Late Nights and One Thing Per Day

It has been a while since I blogged - about two weeks, I believe... Yup, two weeks exactly (just looked it up). Being a full time mommy keeps me busy enough, but when you toss in job hunting (as yet unsuccessful, and rather frustrating, as nobody seems to want to tell you if a place decides to decline the opportunity to bring you on board, preferring to leave you hanging), and trying to maintain the house, and maybe even get it a bit cleaner, plus get some knitting done, and vainly hoping to find some time to write again... well, I imagine you can see where I'm going with all this. Seldom have I felt so busy, and still felt like I've been getting so little done. I need to get back to my system of aiming to get one thing on my list done, per day.

Yesterday's "one thing" was to go get the A/C in my car recharged - late last week, I ran out to get some dinner, and while it was a short trip, it wasn't so short that the A/C should have been still blowing hot air at me when I pulled back in the driveway. The place we take our cars for repair and most maintenance is in the same city as Arazyr's current place of employment, and KatyBeth and I were leaving, A/C recharged, shortly before noon, so I called Arazyr, and asked what he thought of the idea of us meeting him for lunch. He liked the idea, so away we went. (: Nothing fancy - just hit the food court at the mall, but we got to have lunch together, and then we went into the office with him for a little bit, so he could show off the baby girl. (: Everybody was properly appreciative, and had their lines memorized well - they all commented on how cute she is. (:

I actually ended up getting more than one thing done, yesterday - I also stopped by an office supply store, and got a few things, including a small CD carrier case, to house the photo CDs that are to be delivered to my sister (who lives out of state), by a relative of ours who is going to go visit her, soon, and some large heavy duty rubber bands. The rubber bands are an attempt to keep her out of some of the no-no's around the house. A couple of weeks ago, she got to the point of trying to pull stuff out of the coffee table in the living room. I bought some clear plastic bins with lids, to put some of the stuff in, so she couldn't isolate them, to put them in her mouth.... that worked for a couple of weeks. Last week, she managed to get the lid off of one of them. So, now they have the big, heavy duty rubber bands around them. Hopefully, that will keep her out of them, for a while longer. As I write this, she's pulling the bins out, and plucking at the rubber bands. The first container came out of the coffee table so abruptly that she fell backwards onto the pillow I parked behind her. It was mildly comical.

As for today... well, I got a few dishes loaded in the dishwasher - not sure if that counts as a whole "thing", or not, though frankly, managing to get a shower this morning felt like an accomplishment. Maybe I'll lay low, during the day, since it is online gaming night, and I'm going to have my hands full of baby, in the evening - Arazyr can't game, and juggle baby, too, while I can sometimes manage it. I think I got enough done yesterday to count for two days, anyway, especially when you consider I finished a sleeve of the sweater I'm knitting (accomplished while sitting up VERY late).

There's been a fair amount of being "up VERY late", the last few days. Sunday night was the worst, though. KatyBeth actually went down to sleep at a somewhat more reasonable hour than usual (midnight, instead of 2 am), and I tried to go to bed but I had an attack of insomnia, with a headache. Remembering that a gynecologist had actually told me I could safely take Tylenol PM, to help me sleep, late in my pregnancy, I decided that that would be a pretty good solution for the insomnia + headache that I was dealing with, and was not much of a risk, despite the "if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, ask a health professional, before use" warning on the bottle - that warning is even on bottles of VITAMIN C TABLETS, for Heaven's sake... So...I took two, and sat down to knit "for half an hour", until it kicked in. Nearly two hours later, my headache had subsided, but I still wasn't feeling like I could sleep, though I think I tried, anyway. Then, KB woke up and squeaked, so I went into her room, gave her back her pacifier, and then went to prep myself some warm milk, as she drifted back off. Now, I know lots of people that have an instant "EW!" reaction to the mere mention of warm milk, but during my pregnancy, when I was having trouble sleeping a lot, I discovered the secret - you have to sweeten it.

juujika's recipe for good warm milk:
8 oz of milk
1/2 T honey
1-3 drops of some sort of extract (vanilla, almond, coconut, whatever floats your boat)

Put the milk in a mug, add honey. Zap in microwave for about a minute. Stir. Add extract. Stir some more. It tastes a lot like hot chocolate in a flavor other than chocolate, if you can wrap your brain around that.

... so anyway, back to the narrative... drinking warm milk. Went to bed. Took a little while, which was frustrating, but finally, about half an hour later, I actually was feeling very sleepy and lethargic, and fell asleep. At approximately 4 am, KB wakes up squeaking again. Arazyr, having seen how frustrated I was, earlier, at not being able to get to sleep, went to tend to her. When he hadn't returned, within a few minutes, and I could still hear KB fussing, I went to see what was going on. She had apparently managed to throw her pacifier out of her crib, and we couldn't find it. I managed to locate a spare, but by then, she was too worked up to go right back to sleep. Arazyr, after trying for several minutes, brought her into our room... and promptly managed to severely aggravate the neck/shoulder pain he's been having of late, to the point where he could barely keep hold of her. So I got to take back over, now exhausted to the point of practically falling on my face, and running with less than 2 hours of sleep. I managed to get her settled down, mostly by nursing her. She fell asleep, and I was afraid to move her, lest I wake her up again (she needs a little time to "steep", before she can be transferred to her crib), so I rolled over... and started having a "fidgety attack" - the bed felt crowded, and I felt unable to lie still, even though I was dead tired. I get this fidgetiness from time to time - before KB was born, I'd often go into the guest room, where I could stretch out over an entire bed, and twitch and fidget until I could finally fall asleep. Well, the former guest room is now KB's room, and the futon sits in couch mode, instead of bed mode, because of space limitations. I ended up flopped on the carpet in the hall, with my pillow, for a while. Finally, I felt a bit less twitchy, I managed to get KB in her own room, and I finally managed to get to sleep. I have no recollection of what time it was, when that finally happened. Last night was less dramatic, but I was still up until at least 3:30 (KB went to sleep about 2 am). Ah, parenthood... what else causes a single blog entry to require 3 hours, to write...