Sleepless Nights

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  • So, mothers day. What a fuck up.

    Mothers Day.

    I was meant to sleep in, be woken nicely by a cup of tea and snuggly children, before enjoying a lovely relaxing day.

    That however, was not what happened.

    Amy woke up and I got up with her, to grab her breakfast before diving back into bed and prodding Nathan awake. After Amy had come to bed too and stuck her hideously cold feet on my stomach, I was more awake than asleep. Isaac woke up shortly afterwards and despite kicking Nathan out of bed to deal with the kidlets, I was soundly awake.

    Seven also spent a good deal of time barking outside my bedroom window.

    So I sucked it up. I got up and had a cup of tea sitting outside with Nathan. I probably should have realised then that Susie wasn’t about when I didn’t have to fend off muddy puppy paws and LOVELOVELOVELOVE. Heh.

    I showered, interrupted lots by my small children, before getting dressed and realising Nathan wasn’t about.

    I didn’t think anything of it until he came inside looking shaken.

    Someone had hit Susie with their car. Stopped to move her off the road, and yet, they hadn’t bothered coming to knock on the door to let us know.

    You know, whoever you are? Thanks for that.

    Now, it’s not like I live in the suburbs. There are 2 houses within a 500m radius and we’re right next to each other. And Susie was hit right outside our house.

    Sigh.

    From the look of her, she died instantly and for that, I’m grateful.

    Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting to spend mothers day morning watching Nathan dig a grave for my dog.

    We went out shopping anyway, grumpy as we were, vowing to kick people in the shins if we got a chance (we didn’t).

    That was a crap shoot too. Insane drivers – a P plater who was more interested in talking to her friend than staying within the road lines, a HUGE SALE that was more a bunch of junk thrown into bins and priced and two children determinded to disappear in different directions. We won’t mention the many and varied dislocations. My ribs, I think they’ve forgotten what their purpose is in life. No longer are they a protect the lungs and heart cage of bone, instead they’re a slidey held together by chewing gum bundle of pokey bits.

    After we’d found both Sushi places closed (what? I wanted sushi for lunch), we gave up and went to McDonalds. At least we know their chips are GF for Amy. It wasn’t even pleasant to have burgers, which are normally a pretty large treat.

    I finally convinced Nathan to take me driving through the Derwent Valley, so that I could take some photos, only to discover a few minutes down the road that I’d left my SD card at home, so photos weren’t on the plan after all.

    Sigh.

    Fucked up day.

    After finding Susie dead, the rest of the day didn’t really have a chance did it?

    Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better.

    Susie

    ***

    Other news, installment #2 of my Welcome to the Interwebs series is up on the other blog. You should read it.

  • The Awesome Power of the Internets

    Remember waaaay back on April Fools Day, I mentioned that Sleepless Nights had gotten a sponsorship from Ferrero Rocher? April fools joke, definitely.

    However, a knock on the door yesterday morning revealed my postman, trying desperately to not get licked to death by Susie. It seems, SOMEONE heard my plea for a ferrero sponsorship and sent me a box full of them.

    So, like I promised, her button is now up on my sidebar and she is an official sponsor.

    As for me, I’ll just be here, like normal, only now, I’ll be filled with velvety chocolate goodness.

    Thankyou Kristin, the internet is an awesome place to live nowadays.

    ***

    Kristin’s button goes up and joins Warsaw Mommy who is also sponsoring me. If you’d like to be a sponsor and get random shoutouts here, then send me an email and we’ll talk. Write. Whatever. Something. Prices are good, promise.

  • Presents! For Amy! (There was much excitement)

    This post is sponsored by Nuffnang.

    ***

    Toys are the bane of my life. No matter how many time I pick them up, they end up all over the floor again as soon as I turn my back. Not to mention that I am fairly sure they are breeding in the bottom of the toy box while I sleep.

    Every few months I go through the kids rooms and toys and freecycle a bunch of them. However, there are some toys I can’t bring myself to Freecycle and funnily enough, these seem to be the expensive, better quality toys the children are gifted with at Christmas.

    We’re not going to talk about the growing pile of stuffed toys that Amy has that I can’t bring myself to pass along to other children.

    ***

    Amy is obsessed by the mail. It might be because we’ve got some lovely friends in the internet who send me things like chocolate, or because I buy a lot of books online, but there is nothing Amy likes more than checking the mail, hoping for packages.

    She was a teensy bit disappointed when the other day, she checked the mail and instead of a letter, we got a red post office slip letting us know we had to go and collect a package.

    A few hours and a few tantrums later – she’s been a bit difficult lately – we were on our way to the post office, collecting a package from Nuffnang and Mattel. Of course, I didn’t let her open it until we were home again, and she’d helped me clean up all the other toys strewn about the house.

    Excitement ensued when she saw what was inside.

    TOYS! MUM! THERE ARE TOYS! PRESENTS FOR AMY! TOYS!

    Rather excited.

    Mattel rather nicely, sent me some vehicles from the Little People Vehicle range and I’m not sure the kids have stopped playing with them yet.

    Despite the packaging taking a while to open, with excited kidlets bouncing around me the whole time, I am so pleased with these toys. They are tough and the little people are soft enough that I’m not worried about the children hurting themselves on the edges. These definitely aren’t toys that I will want to get rid of.

