Three

I started babysitting when I was 12 yrs old. I began working with children professionally nearly 10 years ago...everything from newborns to teens, only children in the foster care system to triplets I nannied. I have ALWAYS hated when kids turned three. It is my absolute LEAST favorite age. I know I'm supposed to love my child at every age for different reasons...different developmental milestones and all that...and I do love my three year old son. Sometimes, I just want to love him from a distance...does anyone know if there are boarding schools for three year olds?

Anyway, the main reason I've always struggled with three is that at two, they're still obedient because you are (angel's voices sing "AWWW") MOM...and all the glory and fear that comes with it. At four, you can use logic most of the time to explain this is the boundary and this is why it's a boundary in our home or family. But at three you're stuck...they're no longer awe-inspired by your mom-ness but they don't care to be mature enough to listen to the logical reasons behind the various rules.

So, here we are at three. During deployment. All I really want to do sometimes is ship my son to his father but since that would be wrong...illegal...unloving...unethical...horrible...not to mention, pretty expensive since the boy is too big to fit into a flat rate box...and yes, I do love him, I won't ship him to a war-torn nation. 

But seriously, I have a three year old son who is struggling with the fact that his Daddy is still far away and now his Mommy is no longer available 24/7. He loves his sister and (THANK GOD) has not yet started to view her as an enemy. He's confused. He's angry. He's sad. He's frustrated....but he's limited on how well he can express all those feelings because... he's three. 

So I guess we just keep going. I keep trying to give words to his emotions, empathize with his pain but most importantly make clear and maintain the boundaries our family has always had...deployment or not...new baby or not. Eventually, I keep reminding myself, he'll be able to acknowledge his emotions and control them better because eventually he'll be four...then five...six...it goes too fast to really spend a year wishing it would go faster. 

Time

Time is going faster than I ever wanted with my children but not nearly fast enough with my husband. It's a bizarre paradox. I feel like every time I turn around my son is speaking longer sentences with more complex thoughts behind them and now with our baby girl time is a runaway train. She's still very much a newborn but she's begun to smile and hold her head up and I know she'll grow up way too fast. 

My own life, my marriage seems to still be at a standstill. I don't know why I expected my life to be different (other than the obvious) after our daughter was born but I did. It hasn't, however and I'm starting to think this is just what deployment is...at least for me.

Today, my time was spent fight the Red Tape gods...they won the battle but I have confidence that I will eventually win the war. Long story short, I'm still trying to get baby girl into DEERS and thereby onto Tricare coverage. I technically have a couple more weeks to get it sorted but not really because we're leaving soon for our "extended holiday." I will blog more about that when I get the chance...I also plan on posting a review of the much beloved Britax B-ready in doubles mode soon as it has been used many times.

Meanwhile, I managed to get some new pics of the girl done today...hoping to get the boy in his element (dirt) sometime over the next few days. I always hated when people told me that I only took a ton of pictures of my son because he was the first born and once more came, I'd stop. Not. Going. To. Happen. But I will say it does take a bit of effort to not just photograph one child over and over to the neglect of the other. 

Balance

Tomorrow my daughter will be 1 month old. To say it's gone fast would be a massive understatement. I've been fairly successful at coming to a balance with the two kids...mostly because my son is so easy going and loves his sister to pieces. Unfortunately, the rest of my life isn't quite in balance yet.

Other than family and friends who came in from out of town (read: they got the priority) and a handful of local friends, I haven't seen anyone and few have seen the Princess. It's not that they don't want to visit and I don't want to get out, it's a lack of time. I've been swamped with Army stuff and getting ready for our grand exodus...we're going to the beach for a very long vacation (the one upside to this whole deployment situation).

In addition to our extended holiday, we're getting ready for the much anticipated upcoming R&R at Disney World, trying to get baby girl on DEERS, and getting Joshua signed up for his online classes. All while ignoring the news as much as possible because the last couple weeks have been hard for our state. I never thought I'd be the kind of Army wife who would have to avoid the news...I normally love the news and politics (yeah, I'm one of those but I try not to put those opinions up here very often) but I can't. I can't see the pictures...that's the worst part for me. When they show the families, especially the children, I fall apart. I can't do it.

So, instead I bury my head in the sand and focus on my kids, getting the next care packages together and what we'll wear to meet Mickey Mouse.

I'm done.

It's been 5 months. I've learned more about myself, my husband, my children and my marriage than ever before this deployment and now I'm done.

I don't want to hear my son cry for his Daddy to come home. I don't want to be a single mom of a newborn who nurses every two hours 24 hours a day (yeah...went to the pediatrician yesterday and the Princess grew two and a half inches in two weeks...no wonder I'm feeling drained). I want my son to stop being spoiled by his Grandma and Nana...new gifts every week...sometimes every day and it's getting uncontrollable. He was misbehaving the other day pretty bad so I made him throw away one of his prized dinosaur toys...30 mins later he informed me that Grandma would buy him a new one.

