Daggers at dawn

Babe woke at 5.13 this morning. And at just after midnight, 1.11am, 1.23am, 1.46am, 3.24am, etc etc. As we didn't get him down until 10pm last night I knew the 5.13 screaming was because he was exhausted and pissed off at being awake so early. Which made two of us.

I didn't know what to do with the little mite, feeling closer than I have been yet to pulverising him. I haven't had an unbroken night for going on for a month and I swear he's out to break me. Why? I'm his loving mother! So, I bring him into bed with me. More back-writhing and screams. His milk is ready, cooled, on the windowsill (it's not going to curdle overnight in the Uk in May, is it?)(actually his milk did curdle during a brief hot interlude a couple of weeks ago and I didn't notice 'til he was half-way through it - oops) so I put it into his little hands. A nano-second of contentment was swiftly followed by more screams, and my mummy-radar detected the desire for milk that had been warmed.

I open the bedroom door and yell onto the landing,
'The little ba**ard wants warm milk and if he doesn't get it in five I'm going to kill myself.'
Other Half emerges from the spare room, zombie-like, and makes his way downstairs at a reasonable pace for the time of day.

Meantime, Babe points, screaming, at the TV I now keep on the farside bedside table.
'Mine! Rahhhhhhhh.'
CBeebies doesn't start until 6am.
'Not, now, it isn't, sweetheart.'
'RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!'.

Other Half returns with the milk, which he hands to me gingerly through the door, which is ajar. He then retreats. Twenty minutes left until his alarm clock goes off. He starts work at seven, and sits in a vibrating excavator for eleven hours with two 30min breaks per day.

The warm milk has done the trick. Babe lies against the pillow, guzzling, while I frown into my eyelids, wondering for the umpteenth time where I've gone wrong.

Half-way through he runs his soft little index finger across my bare shoulder and removes the bottle from his mouth. 'Mummy,' he smiles. I am filled with joy and know that actually, I haven't gone wrong at all. Well, not recently anyway.

Then he stabs me so hard in the iris that I gasp in pain.
'Eye.'

When Other Half returned from work this evening I asked for thirty seconds of his time.
He looked at me and sat down.
'We need to get this sleep thing sorted,' I say. 'From tonight, we agree a bed time and he can scream as much as he likes, but he goes when we say he does.'
'I agree with you,' he responds. Right answer. And we play games, just like a happy family, look at flash cards, get our little chicken washed and ready for bed. Then it's milk time and Bed Time. My heart starts to beat faster. But twenty-five minutes of screaming later, it has worked. Babe is asleep.

I go into the kitchen and wearily attack a bag of mini mars bars. Other Half comes in. I look at him in what I think is my "Little (well, ok, medium) women needs big (well, ok, medium) man to look after her" expression.
'I need a hug,' I say.
'And I need a shag,' he tartly responds. 'But am I going to get one?'
I'm not sure what my face says, but he picks up his gym bag and walks out of the front door.

New Year's Resolutions

Well, New Week's Resolutions, actually: several readers (possibly all of them) have asked why my blog died such a fast and sudden death. Good question. Well, stupid question really - I'm a working mum who lives with a man, for crying out loud, which doesn't leave time for applying deodorant, let alone written contemplation - but it has given me cause for thought. I must find a way of re-building the person I always thought I was. I must find myself. I must seek a more productive way of letting off steam than turning the air blue and worrying our neighbours. So here it is. I commit to updating this blog twice-weekly for the forseeable future. And now I'm going to watch the second round of Britain's Got Talent. Anything, anything at all, to kurb the onslaught of hugely intelligent and important thoughts that pursue me night and day...

PS On the subject of blue air, Babe has said 'sh*t' about ten times now. And in context, so there's no mistaking it. The first occassion was about a week ago when he rolled off my bed, ran around the side and richoched into a chair. Things must change.

Goat-yoghurt 'me' time

I finally had some 'me' time tonight: a bath. And took Trinny and Susanna's advice and put goat yogurt on my face to soften it up. Now I've got sodding weird dry patches. Liars! I should do them for... well, lying. Because I've got loads of time for complaining and the like these days... not. At least I hadn't made a special trip out to get the stuff.

No, I had plenty of said yogurt in my fridge. Such fancies are the by-product of living with a man of near-Mediterranean descent. We are never without such trivialities as olives, feta cheese (five packs per week minimum), huge amounts of crusty white bread, olive oil, pale lager and wash-and-go. Oh, and apple turnovers (??). We are, however, regularly without such life-sustaining necessities as a kitchen, bathroom, toilet paper and washing up liquid. Heigh ho.

All is not well, it seems, with the down pipe that was laid under the dining room floor while I was in labour. Pooey odours were reaching for my nostrils as I laid in the bath, and for once they weren't coming from Babe. Blinking heck. Other Half had a bad motorcycle accident shortly before we met, and amongst his injuries was the almost entire loss of his sense of smell. And he is concerned that I may be exaggerating said pooey stink to get my own back because I so utterly, literally and physically (ie prostrating myself across his shovel) opposed his digging up of said dining room floor. More about our DIY disasters on another occassion, but a great proportion of my four-day labour and birth story are given over to them. I can see nasty things lying in wait for this weekend, though.

So, on that happy note, I'm going to recklessly fritter a portion of my evening on e-bay. I should have learnt my lesson yesterday when I bought a wonderful baby carrier with sunroof, wind protector, luggage compartment and god knows what else for £4 - RRP £159! Except when I received the payment confirmation I discovered its size XXL. Rats! That will be too large even for my expanding, sagging waistline. And Other Half is obviously much trimmer than I am. I'll have to strap it around a pillow or something as well as my tummy.

