Letting It Go

The week had been a busy one.  The kids had school holidays although we did keep Emily going through the break so she could take some time off later in the semester (the beauty of online school).

As expected, the kids were full of energy so we did a few outings which I felt sure would exhaust them to the point where they would sleep for several days.  Apparently that only works for adults and the kids just keep up the non stop carnage momentum while the adult takes a well deserved nap.  This is a very dangerous phenomenon.

In an effort to pull the house back from the brink of self implosion we instituted a working bee on the Friday morning.  The kids each got a “zone” to bring order to and I started working on the kitchen.  Their zones were all at the floor level since my aged back doesn’t like bending anymore. 

When I clean in the mornings I tend to prefer doing it before I shower and get dressed because it seems wrong to get all cleaned up and then have to put my hands down a toilet.  So that morning I was doing dishes, vacuuming and scrubbing things while wearing my nightgown.  The nightgown was not particularly exciting but it was rather short.  If anyone had happened to peer through my windows that day they may have become blinded, especially if I happened to be bending over at the time. 

Anyway, things were going well as far as the cleaning.  The zones were working extremely well and the threats of pleasures withheld were working like a charm to keep the kids on task.

At some point during the frenzy I was overtaken with a desire to use the bathroom.  On my way there I discovered that the door into the garage was standing open.  Not only that, the garage door to the outside was also open.  I didn’t have the pelvic floor strength to be able to investigate immediately but I did yell out to whoever happened to be listening inquiring where the dog was.  This was followed by a quick search for the dog who was found to be taking a nap under the footstool.  At that time Emily asked “where is Isabel?”

I ran to the front room and looked out the window at which time we discovered exactly where she was.  She had indeed escaped the cleaning frenzy and was at that time enjoying a meetup on the cul de sac island with her neighborhood friend and the friend’s babysitter.  I would have no problem with her playing with her friend, no problem with her playing on the island (we all meet there regularly and let the kids play), my problem at that moment (apart from her leaving the house on her own) was that she was at that time dressed in only a pullup and a Doc McStuffins dressup coat.  No shoes, no shirt, nothing.  She had previously been dressed but at some point during our cleanup she had decided that clothes were not for her and had stripped off. 

My other problem was that I was in no state to stride out there and retrieve her.  I asked Emily to go and get her but after several minutes it was clear that she had also fallen into the trap of the great outdoors and seemed to have no intentions of returning inside.  At that point I attempted to find a section of my front door that would somewhat cover my scantily clad body and cracked the door open just a fraction so I could call out to Emily to get back inside.  I eventually achieved my end, I’m not sure if the babysitter saw more of me than she ever hoped to but I am certain I amused her nonetheless. 

After a reprimand and a sending to her room we continued in our pursuit of cleanliness.  It wasn’t until later when I was satisfied that the state of the house had moved from “send the pictures to the hoarders tv show” to “we almost did it” that I went upstairs to take a shower and get dressed. 

As I walked passed the laundry room in my newly cleansed and dressed body I decided to switch the washing and tell myself what an outstanding housewife I was.  I opened the lid of the washing machine and was met with the sight of about 12 cups of powdered laundry detergent generously sprinkled on top of a load of previously clean clothes. 

Isabel was chatting and singing to herself and her toys in her room and raised her head just long enough to grin at me as I stood there in shock before she turned back, singing “wet it gooooo, wet it gooooo, can’t hold it back anymooooooore.  Wet it gooooo, wet it goooo, turn away and slam that doooooooor”.

My Amazing Body

My body is pretty amazing, it may not look amazing but it has done some amazing things.  It has gone incredibly fast (ok, it was in an aeroplane but I think it still counts), it has climbed to the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it has carried and given birth to four children.  My body also has some interesting quirks.  I never knew they were quirks until they were observed by my husband.  He assures me that I am quite strange but I just know there are other’s out there who are similarly afflicted.

One thing my body does and I have absolutely no control over it is it gets frights.  I mean, I can hear someone coming towards me, think to myself ‘there is someone coming, don’t get a fright’ and then scream and leap skywards the moment they appear.  I have discovered that this does not improve with excessive “therapeutic” exposure so you can all stop sneaking up on me now. 

