Crazy Week

Well, this has been a pretty insane couple of weeks at our house. Two Thursdays ago, one of Paul's coworkers and his wife and little girl came here from Texas to see her brother graduate from college. While they were in town they came by our house to visit for the afternoon. Their daughter just turned two and is a little cutie. My kids loved playing with her. We had fun time visiting with Peter and Katie too.

After they left, I had to start getting ready for a visit from my in-laws. As you can imagine having your mother-in-law to visit usually inspires a woman to clean as much as she can of her house and when her MIL is going to actually sleep at her house, well, that inspires a whole new level of cleaning. Unfortunately, with a baby in the house, I couldn't do quite as much as I wanted but I did as much as I could and thankfully my MIL isn't a big stickler on cleanliness. They arrived on Thursday and we spent the time they were here until Tuesday visiting and eating out.

The day of the most chaos for us was Saturday. We took the in-laws over to the Children's Museum in Indy. We were there for close to five hours. Turns out, five hours of walking around a museum, even a fun one just for kids, turns those kids into terrors. During the last hour, Jake had a couple of breakdowns, one major, that involved screaming at the top of his lungs. Even Tyler had a hard time. He had to be carried the whole day in our baby carrier because we didn't have room in our car for a stroller and all of us. By supper time when we went to the Cheesecake Factory for supper, he was at his wits end. I had to take him out of the restaurant and walk up and down in front of it to get him to calm down and go to sleep. I was finally able to go back in and eat some of my supper, which was a club sandwich that was messy enough to drop lettuce all over Tyler, who I was still holding so he would stay asleep. I finally gave that up just to keep from turning my son into a salad. I did get to eat some yummy cheesecake though (chocolate raspberry truffle). When we got done I realized that Tyler's diaper had leaked (maybe I should have checked that when he first started crying, huh? Hey, I was tired to, OK?) so I took him to the bathroom there and changed his clothes. This, of course, started the crying again. I managed to calm him down enough for us to get in the car and start for home, but not long in to the trip, he started crying again and this time he didn't stop until I got him home and started feeding him. He is usually a pretty good traveler, at the most if he cries in the car, he stops when we are moving and especially when we get on a stretch of road with no traffic lights or stop signs. But the day had just been too much for him and this time, even being on the interstate didn't settle him down. But once we got home and I got a bottle in him, he calmed down and thankfully slept normally that night. Jake also settled down, especially after a brief nap on the way to eat supper. And he slept really well that night too.

On Sunday, we had another big day because right after church, Riley was baptized! We were so excited about that and so thankful for her salvation too! She was pretty excited about the baptism too, especially since it was done in the lap pool at the recreation center where we rent a room to meet for church. After church we took Paul's parents out for lunch to the Irish restaurant in our mall as our Father's Day present to my FIL. When we got home, Riley decided that she wanted Paul to take the training wheels off her bike and teach her to ride it. Now this isn't the first time she's requested this. Last fall when the weather was still nice, she did the same thing but wasn't overly cooperative with learning once they were off and in the end, she asked Paul to put them back on. This time though, I planned to tell her that we weren't going to put the training wheels back on once they were off. She loves to ride her scooter and watching her do that, I can tell she knows how to balance so I knew that it would just take some practice on the bike to learn to balance on it too. The training wheels had pretty much become a crutch for her and weren't really training her to do anything except pedal and brake. Those are good things too but I felt like she had gotten as much out of the training wheels as she was going to get. So Paul took them off and they went to the jogging trail that runs just behind our house and started working on it. Now I'll be honest and say I expected her to either eventually quit and want the training wheels back on or at least get tired of practicing and want to be done for the day. Imagine my surprise when I go out there later and see Paul jogging along next to her occasionally putting his arm around to balance her one way or the other as she rode her bike by herself! By the end of the day, she was riding up and down the trail completely alone, braking and getting herself going again like she'd been riding bikes all along! Needless to say, we were so proud of her.

After such an eventful weekend, Monday was fairly calm, with a huge tantrum from Jake at Chuck E. Cheese thrown in there to liven things up a little. My in-laws went home this morning. We enjoyed their visit but I am glad to get things back to normal again. I think part of all the crying and fits that went on while they were here (at least on Jake's part) was because Riley slept on the floor in Jake's room, which meant neither one of them slept as well as they normally do. I had to keep Riley up later than normal too in order to wait and make sure Jake was asleep before she went in to bed. If I let them both go to bed at the same time, there was more playing, squealing and jumping on the bed than there was sleeping going on.

So now that their visit is over I'll be working to establish a routine with the kids for the summer now that Riley is done with school. And if Tyler would start sleeping through the night, that wouldn't hurt my feelings one little bit. He's doing well with sleeping. I'm no longer up rocking him for an hour after his late evening or middle of the night bottle, so that's nice. I'm not loving the fact that he seems to want to wake up sometime around 5 in the morning needing his pacifier and sometimes not settling down until I hold him. He usually eats during the night sometime between 3 and 4 so he's not hungry when he wakes up. And he actually is still tired since he'll sleep on me for pretty much as long as I let him if I pick him up at that time. I try to make him stay in his bed until 6 though, even if that means me standing in his room continually giving his pacifier back to him when he knocks it out of his mouth. I've had at least a couple of days in the last week where he's woken up at 5 needing the pacifier and then not settling down until I pick him up and take him downstairs. Which translates into me getting up for the day at 5am. But, I know, I know, this too shall pass. Probably (hopefully, prayerfully) he'll be sleeping through the night till at least 6 by the time school starts again.