How to do this new mommy thing all over again...

It's hard to imagine in 4 or 5 weeks we will add another baby to our family. Another mouth to feed (free for quite a while at least!) another little person to juggle time with. Another cry, another laugh, another person to love and to make us crazy. Another person for my husband to support and for me to somehow homeschool.

I remember with my other pregnancies thinking how am I going to do everything I do now AND feed a new baby... dress, care for, wash diapers, carry around... I'll be once again cooking dinner and doing chores with an infant tied to me. It sounds exhausting right now. But once that new baby is here I hardly think of it. For a while anyway. At first they are so light weight and easy to care for that everything falls into place easily. It's not until they get too heavy to carry comfortably that I really even notice. Of course there are things that are harder to do with any size baby. Folding clothes, cook at a hot stove, carry laundry baskets up and down stairs. (Do other people ever carry their babies in laundry baskets on top of the clean clothes?)

You know what I never try and imagine though...how I'll find the time to kiss pink baby feet or tickle yet another baby belly. How I'll find the time to gaze softly at new skin and smell my baby's head. I never question how I'll find the time to massage baby lotion on a silky baby body, how I will love another child, or how that child will fit in.

If children kept that rose petals sprinkled with saltwater dew drops newborn smell I'd be so content -and never ask how am I really going to do this AGAIN...

:) excited...

Crazies! Insane toddlers frazzled moms...

Over the last week and a half Sebastian has painted the walls with his dad's deodorant stick (to which the little girls exclaimed happily, "Now our wall smells like Daddy!" :)

He has finger painted vaseline into the couch. He has taken 2 boxes of noodles -1 spaghetti and 1 lasagna- and dumped and smashed them all over the kitchen floor. He crawled into the empty bathtub and used the shampoo pump freely and them proceeded to slip and slide all over the tub in his diaper and T-shirt. (He thought it was fun until soap got in his eyes.) I usually always remove all soaps from the tub when some one is done in there but the other day I forgot. He ransacked the egg basket on the counter, stole some eggs from it and cracked two of them on the bathroom floor.

When I was out of the kitchen last night Sebastian crushed up his asparagus and broccoli up and threw it on the floor. His lovely sisters got him some more veggies, to do the same to. I'd like to think they were just getting him more food TO EAT. But I know different. They enjoyed seeing him make a mess like a monkey.

As if this all wasn't bad enough he cries seemingly nonstop and hits, yells "no!" and just seems grouchy. He cries when his dad is gone. He cries when I'm gone. He takes every toy away from the girls. He's restless at night and crabby during the day. He's got a runny nose and the other day he said his mouth hurt. So maybe he's teething AND has a little cold. The girls have tiny colds, too.

Mostly I recognize this as just one of those stages that makes a person crazy! He'll be two this month and so this stage is were the phrase "terrible twos" is coined. I've never really liked that saying, because I don't particularly like to think babies as being terrible. They are babies. Learning, exploring, testing limits and boundaries. We all do it. Babies just cry more and throw fits and make huge messes. Sometimes I have to admit it is terrible and exhausting, but sometimes it's also funny in that oh my gosh this IS my life sort of way.

He looks tired. I hope I can get him down early for a nap this morning.

Added 8/12/10 I found 4 rolls of sopping wet toilet paper in the bathroom sink. Gee wonder who climbed up on the stool and did that!?