Hormonal Flux

So after the earlier post on our family of four on how rosy life is, I thought I'd include another bit of realism - postpartum hormones!

Baby blues hit hard with Elijah - probably a combo of a rough PA winter, an early baby, many sleepless nights and being overwhelmed with learning how to mother. It wasn't easy, but I remember them fading pretty easily once we'd adjusted and I got longer stretches of sleep.

This go around the baby blues came again all be it much softer. And, with so much help this go around and a full term easy baby - life has been much easier and I'm so much more rested. Normal baby blues provide more comic relief than hot flashes during newborn days - So I thought I'd share some snippets from our life lately.

Rob and I tried to fly out the door last Monday morning for our 1st pediatrician visit with Nora Cate. My mom was still in town, but we decided Eli should go with us so he didn't feel left out or left alone again. I made the appointment for 8am so we wouldn't be infected by germy little sick kids. This meant leaving the house by 7:30, which meant being functional and out of sweatpants way to early. Oh, mistake. We ended up in the tahoe at 7:50, Rob driving in the front seat by himself. Me in the back with the kids without brushed hair, in the same sweatpants I slept in with a large thermos of coffee. Eli was crying because he didn't have breakfast, Nora was crying because the carseat was cold and I was crying because a song I used to sing at Christmastime in a friend's church when I was little came on the radio - Oh Beautiful Star of Bethlehem. Poor Rob had 3 in the backseat boohoo-ing the whole way to the office.

Rob and I have had fun playing a new game nightly. It's called, "High, Low, Crazy Thought". High Low is a game you may know. You tell your high moment of the day followed by your lowest moment of the day. We've altered this a bit to include your craziest thought of the day. Some of my crazies have included - "we've ruined Eli's life", "what if Nora has some sort of birth injury from being born so quickly into the arms of a nurse?", and "won't we miss life as a family of 3? Eli is the coolest kid ever and this girl doesn't do anything yet!"

Another - in retrospect - funny hormonal moment came when a little 5 year oldish boy saw Elijah crying (he was crying because Nora had just gotten upset and that upset Eli). The little boy bent down and started talking to Eli. Great mother that I am didn't even realize Eli had been crying or what the little boy was telling Elijah as I was paying our bill. I then saw his mother bend down and shake the kid saying, "Don't tell that little boy Santa's not giving him any presents because he's crying! That's not nice!" What? I wanted to bend down and tell that kid, "Didn't you hear the 11 o'clock news last night? Santa's been shot - nobody's getting any presents!" I controlled my hormones and my tongue. Though, it may have turned out differently had Eli been old enough to understand him or believed in Santa in the first place....