Z has been away since Tuesday (he's in Montenegro with the Baby) and alone I shall remain until the end of the month. That first day at work I was all mopey all 'what should I do with all this free time and this lack of demands and responsibilities' and my co-worker gave me a look of pure contempt and said "If the answer to that is not self-evident, then you don't deserve my help."

Truer words may never have been spoken so I came to my senses and flounced off into the arms of Two Weeks Of Singledom like it was made of sushi and cocktails. (Which it has been. Good times).

Since then I have been hugely enjoying this holiday from domesticity and celebrating it with irregular meals, irregular sleeping hours and all the trash tv watching I can stand. (There was a time in my life when middle of the night programmes on BBC2 were my viewing staple and lo, those times have returned).

Z is a stickler for trappings of civilisation ('people should sleep in a bed and eat at the table and verily verily we will live like these people') so I've been rebelling against his boring conformism by sleeping on the sofa and eating at the computer desk. Also if you had a mind to you could trace the history of my movements through the house by following the trail of cutlery, plates and cups that I thoughtfully leave on various surfaces where they remain until I run out of plates and cups and cutlery and gather them up and wash them and put them away neatly and the whole thing starts again.

It is one of the things that drives Z ballistic, but curiously has no effect on me. (On the other hand, if you want to see me embrace Frothing Rage in under 30 seconds then leave socks on the floor or put things away in the wrong drawer).

Anyway, the one thing I thought I would do most of during the week (answering emails and other Internet Use until my eyes fall out) I have done the least of thanks to a combination of factors:

1) Between the demands of Real Life Work and Real Life Socialising I've been too knackered to do anything but collapse amid cats

2) I got my hands on the new Margaret Atwood novel (post apocalyptic is my favourite kind) and I wasn't going to let anything come between me and that gripping baby until it was completely devoured

3) I awarded myself a No-Communication Holiday yesterday - switched off my mobile, read short stories, took long baths and cooked all the perishables in the house (roasted butternut squash with bacon and walnuts, mushroom risotto with parsley and parmesan, carrot soup and roasted peppers peeled and marinated with garlic and balsamic vinegear).

***************************

Anyway. Good reading links now.

My journal has been featured on Schmutzie's Five Star Fridays (thank you to whoever nominated it! surprised and much obliged) along with some ace writing. And since the only thing that comes more naturally to me than fretting about undeserved honours is voracious reading, I set to immediately.

Livejournal is so insular and involving, that it took me a long time to realise there was so many other blogs out there and I've been overloading my google reader ever since. ( My favourite recent discoveries: )

( Books I'm In, and Lovely Books by Other People )

My Crush of the Week - Evil Slutopia . Feminism and brains and cartoons and pop culture snark oh yis. They light up my Google Reader like a star.

Inter-ethnic Balkan conflicts and politics, as explained concisely by Z:

( Under the cut, due to swearing )

Z and I watched The Tour at the Canary Wharf Film Festival recently and it made us howl with laughter and shiver with chills just like the best of the Yug cinema should. I've been delighted to find that someone has uploaded the whole of the film onto YouTube.

The Tour is a comedy drama set in 1993 (the worst years of the war) where a group of veteran actors from Belgrade (who are largely playing themselves) are tempted by the promise of money to go and perform on the Serbian Front Lines in Bosnia and then become sucked into the war as they bounce fron one side to the next.

In the segment of the film below, they storm off in the night after a performance results in a fight with the Serbian soldiers and they end up running into Croatian troops. All the actors are Serbs, aside from Sonja (Mira Furlan) who is Croat, so they thrust her forward as a sort of ambassador while the rest either smile fixedly or try to imitate the Croat dialect.

It's something that I find myself doing quite often. Thrusting Z forward (he's a Croat) whenever we're in any ethnically tense or sensitive situations (because as he said, better PR) while I smile brightly and fixedly and go "Oooh! Look A Croat! Please don't kill me."

