The Wall

We got home from the hospital on Wednesday afternoon. I trudged along through Wed. night, Thursday morning and Thursday night. But come Friday, I was done. I was worn out physically, and emotionally and just hit a wall about 3pm that afternoon. I had started our school year on Thursday (it was supposed to start on Monday but Tomas had other ideas) and wanted to try to catch up some on Friday. I didn't happen. We just did Friday's lessons and called it a day. After dinner the girls and I were cleaning up the kitchen and I just could not move anymore. It was about 7 by then. I told them as soon as I was done I was going to go to bed and they could stay up and watch cartoons until their dad got home at 9:30. They went upstairs to bathe and I started to wind down for the night. I am pretty sure there is an Erma Bombeck essay on this subject exactly.
I finished the dishes, started the dishwasher, and loaded the washing machine and set it for a 10 hour delay so I could put a load in  the dryer first thing in the morning. Then I took Tomas to the bedroom, changed his diaper and his clothes, put his oxygen cannula on. his pulse ox probe on, checked his blood sugars and vented the air out of his belly (ok - I'm pretty sure Erma didn't do that stuff but you get the idea).  After I put him in the crib I went back out to the kitchen and started to make his formula for the next day.
His formula is something else. Long ago I decided I wanted him off the canned stuff. I breastfed my girls and pretty much went straight to mashed table food. Very little jarred food was ever used. With Tomas, I pumped for 9 months and then stopped because I just couldn't find the time anymore. So we switched to over the counter formula. I have always hated it. It smells and tastes horrible. But it also kept my son alive so it most definitely has it's place. Anyway, when he turned one and it was time to move to a toddler formula I decided to give a blenderized diet a try. After tweaking and tuning and adding (all under the guidance of a nutritionist) we had a "recipe" that made me happy and was "real" food. Enter hypoglycemia. In order to try to stabilize his sugars we added fiber and more protein. That didn't seem to help, but the doctors at the hospital were quite glad he was on a blended diet instead of a canned formula as it allowed for the most modification. One doctor's instructions were to substitute all the short chain sugars for long chain sugars.
So there I was in the kitchen with all the ingredients out on the counter: organic 1% milk, organic low fat yogurt (he has to have the low fat milk products because of the missing gall bladder), vegetable puree I made, fruit puree I made, black bean puree I made (for fiber), baby food meat (the one thing I haven't figured out how to duplicate at home and get it smooth enough to fit through the pump), organic multigrain baby cereal, MCT oil, flax oil, and fish oil (added to replace the milk fats - these are easier to digest).
All of these sat out on my counter. Every night I mix up his batch for the next day, but that night I needed to study the sugars on a molecular level. Has the world gone completely mad???? In the end I decided to throw it at the feet of his nutritional team and run with the regular recipe through the weekend.
So back to me getting to bed early, I made the formula, started some rice for my husband to have with some leftover etoufee for when he got home, and re-cleaned the kitchen. By then the girls were done bathing so I tucked them into the guest bed (where the tv is) and blessed them good night. I then staggered my way into my bed. 9:20, 2 hours and 20 minutes after I started!