The other night I was on the phone to James, it was late, there were mousey noises in the crawl space off our bedroom and I was in the process of releasing one of our cats into the area to catch the little critter.  Did I mention it was late at night?  James was all the way in India and I had mildly elevated “I’m going to be eaten alive” levels.  So when I felt a creepy hand being placed on my shoulder from behind I understandably jumped up screaming into the phone and almost fell headlong through the crawl space door where the rodent of extreme size was lurking.  I simultaneous scared the bejeebers out of the dog, the cat and the Emily who was attached to the hand.  I turned around to find her doing a speedy backwards upside down crawl to get away from the monster who had her mothers body.  Do you know what James did?  Besides book himself in for a hearing aide fitting?  Yes, people, he laughed at me. 

Another thing my body does, or rather does not do is that I am thoroughly unable to walk in a straight line, I cannot touch my finger to my nose and I also cannot put my finger to the middle of my lips in the “shhhhh” position.  In fact all my kids have mimicked shhhhing as small children by putting their finger to their cheek.  Its not because they are uncoordinated its because they are copying me!!  I’m not that great at the “head, shoulders, knees and toes” song either.  I would definitely not pass one of those tests the police do when they suspect you’ve been drinking and driving.  And forget trying to say the alphabet backwards, who made that one up?  I would fail it stone cold sober which is how I am all the time because I don’t need to drink alcohol to be in a state of deep confusion. 

I have terrible balance, I always have, it’s a wonder I can stand up at all some days.  I’ve had doctors marvel at my lack of coordination and balance and back in the day I even disrupted a beginners step class taking out other participants in the process, from the back row.  Seriously I have skills, just not the right ones.

Another thing my body does with stunningly frequent regularity (no, not that!) is that as I start swallowing a drink it suddenly decides, completely independent of my intentions, to reverse the swallowing action.  This results in a kind of convulsing, silent cough, tears streaming down my face until one of two things happens.  Either I get the spasm under control and continue to swallow the liquid or I spray it all over whoever is near me at the time. 

Along the same lines, I also quite regularly forget to put the cup to my lips when taking a drink.  I just pour it out down my front or into my lap.  I can’t quite explain this one, it just happens.  There have been times when I’ve done this right before needing to be somewhere and I have convinced myself that anyone seeing me would assume I was attacked by one of my small children.  As the children get older that assumption gets weaker and weaker.  Soon I’ll need to wear a bib for eating and drinking.  I did it the other day while driving the car and managed to stain my top and make it look like I had peed my pants at the same time. 

I love light rooms and sunshine during the day.  I turn on lights just so its bright sometimes (ok, all the time).  I get very annoyed when I lose the ability to see colours very well after dark.  On the flipside of that, I cannot sleep with even the hint of artificial lights.  My husband is addicted to technology and has all kinds of gadgets that make their way into our sleeping space.  There are blue lights, red lights, yellow lights, a whole rainbow of those tiny little annoying indicator lights on various gadgets.  Lights that blink fast, lights that blink slow, ones that randomly turn on at 3 am and some that I swear are doing Morse Code in a last ditch effort to get me to press a button and release the tiny robots that are living inside.  The fact that I have kids who are terrified of their stuffed animals if the lights are off results in our house being lit up like a Christmas tree at night.  It has taken me 40 years to figure out that I could simply use a sleeping mask to overcome this annoyance (and spare my family from my sleep mutterings which apparently are not very kind). 

I got a sleep mask the other day (or eye bra as my children have dubbed it) and tried it out.  It was blissful.  I woke up through the night and opened my eyes.  Still pitch dark out.  Time for more sleeping.  Problem was it was neither pitch dark out nor was it still the middle of the night.  Oops, serious oversleeping that day!!  I’m not sure why my family didn’t wake me but it probably had something to do with my generally unkind reactions to being woken unless there is the sweet smell of coffee accompanying the waker.

I found out the other day that I also have a thing that actually has a name.  I had previously tried to tell James that I wasn’t weird to be this way and that other people also have it but he wouldn’t believe me but its true, its a real thing.  I have sun sneezing.  It’s where you sneeze when you go out in bright sunlight.  Its got nothing to do with allergies or dust or anything else.  It mostly happens in the sun but very bright lights can set it off too.  It makes me happy that other people are similarly afflicted. 

