Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Unicorns and faerie dust and all that.

    Phew! after the fallout from my post admonishing Domino’s for false advertising, I think I need something shiny and pretty to talk about.

    Or maybe a unicorn. Actually, if I could be bothered, I could try and stick a horn on one of the horses, but I doubt they’d be impressed and I’m not really sure I’m prepared to chase horses around the paddock all day with a camera.

    Anyway

    ***

    It’s been a hard week, this last week. I’m due for my period, my joints keep forgetting that they’re meant to attach to each other and sleep has been restless and broken.

    Nan’s house sold and new people moved in. I thought I was fine with that, but it turns out, seeing their car in her driveway was a bit too much to bear. I cried a lot that day.

    I miss her. So much. I would have liked to hear her perspective on Domino’s and I know she would have been watching the comments as closely as I was.

    I watched a documentary on Palliative care last night. Brilliantly done. It follows four patients through their end of life journey. I cried the whole way through it, but if you’re interested, you can view it online here.

    The lady with breast cancer, her attitude reminds me of Nan so much.

    I miss her.

    ***

    Photos!

    My children play well together. Except when they don’t, and then I fear for my own safety as I wade into the fray of hair pulling and toy throwing to separate them. The house is in a permanent state of disarray, but we’re all having fun. Except for Nathan, the mess makes him twitch.

    Susie is settling in well. She’s such a smart puppy and she learns so fast, that aside from normal puppy behaviours, we’ve not had any issues.

    We just won’t talk about her penchant for chewing books.

    Naughty dog.

    ***

    Again on the Domino’s thing – I rang the ACCC and the government body who deals with food safety and labelling. They’re very interested in Domino’s; as the ACCC says, it’s deceptive advertising to call something Gluten Free and then add a disclaimer that it might not be completely gluten free.

    Please forgive me for not knowing which government department exactly I was speaking to, I was passed through 4-5 before I got the right people. It’s someone in the Health Department and they deal with food labelling laws and issues arising from mislabelled food.

    Anyway, the guy I spoke to at the Health Department, he says that Domino’s cannot have it both ways and agrees that yes, they are breaking the law in claiming Gluten Free, but then adding a disclaimer. He was lovely and we discussed the issue, including the response I got from the Coeliac Society and Domino’s.

    So I can let it go, at least on the internet.

    It’s being investigated by the relevant officials now.

  • Minor Technical Details –

    To everyone clicking through your feed reader to my latest post and getting a 404 error, I’m sorry, I’m having some small technical issues with a post that wasn’t meant to go live for a while.

    I got a WP error in the middle of scheduling it to post later and then everything went wrong.

    Argh!

    So uh, don’t mind me. Just pretend you didn’t see it, okay? I’ve just rescheduled it and resync’d feedburner, so it might not even be an issue yet.

    xx

    love me

  • Have Your Say: Food Issues

    Okay, so here is the deal. I want to start doing a ‘thing’ where I’ll talk about something and you can all chime in with as much advice as you like. Normally mothers get annoyed about unsolicited advice, but this time, I’m asking for help.

    Also, I will be about in the comments, so if you want to ask something and have people chime in, even if it’s just to say ‘my kid did that too and grew out of it’ then please, do so. We’ve got a community built here, we may as well utilise it.

    ****

    Now, on to my issue:

    Isaac, he doesn’t swallow food. I feed him and he chews the food, but doesn’t swallow, just spits it out again once it’s chewed.

    If I give him pureed or mashed food, he might swallow a mouthful maybe, before he realises that I’ve deposited it in his mouth, but mostly, he’ll spit it into his hand and try to feed it to me. Failing that, he’ll just drop it. He’s not a fan of spoon food.

    If I feed him finger food, which is his preference, he chews it and then spits it out without swallowing. I can give him half an apple and come back and the apple will be gone, but really, the apple is sitting in a giant circle of chewed pieces around him.

    Peas, well, he’ll eat a few peas, before chewing and spitting the rest. The same for most of his other vegetables. Actually, considering I don’t count the peas, he is probably just chewing and spitting all of them. I haven’t seen any come out the other end.

    He will eat soft fruit: cantaloupe, watermelon, pears, nectarines. He won’t eat the skin of nectarines or pears and once he gets near the skin he starts spitting. If I peel them first, he still mostly spits the food out.

    He will drink milk or water from a bottle or a sippy cup. He is down to 1-2 breastfeeds a day and as of right now, I haven’t breastfed him for 15 hours and I’m not likely to feed him again for another 12 or so hours.

