It’s been a rough past few weeks. Physically, every day gets tougher for me as baby gets bigger and my body gets more tired. I’ve spent the past 24 hours with baby squashing every nerve I own in my pelvis and lower back while simultaneously feeling like s/he is stabbing my cervix with an ice pick.
Pregnancy insomnia has been a glorious thing for my kitchen and productivity but terrible for my mood and tolerance for not sweating the small stuff. I’ve been up by 5:30 nearly every day for over a week after also being up to pee pretty much on schedule at 10:30 and 1:30 after initially falling asleep around 10:00 and then not always being able to fall back asleep right away.
Bot none of that really compares to what I see my kids going through. Much like when we were waiting for Doodle, the girls are showing signs of the stress of waiting (and waiting and waiting and waiting…)
While Sugarplum has matured a lot over the past few months and has (it seems) outgrown her glorious screaming fits, she has recently taking on uncontrollable crying. She will get upset over completely ridiculous things and start crying, without being able to stop. Comforting her, talking to her, separating her, ignoring her…nothing works. She just sits there and cries, saying “I just can’t stop!” She hasn’t been napping which is part of it, but I’m also not sure she’s sleeping well at night and all of it is playing into her fragile state, though I’m not sure she is aware of any correlation between her anxiousness and baby waiting.
Doodle is pretty unaware of what is coming his way. We talk about it a lot and read our new baby books constantly. He likes to snuggle around the baby and feed the baby tea (through my belly button, of course) but he does not like to talk about the baby. He will say he wants the baby to be a girl when asked, but every other question (will you give the baby kisses? should the baby come out soon? do you want to hold the baby?) he adamantly responds “no!” to and the more questions you ask him, the more agitated he becomes (though I’m hopeful it’s not a baby thing as he gave me the same response last night when I asked him if he would ever say “I love you mommy!”)
Honeybun, as with Doodle, is the one that is struggling the most. She alternates between being super helpful, doing household chores like cleaning up toys and emptying the dishwasher without being asked with being overly uncooperative and screaming and getting frustrated over little things I ask her to do (like school or cleaning up the books strewn all over her room). And she keeps saying “I just want the baby to come out now, I wish it could some out as fast as a snap!” then tells people “if this baby doesn’t come on a Thursday, we’re going to fire it.” (not sure exactly when she means by that, though!) Plus she wakes up every morning and asks me if I slept well then proceeds to tell me how she slept (usually not well).
We’re all just ready for this baby to be here, especially now that I’m at my due date and very well could pass it, which hasn’t happened since my first baby! And I’m living my a new mommy mantra as we wait it out which is “Thursday is coming” (and hopefully that means a baby will be, too!)