In Montenegro it was too hot to consume anything but fruits and salads, and my son felt that the only reasonable response to being a 20 month old person was to run around and try to climb on places that have snakes. As a result of this no-food-all-action-all-the-time I shed close to 8 pounds in 10 days. I haven't shifted weight that fast since I gave birth, but since in London I have neither problem I am having pizza for breakfast while I sit in front of the computer and consider into which part of my day I should slot a lengthy nap. Left to our own devices the cats and I synchronise our hobbies.

Spending time with my son was beautiful (he talks! he doesn't shut up! I still haven't decided whether I'm more charmed by his conversations with inanimate objects or his statement-of-the-obvious sentences) and leaving him for another month was heartbreaking.

While my desires to write endless posts and read endless posts slug it out with each other, I leave you with an image of Postmodern Childhood: Collecting cigarette butts on the beach*




* A person cannot dissuade him from this course of action. I've tried. But I'm thinking he has a bright future in garbage collection.

I fly to Montenegro to reacquaint myself with my son , leaving Z to look after the cats and make sad puppy eyes in my wake.

N: I will miss you so much.
Z: I will miss you too. Who am I going to talk with when I come home? Whom am I going to share my bed with?
N:Hopefully no onee.

It has been a month and a half since I've last seen my son and in that time I've gone through Stages Of Separation that roughly look like this:

1. Shock. Disbelief.
2. A headiness that comes from sleep and drinking and going out with other adults five nights in a row. JUBILATION for you are FREE from the YOKE OF TYRANNY of babies.
3. DESPAIR. Perhaps you need tyranny. Perhaps it lends meaning and structure to your life.
4.The excitement of road trips through foreign countries with one's beloved husband. Like a second honeymoon, if wild sex were replaced with crashing nightly into the oblivion of motel beds and exhausted sleep.
5.An aching, aching sadness compounded by jetlag and post-holiday blues.
6. Chaos. Disarray. Due to no longer having a child for whose sake to maintain pretence of competence, stop cleaning house, eating regular meals or buying vegetables. Live like students, eat like hobos.
7. Boredom. A sudden sweep of boredom which hurtles you through dark and dingy alleys of your mind and spits you into the dust and rubble of the daytime world. In your disoriented state you decide the only cure is a trip to IKEA (on a weekend no less) to replace a horrible kitchen table with a nice new one.
8. While Z does DIY you decide to welcome the Beautiful New Table (the thing you ooooh over and admire in the absence of your baby) by scrubbing the kitchen floor on your hands and knees, in your underwear. This will be simultaneously the closest you will come to giving your husband an erotic thrill, although when you realise that he is directing more appreciative 'aaahing' at the shiny floor than at your ass, you threaten to brain him with a bottle of multi-surface cleaner.
9.Heady with success of actual clean kitchen, complete with actually visible counterspace you decide to tackle the ominous mountain of CDs that infests your living room which leads us to:

Remembrance Of Terrible Musical Tastes Past

When some people move house they get rid of as much as possible so that they migrate with as little as possible. We are not those people, and our CD shelves were full of things that we had collected in our teenage years and not listened to since then. My Pile Of Shame attested to an unsavoury affection for country music and Enigma, while Z's contained a mix of German Death Metal and miscellanious Sounds Of Nature CDs (of which my favourite is called Frog Chorus).

Tomorrow I travel and will have no internet until the end of August. The withdrawal symptoms would normally be immediate and severe, but I anticipate that preventing my son from running out onto highways or drowning himself in the sea will commandeeer all my resources to the degree that if I have time to read sell by dates on a carton of yoghurt I shall consider myself fortunate.

x

Between work, sleep, a host of Mysterious Ailments and the following the whole healthcare fracas in the States, I completely forgot to post about Z's and mine most bizzarre BlogHer moment.

Setting: The Recovery Breakfast after the conference.
Characters Next to Z is a father with a 9 month old baby. The baby is wearing footwear in the shape of rabbits, one of which has slipped off its foot.

Z, to infant, conversationally: You have slippers, and they are rabbits.

Baby: *blows a raspberry*

Baby's father, to Z: English is not your first language, is it?

Z: You got me.

Baby's father, to Z: Well for future information, those aren't rabbits. They are bunny slippers.

