A Cry for Help

(This post was originally written last Tuesday, but has been delayed due to excessive busy, as well as lack of sleep and general bad temperedness, read on for the details)

Wit’s End - Where jokes go to die.

It’s a story that will be familiar to many of you, but here is my own version of the old classic, “Help, I’m the parent of a two year old who refuses to sleep and won’t do anything she’s told.”

As with all good stories this one starts with a change in the weather.  The hot weather has really messed us up unfortunately, none more so than the little tyrant.  Although it has been a particularly hard time for my wife who is (I hope I get this right) 28 weeks pregnant, but whose bump, according to the funky little bump chart measurement thingTM (I am available for all your technical term needs) is actually measuring about 3 weeks bigger than it should be.  This,  coupled with the heat (did I mention it was warm?), has made things extra difficult for B looking after the monster.  

Another side effect of the hot weather, which has been really quite warm, is that N has not been going to sleep.  I choose to assume it is the hot weather as then I can lull myself into the, probably foolish, hope that once it cools down a bit this will improve.  I have devoted words on this blog already to the subject of my daughter’s exceptional sleep regime so I won’t rehash that, except to say that things are in no way as bad as they were for the first 10 months of her life, which we affectionately refer to round here as the lost months, and I am very grateful that I have bumped my sleep average up to about 6 hours a night now, positively blissful.  However, gratitude aside, it is getting just a little wearing that whilst N will sleep all the way through now, which sounds great, we need to drill down into those numbers just a little.  Let me especially highlight the Time of First Sleep (TOFS) number which is currently fluctuating between 9 and 10:30pm.  Which when you compare that with the Time of First Awakening (TOFA) number of 5-6am leaves you with an equation which spits out the nightmarish number for Length of Sleep for Two Year Old (LOSFTYO) of around 8 hours.  This may be enough for you and me, it is not enough to prevent my two year old daughter from turning into a whining, exhausted, misbehaving wreck of a little girl.

We have tried a number of things to solve the problem.  From cutting out the afternoon sleep which she has still been having - doesn’t work as she won’t go to sleep much earlier and she becomes impossible to deal with by about 4 o’clock if we try that - to trying to get her to sleep in longer in the mornings - also hasn’t work as she has a built in Daddy’s Going Downstairs, Must Go Down With Him (DGDMGDWH, I think she needs to work on her acronyms) alarm which goes off whenever she hears me creeping downstairs.  Unfortunately she is just at the moment in a cycle where she is not getting enough sleep, is hot and bothered, and is driving us both crazy.

Anyway, this is all a fairly long winded preamble to letting you know that for a while this blog may have to come with a Danger, Lack of Jokes (DLOJ) warning sign while we all wait for things to cool off.  Oh and hopefully this hot weather will stop as well.

Down the Garden Path

It’s got hot.  Very hot.  So hot that the internal combustion engine that keeps me warm in the coldest temperatures in winter is currently squinting at the thermometer and relishing the fact that it has finally found some serious competition.  It has bought itself some training shoes and recruited a personal trainer and is really getting into shape, I think it’s building itself up for the heating Olympics.  This will likely sound familiar to many of you who also feeling the heat a bit, but I say it to try to explain why I am currently struggling to put one word after another in a way that is anything other than arrant gibberish (it may also go someway to explaining why I find the word arrant quite so bewitching.  It clearly means nothing at all, but has the potential to go with pretty much everything to brighten things up, much like salad cream really.

Behold My Works

I’m hot.  This makes me grumpy, and sweeps away any vestiges of comedic ability that I might have.  Which is not great when there is a blog post to write and funnies to be made.  However, in the midst of my wallowing in self pity, which is generally the case with me when the temperature gets up above 20 degrees, about 70 Fahrenheit for those of you who speak foreign, I began to wonder about the little girl, whether she was feeling as hot and grumpy as me.  It would certainly explain the fact that she has just completely demolished one of her toys.  Literally, it is sat in bits in the middle of the floor right now looking reproachfully at me as I write this instead of fixing it.

Hang on, just wait there a moment please.

There, sorry about that, it’s done now, back in pristine condition waiting to be pulled apart again .  Which brings me to a question that I want to ask.  Why is my daughter such a destructoid?  I can foresee a great career in wrecking for her.  I think her dream holiday would be a tour of Britain’s 100 biggest demolition sites.

We all Scream for Sun Cream

You will have noticed the total lack of topicality so far in these posts.  All of the stories I have told so far took place before or at the birth of our daughter, who is currently galloping up on 18 months with the speed of someone who really has no right to be riding a horse and is struggling to stay in the saddle.  Seriously though, where have 17 months gone?  My old philosophy teacher had a theory about time and the way it sped up when you got older, if it is true I think having a child has aged me by about 50 years.  All the stories so far have taken place well over a year ago anyway, but all that changes today.  Today, to coincide with the 5 days of sun which will make up the summer, I am going to talk about sun cream.