Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Dummies are the Spawn of Satan.

    So the dummy weaning. Not going so well.

    I don’t mean that she is still using one, no, not that at all. She hasn’t had a dummy since I decided that she was going to give them up right! now!

    What I mean is that the SLEEPING that accompanied the dummy use is not going so well. Actually scratch that. The sleeping that accompanied the dummy use has become non existent.

    Naps? HAHAHAHA

    Overnight sleeping? HAHAHAH FUCKING HA.

    Sleeping for any amount of time at all so I can sleep to? Yeah well, if you got any sleep last night then I want to throw my shoes at you.

    Hmmmph.

    So, lets go over a regular day (today) here at Sleepless Nights (see? SEE why I didn’t rename my blog the week she actually slept through the night? It would have been a STUPID idea).

    12pm – Nap time. I have been hanging for nap time since we woke up this morning. I want a nap, I NEED a nap. I change Amy’s nappy, make sure her trackpants are comfy and put her into bed. She has a drink, her dog and duck, her soft blanket and a kiss.

    12.01 – Screaming at doorway (it’s gated with a convoluted assortment of crap designed to make it impossible to climb. For me as well). I clamber over all the crap and resettle. I leave.

    12.02 – Repeat.

    12.03 – Repeat.

    Repeat every minute until 12.45 when the bedroom goes silent. Hope like hell she is asleep and retire to the couch with a doona and pillow. I just start to doze off when a little voice calls from the hallway ‘Mummy! Ewwww, POO!’

    12.50 – Change a pooey nappy, remake bed, resettle, kiss and leave.

    12.50 and 5 seconds – Cue screaming.

    Over the next 40 minutes, I climbed in and out of her bedroom lots. Like fucking LOTS. No sign of sleepiness, no sign of settling.

    [I was so tired, my head might have exploded right about here]

    1.30 – Give up, climb into her room, cuddle toddler, curl up in her bed with her and try to fall asleep together.

    1.31 – Remove toddlers fingers from nose. My nose, not hers. I wouldn’t have had an issue if she was picking her OWN nose.

    Repeat for AN HOUR.

    There was no sleep forthcoming for me, and Amy seemed quite content to never sleep again.

    At 2.45, you *may* have been able to find me threatening to do horrible things to Nathan’s sleeping body if he didn’t wake the fuck up and help me out here. He woke up.

    After an afternoon of stress, a few inconsequential arguments (‘Put the cat down! AMY PUT THE CAT DOWN! SEVEN, STOP TRYING TO EAT THE CAT! AMY, PUT THE CAT DOWN NOW! SEVEN! PUSS! AMY! ARGHHHHHHH’) and some food, it was bedtime.

    Bedtime wasn’t quite so stressful. It only took an hour and 10 clambers in and out before she finally settled and fell asleep (at least, I am hoping she is asleep, it’s pretty quiet in there).

    However, the last few nights, she only managed to stay in her own bed until about midnight, after having her scream for 20 minutes I would just give up and take her into bed with me.

    Hell, it’s the middle of winter here and if I am going to be awake for hours with a bouncy toddler, by GOD I am going to do it from the warmth of my own bed. Path of least resistance and all that.

    Have you tried sleeping with your toddler lately? They are poky and bony and they kick! Seriously, what is with the need to kick me in the bladder hundreds of times!

    AND, since I weaned Amy off the breast, she seems to feel the need to assure herself that my boobs are still there. I am spending a lot of the night with a sleeping toddler twiddling my nipple. I don’t even know if she knows she is doing it, but whenever she wakes up, she shoves her ice cold hands down my top mumbling ‘boobies…’

    I am so freaking tired I feel sick. Please don’t tell me that naps are going to disappear forever, because I don’t think I could handle that right now.

    Am off to sleep now, g’ni…zzzzzzzzzz….

  • A Mismatched Post and a Confession

    It’s Nathan’s birthday today, he turned 26. We had a small spread for dinner (dip, baguettes, cake) and we will be having his family come up Saturday to celebrate properly with yummy food and company.

    Happy Birthday sweetheart, I love you.

    *******

    Amy’s dummy weaning is going fantastically of a day (she never did have a dummy much of a daytime anyway), sort of okay at bedtime (screaming, crying, wailing, lots of anger) and fucking shithouse over night (3am inconsolable. World is ending for hours on end).

    Tomorrow will be better.