I still have no idea what that was about, aside from an example of linguistic wankerism, but it has given Z and me a whole wealth of material from which to construct our in-jokes and ad-libbed ludicrous conversations and for that I am profoundly grateful. Otherwise in times of boredom I am forced to parade around the house with no trousers on, showcasing my underwear and cellulitic thighs, mocking Z for being older than me and demonstrating to him how I am the most glorious part of his life since you can't just buy magic like this baby

Your spouse cheerfully makes a thoughtless comment that you find hurtful/offensive and then feels surprised at your emotional response.

Your spouse equally cheerfully organises a Marvellous Secret day out in which you leave your child in the care of excellent friends, drives you for 3 hours to Bath, deposits you both in a spa in which pampering treatments have been booked for you and then after these and dinner drives you back 3 hours to London to pick up child and go home and does all this like it's no big deal.

Congratulations. You are married to Sagittarius.

You have given birth to a child with the ambitious stubborness of Napoleon, the malleability of a filing cabinet, who alternates between heart-stopping, parent-aging climbs and deep civic responsibility. Well done, you have spawned Capricorn. Your parenting should probably involve getting out of his/her way. You may also want to invest in some colourful hats to detract from all the bruises on his face from Colonization Of The Furniture Gone Wrong.

On the other hand, at least the bruises on his head nicely coordinate with My Twilight-Coloured Knee. A knee which was achieved when my foot met a slippery bathroom floor - in the terrible frozen tableau that unfolded I looked like I was about to ask the towelracks for their hand in marriage before I looked like I was going to be sick from pain and the thought of this incident occurring in the bathroom of dear friends, and not say a public building in America where I would at least stand a chance of receiving a nice settlement, instead of merely sympathy; for about a day I had a kneecap the size of an egg and my journey to work on Monday was enhanced by crutches. Still there are worse things than medically ordained Rest, and my extended unscheduled time at home is being all kinds of better by the fact that Matei has taken up both mime and opera.

I can't wait to see what kind of improving influence Eurovision Song Contest will have on him.

Yesterday someone made Z sad because they nicked his bike from in front of our house, so today I have resolved to make him happy by packing away all our winter coats so that our hallway is less of a mess. I am also starting a second Cheer Up Your Husband project - I have gone through my wardrobes to take out the good stuff I've hardly worn (M&S skirts, mostly) and sell it on ebay to see if it generates enough cash to buy him another bike. Normally I prefer to just give stuff away since a trip to the Post Office eats my soul, but these are trying financial times and between the service charges for the house and the nice hotel reservations for my birthday there aint's a lot of cash to throw around.

I haven't been this underslept since Matei was a newborn. I've been averaging 4 hours sleep per day the last two weeks, and the trend is set to continue until July - which is an awful lot of undersleptedness on one hand, but a surprisingly short time in which to prepare and write the further thousands of words I need to hand in. Hmmmm.

I am turning six hours worth of meetings into minutes and the process is mind-crushing enough to make me turn to Food Roulette - mozarella cheese that went off yesterday and tortellini with pancetta which expired on Monday. Dubious and delicious.

It's also why I will always be fat. My lazy metabolism is no match for my enthusiastic apetite.

Words. I am writing deadline-driven words while the rest of my family is out playing in parks.

Words are being written in a state of partial delirium, as I have just started inventing language in an attempt to describe therapeutic dilemmas. Will see if the coining and liberal use of phrase 'respectful disrespect' spells out a masterstroke of creative genius or the hour of my undoing.

Today's failures in chronological order:

*Letting child roam around the room at 7am, left to wreak what havoc he pleased while his father and I slept under the guise of 'ignoring the bad behaviour' and 'enhancing his independece' but mostly'laziness'

*Getting dates of meetings confused

*Forgetting Very Important Unique Keys at home and needing to return for them in my lunch break

*Spilling a mugful of hot tea all over my nice dress and trousers just prior to Big Important Meeting thereby making it impossible to follow the First Aid guidelines about Removing Clothes and Sticking Thigh Under Cold Running Water for 10 minutes.

*Attempting to look as cool and collected and professional as possible for a person with a soaked lap.

