You know, I can’t help but find it ironic that this morning when I logged in to check my email I found the following comment from Catherine at Our Aussie Half Dozen on my post What a morning.

All my babies went through a stage when they started waking at night after they’d been sleeping through for a while. It’s a terrible stage for mums – but not as bad (I think) as the wake-up-really-early-and-refuse-to-go-back-to-sleep stage.

Ironic because some one small had woken up way too early this morning and refused to go back to sleep. Of course, it doesn’t help that she had another bad night, tossing and turning and whimpering on and off. In nearly three years I’ve had maybe a handful of good, full nights sleep. I’m exhausted.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how poorly Erin actually sleeps. With everything else that she’s been through the poor sleeping didn’t seem important, and in truth I thought she’d grow out of it. At 27 months I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

Erin’s an incredibly light sleeper, I’ve joked that you could wake her up by farting in the next room, but it’s true. She sleeps so lightly that she’s barely asleep at all most of the time. A good night is one where she whimpers on and off all night, tosses and turns and only wakes up once. A bad night is well, bad.

We have an appointment with her paediatrician on October. I’m going to ask for a sleep study because this, the light sleeping, can’t be normal.

Friday Flash Back

Erin didn’t start to crawl on all fours until she was already cruising the furniture. She did, however, invent a very cute version of the commando crawl which involved, using her arms to pull herself across the floor while she flipped her legs up in the air–frog style. Sometimes, when she got excited, she’s hop up and down on the spot. Unfortunately the frog crawl was never captured on video so it’s lost to the sands of time.

I always thought I had more time…

Can you call 3:30 “morning”? Because that’s what time we were up today, the first time at least. Little Miss had decided she was hungry–now there’s one for the books, not so long ago she didn’t even know she was hungry, now she’s waking up in the night to eat.

Trundling off to bed at 4am is apparently not reason enough to sleep in past 6 either. Instead she decided that she’d tear the metal cover of a tea light candle in half and cut herself in the process. Now, I say this with a certain callous disregard because apparently it didn’t hurt. She didn’t cry or even complain. In fact she actually sat there poking at it like it was a new play thing! Insanity I tell you! Left over premmie bits.

After a walk to the shop she’s back in bed and not complaining, possibly even sleeping. This is both good and bad news. Good because well, she’s in bed. Bad because I’m not! I’d love a nice little nap but being the busy woman that I am going back to bed today is not in the cards. Woe is me.

I’m hopeful that this waking up in the middle of the night thing is just a passing trend, it’d be even better if it were a one time only offer. So I’m looking to you, oh mothers of older children than mine, reassure me! PLEASE!

Dagnabit! I sat down this morning and wrote a post…and then closed the browser before posting or even saving it. Not fair!

In my defence I have been using a blogging client to post but my 30 day trial ran out so now I’m back to posting from the web like a schlub. Unfortunately paying $39usd for unnecessary software isn’t really on the cards at the moment so here I am gracing the wordpress back end with my presence.

The gone post was about how we’re planning to move Little Miss into a big girl bed. Well, not a big girl bed, but a bed without rails. See, she’s short. At her last paediatric appointment she was only 76cm tall, that was 5 months ago so I’m hoping she’s grown a bit since then. Even so she’s still wee. So wee in fact, that I’m not sure she’d be able to get in and out of a normal single bed without a flight of stairs. Not to mention, a single bed is a long way to fall and since she’s been on a mattress on the floor in our room she’s fall off at least once a night–they get used to that right? Well not used to the falling part, I’m kind of hoping they learn not to fall at all.

Yesterday, in a sort of panic that anyone who has almost missed out on an all important sale understands, we headed out to Target in search of a cute little, white, wooden toddler bed which was on sale at 50% off (hence the panic) the sale had almost ended so when I rang the day before and they said they still had 3 left I was surprised.

It was only after we’d gotten there, tracked down a sales person and headed to the counter that we realised the sale. It don’t start until next week…

It’s very disconcerting to go look at the stats for your blog and find that you’ve had no visitors. None. Not a single one in the past three days! I’d recently been considering buying a tee shirt that says “I’m famous on the interwebs”, but with no visitors that’s hardly true.

