Stop the world, I want to get off
Mar. 5th, 2007 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundI've been meaning to post a straightforward life update for absolutely ages. The past few months have been unusually hectic. So here's a run-down of what I've been up to. (It's long. Can't say I didn't warn you.)
January
The highlight of the month was the visit of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cangetmad and Gnome, which went off swimmingly: both Oyster–Gnome and Radz–Madz relations were cordial, talkative and hugely entertaining. We frequented playgrounds, fraternised sororised with a selection of other LJ luminaries, squished playdough into ever more unlikely niches, and engaged in ongoing analysis of language acquisition, parenthood, politics, etc. It was great.
The lowlight of the month, I suppose, was when I developed non-specific, persistent nausea, which my GP suspected might be gall-bladder related. Boo, digestion. I took the symptom suppressants he prescribed; they did not suppress my symptoms. I cut down drastically on my fat intake; I continued to feel like ass.
The crazylight of the month was the bit where our garden wall collapsed in a high wind one night, outward, onto the public footpath. Nobody was hurt, THANK ALL RELEVANT DEITIES, but a neighbour's car was totalled, and our wasteland-cum-shantytown dug-up-back-garden-and-horrific-shed situation was exposed to the world for some weeks.
February
February was ... interesting.
Monday 5: I started back at my place of employment after my twelve-month career break, two and a half days a week. The Oyster to be minded by K, my doughty mother-in-law, on Mondays and Tuesdays, and by a local childminder on Wednesday mornings.
Wednesday 7: The Oyster was delivered unto me in the afternoon. I went to get him, and he broke into the most beautiful smile I've ever seen. "Mama comed back for Unny!" he said. I asked how he'd been, and the childminder said that he'd missed his Mammy a little bit. I asked him if he'd missed me a little bit, and he said, "No. Just a big bit." He was (understandably) extremely clingy for the rest of the day - indeed, for the rest of the week. He was also so bone-tired from the ordeal of separation and regime change that he conked out on the sofa while I was making dinner, resulting in a very late bedtime.
Thursday 8:niallm and I celebrated our 8th/2nd anniversary (being as how we got married on our 6th).
Friday 9: K rang to say that she had a bronchial infection and wouldn't be able to do any childminding the following week. We had free lunch in Niall's place of employment, A Well-Known Search Engine. The Oyster stayed the night with my parents, allowing Niall and me to go for an anniversary meal and then SLEEP IN the following morning. It was unusually difficult to leave him: we ended up not making it to the cinema because he needed too much from us before we could leave.
Saturday 10: Late, late, late rising (oh, the bliss), followed by fairly frantic day of dashing out to collect our progeny, hasty lunch, then heading into town to make some fecky administrative purchases, then eating in town because it was the only way of ensuring that I'd get to my evening choir rehearsal in time. Then I rehearsed while my menfolk put each other to bed.
Sunday 11: Niall left for the airport at 7:30a.m., and I commenced 15 days of single parenthood. The Oyster and I headed to my parents' again at lunchtime, where his grandfather was to mind him. He was extremely distressed by the prospect of my leaving, and completely melted down shortly after I'd gone. Heartlessly, I sang Bach in the city centre, before hurrying back to my parents' house with my sister (pausing only to collect our aged grandmother). The Oyster was wired to the moon - racing around the place, exhibiting a hoarse and brittle cheeriness; dinner and playing and books did little to calm him. Impossibly, he failed to fall asleep in the car on the way home, despite being utterly, utterly wrecked. When we got home, my sister and I put him to bed and sang him Everly Brothers numbers in harmony until he capitulated. He had a disturbed night.
Monday 12: My sister minded Oisín until the late morning. K being ill, my mother then heroically stepped into the breach (taking time off work), so he ended up heading out to my parents' house again with her. Meanwhile, I plodded away at work (pausing only for lunch withkulfuldi) until 3:00, when I suddenly began to lose my sight. A small area in the centre of my field of vision became blurred, with little flashing lights, and grew until I was only barely able to read out of the corner of my eye. Not so great for the copy-editing. I had no idea what was going on, but I was frightened. I phoned an optician and made an appointment, and then spent the intervening hour doing some routine filing. My vision snapped back to normal at about 3:45, but some psychotic dwarves then arrived and began excavating my skull with chisels. The optician confirmed what I'd worked out: this was my second ever migraine. I left work early. My mother delivered Oisín back to me. I survived until he was asleep.
