C, aged 25 months: I wanna snack, peese, Mummy!
Me: OK sweetheart. What would you like?
C: Fwoot! An' cheese an' cwackers!
Me: OK ... (Begins segmenting a mandarin and grabs sliced cheese from the fridge)
C, indignantly: NO, Mummy! Banananana!
Me: Alright, alright (muttering about $10.99 / kilo fruit and solid-gold food)
C, munching on banana, sees the sliced cheese: NO! The white cheese! I wan' the WHITE cheese! (By which she means my extremely pricey King Island Double Brie that I foolishly gave her a smidgeon of to try).
Me, sighing: OK ... (There goes *my* post-dinner indulgence!)
C, all smiles: Thank you, my Mummy! (Big kisses follow)
Me: You're welcome, poppet. What shall we have for dinner tonight, huh?
C, firmly: Sammon! (Atlantic salmon fillets, very delicious, very $$ - the family eats about $25 worth in a meal).
As I'm considering, she adds: An' choccat cweam! (My home-made chocolate mousse, which uses rather a lot of very expensive dark chocolate)
She likes the high life, does C.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Reading Notes - Room
Some time ago I had a look at the shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker prize. There were some damn good books on it, as usual - Andrea Levy's wonderful The Long Song, set in early 19th century Jamaica and dealing with slavery and its aftermath; the eventual winner, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I greatly enjoyed and would concede is a worthy winner. (It also contained Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, which, due to my stubborn, inexplicable and unAustralian distaste for Carey's style and literary voice, I have not read, and am unlikely to do so).
For me, though, looking at the shortlist, the clear stand-out (and the book I would have chosen, had I been a judge) was Emma Donoghue's compelling, beautiful Room. Room is the story of 5-year-old Jack and his Ma, a loving mother-child dyad who are all the world to each other, in a completely literal sense. Jack's Ma, it transpires, is a prisoner, kidnapped and held in a locked garden shed ("Room") for seven years by a sociopathic man refered to only as Old Nick.
Donoghue's decision to tell this story in Jack's voice was absolutely the right one for creating the intimacy and sense of connection that is the book's strength. Told by an adult, or even partly in an adult voice, Room ran the risk of being prurient, sensationalist, and disgusting. (Think of the visceral reaction you had, or at least that I know I had, to the Fritzl case, or the Jaycee Lee Dugard case.) Donoghue's triumph in this book is to give us a story that is wholly about a mother and her son, about what might happen if that relationship was intensified and forced to be unmediated by the world, through no pathology of the mother's but rather by the evil acts of another.
There is without doubt a sense of menace and shudderiness (for want of a better word) in the first part of the book, where Jack and Ma are still trapped in Room. Old Nick, never directly seen by Jack and rarely heard by him, is a malevolent force who informs Ma's decisions, talk, and moods. The accommodations that Ma has to make to keep Jack safe and away from Old Nick are terrible; Faustian bargains at their most distilled. Seeing it through Jack's sensitive, intelligent but childlike eyes, the details are missing but the essence of domination, violence and the power of resistance is evident.
The ways of Ma and Jack's life, and Donoghue's surmises about how such confinement would affect mother and child's development, are fascinating and ring true to me. Jack's physical limitations (how could he develop good spatial perception when all space is known, and tiny?) make sense as does his incredibly advanced literacy and numeracy. Their deeply intimate yet matter-of-fact breastfeeding relationship is also entirely logical, and beautifully rendered. As a woman currently breastfeeding a verbal child, the dance of comfort and connection around nursing rings completely true to me. (It is an indictment of our society that when Ma and Jack are out of Room, one of the things that provokes vulgar curiosity and revulsion in the public is the fact that 5-year-old Jack is still nursing. As Ma, incredulous, says in her TV interview: After everything that happened to me over the past 7 years, THAT'S what you find shocking? REALLY?)