However, there is sunlight today my friends! And 20 degrees Celsius! It's nice to see global warming finally working for us and bringing us an early spring so I'm all 'What are first degree burns amongst friends?' and 'Pomegranate tea was my least favourite flavour' and 'What dress was not enhanced by brown stains?' and 'I wonder if my misfortune can generate sufficient compassion to make my bid for funds succeed?'

Oh yeah. Rocking out with sunlight and lowering expectations in the workplace since 2000

Matei has decided to start going to bed later and waking up earlier (ostensibly so he can have more time in which to babble baby nonsense at me) and I'm not sure what to call this crime (mutiny? sedition? treason? disturbing the peace?) but I Do Not Like It and I'm refusing to go down without a fight. Guerilla countermeasures have been initiated, mostly in the form of getting him to run in the fresh air until he keels over.

Z killed the computer with a defragment but has resurrected it at long last, and we celebrated by watching The Changeling - which was an excellent film, albeit terrfying, and I'm still not sure why my mother said it had 'a happy ending'.

I hope chocolate and good times have been had by all. An empty bottle of sloe gin is my new definition of an excellent evening.

Work disaster! I have taken it upon myself to do Thankless Presentation which is proving even more soul-destroying by having several hours of my work vanish just now. Argh, argh, argh.

Also daylight savings time has stolen an hour from me recently, and I still have not recovered.

Therefore, in a brief bid to stop my mind from imploding I shall tell you of things that have made me happy recently:

1) Taking Matei swimming on Sunday. We frolicked in a warm pool and within three minutes his initial Baby Death Grip was replaced by an urge to jump out of my arms and drown try out a leapfrog-like swimming style. Great enjoyment was had by all, compounded by the fact that several hours later he took a two hour evening nap (from 6 until 8 pm) - which is unprecedented because he prefers to confine his daytime rest activities to one 45 minute sleep. Although we feared that this would mean he would not fall asleep again until 3am, by 8:30 he was exhibiting signs of tiredness and after we exchanged some smiles he lay his head against my shoulder and slid his arm around my body and I lay there listening to his breathing becoming deeper and deeper and that was that. As a bonus he stayed in his cot and didn't stir until 8 in the morning and Z and I got to enjoy the luxury of being able to stretch out in our own bed and sleep without anyone kicking us in the teeth.

ALL HAIL THE MAGICAL HEALING POWERS OF WATER.

2) I have a new spring cardigan which is pleasing to me on account of a) its fiery coral colour b) the fact that it was on sale.

3)I am going to be reading at Cringe tomorrow night. Free entry, teenage diaries, bad poetry and the promise of alcohol! You know you like it and want to come. If anyone wants more details about it, consult Antonia.

Things my child has learned in the last week:

*How to blow kisses

*How to blow soap bubbles

*How to carefully put a cap onto a bottle and then unscrew it again

*How to chant 'Yes yes yes!' with the fervour of Meg Ryan in When Harry met Sally when he spots something he's keen on.

*How to climb onto a desk using the bed, the chair and his own NINJA POWERS.


Things which I have been trying to teach him but he's failed to uptake with enthusiasm:

*To articulate his hunger by bowing down to me and saying: "Please nourish your humble servant"

*To chant "I love big butts and I cannot lie!" while conducting an interpretative dance sequence

*That any hour before 7am is an Illegal Wake Up Time, punishable by excommunication.

If I see another newspaper headline along the lines of : Jade Goody - last hours I am going to growl at someone. Will they ever leave the woman alone and stop afixing poignant, and touching to every single thing that she does? Ghouls.

Matei has some kind of rash and fever-inducing virus, which he has kindly passed along to me (babies are worse than rats when it comes to spreading disease) and I am feeling closer to death than usual today. I have retaliated by wearing my ultimate comfort outfit: black hoodie, jeans, Rocker Hello Kitty T-shirt and childish socks with unicorns on. I also have bitchin' new glasses.

I have taught Matei to say "bum" and "underpants" which are in our language fairly simple words beginning with a guh sound which he has been practising diligently over the last two days. He is totally in love with these words and has been chanting "underpants underpants" to himself the last 15 minutes.