Tuesday 13: I'd planned to take the morning off anyway, but my headache was still there (if not quite as bad), so I took the whole day off sick. The Oyster and I went to a La Leche League meeting in the morning, returning to find the contractors ready to begin rebuilding the garden wall (and incidentally, redoing the back garden, with paving and raised beds). They weren't able to get very far, though, because people were parked where they needed to position their heavy machinery. I spent some time trying to Freecycle our excess topsoil and some rather decent granite blocks. Doctor's appointment in the afternoon, where he warned me to take it very easy and signed me off sick for the rest of the week (viz. the following morning).
Wednesday 14: I made some more effort on the Freecycle front first thing in the morning. I needed rest. I took Oisín to the childminder as normal, and he collapsed in heinous distress. It was utterly horrible. I couldn't leave. I had to leave. I needed rest. I couldn't leave. I needed rest. I left him crying over jigsaws and stumbled home, hating myself and the world and everything about the stupid, awful situation. When I got home I phoned the childminder, to reassure myself that Oisín's upset hadn't lasted. He was howling in the background. She reassured me that he was fine. I cried. Oisín went on howling. I made her promise to phone me if it went on more than ten minutes longer. She told me he was fine. I wrote some novel and drank some tea and calmed down a bit. Some Freecyclers arrived to take away a small proportion of the topsoil and granite. (Which was better than nothing, but I still feel bad about having sent the rest to landfill.) When I went to collect Oisín after an early lunch, he was calm but subdued. The childminder said he'd been fine after the first little while. I tried to believe her. He said, "I was thinking about Mama." I told him I'd been thinking about him too. We went home to find the most amazing and brilliant thing ever: a JCB breaking up the concrete path in our garden, with the Finger Of God attachment that goes UDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDD. We watched it out the window, and later, when it was doing less heavy-duty gathering and lifting, we had a ride in it. So cool! By evening, my headache was almost gone.
Thursday 15: Oisín and I had a lovely day together. He needed me very acutely - I couldn't be more than a few feet away from him before he started getting upset. I found it tiring, but I also totally understood where he was coming from. He remarked, unprompted, "I was thinking about Mama at [childminder's name]'s this morning on Wednesday." We went to toddler group. The contractors poured the foundation for our new wall, working in heavy rain. In the evening,biascut came over for dinner and curtain-making. (Slowly but surely... But surely!)
Friday 16: In the far too small hours - 3:40, to be precise - I woke to Oisín's crying and went to his room. He was standing at the door, very upset, and seemed in the dark to have had an enormous sneeze. When I went to his bed to get his bear, however, I found that it wasn't a sneeze: he had thrown up. I cleaned and changed him but left the bed as it was (it being 3:40) and took him to my bed. He had some milk, thrashed and whimpered for a while, and then threw up there too. Not as copiously, though, and I'd had the foresight to lay him on two or three thicknesses of towel. So I cleaned up again, and we both went to sleep for another few hours. When morning came it was a sad and sorry little boy I woke up to. He spent the day on the sofa - mostly with me - listless, pale, huddling under a duvet, sipping boiled water, and later essaying banana, toast and apple juice. I got his bedding changed and washed (twice - tenacious stuff, that), and that was about the limit of my achievements for the day. He didn't vomit again, thank goodness, and his long nap during the day had no adverse effect on his bedtime. I ended up eating Chinese takeaway on the sofa at about 9p.m. while watching a recorded episode of Top Gear and thinking, "What have I done with the real Radzer?"
Saturday 17: We had energy for nothing at all other than sallying forth to acquire the week's groceries. Managed to acquire half of them.
