Posts Tagged "Sleep Deprived"
Writing Workshop: The Fry that Flew
Welcome back to the Wednesday Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to post the link to your workshop posts. We’ve got lots of new contributors taking part this week – should be a good one!
But first, I guess it’s my turn.
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No time no time no time. Damn me and my inability to say no to any opportunity or switch off to any new idea. I should be starting to write the short story I have due in just after Christmas. But things keep cropping up. Fun things, exciting things, potential filled things. And ooh look I’ve done another 4 hours work today and no story… oops.
So I’m going to be good and keep it brief. And tell you about a dream I had last week. It was one of those dreams you just didn’t want to wake up from, it was THAT good.
You see, I was one half of a elite crime fighting duo, the other half of which was… Stephen Fry. He could fly people, the Fry could FLY! I, on the other hand, seemed to have no such exciting abilities, but my company (in a pink fluffy cat costume) seemed to be the calming influence in his life that he needed to carry out his super hero tasks without mental breakdown.
Most of the dream consisted of me curled up under a chair as Stephen did an interview, and then playing duets with him on the piano in a huge house (which was actually a shopping centre) jam packed full of people. Despite my reluctance to start thinking about Christmas, it WAS Christmas, with a huge 30ft tree in one corner and twinkly lights. We sang carols and all swayed like some kind of ‘It’s A Small World’ diorama. And then Stephen flew away… to save some animals or something I don’t know. I think I shed some tears as I banged out Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. It was all quite moving…
Now. I would like you to analyse. Get your Freudian hats on (or Jungian if that’s more your flavour) and tell me…
What the hell does this MEAN??!!
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So now it’s your turn! What prompt did you choose?
1. Write a letter to your 16-year-old self
- Inspired by NotSupermum’s beautiful and touching post this week
2.What’s your guilty pleasure?
- Suggested by Leslieanne at Life with a Little Dude
3. Write about a dream you’ve had recently
- Inspired by Tim at Bringing Up Charlie and his bizarre dream of bloggers invading his living space!
4. I want to know your claim to fame (lame or otherwise)
- Inspired by Brits in Bosnia who is achieving some notoriety in her little town.
5. What do you do or where do you go to escape the stresses of every-day life?
- Inspired by ME! and my urban sanctuary this week.
Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) andleave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here!
If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got today! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.
This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
Read MoreSick Note
Morning folks,
My apologies but there will be no Writing Workshop this week. As some of you know I’m feeling a little under the weather at the moment, I’d probably even use the ‘exhausted’ word. Have had a couple of scary blacking-out moments and generally feeling very wobbly and tired. So I’m going to try and be good this week.
Not entirely sure what’s going on. I’m usually tired but not THIS tired. Kai is actually sleeping better generally but I’m finding the bad nights are intensely more gruelling now I’m used to the odd better night. I just want to sleep all the time, bullying my husband to get up early so I can have an extra hour or two. I’m finding the breastfeeding very draining these days too and am wondering whether it might be time to gently encourage Kai to wean now. In any case, I’m booking myself in to the doctors to get my iron levels checked and I’m going to try and spend a bit less time rushing round like a blue-arsed fly and a bit more time resting and not putting myself under so much pressure.
We’ve had four fab weeks of creative writing loveliness and you’ve been working very hard getting your entries in so I figure you could probably all do with a week off too. We’ll be back in business next Monday with five new prompts, I promise.
I shall still be about though, and will probably post the odd blog or two between now and then. But the priorities this week definitely need to be fresh air, snoozing, remembering to eat and cuddles with my boys. Oh and writing. Obviously. But of the quiet, as and when I feel like it, scribbling whilst sitting in a pile of leaves with Kai variety.
