Emilio - 4 Months

Holy cow, 4 months Emi! Where did time fly by so fast?? It has been perhaps the 4 busiest time of our lives. I think we constantly get confused thinking it is you and your brother making us busy, but I think our move and setting up the new house in Ottawa has got much more to do with it than anything.

 

It is hard to believe it has been that long since you joined us out here, but I can tell by seeing you,, you've grown so much!! you are for sure much heavier than before. Although I haven't taken you to a check-up for about a month, I can see your little chubby legs get chubbier by the day, and my back and shoulders  are not so keen on you growing like a weed.

 

Emilio - 4 months

I mostly carry you on the sling for most of the day, and although you are getting a bit too heavy for it (you are also getting too curious and always want to be facing all directions), you are the happiest being carried around in there right next to me.

 

Most days you have 3 or even 4 naps a day still. You sleep for about 45 minutes about an hour or two after waking up. Usually you are in the sling because if I put you down you wake up almost immediately after. Then you wake up for about half an hour and go back to sleep for an hour. Then you wake up for about an hour and go back to sleep at the same time as your brother around noon or 1 p.m, and have a longer nap of 2-3 hours. Finally at about 4.30 or 5 you have another mini nap of half an hour to 45 minutes, and you go to sleep at around 8.30 p.m.

 

At night you sleep for about a 4-5 hour stretch, and then wake up exactly every 2 hours -- not so good for me :/ .

For now you are still sleeping in your crib in our bedroom, and I bring you to bed with us at about 3 a.m. I am still not sure when we will change you somewhere else since your brother sometimes cries at night in his sleep and you still wake up somewhat often.

 

You have definitely started to master your tummy time and head control. Sofar you have turned from your front to your back on a couple of occasions but I think you still don't know what on earth just happened. You also work hard now on controlling your hands and you love reaching for objects and touching everything around you, including my hair.

You are also definitely very aware of your surroundings. One of the sweetest things I've seen is the way you look at your brother Paulo --- it is so sweet! you follow him everywhere with your eyes and if he is still, you just stare at him with this mini grin on your face. It is the cutest thing ever. And if he touches you to pat your head or slightly touch your hand or to kiss your face (even though he can be...well.. kind of rough) you just don't complain at all. But if your brother starts one of temper tantrums where he screams at the top of his lungs, you join right in with the crying (which I am not a fan of :( ). I wonder if you are scared or just sad for your brother.

 

 In general though, you are such a happy baby. I think being carried around in the sling has a lot to do with that. But you are always so content. In the mornings you are ALL smiles, and if you see a new face, and especially somebody who talks to you, you are the happiest. You just smile away with your big smile and happy eyes. I feel as if I could count with both hands how many times you've cried since you were born. Everybody (even strangers) always comment on how happy and content you always look. The only things that make you really cry are when you get really tired (right before bedtime) or having a bath also made you panic quite badly, although fortunately you have seemed to be over it in the last 2 weeks.

 

Your brother is still a bit jealous of you and not so keen on letting you play with basically ANY toy, haha, but he is getting better and making an effort to be nicer in that regard. I do from time to time catch him holding your hand or touching you gently as if by accident. But I am sure you two are going to be a happy giggly pair later on.

 

Emilio, you are such a sweet baby I love you so much, my heart could burst any minute <3.

 

 

Slipping...

So, we finally moved into our new house. It has been a crazy too weeks, trying to unpack everything, getting this house into a livable state, making too many trips to Ikea (enough to take the fun out of it :( ) , and getting everything from health cards to driver's licenses and everything in between, setup here.

Sofar I am loving the new neighborhood. As would be expected, we all need a bit of getting used to. I do miss our "old" life, the familiarity of it, the knowing where I'm at and where I'm going. But all things considered, our start in this new city has been great. People have been extremely nice, especially our neighbors have been very welcoming. Our street is a dead end that backs into great green fields and horse stables, so we see horses being ridden right behind our back yard on a daily basis. Being a dead end street means we get zero traffic, so I don't get particularly worried if Paulo stays outside while I bring in the groceries, or get Emi inside in his car seat. We can play soccer on the street, we brought the basket ball hoop out as well, and we can go for bike rides and let Paulo go as fast and far as he wants to go.

