Moving House, The Trilogy - Moving Day Approaches

Monday April 25^th

This morning, despite another sleepless night I made an extra effort with the kids.  G had slept on the sofa because he couldn’t stop coughing but I ended up with Cuddles in bed with me anyway because he was coughing and then had a nightmare. After several hours of wiggling I carried him sound asleep back to his bed. When it was finally time to get up I felt a little like I had been beaten up. Squashing how I was feeling as best I could I “enthusiastically” played with the kids and after breakfast we went to the supermarket, bought donuts, and went to eat them at the park. We had a nice walk, the park is beautiful and overlooks the marina, we played the kids favorite “Sharks and Mermaids” which is a variation of tag using big rocks as safe places, and I showed them how to make daisy chains and upside-down daisies.

When we got home we had some lunch and then I absolutely couldn’t avoid packing anymore. I packed up the two bathrooms, apart from our essentials, and finished off emptying both our wardrobes. I packed some stuff from the kitchen, shudder. It’s really hard to know if I’m making good progress, I suppose I must be because now I have to look for things to put in boxes, but when the contents of your cupboards are outside instead of inside it gets very crowded. Today was complicated by Cuddles pouring a cup of water on our bed, the cat pooing on the carpet, and cuddles both drawing on and spilling juice on the carpet. I am now spending my evening going up and down 2  flights of stairs and crossing a massive car park to the laundry room as we have no unpacked sheets. Perhaps I should just let them all go for it and come to terms with not getting our deposit back. Joke. I think. I can hardly bring myself to be annoyed as I don't feel like the kids are receiving adequate supervision, poor babies.

Cuddles is supposed to be at school in the morning, his rash came on and off in mysterious waves today. At one point he looked like he had been stung on his toes on both feet, then it disappeared.  I don’t think I’ll send him if he has any rash, he didn’t go at all last week. I am missing that brief time when I usually zoom around town doing all my errands. I am also highly aware that with his school on Tues and Thurs mornings that only leaves us Weds to pack the entire day and the rest will be just the afternoons. He doesn’t stay long enough at school for me to drive all the way home and go back, I’d only be home for 30 minutes, NOT worth it. It’s ridiculous I know, wait till we move further away, then it will be even more ridiculous!

Tuesday April 26th

Alright alright this isn’t funny anymore. Was it really so bad for me to mention in a previous blog post that I now GET a goodnight’s sleep? Yet again G’s coughing kept me awake till 1am, then he woke Cuddles up when coughing in the hallway, so Cuddles woke up and had a coughing fit too. I eventually got Cuddles settled and then slammed my finger so hard in his wardrobe door that I sobbed. After finally falling asleep with my very sore finger with adrenaline coursing through me I was awoken again at 5am by a gaggle of extremely drunk men laughing and chanting outside our building for about 30 minutes until a heroic neighbor went and shouted at them. They carried on after he left “on the handlebars on the handlebars” I think they were shouting, but he came back and this time they left. I swear about 5 minutes later a bloody crow started going berserk in the tree outside our bedroom window, ARE YOU KIDDING ME. He eventually flew off, still screaming his tiny head off, the sound got fainter but was still there, he didn’t fly quite far enough away. I’m not sure if I fell back asleep after that, I remember Cuddles coughing at about 6, and then they came in yelling it was time to get up at 7, I maybe slept in-between those two occurrences.

Today, despite feeling extremely hung over (I’m not) I made lots of progress in the kitchen. My pots and pans are all packed and what I’m most happy about is the junk cupboard where we kept batteries, light bulbs, screws etc, that has been thoroughly sorted and packed. Phew.

We are going to take a much-needed breather this afternoon and take a walk to a friend’s lemonade stand by the beach.

Wednesday April 27^th

After an unsurprisingly restless night with the coughing duo, this morning I heard Cuddles’ chest rattling from a foot or two away. I found that a little alarming so I called the doctor’s  office and they asked us to go in later in the afternoon to get his chest listened to. We spent the morning pottering, we did some drawing and I got them both interested in playing some kids games on the computer. Then I went around the apartment and room by room made a “to do” list of all the tasks yet to be done. It gives me great peace of mind to get organized so I was feeling better about things once I had finished, especially after I ticked a few items off and delegated some to G.

