The Troyer Family: Building a Mystery: Remembering to be Thankful

I am a person who values her sleep. I need to sleep, I love sleep, lets be honest other people need me to sleep. The world is a better place if I have been able to sleep through the night. I am sure all of the moms out there are chuckling now because as a mom sleep becomes the long lost friend. For me, I bade farewell to sleep on September 11, 2010. Since that glorious day sleep and I have had a rocky relationship. My child is a beautiful and precious gift from God, and I am in no way regretting her birth or existence just to be clear. Now that being said, my child led the attack on my sleep. She was even a little sneaky about it. When my wonderful and amazing mom stayed with us right after McKenna was born I did not notice as much that my sleep was under attack because I was able to nap through the day, I believe this was all part of my little angel's plan. She was great and actually slept feeding to feeding so that was three hour stretches! Yay Go McKenna! Mom and I both felt that I had an easy baby. Then mom left. I was almost immediately thrown to the wolves or in my case wolf. I say almost because my great mother-in-law and sister-in-law both came multiple days to help me with the house stuff and let me get some naps in. McKenna had us all fooled. At about two weeks old my child snapped. She no longer slept feeding to feeding; she preferred about thirty minute stretches with screaming and eating in between. This was her pattern for quite some time, about two months or so. Now don't worry she liked to give me some false hope at times. One stormy night Jeff and I decided that she would sleep in her bouncy seat in our room due to Tornado warnings. In our bedroom we have a tin roof, the rest of the house is shingles; this information is just so you can see the importance of the roof. So all night McKenna would be listening to the ballad of the rain. I expected her to be worse than usual but this was not so. She slept from about 11pm to 6:30 or 7 the next morning! I was amazed and immediately told Jeff that we must make it rain every night and put tin over her room. Jeff came up with a more realistic plan and rigged up a sound system in her crib that played a thunderstorm. I thought this was a brilliant plan and went to sleep that night convinced that I was going to get a wonderful nights sleep. About thirty minutes into my false assurance I awoke to the sound of my child crying..... through a thunderstorm. I wish you all could have seen the look of devastation on my face when my dreams of sleep came crashing down. I dragged myself out of bed and went to my child totally expecting to see a smile on her face and a gotcha look. But I saw tears. She was just as unhappy as I was. At this point I believe I began to learn a lesson.
My child was very very fussy for the first three months of her life, it may have been colic, it may have been tummy troubles, or it could just be that she was finding her way in the world. Whatever it was I was constantly trying to fix her. I worried about her, I stressed about her, I researched her (babies in general read every book there is to read), I tried to schedule her, I tried just about anything to make her better. Then at three months she started getting better. I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with me. It was just her time. It was then that I realized that through that time I had completely forgotten that I had so much to be thankful for:
McKenna was healthy, yes she cried a lot but the doctor said she was healthy and the child was not hurting in the weight department. My baby loved to take a bath, had no fear of water and sometimes that is what I did to calm her down, how great was it that I had that tool. My child ate and did it well, she never fussed about eating and took a bottle just fine. My child would sleep in the car (except when she was freezing:( we could almost always count on that getting us some silence from the cries. All of these things were amazing things to be thankful for and yet I had become consumed with fixing her. I had forgotten to be thankful. It can be so easy to focus on the problem or what I think needs fixing instead of treasuring the things that God has blessed me with. I have to choose to treasure and not to fix!

On a side note: McKenna now sleeps through the night, has a schedule, and only cries when hurt, tired, or faced with injustices (like getting things taken away from her grabby hands or told no).