Sunday 18: Off to my parents' again (via their local supermarket), where Oisín was to stay while I went to my therapy appointment, and we were then to have lunch. Before we were half-way there, he was anxiously insisting that Mama would be staying with him and not going anywhere else. Alas, I was unable to accede, and yet again had to walk away from him while he cried for me. (After a year of not leaving him when he needed me, I have not been enjoying the return of the habit.) He didn't cry for long, my father said when I got back - but what he did do was fall fast asleep on the sofa. We spent the rest of the day at my parents', eating lunch and dinner, and then my sister again came home with us to help on Monday morning. Oisín's nap, predictably, led to another very late bedtime.
Monday 19 to Wednesday 21: This was the third week of work, and it was much easier all round. Oisín was perfectly sanguine about the childminding arrangements, for the first time; I conclude that he has realised that each separation is temporary and predictable. Work's fine, by the way - all the things that were good about it before are still good: nice employer, effective boss, excellent colleagues, interesting work. I've been pretty productive, too, which makes me feel pleasantly virtuous. Meanwhile, Oisín has taken a leap forward in clarity of expression, which it tookglitzfrau to point out to me must be because he's away from the person who best understands his speech and therefore has to work harder to make himself understood. (This also explains his exhaustion in the first few weeks - I remember the same thing from school exchanges.) We missed Niall, but video chat was fun. On Wednesday evening, my mother came and put Oisín to bed and minded him while I went to choir.
Thursday 22 and Friday 23: We had a lovely time together, and Oisín needed a lot less from me, which was a relief. He did beautiful paintings, which I must get around to photographing at some point. St James's Hospital, to whom I'd sent my GP's request for an ultrasound (to check out that gall-bladder thing), sent me an appointment for 12 July. Being the privileged sort that I am, I resolved to go private. Meanwhile, I got the (all clear) results of a smear test I'd had in - wait for it - August, which is apparently an entirely routine interval. Such is the sorry mess in which we find the Irish health system. Our garden wall ended the week in an almost finished state - just the final coat of plaster to be applied to the inside.
Saturday 24: I was running out of steam somewhat by now. Single parenthood, it turns out, is on the tiring side. We didn't make it to the La Leche League coffee morning and book sale, or to the Dublin Food Co-op. We just about made it to the supermarket.
Sunday 25: In line with his generally calmer state of mind, Oisín was much more sanguine than the previous week about being left with my parents while I went to therapy. Lunch followed, and the afternoon was pleasantly punctuated by a visit to a garden centre, where I bought compost for the new raised beds, my mother bought climbing plants, and my sister and the Oyster discussed bird tables. In the early evening, we gave him something to eat, and then my sister came home with us for her final Sunday night / Monday morning aunting stint. (She is, in case you were wondering, the best aunt ever in the long and illustrious history of aunts.) We put him to bed, then had dinner, then did some work on the ridiculously filthy and chaotic kitchen, then she went to bed and I wrote for a while before heading that way myself.
Monday 26: Niall's twoyears' weeks' absence ended. The Oyster was deliriously happy to see him, and had to be forcibly restrained from invading his sleep while he began his recovery from the twentyish-hour journey. I went to work, and it was (almost) normal.
Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28: The rest of the month went off smoothly enough. The raised beds got built (of reclaimed brick, which somewhat makes up for my cowardice in not pushing the contractor to investigate eco-friendly cement, argh), the step up to the raised area at the south end got made, and the paving (Indian sandstone, because we're dead posh) began to be laid. (Presumably, Indian sandstone will shortly be exposed as the next big global ethics scandal. Sorry, world.) It's going to be beautiful when it's done. I can't wait. Meanwhile, Iread devoured yiskah's novel, The Angel Makers, which is absolutely gorgeous, and which needs to become a runaway word-of-mouth success forthwith, or I'll want to know why.
March
So far, March has included yet another bloody doctor's visit (still nauseous and generally urgh-feeling, definitely not pregnant), an evening withkulfuldi and her sister, more great art from the Oyster, an ultrasound scan (nothing abnormal - and specifically, no gallstones, which is good), a christening (we didn't make the ceremony, owing to the inconsiderate placement of Manorhamilton in relation to Carrick-on-Shannon: they're altogether too far apart), another Sunday at my parents', and quite a lot of novel-writing (partially inspired by yiskah's achievement, of course). I actually have a fair stab at finishing a coherent draft within the next few weeks - which would be too, too utterly marvellous for the puny English language to express.
