Nights Two and Three
The second night of nightweaning Small DB was the same as the first 
Much screaming – for up to an hour. Last night – the third night, there was no screaming. I fed her each time she awoke – and she awoke many, many times – but only for a minute or two. Then I told her it was time to go to sleep. Most of the time she accepted this and just rolled back over.
Sadly, she seems to be getting another cold and this leaves her snuffly and harder to settle. Gah. This stuff is impossible to avoid. At the moment I’m swinging in between doing one more night of super-short feeds or moving forward with the Dr Jay plan and not feeding at all between 11pm and 6am. Now that is going to be a big step – and not a nice one…
Back at it
It’s taken me a long while to get to the point where I felt I could have a good go at nightweaning Small DB. I think I’m there. I think I was there at the beginning of the month…but then she got a cold. So I’ve been hanging out, waiting until it felt right.
I went through this whole thing with Small Z. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t a huge success, but I think it did improve things a bit.
As much as I try to avoid comparisons, when I removed the boobs from Small DB’s list of going-to-sleep options last night between 11pm and 6am (as suggested by Dr Jay) her scream-a-thon had nothing on Small Z’s a few years back. Small Z screamed for hours and hours as I sat an held her. It was awful.
Last night Small DB remained furiously upset for about an hour and a quarter. It was exhausting and emotion-sapping. I felt very bad for her. But I have had enough – getting five or six hours sleep in a row will not just be good for me, it will be good for THE WORLD. I am hoping once I get some sleep (see how positive I’m being?) I will be less irritable and zombie-like. I will have more time and stamina for doing my stretches and learning new ones…
So here we go. I’m about to head on in and get underway with the Second Night. I already feel annihilated invigorated. Cross your fingers for me…
Mother’s Day. Five.
It was always going to be difficult to top last year’s effort. Swanning around on the north coast from cafes to playgrounds with our friends. It did not help that I had very little sleep, handed Small DB over to M at about 6.45am and then sort of slumbered with Small Z for another two hours when we awoke shrieking – she had to be at her swimming class in fifteen minutes…
Not entirely zen – M tried his best and handed me four bottles of my favourite white wine (as mentioned many years ago, here and cooked me rapid but excellent scrambled eggs. And then disapperated – taking Small Z, who had been force-fed her porridge, with him.
Small DB was already on the whinge from our broken sleep. I looked outside – it was raining determinedly. The Smalls and I were supposed to get on two trains and a bus to visit The Nana. I could not bear the thought of the travel and called my mother to bail. She took it quite well, considering she’d made a cake for The Smalls to decorate…
That done, I flopped toward another cup of tea. M came back 30 minutes later and entered looking trepidatious, like he expected to walk in on me throwing things everywhere in an effort to get to our train fully equipped with snacks, spare change, spare clothes and all the other spare crud that travel entails… There was none and he was visibly relieved.
I sent him off to the boat – he has missed too much building time in the past few weeks. I stayed home with The Smalls. I planned to do cosy, nurturing Mother’s Day-like activities – some baking, some one-on-one with Small Z while the other one slept. But. The other one did not sleep.
After three days of being out or working I wanted to bring the house to some normalcy. I cleaned around them, and ate leftovers sitting in the garden while they played on the trampoline – the rain had stopped for a bit, and I was even convinced by it to hang the clothes on the line…
We then ventured over to our neighbours in the next street. Small DB almost conked out on the way, but not quite. And then there was mulled wine, the adjudication of Small Disputes, conversation and then an invitation to stay for dinner. M appeared brandishing a bottle of his birthday red – a lovely end to a day that had a somewhat frazzled beginning…
Helping out
We have had our lovely friends, formerly of Coburg – now of Sydney, staying with us for the past two nights. This, on top of our Saturday night, has left the Smalls excitable and therefore somewhat sleepless. Their colds are almost (fingers crossed) gone.
Today, after two late nights, I had to go and be ‘helper’ at Small Z’s kindergarten. I left Small DB with her Nana from 9am until almost 3pm, with some trepidation – but she had a ball. Didn’t nap – but apparently enjoyed being the only kid in the house.
Meanwhile I could be found making pancake mixture with kids, reading them stories, cooking 70 pancakes and then, with the help of Small Z, teaching all the kids a dinosaur song we had written. It was also the Mother’s Day afternoon tea…so the four-year-olds all gave their mothers a hand massage and then some moisturising, the aforementioned snacks, sang us all three songs and then we all did craft activities and fingernail painting….
I received my Mother’s Day card from Small Z – a little more detailed than last year’s effort, but still endearingly domestic. It said, among other things,
MY MUM IS SPECIAL BECAUSE: She gave me cream on top of my rhubarb on my porridge. 
It was all rather intense, fun – but by the end of it I had hit the wall… I came home and inhaled a cup of tea. Small DB was utterly uninterested in my return and just asked for ‘more watter’ in her watering can.
I feel much more relaxed about leaving her at home again tomorrow to go to a work meeting – which, of course, takes place during the time I should be working. No doubt the Nana will have a bit more difficulty with Small DB tomorrow as she won’t be the one and only….
There was no water at our house for about half an hour this afternoon, so Small DB had a bath in a bucket in the afternoon sun on the porch…
Apologies for scatty post, but my eyes are falling out of my head.
