Bad Timing!

I am a bit of a moron.

I’m flying to Brisbane this weekend to see Children of Bodom (and with any luck make a few illicit fantasies regarding Henkka or Janne come true). I’d booked this trip the day tickets went on sale – I can’t remember how long ago that was but it was quite early on in the year and James and I decided to spend Monday morning in Brisbane instead of getting the awful red-eye home. (WTF is with concerts on SUNDAY nights anyway?)

WELL! Wasn’t that just stupid? Turns out that UniSA, (my university) has decided to schedule my final exam for the year on that Monday. Luckily, it’s at 6.15pm, but I arrive back in Cairns at 4pm, barring no unfortunate and unforseen circumstances (yes, Qantas, I’m looking at you, fuckers).

So I’ll be cramming for my exams this week instead of working, since I won’t be around for the weekend…

The POSITIVE side of all this is that Skyrim is released in Australia on Friday 11th November and I can NOT wait to play it. So by leaving for the weekend I’ve effectively ruled out the possibility of losing time and procrastinating by playing games and ensuring that I HAVE to study before the day of the exam.

The bonus is that when I get back and the exam’s over – GAME ON!

The bigger bonus – I have trained the Space Monkey to go to sleep by 8.30 now so I can play.

12WBT Update

I was supposed to be updating this with my progress in the 12WBT but I just simply have not had time.

The good news is that the program does seem to be working, I am down 7.8kg in 8 weeks. The bad news is that I haven’t been sticking to it properly the past 10 days because I’ve had a massive chest infection.

So it looks like I’m on track to have lost 10kg in 12 weeks. Hooray! I wish it would hurry up, I honestly don’t feel like I look any different.

Bad Mother Syndrome

I don’t suffer from it. But this is not from a lack of other people attempting to make me suffer for it.

I really wish I knew why people out there, other mothers especially, seem to go out of their way to sabotage people that do things differently.

I took Space Monkey out to the shops on Saturday and I got glared at for several things:

• Formula feeding
• Feeding her in her pram and not picking her up
• Giving her a packet of Rafferty’s Garden puree to suck on instead of spoonfeeding her
• Swatting at a bastard child who randomly tried to steal her sucker (dummy).

 

Space Monkey is nearly 9 months old. She has huge sharp chompers and bites on everything that goes near her mouth. No fucking way am I sticking my nipples anywhere near her razorblade mouth of doom.

Space Monkey, as you may guess by that nickname alone, is kind of a brat and wriggles and squiggles and will not, for the love of anything in this world, sit still. If I take her out of the pram, she will jump right off my knees, crawl over to the nearest thing she shouldn’t touch in a parents room and throw herself into it with a cry of lustful abandon.

Spoon feeding is nigh on impossible for those exact reasons, and due to the fact that she likes to grab the spoon and hit me with it for not shovelling it into her hungry maw fast enough. I learned one day when being an unorganised mother who forgot to pack a spoon for our outing, that handing her the packet to suck got her fed eighty-seven times faster with significantly less mess (read: none). So bugger it, she can suck the packets – I get less clothes to wash, less utensils and heaps less crap to carry around with me. I win.

So I’m not in any way interested in second guessing the choices I make with her, but I can imagine how upsetting some of these nasty looks and snide comments makes other mothers who aren’t necessarily confident mothers feel.

General Craziness: An Update

I survived my exams with my brains intact. I even managed to totally fluke getting a high distinction for last semester. I say fluke because the part of the exam I didn’t know was multiple choice (yippee!) and apparently my semi-educated guesses were correct. I’m now onto the second semester and flailing around miserably. The onus is on me now to repeat last semester’s performance, damnit.

As of last Monday, I am also back working full time. Just not at my actual job, which I’m technically still employed at and I must make a decision about. My husband’s family business has seen a huge deluge of business lately but lost a few key staff members. He’s brought me in to get it all back under control again, because he doesn’t want to do it and everyone else is busy. It’s an incredibly huge job and I don’t really have any idea how to start without stepping on people’s toes.

The Space Monkey comes to work with us. For now. It’s his intention to stop working soon and teach guitar instead and I’ve enrolled her in day care 2 days a week. She can start as soon has her birth certificate arrives. I don’t really want her at work with us. She gets bored VERY easily and screams to high heaven all day, making for rather a distracting work environment. She’s also developed severe eczema, and hanging around 5 days a week in a factory full of sawdust, plaster and silicone is aggravating the poor kid’s skin something fierce. As soon as we get it under control, WHAM! it’s angry and red again from something else. It took us a good month from the start of it’s appearance to work out what originally caused it – the Step 2 formula! Turns out she’s allergic to casein proteins.

