Feeling Understood

When we went to Vegas, we hired someone from my husband's workplace to babysit the kids. She is in her early 20's and is very good with kids and has watched our little ones for us before. We warned her in advance about the no-sleeping baby and she was still willing to do it.

I left her a few instruction pages on how to run things around here. One of the things I brought up was when to squeeze in a shower. In this house, squeezing in a shower can be a tricky thing. There is a small window in which to shower and if that window gets missed, the shower never happens.

I can't shower when the baby is napping because the other kids might wake him up without me right there breathing down their necks to keep them busily engaged in something in another part of the house. Often, if I try to shower while he's sleeping, I end up hearing screams and the pounding of feet on the floor, usually right past his doorway and then his screams a few seconds later all in my 15 minutes of showering right after getting him down for a nap. So I've learned that naptime is not good shower time.

It's hard to shower when he's awake too. I have to bring him in the room with me and shut and LOCK the bedroom door in order to keep the other kids from coming in and leaving the door open. You see, our bedroom is right at the top of the stairs so if the door gets left open, our little crawler can go right to the top of those stairs and since he doesn't quite understand how to go down backwards and doesn't quite understand the law of gravity, he could fall down the stairs during that unsupervised 15 minutes. So I bring him in the bathroom with me with the door locked and he will then pull himself up to standing against the shower door the entire time I'm in the shower and cry because he wants me to get out. Then, because he's standing there, leaning against the door, getting out is also a problem. I have to knock him down while opening the door and sort of push him out of the way just to get out of the shower, which, of course, only makes him cry more.

So really, the only time I can shower is when my husband is home and I have another pair of hands to either keep the kids quiet during the baby's nap or to keep the baby and other kids occupied while I shower. Since the baby-sitter was on her own, I recommended that she try and squeeze in a shower around 7:30 a.m., after the older kids were up and dressed, lunches made and breakfast eaten. Then she could leave the baby under the watchful eyes of the two older kids for 15 minutes (they are very good at keeping him entertained and keeping him off the stairs) while she took a quick shower.

She told me when I got back that she didn't really believe my little paragraph about the showering until Tuesday morning (the morning we flew out) when she quickly discovered that my description was quite accurate and squeezing in a shower was a difficult task.

I finally felt understood!