Notice how Asher has transfered most of his behaviors from Third Pooh to Fluffy Bear, whom he picked out at Target two days after he left Third Pooh on the plane.
We are packing up the family to head out to my graduation in Pasadena. Flying with the family is definitely running the gantlet. We keep surviving it, but It makes me anxious.
Sleep deprivation affects me dramatically. Tracy can function remarkably well with two hours of sleep when she is on call. In contrast, when I am sleep deprived I can't perform simple tasks. I got up this morning and tried to focus my attention on drinking the cold coffee I made yesterday so I could turn on my brain. It took me about 10 minutes to find a cup, mix in the cream and equal and start to drink it. In my defense I was simultaneously working on the heroic task of making toast for Asher.
When Tracy came downstairs from her shower I had successfully cajoled Asher into putting most of his clothes on (he wouldn't put his shoes on because he didn't want to stop wearing his fire boots) and I was finishing up Indy's clothes.
Tracy asked, "Have you fed Indy?"
Me, "[mumble mumble] uh... no."
Tracy walks up to the sink and holds up the empty formula container, "Did you throw it out?"
"No," I said, puzzled. I sat frowning at Indy for a few seconds. I must have fed you. A murky image of sitting at the table with her G-Tube comes to my mind. Was that today, I wondered, baffled?
After another hour of being awake I can now fairly clearly recall feeding Indy. Some mornings I feel as if I've had a stroke, as if really helpful portions of my brain are completely unavailable to me. Coffee, apparently, is capable of kicking these areas back online. Useful. Creepy, but useful.
Tracy has been back to work for two weeks now. This week she is on service, so she is working every day. We keeping figuring this out one day at a time. It is fun having a newborn. The other three are very interested in Miles. Sleep is a challenge. I either stay up with him until 2, or I get up the first time he needs to eat. Tracy is usually up with him by 5:30. We sleep in the afternoons when Sam comes.
Miles is most often asleep. I can usually keep him in the bjorn when I need to get things done. He usually doesn't hinder the daily logistics of getting kids dressed, making meals and putting kids to bed, unless he's upset. Then he takes an adult out of commission for a while. If there is only one adult, everything else gets set aside.
Asher, Liam and Indy have become very interested in helping when I cook. They get things for me, take things to the trash, and I hand them things and they put them on the counter or the table. I let them open cans and stir things. They all get pretty excited about this and it occupies them so they aren't otherwise acting out and pulling me away from cooking.
TV is a fixed part of our day. We didn't let any of our kids watch TV before they were two years old. Now that they're all two, they often watch one or two Tivo'd shows in the morning and two more in the afternoons after nap time. Fixed blocks of time with all three kids attending to something are very useful in keeping up with our four under five.
As to going places, Miles is content in the car more often than he is not. We still have a variety of morning activities. The other adult helpers are still very significant. Tracy, Martha and Ivy's mom Colleen do a lot of the morning transportation and add outings for the kids.
Parenting, for us, is an extemporaneous activity. We make each day up as we go. For the most part, we have been successful in surfing our family chaos.
I do a lot of shopping online. It is by far my preferred means of buying things we don't get on our regular grocery trips to Costco and Supertarget. For a while now, I have been concerned that it was more energy intensive to have UPS trucks driving individual products up to our door. I decided to check it out this afternoon, and it turns out, it uses 35% less energy to buy it online than it does to buy it at a store. Here is the report from Carnegie Mellon:
A new study out of Carnegie Mellon University finds that shopping online instead of going to a retail store cuts CO2 emissions. The research, performed by the university's Green Design Institute, found that shopping online via comparison shopping site Buy.com uses 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than what is produced in the traditional retail shopping model....
The three largest contributors to energy consumption and CO2 emissions include customer transport for traditional retail, packaging, and last mile delivery to customer homes for e-commerce. Approximately 65 percent of total emissions generated by the traditional retail model stemmed from the customer getting to and from the retail store. For e-commerce, packaging and last mile delivery were responsible for approximately 22 percent and 32 percent of the ecommerce energy usage, respectively.
