Those Days are These Days

I used to dread those days.

Those impossibly long, soul draining, parental working days. 

You know the ones. 

The ones that get underway well before the sun comes up, where the dog barks and the child screams and the wind blows the outdoor setting over before the alarm on your mobile phone ever gets a chance to squeal its morning not-so-glory in your ear.

The ones where you manage to squeeze three hours of morning preparation into one, managing to layer nail varnish onto the holes in your last pair of tights whilst co-brushing your teeth with your toddler, making a mental note to buy more milk whilst simultaneously burning a hole in your ear with your straightening iron.

The ones where you, the toddler and your miraculous holy grail head of straightened hair run out the front door smack bang into a cyclonic rain storm, only to find the umbrella is missing: presumed drowned in the toilet, and replaced with a hyper colour plastic phone and six old sultanas covered in indistinguishable fluff and grit.

The ones where the daycare drop off leaves you a mooshy mess of mummy guilt and fluster. The ones where you have to peel your child off your side in the doorway - like sliding a wedge between two magnets - before making a guilt-wracked mercy dash in the rain to the bus, the train, the tram, the overcrowded overpass, that will never get you there on time.

The ones where the barista mistakes your strangled strong latte request for soy latte. Which won’t matter anyway when you spill two-thirds of the stuff in your jacket cuff and down your leg as you try and completely fail to regain some, or any, sense of awesome working person togetherness in the 12 floors of enforced elevator reprieve you must endure while you run late, later every morning.

The ones where the email inbox fills up with emails that you don’t want to contend with, while you stare at the download icon willing the one email you actually need to make its way through the universe so you can please, maybe, yes, perhaps, indeed, oh please just get shit done. Before you have to go back and do the day in reverse again. 

The one where you forgot to put your lunchbox in the tea room fridge, and you are left with a winless choice: a plastic Tupperware container filled with dubious quality and potential gastric disaster, your toddler’s afternoon snack box of cracked up crackers, or a maniacal dash to the food court in the cyclonic rain- which followed you all the way to work and now menaces from the window, daring you to even try. 

The ones where the phone rings incessantly like the mocking failure bells of side show alley, while you doodle on your notepad and daydream of hanging out at the carnival and riding the ferris wheel as like you’re twelve again. You’re thirty, how the hell did that happen? And why are doodling stick flowers and artistically challenged box houses when you have so very much to do?

The ones where your brain turns to puddles of plush pah phoo before four, where you drag your holey stockinged legs through the sideways water bullets to find that the barista has already shut the machine down. And the suit in front of you made off with the last conceivable chocolate brownie standing, perfect stockings, umbrella and all. Oh Murphy, you've done it again, top marks for accuracy.

The ones where the transport system grinds to a smashing halt under the hordes of peak hour crushdom, shuddering along the city streets while you calculate how many dollars this game of human sardines will cost in daycare fines and overtired toddler fees. 

The ones where the traffic lights turn every shade but green as you sit in the thrumming throng, while your toddler melts into a thunderous velociraptor as the situation of the earlier eaten cracked crackers cracks the evening universe into a headache that will lodge deep behind your eye - absolutely cracking and removable only by the power of the weekend and the medication of a bottle of red. Or three. 

The ones where the postie left the bills not the wedding invites, and the parcel man left the slip not the present from Grandma, but the dog left the type of terrifying present in the laundry room that you Just. Don’t. Want. To. Know. About. 

The ones where you oscillate between serving up toast or nutritional value, while sneaking Tim Tams from the top of the fridge and hoping that the pizza gods might arrive on the doorstep and save you from the triple tears of chopping onions with a toddler by your side, finely diced to distraction.

The ones where you manage to pull off a dinner with three finger burns, two vegetables and a side of mash, only to discover that your toddler now exclusively eats muesli with yoghurt from the red bowl, and only while sitting on the floor in slippers. 