    Both vehicles, we’ve got a school bus and a tractor, sing. Isaac spends a lot of time pressing the person to make the car sing and then dancing. It’s rather cute.

    All around, I love Fisher Price stuff and always have, so I’m not really a hard sell – and anything that comes in the post and is for the children is going to win them over instantly. Isaac incidentally is still crawling around with the cow in his hand, so I think they’ve won him over.

    Now, I’ve just got to referee when they decide that they both need the school bus or they are going to die.


    And you know, that’s always fun.

  • Housekeeping

    I’ve been head down in books for the last few days, so while I’ve been about on email, I’ve not really been anywhere else. 7 books in 5 days or thereabouts, with another one started. Yes, I’ve been reading and not much else. Recommendations: If you like Fantasy, pick up David Eddings ‘The Belgariad’ (5 books) and ‘The Mallorean’ (5 books). Much recommended, I’ve only just stopped daydreaming about the characters and that’s becauseI’ve been busily reading the Millenium series, by Stieg Larsson.

    So, yes, books. The weather has been shitty, so I’ve not had a chance to take any photos and I’m getting twitchy.

    On to the crux on the post – blog housekeeping.

    Due to astronomical amounts of spam comments – 300 in an hour type thing – I’ve closed all comments on posts older than a month. I just can’t keep trawling through the spam, checking to see if anything real got caught in the filter – which happens more than you’d suspect.

    So that’s that.

    That’s it really, if you haven’t joined the Aussie Mummy Bloggers with me, then what are you waiting for? It’s not entirely for mummies, or for Australian’s – we’ve even got an honourary Aussies group and some of my very favourite women are there.

    I’ll be back properly when I’ve finished losing myself in another world.

    Okay?

    In the meantime, what books do you adore? I’m always after recommendations…

  • Happiness in Small Things

    After Nan died, I moved through my world like I was in a fog. I was shattered and a grey fog seemed preferable to anything else. After all, I had small children and things to do, I didn’t have time to be crippled by grief, no matter that I felt shattered inside.

    There is something about watching someone you love die in front of you that can leave you a bit broken you know?

    And so that is how things continued. I moved through my days, bundled in a fog of I-refuse-to-feel-anything until I got to the point when I forgot how to feel anything. I internalised all of my grief and hello fog, you’re like a warm woolly blanket. Comforting and a little bit hard to get rid of because I might need you.

    Nan died almost 10 months ago and while outside, I am coping, inside I am still shattered.

    If I think about it, or her, I fall apart.

    So I just don’t.

    I don’t look at photos of her, any more than merely letting my eyes slide over them.

    And I don’t speak about her, unless it’s a little bitterly, with a dose of realistic philosophical thrown in to stop it hurting quite so badly.

    There are still things that make me happy though and at this point, I need all the small doses of happiness I can get.

    Watching the world from the other side of a camera lens, that makes me happy. There is something about laying almost flat on my stomach and taking photos of toadstools or flowers that makes everything else easier to deal with. From the other side of a camera lens I feel like I can breathe again.

    The simple act of taking photos, and coming inside to see how they turned out, it makes everything easier to deal with somehow.

    Focusing on the small things leaves the big things to take care of themselves.

    I am also the first person to admit that I can get a little obsessive when things make me feel happier or fulfilled.

    A long time ago now, I used to work in a kitchen. The fast paced lifestyle left little time for thinking about other things and food, well, food is a huge passion of mine.

    So when I discovered that making my own pasta sauces/jams/chutney and then photographing them gave me a small measure of happiness and fulfilment, I did a lot of it. Currently I’ve run out of jars and I’m itching to buy more strawberries because dammit, at least then you can see the results of all my hard work. I have something to show for working hard at it.

    Grief isn’t like that apparently. No matter how hard I work at ignoring it, or even trying to deal with it, I’ve got nothing to show for it. It still hurts just as much when I poke the hole, so I leave off the poking and move back to things that make me happy.

    Small things.

    Gardening makes me happy. The simple acts of picking my own produce, that’s seeing results from hard work.

    We planted our six gum trees on Sunday. When we were done, I wished for another ten trees, another twenty even. Something to show for traipsing all over the yard, digging holes and dragging a hose around. I didn’t want to stop planting, because playing in the dirt, it made me feel something again. And I’ve not been feeling very much since Nan died.

    I sat in the middle of the yard yesterday and just sat. With a camera in my hand and more toadstool photos on my memory card, I just sat. And I looked at the sky and I looked at my poultry, free ranging fifty metres away. I thought about how hard missing someone is and how much work grief is, for very little result. I thought about all the little things that make me happy and realised that I need all the happiness I can get.

    Because even though the little things make me bounce with excitement, the bigs things are going to be there, waiting to be dealt with. Sitting on my shoulder, just waiting for a stray thought or word to bring me undone.

    I am not a bouncy bubbly person. I am realistic and a little bit cynical. I am philosophical and I am rather snarky.

    And at the end of the day, I will always be the kind of person who wryly tells her dying grandmother ‘Good thing it’s not leprosy, or you would have just pulled your ears off.’

    Because that’s how I cope.

    Happiness in small things.