Megz' Musings: A New Year and back to reality

Memory is a funny thing.

Peter thinks Victoria cries a lot more than Kathleen ever did. I think she cries less.

In my memory, Kathleen did nothing but cry all day long, and we spent night after night rocking her back and forth in her pram to get her to sleep, taking turns rocking while the other one cooked and ate dinner. The terms "Devil Baby" and "Daddy Walk" were not coined for nothing.

In Peter's memory, well I guess he's blanked it all out. He went to work during the day and only saw Kathleen in the evening, and only had a week off when she was born. With the summer holidays, Peter has been at home for 4 of Victoria's first 7 weeks and has seen a whole lot more of her than he ever did of Kathleen. Plus by default he has had to be a lot more hands on with Kathleen in the 4 weeks he's been at home, doing things with her so I can spend time with Victoria.

I bet he was glad to get back to work this week!!!

I, however, miss his help very much. It is exhausting looking after two little ones. It's not too bad when one is asleep, but when they're both awake ... well sibling rivalry has begun already. Kathleen is obviously used to having all the attention, so when my attention is diverted to Victoria, Kathleen will pester me over and over again for what she wants, she will start to get into things she's not supposed to, and when she doesn't get what she wants she will throw a tantrum. And if Victoria doesn't get enough attention, she will just scream and scream.

Admittedly I've only been at this for two days so I hope it won't always be like that.

Juggling the competing needs of two little ones is my biggest challenge right now (and just forget about getting the housework done or cooking dinner - even feeding myself is too difficult sometimes!). I've never been very good at multi-tasking. Kathleen needs to get out of the house and do things. Victoria needs to stay home and have a stable routine.

I'm looking forward to when the summer is over and Kat can go back to playgroup. She will also be starting at Plunket Creche for one morning a week once she turns 2.

Victoria is growing well. She now weighs just over 4kg. I haven't quite worked out her personality yet, but I expect she's going to be just as big a handful as Kathleen is, when she gets older. She's been through several different phases so far. The first few weeks she was very sleepy and would sleep anytime, anywhere, through any noise. That phase passed and then she went to the opposite extreme and wouldn't sleep and by evening would just scream for hours. Then we started working on teach her to self-settle in bed. It has been going ok and I have had more successes than failures (although once again Peter would disagree). But now we're into a new phase where she understands the bedtime routine but just doesn't want to go to bed and will scream and scream as soon as you even go into her room. I wonder what her next phase will be - sleeping peacefully for hours on end? Yeah right. ROTFLMAO.

Over the summer break we have been rearranging the house again. Victoria now has her own room, the room off the kitchen where Kathleen was sleeping. Kathleen has moved into the biggest room in the house and has lots of room for her toys and to play and even has her own couch for snuggling up on to read. Kat's room is the room which we were using as the study, and the study has now moved into the front room. We've got it set up like a proper office, with Peter and my desks facing each other in a cubicle style. There's even a computer just for Kathleen set up there as well.

We hope to now start looking into renovating/redecorating the house again soon.

And finally, because comparisons are inevitable, here are a few photos of Kathleen and Victoria ...