    *******

    I have been feeling faint and dizzy and just generally unwell. I still have morning sickness, but it seems unrelated to that. I haven’t been able to eat anything other than salad lately so I don ‘t think I have been getting enough iron. Anyone know anything about anaemia in pregnancy? I will be asking my doctor about it sometime this week, as well as getting him to run blood tests.

    Needless to say it makes standing up for more than 2 minutes at a time very unpleasant.

    *******

    And the big news. The thing I haven’t been able to blog about yet.

    My Nan was diagnosed with Lung Cancer last week, despite never smoking a cigarette in her life. We are still going through the testing phase to find out what type of cancer it is.

    She has a biopsy done on Friday and then we will get the results of that biopsy on Wednesday 9th July. Hopefully from there we will know what we are dealing with exactly and what kind of treatment is available.

    From what the CT scan seemed to show, she has a primary tumour 2.5cmx3cm in her left lung and then lots of small ‘nodules’ of cancer spread through both lungs. However, the specialist did say that CT scans aren’t the best thing for showing everything possible.

    It kind of feels like we have been kicked in the teeth.

    So, if I miss a few days posting, or don’t comment on you for a while, this is why. I only have so much energy and some days I need it all to keep myself together and functioning.

    I’m trying to keep it together and so is Mum. Head over and see her too okay?

  • Dear Nathan…

    Dear Nathan,

    Thankyou for taking every second turn settling Amy this afternoon for her nap. I know that she still isn’t asleep, but hopefully with both of us working on her she will go down soon.

    Thankyou for not undermining me when I decided that today Amy stops having dummies full stop. I am sick of her being so attached to it, and her talking is getting a little bit lazy because of this.

    I know it’s hard for you when you have to re-settle her and she is asking ‘dummy please? Please?’ and you have to tell her no. I think I am more relaxed because I have already weaned her from breastfeeds over night (by myself) and then from breastfeeding full stop. God knows it’s much pleasanter when I have you here to take turns.

    Thankyou for taking extra turns when my body suddenly decided that while I might have been feeling too sick to eat all morning, the fact that I hadn’t eaten meant that it was going to stop working so well for me. Thankyou for settling her while I forced down some fruit and waited to stop feeling dizzy and nauseous.

    She’s getting closer to being settled now, I haven’t looked in there for a bit so I hope she hasn’t found a stray dummy. I know that it has been nearly 2 hours of wailing and crying, but she is so close to being worn out, she should be asleep soon.

    God, I hope she goes to sleep soon.

    Thankyou for being supportive this week while there has been stuff going on. I know that you are hurting just as badly as I am, you just don’t show it. We will get through it together and hopefully it won’t be as bad as we anticipate.

    You’re starting to accept the fact that I am pregnant a little more readily now. I think you were aloof in the beginning because I had had the bleeding and as far as I can tell, you didn’t want to get attached if it wasn’t going to work out. However we have seen a heartbeat now and my stomach is poking out more and more and you are more willing to talk about it.

    Not to mention we tried for so long to get here, it’s hard to hope that it will all be fine.

    The noise from the bedroom is lessening, we have gone from crying/wailing/screaming to talking and singing, and now to finally the occasional loud sigh. I think we might be getting there.

    I know I don’t blog about you much and I think you prefer it that way, but it seems that sometimes people forget that when I am whinging about a bad time getting Amy down, or numerous poos in a row, that you are here doing this with me. I might be a stay at home mum, but I am not alone in this and that means the world to me.

    I find it funny that the other night when I went out (family dinner) I was asked often where Amy was. When I replied she is with her father, I then get asked if we were still together. Do you think alot of people equate young mothers with single mothers? I don’t think they realised that you were older and very much ready to settle down when I fell pregnant.

    And so was I. That is why this worked for us.

    There is no one I would rather be doing this with. I love you oh so much.

    Veronica

  • Damn Doctor!

    My regular Doctor will be back in his clinic on Monday and MAN am I pleased.

    He took a holiday (first time in ages) and headed to Italy with his family. While he was gone, everytime I rang his clinic (he works from home and had a Locum taking care of things) I would get an answering machine telling me to call back at such and such a time.

    The first time I was calling at 11am on a Monday morning. The answering machine told me ‘I’m very sorry but the clinic is unattended right now. Please call back after 9.30am on Monday morning’.

    Now where I was it was WELL past 9.30am and I should have at least gotten a damn receptionist!

    The second time I called I was told that they were currently too busy and to please call back in 5 minutes. IT’S A COUNTRY TOWN CLINIC! The town it is in has a population of 50 people!

    Fuck me.