The ones where you read half of seven different bed times stories, fairies fractured with sea shells mixed with meatballs falling from the sky onto some kids plate; lulling yourself to sleep while your toddler puts her plush posse to bed and proceeds to march all over the dying dregs of your regrettable soy latte experience.

The ones where you lean your head against the ironing board as the house descends into the sounds of silence, wondering if you managed to hide some Tim Tams from yourself but knowing deep down in your shattered psyche that you've drained the emergency chocolate bank well beyond dry. 

The ones where you finally collapse on the couch, only to remember that you never got the f$%#ing milk … and now the dog is barking at an imaginary cat and the toddler is screaming ‘twinkle twinkle A B D Muuuuummmy’ and you should probably set the alarm before the sun decides to come back up all over again. 

Yep, I used to dread those days. 

Now days though, those days are just these days, and these days are my days.

And I wouldn’t change my days for all the non-soy lattes in the city. 

Would you?

M x

Underneath the Fever

When my daughter started child care earlier this month, I knew that we would be up against a steady wave of daycare ailments and illnesses, resplendent and resilient in all their combined snotty, sniffly, snuffly glory. 

While I am not entirely naive, my first-time-mummy-self optimistically believed there would be an adjustment period, a blissful and relatively sustained snot-free time in the sand box before the first illness set in. 

Over my morning cups of sleepy coffee and cogitation, I always imagined my daughter's immune defenses to be nothing short of a solid wall, carefully constructed from nine months of exclusive breastfeeding bricks and iron-fortified cereal mortar. 

Every day, I would wrap my hands around the coffee cup, warming my fingers and the cockles of my naivety with the happy notion that it would take weeks, months, maybe even years, for the nasty viruses of the childcare world to chip away at that impressive wall.

I was delusional. Downright - stark raving, looney-tune, kilo bag of mixed salted nuts, dancing by myself on the side of the road in my worst holey underwear, seeing Bette Midler and Hugh Grant buying crumpets in a Melbourne supermarket, eating chalk seasoned with toothpaste for dinner - DELUSIONAL. 

Perhaps I drank too much coffee, or too few cups of the stuff, but I can openly confess that the great wall of baby immunity that I had built in my head was nothing but a shimmering mirage in a mental desert of exhausted parenting madness.  

It took all of two short days in care for my previously non-snotty daughter to lick the communal toys, lick some stolen sippy cups, and presumably lick the other babies and the educators and the nursery floor as well, and pick up her first unidentified daycare malady. 

The first sign of the unwelcome bug was when the baby's nose started to run away with itself - but much like with a nest of white ants, the framework was damaged beyond repair by the time the work showed itself on the surface. 

The opening days of the illness parade were uneventful: snot, snot and more snot, with a bit of grumbling and a lot of forcefully refuted saline spraying, nasal suctioning and unavoidable nose wiping.

The fanfare kicked up a notch about the time we ran out of tissues, when my daughter's liquid leak took on a distinctive indistinct yellow-greenish hue (the one time you really don't want to be wearing the Australian sporting colours), and the bug also jumped ship and took up residence in my nose and throat. 

Things became unpleasant. I was hot and sweaty and grumpy, and so was the baby. Our heads were abuzz with aches and thumps and the house was floating in an unpleasant haze of toxic little tissue parcels and lethargy. We couched, with Peppa Pig and Hootabelle and Elmo and all his friends filling the inevitable void.

Proving faithful old Murphy was still hard at work down at the law firm even while we were lazing about on our sick beds, my darling little liquid-leaker chose the height of our fuzzy head-cold woozies to become completely and hysterically terrified of all things sneezing, and all things nose blowing.

Every sneeze elicited an intense bout of screaming, accompanied by the angry kicking of little feet against the carpet. Every nose blown into a tissue, whether it was a petite little exhale of negligible proportions or a thunderously productive and powerful achoo, resulted in the baby turning red, scrunching up her face in the most unpleasant manner and squealing at the highest possible volume on her inbuilt speaker.

