Posts made in August, 2009
A Meme for Me Me
Hello all.
I”ll be honest. I’m having a bit of crud day. A crud couple of days actually. I started a great long moany post about how horribly hard life seems to insist on being at the moment but began to bore even myself so I stopped and took great pleasure in deleting all my self pitying nonsense.
Think yourself lucky you were spared. It was REALLY whiny and annoying – even for me.
Because truth is I should STFU and count my blessings. Yes, I seem to have been given the privilege of bringing up the World’s Most Difficult Child (well, I think he’d at least make the top 100, maybe top 20 on a bad day) but despite seriously making me question the wisdom of EVER deciding to have children and inflicting upon the world someone with my own horribly flawed genetic make-up, he is healthy, bright and, when not being the demon child from hell, actually rather lovely.
My huge great big kick up the rear came in the end from Sally over at Who’s The Mummy who has awarded SIFTW with this fab ‘Great Read’ award – how nice is that?!
Originally this meant I then had to tell you ten things about me, but Sally with her wonderful creative license tweaked it slightly to list ten happy memories. And because I need, NEED to remind myself of the positives tonight, I am going to follow her example and instigate a little tweak of my own.
So here we go.
10 reasons to be grateful that Kai is mine
1. No he doesn’t sleep. But the progressive sleep-deprivation training he has blessed me with over the last 14 months has made me mentally stronger and more resilient than I ever thought I could be. Need someone to hold up under torture? I’m your gal…
2. All that holding, carrying, rocking, and endless trips up and down the stairs every evening have given me biceps and calf muscles of steel. And I am thinner and fitter than I have been in as long as I can remember.
3. If it wasn’t for Kai I never would have discovered the very real joys that are extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby wearing, attachment parenting and baby-led weaning. Without any of which my life, and my experience of motherhood would be far the lesser. By pushing me to my very limits, by constantly making me re-evaluate what I thought about babies and motherhood, Kai has forced me to adapt and find new ways to be a better parent. And I AM a better parent as a result. I don’t feel it most days, but I deep down I really believe that.
4. Kai gives the best cuddles in whole world. FACT. When not beating seven bells out of us he is probably the most affectionate, caring child you could ever hope to meet.
5. I used to be pretty lazy. It’s true. And self-absorbed and selfish. After having Kai I am now only slightly lazy, self-absorbed and selfish. That’s progress.
6. Watching Kai eat pasta bolognaise, laugh hysterically at random events until he falls down, dance and sing to everything even vaguely musical, crawl round with a farm animal in each hand and my bra around his neck, and try to whisper, makes up for all the crying, screaming, temper tantrums and abject refusal to anything he doesn’t want to do ten million times over.
7. His potential. Sometimes I look at him and I see the toddler, the boy, the man he will become and I shiver with excitement and anticipation (and a little fear). I wouldn’t want to miss that ride. Not for all the strong-black-tea-with-two-sugars in China.
8. For the joy and healing Kai’s arrival has brought to my family. He’s unified us in a way I never thought would have been possible, brought me closer to those I love the most, and the smile and the twinkle he brings to his very frail and elderly great-grandmother is worth every moment of heart-ache on it’s own.
9. I’m not a great believer in that ‘everything happens for a reason’ crap but I do sometimes wonder whether my experiences with Kai are preparing me for a time in my future when I’m going to need every ounce of my new found patience, tolerance, and finely honed sense of humour. Ant and I are just really, REALLY hoping it isn’t twins…
10. Yes Kai seems to need me a lot. A LOT a lot. In fact he seems to need me for something pretty much every minute of every day. But he also needs me. I will probably never be needed so much again in my entire life and I know I will miss that one day, very soon, when he is far too busy planning world domination, writing jokes about hilarious bodily functions and coming up with new and interesting things to do with dirt. I am grateful for this time of being so utterly, completely and unconditionally loved and needed. And will treasure that feeling forever.
So there we go, my Kai-ranasaurus, my little monster, my kling-on koala, my little bear. I love you. I love you a lot – just the way the you are.
Now for the love of god sleep you crazy child.
I’m now supposed to nominate some other blogs to pass on this lovely award to. For the purists amoung you feel free to revert to the whole ‘ten things about me’ clause. For the rest of you that are more ‘piss in the wind’ types then go nuts – 10 of anything is fine by me.
The following are deemed really, REALLY, great reads by me, the official authority on everything, so if you haven’t discovered them already I suggest you start clicking:
I know I need to stop talking…
Are we nearly there yet mummy?
