Thursday, March 13, 2008

Running On Fumes

It’s that time of year. It’s that stage of parenting. It’s that stage of babyhood.

Either way, I’m running on empty. I’m exhausted. Not tired. Just purely, completely, exhausted.

The babies don’t nap often, sometimes not at all. Normal for my kids, it’s just there’s two at once now. They don’t sleep through the night anymore, also normal, but again, two times the wakings. All the kids have had colds (thank goodness no stomach bugs yet this year) and now I, too, had a bad cold complete with fever and even a back spasm thrown in for good measure.

Which meant my mom coming out to help two babies who wanted only Mommy. And now my back is still sore from not resting enough, and I really have no idea how or if it will ever recover before these two turn two years old. I mean, I always carried my kids until they were over 2…

And it’s March and I want Spring to be here. And I want to go on a dinner date with my husband without babies, which won’t be happening. Because the babies are two instead of one and there’s few who can handle all four kids. Because I never pumped due to nursing on both sides at once ever 2 hours or less. Because they’ve never even touched bottles. Because we don’t trust the grandparents in town and the other ones are too far away to have bonded REALLY closely with the babies enough to leave them for 3 hours.

I tried. Two weeks ago, and I came home to crying babies after just 2 hours. So I know. I’m not even guessing.

And right now, it sucks. I just want a small break. Just a small one. One night of sleep would be nice. One meal without all the chaos. One day without me feeling like no one got enough of me and I’ll never do anything I desire to do with my kids ever again.

I know this too shall pass, but today, I’m just done. And yet I go on…