Sleep is still somewhat of a delicate subject with regards to the Toddler, as in he isn't particularly proficient yet at letting me have any.  Some nights he'll easily drift to sleep either mid boobing or shortly after, only waking once maybe twice a night for a quick boob session, these are good nights.  Far from perfect yet manageable.  Other nights he'll resist sleep, usually if he's had a sneaky impromptu illicit nap during the day, he'll roll around his be and mine, try an initiate conversations about wee, poo and poo man, serenade me with Anthrax an generally test my fraying patience as my brain slurs the mantra 'gothefucktosleep' repeatedly.   When sleep finally overwhelms him, i'll try an make a quick escape to pee only to return to him blissfully still asleep....yet on my side of the bed! Cheeky git. This then leaves me with the choice of moving him an risk waking him or leaving him and being pillowless.  Give me strength.

Then there are the in-between nights where he'll nod off to sleep effortlessly and even stay asleep for a few hours but then due to illness or more often then not some inexplicable top secret reasons unbeknownst to me he will start to wake.....hourly. I shit you not.

Some day he'll sleep through.  Some day The Husband will once again sleep upstairs.  Some day i'll be able to come the evening downstairs until i'm ready to sleep.


Until then i'll watch the patterns my fraying sanity make in the dark, cherish the lullaby of his breaths next to me and his little hands gripping me as he nuzzles, snuggles and feeds because it won't last forever.

Milk Monster

The week isn't by any means over yet and so far it started with The Dog eating Thing Two's sausage roll that was lunch-box bound before school resulting in an impromptu trek to the super market and then to school to drop of a replacement lunch and last night I had to call out a paramedic for The Husband who was having an asthma attack.  In between all that we've got Thing One who's practicing being a vile teenager five years early with utter insolence and sheer obtuseness and The Toddler who has apparently banned all forms of sleep for himself and thus me.  Not to forget The Husband having to rush to school, following a drama-whorish call saying Thing Two was frightfully distressed and in considerable pain due to a toe nail apparently hanging off and could he possibly go there with some nail scissors to 'see what you can do'.  He was in a terrifically bad mood due to suffering from a migraine and had been somewhat of a total twunt so needless to say he was rather bemused to find Thing Two happily sat in her classroom, barefoot, having her lunch with her teacher.  One corner of a toe nail had been digging in to her toe. That was all.  I would have gone myself but I had the time critical task of supervising brownies baking in the oven. Shame.

The Toddler has near completed his training as The Sanity Assassin and having rather cleverly lulled me into a false sense of security at night deciding to do the absolutely unheard of and sleep for 5 hours straight only to then spend the past 5-7 days waking every 60-120 minutes and feeding fervently like a newborn, yes, at 31.5 months of age.  I'm so abysmally tired that my eyes feel like spinning metal balls in their sockets and my limbs feel like concrete blocks of pain.  Add this to the creeping onslaught of yet another M.E trough coupled with an accelerated dip in mood i'm rather more bits then pieces.

There is 'well you could night wean him' road to wander down yet unfortunately he is simply not ready.  You just 'know' when they are and it's untraumatic and surprisingly easy (see also potty training etc etc).  I actually have no qualms with a waking or two during the night and a quick boobie snack with added snuggles, however I do become considerably grumpsome when it becomes every 60-120 minutes, as you would.  We've tried the counting up to ten method which is what worked when Thing Two was a toddler and indeed The Toddler is on occasion been known to be somewhat amenable to this idea, which is nice.  It also proves our suspicions that he indeed absolutely understands the proposal.  However, more oft then not lately he'll simply shake his head and mumble around a mouthful of boob 'no'.  If I try and subtly remove said boob then well...all hell breaks loose.  Arse.

There is a possibility that he's still teething, again.  For now i'll go with that idea with it being terrifically more endearing then the alternative 'he hates me'

So for now he shall remain, the boob junkie boobie monster.

It has taken me several days to write this.  The Husband is now en route to Austria and i'm home, alone, avec The Spawn, and I have no chocolate.  This could get messy.  Thankfully The Grandparents are coming to my rescue and having Things One & Two for the night.  They're all currently in the bathroom (The Spawn, not The GrandParents) as The Toddler fights them for the bog.  I'm best off not knowing really.  I'm pretending to ignore the arguments and the 'MuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuM!!!!!!' calls.  Is it vodka o clock yet?  Oh Bollocks. I'm practicing neglect by hiding behind the laptop.  Tomorrow i'll be all smiles and weave lentils with them.  Honest.