One of the things I loved the most in this book was the creation of Ma through Jack's eyes. Ma is all the world to him and what a person she is - fiercely loving, protective, intelligent, and human. The days she and Jack share, in their tiny Room, are filled with her commitment to nurturing and teaching her son and keeping him safe. And although both Ma and Jack exhibit unmistakeable signs of the fear, stress, anxiety and unnaturalness that shadows their lives (Jack with his obsessive counting, Ma with the days when she mentally checks out and is "Gone"), the two of them remain, to my mind, remarkably rich, well-balanced, and functional throughout. One of my favourite passages in the book comes after their escape from Room, when Ma is giving a TV interview about her captivity. Her lucidity, scorn for platitude, fierceness and strength shines through as she takes down the interviewer but good. (The fact that the interview carries a severe emotional backlash for Ma and Jack is also not disguised or minimised. Donoghue isn't about hiding the magnitude of this situation, at any time).
I think Donoghue's message here is incredibly powerful and hopeful and a testament to the character she has created in Ma - These people are strong, and they are not complicit in the subjugation and abuse they are subjected to. The fault and guilt lies with Old Nick in its entirety, at all times. And despite the trauma that will be part of Ma forever, Old Nick does not have the capacity to draw her (and Jack) into his abusive mental world; Ma stands apart, holding Jack with her on her island of connection and consent and love. This might seem an obvious message until you consider the insidious and sly tenor of commentary that always seems to creep into reportage of kidnap-and-imprisonment cases - the insistence that the kidnapee must have developed some attachment, some form of Stockholm syndrome; the notion (explicated in the Klampusch case in particular) that escape *would* have been possible, had the victim *really* wanted to get away; the unspoken idea that even these victims, the most victim-y of all possible victims if you think about it, must have in some way contributed to their abuse, or their abuser's selection of them. Donoghue, as I, calls bullshit on this egregious and especially nasty manifestation of victim blaming, through the person and dignity of Ma.
And Jack - oh, Jack. Was ever a 5 year old boy more exquisitely realised in fiction? Jack is three-dimensional, breathing through every line in this book. He is bright, loving, perceptive, wonderful - and he is a child. There is nothing adult in his way of being. This does not imply that he is simplistic or stupid, naturally. As a parent with a 5 year old currently, I recognise the speech patterns and thought trajectories with a shock of familiarity. Donoghue has said that she drew upon her experiences with her own son in creating Jack, and that shows. He is, quite simply, lovely - a joy on the earth, a wonderful boy.
So I would give Room my highest recommendation. Despite its subject matter and the potential for disgust, this book is not creepy or disgusting at all. It is powerful, moving, engaging, and one of the books that stays with you for a long, long time.
For me, though, looking at the shortlist, the clear stand-out (and the book I would have chosen, had I been a judge) was Emma Donoghue's compelling, beautiful Room. Room is the story of 5-year-old Jack and his Ma, a loving mother-child dyad who are all the world to each other, in a completely literal sense. Jack's Ma, it transpires, is a prisoner, kidnapped and held in a locked garden shed ("Room") for seven years by a sociopathic man refered to only as Old Nick.
Donoghue's decision to tell this story in Jack's voice was absolutely the right one for creating the intimacy and sense of connection that is the book's strength. Told by an adult, or even partly in an adult voice, Room ran the risk of being prurient, sensationalist, and disgusting. (Think of the visceral reaction you had, or at least that I know I had, to the Fritzl case, or the Jaycee Lee Dugard case.) Donoghue's triumph in this book is to give us a story that is wholly about a mother and her son, about what might happen if that relationship was intensified and forced to be unmediated by the world, through no pathology of the mother's but rather by the evil acts of another.
There is without doubt a sense of menace and shudderiness (for want of a better word) in the first part of the book, where Jack and Ma are still trapped in Room. Old Nick, never directly seen by Jack and rarely heard by him, is a malevolent force who informs Ma's decisions, talk, and moods. The accommodations that Ma has to make to keep Jack safe and away from Old Nick are terrible; Faustian bargains at their most distilled. Seeing it through Jack's sensitive, intelligent but childlike eyes, the details are missing but the essence of domination, violence and the power of resistance is evident.
