What a difference a couple of months can make.
In my last post, I was the hopeful parent of a baby whose sleep was getting better, and whose three year old was still in child care three days a week.
In this post, written several weeks after I'd intended to write it, my baby's sleep has regressed to a newborn pattern of two and three hour stretches at night, and the three year old has finished childcare and is yet to start kindergarten.
I'm nearly at my wit's end. Definitely sleep-deprived, possibly a hazard to fellow drivers, and feeling like I'm winning if I make it to the end of the day and everyone is still alive.
At the moment, we have some help: grandparents are visiting and husband is at home. But, in a couple of weeks time, it will be back to me, myself and I looking after daughters one and two. It was hard enough with seven hours' sleep a night, but feels positively daunting on four or five broken hours. Serenity now, serenity now!
While pregnant, I asked a number of mothers of two or more children what it was like managing two children. If there is a conspiracy of silence around birth, as some have opined, then there is surely one around looking after more than one child. The nearest anyone came to describing how demanding it was, was one mum who repeated her own mother's advice: one child is a hobby, two is a job.
And what a job! Baby and three-year-old like to tag-team. If one needs to be settled to sleep, the other decides she needs help with the potty. If one needs a feed, the other decides she wants to play hide and seek. The core 'problem' to be solved in this job is how to divide your attention between the one who physically needs you to keep her alive, and the other who needs you to help her make sense of life.
I know, I'm sure there's a sense of 'well, cry me a river' about this. I know I've got blessings and am counting them. And I'm slowing getting to use to the difficult juggling act of managing more than one child. Revisiting some of my earlier posts on being an invisible woman, breastfeeding, striving for mediocrity, filling the days, maternity plays, among others, has helped refresh my memory of just how challenging I found the first year of motherhood. It also helped me see differences: the challenge now is less about filling the days and feeling invisible, so much as it is about juggling competing needs and dividing my attention. Where I had to remind myself to 'strive for mediocrity' before, I now almost constantly feel like I really can't do everything and am stretching myself pretty thin already. Mediocrity feels like it would be a pretty awesome place to be just at the moment.
So my blogging in 2014 is likely to be quite sporadic, at least until baby number two's sleeping sorts itself out. In the wee small hours, awake and feeding, I have been pondering many things, not least about feminism and motherhood and life, the universe and everything, that I would like to share.
The challenge now is learning when to throw the blogging ball up into the air so I can juggle it along with all the others.