Forgive me journal, I didn't mean to abandon you.

Where has the time gone? I'm guilty of digital neglect. My poor poor blog. Please don't divorce me. I need you.

Although less so then it was The Husbands back is still essentially buggered and not in the kinky way either. I'm not an overly sympathetic person at the best of times and I confess that I'm getting rather bored of being nice and helpful to him and am resisting the urge to issue a swift kick to his dimpled behind purely for amusement.

I seem to be perpetually on the precipice of a cold lurgy type  thing and am accordingly 50 shades of bloody miserable.  This isn't at all aided by The Toddler who has reverted back to waking 4-8times a night, again. I can endure the usual 2-3 wakings but this is dangerously breaching the borders of torture despite me often educating him in the many varied and indeed far quicker ways to kill me if that is his mission.  I'm fundamentally touched out and really rather beyond the realms of shattered and entering an undead state of existence or should that mayhaps be mere survival.

He'd better be learning something impressive like fluent Latin or quantum physics to warrant me being an all night milk bar.

Yet despite his rampant anti social night time antics he has worn the same night nappy for a week. Why? Because The Toddler appears to have bladder muscles of steel and is now dry day and night. Crikey.

Oh how frightfully unBritish of me, I nearly forgot to mention the weather, which has been renamed to simply 'rain' seeing as that's really all it appears to do lately, yet another reason upon the many others that have me sat writhing in personal insanity and scoffing copious amounts of stodge rather then walking off calories. Damnable self sabotage. I am now an extra half stone away from my ever distant target. Bother, Damn and blast.

Thing Two has finally lost her first wobbly tooth yet It's her second gap thanks to an incident when she was a young toddler and one of her top teeth came out, whole, root and all, bloody huge it was too. I've never been good with wobbly teeth, they send me dreadfully nauseous. As a child at the first sign of a wobbler I'd use my nails to sever the bugger at the root. Thing Two however is one of those children though, you know the ones.... they absolutely refuse to pull the blasted thing out and just leave it....hanging by an itty bitty thread of root as they push it around with their tongue inducing vomitous rage in me and ghastly revulsion. Inevitably it did quite literally fall out, eventually, at school. Typically on her special day so it was The Mothership collecting her. Apparently Thing Two's teacher (who is terribly fabulous) told her that Thing Two had found the ordeal somewhat traumatic and they all felt awfully bad as they as teachers weren't allowed to help her get the Damn tooth out so they just had to sit and comfort her until it quite literally fell out. Yes, it was that loose.

The Husband needs to go back to tooth fairy school... I mean leaving chocolate with the money? Seriously? Bad tooth fairy. Bad. I'd smack his bum but he'd rather like that a little too much.

He keeps threatening to teach Thing Two to spit through her gaps forcing me to use my wifey glare of husband thought paralysis on him. bloody husbands.

In a rare moment of being a real little girl, Thing Two picked up a small ugly little doll that The Mothership bought for her from Spain many years ago. It came in darling little dungarees and one of those abhorrent baby headbands with a bow on it which thankfully got lost. So, imagine Thing Two's shall we say 'surprise' when she finally got round to stripping It's kit off and discovered the doll has a Willy. Not just a Willy but one with a hole in the end. Who'd Have thought that all this time the doll was a tranvestite! The Toddler however is quite taken with 'her' and even let's it wee before him on the potty.

The doll playing ended quite abruptly and she was soon back to her usual self. She fell asleep with a silver chunky chain poised in her hands leaving me to contemplate which particular nocturnal super natural visitors she was trying to repel until The Husband enlightened me to the fact that she'd actually been seen earlier using it as a noose around Tigger's neck, suspending him from her door. Mystery solved.

We're still trapped in the perpetual and bitter war of trying to get The Spawn to tidy their jeffing rooms with Thing Two resorting to desperate measures such as The Note... Only she shot herself in the foot on that one as she used the word 'promise' a word she is often reluctant to say due to It's brevity. Ha. Sucker!

Thing One however still prefers to resort to good old temper tantrums, something he is extraordinarily good at, to attempt to delay the inevitable.

I should be sleeping. The Toddler is sleeping and will no doubt wake soon. Why aren't I sleeping?

Oh hello insomnia, I forgot we had a date tonight. Again. Didn't you get my Dear John.... letter? Poppycock.

Atchoo.

Today is one of those days, yes you know the ones, when your internal narrator randomly snaps ‘Fuck Off’ at everything and everyone. Constantly.

