party of five

Holy crap! Where to begin on updates???

First, we are now a party of five. Brayden Matthew Martinez was born on 9/26 at 8:02am, weighing 7 lbs 10 ounces. It was a great delivery. I'm not sure if I ever shared my very intense anxiety about my last C-section but to sum up - it was one of the worst experiences of my life. This one, though, was VERY different. The anesthesiologist was amazing and made all the difference. She asked me about my previous experiences and what I would change. I told her about my high anxiety and she said she would do anything possible to make it a better experience. During the whole thing she told me exactly what was going on and kept me distracted enough from my own thoughts. I told Vincent to talk to me to keep me distracted too. His distraction talk? He told me he was going to clean the house. Then he told me he was going to clean the carpets with the carpet cleaner. Sad, but it actually made me happy and kept me distracted for about 2 minutes while I envisioned my house completely clean. After becoming huge and EXTREMELY uncomfortable these last few months- lots of things were not being done. One being the upkeep of once daily/weekly chores- like vacuuming, cleaning the carpets, making sure laundry was put in the right place (i.e. making sure my husband put away clothes correctly). It was sad how embarrassed I was of our home. And of course everyone came to visit right after the baby was born and Vincent had had no time to clean. Darn.

Anyway, back to the operating room. Anesthesiologist was amazing and so the delivery was very low anxiety. I had my tubes tied because there is no way we can ever do this again. I have 3 children- all under the age of 4. I am a retard. Tristan has really blossomed and been great. He loves his big brother role and takes it very seriously. Caleb, on the other hand, is seriously becoming a very real candidate for temporary foster care. He has entered his terrible twos (great timing, bud!) and it's even worse than Tristan's. He touches everything we tell him not to and he everything is followed by a "No!" from him. We had the worst first week together as a family of five because I put off making Tristan and Caleb sleep together until the baby came. That's because every time I tried to make them sleep together in the same room, Caleb would play for hours. I am not exaggerating- hours. He would be up till 11 or 12 until I would give up and throw him back in his room/ Brayden's new room. I spanked him so much my hand hurt. He was being so bad that I would spank him and then he would blatantly disobey right after I spanked him so I would come back to spank him again. He would see me and then take his hand and spank his chunky thigh himself- as to say "See? That doesn't hurt me. I dare you to do it again". Vincent and I didn't know what to do. Avoiding the issue of them sleeping in the same room seemed best. So when it finally happened, we had no back up solutions. Caleb was literally staying up till midnight the first week. Then, one night after Caleb kept turning off the TV that Tristan was trying to watch, I took Tristan out of the room and put him in our room to watch his 30 minutes of TV. I left Caleb in the room by himself with no lights or TV and he fell asleep within 10 minutes. So, that's where we're at. We put Caleb to bed 30 minutes before Tristan and he falls asleep no problem. I think Caleb just gets too distracted with anyone in the room with him. That's fair. At least we know now.

Brayden is sleeping 5 hours at a time right now and it's been good because Vincent has been home this whole time. This Monday Vincent goes back to work and I'm scared because it's on me. Plus I have 3 doctor's appointments to go to next week and it's really hard to go anywhere with a baby- yikes!

Alright well now I'm exhausted and I'm up for the next shift for Brayden. I'll try to update again soon.