My greatest fear in life has now become stepping outside into the bright sunshine while taking a sip of coffee with someone sneaking up behind me.  The only thing worse than that would be if I wasn’t wearing adequate incontinence protection at the time.

Let Sleeping Mummy’s Lie

My children have always known that it’s a bad idea to wake me up when I’m sleeping.  Even while in utero Emily chose to wake James by kicking him in the back while leaving me peacefully sleeping (don’t ask me how she managed that).  Of course James woke me to share the blessed news and then promptly went back to snoring leaving me laying there awake in the middle of the night while Emily practiced her nocturnal karate.

James is currently traveling for work and during his absence I have been inflicted with quite a number of sleep interruptions.  He was originally meant to be gone for one week, seven sleeps, but on the night of the 4^th sleep (half way through which I planned on celebrating making it to the half way mark of the trip) he called to say things weren’t going as well as they could be and he was going to have to stay an extra week (actually an extra 8 sleeps).  There have been plenty of opportunities now for sleep interruptions.  Here are some of them.

One night I was woken to find myself being slapped in the face by a Chewbacca mouse toy on the other end of which was one of our cats, Optimus Prime.  Seriously, I’m not making that up.  I think Chewbacca is still buried in my bed somewhere.  Now Optimus Prime makes it a nightly habit to “find” his Stormtrooper mouse toy from a corner of my room where it has presumably escaped to.  After finding the toy he proceeds to parade his “kill” around the house eventually making it to my bed where he flings it around for a while.  I’m not quite sure when the Stormtrooper makes his escape and hides back in the corner but apparently he’s not that smart because he always hides in the same place.

Another night we had an extremely bad thunderstorm, in February, when its supposed to be winter.  I was rather annoyed that someone kept turning the lights on and off until I figured it out (not at my cognitive best at 3 am).  A different night we had another storm, just wind this time but I did get up to see if there was anything very big being blown around.  I had no plans to save us from big things being blown around so I’m not sure why I looked but it made me feel better.

On several nights I was joined by little visitors who completed the night next to me.  Most of the time this made we wake with a start after they had probably been there for quite some time (serious delayed reactions).  One early morning though, I woke up with such a fright and nearly screamed in terror when I sensed a child sneaking around my bed in a failed attempt to retrieve her phone from my headboard where it lives overnight.  She didn’t even stop when I had almost had a heart attack and then promptly fallen back asleep.  She just kept sneaking and I kept waking with a start.  This happened at least three times, although reports from witnesses vary.  Later I was sure there were two of them doing it which resulted in an epic meltdown from the innocent one I had falsely accused.  I still say she’s guilty because I’m sure if she’d thought of it she would have done it too.

One morning the dog had either escaped or been let out of her crate too early and she came to greet me with a huge amount of joyful barking.  I didn’t feel as joyful as she did, I was especially unjoyful at the thought of her needing to go out to the bathroom and yet being unable to open the door herself.  I was most unjoyful about her bathroom backup plan which is to do it on the floor. 

Two mornings I was roused by the same child with different problems.  The first time she had woken well in advance of my alarm clock and apparently won the prize for being the first and only person in the house who was awake.  This excited her so much that she felt the need to come and share this news with me and ask “what should I do now?”  She was a bit puzzled when my garbled reply was that she should get dressed, have breakfast and be ready for school. 

This morning she turned up to tell me that there was something in her eye, most likely a spider.  I told her it was more likely to be sleep (you know, the little crusty bits that form in the corners of your eyes) her reply was that it couldn’t be because she wasn’t asleep anymore.  Once again I lacked the cognitive ability to explain this and since it was still dark out I was forced to turn on my light and investigate this fierce eyeball spider for myself.  I couldn’t even see crusty bits let alone a spider and after I managed to convince her of this I was too awake to go back to sleep. 

I don’t know what the next few nights will bring, I keep thinking it can’t get any stranger but I should know better than that by now.  All I know is that I can’t wait for James to be back again so he can take care of at least some of these nighttime shenanigans and I can get some uninterrupted sleep.