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

 

Moving.

I haven't had time to write lately. I have been wanting to post so many things, but I just haven't had any time at all. We finally moved to Ottawa last Sunday, and as you can picture, our lives have been pretty close to a nightmare since last week. We spent every night packing until late at night, then the movers came and took everything but our bare essentials, and still we managed to travel with about 10 pieces of luggage between big suitcases, carry-ons and car seats.... Pretty crazy.

We got on our 3 hour pane ride late at night and didn't make it to the hotel until 1 a.m. Ontario time. This is two hours ahead of our usual, so the kids have kind of been struggling with the new schedule. Especially Paulo. Emilio, as usual, just goes with the flow and falls asleep when and where he can. He's pretty awesome.

Anyway, the plane ride went as well as could be expected. I think there where 2 keys to making this as stress free as possible: 1. One was to actually prepare mentally for the worse. I mean, we were, after all, travelling with an infant, a two year old, and a senior (Rob's mom). N number of things can get frustrating under these circumstances, and we just had to try our bests not to get angry or stressed, because we would only add to the situation. We just had to try and keep it together at any cost. And 2. Was to allow enough time to take our.sweet.time doing everything, from calling the cab to getting into the plane, just doing everything with way more time than necessary. Because we knew we would forget a million things, and we needed time to allow for tantrums, pit stops, snack breaks, etc. without making us late.

 

Discovering the Ottawa Public Library

As for the new house, I mentioned earlier that when we came to Ottawa the first time to look for houses, the one we had liked fell through. We didn't want to do another big trip like that again, so we ended up renting the house having only seen a tour on video. Pretty gutsy, I know. But actually, you can do that these days with all the technology there is, such as emailing videos using dropbox, using google maps ( to get an idea of where the place is relative to the rest of the city, and to actually SEE what the neighbourhood looks like), and of course e-mail to sign rental contracts tec. At some point we even almost used Skype because the landlord wanted to meet us. So yesterday we visited the new house and it looked just like it did on video. The backyard is smaller than we thought, though (it was hard to get a good view with all the snow), and we noticed all the open space around it is actually fenced off (bummer!) but I have decided not to worry about it.

Rob is going through an enormous amount of stress. We all are. But I think he bears the burden of not only taking care of us and all the physical stuff, but also the responsibility of bringing us all across the country, doing all the moving arrangements I have tried to handle these as much as I can so he doesn't have to worry about any of it), and then doing a good job at work (where he has been super busy as well). Poor guy. He's got a lot on his plate, and added to that he's having to adapt to a new city, away from his friends and most of his family. I hope we can all bounce back to our new normal soon.

 

For now, tomorrow is moving day, so although I know it will end up being a crazy busy day, I am excited and looking forward to moving into our new house, yay!!

 

 

Things he said...

I have been told by friends that it is important to record your children speaking as they grow up, because when you go back and listen to them speaking, it is amazing the memories that come back. I think I have done this once or twice with Paulo, but I haven't done that for a while and now his speech has gotten even better, and also, he is sadly interestingly starting to sound like me. So, in the interest of preserving this for posterity, here are some of the hilarious things he's said in the past month/week/days that have blown my mind:

 

• (When I was taping some boxes shut for our move): "No mama! no hagas ruido!" (No mom, don't make noise!) --- this makes me laugh because lately I am always telling him not to make noise when Emilio is sleeping, so I almost feel bad for the poor little guy.

 

• Me: "Paulo, ya terminaste de hacer pipi? (are you done going pee?)" Paulo: "No mama, claro claro claro que no!"  (No mom, of course of course of course not!) --- I honestly don't know where he picked this up, surely it was me, but I am not sure when.

 

• "Ahhhh Chihuahua..." (Ohhhhh darn...)-- he said this one when he was going pee and missed the bowl. I'm glad he didn't pick up anything worse, but still not exactly proud of myself for this one... and too bad I can't blame Rob for it either...

 

• Me: "Paulo que soñaste?" (Paulo, what did you dream of?) Paulo: "Con unos globos amarillos que tronaban y asustaban a las personas" (with yellow balloons that popped and scared people). This one is hilarious because he is OBSESSED with balloons, and for some reason he has an obsession for yellow lately. He also loves popping balloons.

 

• "Oh my God!" when falling off his bike last week. This one is thanks to the bike fails videos he's been watching on You Tube.

 

And that's all I can remember right now!