And just in case you didn’t think I had enough on my plate, I signed on to do Michelle Bridge’s 12 Week Body Transformation, starting next week. I’m going to blog about it here, since it’s kind of directly related to me being a mum. Three years of miscarriages and fertility treatment sure as hell wasn’t kind to me. I hope I can manage to stick to her plan. I know if I schedule everything in properly, it’ll be fine, the only problem is that I have an incredibly lazy husband who refuses to do any housework, doesn’t like looking after the Space Monkey after 5pm after having her all day at work (see he does nothing, I’m the one that actually has to do the work – because he wouldn’t do it in the first place and now I have to fix it) and hates exercise with a rabid passion. I’ve convinced him to support me, but I don’t foresee it happening longer than 2 weeks, really. Love him to bits, but damn he’s a shit sometimes.

 

Wish me luck?

Teefs!

Holy crap! Space Monkey has started teething! It makes for a very noisy household as the poor little munchkin is a bit of a wussbag like her daddy and doesn’t deal with pain very well.

I had hoped she wouldn’t bother with this malarky until she was a few months older, but trust me to have the impatient child. I couldn’t wait to grow up when I was a kid so I guess this is karma.

She’s also refusing to drink her damn bottles because she just wants to nom on stuff. Like she will nom on anything. Today she gave my wrist a hickey from nomming so hard on it. But she just can’t work out her tongue yet so it’s useless trying to feed her people food.

Mother’s Day

Today is Mother’s Day.

I got kind of over people asking if James and Space Monkey had done anything/bought anything for me pretty quickly. I went out to breakfast with my mum, sister, nana and grandma and they were both still asleep when I left. James is not a romantic or sentimental sort of guy. I’m 100% down with that, as I am not a romantic or sentimental type girl. So when he didn’t do anything for me, it really didn’t bother me. As I said to him in the days leading up towards it, after everything that we went through to get Space Monkey here, every day is kind of like Mother’s Day.

We went to his sister’s place for lunch. His parents are building a new house on the block of land next door to her (or close enough next door anyway) to sell. We got the grand tour. It was terrifying. It’s attached to the side of the mountain so it’s on scary toothpick poles and the third floor balcony is suspended over a giant abyss of nothing. It’s not even resting on top of the second floor, it’s just stuck on the outside of the house with three toothpicks attaching it to the second floor in a triangle formation. TERRIFYING!!! Were it not on the side of a mountain perilously close to sliding off, it would be a lovely house.  Too scary for me though. Do not want to visit.

I also got kind of sick of people remarking over my ‘first’ Mother’s Day. It’s technically actually my third, but since my first two babies died, people tend to forget that. Oh I don’t mind if my friends do, most of them have other shit on their mind, but it’s kind of annoying that our family did.

Busy Bees

I’m in the middle of a study deluge right now – two separate courses (as in two totally different areas of study from two separate institutions), six assignments (four completed) and two exams. We are busy bees.

I spent four days away in Brisbane for a friend’s Hen’s night (stupid public holidays meant the only flights available were four days apart unless I wanted to spend over $1000 each way and I definitely did not) and Space Monkey survived the time with her daddy very well. In fact he said he said he hadn’t slept better in ages and would really like it if I left more often

Brag Point: Sleeping

As a member of a few parents groups around the internet (a few forums and a couple on Facebook), I’ve learned an awful lot about what seems to be normal for babies (my studies focus solely on the mother, not the child). The Space Monkey is my first, and likely only, child and previous to having her my experiences of babies were limited to my brothers and cousins.

Space Monkey woke up about 2am and 5am for a feed for the first two weeks, then I ran into trouble feeding her and had to start expressing and topping her up with formula. Since then she sleeps from 10-11pm through to 7-8am, just like me. Every night without fail.  *BRAG* Perfect child.

I had no idea that so many women had trouble with babies and their sleep patterns. I’d never heard of this strange idea called a Dream Feed. The first time I heard the phrase I thought it was simply describing an ‘ideal’ feed, you know, like the baby had a good feed and burp and went back to sleep. It’s actually when you feed the baby while they’re asleep, just slip ‘em a bottle or a boob and fill them up so they keep sleeping through the night. Apparently it works. I tried it once with Space Monkey before she started sleeping through the night to no avail – if she’s asleep she’s completely comatose and it was very difficult to prise her jaws apart. Plus I felt a bit mean for attempting to shove a bunch of liquid down her neck when she was asleep.