The trees in the neighborhood are old and tall and full of variety. And the weather... oh the weather! nothing like getting away from the cold and unpredictability of the mountain weather and get some REAL SPRING heat. I haven't bundled the kids up to go out in almost 2 weeks, and half the time I feel like I'm back in Mexico. Sure there's lots of creepy crawlies too, which frankly I didn't miss... but hey, you can't have it all, right?

 

Despite everything going so fine and dandy with our move, I feel like on the family front lately I've been.... slipping. There have been some challenges lately that have gotten me borderline depressed, and it all peaked yesterday with some sort of anxiety attack that brought me to writing this post.

 

What has caused this? well, lately I have been working WAAAY too hard at being a mom. I know being a mom is a 24/7 job and that's all there is to it, sometimes there is just no way around it. But added to that, I seem to have an incredible ability of holding on and holding on and holding on, until I just can't take it any longer and then I explode. Rob often tells me I have to rely more on him and take a break and ask for help. But sometimes that is hard to do when you don't have any family to rely on, and your husband is working his ass off as well. It is just hard to be the one to add yet another thing on his plate. I know it isn't really, and that it is better to take care of yourself first, blah blah blah, but it is just hard to do when you feel like you're dropping a ball. That's how I feel sometimes about asking for help ... maybe it is a personality thing.

 

Anyway, there are a few things that have been particularly bad, and I guess it starts with the fact that Paulo's sleep has been just terrible lately. He has never been a great sleeper, but we had reached a point where he was sleeping through the night pretty consistently. Now, since we started packing for the move, and after Emilio was born, he has been waking up every single night without fail and climbing into our bed. This wouldn't be such a big deal, if only our bed wasn't a queen, my son wasn't a bed hog; if we weren't partially co-sleeping with Emi, and Paulo didn't wake up with nightmares in the middle of the night, screaming and kicking. This all results in him waking Emilio up, Rob having to go to sleep somewhere else (because he needs to go to work the next morning and he is a bad sleeper as well), and me getting sandwiched between two kids, getting no good sleep and sometimes, getting just pissed.

There has been at least a couple of occasions where I have just been exhausted from working all day unpacking and looking after the kids, and when I finally go to bed, this circus starts, and it drags on until the middle of the night, where I just finally lose it and explode on Paulo. Half a second after I explode and make him cry, I feel extremely guilty and not only feel exhausted, but also too guilty to get any sleep even if they'd let me. When this is not the case, I just get depressed that I just can't even get a break at night, and I start to cry. Last night, this is what happened, after a long, exhausting day when Rob was stuck at work, didn't make it home until late, and I had to put both kids to sleep (which is CHAOS) and Paulo just would not go to sleep until almost midnight. I was able to keep it together enough to walk out of his room without losing my cool, but after I came downstairs to tell Rob he needed to take over, I went completely into anxiety mode, which now makes me feel like a total loser.

 

I know this all sounds like it is just a sleep issue. But frankly, the fact that Paulo is doing this every night, sometimes throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of the night, makes me feel like I have absolutely no control (not a good feeling) and even manipulated. I certainly do not appreciate the fact that night after night I have been sleeping completely sandwiched between my bed hog babies, and I cannot remember when was the last time I woke up with my husband next to me. I appreciate even less that I cannot remember the last time I had a good night sleep.

 

Of course I constantly feel like crap all day. I am cranky and Paulo irritates me easily. I look at myself in the mirror and I see a skinny, tired face with circles around the eyes. I see myself getting old. And I see my life slipping by with nothing left for me.

 

I know I don't always feel this way, and I keep telling myself that I hope (I REALLY hope) this is just a phase that will go away. Please let this be a phase. For now I will go to sleep, for the sake of sanity.

 

And on a more cheerful note, some pictures of our neighborhood....

walking down our block

Brothers

biking in the neighborhood