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

I had a dream last night that I was accepting a hay delivery for my mom while she was away. Two different farmers pitched up at the same time, and both were in a hurry to get on their way. There was only myself and Joe (the guy who looks after our horses) to offload, so there I was my pregnant self moving around large and heavy round and square bales of hay. It was tiring even in the dream. When my mom got home she complained that I hadn’t stacked them neatly enough.

The dream reminded me of this photo. Last year we got some great oat-hay for the horses. So great that the two horses in the paddock next to the hay shed would hardly let us offload it, they kept trying to take mouthfuls while we where reversing the trailer and offloading.

Here are my two boys, in the pouring rain, trying to grab the last few mouthfuls from the back of the truck

Well, they’re not both mine, the bay (brown) boy at the back is my funny horse, Dartmoor, he is about half the width of the other horse and about as brave as he is wide: not very. The chestnut (orange) big guy at the front is Pickle. He belongs to my mom but I love him to bits; he’s the one I’m still riding on occasion. He is built like a tank and is as bold as they come. Despite their differences these two are best mates. They call for each other if you separate them.

Okay, so own up. For the last 3 weeks at least, I have had a number of searches each week along the lines of “alex van niekerk”, “alex van niekerk orange” and “alex van niekerk blog”. This can only mean that someone who knows me is spying on looking for me, but he / she leaves no comment. I have a reasonable idea who you are, so you can stop lurking and at least leave a comment folks! I don’t bite.

At least once a week one disappointed person a week gets here looking for brown recluse spider bites and photos of brown recluse spider bites. Hunny hasn’t posted his picture story yet, because well, it’s not done yet, so a here’s quick update on that story: Nearly 3 months on, Hunny’s arm is still not fully healed. He stopped applying the dressing properly for a while which resulted in a bit of back-sliding in the healing process. Since he started doing it properly again (for about the last month) the skin/scar tissue is growing back, but it’s still not closed up yet. In short: those bites are nasty things and if you suspect you may have been bitten by a brown recluse (also known here in SA as violin spiders), see your doctor as soon as possible. The sooner you catch it, the less dead tissue they will have to remove.

I feel marginally bad about the 1-2 searches a week that still reach my blog looking for smiths motorcycles. But only marginally, because in truth that really was a kak* service experience. By far the worst in my short medium-length life. But it was also probably a once in a lifetime thing, so perhaps your experience with Norm won’t be the same as mine was.

More dream snippets from last night:

• Flossing my teeth
• Putting my foot in my shoe to find a huge orange spider in there. It was made of felt cloth, but was non-the-less alive. It crawled out the shoe (once I had stopped screaming and removed my foot) and climbed up the wall.

* for the non South Africans: ‘kak’ is Afrikaans, and translates directly to ‘crap’, but really it’s just so much more than that…

Rarely a night goes by without me dreaming something odd recently. I don’t remember all of them, some of them are just random clips strung together, but last nights was pretty good… See if you can spot the punch-line before the end

I dreamt Hunny and I bought a piece of land to build on. Not the plot I would like, but significantly larger than what we have at the moment. It was a secluded pan-handle plot, part of an old farm that had been sub-divided into smaller plots and sold off. This was the last one available.

When the plot had been split up, they demolished the old farm house, which was pretty run down anyway, and it was the piece of land that had held the main homestead that we bought. Because of this it still had an established garden. We were visiting the plot, and I was checking out exactly what we had bought. Nice big trees and an established garden. A pond that had crystal clear water and fish in it. A rock water feature, still running. A swimming pool, miraculously restored, still with a pool side entertainment area that had a toilet with working plumbing. Another outbuilding, also with a toilet in functional order…

Walking around our land, I started to need the toilet. I said to Hunny that it was time to go home, I needed to pee. He replied that I should just use the toilet in the poolside entertainment area. Which I was just about to do when I woke myself up and took myself off to the toilet in my real-life house…

I am a little sad that the land was just a dream but am quite amused at my brains way of letting me know that my bladder won’t hold till morning.

So much catching up to do, it’s been madness the last couple of weeks

I’m nearly 22 weeks along and up 6 kilos, with a pronounced Tum. It now hurts to sleep on my back, so I’m now forced to find an alternative. That’s not going so well. Two weeks back I slept funny and hurt my left shoulder/arm. It recovered okay, but two nights back I did a repeat on my right shoulder/arm. If I want to lift my right arm from the shoulder (ie, not just elbow) I actually have to use my left arm to do it. It makes getting ready for work in the morning interesting.

Still on the sleep topic, I’m dreaming up the weirdest bunch of rubbish. Two dreams about armed robbery, in both instances I was one of the robbers. I held up a canoe & kayak shop. I have always wanted to take up canoeing, but this is a bit extreme. In another dream I mistook a puppy for my baby. I was still pregnant at the time, but was convinced I’d had the baby, and this Jack Russell pup was my kid.

