Bonne annee y'all!

I can tell lots of friends are wondering how life is in the trenches. Well, after a week of snottiness and coughing and general sleeplessness (even more than might be expected with a newborn since even poor Chloe was waking from feeling lousy), we recovered around New Year's, and Mike returned to work. We're nigh on the four-week mark, and things are falling into place. It's a bit of a juggle, active toddler and hungry baby, who naps when and oh remember to try the potty, oops it's been a while since I changed a diaper and all that, but it's not bad, really!
Sophie, though big, eats every three hours day or night like most newborns. For her, right now, the main challenge seems to be getting digestion figured out. Hearing her straining sometimes, you wonder how it can be that hard to expel liquid matter. But after two epidurals, I get it now. You have to learn what muscles to use, you feel pressure and you want to work against it, but it's not obvious what to do...
Chloe seems genuinely in love with her kid sister, which is a wonderful surprise. I picked her up from preschool and she ran to Sophie to hug and kiss her and pet her feet. The adjustment seems to center around her parents' divided attention, though. The first two weeks, she was angry and then mourned her exclusive rights to my arms and lap, and since then she has gotten used to it and figured out how to share those. She is currently adamant, though, that her daddy's time be exclusively hers. So all in all, everything is fine.
The week before Chloe came, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the intimacy I had with Chloe and which I was about to lose. The first two weeks of Sophie, as everyone could have predicted, Chloe needed me. What I couldn't foresee is how much I needed Chloe. Since then, countless moms have told me the same thing. It seems to be a secret passed between mothers of >1 kids, they whisper to me, with a concerned look, to ask how I feel with missing Chloe. Several were still tearing up from the memory of it. I cried. One said "After S (her now 15-mo-old son) came all I wanted to do was crawl in bed with M (her eldest) and read bedtime stories and snuggle and smell her."