Just as the malady parade reached fever pitch, and the balloons started to drift off into the sky to make an environmentally unfriendly mess somewhere else, the whole icky parade switched direction.

Out of the snot and the fever and the aching legs, out of the tissue wasteland and the leaking bottles of baby paracetamol with adult-proof-child-safe caps, came a completely unexpected and virulent bout of mutant daycare bug gastro. 

Without any warning whatsoever, I was plunged into an abyss of throwing up into a bucket while trying to sing nursery rhymes and change the batteries in a malfunctioning, off key musical toy lion covered in cracker crumbs and snot.

Worse than the head-breaking lion was the unavoidable and instantaneous realisation that throwing up is far higher on the baby noise terror scale than the mere trifling sounds of sneezing and nose blowing. For every dalliance with the bucket, my daughter would issue forth a blood-curdling scream that would send me back to the bucket, a circle so unpleasant it can't be painted with words.
 
With my husband interstate and my family very far away, I was left without back-up, looking hopefully at the crack of light coming from the back of the television, and pleading with the universe for a box of electrolyte lollipops and a wet face washer. 

Clutching onto some ice cubes and the dying tendrils of my dignity, I slowly scrounged up the walls of abyss, changing nappies and wiping noses and preparing finger foods and running baths and singing bedtime songs and throwing up (quietly) and reading Where is the Green Sheep, wishing it was anywhere else in the universe but here. 

Where once I would have curled up into a ball and focused on stillness, feeling atrociously sorry for myself, I jumped right into the ugly wave of sea sickness and sploshed around until there was nothing left in my stomach, and my daughter was fed, washed, giggled, crawled, storied and asleep.

It was horrible, and it was painful, and it was brilliantly colourful in the greyest of ways, but I managed to muddle through and come out the other side - and that, right there, is the underlying magic of parenting. 
 
It's the ugliest and strongest kind of magic, the one hidden between the sweaty bed clothes, the one floundering around listlessly at the bottom of the toilet bowl. It's the type of magic that makes you all warm and fuzzy (and potentially feverish, depending on the intensity of the ailment) and sends your ovaries into a little spin and rinse cycle when you least expect it.
 
It's the magic that propels mothers to simultaneously fix mechanical lions and throw up in buckets, and makes fathers stay awake at night when they are interstate, and helps parents find the energy to become parents again and again and again.

It's the magic that gets you up at midnight and three in the morning and again at quarter to five, and it's the non-sparkly fairy dust that falls from the sky and keeps you going, through and beyond the eleventh napless day in a row.

It's the force that sees you change nappies that would be better attacked with a fire hose, and gives you the extra soul points to get you through another rendition of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and the only reason that you agree to spend every happy hour dicing up finger food in the kitchen instead of hightailing it down to the bar for a cold mojito and share plate.

It's the reason people without children think about switching out Sundays down at the pub for Sundays down at the park, and the spare room for a nursery, and sleep-ins for just a few minutes of plain old sleep - it's the reason, even though those people don't actually know that the magic exists just yet.  

David Frost once said: Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or healthy adult." Having just had my heart on my fluffy dressing gown sleeve and my sleep on hold for the better part of a very long and snotty fortnight, I couldn't agree more.

How do you get through the sick days at your house?
Where do you find the magic?

M x

These are teething times

The Teething Monster is back, and making plenty of noise about it. 

After a brief but necessary holiday away from this rambling house - perhaps to Tahiti, or the Great Barrier reef, or somewhere else suitably unfair - he unexpectedly lobbed up on our doorstep on Tuesday afternoon with a fresh enthusiasm for pain and a suitcase full of new teething twists. 

He took us unawares, even though we should have known better. After all, we were due to meet teeth three and four, and the Teething Monster is renowned for being one of the sneakiest little devils in the entire mummy universe. 

