Sugar, Stupidity and Sleep Disturbances...
I'm getting a bit rubbish at keeping up with the blog again... believe it or not, I am becoming more and more bleary eyed at the night time wake ups. Usually, this is - or was- my best time (only time?!) for blog writing... and it helped me to keep my eyes open.
But, as we're settling into new 'routines' and life with two little people, I am unsurprisingly struggling to stay awake enough to string quite-literal-sentences together.
I don't mind the wake ups too much though. It's what newborns do, huh?! In fact, I was reading a really cool article that discussed the fact that tiny babies are supposed to wake up every few hours as a survival mechanism. It's like baby wakes up just to say, "Hello! I'm here! I'm all good. Milk party now??"
That said, more recently it's been tot that has been up in the early hours unsettled: she's had a rotten chest infection. First try on antibiotics! Oh boy, she loved it (the antibiotics that is, not the infection!) When we left the pharmacy with this bottle of fluorescent yellow 'medicine' I was playing out several scenarios in my head of how I was going to negotiate getting the liquid into tot's mouth. At 19 months, she puts up a good toddler fight, and I was considering whether the best method would be some sort of medicinal disguise (could I put it in juice?) or a good old fashioned WWF style 'you-will-open-your-mouth' syringe attack?
Turns out, we offered it to her on a spoon and she took it. Well- she more than took it. She thought it was delicious and then picked up the bottle requesting more, when she'd already had her 5ml dose! She continued to stand there, holding this bottle, pleading with us by making that slightly whiny toddler sound: 'ah ah ah uh uh' which means: 'Do this!'
When I was a kid, and when my husband was a kid, this famous yellow medicine was banana flavoured. Crikey- you can almost remember the taste, can't you? It was quite yummy....
Well, now it seems to have become a bottle of lemon sherbert flavouring....with loads of sugar...
Got to give it to tot, it was delicious. I mean, I only dipped my finger in to taste it, but were it not there to remedy the poorly one, I'd have happily guzzled the lot. In fact, I think they should dish it out to parents as a supplement.
A) it tasted so sugary it'd provide us with some much needed energy surges and,
B) we'd have better immunity to every flipping little infection and bug that the small people like to collect and share with us!
Anyway, our tot is fully recovered now and it's lovely having her happy and cheery again. It's hence I've found a small bit of energy for bed time blogging, as I don't currently have a sweaty, spluttering tot squishing me (in our bed when unwell.)
That said, I did have a terrible bed time fright the other night! Believe it or not, a wasp zoomed out from under my pillow!! At least, I thought it was a wasp because the little blighter (I feel like that's only ever a word to use in relation to wasps) looked like this:
However, I've since seen more of these and been told it's too early for wasps so it must be a honey bee? I've checked in with Google because I always thought honey bees were big and round, but I stand corrected! Honey bees actually look like wasps (poor them!)
So actually a honey bee zoomed out from under my pillow! And the doppelganger-blighter freaked me out because I started to fear it might sting our newborn, who sleeps in a crib in our bedroom. My husband was rousted from his slumber and sent on a mission to search the bedroom for Madame Honey Bee (aka wasp)... but she was not to be found in the silly hours of the morning!
The irony was, both tot and babe had slept brilliantly that night, yet my husband and I were still wide awake due to the bug hunt. Hey ho. The bee-wasp didn't show up again until about 10am when I took the photo (mainly to prove to my husband that I hadn't dreamt the whole scenario!)
I realise I probably sound a bit stupid not knowing about honey bees, but I'm apparently more stupid than that. I might dent my profession here, but for the sake of slight entertainment I will share with you one last little anecdote that my husband and family have found highly amusing lately...
Babe is now a month old and I was reading about the development of her eyesight. Apparently newborns see in black and white. I was quite astounded by this and, the conscientious parent that I am, thought I'd better entertain her little brain. Off I went around the house, collecting black and white objects. The TV remote, a top I own, and the inside of a book were all part of the collection.
If you've already cottoned on- humour me- because I had not cottoned on...
I then continued to show babe these objects and enjoyed seeing her little eyes looking at them. Lovely.
But still, I had not realised.
That evening, my husband got home and also my brother came over. Chuffed and excited, I told them: "Today I showed 'babe' some black and white objects from around the house because she can only see in black and white at the moment!"
Oh how they laughed. And as they laughed, I cottoned on. Duh. Of course. It didn't matter what colour/shade the objects were....!
I have since resorted to more conventional sources of entertainment for babe, such as a playmat and bouncer chair. Both of these are brightly coloured. Multi coloured. Abundantly coloured.
Silly me.
