A week of full-time parenting a toddler and a baby!

Today it was eerily quiet in the house, apart from baby S’s cries and coos… W was back with the childminder on her return from holiday….

It means that I’d had both boys home with me for over a week, on my own apart from the weekend when my OH was home…

I have no idea how stay-at-home-parents cope – I was utterly exhausted by the end of it!

I keep wanting to give the childminder a month’s notice to reduce W’s 4 days down to 2 or 3 but until baby S gives me more than a couple of hours sleep in the night, I just don’t think it’s fair on any of us!

• There were two days in a row where I left the house with them… without having showered.
• There was one day I left the house with baby poo on my jeans because a) we were in the ‘ready-to-go window’ and b) I didn’t have any other clean bottoms to wear!
• I think there was a total of an hour and a half all week where both of them were napping at the same time!
• As a cherry on top, W was being potty trained!

Of course, it was a wonderful week though and I managed to leave the house with them both every day…

• We walked to our local baby and toddler group twice, which involves W walking along a main road with me pushing the pram!
• We went to a local bloggers coffee morning for Macmillan at a play centre we hadn’t tried yet (Parc play) – W loved it!
• We went for a walk down Cardiff bay barrage where W saw sharks in the water (!), we saw a Roald Dahl-inspired crocodile, lots of ‘rock slides’ (don’t ask!) and a play in the sand park down there for the first time
• We met a friend for coffee and cake at Thornhill farm shop (stunning place/views but not quite enough in the play area/animal section to keep W entertained for more than an hour!)
• We went to Jump play centre for the second time in a week, this time for a Facebook group mums meet-up!
• On Friday, my OH finished work early and took them both for swimming lessons with Swimkidz… Both went well considering it was S’s first lesson and W’s first lesson in over a year (let’s not talk about the two poos he did whilst in the pool – very lucky that his swim nappy contained them!!)

It was fun but tiring. Neither got enough of my attention but I did my best, and was lucky that both were so well-behaved all week! Two overarching highlights remain…

• I did it, I bloody did it! I’d only had a handful of days with them both on my own before this, and was nervous about going out and both kicking off, or W running off etc… But it all went pretty smoothly and so it was great for my confidence!
• So lovely to have some extra time with W… He can articulate memories now eg the crocodile we saw, the animals we saw at the farm shop, so I love that we made some new memories together. It was lush seeing him spend a bit more time with S too, playing with him, chatting to him and generally helping out – bloody lush!

But now happy to hand him back to the childminder and spoil baby S a little bit more 🙂