What I've Learned Two Weeks Post Birth...

Raising a toddler and a newborn is TOUGH WORK! I thought it'd be a piece of cake. Seriously, I did. I was all like, "Psh...I can do this. I did it before!" Umm..Yeah, I did it before, with a 5 year old who went to Kindergarten all day and a newborn. I was home with Claire, and Ethan went to school. If Claire needed a nap and I was feeling a little tired myself, all I had to do was go into the bedroom and lie down with her and we could take a little snooze. I didn't have to worry about much but being awake when Ethan stepped off the school bus and through the front door. Now, what do I have to contend with? Well, here's a list of what's happened in the past two weeks..

-Claire, in her need to be close to Grayson during diaper changes, was showered the other day when Grayson sprung a leak. She was mad, and stole the baby wipes, which resulted in Grayson pooing on the blanket I was changing him on, and also on me. Awesome.

-Claire got mad that I was feeding Grayson and couldn't get up to get her more animal crackers, so she threw her snack bowl at my head.

-Claire, Grayson and I took our first trip out alone to do some grocery shopping since my two week healing period ended on Saturday. I had planned to use my hotsling, but since I've only been using it around the house, I wasn't comfortable taking it out to the store yet. I had to put the car seat in the cart and drag it by the side, hold Claire's hand and pray that Grayson didn't wake up and want to eat. I had pumped milk that I had pumped the night before and that morning for this excursion in the cooler pack in the diaper bag, but that would have made my trip that much more challenging trying to feed him, hold onto her and get the cart out of the way. Double awesome.

-Claire likes to cuddle and watch Sesame Street. She threw a full out tantrum when I had to put her down to feed Grayson this morning during Elmo's World. Video games were thrown off the media shelf, legs were flailed, sippy cups were thrown and screams were uttered to break the non-silence, because Grayson was already giving out his hungry cry. That lasted a good 10 minutes. Exciting, isn't it?

Also, our trip to Target for pictures of the kids? My oh my was that fun. Grayson cried, the entire time. Ethan decided to get silly. He kept falling over and acting goofy and the photographer couldn't get a good picture of him. Claire didn't want anything to do with the photographer taking her picture..At all. Guess what though? As soon as the pictures were done being taken, Claire wanted the photographer to pick her up and hold her, and refused to let her put her down. Yeah...I'm totally serious. She became best friends with the photographer AFTER the pictures were done. It makes me think I need to take her in early to make friends before pictures next time, which is in 6 months for Grayson's six month pictures. Or, maybe by then, she'll be ok with photographers. So, of all the pictures taken, only 6-7 of them were good enough for me to purchase. I hope I got enough of them too..We have lots of people to send them to, and with all the post picture madness of Ethan running around the portrait studio, Trying to feed Grayson and Claire hugging our photorapher and also worrying we weren't going to make it to the H1N1 clinic on time, I couldn't think straight enough to decide how many and how big of each pose I wanted. I guess we'll see.