Whine, Whine

Tomorrow is my first day back at work. I expected to have semi-mixed feelings about going back, since many people I know have felt a little relieved when they come back to work because it gives them a mental break from the exhaustion/tedium of raising infants. As I face the prospect of coming back, though, I'm finding that my feelings are pretty darn unmixed, if that's a word. Or, at best, they're a mix of dread and extreme dread.

As I see it, coming back to work right now is really a "worst of both worlds" situation for me. Observe:

• Kathy and I have been getting by with about six or six and a half hours of sleep a night, usually in three chunks between Leah and Riley's feedings. To get to the office on time, I'm going to have to lose the second half of Sleep Chunk #3. Boo, I say!
• It would be nice if I could compensate for this sleep chunk loss by sleeping through one of the nighttime feedings and letting Kathy handle it alone, but our weird feeding circumstances (the twins don't get enough milk from breastfeeding so we have to supplement with pumped breast milk or formula) would make it really difficult for Kathy to handle a night-time feeding without my help, unless, of course, Kathy were to grow an extra set of arms and hands. Which seems unlikely. And, come to think of it, not really that desirable. Again, I say boo!
• The babies are in the best mood from about 8 am to 10 am each day. During these blessed two hours each day, Leah and Riley are at their most adorable -- wide-eyed, smiling, cooing bundles of joy. These two hours are the ones when all the milestone moments happen -- first smiles, first laughs, first babbling sounds --that make all the more difficult hours worthwhile. My work day starts at 8 am, so I'm going to miss these hours. Boo!
• Riley switches into "holy terror" mode at about 6 pm and usually stays in that mode until about 8 pm or so. Riley basically spends these two hours frantically crying her eyes out during every moment that her parents, in her judgment, fail to pay her the amount of attention that she deserves. My work day ends at 5:15 or 5:30, meaning that I will get home just in time to watch Riley go ballistic. Boooooo.
• My poor wife Kathy is going to have to try to survive from 7:30 am-ish to 6 pm-ish every weekday, despite being outnumbered by a factor of two for most of that time. No doubt she's going to be pretty darn exhausted by the time I get home and will need a break from the babies when I get home -- which means that I probably get to fly solo right as Riley goes to her unhappy place. Boo!
  
• Oh and apparently I'm supposed to get work done at the office. Coming in and just sleeping under my desk is frowned upon, I'm told.
  

To sum up -- coming back to work equals boo.

Sorry for the whining tirade. I do actually realize that I'm lucky that I got to be around for the first eight weeks of my babies lives, which I know most dads do not. And I was able to, in the next-to-last day of my leave of absence, take a picture of one of Leah's ever-elusive smiles:


Pretty cute. All right, we'll call it even.