so I gave him 1 breastmilk and 3 formula bottles. Whatever overage I had would go in the freezer.
In January I dropped to pumping once a day for about a week and had little-to-no-engorgement. We used up the excess milk in the freezer in a few short days, and then I gave up pumping altogether right before his 6-month birthday. I still nursed him first thing in the morning and at the end of the night. Most of the time I really enjoyed that time I had with him…a nice snuggle and his little hands patting me or playing with my hair while he ate. And since I had about 12 hours in-between feedings, my body had enough time to refill the old boobs, so I didn’t have to give him any supplemental bottles afterwards. On the mornings I was running behind, though, I wished I could get Justin to feed him for me. But I carried on because, well, those hormones did keep me extra calm in the mornings at work and at the end of the day before bed (man, do I miss those! anti-anxiety drugs have nothing on the hormone oxytocin!).
On Cooper’s 7-month birthday in February, I decided to replace the morning feeding with a bottle and just nursed him at night. Wow! Those first 3 days were uncomfortable! But my body adjusted and nursing him at night was a great way to end our hectic days. Then came the flu. Now, Cooper had one of his flu shots in January and was due for his second one in February  but he got sick before I could call to find out that they were out anyways (plus that whole thing that we had a few more strains running around than what the vaccine covered).  Even though the flu test came back negative, the doctor still thought it was the flu–explained that you can get a false-negative if you test too early after coming down with symptoms. Well, poor baby didn’t have a runny nose as much as compacted snot and gunk up in his upper-nasal-area (read: out of reach of the snot-sucker), so he actually had more trouble breathing than if he had snot running down his face. This made nursing a lot harder than the bottle because it took a lot more effort…so he’d take a sip, gasp for air, take another sip, gasp for air again, and then cry hysterically because he’s hungry but he can’t breathe enough to eat efficiently. Lather, rinse, repeat. I finally gave him a bottle and he was able to drink quite a bit more before gasping for air…he still fussed, but wasn’t getting as frustrated. Once he had a little to eat, I tried nursing him again, but same scenario. So I gave the bottle back and cried because I was really hoping that when I weaned him, it wouldn’t include shrieking, renting of garments, and gnashing of teeth gums.
I tried again the next night, but my milk already dried-up on the poorly-performing side, and seemingly had very little on the better-performing breast…and he was still congested and couldn’t breathe, so we had a rehash of the night before with the screaming and attempts to eat followed by more screaming and both of us crying.
But now? He’s great. Like I said, I miss the snuggles and closeness, and the warm-and-fuzzies I got from the hormones, but he’s happy. I’m just not happy with my formula bill!