Later on at the doctor’s we discovered that Cuddles has bronchitis. It wasn’t a great surprise as he had taken quite a turn for the worse. We always freak out a little when it comes to his lungs because of his stay in the NICU with pneumonia as a newborn. One extremely badly behaved visit to the pharmacy to drop off the prescription and we were back at home. G went to pick up the prescription near our new home but we didn’t realize there are two within a block of each other so he queued up for 15 minutes at the wrong one. I felt pretty bad about that as he had left work nice and early and ended up getting delayed by 30 minutes. We then spent most of the evening with Cuddles on the sofa trying to find something to watch which would be acceptable for him but not too mind numbing for us, this was difficult. He eventually settled down once I had come back from the laundry room with his boy pajamas. He had gone to bed in his sister’s pajamas because he only has 3 pairs that are not packed and he always manages to get them wet and dirty in the morning. He was not happy about wearing girls’ pajamas at all.

Anyway, all in all, not a terribly productive day, tomorrow I will surely do better out of a sense of urgency. I think we might go and get a donut first again as a treat, shh, its terrible, once you have one, then you want to go back and buy another.

Thursday April 28^th

Today is the last day before we move. The movers are due here tomorrow morning at 8am. Today has gone pretty well, the house now has a sense of calm over it as do I. Unfortunately G has been majorly held up at work and still has several things he needs to get done before tomorrow, I’m not expecting him till at least 9pm. I’m going to have my shower this evening and try to enjoy a little tranquility as there isn’t a whole lot I can do right now.

Go to Sleep my Baby

I have been avoiding writing this blog post. I want to write it but even as I sit down to begin I feel traumatized by the sleep deprivation I suffered for the first four and a half years as a parent.

When we had our son, 26 months after we had our daughter, I was working on the illogical and highly optimistic assumption that we couldn’t possibly be unlucky with sleep again, that just wouldn’t be fair. Obviously the world is an extremely unfair place and we are pretty damn lucky in almost every aspect of our lives. When you are averaging about 2.5 or 3 hours broken sleep a night it is hard to remember how lucky you are, or in fact what your child’s birthday is or what your husband looks like.

For those four and a half years between my first child being born and my second child turning 2 and a half, sleep deprivation affected my life in plenty of unforeseen ways. I would freeze when someone asked me what I had done the day before completely unable to remember. I never really felt tired, just like I was in another dimension, removed slightly from reality and certainly not “myself”. I would break things and lose things but what bothered me the most was that I lost my sense of humor and to a large extent my ability to socialize with anyone other than close friends. I remember blankly staring at other moms during playdates wanting to make the effort to be upbeat and chatty but not being able to think of a single thing to say.

I’d like to give some background to the circumstances surrounding our children’s arrivals as I think the stories are definitely linked to my choices when it comes to helping my children to go to sleep at night. It may be a little traumatic to read, if you don’t feel up to it, skip a few paragraphs.

Our start as parents, as I have mentioned before, was rocky. Our daughter had to have surgery at 48 hours old and nobody ever reassured us that she would be OK, the day she was released from hospital at just under 4 weeks old with a feeding tube still attached to her tummy was the first indication we really had that she was going to make a recovery. Still to this day at 5.5 years old nobody has ever told us that she will not have any further problems or that she will be OK. It is plainly obvious to us that her problems are all behind us, she is a perfectly normal well functioning little girl with no serious medical issues. It wouldn’t have hurt for someone to put a hand on our shoulders and tell us “hey you know what, we’ve seen this before, she’s doing really well, I can’t make you any promises but I really expect she is going to do just fine”.  What we got was more than we ever dreamed of so I should definitely not be complaining. For a couple of years after she was born it was hard to understand how we could be so lucky.  I try to remind myself regularly of just how lucky we are, it’s easy to forget on those days when the challenges of parenting leave you frustrated, confused and tired.