Much like his good friends Separation Anxiety and Unexplained Wakefulness, he evaporates moments before you can wring his neck and then reappears when you least expect him to - midway through a bowl of sweet potato puree, up from the depths of the bath tub, through the door at the ungodly hour of 3:27 am.  

Since his unwelcome return, the Teething Monster has been doing his part to keep the cogs of the mummy universe turning. He has been keeping our little family of three up all night, with the odd surprise nap mixed in here and there to test our reflexes and our sanity. He has also been keeping us down most of the day, leaving us stumbling around in a tetchy teething tether. 

In a move reminiscent of his second cousin, the Cookie Monster, he has been effortlessly spreading crumbs and mess throughout our lives. The lounge room is an obstacle course of teething rings and cold face washers, and the kitchen bench has transformed into a comprehensively (and expensively) well-stocked pharmacy.

On top of the obstacles and the drugs, the house has been attacked with a liberal spread of banana teething rusk mush. This highly adhesive glue of wheat and flavouring has adamantly adhered to the furniture and the fixtures and the forlorn parents in a sticky tribute to the Teething Monster and his unfortunate powers. 

Despite his persistent presence and grumbling, the Teething Monster has yet to deliver any new teeth so his visit looks set to continue through the weekend and well into next week. 

I just hope there is enough patience and grace in the mummy universe (and enough wine in the cupboard) to get me through. 

Has the Teething Monster visited your house recently? 

M x 

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20 weeks: an open letter to my pregnant friend

Cake is not the enemy

Hurrah! You did it! You are twenty weeks pregnant! 

Congratulations on reaching this important milestone on your first ride on the pregnancy roller coaster. You have just ricocheted out of the loopy and bendy bits of the ride and embarked upon the long, steep climb before the sheer vertical drop. 

Having suffered through the early stages of pregnancy, you are now qualified to experience the joys of the midway juncture: finding out whether your watermelon is a blue or a pink one, fighting with the elderly to get the priority seat on the packed morning commuter train, agonising over what nursery accessories to order on eBay.

You are also about to unceremoniously pop, much like a piece of microwave popcorn. You might also start to swell, puff, huff, stretch, sweat and take on a new skin tone - think reds, pinks and splotches - and be forced to stop shaving your legs and clipping your toenails. Choice. 

As your belly continues to increase, so too will the level of unsolicited pregnancy advice you receive. From your friends, from your mother, from your colleagues, and from complete strangers (and yes, you will want to strangle them, and yes, that is normal). 
 
A pastiche of meddlers will tell you to wear compression stockings, avoid bean sprouts, take a babymoon, give up on fashion and buy mumu dresses, and cut out dried fruit before your gestational diabetes test. Nod, shrug, tell them to shut up and sod off, stick the proverbial where the sun don't shine, then waddle off on your own and eat some cake. 

Before the unsolicited onslaught begins, I would like to offer five little snippets of advice of my own, then step aside and encourage you to choose your own adventure (although I fear you may already know how the ending will play out!)

Regardless of whether you choose to be the captain of a tight ship with an even tighter birth plan, or a pirate with a platoon of chocolate biscuits and a tattered treasure map, I will support both your method and your madness. 

Cake
Considering it's already on the table, let's start with cake. During the second half of your pregnancy there will be lots of cake.  Or biscuits, or sour cream, or hot dogs, or blocks of cheese, or hamburgers, or sour gummy worms, or bagels, or a whole family sized bag of random cravings. 

When you are staring down the barrel of yet another block of dark chocolate with sea salt, and you feel conflicted (hello little voices) please don't be too hard on yourself. Much like shells gain crabs and cream carpets gain red wine, pregnant women gain weight. 

Try as you might, you will not stay thin, you will not be happy with how you look, and you will never be content with the amount of weight you did (or perhaps, unusually, did not) put on during your ten month stint as a pregnant lady. So provided you keep a modicum of perspective and self-control, give in to some of the cravings and eat yourself to a little bit of happiness. 
 
