Party of Four: A Trial Run

When our friends Christine and James asked us if we could watch their 7 month old daughter, Milan, for the weekend while they were out of town, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to have a little test run of what life is going to be like everyday in the Molloy household in three short months. Marty and I have already been thinking about how everything is going to work logistically with the second child - how are we going to get everyone ready in the morning and get out of the house on time? How are we going to do bedtime with Ellie in the middle of newborn madness? How is anyone in the house ever going to be able to get a bath or shower?

Well, what better way to start to figure some of these things out than to actually do it? The plan was to meet Christine and James on Thursday evening to get Milan, then head over to Marty's parents house to pick up Ellie, and take both of the girls back home (ideally while they smiled and cooed at each other in the backseat - and/or slept.) The first spoiler to our master plan was that I had a big grant due at work on Friday and was unable to get it finished early enough on Thursday to go with Marty to pick up Milan and Ellie. So, Marty cheerfully took on the task by himself saying breezily "What's the worst that can happen? They cry on the way home? Big deal - I can handle crying for an hour."

So you can imagine my surprise when Marty pulled into the driveway that night, handing me my screaming child while pulling the other screaming child from her car seat, ranting about how he just experienced the worst three hours of his life. Turns out that Ellie was really not in the mood to share her Daddy with someone else. When Marty showed up at his parents house with Milan, Elise was instantly jealous and started acting like a complete maniac. She didn't want Marty to touch Milan, look at Milan or have anything at all to do with any child that was not herself. Ellie completely regressed - stopped using her words, cried about everything and generally acted like a monster for the two hours that Marty was at his parents house. Then came the car ride...Ellie screamed and cried the entire way home. Milan, who was being perfectly wonderful and pleasant during Ellie's earlier tantrums, was trying to sleep and got extremely cranky that this little two year old would not stop screaming in her ear and let her sleep. In fact, Ellie seemed to be purposely trying to keep Milan awake, because whenever Milan started crying, Ellie stopped. Then when Milan stopped crying Ellie started whaling again.

Dealing with all of the crying and terrible traffic for an hour might have been the worst torture Marty ever experienced and I think I actually saw steam coming from his ears upon their arrival. Once Milan was happily in bed, Marty tried to talk to Ellie, who kept saying "No Daddy, go away. Go be with Milan!" When I was putting Ellie to bed a bit later, trying to explain to her that Daddy and Mommy love her even if we have to give our attention to someone else, and babies need more help than she does because she's a big girl and can do thing for herself, she started crying. I asked what was wrong. Does something hurt? "Milan hurts" Ellie cried. It hurts that Daddy was paying attention to Milan? "Yeah" she sobbed. Oh boy. We are in for it.

After both girls were safely asleep Marty detailed the horrors of the day and suggested that we go ahead and plan to give Juan up for adoption because there is no way that we can handle two children without killing one of them, killing ourselves and/or divorcing. "There are tons of people in this country that would love to adopt our baby!" he encouraged. I promised him that Ellie was going to get used to it after a brief adjustment period and asked him to hold off on signing the adoption papers. Then I crossed my fingers and prayed that I was right.

Luckily for the entire Molloy family, I was right. Both girls got up the next morning around 6:30 and from the very start, Ellie was a completely different child than she had been the night before. She was extremely helpful and loving with Milan - handing her toys, running to get things she thought she'd like, trying to share her meatballs...it was like some sort of miracle happened overnight and Marty and I felt a huge wave of relief. We all had lots of fun all day - we hung out at the playground, crawled around on the ground like lions trying to teach Milan to crawl and even played with our neighbor Miles in his baby pool for a while.

At one point, I decided that I should do a quick vacuum of the living room rug if Milan was going to roll around on it (she kept rolling off the blanket) so I asked Ellie to help me clear off the other things off the rug. Once we'd finished clearing the rug, all but for Milan, I pulled out the vacuum cleaner, and Ellie cried "No! Don't roll over Milan!" because apparently she thought I was going to vacuum the baby up. Since Ellie would have been a fan of this idea the night before, I felt very encouraged that she was suddenly so protective of her new friend.

I had a trip planned and had to leave on Friday night, so I left both girls in the capable hands of Marty and his brother Kevin, who successfully held down the fort until Christine came home on Saturday afternoon. We are both feeling a lot more confident that we can, in fact, handle two children and that Party of Four won't be such a nightmare afterall. We are just keeping our fingers crossed that Juan is as laid back and easy as Milan. And it would help if Juan comes out as a 7 month old.