My blood sugar levels are now more volatile than ever. I nearly passed out today after 2 cupcakes. The low GI diet my doc recommended really helps, but what good is it being pregnant if you can’t over-indulge on all the good stuff?

I can now most definitely feel Junior move, and he’s quite an active boy! There are rarely more than 1.5 hours between his wriggles, and for now anyway, it never fails to make me smile. Of course, if he has a quiet day it makes me panic … We had a fetal anatomy scan last Friday. He is looking great. Everything measures up well, but he already has really long legs. His dad’s child

As for work and studies, one word defines: Chaos! In a wonderful synchronization of utter madness, I had to complete work on items for a major release for our client in the same week I need to finish and present an assignment for my part-time studies. I’m still trying to recover. Thankfully I have a week by the sea side soon to help me relax. I return to move into a new role at work, so nice clean slates there too.

In other news, I have been riding a little, but it’s getting a bit awkward. I have a belly support band and that does help, but I’m running out of ingenious new ways to make my riding clothes fit. My friends will breathe a collective sigh of relief when I let them know I have stopped riding.

I’ve also lost the spring in my step. Literally. I discovered this quite alarmingly when trying to leap across a stream. My leaps just aren’t what they used to be and I narrowly missed landing rump first in the stream. Taking stairs two at a time is also something I can no longer manage.

Signing off now with more promises to update more regularly, but to make up for my bad behavior, I’ll post some happy snaps from the life of Alex.

We took the dogs to a local cross-country venue to stretch their legs and play in some water.

waiting in the truck, can we go now?

what a handsome boy!

in the water is the only time Cilla can beat George fetching sticks

throw the stick! throw the stick! throw the stick!

I dreamt last night that my boss’s wolf ate my cat, and it was my fault. I put the cat in a closet to hide it away from the wolf while I continued partying at my boss’s house, because I was too lazy to take her out to the car and put her in her box. The wolf knew how to open closet doors. I’m not sure how my cat ended up at the party …

I’ve had this terrible rush of guilt every time I have seen my cat today.

I did my first bout of proper maternity shopping today. I bought some larger and looser clothes a few weeks back, but today was the first time I hit the actual maternity section. Funny how proper preggie clothes make me look bigger. I actually look pregnant in them; in my normal clothes I just look fat.

Scale says 64.5 kg’s today. On Tuesday it said 66 kg’s. I think we might need a new scale, or can pregnant chicks actually retain that much water?

Also I have pregnancy rhinitis. Yeah, it’s a real thing, I’m not making it up. My sinuses are so very clogged that I can hardly breathe through them. Most frustrating. Turns out it wasn’t a cold / flu after all. Drixine helps plenty, allows me to sleep at night. Doc said it’s okay too, so bonus! And yes, I have tried a saline spray, and no, it doesn’t help. At all. I don’t know what is that’s filling up my sinuses. It seems as if my sinuses themselves are closing in. There is no snot at all. So very frustrating because it feels like a good blow will sort it out, but I can blow until I get a draft of air out of my right tear duct and nothing green and gooey comes out.

Oh, and quick question: If you were eating lunch at a restaurant and the woman at the table directly in front of you was showing about 5 cm’s of arse between her g-string an her jeans, would you say anything? It really ruined my lunch seeing that every time I looked up, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk over to her and tell her that she might want to pull her pants up a little. She was a slim an attractive woman, but it’s not what I wanted to see while tucking into my bacon cheese and mushroom on rye.

I think I’m reading too many crime novels. Last night I dreamt that I solved the murder of two young newly weds. It was a very sad tale how they were drowned in a drainage damn. Hunny and I were traveling in the area, and as we passed the damn I had a vision of their murder. I was then able to tell this to the cops and they arrested the teenage murderer. That’s me, dreams and visions

I do think it’s related to the 7 crime novels I have read over the last 2 months. The problem is that I’m so determined for instant entertainment these days that I can’t take the time to get into something a little more intricate and slower moving. I have chopped most of my entertainment down into bite size chucks. I have this vague feeling that 1 full hour TV show is to much time to dedicate to one story. Give me two half hour stories instead, then I can fill my head with twice as much junk in the same amount of time.

It seems I’m winding my whole life up to this pace. Everything must happen quicker. Dinner at a restaurant takes half an hour these days, home cooking is chosen at the fastest to prepare option and I’ve even taking to showering instead of a relaxing bath. What happened? I really need to slow down a bit before I totally ruin out of energy. I’m quite sure I’m not producing that at a faster rate.

And it’s already February! What’s going on here? Did God flick the fast forward switch?!

There was this tree, right? It was wide and leafy and very green and it was in the middle of a small island in the middle of an oasis in a desert. On the top of the tree there was a thick 3m long pole. One end balanced on the top of the tree somehow – it defies physics – and it ran parallel to the ground. On the other end of the pole was an upturned black dustbin, on which I sat holding a small white bucket.