Could the next couple of months or so be kind of boring, please? Kthxbye.
January
The highlight of the month was the visit of
cangetmad and Gnome, which went off swimmingly: both Oyster–Gnome and Radz–Madz relations were cordial, talkative and hugely entertaining. We frequented playgrounds, The lowlight of the month, I suppose, was when I developed non-specific, persistent nausea, which my GP suspected might be gall-bladder related. Boo, digestion. I took the symptom suppressants he prescribed; they did not suppress my symptoms. I cut down drastically on my fat intake; I continued to feel like ass.
The crazylight of the month was the bit where our garden wall collapsed in a high wind one night, outward, onto the public footpath. Nobody was hurt, THANK ALL RELEVANT DEITIES, but a neighbour's car was totalled, and our wasteland-cum-shantytown dug-up-back-garden-and-horrific-shed situation was exposed to the world for some weeks.
February
February was ... interesting.
Monday 5: I started back at my place of employment after my twelve-month career break, two and a half days a week. The Oyster to be minded by K, my doughty mother-in-law, on Mondays and Tuesdays, and by a local childminder on Wednesday mornings.
Wednesday 7: The Oyster was delivered unto me in the afternoon. I went to get him, and he broke into the most beautiful smile I've ever seen. "Mama comed back for Unny!" he said. I asked how he'd been, and the childminder said that he'd missed his Mammy a little bit. I asked him if he'd missed me a little bit, and he said, "No. Just a big bit." He was (understandably) extremely clingy for the rest of the day - indeed, for the rest of the week. He was also so bone-tired from the ordeal of separation and regime change that he conked out on the sofa while I was making dinner, resulting in a very late bedtime.
Thursday 8:
niallm and I celebrated our 8th/2nd anniversary (being as how we got married on our 6th).Friday 9: K rang to say that she had a bronchial infection and wouldn't be able to do any childminding the following week. We had free lunch in Niall's place of employment, A Well-Known Search Engine. The Oyster stayed the night with my parents, allowing Niall and me to go for an anniversary meal and then SLEEP IN the following morning. It was unusually difficult to leave him: we ended up not making it to the cinema because he needed too much from us before we could leave.
Saturday 10: Late, late, late rising (oh, the bliss), followed by fairly frantic day of dashing out to collect our progeny, hasty lunch, then heading into town to make some fecky administrative purchases, then eating in town because it was the only way of ensuring that I'd get to my evening choir rehearsal in time. Then I rehearsed while my menfolk put each other to bed.
Sunday 11: Niall left for the airport at 7:30a.m., and I commenced 15 days of single parenthood. The Oyster and I headed to my parents' again at lunchtime, where his grandfather was to mind him. He was extremely distressed by the prospect of my leaving, and completely melted down shortly after I'd gone. Heartlessly, I sang Bach in the city centre, before hurrying back to my parents' house with my sister (pausing only to collect our aged grandmother). The Oyster was wired to the moon - racing around the place, exhibiting a hoarse and brittle cheeriness; dinner and playing and books did little to calm him. Impossibly, he failed to fall asleep in the car on the way home, despite being utterly, utterly wrecked. When we got home, my sister and I put him to bed and sang him Everly Brothers numbers in harmony until he capitulated. He had a disturbed night.
Monday 12: My sister minded Oisín until the late morning. K being ill, my mother then heroically stepped into the breach (taking time off work), so he ended up heading out to my parents' house again with her. Meanwhile, I plodded away at work (pausing only for lunch with
kulfuldi) until 3:00, when I suddenly began to lose my sight. A small area in the centre of my field of vision became blurred, with little flashing lights, and grew until I was only barely able to read out of the corner of my eye. Not so great for the copy-editing. I had no idea what was going on, but I was frightened. I phoned an optician and made an appointment, and then spent the intervening hour doing some routine filing. My vision snapped back to normal at about 3:45, but some psychotic dwarves then arrived and began excavating my skull with chisels. The optician confirmed what I'd worked out: this was my second ever migraine. I left work early. My mother delivered Oisín back to me. I survived until he was asleep.Tuesday 13: I'd planned to take the morning off anyway, but my headache was still there (if not quite as bad), so I took the whole day off sick. The Oyster and I went to a La Leche League meeting in the morning, returning to find the contractors ready to begin rebuilding the garden wall (and incidentally, redoing the back garden, with paving and raised beds). They weren't able to get very far, though, because people were parked where they needed to position their heavy machinery. I spent some time trying to Freecycle our excess topsoil and some rather decent granite blocks. Doctor's appointment in the afternoon, where he warned me to take it very easy and signed me off sick for the rest of the week (viz. the following morning).
