Baby Blues

The fundraiser is over- hooray!

More on that later, but first....

I babysat my 7 month old niece, Jolie, last night after Jeremiah's fundraiser. I wanted to give her parents (my brother) some relaxing time without her for a change. It was her first time being with a babysitter ever. It made sense to me to do it last night bc we would already be seeing them for Jeremiah's fundraiser and then it would be night time and she'd go to bed eventually, right? And then we'd have the morning to play and they were supposed to pick her up before I had to work on Sunday. Easy Peasy.

Well.

We took her home in our car and Jillian read to her the entire way. No problem. Then I took her out of my car and she looked around for her parents. Didn't see them of course, bc they were gone (it was 7:30pm) and not returning until 2:30pm the next day! But she started to scream. Not cry. Scream. and there was nothing that me, or Jeremiah, or my friends Julie and Heather could think of to calm her down.

Between the four of us, we managed to get the cars unpacked and put my kids to bed while someone tried to calm Jolie. But she still cried. And screamed. And twisted. And there was nothing that gum medicine or tylenol or burping or feeding or dancing or bouncing or rocking could do.

She cried herself to sleep around 9:30pm and then woke up again around 11:30pm, screaming. At 12:30 when I couldn't get her back to sleep and the screaming woke Jillian (who ended up throwing up all over the floor for some reason and had to be babied back to bed), I gave in and called Jolie's parents to come get her.

They were just driving home from a concert that they had gone to for their night out. So at least they got that part. They were up by Frederick and then made crazy wrong turns to finally get to my house at 2am. Jolie stopped crying and was all smiles and happiness and joyfully kicking her feet to see her parents. Dang that separation anxiety. I usually don't get to experience it bc I'm the one away from the crying baby, you know?

At first, I thought I'd enjoy having a baby around again. I forgot that having your own baby is very different (and while they're young, a lot easier...) than babysitting. Babysitting a baby sucks bc nothing but mama will do!

So then I was miserable and wishing I hadn't volunteered to do this and I should have known better and I was so tired after the day of the fundraiser. I had late night panics about having another kid. Because sometimes it's like this, even with your own kid. Some nights are just awful. Do I really want to do this again?

But then seeing Jolie as a happy baby again and seeing the power of parents, I know that our family is not done. We really should have another kid. And we'll find a way to do it bc that's what we do. We do things that are hard. And we get through it.