Returning to normal.

Jerad got back late Tuesday/early Wednesday from his out of town project in Twentynine Palms after being gone almost 2 weeks. The beginning was rough. The boys weren't listening, Emery wasn't sleeping, Marshall was waking up multiple times with growing pains, it was raining, even the dogs were being high maintenance. I was feeling pulled a million directions and like no one was getting the attention they deserved. At the end of every day I was just exhausted, feeling guilty for not enjoying my children as much as I should be, dreading the hourly night wakeups that were sure to come, resenting the fact that its always up to ME to make everything run smoothly without any help, and wondering how I was going to keep it all together until Jerad got home. Then the dryer broke, which meant I was lugging the kids to the laundromat on top of everything else.

I went back through my blog archives and read this post from when Marshall was the same age as Emery is now and we were going through the exact same thing. He was in the middle of a horrible sleep regression, it was raining, Jerad was working out of town for 11 days... Somehow reading and remembering how much I was struggling then was exactly what I needed to turn my attitude around. Like, this is just a bad season but it will pass soon and I won't remember it or something. The next day the clouds (literally) parted, we were able to go to the park, the kids all took good naps, and I felt like myself again and that it was no big deal having to solo parent for another week or more .

Thanks to my strange personality quirk of having to be able to control something when I feel like things are out of control, I also completely cleaned the house from top to bottom including changing the sheets on all 6 beds, and baked banana bread and homemade butter with the boys (a recent favorite). I stayed up late after the kids were asleep to finish cleaning which meant I was already up for a bunch of Emery's on-the-hour-wakeups so even those didn't seem as unbearable.

The rest of the time Jerad was gone the weather was good, the kids were pretty well behaved, and by the end Emery had gone to only waking up every 2 hours which made a world of difference. We went to and hosted play dates, made sure to play outside a few hours a day (this is such a part of our routine that it really feels like the end of the world when we're stuck inside because of rain), did crafts, went to the library, loaded up on some yummy treats at the grocery store for me to sneak after the kids were asleep, and took nightly walks and instead of feeling like I was hanging by a thread I was able to enjoy our time together.

Then Jerad got home I got to sleep in until 9am yesterday, Emery slept a 3 and a 4 hour stretch last night, and we have all sorts of fun plans this weekend. It feels like life is back to normal.