Wednesday 14: I made some more effort on the Freecycle front first thing in the morning. I needed rest. I took Oisín to the childminder as normal, and he collapsed in heinous distress. It was utterly horrible. I couldn't leave. I had to leave. I needed rest. I couldn't leave. I needed rest. I left him crying over jigsaws and stumbled home, hating myself and the world and everything about the stupid, awful situation. When I got home I phoned the childminder, to reassure myself that Oisín's upset hadn't lasted. He was howling in the background. She reassured me that he was fine. I cried. Oisín went on howling. I made her promise to phone me if it went on more than ten minutes longer. She told me he was fine. I wrote some novel and drank some tea and calmed down a bit. Some Freecyclers arrived to take away a small proportion of the topsoil and granite. (Which was better than nothing, but I still feel bad about having sent the rest to landfill.) When I went to collect Oisín after an early lunch, he was calm but subdued. The childminder said he'd been fine after the first little while. I tried to believe her. He said, "I was thinking about Mama." I told him I'd been thinking about him too. We went home to find the most amazing and brilliant thing ever: a JCB breaking up the concrete path in our garden, with the Finger Of God attachment that goes UDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDDUDD. We watched it out the window, and later, when it was doing less heavy-duty gathering and lifting, we had a ride in it. So cool! By evening, my headache was almost gone.
Thursday 15: Oisín and I had a lovely day together. He needed me very acutely - I couldn't be more than a few feet away from him before he started getting upset. I found it tiring, but I also totally understood where he was coming from. He remarked, unprompted, "I was thinking about Mama at [childminder's name]'s this morning on Wednesday." We went to toddler group. The contractors poured the foundation for our new wall, working in heavy rain. In the evening,
biascut came over for dinner and curtain-making. (Slowly but surely... But surely!)Friday 16: In the far too small hours - 3:40, to be precise - I woke to Oisín's crying and went to his room. He was standing at the door, very upset, and seemed in the dark to have had an enormous sneeze. When I went to his bed to get his bear, however, I found that it wasn't a sneeze: he had thrown up. I cleaned and changed him but left the bed as it was (it being 3:40) and took him to my bed. He had some milk, thrashed and whimpered for a while, and then threw up there too. Not as copiously, though, and I'd had the foresight to lay him on two or three thicknesses of towel. So I cleaned up again, and we both went to sleep for another few hours. When morning came it was a sad and sorry little boy I woke up to. He spent the day on the sofa - mostly with me - listless, pale, huddling under a duvet, sipping boiled water, and later essaying banana, toast and apple juice. I got his bedding changed and washed (twice - tenacious stuff, that), and that was about the limit of my achievements for the day. He didn't vomit again, thank goodness, and his long nap during the day had no adverse effect on his bedtime. I ended up eating Chinese takeaway on the sofa at about 9p.m. while watching a recorded episode of Top Gear and thinking, "What have I done with the real Radzer?"
Saturday 17: We had energy for nothing at all other than sallying forth to acquire the week's groceries. Managed to acquire half of them.
Sunday 18: Off to my parents' again (via their local supermarket), where Oisín was to stay while I went to my therapy appointment, and we were then to have lunch. Before we were half-way there, he was anxiously insisting that Mama would be staying with him and not going anywhere else. Alas, I was unable to accede, and yet again had to walk away from him while he cried for me. (After a year of not leaving him when he needed me, I have not been enjoying the return of the habit.) He didn't cry for long, my father said when I got back - but what he did do was fall fast asleep on the sofa. We spent the rest of the day at my parents', eating lunch and dinner, and then my sister again came home with us to help on Monday morning. Oisín's nap, predictably, led to another very late bedtime.