    After many more days (where I was thanking god I wasn’t actually sick or anything) I finally got a receptionist. She told me that she was busy right now, could I please hold? 10 minutes later I was still holding, only I wasn’t listening to music, I was listening to her wander around her office making coffee and talking to the doctor.

    Then, when I finally heard her heels walking towards the phone and I thought I was actually going to get to talk to her, she hung the phone up. Without checking to see if I was still there.

    I rang back.

    And got a freaking answering machine!

    You should have seen my ears smoke. Nathan says it was funny.

    So I rang back again, and rather snippily told her that I had JUST rang her to ask for an appointment. I got an appointment, but not until she blamed ‘someone’ for hanging up the phone. I should have told her that I could hear her the whole time.

    But the straw that broke the camels back? I went in when I was first pregnant (May 23rd to be precise) and got all the necessary paperwork done to be sent to the hospital.

    [Basically here, you go to your GP, get a positive pregnancy test and then promptly get referred to the Hospital for a booking in appointment with the midwives and then a health and well being check with the doctors. Then if all looks good, you get cleared to continue seeing just your GP until you are 36 weeks. High risk pregnancies don’t have this option and need to go to the OB’s at the hospital for every appointment]

    I had to ring the hospital a fortnight ago to cancel a GYN appointment I had, while the lovely lady was checking the appointments and congratulating me on my pregnancy she noticed something odd.

    Despite having seen the GP weeks before, they had no record of an antenatal referral for me AT ALL. I asked her to check again and she did, she even went so far as to check through all the recently received paperwork that hadn’t been entered into the computers yet.

    Nothing.

    So I of course, rang the GP [Locum, remember] to try and sort out what the fuck had happened. Do you know, I haven’t been able to get in touch with him! When I do finally get my call answered, I got told that the current receptionist knew nothing about it and could I call back when the other girl was working and they had had a chance to talk to the doctor please?

    Fuck ME!

    So I didn’t bother. I figure I’m not going to die between then and when my regular GP gets back to work (Monday, sweet sweet Monday) and I will go see him then and get everything sorted out.

    No matter that I will be nearly 11 weeks along by the time I get to see him. No matter that it takes up to 8 weeks to get an appointment at the hospital. No matter that everything that counts will have been done by then, even though the hospital won’t know I exist.

    Dammit, I just want to see my regular GP and have him sort everything out.

    So my advice? Never trust a Locum, or the receptionists when their boss is on holiday, because you won’t get anywhere.

    —-

    So far everything is still going well. My abdomen continues to expand with intestines and stuff, while my uterus remains pushing hard up against my spine [my hip and lower back are protesting this quite a lot].

    I cannot wait for this first trimester to be over and for the nausea and exhaustion to stop. I want to be able to feel the baby move so I can stop thinking morbid dead baby thoughts. I want to feel certain that at the end of all this, I will have a real baby to take home.

    I am still definitely pregnant and heading closer towards the time when I can schedule a NT scan. I want to be able to discuss my dates vs my ultrasound with my REAL doctor.

    And there is some other stuff going on here that I can’t blog about right now, but it’s big and it isn’t pleasant, so any good thoughts you send my way won’t go to waste. Trust me, send the good thoughts. We need them.

    xx

  • It’s Been A Bad Day, Please Don’t Take A Picture

    So I need you to do some imagining.

    Last night:

    First, you have a toddler and that toddler gets into the sugar bowl at 9.30pm, 2 hours after bedtime. Then that toddler suddenly had all! this! extra! energy! and discovers how to break out of her gated bedroom.

    Then you have to imagine various levels of toddler chaos until midnight, when she finally settled enough to fall asleep for me.

    Then she wakes a few times between 12am and 7am. At 7am her world needs to end and she needs to come to bed with Mummy for a few hours, regularly kicking Mummy in the back.

    She then spent the day out with my Mum (thankyou!) and came home in a slightly clingy, but mostly happy mood.

    She fingerpainted with guacamole, all over the carpet. She refused to eat her dinner, but sat next to me and ate all mine quite happily (seriously, how does that reasoning work?).

    Then I puked. And got a splinter. And trod on a bead and swore to high heaven.

    So, I did what I always do on shitty days. I turned on the music really loud and danced and sung like an idiot. Can you picture me dancing and singing like an idiot with Amy on my hip? Amy thought it was hilarious. So did I until I looked down and realised that she had pooped all over my hip.

    So, here is my song for bad days. It needs playing up REALLY REALLY loud.