He has taught himself to pick up bits of fluff and cat hair off the floor and turn them into the nearest adult in return for praise and applause. However, the last few days he has been going directly to the source and plucking handfuls of hair off the actual cats and then toddling over to us with the loot, radiant with his own cleverness.

The boy is an applause-junkie. He has learned how to clap and now claps every single time he is proud of something he has done and looks offended if you don't join him. On the other hand he is prepared to give as good as he gets, and offered me extravagant praise and applause when he watched me unload the dishwasher. This is exactly the same attitude I have been trying to instill in Z, but without success so far.

Today my mothering techniques have mainly involved lying in his playpen like roadkill while he bangs my head with some plush toys. I am tired, tired, tired. Have pity, send biscuits.

When your baby has finally decided to sleep but you no longer can:

1. Utter a string of curse words
2.Stare at the cieling.
3. Wonder why me.
4. Count sheep until you get to 500 and give up because you're still awake but you now hate sheep.
5. Write poetry.*


( (* Or re-write poetry you've written years ago) )

Hello!
It is New year and I am crazy!
You will know that this is true when I tell you that I've spent a week of my life tagging all my old entries since 2003. This made me realise several things:

1)My kitchen cupboards may be a mess, although at least my blog is tidy.

2)I used to write a lot when I was unemployed.

3)Not all of it was unreadable drivel.

4)In fact my writing then was better than my stream of consciousness stuff now. I may be able to wing it through many aspects of life on charm and eyelashes alone, but blogging isn't one of them.

5) I changed a lot of privacy settings, because stuff that was current and pressing then is now History and the people I was protecting no longer need it.

In other news, I may end up needing some kind of midget-sized mask if I want to take my child out in public again. Matei may have learned walking but not Picking Up His Feet When Coming Across Obstacles and instead he has been meeting these obstacles with his face. At the moment he has bruises on his forehead, his nose, a cut on his ear and two bruises like dimples on his cheeks (but at least they are symmetrical!). He is starting to look more and more like baby P every day and me explaining that 'He walked into a door' doesn't sound that good either.

Hmmmm.

The Season of Parties is also over but he refuses to be convinced of that and has been holding nightly parties of his own in his bedroom. Largely they consist of him dancing in his crib and chattering brightly in baby nonsense 'daddadadaDAbabababBADADA'. I would be willing to turn a blind eye to this behaviour, except that he is unwilling to do it in the privacy of his own bedroom. Nooooo, baby needs an audience. Perhaps I really shouldn't have watched all that X-Factor when I was pregnant.

Our putting him to bed ritual used to involve bathtime, and then guzzling a bottle of milk and burping like a trucker and snuggling with Z and me on the sofa while we stroke his hair and watch television and he nests like a kitten until he falls asleep. A pleasant thing for all involved. Except that nowadays instead of snuggling on the sofa what he prefers doing is jumping up and down like a maniac and maybe smacking one of us on the head with the remote.

Therefore, shows are recorded while parents take turns sitting with the baby in a completely dark room, rocking in the rocking chair. And all throughout Matei keeps giving us these alert, indulgent looks that say: "I am never going to sleep! Never never never! But because I love you I will consent to sit in your lap for the next three hours if this pleases you and chatter at you while you sing me my lullabies until your voice breaks, shortly followed by YOUR SOUL, and every single time you put a dummy in my mouth I take it out in order to tell you more about my day. BababababaDADADADADAH!"

And the no sooner have we stamped out an uprising and sent him off to sleep finally, then he wakes up at some pre-dawn hour for another round of singing and dancing.

And then we do the same thing (in fact much as I was doing the same time last year, only with fewer tears and less cursing) in which our son looks at us in a cheerful, alert (so bloody alert! How can he be this energetic? Maybe we should put him to weaving carpets to tire him out a little) way all: "Isn't this nice? To think we could have wasted all that time sleeping, when instead you could be stroking my hair and I could be smacking you in the face lovingly. Let's do this again tomorrow."

Ways in which the Universe has made me weep lately:

1)To the wanker who stole all my money and used it to pay for taxis and hotels via internet fraud - I wish you would be one of those people end up killed in freak accidents by their beds or the laundry or something.