The ways of Ma and Jack's life, and Donoghue's surmises about how such confinement would affect mother and child's development, are fascinating and ring true to me. Jack's physical limitations (how could he develop good spatial perception when all space is known, and tiny?) make sense as does his incredibly advanced literacy and numeracy. Their deeply intimate yet matter-of-fact breastfeeding relationship is also entirely logical, and beautifully rendered. As a woman currently breastfeeding a verbal child, the dance of comfort and connection around nursing rings completely true to me. (It is an indictment of our society that when Ma and Jack are out of Room, one of the things that provokes vulgar curiosity and revulsion in the public is the fact that 5-year-old Jack is still nursing. As Ma, incredulous, says in her TV interview: After everything that happened to me over the past 7 years, THAT'S what you find shocking? REALLY?)
One of the things I loved the most in this book was the creation of Ma through Jack's eyes. Ma is all the world to him and what a person she is - fiercely loving, protective, intelligent, and human. The days she and Jack share, in their tiny Room, are filled with her commitment to nurturing and teaching her son and keeping him safe. And although both Ma and Jack exhibit unmistakeable signs of the fear, stress, anxiety and unnaturalness that shadows their lives (Jack with his obsessive counting, Ma with the days when she mentally checks out and is "Gone"), the two of them remain, to my mind, remarkably rich, well-balanced, and functional throughout. One of my favourite passages in the book comes after their escape from Room, when Ma is giving a TV interview about her captivity. Her lucidity, scorn for platitude, fierceness and strength shines through as she takes down the interviewer but good. (The fact that the interview carries a severe emotional backlash for Ma and Jack is also not disguised or minimised. Donoghue isn't about hiding the magnitude of this situation, at any time).
I think Donoghue's message here is incredibly powerful and hopeful and a testament to the character she has created in Ma - These people are strong, and they are not complicit in the subjugation and abuse they are subjected to. The fault and guilt lies with Old Nick in its entirety, at all times. And despite the trauma that will be part of Ma forever, Old Nick does not have the capacity to draw her (and Jack) into his abusive mental world; Ma stands apart, holding Jack with her on her island of connection and consent and love. This might seem an obvious message until you consider the insidious and sly tenor of commentary that always seems to creep into reportage of kidnap-and-imprisonment cases - the insistence that the kidnapee must have developed some attachment, some form of Stockholm syndrome; the notion (explicated in the Klampusch case in particular) that escape *would* have been possible, had the victim *really* wanted to get away; the unspoken idea that even these victims, the most victim-y of all possible victims if you think about it, must have in some way contributed to their abuse, or their abuser's selection of them. Donoghue, as I, calls bullshit on this egregious and especially nasty manifestation of victim blaming, through the person and dignity of Ma.
And Jack - oh, Jack. Was ever a 5 year old boy more exquisitely realised in fiction? Jack is three-dimensional, breathing through every line in this book. He is bright, loving, perceptive, wonderful - and he is a child. There is nothing adult in his way of being. This does not imply that he is simplistic or stupid, naturally. As a parent with a 5 year old currently, I recognise the speech patterns and thought trajectories with a shock of familiarity. Donoghue has said that she drew upon her experiences with her own son in creating Jack, and that shows. He is, quite simply, lovely - a joy on the earth, a wonderful boy.
So I would give Room my highest recommendation. Despite its subject matter and the potential for disgust, this book is not creepy or disgusting at all. It is powerful, moving, engaging, and one of the books that stays with you for a long, long time.
Monday, March 21, 2011
This and that
Monday, Monday ...
I have a stubbornly red, itchy and weeping eye. I thought it was just allergies but now I'm wondering, as it's not terribly responsive to eye drops and has been going on for a few days. I don't think I've ever had pink-eye before but I'm a bit suss that this is it. Botheration.
Toddler has decided that she wants to wee "onna toy-yet" like her sisters, rather than on her potty. On one level this is great, as it means less porting around of potties and so forth. It also means that, with her tiny 25-month-old bum, she needs to be held every time, so goodbye independent toileting for a while. Swings and roundabouts.
It'll be hubs' birthday on Wednesday. I'm trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night that will be a treat for him, but also eaten by the kids, as I don't favour making two separate meals if at all avoidable. Given that his taste runs to seafood, I may see if I can get some nice barramundi or salmon. Maybe some pickled octopus for him for an appetizer. (Pre-kids, we always went out for birthday dinners, but these days it's sooooo much easier to eat in. Not to mention cheaper!)