It’s an ‘I don’t have enough middle fingers kind of day’

The Toddler decided to wake me every two hours last night and then deigned 6am the start of the day complete with three tantrums and one epic prolonged screaming session. Git. He’d better be learning quantum physics or something equally impressive to warrant this abhorrant decline in sleep, even by his usual standards of lets face it, crappy sleep habits. The past week has seen me starring in my own personal film ‘sleepless in Lancashire’ Only problem is the film doesn’t appear to have an ending, mayhaps it should be called groundhog day instead.

Thing One’s ankle appears to be on the mend going by his incessant and prolific exertion he haplessly puts upon it. Thing Two who is now six, yes six! (don’t worry, needless to say I’ll dedicate an entry to her shortly to bore your pants off) and has her first wobbly tooth. I despise wobbly teeth. Just the thought of them makes me shudder with sheer repulsion a bit like public swimming pools and mouthfuls of verucas. When I was a child, the instant my tooth wobbled I attacked it with my nails, severing through the root and yanking the bloody thing out. We’re still hoping that the front tooth that fell out in it’s entirety when she was a toddler will grow back someday. She also appears to be coming down with a cold of some sorts with a horrific cough so I’m on tenterhooks with The Toddler as whenever he catches a cold we inevitably end up at the hospital for oxygen / nebuliser / steroids.

Oh and it’s raining. As in it won’t stop raining. The sky is a thick sludgy mass of grey that makes you want to drag your finger through it if only to write ‘cheer up’ upon it. Apparently it missed the memo that it’s still summer. Just.

At this rate we’ll never get that bastard trampoline up. Can you trampoline in the snow? We like snow.

There is naught so irritating as hearing The Husband snore whilst I’m awake. It’s odd how hearing the children snore makes my lips twitch upwards and my heart go squish yet the sound of The Husband snoring makes me want to make his heart go squish, with a mallet. I do love him, kind of, in a way.

I was tremendously brave at the weekend. Those who know me are aware of my crippling social anxiety, Despite being a net junkie for 17 years, being an active member of and indeed running many many groups getting to know a substantial amount of amazing people (and unfortunately many not so amazing, who are polluting the gene pool) I have only met, in person, until this weekend seven of them and I may or may not have perhaps been romantically involved with three of them (at different times, I’m not a total harlot, honest) People scare me. People I actually like, respect and value, down right bloody terrify me at least in part by my own personal banality and lack lustre in all aspects. However, this weekend I met the amazing Mrs Pickles & co. She assured me she wasn’t actually all that fabulous. She totally and irrevocably lied. Big time. She is simply enchanting and Master Pickles is so adorable he’s verging on being edible. Not that I’d ever eat a child. Well not raw anyway.

However, the morning wasn’t without it’s typical drama mainly consisting of a very naughty Dyson that played dead and an ancient decrepit hand held hoover that may have exploded copious amounts of crud all over the carpet mere minutes before our guests were due when The Husband helpfully opened it so I could empty it.Arse. Did The Husband help? Did he fuck. He instead decided to follow me around filming my cleavage and derriere whilst I tried to hoover a hall and a sitting room with a hand held (wannabe dust buster) cleaner.perve. This was following an hour of him being in a terribly vile mood full of tantrums, you know the kind, the ones that only grown men and children can throw.

And now, to ice the cake of sleep deprivation I appear to have caught Thing Two’s cold, only worse. Super. Spiffing. I know I taught her to share but this really does take the proverbial. Of course this is in conjunction with teetering on the edge of another M.E trough, staring down into the very mouth of it, and what a grim mouth it is.

There is a smithering of good news however and that is in the form of a laptop! Hoorah, yes I am back online. The very lovely Mr Pickles sold me his old laptop.

Thing One is having his special day with The Mothership who is back from Spain and The Toddler appears to be brutally assaulting Thing Two by the sounds of it. I say by the sounds of it because I’m hiding in the kitchen cooking tea leaving The Husband in charge of the cretins. Still it may or may not be an improvement on the thermonuclear farts The Toddler had been letting off in her face earlier, under a blanket. He gets his charm skills from his Father.Obviously. Still, makes a change from Thing One and Thing Two arguing over Videos (yes videos, we’re dreadfully old school), air and the colour of an orange.