    He doesn’t appear to be losing weight, but I don’t have any scales here to check if he is gaining weight either.

    He is drinking a full bottle at bedtime and naptime, but I know he is hungry when I give him solid food to eat, so it’s not a hunger issue that I can see.

    Oh and he is just over 12 months old.

    My questions:

    Does anyone else’s child do this?

    Does anyone have any good ideas that I can try, to get him to start swallowing the food?

    And, to my readers with experience in Ehlers Danlos Syndrome – do you think this could be EDS related? We don’t have another specialist Paeds appointment for another five months, but if he continues to not swallow, I’m prepared to push for an earlier appointment.

    Finally: Does anyone else have any questions they want answers to about kids and food? If so, leave them in the comments section. Commenters, read the comments, someone might be dealing with your exact same issue. This might work really well, or it might flop. Frankly, if it helps me get Isaac actually swallowing solid food, then I don’t care.

    Kids! Sheesh, but they’re stressful.

  • New Theme

    Just a quick post to show off my new theme.

    Does anything look broken to you?

    How is the header showing up in your browser?

    The header will probably get changed randomly as I take more photos that I think will suit here.

    Anyway – that’s me. The baby just woke up (BLEH) and is whining, Amy and Nathan are out together and my alone time is done. Sniff.

    (Nathan did offer to take Isaac too, but Isaac really needed a nap and I figured he would sleep better in the cot, rather than the car.)

  • So it happened again.

    So it happened again.

    The temperatures soared, the wind picked up and faster than you’d expect, we were surrounded by a thick fog of smoke, unable to see the hills.

    As the smoke got thicker, the butterflies in my stomach grew and I brought up the Tas Fire Service (TFS) website to find out where the fires were.

    Nothing.

    Page cannot be displayed.

    I pressed refresh and refresh again, hoping for something, anything, to let me know where the fires are. I’m not in the city, I’m a rural girl and when the smoke starts to hang overhead, I start counting how long it will take to fill up all the water containers on the property. I start thanking my lucky stars that I had water delivered recently and my tanks are still full. I do a quick  walk around and a survey, looking at anything that might be flammable that needs damping down.

    So as I pressed refresh on the website and nothing was coming up, I got a little worried. The sky was dark and smoke filled and the sun had gone a blood red, the kind of red you only see in bushfire season.

    I grabbed the phone book and hunted for the TSF number. It took me three tries to find it, in my worried state.  In case anyone is wondering, it is under Tasmania Fire Service (not under Tasmanian Fire Service, nor under FIRE! EEEK HELP!).

    I rang and spoke to a computer.

    Which told me to please see the website for information on fires.

    Fine, except the website, had crashed. Again.

    This happened last time we had bushfires in the state, a few weeks back. Their site crashed and the public got a touch irate. But you tell me, wouldn’t you think that they would plan for it and FIX IT before the next lot of bad weather?

    Eventually I got through to an operator, after being told to instead, check the website THREE times, and he was lovely (kudos to the TFS, whoever is manning your phones always does a brilliant job). The fires were about 35 km to the west of me and the wind was blowing the smoke straight over.

    Hanging up, I could breath a little easier, even as I continued to push refresh on the website, eager for any information I could gather. Mobile phone reception out here in rural Tasmania is patchy at best and nonexistant in many places. I can’t pick up any radio stations here and trying to play them through the live streaming on the computer has, in the past, proved to be more static that radio.

    It might be that I’m spoiled, living here in my first world country and getting my news delivered up to the second by twitter and online news sites like the ABC.

    But you know what? When that blanket of smoke descends on you and you can’t breath for the smell of burning gum trees, I think you could forgive me for wanting up to the second information on what the fires are doing and which direction they are headed.

    So to the TFS, thank you for defending our state from bushfires and thank you for manning your phones with people who don’t get exasperated when yet another Tasmanian, rings and asks about the smoke.

    But, we’re living in a technological world now, I would think that you could have sorted out any teething problems with the website by now. Your computer on the other end of the phone lines tells you to check the website no less than three times while you’re pushing buttons, trying to get hold of someone to tell you whether you need to sleep with one eye open tonight.

    In this day and age of instant information, I don’t think having your website crash at a critical time is acceptable. Buy more bandwidth. Sort out your servers. Pay someone to recode the website better so that you can update it without it going offline.

    Because a page cannot be displayed error, when I can smell the gumtrees burning, it’s just not good enough.

    **

    Thankyou to ABC radio for providing information on the fires through twitter.