oh my gosh y'all

If I had been more on the ball, or if I could have stopped the space-time continuum long enough to get a blog entry posted, you would've read several different posts from me, summarized as follows:

1. This having two kids thing isn't as hard as I thought! Babies are so easy! They just eat and sleep...
2. I think Maddox had his first growth spurt. I can't wait till his sleep patterns return to normal...
3. Oh my god make it stop! It's not a growth spurt! He just eats and eats DAY and NIGHT, day in, day out. I haven't slept more than 2 hours in a row for 2 weeks.
4. Wow man, check out the colors. Think of all the money I've saved on recreational drugs...

I kept thinking all I had to do was coax Maddox into the same 3 hour eat-play-sleep schedule Roan was on at his age. She was so regular I could set my watch by her. I kept scratching my head with Maddox, because I kept doing the same things, but he kept switching it up on me. And that was before his eating started to get crazy.

The first two weeks were admittedly pretty mild. But the last two weeks have been a trial by fire. The amount of time this child will spend nursing - and the quantities of milk he can consume in a single stretch - are absurdly mind boggling. It is not at all unusual for this child to nurse for the better part of two hours, suck down 4 ounces from a bottle, nurse again, and then wake up an hour and a half later to eat again! My body, mind, and soul have been pushed far past exhaustion trying to keep up.

[Editor's note: I think I may be living in a black comedy. Literally JUST as I was about to tell you about the great solution we think we've found to his long eat / short sleep cycles he WOKE UP a mere 30 minutes after the mega bottle we fed him, starving of course. Heaven help us!]

Our sweet little baby is already 14 pounds at one month old. And as sweet as he is - and he is such a sweet child - the poor thing is just plain hungry all the dang time. Yesterday we had some successful experiments feeding him a mixture of breastmilk with formula that includes rice cereal. After sucking down one of those, for the first time in weeks Maddox had this wide-eyed look of contentment before drifting off into a long nap.

You know it's bad when you feel like a new woman after getting a whopping 3 hours of sleep. But that is in fact where I'm at. Last night felt like a "gift" because he only woke up three times. Today instead of stumbling through the day in a stupor I actually got some things done - cooked a good dinner from scratch, did loads of laundry, even painted Roan's nails (two different shades of pink for the little princess) and made it to a playgroup.

But the truth is, we've been here before. Sometime back we thought we'd found the "answer:" Load him up on a breastmilk bottle right before bed. That got us a whole 4 hours of sleep one time. ONCE. And then he went back to waking up 30 minutes or an hour after each feeding. It's quite possible our latest solution won't have much staying power either. I guess we'll find out shortly.

If he would just let me get some sleep I might actually be able to get some photos posted!