The kids have a few favourite jokes at the moment. Check out these gems:
Q: What do you call a big ant?
A: A GI-ANT!
Q: Why was the sand wet?
A: Because the sea wee-ed!
Q: What do you call two robbers?
A: A pair of knickers!
A man and a giraffe walk into a bar. The giraffe is tired so he lies down on the floor. The bartender says, "What's that lyin' on the floor?"
The man says: "It's not a lion, it's a giraffe!"
Boom-tish ;-)
I have a stubbornly red, itchy and weeping eye. I thought it was just allergies but now I'm wondering, as it's not terribly responsive to eye drops and has been going on for a few days. I don't think I've ever had pink-eye before but I'm a bit suss that this is it. Botheration.
Toddler has decided that she wants to wee "onna toy-yet" like her sisters, rather than on her potty. On one level this is great, as it means less porting around of potties and so forth. It also means that, with her tiny 25-month-old bum, she needs to be held every time, so goodbye independent toileting for a while. Swings and roundabouts.
It'll be hubs' birthday on Wednesday. I'm trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night that will be a treat for him, but also eaten by the kids, as I don't favour making two separate meals if at all avoidable. Given that his taste runs to seafood, I may see if I can get some nice barramundi or salmon. Maybe some pickled octopus for him for an appetizer. (Pre-kids, we always went out for birthday dinners, but these days it's sooooo much easier to eat in. Not to mention cheaper!)
The kids have a few favourite jokes at the moment. Check out these gems:
Q: What do you call a big ant?
A: A GI-ANT!
Q: Why was the sand wet?
A: Because the sea wee-ed!
Q: What do you call two robbers?
A: A pair of knickers!
A man and a giraffe walk into a bar. The giraffe is tired so he lies down on the floor. The bartender says, "What's that lyin' on the floor?"
The man says: "It's not a lion, it's a giraffe!"
Boom-tish ;-)
Friday, March 18, 2011
Sleep transitions
My 25-month-old toddler is starting to slowly transition to a state of naplessness.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that *I* am starting to encourage her in that direction. While she is no longer at all likely to simply go to sleep on her own in the middle of the day, I can stack the deck - if I give her a breastfeed, she will still happily feed off to sleep and then snore away 2 or more hours. However, if she does that, she then won't settle for night sleep until at least 9pm, and she's been pushing that later and later, until last night's 10:30pm effort finally convinced me that the daily nap is becoming a problem rather than an asset to our overall family rhythm.
The difficulty with toddler not going to sleep until effectively the same time as me is fourfold:
1. I get no time in the afternoon / evenings to spend exclusively with my older daughters, talking about their day, listening to readers, exploring homework, reading our read-aloud chapter book, and just hanging out. As toddler has pushed her bedtime later and later over the last month, the 7 and 5 year olds (who go into bed at 8pm, with lights out at 8:30) have been really missing that time to relax together without an enormously cute and enormously mischievous 2 year old running around.
2. I also get no time at all during the week to talk child-free to my husband. This is not a great thing for either our relationship or my sense of personhood as an adult separate from my identity as "Mummy."
3. Even though I do, in theory, get up to 2 free daytime hours when she naps, this trade-off doesn't seem to quite equate to the productivity and sense of benefit I can achieve if toddler is asleep at 7, the big kids in bed at 8, and me well-rested enough to do stuff through until 10:30 or 11. I often seem to find myself doing household chores, things that can just as easily be done with toddler awake, when she is asleep in the day. Things like laundry, dishes, cooking, and mopping, things that she actually enjoys doing with me and are part of her play / development.
When all the kids are asleep at night, I am much more likely to blog, do paid work if I have a bit of contracting on (which is sporadic and occasional, taking up about one or two nights every three weeks or so), write poetry or stories, ring a friend to chat, watch TV with my husband, or catch up on my own reading. In other words, it's less about the house, more about me (at the moment I count the contract work as personal time, because it's interesting and engaging and, most importantly, not ever-present ;-)
4. I think C herself prefers not to sleep sometimes. She seems to really enjoy the extra stories, playtime, and usually extra 15 minutes or so of TV that the lack of the nap buys her. She is rarely super-grizzly and while she becomes very subdued as the afternoon wears on, she doesn't seem dramatically affected by it.
