Flashback Friday: Just go to sleep

Right now I’m so tired that I’m not sure I can even write anything coherent, let alone anything that would be interesting to read. But I guess that’s parenthood for you.

I remember not being very good at sleeping when I was younger. I often slept in my parents bed. Or floor. Or the little couch in their room. And when my dad left for work a o’dark thirty I’d climb in bed with my mom and then I’d ask her questions and things like that and she’d say, “Nancy, just go to sleep.”

And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.

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You can give a child a bedtime…

We are all sleep deprived, but oddly enough the one suffering the most is Rachel. That girl!

Our goal is to have her be in bed by around 8:30 or 9:00 every night and we really don’t struggle with that goal very often. She’s pretty good about going to bed most of the time. She’s even mostly good about staying in bed. It’s the going to sleep part that she won’t do.

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PKU

The infant PKU test isn’t offered in Egypt, at least, not at birth. Instead you have to have a private pediatrician order a private lab to come to your home and draw some blood from your new born baby and mail it off to Germany to get the results. All this costs around 200 USD (from what I hear).

Rachel got tested in the States and she was fine—most kids are since only 1 in 15,000 babies born inherits the disorder.

We still haven’t gotten Miriam tested.

Part of me wonders if it is worth it—forking out two-hundred dollars to get back what will, in all reality, probably be a negative test result. Two-hundred dollars for peace of mind. That’s a lot.

On the other hand, what if Miriam is the one in 15,000? Suddenly two-hundred dollars doesn’t seem like that much…

I think I’ll have Andrew set up that appointment ASAP.

You have two babies?!

After church on Friday Nic, a 5-year-old in our branch, saw me carrying Miriam.

"Whose baby is that?" she asked.

"It's mine," I said.

She looked at me all confused, "But I thought Rachel was your baby."

"She is," I answered.

"Then whose baby is that?"

"Also mine."

"You have two babies?!"

The irony of this is that Nic comes from a family of seven children so you'd think she'd understand the concept of a parent having more than one child. I explained to her that Rachel is still my baby even though we now have Miriam just like she is still her mommy's baby now that her family has Rex (who is Rachel's age). She seemed to accept that answer but I'm still not sure she believes that both those babies are mine.

I’m a hippie

If you asked my father-in-law to describe me in one word, he’d probably say hippie. Or awesome. But probably hippie.

Truthfully I think it stems from the fact that broccoli doesn’t make me balk. Or it could be our parenting style. Possibly a toss up between the two.

We do some weird parenting things, it’s true, but we don’t adhere strictly to any child-raising techniques. I’ve never read up on attachment parenting or the Ferber method or anything like that. And I know I’m not a granola mom because I still shave my armpits and I’m pretty sure that disqualifies me from ever holding that title.

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My handicap

Miriam, the champion-sleeper, slept from 1:00 AM until around 7:30 AM at which time I forced her awake and begged her to eat before I exploded. My milk supply, though still over abundant, isn’t quite as hyper-active as it was with Rachel which means that I can actually sleep for six hours before I feel like I’m going to explode. It’s kind of nice. Not that I slept for those six hours…

Rachel woke up almost every two hours last night and then came into our room around 8:00 AM. It was nice of her to wait that long because I heard her up and stirring much earlier than that.

I was so tired—I went to take a nap around 11:00 AM and didn’t wake up until 1:30 PM. And then I saw Andrew was online so I started chatting with him.

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Don’t do that again, Miriam!

Late this morning, so late that it was almost early afternoon, Miriam and I ventured out of the bedroom. Rachel was very excited to see us. She’s often telling me how tired I am and how much I sleep and once when I came out of the bedroom after an extraordinarily long nap she exclaimed,

“Happy founding, Mommy!”

A “good morning” was definitely not called for since it was almost dinner time but she had to think of some way to greet me, I guess.

Anyway, when we came out this morning, Rachel wanted to hold Miriam so she got all settled on the couch with the boppy on her lap to help support Miriam and I handed Miriam over.

For a long time they sat peacefully and blissfully together, staring into each others’ little faces and smiling when suddenly…

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If you don’t give a 2-year-old a muffin…

“Give me my muffin!” she bellowed again, holding out her hand to further emphasize the demand that I relinquish the muffin, as if using the word “my” somehow automatically shifted ownership from me to her.

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Flashback Friday: Recurring Nightmare

Yes, I’m writing my Flashback Friday on a Saturday. I’m allowed to do that because I just had a baby. Anyway…

In the defense of MOMster’s children, I will share one of the recurring nightmares of my childhood involving a beetle, and not just any beetle, but one of the most innocuous beetles known to childhood. The dreadful, the horrifying, the terrible…ladybug.

Yes, that same one featured in the nursery rhyme.

Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home!
Your house is on fire and
Your children are alone.

The protagonist of more than one story in our book bin. The one plastering Rachel’s pyjamas. The one that no child is afraid of.

Yes, that one.

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I’m seebing her

Everything I do, Rachel does, too.

For example, Miriam spends a lot of time in a sling (courtesy of my friend Jill—thanks, Jill!).

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Men at Work

Since I never seem to leave the house anymore I don’t have anything interesting to say, really, except that I was breastfeeding Miriam with the window open and I looked up and was met eye-to-eye with a lumberjack.

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4 o’clock isn’t so lonely around here

This morning I was nursing Miriam while listening to the ghostly echoes of various muezzins recite the first adhan of the day. Their voices twisted and glided around the streets and drifted through our bedroom window, an eerie choir unconstrained by either tone or time—confusingly beautiful at times and ear-gratingly obnoxious at others—until the last voice finally tapered off and I was left in silence once again.

It’s quite like how I imagine the Hogwarts Anthem being sung.

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Like lemon juice in a paper cut

Sometimes when I’m too lazy to walk anywhere I ask Andrew to do the walking for me. Yesterday I was too lazy to stand up after changing Miriam’s diaper and so I asked Andrew to bring me the sink to me instead, in the form of hand sanitizer.

He squirted a little in my hand and Rachel noticed so she, of course, wanted some as well. She loves hand sanitizer—she calls it hanitizer—she stuck out her hands and asked her daddy if she could have some, too. He obliged and gave her a big ol’ squirt. It was way more than her little hands could possibly soak up.

Looking for a quick solution to her overly sanitized condition, Andrew noticed she wasn’t wearing a shirt. We had taken it off for dinner-eating purposes.

“Rub the rest on your tummy,” he suggested.

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Are you 'rected?

Rachel and I were just looking at the family tree we put together last night. She was asking questions about everyone on the chart. When we got to her great-grandma Conrad, Rachel insisted that she met her. I went and burst her bubble.

"Well, maybe you met her in heaven before you came to live in our family. She died before you were born."

"Oh," she said, kind of disappointed by that, "Mommy died, too."

"No, I didn't die."

"You didn't die?"

"No. I'm not dead."

"Oh, are you 'rected?"

"No, I'm not resurrected, either. I'm just plain, old alive."

Rachel is now acting like my position on the cool-chart just went down 10 points because I am neither dead nor resurrected.

Modesty on the Metro

I took my last metro ride as a pregnant lady the night before Miriam was born. It was an impromptu ride so neither Andrew or I were really dressed for a jaunt downtown. When we leave the expat-world of Maadi we both prefer to dress a little more conservatively, meaning long pants for both and long sleeves for me.

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