Life

I’m counting down the days, hours, minutes.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

Wednesday, Amy starts grade 2. Thursday, Isaac begins Kindergarten.

Then, dear Internet, I will have somewhere in the realm of fifteen hours a week with only one child at home. I am pumped. I am stoked. I am carefully working out a regime of eating alone, drinking cups of tea and reading books.

It is going to be GLORIOUS.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this school holidays, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little mentally exhausted. Everyone keeps asking me questions and expecting intelligent answers from me, when all I want to do is sleep for a month.

It hasn’t helped that Evelyn was sleeping terribly. Waking five-six times a night, wanting boobs, screaming, fussing, tossing and turning. She was getting molars, but come on, enough is enough.

But, just quietly, she’s stayed in her own bed nearly all night for two nights running. Only needed one breastfeed at 4am.

And I am feeling much less exhausted. Waking three times a night is easy, blissful in fact, when compared to double that amount.

(I am writing this and Isaac is playing Minecraft: “Mummy! Come here! YOU NEED TO SEE! Another skeleton dropped a bow! COME AND SEE.” You can see why I’m exhausted. I am also not walking the length of the house again, to see a minecraft bow, again. Again again again.)

So! School. Going back. Beginning. A new chapter. One toddler at home. One toddler who NAPS. Naps, people.

It’s going to be great. Fantastic, in fact. And after Easter, there will be even MORE alone time, because Isaac will learn to catch the school bus with Amy and angels will sing, choirs rejoicing at the extra hour I have to Get Things Done.

Of course, Evelyn will probably end up terribly bored and sit on me for the entire time her siblings are gone, but I’m remaining optimistically dreamy.

SCHOOL!

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I read a lot, eagerly consuming books as fast as I can download them. Anything and everything, I’m not a fussy reader.

Of course, I have my preferences – I’ll choose Urban Fantasy over a mystery, and a mystery over literary fiction. I love my kindle, I love the Book Depository, I’m never happier when I stumble across a book sale, or second hand books being given away.

So when Anita Heiss published her Black Book Challenge, I expected to have read at least a few of the books.

No.

Not even one, I’m ashamed to say.

It’s ridiculous, because clicking links and reading synopsis after synopsis, they are amazing books one and all. But because I rely on discount books, word of mouth recommendations and things I find in second hand stores, I’d missed every single book on the list.

This is my challenge for 2014 – to read at least 20 of the books on the list, possibly more depending on finances. Because they’re not mass market paperback, they’re not cheap, but I’m treating every single book as an investment.

With information coming out about plans to change the school curriculum, and the way history is taught, I feel it’s important my children have access to stories which tell of what happened when England invaded Australia, and the atrocities which followed over the next two centuries.

It’s a dark history. Shying away from it, and refusing to teach our children the truth about how our country came to be won’t change what happened. And frankly, history is schools is already woefully inadequate, and Aboriginal history is even worse.

I’m hoping by the end of the year I will have learned more, found new favourite authors, and gathered together a collection of books I wish to read and read again.

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I’ve been reading the inheritance series and I really like it but it also reminds me I’ll never fly a dragon and that makes me want to die

— Em Elizabeth (@the_writer_life) January 24, 2014

I read a lot of books, and lately it’s been mostly urban fantasy style stuff. Ilona Andrews. Carrie Vaughn. Patricia Briggs. Kalayna Price. Richard Kadrey. Also Robin Hobb, who isn’t urban fantasy, but she writes the best characters and magic I’ve read.

I finish these books and I’m left feeling emptier somehow, wishing for magic, for meaning, for something more.

Em Elizabeth tweeted above about dragons not being real and I sat there, looking at the screen, stunned for a bit. I spend an inordinate amount of time wishing magic were real. Constructing elaborate fantasies inside my head involving the existence of werewolves and fae, debating their existence.

And it’s strange really. I’m a married mother with three children, and yet, I desperately wish these things were real.

I’d like to say something beautiful and poignant here about bending reality to my whim, and etc, but really? I just think magic would be really fucking cool.

This is why I’m a writer. My daydreams get to become reality in some small slice somewhere. I can write rules which have to bearing on my current reality. I can have faeries, and yes, even vampires. Because why not?

But it does seem disappointing to only have the reality I want exist in my mind, completely oblivious to the world that is.

You might think me strange and that’s okay, because I am. All writers are a little weird.

Do you read Urban Fantasy? Who does it best?

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Evelyn is 17.5 months old now and OH, don’t we know about it. She has WANTS and NEEDS and LOUD OPINIONS that frequently see her throwing herself to the floor to screech about the unfairness of it all.

Last night, Amy curled up on my lap for a snuggle while I read a book. Evelyn noticed, and looking determined, she climbed on top of her sister. Using feet and elbows, she wedged herself between us, screeching at Amy the whole time.

WOE to anyone who dares touch me. Evelyn will be there, pushing them away.

It’s both cute, and frustrating. Usually we just pull her into the middle of whatever cuddle we’re having until she fights free.

This morning Isaac was playing Minecraft on the computer. Evelyn climbed up onto the chair with him, and carefully, using her feet, began pushing him off the chair. Isaac, being a decent big brother, went and got a second chair for himself. Eve crawled onto that one as well and kicked him off.

At which point I intervened and took her away, but OPINIONS and NEEDS and WANTS.

She’s full on, exhausting. If I sit down at my computer, she pouts. If I keep working, she turns the computer off. I moved to a new desk to make the computer tower higher, out of reach. She gets a step stool. If I switch to the laptop, she shouts and pushes the lid closed.

Needless to say, I haven’t been on the computer much at all.

Eve’s eating has picked up a little bit. I’m hesitant to hope too much, as her eating has always been peaks and troughs, but for now she’s eating. I mostly weaned her too. She’s having a breastfeed at 4am, but isn’t interested during the day. And HALLELUJAH she’s taking a bottle of pediasure before sleep now.

We’re working on finding new things that she’ll happily eat. She likes well seasoned food, preferring curry to plainer foods, which is nice. It’s nice to have one child who likes curry – the older two mostly just eat the rice.

But she isn’t talking yet.

I hesitate to say she isn’t talking “at all”, because when pressured, she will say Mumum, Da-da and something that sounds close to “MeeMee” which I assume is Amy. But she’s mostly a silent child, using various inflections of screech to communicate. She wasn’t a babbly baby, and she still isn’t now. It’s strange for me, even at the peak of Isaac’s ASD regression, he still had around 10 words.

Our speech pathologist is a bit concerned, because it’s clear Eve understands well.

But it’s another wait and see thing. In the meantime, I think I’d best start learning some simple sign language to teach her. It might curb the angry frustration we’re seeing a lot of.

And that’s it from me. School holidays have left me with hardly any free time. Three children mean it’s rare that someone isn’t speaking to me, climbing on me, or needing me immediately for something. School is back in another three weeks. Isaac turns five on Saturday.

Life is good. Busy, chaotic, exhausting – but good.

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