I can sit!

With even a smidgen of concentration left to smile

Getting in as much sleep as possible, because as of tomorrow I am back on double night duty, as Hunny returns to work. So I get the 1 AM and 4 AM feeds, bad planning on my part because I should have put the gorgeous boy to bed later. At least then it doesn’t feel so much like 2 night feeds.

What I am doing: Jigsaw puzzles at http://www.jigzone.com to try to tire out my brain enough that I may actually sleep dreamlessly tonight.

I’ve been having the craziest dreams lately. Masses of murder and mayhem, usually with me on the receiving end, but sometimes I’m dishing it out. And then my warped and twisted mind has this bad habit of merging dreams and reality wile I’m in a half asleep state. A glimpse of Resident Evil on tv a couple of weeks ago is still with me, and I crawl back into bed after Aidan’s middle of the night feed wondering how I would be able to tell if Hunny had turned into a zombie while I was out of the room. I hate zombies, just about any other incarnation of fictional or actual evil I can handle, but zombies give me the heebies. Like I said, I’m half asleep so not thinking too fast, but I have come up with the following:

- Does he look grey in the half light from the passage? Zombies are always grey.
- Is he warm to the toe-touch? You don’t have to be as close to do a toe-touch as you do for a finger-touch.
- And the clincher, which I thought up last night: Is he breathing? Well obviously! Zombies don’t breathe! This one’s a winner. This way I can stand at the entrance to the room and listen carefully before I need to get within proximity to asses warmth, or colour in the half-light.

Problem is, as I climb into bed next to what I am fairly sure is my living breathing husband, I start entertaining thoughts of my baby being a zombie, and me not realizing it until he sinks his teeth into my breast at our next feeding session. Warped and twisted I tell you, warped and twisted. This kind of crap doesn’t happen as often when my brain is properly tired out at work.

In other news, Hunny got us a wii fit for Christmas. It’s a very nifty device, even if it did age me at 64 in my first attempt: “You seem to be quite unbalanced, do you find that you trip often when you walk?”. Where’s the check box that says “My core muscles are totally shot by their recent stretch-beyond-comprehension pregnancy experience and that’s why I’m a little shaky when you ask me to stand on one leg and place the other foot next to the opposing ear while simultaneously touching my toes and breathing … in through my nose … out through my nose …” But something’s working, I’m starting to feel a lot less wobbly when horse-riding again

And the hula-hoop game is great party entertainment; we’ll start posting blackmail videos of our guests as soon as someone declines our offer to swap their video for baby-sitting time

- a decrease in size of an organ caused by disease or disuse
- undergo atrophy; “Muscles that are not used will atrophy”
- any weakening or degeneration (especially through lack of use)

I suspect my blogging ability may have fallen victim to creativity atrophy. It’s been more than 4 weeks since I last blogged. I know this because we took Aidan for his second round of vaccinations this week. The vaccination dates are 4 weeks apart and the last post I wrote was in part inspired by a very grumpy baby one day after his first round of vaccinations, though I hadn’t realized that was the cause at the time. Somehow if felt very personal when he didn’t want to feed, but I know better this time.

I didn’t want this blog to be a journal. It was intended to be a place to exercise my creative juices. I knew I would be drawing posts from personal experience, but I was hoping to present that experience in such a way as to make it an adventure or maybe a reflection, not just an account. Lately I have found that I can’t produce much other blow-by-blow accounts of my experiences with motherhood, so I haven’t gotten round to putting any posts to keyboard. The problem is, the longer I leave it, the worse it gets.

I read many journal type blogs, and I enjoy them, but that just isn’t what I had planned for my little space of the interwebs. I was going be a writer. I was going to produce something that was practice for the novel I want to write one day, the best-seller that will free me from the 9 – 5 and allow me to pay off the mortgages of my family. I suspect my family will have paid off their mortgages the hard way before I produce a best seller, but hey, we all need a dream, right?

So, lets just get back on the horse shall we? The longer I wait for creative juices to return, the less likely that becomes. What you’ve missed while I’ve been away:

- Aidan is now 12 weeks old, 6.85 kg’s and 62 cm’s long. He has blue eyes, chubby cheeks and a button nose. He loves his hands, he tries to stuff both of them in his mouth at once. He does a technical ‘sleep through’ on occasion: 6 hours between feeds, once a night. It doesn’t feel like a sleep through to me. He’s a happy friendly guy who still manages a smile even when his tummy hurts or he’s waging internal wars on nasty vaccine gogga’s.

- I’m still in the worst shape of my life. I can hide it enough so that people remark that I must have lost all my baby weight, but I know the truth. 4 stubborn kg’s still to go, but so much more work to be done to put things back in their correct places.

- I’ve been back on a few horses a few times, but my own only once. He was reasonably behaved, but time hasn’t worked any miracles, he’s still the same nutty creature he was 10 months ago.

- We’ve celebrated our first Christmas as a family, but the spirit was missing. I’m not sure what went wrong. I suspect that Hunny & I have both realized that Christmas no longer belongs to us anymore, but Aidan was too young yet to appreciate it, so it kinda slipped through the cracks. But lest you think we are terrible parents, we did buy him presents and entertain him excitedly tearing off the wrapping paper on his behalf.

- Hunny’s spider bite, remember that? It’s finally healed. It took six and a half months, regressions caused by infections, and several roles of plaster gauze and granuflex, but at last it is done. The scar looks like a bullet wound scar.

- I graduated from my part time studies, top of my class. Proof that you don’t have to succumb to baby brain.

We have had an extraordinarily blessed year, and for that we are most thankful. Thank you God for being there in the bad times and the good times too, even if we forget you then sometimes.

Merry Christmas everyone!