See you soon! x
Read MoreWriting Workshop: Back Room Ramblings
Welcome back to the Wednesday Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to post the link to your workshop posts. But first? Well I guess it’s my turn! I’ve chose prompt #5 (since that was kind of my homework this week anyway… two birds, one stone and all that…)
The following is a description of my back room. Tiny, cluttered, scene of many a thrown sippy cup and forgotten and later trodden-upon rogue Cheerio. It’s funny isn’t it, but when you spend a lot of time somewhere, after a while you just stop looking. Well tonight, I made myself sit, and I looked. I’m not in a very eloquent or witty mood so forgive the ramble…
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I wouldn’t call my back room a dining room. It seems too, well, pretentious, for a room that measures 10ft square and contains more clutter than dining space. The dining table is pushed to one wall with only two chairs free for sitting on, one sporting an attractive graffiti biro scribble on the seat from a certain young Banksy. In fact, for a number of months when Kai was first born we didn’t use the table at all, other than for piling things on that we couldn’t find homes for elsewhere – even now it’s sporting a Nodding Homer Simpson dashboard figure, my pencil case and text books and a pile of Ant’s folded boxer shorts. In our ramshackle two bedroom we have significantly more stuff than space so life becomes one long jigsaw puzzle game of moving stuff from one place to the next into some kind of semblance of order, that actually, no matter how hard we try and when you do get all the pieces vaguely fitting? Still just ends up looking like a small house filled with crap.
Our back room is the room that houses all the things we don’t know where else to put. So we have a dresser filled with stationary and printer cables and washing powder on one wall, Kai’s tricycle parked in front, next to the chalk board easel and the sand pit table and the big bag of plastic multi-coloured balls. (Actually thinking about it, the ‘stuff to space’ ratio has become increasingly weighted towards ‘stuff’ in the last 15 months… fancy that). There is the skateboard Ant was bought as joke for his 30th but that Kai likes to push his toys around on; there is the pushchair folded up under the radiator, next to Kai’s (disinfected) potty currently housing one lone shoe. There is the ironing board and the shredder and the travel cot in it’s bag and svivel chair that we don’t know what to do with but keep in the vague sensibility that it’ll be an extra chair for when next throw a dinner party (we never throw dinner parties).
On the wall above the dining table is our house’s biggest mystery. A square mirror set into the wall, like a window. Why it is there we have never figured out. On my wilder days I like to imagine it holds a whole other world. One with a more capable, together Josie who has a habit of scowling at me. Whatever it’s supposed to be however, Kai loves it – eating his dinner grinning at the plump, sauce covered baby that seems to like sharing his lunch times. The other walls look a little tired, the wallpaper peeling slightly at the seams, and in need of a fresh coat of paint. The line of dust along the skirting boards betrays my cursory and infrequent cleaning habits. The cobwebs in the corners quite embarrassing now I come to notice them…
But the thing that there are most of in my back room? Books. Books upon books, piled on top of books. Books filling three bookshelves and squeezed into the spaces on top and around, or just piled high at the side. It’s mostly non-fiction apart from a small corner, the beautiful floor-to-ceiling shelves in the front room reserved for the fiction section of my library.
You could write a biography of my life by these books. Each marking a time in my life, a specific interest or the latest obsession, most (ashamedly) past-by in favour of the next one before the spines are even creased, apart from the odd one where the well-thumbed pages portray a more lingering interest or significance in my life.
There are the books on alternative medicine, and healing and natural pain relieving techniques, from my days as a sick person. Books on meditation and mindfulness and mysticism from my days of soul searching. Books on mythology and Ancient Britain and esoteric mysteries from my days as a spiritual explorer. And books about creativity and writing and self-expression from my days as writer, artist and free spirit.
I am still all of these things of course, although to a greater and lesser degree than perhaps I once was. The books on healing are looking a little dusty and neglected while the books on creativity are rarely in their place on the shelves, instead lying in hopeful, easily grabbed piles round my living spaces.
I wouldn’t part with a single one. Pieces of me as they are. Pieces of my life, my own story.
Maybe I’ll add to their number one day with one authored by my hand, about a world I have created or a story I have told.
Who knows.
One thing I do know? Sitting here in my little backroom looking hard at every detail it is evident that book writing and wild imaginings should really take a back seat to the far more pressing need for some Mr Sheen and a bit of elbow grease… oh and perhaps a visit from Kim and Aggie.