I think she isn't quite ready to ditch the nap totally - after gymnastics and playdate morning on Tuesdays, for instance, she is always desperate for a nap by 12:30, and the same is true on swimming Saturdays. For now I'm going to try every second day and see how that flies. It might be a disaster, but sometimes you have to try things to see what'll work.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that *I* am starting to encourage her in that direction. While she is no longer at all likely to simply go to sleep on her own in the middle of the day, I can stack the deck - if I give her a breastfeed, she will still happily feed off to sleep and then snore away 2 or more hours. However, if she does that, she then won't settle for night sleep until at least 9pm, and she's been pushing that later and later, until last night's 10:30pm effort finally convinced me that the daily nap is becoming a problem rather than an asset to our overall family rhythm.
The difficulty with toddler not going to sleep until effectively the same time as me is fourfold:
1. I get no time in the afternoon / evenings to spend exclusively with my older daughters, talking about their day, listening to readers, exploring homework, reading our read-aloud chapter book, and just hanging out. As toddler has pushed her bedtime later and later over the last month, the 7 and 5 year olds (who go into bed at 8pm, with lights out at 8:30) have been really missing that time to relax together without an enormously cute and enormously mischievous 2 year old running around.
2. I also get no time at all during the week to talk child-free to my husband. This is not a great thing for either our relationship or my sense of personhood as an adult separate from my identity as "Mummy."
3. Even though I do, in theory, get up to 2 free daytime hours when she naps, this trade-off doesn't seem to quite equate to the productivity and sense of benefit I can achieve if toddler is asleep at 7, the big kids in bed at 8, and me well-rested enough to do stuff through until 10:30 or 11. I often seem to find myself doing household chores, things that can just as easily be done with toddler awake, when she is asleep in the day. Things like laundry, dishes, cooking, and mopping, things that she actually enjoys doing with me and are part of her play / development.
When all the kids are asleep at night, I am much more likely to blog, do paid work if I have a bit of contracting on (which is sporadic and occasional, taking up about one or two nights every three weeks or so), write poetry or stories, ring a friend to chat, watch TV with my husband, or catch up on my own reading. In other words, it's less about the house, more about me (at the moment I count the contract work as personal time, because it's interesting and engaging and, most importantly, not ever-present ;-)
4. I think C herself prefers not to sleep sometimes. She seems to really enjoy the extra stories, playtime, and usually extra 15 minutes or so of TV that the lack of the nap buys her. She is rarely super-grizzly and while she becomes very subdued as the afternoon wears on, she doesn't seem dramatically affected by it.
I think she isn't quite ready to ditch the nap totally - after gymnastics and playdate morning on Tuesdays, for instance, she is always desperate for a nap by 12:30, and the same is true on swimming Saturdays. For now I'm going to try every second day and see how that flies. It might be a disaster, but sometimes you have to try things to see what'll work.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
A Jonah Day
"Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I'm so ashamed of myself." (L.M Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea, p 92)
I had a real pig of a day yesterday. A day when nothing (or very little) seemed to go as it should, when every tiny thing was a battle or an effort. A day where everyone, most assuredly including myself, was out of sorts and querulous and impatient and fractious. A day of worrying and dark imaginings and feeling overwhelmed. A day of not rising to the challenge with grace (ha!) or good humour (HA HA!) or indeed at all, but just sulking and wishing myself elsewhere.
Each little thing taken by itself wasn't such a big deal. It started with a bad night's sleep for me, where I woke with a headache and to settle the toddler at 3am. She was back asleep within 10 minutes, but I, for some reason I don't recall, stubbornly decided not to take any Panadol for my head. Thus, I couldn't settle back to slumber until almost 6, only to be woken for the day at the toddler's usual 6:30am. Still with a headache.
Then the big girls squabbled steadily from rising until leaving for school, which is unusual for them, and pretty grating after about 10 minutes, let alone 1.5 hours. This resulted in quite a lot of ultimately ineffective parental shoutiness from both G and I. The toddler then picked this as an ideal time to refuse to eat her breakfast, dance across the table, and sit down in the 7 year old's bowl of Weetbix, creating much drama.
