One thing about having a second, tiny, wriggling infant inhabiting our house once again, is being re-introduced to all the chores and routines I strangely had forgotten all about a mere 20 months ago when our first infant came along.
In the case of this second infant, unfortunately, there's the added bonus of our daughter spitting up copious amounts of breast milk multiple times every day. With our first child, there was only minor spit-up issues. Our preemie daughter, however, comes equipped with an easily irritated stomach and a hair-trigger reflux action. The combination results in our daughter spewing mom juice all the time, often violently, as if she's auditioning for an infant remake version of "The Exorcist."
Obviously, such repeated milk hurbling is a concern just from the standpoint of worrying whether our daughter is getting enough nourishment to stay down. But, also, it leads to a truly staggering amount of laundry, because each time our daughter expels a hork-load of mammary mix, it doesn't just disappear into mid-air. If ONLY.
No, it goes EVERYWHERE. And it doesn't discriminate against clothing, either. My clothes; my wife's clothes; our daughter's clothes; heck, even occasionally our son's clothes--it's all fair game so long as it's within an acceptable hurbling distance, and you'd be amazed at how far a six pound baby can eject a stream of milk.
And so the laundry just piles up day in and day out, all day long. I'll actually be in the act of putting laundry into the washing machine, and freshly en-hurbled clothes will continually rain down through the clothes chute just inches away from me. I simply can't keep ahead of it. It's the laundry equivalent of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill. I get SO CLOSE, and then another fresh batch comes cascading down.
"Oh, Ryan," you say. "It can't be that bad. Just let it sit for awhile."
To which I respond: "You shut your fool mouth!!"
Believe me, I once allowed a mound of milk-moistened laundry sit a bit too long, and I became keenly aware of my error when I walked by the fermenting pile and was taken aback by the pungent odor of whatever kind of cheese I had unwittingly begun creating through my laundry inaction.
Never. Again.
And so we push through each and every day, waiting for our daughter's internal plumbing to adequately develop so she can keep more milk down and digested, at which point our focus will no doubt shift back to the wonderful world of diapers.
Kids. They're just gross.
Tempers are short in the Rhodes household as of late. I should amend that statement, because the toddler and infant seem to be in fair spirits. Rather, tempers are short between my wife and me. Honestly, the slightest of slights can set us off.
Such is the price we pay for severely limited access to sleep and the silver-winged dreams granted to those enjoying REM land. Souls without access to REM land are a surly lot who are best to be avoided.
Currently, my wife and I are best to be avoided.
Even with one child, sleep is a precious commodity on par with gold or platinum. With a fresh infant now on board the good ship Rhodes, sleep has become an even more unfamiliar territory.
The problem lies primarily with our daughter's stubborn insistence that she only has to drink a maximum of 15 mL per feeding. When she was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), nurses hooked her up to an automatic syringe that injected 50 mL through her nose and into her stomach, after which Zoey was good for two to three hours until the next feeding.
Once the nose tube was removed and she actually had to work come feeding time, Zoey took a sort of "Meh" approach to the whole idea. It makes sense, after all; if I'd lived most of my life with my stomach magically filling up every three hours, I'd consider it rather annoying to have to suddenly learn how to pick up a fork and ingest food manually. Come to think of it, a nasal feeding tube sounds kind of good right about now.
Anyway, if you do the math, Zoey's milk intake is a little over 1/4 of what she should be taking in per feeding, which similarly impacts her sleep schedule because, even though she's content with 15 mL feedings, her stomach has other ideas and insists on a constant string of feedings to make up for the diminished volume.
Therefore, if you calculate a 50 mL feeding buys a three hour sleep window, you'll correctly deduce a 15 mL feeding buys about 40 minutes, which doesn't take into account the time required to actually administer the 15 mL, which can take anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes, depending on Zoey's attitude. As you might imagine, Zoey's attitude after only about 20 minutes of sleep is typically pretty poor. So, we're basically going through a kind of hellish, sleepless loop.
And, man or man, do my wife and I have short tempers. Our tempers are so short, Vern Troyer towers over them. We'll snap at each other about ANYTHING. Currently, my best temper snap regarded how my wife burnt cookies one time, while she snapped at me once by doing a spot-on impression of me eating Raisin Bran cereal--after seeing it, even I had to admit it's pretty annoying.
So, until my wife and I are actually able to hunker down and get some serious sleep, I want to apologize preemptively to any of you readers out there who may encounter us during the next few weeks. We're really not as awful as we seem.
You jerks.
