sleepless nights, festival of lights, weekly count

So I know I shouldn’t complain. But I’m going to for just a second. I have been so blessed with good babies who have all 3 been consistently sleeping through the night since the end of July/beginning of August. I was questioning myself, because I continued to set an alarm and get up through the night to pump when they weren’t! (which made it an easy decision to stop when I did in October!) I think my body adjusted really well to getting broken sleep in hour and a half chunks, and I really didn’t feel so tired, which was great. But, now that I’ve enjoyed many nights with 8 or more uninterrupted hours of sleep, to go back to our old ways is TERRIBLE! We have had 4 bad nights in a row…3 caused by Zach (who I hope is teething b/c the poor baby was pathetic last night but no fever and nothing obviously wrong!) and one by Colby who was just hungry (surprise surprise!).



Here was my schedule last night:
10:00pm Colby asleep
11:00 Avery asleep
11-11:30 Zach screaming (administer Tylenol)
11:45 Zach asleep
11:45-12:15 make formula
12:30-1:30 sleep
1:30 wake up to zach screaming (josh gets him)
1:40 take zach from josh
1:40-2:30 Zach screaming
2:30 put zach in the cosleeper that’s still attached to our bed
3-6:30 sleep (not straight through though, zach woke up 2-3 times and if I held his hand, he’d fall back asleep)
6:30 Avery up (I think she was feeling left out of being up entirely too early the past few nights, so she got up to eat a little and fell right back to sleep)
7-7:45 sleep
7:45 Zach up (not screaming like he did last night, but not completely happy either) and drank a little bit of a bottle and fell back asleep
8-9:30 dozed in and out while holding zach
9:30 colby and avery awake for the day
for those of you that don’t like math…that’s less than 6 hours total of very broken sleep and after 3 other nights of bad sleep, I’M TIRED!!








Now onto the fun stuff!
Josh is on vacation (kind of) from work as of Sunday morning. He had to go in yesterday all day though for training, so we now get a good stretch of daddy time! On Monday night we took advantage of the 60 degree weather in December and went to the zoo for the Festival of Lights! There were a lot of other people that had the same idea as us too….it was VERY crowded. But for our purposes of just walking around and enjoying the night, the lights and a few animals, the crowd didn’t bother us much at all!

We started by seeing the elephants. There were 2 that were right up close and personal. We took turns getting the kids out of the seats to see the animals, so Avery got to get out to see them!

We were dorks and had to use the map to get around (I’m sure I’ll know it much better in the next year or two!) and figured out a loop to follow. We saw the giraffes,

some fish, went in the cat house, saw a sleeping polar bear, saw the monkeys,

and saw Santa's reindeer!

Colby took a nap the 2nd half of the night, so he missed his turn to get out and see the animals..maybe next time. Josh said he was a little disappointed that we saw the elephants first b/c they were right there and fun to watch, and then everything else was either hiding, sleeping or on the other side of the exhibit from where we were. But we had a really good time, we stayed warm and the babies were great! (except for in the car on the way home….the boys were REALLY loud)

We saw the gingerbread girl and boy too!

Yesterday, like I said before, josh had training all day, so it was just me and the babies in the afternoon. After their first nap, I made the peanut butter cookies with the Hershey kiss in the middle while they were playing in their bouncers and walk around. We read books and played some more after I was done, then they all took their evening nap at the same time. As soon as they were asleep I ran back to the kitchen and baked 4+ dozen of homemade oatmeal raisin cinnamon chip cookies! of course now I’ll have to eat them, and that isn’t the best, but the fact that I was able to make almost 8 dozen cookies when I was home by myself with 3 babies is empowering! Now today I have a little more shopping to catch up on and maybe a little wrapping and will get to enjoy a dinner tonight with the ‘ladies of oxford’! I think I’ve earned it! =)

And by special request….the totals for the week…

12 bottles a day=84 bottles a week (filled,emptied, hand washed, repeat)
15ish diapers a day=105ish diapers a week
6-7 jars (or the equivalent of) babyfood each day=right around 50 per week
4-5 loads of baby laundry each week (which means folding and putting away all that too!)
3 times a week run the dishwasher

Times we’ve seen Santa this year….3…Merry Christmas!!