Anyway, as Christmas is approaching, I thought I'd ask Other Half what special things I could search for him for on E-bay, and he asked me to look for a spare car key. I'm not sure if he's taking the piss. Still I like a challenge.

Watching TV and crying

Good grief! What has my life come to? I've just caught the tail end of some film for kids about whales and surfing or something and within five minutes I started crying. Other half is crying too, but children's films tend to have that effect on him. Think he must yearn for a simpler life at times. Not that I make life complicated, you understand. (Yeah right - the ED.)

So, back to the film, and the fact that I'm writing this sniffing. Must be the evocative music. Or the fact that's I've been up since half five again this morning, and it's taken both of us two hours this afternoon to settle an increasingly manic Babe down for a sleep. Poor little mite has been given about ten bottles of formula, as that's what usually gets him to drop off. OOPS - BORING MOTHER DETAIL ALERT... And it's been windy-rain-hailing outside so pushing him out in the pram wasn't an option. He did sleep for half an hour at 8am, which is when I should have had a nap too, but I decided to tidy the loft, and have filled the dining room with dusty boxes to sort. And now I'm going to go and make stuffed aubergine for dinner. I think there's a learning point here somewhere, but will ignore it for now. So much to do, and so little time...

Ok, so I lied

You probably guessed that my other half didn't get tangled in the helicopter outside TKMaxx. That would have been silly. So I've been musing about why I lied. I suppose it's because I felt I was building up to a crescendo and then realised I didn't have one so made one up. The story felt a little empty without something else on top.

But what none of you realise is that nearly every day for us is a story like that one. Life for me is kind of like scootering along, gripping the handles for all I'm worth, knowing that as soon as a corner approaches I'm going to have to indicate, and that's the point at which I just know my shoelace is going to get caught up in the wheel spokes. So I cunningly decide not to indicate at all, or change direction mid-journey, and that's when the contents of the ice-cream van I hadn't noticed ahead of me by the kerb shoots it's load across my path.

Sunny Sunday

Today was going so well. We got up (good start:)) around 6.45 which was a lie-in by Babe's standards. Had breakfast, made animal noises, piled up and knocked down plastic bricks a few times (Other Half), put several loads of washing through, cleaned the kitchen, cooked, washed hair, hoovered and cleaned the windows (me)... you can picture the scene. Except no, you can't, because we had glorious smiles on our faces! This was our first DIY-free weekend in months. Life seemed delirious and carefree. We sipped coffee in between our respective tasks, chatted about nothing, relished the cuteness and clearly intellectual outputs of our offspring, and even had time for a bit of the other while he had a nap midday. Gosh!

After the obligatory 'see how much of the surface area of the kitchen we can spread our lunch over' feast - wrestle with the Babe for his spoon and somehow he always wins, catapulting whatever's on it into your hair (well, they do say they're born with enough grip to hang off washing lines) - we decided to go into town. The excitement in the car was tangible. A day out with mummy AND daddy!

And you know what? We had quite a nice, argument-free afternoon. Didn't really do anything, but it was nice. Different. Strange :)

And then it was time to come home. We shouldn't really have left it so late. Babe had been happily helping me choose carving knives in TKMaxx when he suddenly started screaming with hunger, in the way that only babes suddenly can, and a packet of organic raisins wasn't going to cut the mustard. So we ran to the car, in a loving, nearly hand-in-hand, smug, 'we're a family and we've spent the day outside the house together and we're still alive' kind of way.

Then Other Half (who had been rummaging in his pockets in an exaggeratedly casual way) asks me for the key. My brow darkens. 'Why the f**k would I have the f**king key?' I reply. 'I can't drive, I have no pockets, and you parked the car while I went on to the shops with Babe.'

I can see in his face that he is tempted to argue with me on the technicalities of whether I can actually drive or not, but fortunately he applies restraint and we quickly decide to re-trace our footsteps in search of said key.

Where had we been? Well, Babe had messed himself as soon as we arrived at the shops, so first we'd gone to the baby change facilities. No key there. Then we'd gone to buy some water as I was thirsty. No key at the newsagent's. Then we'd waited outside the lifts for a while, to go up to the third floor to take some clothes back. No key in either lift. In case you were wondering, we'd ended up accidentally getting out at the second floor and having to wait for another one, and then it turned out that the shop in question was, actually, on the second floor after all so we had to go back down again. Then I'd needed the loo. No key there. The woman in the cubicle I'd used had great boots though. Then we'd chatted with a woman who tried to flog me a gel-filled bottle heater for 20 quid outside Santa's grotto - no key there. Then had gone to travel agent so that Other half could get brochures on Florida, which I tolerated as people have to be able to dream, but frankly I have no intention of ever visiting the USofA, and no key there, so that left TKMaxx. I told you we'd had a great afternoon.

By this time, we were being warned that the centre was closing in five minutes, so we decided to split. Other Half went to TKMaxx while I went to press the Help button on the ticket machine. Thirty seconds later, I'd arranged to have a camera put on the car, to get a taxi home, for Other Half to pick up car in morning (lucky he's not working, but that's another story) and for the all-night fee to be waived. Other Half had, meanwhile, got himself stuck inside the kids helicopter outside TKMaxx - god knows how he got one of the blades tangled in his rucksack but now I know where they were while I was in the lav - and an angry-looking security guard was trying to get him out, in a 'rabbits and all his friends and relations' kind of way, while straggling shoppers gave them bemused stares.

And he hadn't found said key. We can't even have a sodding simple boring afternoon without something happening that you'd prefer not to...

Smelly house...

Am annoyed. Entire house smells of lamb meat. Other Half making bi-annual visit to kitchen and frying everything within reach. At least there's no fish in sight. I've lost count of the times I've turned the corner at the bottom of the road and known immediately that it's fish for tea. Bloody hell. Kitchen like the engine room of an Atlantic steamer.