Upon further investigation it appears that it’s not my site that sucks, it’s my stats plugin. Despite working perfectly well with the old version it stopped working when I upgraded it because my template didn’t have a footer tag. So rude.

Oh well, I guess. My stats, though very skewed, are back up and running. Almost all is right in the world.

Because I don’t have anything to talk about today–actually you may have noticed that as a reoccurring theme this week–here’s a snippet from my current work in progress. This scene came to me a whole chunk while Erin was in the bath (my only 10 minutes of quiet a day) and it’s stayed basically the same now as it was when I first scribbled it down. That said, it’s also still the first draft so there are bound to be grammar and spelling mistakes. Before you ream me out keep in mind that this is the first thing I’ve written in two years…

Untitled Work In Progress

It’s also title-less. I’m thinking something with dogs…

In my search for good pie (who can go past good pie?) I was carrying Miss E in her sling while pushing her stroller filled with a variety of other things. As babies are known to do, Miss E changed her mind about wanting to be in such close quarters and was starting to whine, so I pulled the stroller over and started to unload it in order to put her in and carry our packages. While I was doing this an old woman hobbled up beside me yammering on about how she hadn’t seen the little baby, isn’t she beautiful and how old is she?

Smiling, I continued to put Miss E in her stroller and said “she’s eleven months old”.

“She’s so little! She obviously doesn’t get it from her mum, is her dad…”

“No he’s fat too” I say, strapping E in and walking away.

Dear Rude Old Woman,
Put brain in gear before speaking!
Signed,
The Fat Mama you insulted the other day.

Dear Erin,

Here are a few things I think you should know for the future, you know, for your own safety and all.

In order for it to be toast it must be cooked. Stamping your feet and screaming “Toast! Toast!” while I put the bread in the toaster only means you’ll end up with dry, untoasted bread. Fortunately you seemed pleased by this even though I’m a little perplexed.

Coming down stairs and looking for me with a big smile on your face, and then saying “Boots!” and pointing to the TV as way of greeting really really isn’t as endearing as you’d think.

Why is it that you need to walk around with all three of your dummies (pacifiers)? You’ve only got one mouth Sugar Pie. Also, can we give those up yet? Please?

Waking someone up by poking them in the eye and then laughing is asking for trouble!

Lovingly,

Your Mama

Ever since I decided that having a baby was something I’d like to do I’ve been worried about passing on my self deprecating thoughts to my children—girls or boys—the way my mother did to me.

Comments like “We need to go on a diet” and “That shirts not long enough. It needs to cover your arse” have really hardened my mind set. Ironically, the only thing comments like that have ever done for me is to worsen my eating habits. I remember being 14 and on my way out on a date and feeling really proud that the only thing I’d eaten in the four days previous was an apple.

My mother isn’t a bad person, sure she has her faults, this is what was passed on to her. All the women in my family are the same. My grandmother is always on a diet, my aunt can’t eat three meals a day without gaining weight. Even my skinny cousins “struggle” with their weight.

It has to stop!

This is not the legacy I want for Erin. I do not want my beautiful girl to look into a mirror and hate what she sees. Or wonder what she’s going to wear because nothing looks good on her. Or, god forbid, think she needs to be on a diet when she already weighs under 60 kilos.

What I want her to know is that she is enough. No matter what she weighs, no matter if she can’t run fast or isn’t as smart as the other kids. She’s good enough. She’s special enough. She’s perfect.

But, how do I do that?

So I’m actually have a lot of trouble coming up with enough random thoughts to do a Random Sunday post. I blame Twitter, though I do love it so. The trouble is that all my random thoughts end up as tweets so I’ve got nothing left for you guys. For shame!

This week I’ve decided to use my Twitter account as a database of sorts. A place to find all of my best/worst random thoughts for this week. Yeah, it’s kind of egotistical, but this is a blog. If you can’t be egotistical on your own blog where can you?

• You’ve only got to have a small audience to be a successful moron.
• Just found a cheese slice between lounge cushions. It was half eaten so that’s something I guess.
• You know you’re a mum when you say you’re going for a shower and you end up cleaning it…
• I wonder how many people are in the market for more than 12 toasters…
• Big fish, little fish, cardboard box…

So there you have it folks, a week in Tweets. Don’t forgot to comment with your own favorite random thoughts/tweets for the week!