Having delivered the big kids to school just before the bell, the toddler and I headed off to visit my mother in law, stopping at a bakery and a pharmacy on the way, whereupon I managed to drop and break a $28 bottle of iron liquid tonic - the last one the pharmacy had in stock - as I left the shop, because the toddler decided to bolt for the road and I had to ditch my parcels to grab her. The 1.5 hours we spent with my MIL was probably the best stretch of the day for me, as the toddler enjoyed looking at and feeding the chookies, ate her morning tea without incident, and I got to drink an entire cup of tea without harassment. My MIL's yard is huge and securely fenced, so runaway 2 year old could explore and take off to her heart's content (and did).
Of course, never one to leave a peaceful moment alone, my curious and super-active toddler decided to quietly strip most of the unripe tomatoes off my sister in law's prize-winning heritage tomato plant and dump them in the chook's water to see them float. "Yittle geen balls, Mummy!" she proclaimed proudly, as MIL and I looked at each other in silent horror, I resigning myself to the inevitable outraged phone call I would get that evening when SIL went out to water her vegetables.
Home again to discover that birds had comprehensively crapped all over the majority of my half-line of washing - about 2 loads' worth - due, I suspect, to the dog startling them with his rapid as they perch nearby. While I was muttering under my breath and pulling soiled clothes down, the toddler upended the dog's water bowl over her head, put the empty bowl carefully on the ground, took her nappy off and weed in it. "Yook! Outside potty, Mummy!" she exclaimed gleefully.
"...!" sez I.
Inside, I put on a Spot DVD for C, and started paying bills online, discovering, to my horror, that I'd forgotten all about the car insurance and it was now lapsed.
After Spot, I was starting to think the day was improving, as C sat on my knee and ate her lunch calmly while I read her stories. OK, OK, things are looking up, I thought, as my little sweetheart snuggled in. This is nice, I feel better...
Then the phone rang.
It was the school office. My 5 year old, who'd been so uncharacteristically grizzly and quarrelsome in the morning, was there with a headache and generally feeling icky. I offered to come get her but the school secretary suggested a dose of Panadol first, which I agreed to. She assured me they'd ring back if she didn't improve.
All the way through C's half-hour breastfeed before her nap, I was on a tenterhooks, expecting the phone to ring, and worrying like hell about 5-year-old E and her 7-year-old sister who's been having repeated headaches for weeks. I started to feel sick thinking about it all.
C napped for an hour and a half, during which time I managed to get some rice paper rolls made for a birthday party we're attending tomorrow. I also rehung the washing and ate my own lunch. Then I threw it up, which was excellent.
Up to school for assembly, which was an exercise in chasing C around the hall in mounting frustration, to be followed by a gentle ticking off from E's teacher for not having come to fetch her, despite the fact that the office had not called me back and she had improved from the Panadol. After assembly I let the kids have a play on the playground for half an hour with some friends, where they took the opportunity to filthy up their clothes and each accrue at least one injury, accompanied by screaming.
By this stage, my judgement was somewhat impaired, otherwise I never would have made the dubious decision to go ahead with Plan A and take them off to the local shopping centre to buy new sneakers. I will grant that the sneakers were successfully acquired and that both the 7 and 5 year olds were cheerful and helpful. Buuut the 2 year old ran. Every. Where. All. The. Time. Fast. And when I picked her up to prevent the running off, she screeeeeeeamed. And wriggled, and kicked, and pushed, and pulled my hair. I cursed myself repeatedly for not bringing the pusher with me (brain fail! brain fail!!)
Then, riding the travelator to the food court to buy a donut for each kid, I saw two head lice merrily jumping around on the 5 year old's head. Her class had been lice-checked earlier in the week, due to a head lice case in the class, and E had been proclaimed clear. Not so! A happy Saturday of family delousing beckons!
By this stage E was starting to look a bit peaky again and so we purchased the donuts and bundled into the car to go get G from work. At his workplace, C ran, E moped and was hot to the touch, and A, who had been getting sniffier by the minute, snorted into tissues. I sat slumped with my head in my hands.