When we were expecting our second child I had many scans to make sure our baby would have none of the problems our daughter experienced at birth. Statistically it was more likely he would have the same birth defect and statistically it is more likely our daughter will have a child with that birth defect. Something I’m not looking forward to explaining to her, but hey, at least she’s here, at least she should be able to have children should she choose to.  When our son was born by a scheduled repeat c section on a predetermined morning in December it was a very different experience than my first delivery. With my first child I was in labor for 45 hours and finally wheeled into surgery vomiting and in the firm belief I was dying,  that was before we found out our baby was ill, I shall hold on to that story a little longer.

As with my illogical theory on bad sleepers and not being unlucky twice, I also believed that there was no way my second baby could be born with a medical issue because that wouldn’t be fair. We were reassured by all the tests we’d had but I’d actually had extensive scans in my first pregnancy that never picked up any abnormality. When he was shown to me in the operating room I was overcome with the relief of finally meeting my boy and him being so healthy and strong. What I couldn’t hear in my euphoria was his barking rasping breathing. I’ve had it described to me by husband who was there but I was completely unaware of it, I guess I just believed he was healthy. They made light of taking him to be checked out in the NICU as if it really wasn’t a big deal but he ended up being in there for 10 days. Nobody has ever come up with a definite reason for his breathing problems at birth, it could have been pneumonia, it could have just been that his lungs were immature. The most terrifying part of his stay in hospital for me was how slow his progress was. When our daughter was so terribly sick after her surgery, her body swollen up to twice its width, she still made unbelievably fast progress despite the odd setback.  The surgeon who has been performing these operations her whole life told us our daughter was the best outcome and quickest recovery she has ever had. On Christmas eve 2007 I went to visit our little baby boy in the hospital and was so exasperated by how his recovery was crawling along so slowly it occurred to me for the first time that he really might not make it. This quickly turned into despair, and I became more and more convinced he was going to die. Then on Christmas day he started to improve slowly, I went to see him twice before and after dinner. A few short days after Christmas he was fully recovered and released from hospital. Incredible. Never ever underestimate a little baby’s resiliency; they are so much stronger than they look.

So all that background leads up to me explaining that my kids both woke up, from being a couple of months old, every 20 minutes to every hour and a half all through the night, every single night and would never nap for more than 20 minutes. For my daughter this stopped around 2 years old and for my son a few months later. With my first child, I had the dubious luxury of being able to control her sleeping environment. I bought several books that I read over and over, I tried everything. I tried leaving her to cry it out once, I lasted 20 minutes and then went in to check on her and the sight of her tearstained face sitting up in her crib put me off forever. I still feel guilty 5 years on. Suffice to say I am indeed a MAJOR soft touch, so sue me. I would always think back to my daughter’s first month when she slept alone in the hospital every night. With my son the similar sleeping patterns led me to eventually let him cry, but after 90 seconds, that’s seconds not minutes, he vomited. It turns out, and it is still true to this day, that if he gets too upset he will throw up, copiously, all over the place. So that was that. I went back to trying all these different techniques I had read about really to no avail. I think since my children have matured into their sleeping, my endless sleep research has finally benefitted us, but not at first. Now they go to sleep at 7.30 most nights and wake at 7am, regular as clockwork, and we do not hear from them in between unless they are unwell. Now here comes my finest most “groundbreaking” piece of advice learned from many many hours of research and trial and error: PUT THE BOOK DOWN, CHILL THE HELL OUT, YOU CANT FORCE THEM TO SLEEP, IT WILL BE OK, YOU’LL MAKE IT THROUGHT THIS, ASK FOR HELP. I do wish someone had told me this, although I don’t suppose I would have listened, how could you not try when you are getting so little sleep. I was miserable. Those books convinced me that I could change the situation if only I would follow the steps correctly. But it never worked, so I blamed myself for not doing it properly. It makes you wonder, there are a lot of people making a lot of money from desperate mothers just like me. Making us feel like it’s our fault. It’s not your fault. A baby is a person too, you can’t control her, you can only guide her and hope she does what you want. And by the way, nothing lasts forever, and women are strong as Hell when we need to be.

As an afterthought, anyone else who wants to know if we will try for #3, please see above.