To Dream Perchance of Sleep
There’s something about lack of sleep that puts me in the blog-mood. My baby will not sleep at night, and apparently is also refusing to sleep during the day. He’s in the sling right now, lazily chewing my hair and stuffing banana-scented fingers up my nose with a look of supreme exhaustion upon his gorgeous features, hanging on by the sheerest of threads to consciousness. Of course, if he does decide to fall asleep, I will have to wake him up anyway to get to Fooey’s afternoon “recital” at her music class.
But it’s my own sleep deprivation, not his, that makes me want to type. I’m too tired to analyze the whys and wherefores, though I’m sure something applies. I was up approximately once an hour last night with this child. He refuses to nurse during the day unless he’s beyond starving and nothing like a banana is in sight, yet at night he seeks milky comfort to lull him back to dreamland … last night I saw midnight, 2am, 4am, 5am, 6am; those were the ams I recall seeing, anyway. By 7am the whole house was up, woken by Apple-Apple’s surprise nosebleed. Did I mention we also had a child, who shall remain nameless, pee on top of the toilet lid last night? That was my second unexpected opportunity of the evening to really clean the bathroom. The first followed a series of reckless baths. I’d no idea what had rolled under our tub since the last flood. Apple-Apple asked whether I’d found a dead mouse. Nope, just a giant fuzzy hairball.
You can thank me for that image later.
I’ve just laid CJ down, awake, protesting but weak. If he falls into sleep now, I’ll be dragging him out of dreamland in, oh, twenty-seven minutes or so. I run on precision timing.
Was just packing the diaper bag for aforementioned outing, and discovered an old cloth diaper lingering, shall we say, in one of those handy stuff sacs. Maybe we’ll go disposable just for this event. At the rate this day is going, I anticipate solids arriving somewhere mid-performance. And no, he’s still awake. His howls just took on real drama. Twenty minutes till departure.
I’m going to go pick him up now.
Photos
Okay, I’ve added some photos on another blog that is running parallel to this one. I’ll pop the link in at the side. Explanation over there, and perhaps to follow here at some later date when I’m not so tired. I do hope to continue using photos to accent this blog, but this is going to have more words. More words, she says, and sighs deeply, and blinks, and wishes there was a little button one could push that would lift one directly to bed (and brush one’s teeth, and put on one’s pajamas on the way up).
Trying to Add Pictures
Above. I was trying to capture the moment on Tuesday when Fooey was sick and CJ was wearing an old pink sweater that used to belong to Apple-Apple, and we were hanging on the couch. In anticipation of the flash, CJ kept blinking, and Fooey had a hard time taking her thumb out of her mouth.
Peace, Joy, and Et Cetera
Christmas preparations …
We promised to hang up some decorations today, so the kids got themselves up and dressed and started cleaning the house before we’d crawled out of bed this morning. There was a lot to clean. Too much. So they ran out of steam. But I loved that they tried and that it was of their own inspiration.
The house got cleaned. I was on an efficient adrenalin rush, and it happened.
We put up the tree. You plug it in and it spins and glows fibre-optically. We had it in the attic, and the kids longed to use it rather than cutting down a real tree. So it’s kinda environmentally friendly, right? As long as we don’t turn it on. Then they took turns decorating it. It’s small and sits on a table, doesn’t fit a lot of decorations. There was fighting. So each, in turn, got to take the ornaments off and put them on again. Apple-Apple and I went out to do some gifty shopping (almost done!!!), and we finally bought a creche scene complete with rustic stable at Ten Thousand Villages, and we found a colourful unbreakable wooden 18-piece scene. I’ve been meaning to add this to our pretty minimal Christmas box. And how lovely that the kids can play with the scene and retell the story. Except they spent about 15 minutes screaming at each other over it as soon as Apple-Apple and I got home … SIGH. When I tried to initiate a conversation about the meaning of Christmas (“What is Christmas about …? Don’t worry there’s not a wrong answer …”), Apple-Apple remembered Jesus’s birthday (my little Sunday School darling!), and Albus piped up with “Getting gifts.” “What’s the opposite of that,” I asked, transparently leading the conversation, and he said, with a little sigh, “Giving gifts,” and then brightened up as he cleverly thought of another option, “Not getting gifts is the real opposite!” Okay, yah, you’re right, kiddo, but … Thus ended the chat, though I did get in a bit about sharing and kindness and peace and joy before Apple-Apple started shrieking again about how unfair Life is, et cetera.
Babies, Real and Pretend
Why is it so satisfying, when feeding a baby, to scrape the extra stuff off his chin with a spoon? This morning I said to Kevin, who was spooning the mash into him: “You could feed him another meal with what’s on his chin.” People who are not parents might be grossed out by this thought, however.
You know your housekeeping standards have really fallen when (this could be one in an ongoing series): Your baby has taken to snacking off the kitchen floor.
Read a story in the Globe today about a Fisher-Price talking baby doll that apparently says: “Islam is the light.” Wouldn’t you know, we have this very doll, given to Fooey for her third birthday by her auntie Fi. So, naturally, I turned it on (it’s usually off; it has the unnerving habit, when on, to randomly and mechanically wriggle about like an actual cooing, fussing, gurgling baby, of which we are already in possession). And lo and behold, one of the random babbles does sound eerily like “Islam is the light.” Unless it actually sounds like “God is the light.” Or even “Please turn on/off the light.” Apparently there is an outcry (from whom?) to recall these dolls lest they subliminally convert the innocent. From my unscientific exploration of the subject, I’m not sure to what one might fear conversion. If the doll could subliminally get my kids to turn out their lights at night, I’d keep the button “on.”