Maternal Tales from the South Coast
Enjoy!!
Linguistic Mysteries and Practical Storage Solutions
If you were to press your ear against the front door of our house at the moment (which I hope you wouldn’t by the way, I have quite enough stalkers already thanks, but if you were figuratively speaking to press your ear against my front door…), you would probably be greeted by one sound and one sound only:
“Bakkum bakkum bakkum bakkum”
Don’t ask me what it means. I have no idea. But it obviously means something to Kai because he says it A LOT.
I have often wondered at the true nationality of Kai. Given his tendency to babble incoherent yet strangely consistent words and phrases and shun normal words I doubt he is English. To be honest, most days I doubt that he is even human. If two white parents can have a black child because of random contributions from their combined genetic history then I find it perfectly feasible that I can have given birth to a child who is not the same nationality, race or perhaps even species as his parents. I swear his ears grow more pointy by the week so my bets were on troublesome fairie folk.
Anyway, his dad and I have listened on in bemused (and slightly concerned) amusement to Kai’s constant and earnest attempts at communication for the last couple of weeks with absolutely no idea what “Bakkum” or “Grunbar” or all the other weird and wonderful words he comes out with might mean until a family day out last weekend brought some unexpected insight on what he might have been trying to tell us all along.
We were off to visit my brother’s brand new flat in Coventry, city of grey and the famous ring road of doom. Feckin’ nightmare that ring round. We went round it twice, in both directions, before we figured out where we supposed to get off (and that was only after we’d shouted at each other, pulled over and waved Ant’s phone with it’s GPS out the window a few dozen times to try and calculate our position, and then finally relented and phoned for directions). Turns out we needed to get off, then drive as if we were getting back on and then pull a Lewis Hamilton type hard left to screech off down a side road at the last minute. Who knew? Not google maps that’s for sure.
Anyway. It’s a gorgeous flat, very ‘young executive’, and with TWO balconies and TWO toilets (which seems quite execessive for one a one bedroom flat but there you go). But that’s not the exciting bit. No. The exciting bit is that it is within 3 minutes walk of Coventy Ikea.
“It’s WHAT??! You mean you can WALK there???!”, I screech down the phone at my brother a couple of weeks earlier.
Dave: “Ummm yes. But anyway… did I tell you about the balconies? And the under-ground car park? And the concierge”
Me: “SCREW the balconies! Ikea baby!! Oh my god… you could go there for breakfast!!”
Dave: “I fear you’re rather missing the point…”
So of course, on our visit there I insisted we have a day trip out to the blue and yellowed halls of delight (Dave: “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to do something else? See the Cathedral…?” Me: “IKEA BABY!!!”) I mean, come on, where else can you indulge your need to by useless yet beautiful kitchen implements AND eat your body weight in meatballs and chips?
And it was while we wandering round, marvelling at the LEKSVICKs and the SKUBBs and EKTORPs that it dawned on us.
Kai is Ikean.
Now they are an elusive race the Ikeans. By night they revel in their homeland paradise of practical yet stylish storage solutions and simple, common sense design. Perhaps sitting and reading one of those books you see on the shelves in an incomprehensible language (it’s not Swedish, it’s Ikean), or working in one of the ergonomicallydesigned office spaces, their children running gayly amidst the labyrinth of sofas and TV cabinets, before being tucked up under their stripy, whimsical duvets with their strange giraffe-esque cuddly toys. But as dawn breaks, our mysterious friends scuttle out of their sanctuary in preparation for the mass public invasion and disappear off into the early morning light to be forced to design new and exciting additions to next year’s catalogue. The only clues of their existence being a half-eaten hot dog, a crumbled looking bed, and their shining faces with just a hint of sadness peering out from photo frames in their abandoned living rooms. A displaced people they are. Waiting for the day they will be allowed the freedom to conduct their lives undisturbed.
To them LIATORP isn’t merely a strange name for a coffee table – it means “place to put your cuppa”. Their native tongue bastardised for novel marketing purposes.
Somewhere in my distant ancestry, I reckon we must have Ikean relatives and Kai is the genetic throwback.
If only I could find an Ikean to translate and tell us what “Bakkum” really means…
Maybe I’ll ask Sandy Toksvig (whose family name translates as “She of the Interesting Shoe-rack”)
I bet she’s one of them…
A Leap in the Dark
(If you don’t like long stories – skip to the bottom. I won’t mind)
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Once upon a time there was a little girl. She liked to dream and imagine things and read hundreds and hundreds of books and ask pretentious questions and be in charge. She loved to write stories and imagine adventures in her head and generally preferred being in her thinking place than outside, where things tended to get a bit scary and insist on changing all the time, usually just as she thought she’d got the hang of this being alive business.
