Animals

Small things:

by Veronica on September 15, 2009

in Animals, Life

Nathan dislocated his thumb today while we were doing minor home improvements.

The nice side of me went ‘shit! are you okay? show me? no, it’s back in, do you want a bandage?’

The bitchy side of me went ‘see? now you know what it’s like. i do that multiple times a day. maybe you’ll be more sympathetic next time I tell you something’s popped.’

The nice side of me won. I bandaged it and made sure it was fine. Poor baby.

Heh.

***

Remember the birds that fell from the sky? Apparently they’ve been dying of Salmonella.

Which of course can be transmitted to humans, dogs and cats.

All of which currently live on my property. With a metric shitload of sparrows.  And tank water.

The joys.

If I start vomiting, I’m declaring war on sparrows.

Actually, I might do that anyway, vomiting or not.

Death to sparrows.

Just not salmonella death.

***

Today I’m guest posting over at Sarcastic Mom’s. Sure, I wrote it when Isaac was 5 weeks old and I was sleep deprived and bitter, but oh well.

Go read it.

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Isaac is sleepless. He’s more sleepless than Amy was and seeing as how I named this blog ‘Sleepless Nights’ when she was 11 months old, that’s really saying something.

He finishes cluster feeding at around 11pm, five hours after I’ve put him down for the first time. His cluster feeds are generally 5 minutes long, every 30 minutes or so. It would be lovely to have an early night, but I’m not kidding myself that it’s going to happen.

At 11pm, I finally get to drag myself off to bed, content in the fact that Isaac is sleeping deeply. Only to have him start the night time feeds.

Every hour, he wakes crying. On a good night, he’ll feed for twenty minutes and then sleep for forty minutes before waking again. On a bad night, like the last few we’ve had, he’ll feed for 20 minutes, goo and laugh at me for 20 minutes, feed for another 20 minutes before sleeping for, you guessed it, twenty minutes.

Add, rinse, repeat.

Over and over again.

Some nights he’ll stay awake for 1-2 hours. Talking, gooing, feeding, crying. Everything except sleeping.

It’s … wearing to say the least.

Our days start at 5am. By the time I get Isaac back down for a nap at 7.30-8am, Amy is awake for the day, needing breakfast and playtime and snuggles and ohmygod.

I’m a little exhausted.

***

The doctor prescribed me some new anti-inflammatories recently. Which is great! My tense and sore muscles thank her.

Only, there is one problem.

Once my muscles are coaxed into relaxing by good drugs, I’m left rather floppy.

No, scratch that.

I’m left with fuck all stability at all.

Apparently all my tensed and painful muscles are actually keeping all my joints together. Whodathunkit.

Anyone else had any experience with anti-inflammatories causing floppiness issues?

By 8am this morning, I’d relocated a good half a dozen joints god knows how many times. After the fourth wrist dislocation, I put a brace on. By lunch time, I’d removed the brace because I was only dislocating inside it. My hips popped in and out as I walked and I’m still not convinced that my elbow and ribs are all back in.

It was a bad day.

The actual dislocations are getting less painful, while the overall pain is getting worse. Trade-off I suppose. It’s rather disconcerting to feel your bones sliding against each other though. Especially when they won’t stay put.

***

6am this morning found me curled up on the couch under a blanket while Isaac played on the floor next to me. I’d been trying to nap again, but he kept squawking at me and needing things. He’s finally worked out how to go forwards, as opposed to sideways or backwards, so he kept getting stuck and needing rescuing.

I climbed off the couch and stood to put wood in the fire. A cat curled around my ankles, trying to make me break my neck. I shoved the wood in, shut the door and leant down to catch the cat. For once, it was easy. She was hungry and didn’t dart away.

I walked past the couch, picking up my heatpack as I went. I opened the gate into the kitchen and walked towards the microwave.

It was only the frantic scrabbling of the cat as I went to open the microwave door that had me realise that it wasn’t the heatpack that I was about to put into the microwave.

It was the cat.

Poor cat.

God knows I wouldn’t have enjoyed having to run outside to rescue my heatpack from the icy ground after I threw it out of the kitchen window.

Thank god I stopped in time.

My feet would have been frozen.

I shook myself to wake up, and ended up with things where they were meant to go. The cat out the window and the heatpack in the microwave.

We won’t talk about how many attempts I had at making a cup of tea though. That’s just embarrassing.

Cough.

***

Hi, my name is Veronica and today, I almost microwaved the cat.

How are you today?

***

Edited to add:

I forgot to mention. I was included in this shiny little list. I’m thrilled. 100 Most Bookmark Worthy Websites For Dr. Mums.

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Death! Death and destruction!

by Veronica on March 29, 2009

in Animals

I keep finding dead mice in random spots.