So imagine my surprise when all the women in these parent groups started expressing their frustration and anger at the fact that their babies wake 2 or 3, sometimes even 4 times a night for a feed! I haven’t quite been mean enough to brag about her awesome sleeping habits in the groups though. That would start way too much mummy drama. Seriously, mummy drama exists, that’s why I keep my bragging here. Then only people who want to read about Space Monkey adventures can read them and I don’t get crazy mummies sicced on my arse.

 

The Uni Mum

Yesterday I received all the information booklets, assignment and exam details for my next uni subject which starts in a few weeks. UniSA is a bit weird in that they have a whole bunch of strangely timed semesters throughout the year so sometimes the subjects get staggered. It sounds great in theory, but if you’re doing a full time load AND working at the same time like I did last year, it means you get approximately stuff all break January and December. It sucks even more when you’re 6 months pregnant, studying, working AND doing clinical placement all at the same time.

I’m struggling with the subject I’m already doing at the moment. It’s a scientific subject which means it’s very textbook/lecture intensive and I actually have to do the readings and listen to lectures instead of just skimming through them the day before the exam and walking off with a distinction, as is my usual style. I’m a very lazy student, I read incredibly fast and once I’ve read something I remember it forever, so it’s become my signature to just cruise through all my subjects. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to steal a few hours for myself away from the Space Monkey to study. She’ll settle and play happily for 20 minute stretches during the day before she screeches to be picked up again. 20 minutes is just long enough to shovel some food down my throat before she notices I’m eating and screeches, it’s an uncanny ability that one. It’s almost like she wants me to starve to death. It’s just not long enough to do any real work.

When the other half comes home from work, he’ll take her for a bit, but we share an office and he likes to listen to music or play guitar with her (and yes, she behaves nicely for him, the brat) and his just being there is incredibly distracting and gives me the shits.

So when I received my subject mailout yesterday I did what I always do when I get them, skip through to the assessment section to see how much work I have to do. Crap. This subject is wholly assignment based. Again, normally not so bad, but when I don’t have time to do the readings for one subject, how am I going to do it for two and pump out four huge assignments, one of which requires me to prepare and present a lecture in under 5 weeks?

Well, I did what any normal person would do. I said “fuck it”, dropped the subject and I’ll do it next year instead.

Pink vs Blue: The Battle For Our Children’s Identity

Girls wear pink.

Boys wear blue.

Acceptible gender neutral colours are white, yellow and green.

I don’t believe that particular colours should define the identity of our chidren. If my daughter wants to wear a blue shirt, so be it. Blue is an awesome colour.

I had the Space Monkey in a cute little pale blue onesie (with pink writing declaring she was in fact a girl) and I had oodles of people comment on how adorable my little boy was. It was all I could do not to call them a moron. I may be slightly biased being her mother and all, but there is no way in hell someone with her features could ever be mistaken for a boy, even if she was wearing clothes that said “I’m a dude”.

We’ve taken her out and she was wearing a little red onesie with black sleeves and a black printed tie on it, again with the boy comments. She’s got a onesie that says “When I grow up I wanna be a rockstar” on it and another one that’s black with a cradle on it and AC/DC written in blocks above the cradle and “for babies who rock” underneath it and I’m always getting comments about why I don’t dress her in pink frilly stuff.

Here’s the thing – I’m not intentionally not dressing her in overtly girly things, it’s just the things that my husband and I find cute and endearing happen to be things like the aforementioned outfits. She probably will want to be a rockstar, her daddy is a mean heavy metal guitarist and her mummy sings classical and screamy metal vocals. It’s a reflection on us and the values we hold, rather than any subconscious desires of wanting a boy coming through.

We also have half the collection of nerdy Think Geek baby clothes, like the one that has a biohazard symbol on it and the one that says Version 2.0. There’s norule that says those clothes have to be specifically used on baby boys.

I don’t like a lot of little girl clothes because I think Barbie is stupid, those Bratz things are gutter trash, Dora irritates the crap out of me and 90% of the rest of it is nauseatingly saccharine, so why should I dress her in clothes that reflect ideals we don’t hold?

Also, I’m pissed off because my mother dared ask me if I packed her any clothes that would identify her as a girl to passers by when I dropped her off to babysit on the weekend.