Tired.

My mother and sister are leaving today, and although I've loved having them here it's been two and a half weeks of their constant company and I think we all need a break. I want to get to know our tiny little girl and we need some time to bond as a family. That is in short supply - in two weeks, my dad and my sister are coming out to help us move. My sister and I will take the baby and fly back to Michigan; my dad and Max will drive our car (with all 9 cats inside) across the country. It's the same drive Max and I made almost two years ago, in reverse. I don't envy them their journey. It is a long, hot, exhausting drive with animals who don't like to travel.

I am so tired. I can't sleep. I barely slept in the hospital because there was always someone coming in to check on me or check the baby or some monitor going off or noises outside. When I got home, I couldn't get comfortable. When we bought our bed, it seemed like a good idea to get the cool-looking (and more importantly, cheap) one that was only a foot and a half off the ground. Turns out having a bed at calf-height is something of a problem when they had to slice you open to get a baby out. My mother has been in the guest-room bed, which is at hip height and really too high for me to get in and out of comfortably. My sister is on the couch. I slept in 10-minute bursts in the hospital, sitting straight up because it was too painful to lay down. I could feel my stitches pulling every time I moved. At home it's no different. Getting into our low bed is a painful, slow process, and getting up again means rolling to the edge of the mattress (ouch), sitting up (ouch), and vaulting myself over the hard (ouch) side-rail then using the wall for support while I pull myself up (ouch).

I am so, so tired. I am terrified I'm going to fall asleep while I'm holding the baby and drop her. I have actually almost done this on five seperate occasions (three of them while I was still in the hospital), but luckily I caught myself as my arms started to relax. I have started spontaneously crying several times because I'm so exhausted. Our experience at the hospital was so awful I start to cry every time I think about it. I feel like I'm losing my mind. And it's so hard to have people around, even my mom and sister, because I can't just let go and cry it out like I want to. I can do this in front of my husband, but all these other people expect something more from me. And they want my baby. Everybody wants a turn, and I don't really mind most of it, but it's hard to have so much "help" 24 hours a day. I don't know how this is going to go in a couple of weeks when we get to my parents' house and I have to face the rest of the summer with all this "help."