Monday 19 to Wednesday 21: This was the third week of work, and it was much easier all round. Oisín was perfectly sanguine about the childminding arrangements, for the first time; I conclude that he has realised that each separation is temporary and predictable. Work's fine, by the way - all the things that were good about it before are still good: nice employer, effective boss, excellent colleagues, interesting work. I've been pretty productive, too, which makes me feel pleasantly virtuous. Meanwhile, Oisín has taken a leap forward in clarity of expression, which it took
glitzfrau to point out to me must be because he's away from the person who best understands his speech and therefore has to work harder to make himself understood. (This also explains his exhaustion in the first few weeks - I remember the same thing from school exchanges.) We missed Niall, but video chat was fun. On Wednesday evening, my mother came and put Oisín to bed and minded him while I went to choir.Thursday 22 and Friday 23: We had a lovely time together, and Oisín needed a lot less from me, which was a relief. He did beautiful paintings, which I must get around to photographing at some point. St James's Hospital, to whom I'd sent my GP's request for an ultrasound (to check out that gall-bladder thing), sent me an appointment for 12 July. Being the privileged sort that I am, I resolved to go private. Meanwhile, I got the (all clear) results of a smear test I'd had in - wait for it - August, which is apparently an entirely routine interval. Such is the sorry mess in which we find the Irish health system. Our garden wall ended the week in an almost finished state - just the final coat of plaster to be applied to the inside.
Saturday 24: I was running out of steam somewhat by now. Single parenthood, it turns out, is on the tiring side. We didn't make it to the La Leche League coffee morning and book sale, or to the Dublin Food Co-op. We just about made it to the supermarket.
Sunday 25: In line with his generally calmer state of mind, Oisín was much more sanguine than the previous week about being left with my parents while I went to therapy. Lunch followed, and the afternoon was pleasantly punctuated by a visit to a garden centre, where I bought compost for the new raised beds, my mother bought climbing plants, and my sister and the Oyster discussed bird tables. In the early evening, we gave him something to eat, and then my sister came home with us for her final Sunday night / Monday morning aunting stint. (She is, in case you were wondering, the best aunt ever in the long and illustrious history of aunts.) We put him to bed, then had dinner, then did some work on the ridiculously filthy and chaotic kitchen, then she went to bed and I wrote for a while before heading that way myself.
Monday 26: Niall's two
Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28: The rest of the month went off smoothly enough. The raised beds got built (of reclaimed brick, which somewhat makes up for my cowardice in not pushing the contractor to investigate eco-friendly cement, argh), the step up to the raised area at the south end got made, and the paving (Indian sandstone, because we're dead posh) began to be laid. (Presumably, Indian sandstone will shortly be exposed as the next big global ethics scandal. Sorry, world.) It's going to be beautiful when it's done. I can't wait. Meanwhile, I
yiskah's novel, The Angel Makers, which is absolutely gorgeous, and which needs to become a runaway word-of-mouth success forthwith, or I'll want to know why.March
So far, March has included yet another bloody doctor's visit (still nauseous and generally urgh-feeling, definitely not pregnant), an evening with
kulfuldi and her sister, more great art from the Oyster, an ultrasound scan (nothing abnormal - and specifically, no gallstones, which is good), a christening (we didn't make the ceremony, owing to the inconsiderate placement of Manorhamilton in relation to Carrick-on-Shannon: they're altogether too far apart), another Sunday at my parents', and quite a lot of novel-writing (partially inspired by yiskah's achievement, of course). I actually have a fair stab at finishing a coherent draft within the next few weeks - which would be too, too utterly marvellous for the puny English language to express.Could the next couple of months or so be kind of boring, please? Kthxbye.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 12:06 am (UTC)hurray for Niall being back, though!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 11:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-06 02:58 pm (UTC)Also, I'm very sorry to say that I did actually read an exposé on Indian sandstone only the other week. But sssh. You didn't, and you are Not to be Beating Yourself Up, do you hear?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-07 10:04 am (UTC)do have a nice boring time of it for a while, you should, you really should.
and how i wish i had a sister.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-08 11:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-12 09:46 pm (UTC)