Figuring it out...

So I've officially been back to work for one whole week, this being the start of my second.  Tonight I was able to come home, spend some love time with our sweet girl, eat dinner, bathe the baby, listen to a bedtime story, put the baby to sleep, prep the overnight bottles, grade two assignments for school, and update this blog.  Now that is a damn productive evening if I do say so myself.

We've been working on building an evening routine.  Annabelle usually has a bottle between 6 and 7, depending on how her day went.  Today marks exactly a week that we've worked to take a bath after that bottle, read a story, quietly rock in a mama's arms, then lay down. Every night, she has spent an hour or more griping and whining, spitting out her pacifier and hollering until one of us would come and plug her back up.  Until tonight.  After our bath, Mama Shanni read us Children Make Terrible Pets.  Then I laid her in her bassinette all swaddled up and she hasn't made a peep.  That was at 7:40.  It's now 8:10.  Hooray!

Shannon is still off this week, and I believe that is making this back-to-work transition easier for me.  But it's still not easy;  I miss Annie and being home with her every single second of the work day.  And as soon as I get home, exhausted though I am, I just want to soak up every single moment with her.  I even get up to do the early morning 3am-ish feeding, not because Shannon won't do it, but because I want those extra minutes to hold her and hear her and look at her precious face. I'm figuring out how to live with less sleep, how to handle this incredibly difficult working mom stuff, how to adjust our household routines. How to love my family *this* much.