I slept last night! Rosie slept all night long!
The baby nursed some, but nothing that really disturbed my sleep.
I looked at the clock and it was 1:41 at one point when I changed a diaper.
Then I blinked (I thought) and suddenly the baby was choking on my fire hose of a boob. I shoved a handful of cloth wipes in the general direction and looked at the clock again. It was 4:14, that confused me.
I'm too tired to figure out the difference between 1:41 and 4:14.
Then the baby was loudly pooping and it was 7:18 and light outside.
That's a pretty good night of sleep! I still feel so tired though.
I guess this is a normal part of adjusting to being a momma of two little kids.
It's like some kind of test. A test for what, I don't know.
One night I was laying there thinking that it was just like Chinese water torture.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Wait until you drift off to sleep, and *just* as you slide into oblivion...JOLT! You have to wake up to tend to someone, or someone is stirring and you have to check, or you hear a cry and it's not even real. Over, and over, and over, and over.
To answer a common question, Rosie does not nap. Rosie *cannot* be allowed to nap. She hasn't napped since like 18 months.
If Rosie takes a nap at any point in the day, then two things happen. First, she wakes up and is so grumpy she ends up crying for at least an hour. Second, even if it was a morning nap, she will not be able to fall asleep at night until well past midnight. She'll be overtired, hysterical, and unable to sleep! She thrashes and rolls around and cries. It's horrible. I will do anything in the world to keep her from napping because of this.
Rosie takes after me. She just doesn't need that much sleep, like she physically can't stay asleep for that many hours in a 24 hour period. She goes to bed around 9 (at dusk, after we lock up the chickens together) and then she gets up sometime between 6 and 8. Usually around 7 on average.
I know kids are supposed to get more sleep, but she doesn't sleep that long! If she goes to bed earlier then she'll wake up earlier. I've tried getting her in bed by like 7:30 and then she's up and wide awake at 5:30 in the morning.
She never slept as an infant either, not like Ada. Ada sleeps for hours and hours, even at night she sleeps through grunting and stirring around. She has even pooped in her sleep before.
Great. The baby started thrashing and my entire plate of breakfast just fell upside down on the cat fur coated floor.
That's ok. I am a Goddess. Goddesses don't need to eat.
Or something like that.
Maybe they don't need to sleep like a normal human being either...that would be lucky.
Rosie seems to be less jealous today, so far, in the hour we've been awake. She announced she loves having a baby sister.
When she woke up while I was nursing the baby I reminded her of all the fun things big sisters get to do that babies can't do. Rosie thinks she wants to nurse all day long and be called a baby, which I'm sure is just a normal reaction since she realizes the baby is getting a lot of attention.
Once I spent 20 minutes listing everything big sisters could do that baby sisters can't do she seemed a bit happier. Especially when I reminded her how big sisters do things like eat ice cream, go to her favorite book store, hold chickens, eat cake, make bread and eat the dough, help mom do chores (she likes to scrub stuff), ride in big kid sized purple car seats (she just got a new one), and the list went on and on...
In comparison all baby sisters get to do is lay around and get milk all day, then get poopy all over their bums.
Now which one looks like more fun!?
She agreed it might be a lot of fun to be a big sister instead of a baby after all. Hopefully that notion will stick.
Anyway, anytime I feel like I'm totally losing my shit I can at least look at my sweet fat cheeked baby and get a surge of love and happiness!
Thank God for that.
I really have to go grocery shopping today. We're out of everything!
So far it hasn't been hard taking the two of them out places together, but Rosie and the grocery store recently didn't work out well if you might remember. Those stupid car carts!! I wish I could put a bag over Rosie's head, run and hide all of the car carts from her sight, then take the bag off and walk in the store and enjoy our shopping trip.
While sitting here nursing the baby I made an extensive grocery list with a meal plan and a list of healthy snacks we'll have on hand.
I can't wait to get the food so we can eat it. All of this nursing is making me starved!!
Did I write about the egg fiasco? I'm too tired to remember...I don't think I did.
While I was recovering from giving birth for the past two weeks I asked Tyler to take care of the chickens. Before I gave birth I showed him several times what to do--
Put a handful of oyster shell in the feed bucket, a handful of scratch grains, then four scoops of feed. Then another handful of oyster shell, another handful of scratch grains, and four more scoops of feed, and a handful of each thing again on top. Then throw in whatever scraps we've saved.
That's easy. Take it outside, pour half of the bucket in each feeder. (I use litter boxes for feeders. They're cheap and they work great because all of the chickens can eat at once, and they can easily be hosed out or whatever.)
Then give the chickens water in the hanging waterers and in the few dog food dishes laying around out there. Rinse out and fill the 5 gallon bucket full of water for emergency extra if it gets really hot and they run out. They roost on the side of the bucket and drink from it. You only have to rinse out the bucket every 3 days or so...the ducks drool food into it and it ferments and smells like vomit if you don't rinse it out!
On your way back in refill the dog water dishes. Then turn off the water and put the hose away.
So that's not very hard, right? It takes me 10-15 minutes each morning at the most.
Come to find out he hadn't been doing all of that, instead he had just been opening the coop doors when I asked him. Poor birds. I know I wrote about that.
But here comes the best part--I also asked him to collect the eggs every afternoon before he left for work. This isn't hard, it takes less than 5 minutes.
I assumed he was doing it, but of course...no.
It turns out he'd skipped a few days at a time and then gone out and collected all of the eggs at once. See, I'm really careful about egg collecting. I collect them every single day, sometimes twice a day if it's really hot or cold out. No chicks will develop in fertile eggs unless they are incubated or sat on, so if you keep up with your eggs then it's not a concern.
The other day I felt well enough to take over the chicken chores myself again, and when I went out I discovered I had a broody hen in each of the two coops. I asked Tyler how long they'd been sitting and he said he didn't know, he hadn't noticed there were any broody hens.
It's Tyler, of course he didn't notice. Captain Oblivious.
Are you seeing where this is going?
He had waited like four days, then collected eggs out from under broody hens unknowingly.
Then he mixed those eggs into all the rest of the eggs.
OMG.
There were 200 eggs in my house, and some of them had baby chicks started in them.
Noooooooooo!
I candled some of them. The thing is, it's hard to tell through dark shelled eggs if anything is going on in there so early. By day 4 you should see veins that look like a spider, and sometimes you can see an eye forming if the shell is thin and white.
Most of my chickens have dark, thick egg shells.
I cracked one that looked suspicious and the chick forming made me dry heave.
I threw away almost all of the eggs last night. I'm so upset!
What a waste of eggs and hard work from my hens. :-(
Ok enough rambling.
I lied, either I'm not a Goddess or Goddesses do need to eat...
I wish I had loyal followers to bring me some delicious offerings! Instead I'd better go scrounge up something from my kitchen...
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