And then one day, out of no-where, and even though she REALLY didn’t want to, she Grew Up.
She still dreamed and still imagined and asked even more pretentious questions but as a Grown-Up was told she needed to be ‘responsible’ and ‘realistic’ and ‘practical’ and all of a sudden all her dreams and imaginings seemed very small and insignificant and worthless and certainly not the kind of thing that had any value in the Real World. Instead of having adventures in her head she was told she needed to do things like go to work and make enough money to keep her and the very Handsome Prince she had met in crisps and ice-cream and chocolate digestives.
She was confused. Everyone kept asking her what she was going to do with her life but she didn’t know. All the other Grown-Ups seemed to have decided and were busy getting on with life and having Real Careers and being everything confident, secure, competent Grown-Ups should be. And since their Real Careers seemed to mean they got to do fun stuff like buying houses and cars and going on holiday, and since she also wanted to feel confident and secure and competent she decided she’d give this being a Grown-Up business a go. Even though she didn’t feel the slighest bit confident, she hoped if she ran fast enough in the right direction then eventually she’d end up where everyone else was.
But try as she might things kept getting in the way. First she got ill, which was a real pain in the ass, and although it meant she could sit around in PJ’s all day which had always been in her top 5 requirements for her dream job, it wasn’t quite what she had in mind given that it was accompanied by generally feeling like crap. So getting better became top of her priority list, along with filling her long days with learning about all kind of random stuff to pass the time and distract her from the disgruntled beavers nibbling at her joints.
But she still hadn’t decided. You know, on the ‘Real Career’.
One day she got better (eventually – man alive that took a long time. Cities rose and fell in the time it took her to teach her feet to work one in front of the other. Physiotherapy definitely not for her if she couldn’t even get her own body to work properly – at least that’s one to strike off the list). Well, better enough. She managed to get a job that just happened to involve reading stories all day and teaching other children how to dream and imagine stuff all for themselves. And it was pretty cool. For a while. Not quite a Real Career (given the lack of future prospects and, well, decent pay), but it made do while the girl continued to try and figure it all out.
Then something magical happened. Her and the Handsome Prince got married and grew a whole new person. A tiny, needy, beautiful little person. And just like that things got Very Real Indeed. All of a sudden the girl found herself doing probably the most Grown-Up job you can do that, despite all pre-conceptions, just left her feeling even less confident and secure and competent than she had before. And though she loved this little person more than she ever knew it was possible to love something and not have your heart pop out of your chest and make a big mess on the floor, she also found it very, very hard and scary and found she wanted to go back to that thinking place in her head and do some imagining to recover.
So she started a blog. And wrote, and thought, and dreamt, and told jokes which made her feel better. A LOT better. And what made her feel even better still was that the people that read her random ramblings seemed to quite enjoy them, and wanted her to write more. She got the opportunity to write for a brand new Toy Review Site, and then to help out as Deputy Editor, which she kind of loved, and made lots of lovely new friends.
And sneakily, without her even realising it, the old dreams and yearnings to write came creeping back. She was that little girl again, sat surrounded by books thinking that words and pictures in your head were just about the best thing about being alive (although, she now also thought that tiny people covered in porridge and giving her big kisses were equally brilliant which shows that change is sometimes a good thing).
Oh but wait! I missed a bit out! (which coincidently is JUST the kind of thing the girl would do, given her inability to do anything in a straight line, especially walking).
Amidst her year of changing nappies, and being puked on, and getting her boobs out and traipsing up and down the stairs ten zillion times every evening, the age-old question has reared it’s ugly head. All her fellow mummy friends had gone back to work and here it was haunting her once again. What on earth was she was going to do with her life? (apart from pop out babies, which apart from the poo and the no-sleep thing was kinda fun). In an effort to make a decision once and for all, and make some money and FINALLY get herself that Real Career and the house and the car and all the rest, she signed up to do a degree in Earth Sciences. She wasn’t really sure why. She liked nature and stuff and thought, although it would be hard, would also be nice and safe. She’d probably get her essays back with big gratifying red ticks. And eventually a nice, safe job that would pay reasonably well and make her feel like a Proper Grown-Up at last.
But.
It wasn’t writing. And writing was pretty much all she wanted to do these days. The more and more she thought about it, the less sure she felt about the whole caboodle and the day all her study materials arrived she cried.