Undies
To accommodate the growing baby, and the growing consumption of cake, your body will be forced to expand. Sometimes this expansion will be proportional, and sometimes it will preference particular sections of your anatomy. Regardless of expansion type, you will expand around the middle, leaving your beloved reg grundies rather too tight for comfort.

To avoid standing in the checkout queue at the supermarket with a pair of cheap cotton undies wedged between your bum cheeks, or spending most of your work day mentally trying to stop your underwear sliding down your leg, please go out this weekend and invest in a new and larger set of underwear. 

Tantrums
Pregnant tantrums happen. They are much like regular tantrums, but with added fuel and excess sugar. Despite being a professional woman with thirty-odd years of life experience and lessons safely in the makeup bag, the odds are high that you will succumb to the pregnant tantrum.

Your tantrum could be about anything, and it could strike at any moment. The only thing for certain is that your tantrum will be entirely irrational and illogical, but only in hindsight. The tantrum will rattle your partner - and possibly the neighbours, sorry about that - before suddenly dissipating into the atmosphere and leaving you demanding more cake. 

Accept it. Eat some cake. Eat the rest of the cake. Move on. 

Sex
So this is the state of play - you are twenty weeks pregnant, you have a reasonable bump on your front which makes things a bit weird in the bedroom, and you are so shattered from making a cup of tea and doing the laundry that you would like to curl up with your pregnancy pillow and just watch reruns of Dawsons Creek until the baby shows up. 

Sure, sounds reasonable enough, but I assure you - now is the time to have sex.  You have not yet endured labour, you have not yet acquired a sleepless baby and you have not (quite) become Violet Beauregarde and been rolled to the juicing room. There is an acutely limited window of opportunity right in front of you, which will slam shut and not be pried open again for quite some time. 

You have been warned.

Solitude
Over the coming weeks, which will pass in a blur yet take an entire lifetime all at once, you will move from being a bit pregnant to being totally, painfully, awkwardly, unmistakeably, completely, pregnant. 

When you finish work on a Friday night, you will want to go home and hibernate instead of going to the pub. You will laugh at those people who invite you out to dinner at 9pm, and curse at the (same) people who invite you out to dinner at restaurants that have stairs or serve seafood or have noisy concrete walls.

You will start to derive a strange joy from washing and folding bassinet linen and stockpiling impossibly tiny socks. No doubt, you will be ropeable when your husband goes to the cricket for the weekend and leaves you on the couch with a promising kick boxer in your stomach, ice packs on your swollen feet and an unopened flat pack cot. 

You will mostly enjoy flumping in solitude, and napping before dinner, and wearing nothing but pajamas from Friday night until Monday morning. Sometimes though, you will get lonely, and feel like the pregnant lady that time and your friends forgot. When this happens, just pick up the phone and call me. Any time of day, any time of night - I'm always here, and I'll probably be awake breastfeeding anyway.

M x 

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Unnaturally natural

My daughter is playing her favourite game again today - fusspot feeding. An apathetic snack here, a lazy sip there, a few half-hearted gulps sandwiched in between touching her fingertips together, tugging the zipper on my jacket and staring in awe at the shadows on the wall. 

Trying to get the baby to attach on days like this is akin to trying to wrestle a pterodactyl into a ball gown. Wriggle, stretch, scratch, chat, raspberry, kick, arch, stretch, stiffen, hit, giggle, thwack. 

During these intensely loveable but frustrating feeding 'experiences' I close my eyes, hold my breath and remember just how far my daughter and I have actually progressed with this up-and-down milk caper.

Five and a half months ago I found myself in hospital with a brand new squishy faced baby, two sore mama breasts and an expectation that somehow the baby and the breasts would have a chat with one another and get things sorted. 