The pole was rotating, from above it would look like one of the hands on a clock. It was moving slowly at first, but when I realized that there would soon be an earthquake beneath the island, I convinced it to move quicker and quicker, until it was spinning at a dizzying pace. When it had gained enough momentum I flung myself, with my dustbin and bucket, as far as I could. My plan was to get sufficient distance between me and the coming earthquake.

I then discovered that if I remained sitting on the upturned dustbin, holding my white bucket, I could fly, or at least remain afloat. If I got off the dustbin or let go of the bucket I would fall. I traveled for miles across the desert this way until I cam across a white castle. Somebody was throwing a party on the roof of the castle and I stopped to investigate. I discovered that the hostess was my mom and she was dressed in a white linen outfit. She encouraged me to stay and enjoy the party, but I quickly got bored and decided to move off. I jumped off the wall of the castle onto a construction site below, dragging my bucket and dustbin with me.

I was a multi-storey facebrick building that had no roof yet and I was on the top floor. The windows had steel window frames but no glass. It started to get overcast and I looked around me and saw that the scenery had changed. My construction site was in a forest surrounded by incredibly tall trees. I walked over to the window, pushed my dustbin through the wall and climbed out the window with my bucket. I wasn’t quick enough to get back on my dustbin and I started to fall from what turned into a great height. I was falling faster and faster: trees whizzing past in front of me and the walls of the building to my back.

As I hurtled towards the ground it occurred to me that if I hit the ground at this pace I would surely die, so I slowed myself down and landed on my feet.

I had a couple of joke books as a kid, filled with the usually corney rubbish as well as a couple of classics. There was one joke in one of the books that went something like this:

Teacher: Johnny, name a substance that that is flammable and is used by cars?
Johnny: Uhm, I’ve almost got it, it’s on the tip of my tongue ….
Teacher: Well for goodness’ sake, spit it out! It’s gasoline!

I’m sure the first line is somewhat incorrect, but you follow the joke right? The punch-line always pops into my head when I am struggling to recall something that is only just outside of my memory grasp… You know when someone says: who sang that song with the line “spiderman is having me for dinner tonight”? and you can just about pick up the tune in your head, but not quite, and you know if you get the tune going, you’ll remember the rest of the song and the artist, but you just can’t get it? (It’s The Cure, by the way, and the track is called Lullaby)

Well, that feeling has been haunting me most of today… Not from any trivial pursuit type questions but because though I know I dreamed a whole heap of odd stuff last night, I just can’t remember any segment of it. I know that it was vivid, obscure and made up of patched together but unrelated segments, but try as I might, I can’t remember even one of those segments … Certain thoughts nudge the pinball machine in my mind where the dream is lodged, but nothing gives it enough of a nudge to free any part of the dream …

Thinking about puppies give the machine a big nudge, as does thinking about Crimson, a horse I’m training up at the moment. Death gives the pinball machine a little shake, as does food, but nothing near enough.

I’m trying to stop thinking about it, however it remains stubbornly on the tip of my tongue: I can’t spit it out and it won’t be swallowed either.

Of course blogging about it doesn’t help it go away at all. What can I do? I needed a topic …

30-in-30 is going strong. Healthy eating is doing okay. I’m successful on weekdays, the weekend didn’t go as well. I’m blaming that on the weddings and birthday parties and aiming at doing better this weekend.

The scale doesn’t say much different, probably only consistently 0.5 kg’s lighter. I expect that to take some time though. I’ve eaten breakfast 7 days in a row now, somebody hand me my noddy badge! I’m still struggling with the morning person thing. I had to be up by 6:30 and 8:30 respectively this weekend, but I wasn’t happy about it and only woke up fully about an hour later… It’s amazing how much I can do whilst half-asleep.

I have quite an active imagination as far as dreams are concerned. I have some very whacked dreams at times, I have died or been murdered twice in my dreams, I have narrowly escaped dying at least a dozen times. I have killed and flown and leapt over houses, fought of lions, disposed of corpses and been folded into and mailed in an envelope. All of these quite surreal and easily distinguishable as fictional (I promise – I don’t think real people melt like plastic when you attack them with a blow-torch)
This past week though I have had a number of snippets of dreams that are too plausible. I dreamt the antique shop down the road from my folks was demolished to make way for some apartments.  I dreamt my boss told me that my  shirt was too low cut. I dreamt Wimpy forgot to put the avocado on my cheese bacon & avo burger. Oh no wait, that wasn’t a dream, that actually happened … damn.
Some folk would think these kinds of mundane activities in my dreams are preferable to the weird and often macabre dreams I usually have, but this is messing with my head! I drove past the antique shop yesterday and wondered what it was still doing there, and I’m feeling a little offended by the comment I know my boss wouldn’t have made.  What it boils down to is I am having some trouble distinguishing between these realistic dreams and my everyday reality. I’m walking around waiting to find out what else didn’t actually happen.
Tonight I think I will take a sleeping pill to make the dreams go away altogether. Doing all this normal stuff in my dreams is proving tiring, I think last night I even did some ironing …