Scattered

So it’s been 6 days with a newborn in the house and as expected, things have been utter chaos. Despite my best efforts, I’ve become a cliché with all grown up talks with Andy revolving around feeding schedules, poo consistency, thoughts about gas and our ongoing argument on whether the baby is too hot or too cold. Compounded with all this is the lack of sleep which to be fair, I’m not handling gracefully. I’ve never had the best record for sleep. 6 hours is my typical night of sleep and if I don’t get those 6 hours then I tend to turn into a four headed monster – moody, difficult, impossible – basically I revert back to a 2 year old.

Saturday was when I hit my wall. I had done 4 days on 4 hours sleep (sometimes that 4 hours broken up into 45 minute segments) and it was my turn to do the couch sleeping night shift. While Henry can sleep for 3 hours solid before requiring any of his basic needs, that particular night he was up demanding something every half hour. I just lost it. I don’t mean I lost it in the sense that I screamed and yelled or threw anything, I just broke down. There was a point at 5 AM where I’m feeding Henry for the 5th time that evening and tears are just rolling down my face. I’m sobbing. And I couldn’t stop sobbing. I was just so tired and overwhelmed. Typically when I hit a wall like that, when things get too much for me at work, or in a relationship, or if I’m just having one of those days when everything goes tits up, I leave. I leave and go for a drive or I leave and go to the pub or I leave and go sit in a park…I just leave. The fact that I couldn’t leave made me break down that much further and I ended up waking up Andy around 6 AM, eyes all puffy and red and tears still streaming telling him over and over again that I was sorry and that I couldn’t do it anymore. My husband is awesome. He put me to bed where I slept for almost 5 hours. Then last night, he sent me to bed at 11 PM and let me just sleep….and sleep…and sleep. I never thought that being given 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep would be as romantic as a getting a surprise shag in the middle of a car park, but my god…it is.

Today I feel normal again. My brain seems to be able to process more than “hungry = eat food”. I feel up to making important decisions like deciding to cut out Facebook and news\blog reading for the week so I can utilize Henry’s sleeping hours to actually unpack a box or two….or prepare a meal more complicated than a bowl of cereal…or to take a fucking shower.

3 days later…

Very typically, after I wrote “fucking shower” Henry started screaming and I completely forgot to finish this up until right now. Part of that was due to the fact that because I had gotten some sleep I managed to find the energy to tackle some of the boxes littering every corner of our house. I’m proud to announce that my kitchen is back. Well, as back and complete as it’s going to be. Even though the physical size of our UK kitchen appears to be the same size as our US kitchen, the kitchen cabinets here aren’t as deep or as wide as the ones in the US and I’ve had to go through and repack things that we don’t immediately need. Like barware. I know! The barware! My theory behind packing the barware away is that we don’t exactly have a group of friends here yet to invite over for BBQ’s and the likelihood that Henry will let us get out and about to make such a group of friends is away off still so…away it goes. In another Shit We Paid to Ship that’s Completely Useless Here are my baking trays. My baking trays are made for those wonderfully wide US ovens and simply don’t fit in my UK oven. Not that I didn’t try. Holding one of the baking trays in hand I could physically see that the tray was too wide for the oven but it still didn’t stop me for trying to jam it in. Not that it would have worked, but the tray didn’t even fit if I put the tray on an angle. Looking back I’m not sure why I tried to fit the tray in at an angle – I think maybe if it fit that way I would have gotten all smug and justified that we paid to bring it over…or something.

By the way, I’m doing pretty well at my Facebook ban. I couldn’t manage to give up blog reading and a little news reading but I haven’t logged on to Facebook for 3 days now and I feel…a bit free really. I might have to continue my ban for longer than a week – or modify it a bit and only check in once a week.

This is a random post, isn’t it? It kind of reflects my brain at the moment. Like now I want to tell you that Andy has gotten me hooked on “Jonathan Creek”, a now cancelled mystery show that humors me to no end. In the two specials that I’ve seen so far (which with a baby takes us 2-3 days to watch) the main character will solve the murder and announce how he solved the murder TO the murderer (or relative of the murderer) and yet the murderer doesn’t feel inclined to, you know, MURDER the main character. Yeah, I know…I’m easily amused these days.

So I know this post isn’t that entertaining but my sweet son is about to roar his head in hunger so it’s the best I can give you for now.