On the way home, C screamed for the Wiggles. E slept, her breathing shallow and rapid, her head on fire. A stared out the window. I almost cried.
G dropped E and I at home and bore the eldest and youngest off in search of food. I dosed E with Panadol after taking a temp of almost 39 degrees. Boy, did I feel like a good mother (not). She lay on the couch watching TV while I attempted to restore some order to the house.
The others returned, we ate (except for E), and baths and showers happened. C promptly pooed in the bath, just for extra difficulty points.
(As I'm writing this, my 7 year old, who is reading over my shoulder, is giggling. She just said, "It's funny now, but it wasn't funny then!" OH SING IT, SISTER.)
After another few rounds of squabbles, yelling and general bad behaviour on everyone's part, the big girls (E with her temp back to normal, thankfully) went to bed, and I settled down to give C her bedtime breastfeed in my bed, so I could lie down and contemplate the awfulness of the day in peace. One mercy was that she fed quietly, and then went to bed easily at 9pm, without requiring me to lie down in her room as she often does.
Then my phone pipped with a text message. Stuff YOOOOOOOU! I thought in defeat, and clambered into bed with a Terry Pratchett book and a cup of herbal tea, and fell asleep half an hour later, exhausted in mind, body and spirit.
Given my personality, I am tempted to blame myself for many of the ructions of the day, which I would have managed differently (and probably largely prevented) if I'd been on my A game. But I guess, like Marilla tells Anne, "We all make mistakes ... but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody."
And today, well, it's a new day.
I had a real pig of a day yesterday. A day when nothing (or very little) seemed to go as it should, when every tiny thing was a battle or an effort. A day where everyone, most assuredly including myself, was out of sorts and querulous and impatient and fractious. A day of worrying and dark imaginings and feeling overwhelmed. A day of not rising to the challenge with grace (ha!) or good humour (HA HA!) or indeed at all, but just sulking and wishing myself elsewhere.
Each little thing taken by itself wasn't such a big deal. It started with a bad night's sleep for me, where I woke with a headache and to settle the toddler at 3am. She was back asleep within 10 minutes, but I, for some reason I don't recall, stubbornly decided not to take any Panadol for my head. Thus, I couldn't settle back to slumber until almost 6, only to be woken for the day at the toddler's usual 6:30am. Still with a headache.
Then the big girls squabbled steadily from rising until leaving for school, which is unusual for them, and pretty grating after about 10 minutes, let alone 1.5 hours. This resulted in quite a lot of ultimately ineffective parental shoutiness from both G and I. The toddler then picked this as an ideal time to refuse to eat her breakfast, dance across the table, and sit down in the 7 year old's bowl of Weetbix, creating much drama.
Having delivered the big kids to school just before the bell, the toddler and I headed off to visit my mother in law, stopping at a bakery and a pharmacy on the way, whereupon I managed to drop and break a $28 bottle of iron liquid tonic - the last one the pharmacy had in stock - as I left the shop, because the toddler decided to bolt for the road and I had to ditch my parcels to grab her. The 1.5 hours we spent with my MIL was probably the best stretch of the day for me, as the toddler enjoyed looking at and feeding the chookies, ate her morning tea without incident, and I got to drink an entire cup of tea without harassment. My MIL's yard is huge and securely fenced, so runaway 2 year old could explore and take off to her heart's content (and did).
Of course, never one to leave a peaceful moment alone, my curious and super-active toddler decided to quietly strip most of the unripe tomatoes off my sister in law's prize-winning heritage tomato plant and dump them in the chook's water to see them float. "Yittle geen balls, Mummy!" she proclaimed proudly, as MIL and I looked at each other in silent horror, I resigning myself to the inevitable outraged phone call I would get that evening when SIL went out to water her vegetables.
Home again to discover that birds had comprehensively crapped all over the majority of my half-line of washing - about 2 loads' worth - due, I suspect, to the dog startling them with his rapid as they perch nearby. While I was muttering under my breath and pulling soiled clothes down, the toddler upended the dog's water bowl over her head, put the empty bowl carefully on the ground, took her nappy off and weed in it. "Yook! Outside potty, Mummy!" she exclaimed gleefully.