2)To my bank who authorised the transfers of large sums of money from my account without bothering to contact me, until it rejected my card in the supermarket a few days later and sent me a kind letter saying I had exceeded my overdraft limit that will be x fee please - I make glarey eyes and think of you in a shouty voice. Also, I should warn you right now that I do not intend to pay those fees.

3)To the council that cashed my check for service charges but then saw fit to lie about it and refer my details to a debt collecting agency who sent me a kind letter saying they wanted the money I HAD ALREADY PAID plus £200 for their kind service of breaking my kneecaps collecting this debt - I have actual proof from my bank the cheque has cleared which I shall wave in your face very soon WHILE making glary eyes and shouty voices.

4)Dear Universe, although I appreciate all these hints to make this Christmas economically sensible, I think you can stop now, because Universe, I need to eat. And the baby needs diapers and eats more than I do. Thank you kindly.

5) To yesterday's client re: your kind offer to 'fuck me up'- thank you but no.

6)To my son - my darling, though I cherish your adventurous spirit, the union between your nose and the furniture will never be a happy one. I suggest you learn this lesson as soon as possible. I want you to know that although your injuries may have a karmic component to them*, they give me no joy whatsoever and you can stop with them now.

Matei's Cranium: 1, Nina's Cheekbone: 0

My newest unlikely explanation for my black eye : "The baby hit me."

This is what comes of trying to comfort the congested little ingrate in the comfort of the parental bed, while he thrashes around wildly and headbutts all and sundry.

Christ on a bike, it's cold outside. If I find a polar bear messing with my trash I would not be at all surprised.

Walking home from work I encountered elements so hostile that my wool coat was powerless against them and my jeans and trainers might as well have been made of dandelion fluff for all the protection they offered. Each breath felt like knives stabbing me in the brain and my feet were more or less lumps of ice. In fact, so dire were these circumstances that I actually ran most of the way home in an attempt to delay frostbite.

Since unlike some people I have no footed fleece pijamas I anticipate that tonight there will be lots of shivering and enticing cats to lie on my feet.

THe best part of the (v. brief) snowfall yesterday was watching the baby watching the snowflakes through the window, bouncing with glee and turning to look at me all :"Are you seeing this? There's fat white stuff raining from the sky! Crazy shit!"

I'd like some double glazing now please.

Baby still sick. Z and I reaching new heights of ragged undersleptedness. Because the health symptoms of myself and the young 'un are really only of interest to my next of kin I shall only use them to illustrate a couple of brief anecdotes.

1) It is three AM. I am holding a tired, congested, cranky baby who is burrowing his face against my neck and thrashing around as he attempts to settle nad sleep. I am stroking his face to calm him down, but just as he drifts off his equally overtired father starts snoring and Matei immediately perks up and lifts his head like a meercat trying to locate the source of the noise. I therefore spend the next half hour alternatively stroking the baby's head and kicking Z in the shin to get him to stay awake. It's a bit like being a Medieval Inquisitioner. 'Confess Heathen! No sleep for you! Confess!'

2) Having spent two nights in Matei's room holding him until he drifts off and then putting him down in his own bed only to have him wail piteously, we have given up the fight and put the baby into our bed. He finds this deeply relaxing and spends the night thrashing around happily alternating between headbutting me and kicking Z. This is both an argument against co-sleeping and a demonstration of what you put up with when you


In fact, I was so tired the next day that I just lay down in the baby's playpen and when he began pulling my hair I didn't register this as assault so much as an opportunity for him to occupy himself with something while I had a nap.

************

Babies! They are so odd!

To Matei there are few things more loatsome than nose drops but few things more beautiful than their container. It is one of his favourite toys.

Also, today he spent a happy half hour playing with the cat's carrier box, opening the door, putting something inside it, closing the door; then opening the door, retrieving the object, closing the door; repeating this.

I am extremely fond of this game, since it causes minimal mess and allows me to doze on the sofa.

*************

Mojo is the best cooking ingredient ever. I add it to everything that touches a pan, and it is certainly its magic (rather than say, love) which has made Z proclaim he would pay good money for my risotto.

