It Finally Happened

The thing that inevitably happens when one has a new baby...

I...

am...

so...

unbelievably...

tired!

So far in our little journey together I have been really lucky in handling the newborn/lack of sleep thing.  The Girl has been really good at waking up once or twice a night, but eating rather quickly, and then going right back to sleep.

Yeah, that isn't so much happening anymore.

Today she is four weeks old (holy crap!!) and she has officially "woken up."  She has much longer awake periods of time and with that comes the infamous "fussy time."  I feel bad for her when it happens.  She clearly gets tummy aches and will be sound asleep and will just jump up with a start and begin screaming.  She grunts and groans and pushes and her little face gets all red and, when successful, she blows out a huge fart or poop.  But more times than not, she works and works at it, but you can tell that she just isn't getting any relief.

This happens for her now on a nightly basis between like 9:00pm and midnight.  During the day she seems to be fine.  And truthfully, that is a pretty convenient time for it to happen.  The Boy is in bed and I have the time to be able to devote to just rocking her and changing positions and trying to make her comfortable.  Any other time of day and I would be busy dealing with The Boy and/or dinner or something else.  So if she has to have a fussy time, I am happy this is the time of day that it hits.

The one thing that seems to work is Gripe Water.  But here's the catch...  Gripe Water by itself tastes like black licorice.  For a baby that has had nothing in her little mouth except for breast milk, it is a far cry from something she considers tasty.  So if I try and use the dropper and give it to her directly she gags and spits and chokes and almost all of it ends up coming back out.  So the best way to give it to her is mixed with breast milk.  I used Gripe Water with The Boy, but he was getting bottles.  So I just mixed it in and we were good to go.  Well it isn't that easy with The Girl.  She is exclusively breast fed, and although she does get an occasional bottle every couple of days (to ensure she will take one when/if I have to go back to work), she will absolutely NOT take one from me.

So IF my mother (or anyone else actually) is around, we are cool.  I just pump a little breast milk and mix it in with the Gripe Water and have someone give it to her in a bottle.  Then she is usually cool.  BUT!  When there is no one around but me?  If I try and give her a bottle she acts like I am shoving a flaming hot poker stick into her mouth.  How dare I try and torture her like that?  Don't I understand that I am boob lady and only boob lady?  So getting her to actually TAKE the Gripe Water is rough.

Saturday night I was home alone all night.  So getting her to take her Gripe Water was beyond hard.  She cried from 9:30 pm until almost midnight.  Finally around 11:30pm I used a dropper to give her the mixture of breast milk and Gripe Water.  It took a full half an hour to get it into her but I finally did.  And once I did, she finally went to sleep.  So she fell asleep at like 12:30am, and then was up to eat at 4:00am and was fussy and didn't fall back asleep until 5:15am.  Then The Boy got up at 6:30am.  I was up with him for around a half an hour until I put a movie on for him and tried to go back to sleep.  Then The Girl was up again around 8:00am.  Then we were up for the day.  And no nap for me yesterday.  When The Boy was napping, The Girl needed to eat and was fussy and just wouldn't let me sleep.  Sigh...

Then last night my cousin came into town (she is still doing work for me on Mondays and Tuesdays) so I thought I was in the clear.  She would be able to give her her bottle.  And she did!  The Girl got fussy early.  So she got a bottle around 8:00pm and had a relatively decent evening and night.  We all went to bed after the Survivor Finale at around 11:30pm.  Well of course at that time The Girl decided that she was going to have a tummy ache and started bitching and moaning.  Around 12:30am it was clear she needed another dose of Gripe Water.  But of course by this time my cousin is nicely tucked away in bed so she wasn't there to give her the bottle.  So I tried everything in the book to calm her down.  Finally around 1:00am I went out to mix up another concoction of Gripe and milk while holding her and bouncing her etc...  By the time I got it ready and headed back to my room with the dropper I realized she had passed out on my shoulder.  That was around 1:30am.  So I put her down and went to sleep.  Then she was up from 4:00am until around 4:45am.  Then she got up again at 6:30am and ate for about 5 minutes and passed back out.  At this point my boobs felt like they were going to explode so I came out and pumped for about 10 minutes (and got 4 ounces!!) and went back to bed.  The Boy got up at 7:00am and then The Girl woke up again at 7:30am (what?  That whole 5 minute feeding an hour ago didn't hold you?) and ate again.

All of this is to illustrate that I am beyond tired.  I have to be up now and get The Boy off to school.  I also have to get work done during the day today.  And also feed Fussy McFussy pants at her every whim.  And if there is a God...there will be a nap in my near future...because I am so tired I might die...

Here's a shot of the princess getting her beauty sleep while sitting with my mom.  Note:  She will pretty much always sleep when sleeping ON another human being.  So helpful...