Things started with a false positive. As per the pregnancy books and the educational video with appalling music that we had suffered through during our childbirth education classes, the baby latched on immediately after birth and contentedly drank away until she fell asleep. Aww, lovely.

Very. False. Positive. Jump forward eighteen hours or so to the maternity ward. Middle of the night, wilting mummy, flummoxed midwives, hysterical little baby obstinately refusing to open her mouth and latch. 

The midwives came armed with suggestions and I diligently tried them all. There was walking and shhhing and swaying, combined with nipple shields and finger sucking and syringes. We tried feeding standing up and we tried feeding lying down, using the cradle hold and the football hold and even pleading with the baby: please, baby, please have a drink before mummy has a meltdown. 

Zip, zilch, nada. The baby did not want to breastfeed - but the mummy certainly did. My well entrenched stubborn streak combined with my new found mama streak to press on and keep trying to make it work.

And so it was that for the first three hazy postpartum days, I spent hour after excruciating hour propped up in my hospital bed, hand-expressing colostrum and early milk to give to the baby with a syringe. By the time I managed to fill a syringe and give it to her, she would be red-faced and thirsty again and wailing for more. The supply and demand system was entirely out of whack, and I was starting to feel much the same way. 

My milk arrived in earnest. We tried different sized nipple shields. We got bigger syringes. We bought an electric breast pump. We were discharged from hospital and took the baby home. We put in a hundred and twenty seven percent effort. But the baby still wouldn't eat, and was getting smaller and sleepier: we were starting to have a real problem on our hands. 

The health nurses were becoming concerned, and the threat of formula was looming ever larger. (For the record, I don't have any issue with bottle-feeding, every Mum has the right to choose what works for them, I just really wanted to make breastfeeding work for me.) After a two-day battle of the wills, where we discovered my daughter had inherited my stubborn streak, we finally got her to accept a bottle and started giving her expressed milk 'comp' feeds to supplement the breastfeeding efforts.

As her weight and energy levels finally started to climb, I started to go downhill. The toxic combination of utter exhaustion, frustration, hormones, visitors and perceived helplessness was starting to radically undermine my resolve. 

I was daydreaming about frolicking in tins of formula, or hiding under my bed with a hot chocolate and a blanket, or holidaying in Fiji while my husband stayed home and just 'somehow made it work.' I needed help, or I was going to graffiti the writing on the damn wall myself. 

Our salvation came just before breaking point, in the form of two gobsmackingly amazing midwives. These two brilliantly patient, and patiently brilliant, women sat with me while I wrestled the baby, cried in to cups of tea and even threw a couple of giant wobbly tantrums.

They gently pointed out what wasn't working and firmly pointed out what I needed to change. They stepped back and observed and they stepped in and positioned my arms and my baby as needed. They threw out my nipple shields and found me a proper breastfeeding pillow. Most importantly, they gave me heart when I had none left.

Over the course of a teary, soul-crunching week my resolve started to firm back up and my baby started to latch: and just like that, one random Thursday morning in the middle of a discussion about chamomile tea, the baby and I were breastfeeding. Just. Like. That.

Five and a half months later we are still breastfeeding. We feed sitting on the couch, lying down, standing up, at the cafe and in the park. We have fed with a flu, and survived a course of antibiotics, and discovered that drinking orange juice and breastfeeding the baby are not compatible activities in our household.

I have learned that the baby will tug my hair while she eats, pull my shirt open in public just because she can, nuzzle in when she is tired and bite down when she is teething. I can honestly say that breastfeeding is the most unnatural natural thing I have ever done, but that I would do it again in a heartbeat. 

And I have come to accept that even when the baby is being fusspot like she is right now, and she would rather watch the sunlight hit the floorboards or chew her own foot than drink, it doesn't matter: it's just part of breastfeeding, and I'm okay with that.

Are you a breastfeeding mum? Have you faced feeding challenges? I would love to hear your stories.

M x 


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