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.

Polygraph over here please…

We are in the midst of somewhat of a lying epidemic in my household. I’ve heard we are not supposed to call it lying when children are 3 and 5 years old, but it certainly feels like it.

Cuddles just told me he didn’t put his shirt back in his bedroom as I had asked him because daddy (who is at work) told him not to. Littlest Bean went to Disneyland with her friend for her friend’s birthday. According to my friend who took her, she asked throughout the day to get her hair done in the Bippity Boppity  Boutique like last time. It wasn’t part of the plan of activities and one of the party was a 5 year old boy who surely would not have appreciated the experience so they didn’t go. When she came home she told me that she did go and get her hair done but that it had fallen out.  She also tells me more serious “mistruths”, one which even led to me speaking to her teacher. I found out later after much questioning  that none of it was true.  I’m still not totally sure whether that story was true or not.

I think the general consensus is that it is age appropriate and aside from not deliberately setting them up to lie, there is not much you can do about it. It is hard not to worry though when you don’t know if any of the information you get out of them is true.

Littlest Bean had a hula hoop show at school. The kids had dreamt it up and one of the teachers helped them to organize themselves and find music. When I picked her up from school one day and she told me about it I honestly didn’t believe her, although I didn’t say that directly. She said that we had to go straight to Toys R Us and buy her a hula hoop because the next day they were doing a big hula hoop show. I told her we didn’t have time to go and that I was sure if I were required to buy her a hoop I would have received an email. She was very upset. I didn’t receive any messages that day but the following afternoon I received an invitation to the show. It mentioned that they had plenty of loaner hula hoops so not to worry about buying one. I felt quite guilty about not believing her. We went to the show and it was fantastic, about thirty of forty kids simultaneously hula hooping to music, enjoying themselves so much. Her whole class came to watch and she was so proud of herself.

Another time she told me that her teacher had told her that she had to wear her hair in a bun. Again I really didn’t know what to believe, I’d received no memo and it seemed unlikely but it turned out they had just discovered a case of nits and it was true. We eventually received a memo about it. The trouble is she could come home this afternoon and tell me she needs to buy a new skirt for school because her teacher told her they all have to wear the same skirt. This wouldn’t be true but the way she says it, she really believes it. If you don’t know that it couldn’t be true it’s easy to fall for it.

Some of the lying, for example the lie about getting he hair done at Disney Land, I feel like I understand a little. Although I wish she wouldn’t. I suppose her little 5 year old brain feels like if she tells me it happened, it feels more real to her and she can imagine it did.

So what am I to do? I have no idea. I just hope we figure it out or she grows out of it because it’s one thing not being able to tell when your 5 year old daughter is telling the truth, but when she is 15 it will be something else entirely.

3 Year Check Up

Today I took my son for his 3 year check up at a new pediatrician. We are on a quest to contain our lives to only about 5 square miles to reduce our petrol consumption and increase my sanity. The new office is really close to my daughter’s school and right in the area we want to move to soon, also there’s free parking instead of the $6-$9 I had to pay to park at the previous doctors’ office or face trawling the streets searching for a meter.

The waiting room was a little small but very bright and airy with some nice toys, unfortunately it stank of poo, hopefully this was just left over from a recent situation rather than the way it smells all the time.  One thing I might have changed was the paint handprints all over the walls, I get what they are going for, but they used large adult hands, so instead of “cute” what I got from it was more  “CSI”.

We had to wait about 45 minutes to be seen which wasn’t a great first impression.  The nurse introduced herself, “Nurse Jackie”, this really tickled me, she was very nice and didn’t seem high at all so that was good. After my son had seen and charmed the doctor he had to have 3 shots. Oh my God my poor baby, he was trembling and shaking afterwards, sobbing so hard I could hardly hold it together.

He had recovered after about 10 minutes; my daughter was with us as she was having a sick day and was looking after him and sharing with him and trying everything she could think of to cheer him up. I have to take him back in a couple of months for 2 more shots, ugh, I shall dread it.

Weaning from breastfeeding

I’m not for or against weaning a baby from breastfeeding. It’s such a personal thing to each mother and each child. With my two children my experiences were polar opposites. Weaning my son was not an issue as he stopped way before I was ready at 9 months old. He made his opinion pretty clear by biting me every time I came near him with a boob (I’m sorry did I say that biting has not been an issue in our family in that earlier post?).

My daughter who is the oldest was a completely different story. Born with a birth defect which necessitated major surgery at 48 hours old and a month-long stay in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we didn’t get an early start to breastfeeding. I faithfully pumped for her and the nurses gave her breast milk through a tube that went directly through her tummy to her stomach. It helped to be able to do this small thing for her when I was otherwise completely unable to ease her pain or help her grow and heal. When I was finally able to nurse her it was rough for a couple of weeks as she was used to a bottle but with the help of some very sweet and kind experts we finally got there. Nursing became her absolute favorite thing to do and who was I to deny my baby that close comfort she hadn’t been able to have for her first month. There were many days in the NICU  we had not even been able to touch her and we would just sit for hours watching her sleep.

Fast forward eighteen months, we have moved to Los Angeles from New York City and my daughter is still incredibly attached to nursing. I would have carried on longer but for a couple of other circumstances. The month before I had miscarried an early pregnancy and I had just found out I was expecting again. My doctor my mother and my darling husband were all very concerned about the potential for another miscarriage. Although I didn’t 100% buy the notion I could cause another miscarriage by breastfeeding, with all that concern I felt that weaning my 19 month old was the right decision.

I was very concerned about causing my young daughter emotional upset as she took so much comfort from nursing and I was determined to find a gentle way to do it. I started by tackling daytime feeding as that seemed to do be the most sensible place to start. I came up with a time, say 5 minutes, and I would let her nurse whilst watching the clock. Then I would take her off. If she cried I would let her nurse again but for only 2 seconds and then take her off again. At first it would take a good few 2-second feeds before she would finally give up but it happened. It was annoying to her so she would stop without complaint. She quickly learnt it wasn’t worth arguing about the 2 second feeds as I would just keep repeating the same pattern. Within days I was able to cut the 5-minute nursing periods gradually down to 10 seconds. Before I knew it I was only nursing at nap time and bedtime. Nursing before she fell asleep took a little longer but I repeated the same pattern, slowly slowly reducing the time. I had just gone through a very tough couple of months teaching her to fall asleep without nursing so that she would be able to sleep better during the night so I had already laid the foundation.

I miss those quiet times with my little angel who now barely sits still long enough to hug but I’m pleased we came through it none the worse for wear and now she has that little brother to play with.

As far as teaching her to fall asleep without nursing is concerned, there was no easy or quick way to do this. Every night I would cuddle her when she got up and lie her back down in her crib…over and over and over again, until weeks later it finally stuck.

hi thanks for reading...

I want to write about my parenting experiences, the ups and the downs, in a non-judgemental way that informs, supports and amuses parents and non-parents alike. This is NOT advice!