This post is for all the moms and dads I know out there (and for my friends without kids who can stomach this situation and laugh at my expense). It's also for those of you I don't know. Enjoy!
Oh, and there's no gross photos, just so you know. I'll just use this cute photo of Seoul...
For the last 2 nights, Seoul has been making me a bit nuts. Since she's now 3 weeks old, I'm guessing this is just a growth spurt since she's chunking up fast. Her little legs and arms are getting fatter as is her face and although I'm exhausted, I'm happy she's getting bigger and stronger. But this of course means that she's been waking up constantly in the night, wanting her milk boobs. Then needing to burp. And of course, pooping. Then she needs to go back to sleep which she loves to do during the day but now that Mommy is tired and her eyes are so dry and heavy they're practically glued shut, she wants to look at me and smile. It's a good thing she's smiling, because I'm ready to scream I'm so exhausted.
At some point in the night, Raelynn began crying in her room. Jeremy went and stayed in there to calm her down since I was busy nursing Seoul and we wanted to avoid having Raelynn in our bed with the baby. She tosses and turns and doesn't pay attention so I can't sleep when she comes in because I worry she'll accidentally smack Seoul. It's just easier this way. Plus, Jeremy's snoring sucks so maybe I'll get more sleep, I think. Wrong!
Seoul finishes eating and I go to put her back in the crib. Her eyes are shut and she's sleeping. Phew! Into the crib she goes and back into the bed crawls Mommy, who can almost taste the peacefulness of sleep.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Not 5 minutes later, Seoul has unswaddled herself like Houdini and is upset because she's at that fun newborn stage where she hasn't quite figured out that those are HER hands that are smacking her in the face. I swaddle her again. I rock her in my arms and then put her in the chair to rock her some more. And finally, she starts to drift off. I wait a few minutes and then move her back into the crib. And back to bed I go! Hooray!
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Oh fuck me. What is it now, Seoul? Ah, she's escaped from my blanket cocoon once more. And again, I repeat the whole sequence above. I do this 5 times before 2 hours have passed and now it's time to give her more milk boobies. I think I've slept about 15 minutes in total.
As I'm feeding her, she makes one of those epic splatter-poops that newborns do so well. It sounds just like what I'd imagine shit hitting the fan to sound like. I wait, as she keeps eating and I know from experience that she'll make more poop in a few minutes. And there it is...PLLLLTHIRRRRPPPPTHRRRTHRIIIIRRRRPPPPLLLLP! She begins crying now as anyone would who is trapped with an epic shit in their pants so I get up and proceed to change her.
I put down the changing mat and ready all the tools I need for this job - the wet wipes, a fresh diaper and baby powder. And now I begin the grueling task of changing a stinky disgusting poop-filled diaper at 3:30am. But suddenly, as I'm trying to slide the new diaper under the old one, something frightfully awful happens and because I'm running on a total of 4 hours sleep in a 48-hour period, I'm not sharp enough to catch on until it's too late.
Seoul rips a massive fart followed by a huge streaming squirt of poop that flies completely over the dirty diaper as well as the clean diaper and sprays my pajama bottoms and the floor by my feet. I hear screaming and realize it's me. How Jeremy and Raelynn didn't wake up and come running to see what was wrong is a mystery to me. Now there was poop all over the changing mat, poop on Seoul's blanket (though thankfully, none on our bed), and poop all over my fucking hands and clothes. I didn't even know what to begin cleaning up first. Seoul begins crying again because my noisy shrieks of terror are understandably frightening to her and I do my best to hurry and clean up the stinky situation before me.
Now I'm wide awake because I have effectively scrubbed everything in the vicinity of the pooping and although I've cleaned it all up and removed anything that needed washing, I still feel gross. I desperately want to sleep and now I'm nursing again. Ah, now she's done. I can go back to...oh, another poop. Noooooooooo! This time, I'm much luckier. No surprise attacks. But now she won't go to sleep, no matter what I do. I rock her in my arms. I rock her in the chair. I sing her songs. I have the white noise machine doing its' thing. WHY WON'T SHE SLEEP?!? AUGH!
And so, I repeat this endless cycle of insanity all through the night until some time in the early morning when my husband comes in to check on us and sees me hanging on by a thread rocking the baby's chair. This is probably what I get for laughing at him when Raelynn pooped in his hand when she was an infant and he was changing her diaper and for when the same thing happened when Seoul was about a week old. But he didn't laugh. Not then anyway (he, being a good husband, laughed at me later). He shooed me into the bed and took over rocking the baby so I could get some sleep. It wasn't much sleep thanks to Raelynn deciding that 7:30am was a super time to bang on her xylophone and causing MIL, who had come to take Raelynn to the park, to yell at her for making too much noise (which was counterproductive but hey, that's MIL for you), but as any sleepless parent can tell you, it was way better than nothing.
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