Tonight’s post is reality check. I wrote this a couple days ago, but decided to hold off and sit on it given the “reality” of the content. If you like the fluffy “all is well at the Tille’s and you guys are doing a great job,” stop reading now and come back next time. This one is gonna be: Heath opens up a bit about what is really happening and running through our heads. I started this post on Sunday night, but finished on Monday.

So my daughter forced me to drink tonight (Sunday). Brooklyn just cried and cried and cried tonight; just screamed her damn head off. Her cry sounds unnatural when she’s like this. If you’ve heard her when she’s like this, you know what I’m talking about. She had been like this a week ago for several nights in a row, but it had gone away and we thought it was in the past. Brooklyn typically won’t calm down until she works herself up to the point of throwing up. Angela tried to comfort her for a while, but had enough with her. She handed her off to me and asked me to go away with her. There was a scary look in her eye when she told me to “just go.” I took Brook downstairs where I tried for a long time and eventually began to get upset myself. I put her down, and went to the other room for a beer. She cried for a long time, about an hour. Angela eventually came back, took over for me, and got her to sleep after screaming like a child possessed. I’ve only gone to the fridge like that one other time and it scares me a bit that it happened again.

Anyway, Brook and Angela are sleeping now and I felt the need to write. I’m not sure how this post is gonna go, but I have a few things that I want to write about. Angela and I have a difficult time sharing and dealing with our frustrations that we face on a daily basis. We handle our challenges in different ways. Writing is one of the ways that I deal with it. .

Angela and I have been pretty stressed with the kids in recent weeks so I called my parents, Oma and Opa, last week asking for help. We never want to overuse our volunteers so we rarely ask for extra help. Angela and I have been at each other a bit and the kids are really wearing on us. My dad took a few days off work and they made the way up on Thursday. Angela and I left the house on Friday night to run some errands. We also grabbed a quick bite to eat and went over how things are going at home. Saturday was a big day for us. We arranged to meet a new couple in town in Hudson at the GiggleFactory. This is a great place for kids like Meredith to run off some steam. Meredith met some new friends, Emma and Ella, and we’re hoping that they spend a little time together moving forward. They live down the street from us. On Saturday, Angela and I had our first date night in nearly a year. We had dinner at the West Wind, my favorite place in River Falls and we saw Avatar in 3D. Avatar is the best movie I’ve seen in years.

Sunday came around and we knew that my parents would be leaving. This is the time when Angela starts to look at the schedule and stresses out. She stresses about blanks on the schedule as much as, if not more than anything else in our lives. If you’ve ever been at our house and seen her in front of the computer, she’s looking at the schedule and panicking on the inside about how she’s gonna make it through the day. If you’re a reader of this blog and you’re a volunteer that comes to our home, I would like to make a request. If you know that you can and will volunteer for a spot, please let someone know as soon as possible, even if it’s two weeks in advance. We’re starting to see a trend in that sports don’t get filled in until the last minute. A variety of things happen when spots don’t fill in until the last minute. Angela freaks out on the inside all the time and Brenda has to start making phone calls. When both of those things happen, it starts to affect me and I have to start adjusting my work schedule. I did it just today. I booked an appointment later in the day instead of for a preferred 9 am knowing that we might not have anyone at the house to help Angela out. This is my plea for help…if you know someone who has any interest in helping; we want to meet them; even if it’s just for one shift. If you’re on our list of volunteers, but haven’t been here recently or at all, we’d love to have you back. It is worth its weight in gold to not have my wife worry about how she’s gonna make it through the day. If you’re a student and you read this, tell your friends and class mates. My only request is that new people talk with Brenda or one of us beforehand. We’ll still ask for the background check, and if someone isn’t willing to fill out one out for us, then we’ll deal with the volunteer shortage. I think everyone can and should understand where we’re coming from on that. Long story short is that we’re concerned about the schedule. Let me be clear as I finish this portion of the blog, this is not a request for those of you who help 4-8 times a week to do more. We can’t afford to burn you out! You know who you are…

Meredith is entering in to a new stage in her life. She’s throwing, hitting, talking back and just behaving poorly when she doesn’t get her way. She even bit Angela yesterday to get her attention (also another reason that we need to have enough so that Angela can focus on Meredith). Her behavior normally wouldn’t be that destructive if there weren’t 5 other very precious little ones lying around. I don’t subscribe that she isn’t getting enough attention and isn’t dealing with sharing attention with the other five. She’s attached to Angela’s hip every waking moment. She has “mommy-itis.” Tonight Meredith took a soft toy and wound up and swung it at Lauren, who was lying next to her on the floor. She really hit her hard, but Lauren didn’t cry. I saw it happening. It was one of those moments where you see it happen and you feel like it’s happening in slow motion, but you can’t do anything about it. I had Alex in my arms and I almost dropped him reacting to Meredith’s poor choice. Angela got to Meredith first and it was good for Meredith that she did. It wouldn’t have been pretty if I had gotten there first. I’m glad that Angela beat me to her. I don’t know that anything Angela said or did anything that will change or affect her behavior in the future, but I’m still glad she got there first.

Tonight (Monday) was another round of RSV shots for the kids. The kids all got weighed. They’re getting huge. Alex is still the largest at 16-14, followed by Brook at 16-2, Madeline at 16-1, Lauren at 15-4, and Emma at 13-15. They handled the shots pretty well.

Lastly, I want to take a moment to thank my parents for making the trip up to help us out and get us out of the house for a while this past weekend. We needed it. I also want to thank Laura Haskins. Laura took some wonderful pics of our kids over the Thanksgiving break and I’ll get them on the site somehow in the near future. There’s a couple hundred of them and every single one of them is awesome. Please keep your eyes open for future blogs.

I’m sorry for the reality check and downer of this blog post. We expected things to get like this. This blog has always been a vehicle for me to share how I’m feeling and deal with things instead of bottling them up and blowing up some day. I’m not asking for a bunch of “you’re doing great job and keep your chin up.” I’m just a bit frustrated and letting it out a bit.

In the grand scheme of things, we’re doing well. The kids are 7 months old this week. They’re all flourishing and we have a lot of really wonderful people that help us out. Thank you all so much for helping. We’d be in so much trouble with out all of you.

Until next time (and hopefully in a better mood)…

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 4:52 am and is filed under January. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.