Talking of farts, oh sorry ‘pumps!’ Whilst trying to settle Thing Two the other night I let one off (yes, us females do. Just because not all females admit it doesn’t mean we can’t fart with the best of them.) I gasped in faux astonishment and declared to my newly six year old 'one of your dollies just pumped!’ Thing Two has no flies on her as she stared at me in a state of utter derision and informed me slowly and carefully as one does when talking to someone of immense stupidity ‘Dolls are fake. They can’t fart. They can’t do anything. Because they’re fake.’ Oh dear, that’s me told then. Should have blamed the cat.

Is it bedtime yet? The Toddler is refusing his tea, or should I say refusal is in part for he is actually quite adamant that he would rather like his chocolate mousse, NOW. The Dog is doing the Dharmer on the living room floor and I’m doing a rather remarkable impression of Rudolph what with my sore red nose, the same nose that has been in danger of being punched all week due to allergy related runniness and my itchy throat that is making the thought of a serrated bread knife rather tempting, not to slit my throat (sorry to disappoint) but to scratch the buggering thing.

The Husband very kindly ‘let’ me have a bath this morning to unwind (obviously collecting brownie points for a blowie) yet the hot tap kept running cold and there was an incessant shrill alarm going off, constantly. The entire time. Oh fabulous.

And to top it all off, the crux of existential problems, I now have to dye my hair a ‘normal’ colour. Why? Because it would appear that every troll-munter and her mates in the school playground in all their chavvy pj clad glory have suddenly developed a penchant for purple/pink/blue hair etc. How very ruddy inconsiderate of them. Whatever next? Stripy thigh highs and bother boots?

So alas feeding time at the zoo and thus my respite computer time is over as I contemplate another sleepless night and if I could get away with vodka on my ricicles in morning, purely medicinal of course.

I shall leave you with the conundrum that has been plaguing my wilting mind of late when listening to the arguments between The Husband and The Spawn; how come The Husband is so impressively good at acting like a child yet absolutely incapable of attempting to understand how a child thinks?

Of wee and The Sleep Bandit

The bloody cat is incredibly close to being put in the microwave. I caught her pissing up the bath side and on a towel, the pesky house dwelling little shit. She usually does this when on heat and it is the sole reason she is barred from the lounge. However, judging by the significant lack of wailing and yowling like a wanton whore whilst rawling around in readers wives style I'm thinking she's doing it more out of spite.

Anti bacterial wipes, tea tree oil, fresh lemons (allegedly a deterrent) and even bloody lynx spray later and the house still hums of nasty l'eau de cat piss. Great. Just dandy.

If only that was the extent of my woe, if only I tell you.

Then comes The Toddlers latest antics as his role as a trainee sanity assassin.  Having been virtually dry during the day for several weeks he has decided to piss on the floor. Huge great big Willy floods. Despite being dry at nap times and virtually dry during the night.  Trying to ignore it and pretending to not be even slightly perturbed as I adopt that irritating high pitched mummy voice through gritted teeth 'oh dear darling, nevermind, mummy will just clean this up off the floor because we will wee in the potty or toilet next time won't we?' Whilst my internal narrator hisses 'for fuck sake, are you trying to piss me off, that is just vile you cretinous toddler?' This is combined with returning to type and waking every 60-120minutes throughout the night lately.

Then came Friday, Friday was supposed to be trampoline day. Both sets of grandparents clubbed together for Thing One and Thing Two's birthdays and bought them a surprise present to share, an 8ft trampoline. We have purposely been stashing it at The Grandparents so we could erect it on Friday which marks the middle point between their birthdays. So what happens Thursday? Thing One hurts his ankle resulting in a trip to A&E on Friday. Bugger. He has to apparently 'rest' it for two to three weeks and even I'm not mean enough to give him a trampoline when he can't use it. However, if he keeps being a little sod, my stance on this could very well change.

Even the rain is wrong. Rather than pelting it down rhythmically its all crappy and just a constant hiss of sheer bloody wetness that won't even lull you to sleep.

That's assuming you are lucky enough to get any sleep and just so we're clear, if you do....I don't much like you at present. I'm neither compassionate nor nice. Upon hearing The Husband snoring all oblivious in blissful slumber downstairs on the sofa, whilst I stew in a sleep deprived homicidal psychosis, rather then be happy for The Husband, I have to sit on my hands to prevent myself stumbling downstairs to pull out his eyelashes and hold a match to his toe hair.

However according to The Husband he has no iota of sympathy as I 'choose' to breastfeed and cosleep so thus being so, I therefore choose to have no sleep or at the very least deserve it. 

My children made me ugly. Never mind beauty sleep, any would be nice.

It's a good job the little sleep bandits are cute.