I want my husband home. In a weird way, I keep expecting him to walk through the door just because I want him to. I'm not delusional, I know he won't be home for months...many, many months but I guess I'm just selfish. I've pretty much always managed to get what I really wanted until now. There's not enough work or manipulation or begging or praying or anything that will change the fact that he's still deployed and I'm still home with our kids.

On a happy/potentially dangerous-to-the-budget note, my Aunt (aka Nana), my cousin and her two kids will be in town for a long weekend and it's tax-free weekend for our state so let the shopping begin.

Belated update

Ok...I'm a bad blogger. "Tomorrow" turned into 10 days later. Turns out there's a lot more to newborns that I somehow forgot but before I get to that, let me tell you about the delivery since I said I would a week and a half ago.

It was dramatic, to say the least. Joshua (the hubs) is at a new FOB...very new. So new in fact that there wasn't personal internet set up...still isn't but that's an annoying topic for another day. To be honest, he works with military computers and at the time, they barely had military internet. Two and a half hours before our princess made her debut, we found out that Joshua would be able to skype in and watch the delivery. It was the best of a bad situation and for just over two hours it worked great and labor continued well...aside from having to get stuck twice for the epidural-that sucked and I'm still having some back pain from it.

(for those of you who are opposed to epidurals in general, I totally understand and if it weren't for the fact that without it, I could've died because my heart isn't strong enough to handle the stress of labor, I might have wanted to go the o'natural route so let's keep the preaching about natural childbirth to a minimum)

Anyway, as I reached a 10 and started to push...we lost signal. Yup. So as my OB was telling me that the umbilical cord was going to be around my daughter's neck and I needed to focus and push, I was yelling at my mom to reconnect and press the "video" button. Nothing was working so as much as it frustrated my OB, I stopped pushing, turned and clicked the button myself. I couldn't focus on her without him. I pushed one more time and just as the video was coming back on, she came out.

I cut the cord and she got an 8/9 on the apgar scale. Once the stress of pushing was done and she was safe, the stress of it all overwhelmed me. I started crying hard...something I never do in front of anyone. My OB was concerned I was crying because I was in pain but after a moment to get control of myself, I was able to tell her it wasn't painful. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the drama. I had torn internally and my OB wasn't able to close it with stitches. Every time she tried, it tore more and I bled more so she left it to "ooze" and hopefully close itself. It did but it took a day and a half so they ended up keeping me an extra night. I opted not to get a blood transfusion because although I'm sure it would have been helpful at least in the shorterm but longterm there are much more serious problems it could bring and I had confidence that my body would heal itself with enough time.

Healing has come slowly...at least more slowly that with the boy. It feels like I'm just now starting to get my body back. Although, motrin is still a necessity. It's been nice to have my mom and friends around off and on. I've only had a few days alone with both kids and this week I'll have 3 more days alone and then I'm loading up the kids, the dog and half of our house to visit Grandma's because we'll have family in town that we haven't seen in months. It should be fun but it's also the "tax-free" weekend so shopping is most likely going to wear me out more than the kids which at this point says a lot.

The things I seem to be relearning about newborns or at least my newborn could fill volumes but in a nutshell...

*nursing is awesome for losing weight but not so pleasant on nipples
*losing 30 lbs in 11 days is rough (don't roll your eyes...it's exhausting)
*my daughter doesn't sleep or stay awake in a happy place unless she's held
*changing poopy diapers 10-12 times a day sucks
*nursing = purposely allowing pregnancy hormones to rage through your body
*having a 3 yr old who adores his newborn sister makes life much easier
*you do what you have to...ei pacifiers are not the enemy
*I have little to no patience for whiny parents who have their spouse in the same country

Well, the boy is waking up and the girl is hungry so although I'd love to wrap up this post in a nice, neat way, there's nothing about my life that's nice or neat right now.

Our Princess

I am home from the hospital...our princess was born on Monday at 1:05 in the afternoon. There were a few complications but everything worked out great. I'll write a more complete post with details of the complications probably tomorrow but for now, the important things...

Joshua was able to skype in and see the delivery

The Princess is perfectly healthy

I'm recovering well

She's adorable...see for yourself...

T minus...???

Well...without giving gross details, all indications point to me going into labor sometime in the next couple of days. I've got the laptop and camera charged, bags packed and thankfully Joshua is no longer under a security black out (btw, that was not fun). In fact, our little princess seems to be an Army kid already. The black out lifted this morning (my time) and while chatting with Joshua, "things" began happening. Now, it's just a hurry up and wait (again, can you say Army kid) for the contractions to pick up. So if I'm MIA of a while, just assume I'll be back with tons of pics.

It's a surreal feeling knowing we're going to have two kids in a matter of days...possibly hours...hopefully days-days would work better for Grandma's schedule. I'm heartbroken Joshua is so far away but I know that even with him deployed, she's the luckiest little girl to have him for a Father. He's the kind of Dad that every little girl deserves...the kind of Dad I would have done anything to have myself...the kind of Dad every man should be.