"...!" sez I.
Inside, I put on a Spot DVD for C, and started paying bills online, discovering, to my horror, that I'd forgotten all about the car insurance and it was now lapsed.
After Spot, I was starting to think the day was improving, as C sat on my knee and ate her lunch calmly while I read her stories. OK, OK, things are looking up, I thought, as my little sweetheart snuggled in. This is nice, I feel better...
Then the phone rang.
It was the school office. My 5 year old, who'd been so uncharacteristically grizzly and quarrelsome in the morning, was there with a headache and generally feeling icky. I offered to come get her but the school secretary suggested a dose of Panadol first, which I agreed to. She assured me they'd ring back if she didn't improve.
All the way through C's half-hour breastfeed before her nap, I was on a tenterhooks, expecting the phone to ring, and worrying like hell about 5-year-old E and her 7-year-old sister who's been having repeated headaches for weeks. I started to feel sick thinking about it all.
C napped for an hour and a half, during which time I managed to get some rice paper rolls made for a birthday party we're attending tomorrow. I also rehung the washing and ate my own lunch. Then I threw it up, which was excellent.
Up to school for assembly, which was an exercise in chasing C around the hall in mounting frustration, to be followed by a gentle ticking off from E's teacher for not having come to fetch her, despite the fact that the office had not called me back and she had improved from the Panadol. After assembly I let the kids have a play on the playground for half an hour with some friends, where they took the opportunity to filthy up their clothes and each accrue at least one injury, accompanied by screaming.
By this stage, my judgement was somewhat impaired, otherwise I never would have made the dubious decision to go ahead with Plan A and take them off to the local shopping centre to buy new sneakers. I will grant that the sneakers were successfully acquired and that both the 7 and 5 year olds were cheerful and helpful. Buuut the 2 year old ran. Every. Where. All. The. Time. Fast. And when I picked her up to prevent the running off, she screeeeeeeamed. And wriggled, and kicked, and pushed, and pulled my hair. I cursed myself repeatedly for not bringing the pusher with me (brain fail! brain fail!!)
Then, riding the travelator to the food court to buy a donut for each kid, I saw two head lice merrily jumping around on the 5 year old's head. Her class had been lice-checked earlier in the week, due to a head lice case in the class, and E had been proclaimed clear. Not so! A happy Saturday of family delousing beckons!
By this stage E was starting to look a bit peaky again and so we purchased the donuts and bundled into the car to go get G from work. At his workplace, C ran, E moped and was hot to the touch, and A, who had been getting sniffier by the minute, snorted into tissues. I sat slumped with my head in my hands.
On the way home, C screamed for the Wiggles. E slept, her breathing shallow and rapid, her head on fire. A stared out the window. I almost cried.
G dropped E and I at home and bore the eldest and youngest off in search of food. I dosed E with Panadol after taking a temp of almost 39 degrees. Boy, did I feel like a good mother (not). She lay on the couch watching TV while I attempted to restore some order to the house.
The others returned, we ate (except for E), and baths and showers happened. C promptly pooed in the bath, just for extra difficulty points.
(As I'm writing this, my 7 year old, who is reading over my shoulder, is giggling. She just said, "It's funny now, but it wasn't funny then!" OH SING IT, SISTER.)
After another few rounds of squabbles, yelling and general bad behaviour on everyone's part, the big girls (E with her temp back to normal, thankfully) went to bed, and I settled down to give C her bedtime breastfeed in my bed, so I could lie down and contemplate the awfulness of the day in peace. One mercy was that she fed quietly, and then went to bed easily at 9pm, without requiring me to lie down in her room as she often does.
Then my phone pipped with a text message. Stuff YOOOOOOOU! I thought in defeat, and clambered into bed with a Terry Pratchett book and a cup of herbal tea, and fell asleep half an hour later, exhausted in mind, body and spirit.
Given my personality, I am tempted to blame myself for many of the ructions of the day, which I would have managed differently (and probably largely prevented) if I'd been on my A game. But I guess, like Marilla tells Anne, "We all make mistakes ... but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody."
And today, well, it's a new day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