The first one showed up in the bathroom. I was alerted to it’s presence by a yelling Nathan, who had me pick it up and throw it in the fire. [In his defence, he was just about to step into the shower and everyone knows you can’t deal with mice when you are naked]

The second one was in the middle of the study. Just laying there. I almost trod on it, which would have been unpleasant, because we all know what poison does to their insides. I can just imagine the squidge sound it would have made.

SQUIDGE.

I mean, I knew it was going to happen when we poisoned them. Theoretically I knew.

I don’t think I was prepared for the dead mice to start appearing all over the house though.

It feels like it is only a matter of time before I go to put on a pair of socks, only to find dead mice inside them. Or pull out a pot from the cupboard to find a tiny little funeral taking place.

I don’t know what’s worse. To have them scurrying about, breeding and carrying disease, or dying in nooks and crannys where I may or may not find them.

Fun times.

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Not Sleepingness

by Veronica on March 20, 2009

in Animals

It seems to be a theme around here, I don’t sleep and at the pinnacle of my not sleepingness, I blog.

When I’m not getting any sleep, sleep seems to be all I can think about. Will I get enough in order to cope through tomorrow? Will Isaac go down before midnight? If I make sure there is no butter/zinc cream/crackers/vegemite/water/scissors in Amy’s reach, can I stay in bed dozing while she destroys the house? How hard will I have to kick Nathan to make him get up in the morning and leave me blissfully alone?

On and on it goes. Circles, all made up of the same questions.

***

Yesterday:

Nathan: ‘So, what do I do with it?’

Veronica: ‘It’s pouches. Just get one out and pop it up into the ceiling.’

N: ‘How?’

V:’Well open the pac….’

He looked at me oddly.

N: ‘Not like that! How do I get it into the ceiling?’

V: ‘Oh. Those gaps in the dining room roof will work.’

N: ‘Of course.’

You know it’s bad when neither of you bats an eyelid when you talk about the gaps in your ceiling. Or the throwing of poison pouches up into the ceiling to kill the fucking mice. Or the fact that I checked the poison placement to make sure that it wasn’t going to fall back out of a gap.

More to the point, you know the mouse infestation is bad when you can smell them. Or when it sounds like mice wearing football boots and pushing shopping trolleys are living in the ceiling. Needless to say, they are noisy and if I see them I will stomp on their furry little heads.

****

Dear Isaac,

Did you know that breast milk has a sleep inducing hormone in it? You did? Wait, so that would be why you are refusing to both feed and sleep right now? Surely there is room enough in your stomach for just a tiny little sleep inducing feed? Please?

Well you know if I have to keep jiggling you to stop the crying, I am likely to jiggle an entire feed out of you. Wait, you knew that too?

Heh.

Good thing I love you so much.

Mummy.

***

Dear Amy,

You are much bigger than a moth. Please stop waking screaming because you are having nightmares about them. Tomorrow I am going to teach you how to stomp up and down on their little moth heads. Again. I know that we’d just about gotten you over your moth phobia when you got scared of a moth the other day. Everything would have been fine had Daddy not tried to show you the dead moth so you wouldn’t be scared, when suddenly the moth came to life.

I know you were terrified, it showed in how white you went and how quickly you threw yourself under as much of me as you could find while screaming your little heart out. I’m sorry the moth came back to life.

I’m sorry I laughed so hard I cried. Tomorrow we will stomp on moth heads. Together.

I love you.

Mummy.

***

Gosh I’m tired.

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And POP! my head exploded.

by Veronica on March 9, 2009

in Animals

There is something about seeing a mouse and not being able to schwack it that makes my head explode. So, when I heard a scritch scritch sound and finally tracked it down to a mouse underneath the fridge, I may possibly have started to froth at the mouth.

‘Argghh! There is a mouse! Look! A MOUSE AND IT IS LOOKING AT ME.’

[I may have possibly have been shining a torch at the mouse, hoping that the torch beam would magically turn into a laser and burn the little fucker to death.]

Nathan:’Well? Not much I can do about it.’

‘It is looking at me! WITH BEADY EYES!’

‘Sigh’

Nathan might get a little sick of how I overreact when I see a mouse and can’t kill it instantly by mind power alone.

‘ARGHHHH! It is running up my FRIDGE! IT RAN UP THE BACK OF MY GODDAMN FRIDGE! AND ONTO THE FUCKING SINK! Kill it! kill kill kill the goddamn thing!’

This is where I’d like to point out that a torch is fucking useless as a schwacker. Especially if you are trying to schwack around the dirty dishes. Even more so if there is a nice little mouse hole at the back of the sink for the mouse to disappear into.

Fucker.

I have now moved the mousetrap. Nothing would make me happier than to dance around gleefully over the body of a dead mouse.

***

In other news, I am 6 comments off having 10000 comments on this blog. Will *YOU* be the ten thousandth commenter? No, you don’t win anything except my everlasting love and devotion. Sorry about that.

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