Crisis averted?
I felt tense this afternoon. I got to lie down for a while, then I made dinner, which was exhausting. Then I could tell that Mark was getting a little frustrated and tired — he’d been with Amy most of the day, and was trying to watch the playoffs, and she kept not sleeping much, or losing her pacifier and then wanting it again (she sucks on her hands now a little, but that kind of sucking is different than what she needs to do to keep a pacifier in her mouth)…
I started to get anxious. But… I sat by her bouncy seat to eat my dinner and talk to her and keep replacing the pacifier, and then when she cried harder I decided to try changing her diaper. I had to sit and watch her lie on the changing table for a while, because I was distressed and crying. Fortunately she was enjoying her mobile and activity caterpillar.
Somehow I stopped crying, finished my dinner, finished changing Amy, sat with her here at the computer while I read blogs, and finally put her in her swing, where she fell asleep.
And here I am, dry-eyed. And Mark feels better for having had a break from her, even though he had to do the dishes.
Of course it’s only 7:40; hence the question mark. I don’t mean to minimize these positives, I just want to emphasize how much they cost and how small they are in comparison to the darkness.
——
Edited to add:
My night was fine. I retreated early in hopes of heading off the anxiety attacks that seem to be most likely in the later evening, and it worked. On the other hand I woke up at 2:00 and every two hours after that, but so far I feel okay this morning.
Mark and Amy had a difficult early night; we talked about it this morning and decided that maybe it’s best to just accept that Amy will not really go down to sleep until around 10:30 or 11:00 and that it might be easier on Mark not to try to make it happen before that, but to just try to keep them both fairly comfortable until then. We also agreed that it would probably have been worse if I had stayed up — my early retreat meant he only had to deal with his own and Amy’s stress and not mine. By the way, once she did go down, she slept about seven and a half hours.