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So now it’s your turn! What prompt did you choose?
1. You get a day off. Where would you go? What would you do? - Inspired by Metropolitan Mum’s Mummy Needs a Break
2. Write your house rules… your DREAM house rules, that is – Inspired by Potty Mummy’s own House Rules this week.
3. Take a well-loved bedtime story then re-write yourself and/or an episode of your day into the story – Inspired by April’s Tribute to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
4. Tell us about a close-call, a miracle, or a lucky escape - Inspired by the terrifying story of the baby falling under the train this week.
5. Sit in a room of your house you spend a lot of time in. And really LOOK. Notice all the details you usually miss, and describe them with all the creativity you can muster. Let the every-day inspire you – Inspired by ME!
Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here!
If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got today! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.
This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.
What a difference a night makes
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a night of dream-like wonder during which Kai woke up only twice, closely followed by a night of hell-like torture that made me feel like my face was melting. Remember?
Well I think we were all hoping that maybe the ‘good’ night was a hint at possible sleep-filled nights to come with the ‘bad’ night just a brief blip on the radar.
Err, no.
Actually, since that one good night Kai has broken all recent records for awful, torturous, mummy-breaking sleeping habits, deciding to make a habit of waking up two hourly after 11 and then waking UP up at about 3am and not.going.back.to.sleep. Bless him, he tries. He lies in his cot, with poor mummy passed out comatose on the single bed next to him with her hand hanging limply through the bars making half-hearted patting and soothing attempts. He tosses, he turns, he sits up, he lies back down again. The little sighs and sobs begin to get more and more desperate until they reach air-raid siren like proportions and he works himself up into hysterical frustrated rage. Nothing helps. Not milk, not cuddles, not patting with increased force and frequency (PAT FECKIN PAT!!!) After about two hours I give up and we go down stairs for me to slump on the sofa while my poor tired boy cuddles close to watch the weird psychedelic Baby TV shows that are all we have the energy for in the pre-Ceebies dawn.
Anyway. After two weeks of this I was reduced to the wispy ghost form of my former (already rather haggard) self. But I pushed on, as usual.
I don’t think I’d quite appreciated what a hole I’d fallen into though till today. Because last night, dear reader, another one of those randomly good nights (and they are completely random) happened to grace our household. We still had the early morning wake up, but before that I got 5 hours of blissful, deep, uninterrupted sleep. And after a crawling round his room and singing session between the hours of 4.30 and 6, Kai then went BACK TO SLEEP and slept in until 8.20am, possibly the latest he has slept in his entire little life.
I got 7 glorious hours. I feel like a new woman.
I awoke with a smile on my face and a song on my lips. Temper tantrums were taken in my stride with unflappable patience and good humour. I found time to type up a huge pile of toy reviews AND play with Kai, unresentfully and committing fully to the moment. I cleaned, I made lunch, I cleared out the pile of old baby clothes under our bed and sorted them in bags for friends. And I still found the energy to get us all out of the door for an hour getting sandy in the park and back in time for tea.
In short, I was frickin awesome.
And it dawned on me. I’m not the awful, failing, incompetent excuse for a human being that I convinced myself I was this last couple of weeks. I’m just TIRED!
I know this sounds stupid but it was quite a revelation to me. I had no idea how much my state of mind, my emotions, my outlook, my motivation and my general self-perception was affected by the amount of sleep I got. I thought this was just the way I was, just the way my life was.
I’ve decided. I need to give myself a break. Because I AM the motivated, positive, organised, emotionally together person I always thought I was but feared I’d lost forever. It’s just hidden beneath a huge great big layer of months of sleep deprevation. Ever so often I get to catch a glimpse of it when the odd good night gets thrown my way, tantalising and brief. But it IS there, that IS me. And the best thing? This zombie, fragile, insecure not-Josie is only temporary. The no sleep is only temporary.
It will pass. I will get to be ‘me’ again.
And then watch out world…
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