**************

The air smells of snow.

A much longer, better thought-out post is in the works and will be with us shortly - at a guess just as soon as the incredible human limpet my son gets over his lurgy and stops wanting to be welded to me his every waking and sleeping hour. (This state of affairs is not without its share of charm to be sure, although it is a smaller share when one weighs over 10 kilos).

Yesterday in Therapy School we were practising a technique called Relational Reflexivity. It's meant to be a way that therapists and clients can talk about their relationship/coversations/beliefs/assumptions/ the process of therapy by adopting an observer position from the process through the use of phrases like 'If I were to do X, would it make you think Y?'

(For example: 'If I were to compliment you on all the changes you've been making, would it make you think I'd be dissapointed if you didn't keep it up?'

And all I could think about was how I should have paid more attention to my grandmother because she was a natural at this. Her favourite saying was 'Well I don't dare say anything, but if I did dare I would say [insert lengthy list of complaints'.

Some Shortcomings, presented In Order of Ridiculousness

*I have an inexplicable aversion to both Post and Post Offices. I tend to avoid both as much as possible, and I don't end up opening the former for sometimes ridiculous amounts of time.

*I have highly optimistic perceptions of time and my ability to accomplish things in that time.

*I hate kiwis (the fruit). I consider their every aspect loathesome and beyond redemption.

*I have an irrational and debilitating fear of rats and mice (it's the skinny naked tails) but not chinchillas. In fact, naked animals in general freak me out (well, except Home Sapiens).

*My filing system nowadays mostly seem to consist of shoving things in random nooks and boxes.

*I rarely seem to be able to distingish between mail I have returned in my mind, and the ones I have done in reality.

*I generally don't bother with instruction manuals, but attempt to work things out myself using a mix of intuition, deductive reasoning, and random pushing of buttons.


FURTHERMORE
I am beginning to think that my choices to stay up until 11pm most nights in order to read the internet/natter with Z are deeply flawed. Either that, or they are being purposefully sabotaged by my son. Perhaps because he is teething. Either that or because he is a mean boy who wants to get back at me for not letting him lick electrical sockets. Only time will tell.

His father and I went to bed at midnight. Our son woke up at 3am. Normally he falls back asleep with minimal assistance which had lulled me into a false sense of security and my parental awesomeness. Instead, last night despite some promising snuggling with teddy bears and lying down I discovered that he would only be prepared to commit to sleep if I was willing to act as his personal hammock. Otherwise? Not so much. In fact he would go so far as to from time to time startle from seeimingly deep and peaceful sleep just to make sure I hadn't done anything evil like put him in his cot he, and when he saw me he would close his eyes again.

Six months ago this would have been the sort of thing that would have caused me to rail against the Unfairness and Shackling Horror of it all. And my railing in turn would also make me feel really shit about myself as a parent. (Most of the time I am at peace with my flaws as a human being, but my shortcomings as a mother dig at me; I always feel like I should strive harder, be more patient, more connected).

Nowadays though, because he on the whole sleeps well, I find it easier to keep my cool (and it also helps that I am not chronically overtired). When A Bad Night happens - I try not to be resentful about it, instead to use it as an opportunity to snuggle with my son. During the daytime he's generally far too busy to want to snuggle, and in a few years time he probably won't want to snuggle at all (on account of it, and me being EMBARASSING and What If Other People See?). So I stroke his hair, and kiss his hands, and he burrows his face more deeply into my neck and gently strokes my cheek.

And I employ Z's Making Babies Sleep trick #5 which is 'Never think of how much you want that baby to sleep, because it won't due to its contrary nature. Instead think of something else, a concept, like Mercy or Tranquility. And when you are immersed into it, the baby will absorb this concept by osmosis and drift off'*.

So that's what I tend to do nowadays. That, and some humming. And I feel happy that I CAN do this, can just be here for him, without wanting to disown him or wanting to pour poison in my ear.

*Z's theories are things of beauty because they are always straying into the metaphysical; I enjoy them all the more for rarely understanding what he talks about; it's a similar feeling that I used to get around Australians, when it sounds like they are speaking English but they are not.