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