So here she was. Two paths laid out before her. On one side was a lovely safe path, with interesting things to study and A+s within her grasp, and a nice job at the end of it all.
It looked kind of dull.
On the other side was a big yawning cliff. It was a very long way down and held lots of opportunities for failure and disappointment and generally making a fool of herself. But it made her heart do a little skip with excitement when she thought about. And somewhere in the distance, there was a beautiful, alluring, dream-fullfilling place with Writer written in big letters on the sign over the entrance, and people sitting around in the PJs making up stuff and being interesting and arty and neglecting their housework. They didn’t seem to have much money, but damn, were they having fun.
So guess what she did.
She jumped.
She cancelled her place on the Earth Science degree and signed up for this course, which starts in a month and, coupled with some other equally fun writing courses over the next few years, would give her both an Open BA (Hons) Degree AND a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing . To learn about writing and give her an excuse to write all day under the guise of being a student, and generally give her the opportunity to see if she could make this writing thing stick.
She re-designed her blog as a way of increasing her audience and give her a place to showcase her writing efforts. And for the first time in a VERY long time, she felt truly happy and content. Yes she was scared. Very, very scared. Of failing, of everyone not taking her seriously, of rejection. But it was a good kind of scared. The kind of scared that might come before something really wonderful.
And in celebration of all of this she wrote a very long, convoluted story to tell you all about it.
THE END
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P.S. You got that the girl is me right? And that I’ve jacked in my Science Degree to follow my dreams of becoming a real life writer? Yes? Good, good. Just checking…
*insert funky intro music here*
Hello!!
Welcome to the new look Sleep is for the Weak – with it’s very own custom domain name!
I decided the whole ‘bloggymama’ url was getting too confusing, and after making a big decision about my future recently (which I’ll tell you all about soon), I decided a hosted website was definitely in order to give the whole venture a bit more of a professional feel and more flexibility. I signed up with Justhost.com and got a killer deal for a year’s hosting – a bit of treat to myself after the success of the blog these last few weeks.
Yes, I know. I said I wasn’t going to mess with the theme. But I couldn’t resist! See, turns out if you host your own wordpress blog you have almost unlimited choices for customisation – and for a perfectionist, obsessive tweaker like me that was an opportunity too good to let up. And, well, I get bored easily and when I loaded the old theme up it just looked a bit blah. As well as a new look we’ve got lots of fancy new icons, widgets and features which I hope will make the SIFTW experience that little bit more user-friendly.
So what do you think? Be honest! Knowing me I’ll probably change it all in a couple of weeks so feedback would be appreciated! If anything doesn’t work or is fiddly and annoying then please tell me so I can change it. Unlike with a wordpress.com blog you have to do pretty much everything yourself – something that dawned on with a growing sense of horror as I realised how much coding I was actually going to have to do.
I’ll be honest – it’s kind of consumed me the last few days. I’m not very good at ‘making do’ and until it was all perfect I just couldn’t let it rest. So lots of late nights and annoying my husband with endless “do you think this looks better, or THIS?”. Bless him – as usual he’s been more than patient (and as usual I ignored most of his advice – oops!)
I’m still not entirely sure I’m happy (not sure about the font now I’m typing! *edit* changed it!) and haven’t finished some of the pages but it will HAVE to do for now because I’m getting withdrawal symptoms from actually writing rather than fiddling with stupid details and getting a header-ache.
Don’t forget to re-subscribe to my feed via the handy (and beautiful) icons on the right and change the URL in your blogrolls etc. For those of you that don’t know, SIFTW has a facebook page too which you can also join on the right there, and if you’re into Technorati I’d love it if you could add me to your favourite blogs. You also have the option of re-tweeting a post via my handy new Twitter widget at the top of each entry and each new post will usually have a ‘Stumble It’ option too. So feel free to spread me around a bit – you’ll make my day.
I’ve got lots of news to share with you from the last few days so expect a blog update very soon featuring:
- life changing decisions
- being brave and laughing in the face of impending failure
- a new job (well, kinda)
and
- the true, secret nationality of Kai – he’s not English I’ll tell you that much.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new site!
P.S. Special mention to my lovely friend @flimgeeks for helping me out when CSS coding was making the little vein on my head pulse alarmingly. If you’re into all things hip and happening in the world of tv and film (and pop culture in general) and are looking for more witty, intelligent, interesting people to follow on twitter, then he’s your man. Follow him. Now.
