MIA

My goal is to blog AT LEAST once a week. Saturday may be the last day of the week, but it keeps my goal. Phew. 

It has been pretty crazy up in here as of late. Not a lot of spare time and a lot of this:

This poor boy has been teething for what feels like years but in reality has been a week, maybe two. We can usually tell when he's teething because he starts waking up at 5:30 a.m., then comes the drool and the not wanting to eat. We knew he was teething but then things got serious last weekend (and a day or two before the weekend). He came down with a really bad fever and was so cranky, like the crankiest I think I've ever seen him. We had about three nights where none of us got much sleep. It was pretty awful. I felt so bad for him. He just seemed so miserable and nothing seemed to give him the relief he needed. The teething rings seemed to help a bit...

And sleeping in our bed, or in our arms on the couch or bed or rocking chair or wherever we could get him to fall back asleep and stop crying. 

By Sunday he seemed to be a little bit better so we went ahead and brought him to church, which means leaving at 6 a.m. so that Darin can get to his morning meetings. We knew he was sleep deprived so we brought the pack n' play just in case. Good thing we did because by 9:30 a.m. (half-way in to Sacrament Meeting) he was dying. Darin found a room that no one uses, set up the pack n' play and he was OUT. Darin sat outside the room and listened to the meeting from the foyer microphone. I took over guard duty during Sunday School. We had planned to wake him up at 11 a.m. if he wasn't up yet since we were both teaching lessons in YW's and EQ's, but I really wanted him to sleep as long as he could so I put this little sign on the door and taught YW's in the room right next to him so that I could hear him if he woke up.

The end of church came and he was STILL asleep.  We just let him keep going while Darin took care of tithing and other things. At 12:45 p.m. when Darin was done we went in and woke him up. He slept for over three hours! Poor boy, he was SO tired. I'm so glad that Darin thought to bring the pack n' play because there is no way he would have slept like that in one of our arms.

Of course the downside to Shae sleeping all morning was that he wasn't going to sleep in the afternoon. Darin and I were dying for sleep as well after the terrible nights sleep and waking up at 5:15 a.m. to get ready for church. Thankfully, Shae was still out of it enough to just lay on me and watch Phantom of the Opera while I snoozed. Needless to say, we put Shae to bed at 6:30 p.m. that evening and Darin and I were out on the couch by 7 p.m. We moved up to the bed around 9 p.m. We haven't felt that exhausted in a long time.

On top of the fever/crying/teething...what made all of this really hard was work. Both Darin and I have been insanely busy with work over the past week and a half, which made the lack of sleep that much harder to handle. 

Darin's big survey goes out next week. Last week he averaged about 12 hour days in the office and then came home and kept working till about 12 a.m./1 a.m. while trying to help calm Shae as much as possible. The end of the month always gets busy with my editing so I had more work last week and this week than I have the rest of the month. On top of that, the Spanish country partner that Darin works with told them last week that she wouldn't be able to do their translation of the survey. They asked me to do it which was really awesome and I was super excited about it...and then the fever came. It's a really long survey (108 questions with multiple responses for each question) so I've been staying up late working on that in between cuddling with my baby.

Bottom line, it's been bizzz-eeee. We left on Tuesday of this week to drop Darin off in D.C. for a conference where he has been busy doing conference stuff PLUS survey stuff.  Shae and I came up to PA where I've been able to get quite a bit more accomplished with others to entertain Shae (who is feeling SO much better and now has four pointy little canines to call his own). 

Darin is now with us and we're hoping we can put the work aside for a few hours to enjoy Labor Day weekend before going home on Monday and finishing off this survey for good (thank goodness!).