Extremely Loud Moonwalking
This is the oddest thing. I have to write about it now, even though I have visitors due in a short while, clothes to put away and washing to hang out.
On my Kindle I have been reading Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer. I haven’t looked at it for a week or two, but sat down to get back into it while I had my lunch today.
(Incidentally, the sun is out for the first time in days. Small DB is asleep. Small Z is at kindergarten. M earned himself serious points by cleaning the house this morning after we’d left.)
When my dad was here on my birthday I showed him my Kindle and made him have a poke around with it. I was hoping to convince him to take it along with him on his upcoming jaunt to investigate Scotland. I failed.
So when I went to read my book today, it didn’t open where it was supposed to. I went to page 200 – making the assumption that was about where I might be up to. I didn’t recognise any of the writing so I flipped back from there until I did.
It was the part about the bombing of Dresden. I’d read it before. I read onward until I got to the point where the writing was new to me. The book – Moonwalking With Einstein – is about memory – a guy who starts investigating how memory works, how it has been used throughout history and memory competitions today. There are many examples of different ideas and ‘memory palaces’ in the book, so I assumed I was in some long descriptive piece that was eventually going to end.
It didn’t. The writing was fantastic. I read and read, sitting in the sunshine. I read about September 11 2001. Someone in the book had a father in one of the towers. The whole descriptive piece did not seem to be making any point about memory as far as I could tell. I was thrilled with what I’d read, but baffled…until I realised.
In showing the Kindle to my dad, I had begun reading the wrong Foer. I was in the middle of Joshua Foer’s book, but had mistakenly landed in the midst of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer – his brother. I had not read that section of text before, but I had heard the author read it himself, on the BBC World Book Club.
It was such a disorienting experience. With the additional (and relevant) oddness of me being initially unable to differentiate between text I had heard, and text I had read. Weird.
If you have read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close you will know that the father describes New York as once upon a time having a sixth borough. The descriptions in this story within a story are just quixotic and beautiful – but so could have fitted, somehow, into Moonwalking With Einstein.
Now I’ll have to read both. But I’ll start at the start.
Birthday Huzzah!!
Saturday night. I did not expect anything, but our lovely houseguests – Mr, Mrs and Master H, descended upon us as planned. But instead of being fed pesto pasta – they showered us with champagne, Indian takeaway and the Most. Amazing. Cake. Looky….
They are some of Small DB’s favourite people. They all have a mutual appreciation society going on….
Earlier in the day, Small DB and I walked to a garage sale. She wasn’t too excited at the prospect…
And then it began to rain. She refused to go in the pram and took off with the only umbrella…
We bought a $2 hardwood chair, that we took home in the pram. So it wasn’t all bad…we used it for our wondrous and doting guests. Thank you Mr, Mrs and Master H – my extended birthday was a.w.e.s.o.m.e!
Pottering
I wrote this long post about how I had liked working with clay when I was in Grade Two. Lost it all in a copy/paste/sleep deprivation error. I will merely say this: I have always wanted to use a potter’s wheel and yesterday I did. Loved it. I made these.
Thanks to my mum for my birthday funds. Hope to get back there next Saturday morning to, I don’t know, have a go at glazing? I learnt that there’s a difference between working with normal stoneware kind of clay and porcelain kind of clay. The latter is much harder… Baby steps.
Chickens or bust
Here’s a new song. ‘La la la, I don’t have time for anything, Not even the proactive very useful things, la la la…’ You’ve heard it all before, right? My blogging gaps have been so great of late. How much does this suck? The days are shooting past – it will be the MIDDLE OF THE YEAR IN 28 DAYS. Hello?
There is so little of what I want to do that seems to be achievable. Some of this is my problem – I want to do too much. Put things on eBay!
Now, what was wrong with that sentence? It should read PUT THING ON EBAY. See? Tiny steps and things get done – but I’ve been inert with the thought of trying to DO IT ALL. Stupid inertia.
I was momentarily revitalised by chickens last week. Making them (and dreaming of having some in the backyard) from a great tutorial on Red Ted Art. They are so easy – made from one rectangle of fabric. Heaven.
We have since given the red one away to Small Z’s kindergarten teacher for helping us source a (real) chicken coop for free. The blue stripey one is destined for a recent Small visitor from afar 
and the remaining ones belong to the Smalls. They are cute – and quick to make (or I couldn’t have made them). Their mere existence makes me feel like I’ve at least done something that is not related to domesticity and parenting…even though, of course, they are related to both.
I also got snippy with a pure wool turtleneck sweater and turned it into some floppy housepants for Small Z. If I was a real crafting queen I’d say I ‘upcycled’ or ‘recycled’ – but really, I just used a jumper I can’t wear to make some woolly trousers I can’t buy. She wasn’t 100% today and stayed home from kindergarten (and thus we missed representatives from all the primary schools pimping their programs – it must be fate leading us toward unschooling…) – I say housepants because they are a little bit…um…odd.
But she liked them and they are comfortable and warm. Good on a day where it only stopped raining for few ten minute pockets of time. I made Small DB some in fleece. They are equally quirky, but serviceable… Gosh I love being back here, writing something. Now excuse me. I have a toddler to night wean…
