I’ve just bought BlogPress for my iDevices, mainly so I can help my son Jacob keep his blog record of our forthcoming trip to Florida up to date, but I thought I’d test it out with my own blog too. So here you go…
How’s it looking?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
FINALLY GOT A WIFI CONNECTION SO POSTING THIS, WHICH I WROTE LAST WEEK:
I am writing this on the patio of the house we’re renting for two weeks in the South of France. As I type a bank of thick black cloud is heading this way from the small row of mountains to the north, and there’s a slight chill breeze in the air. This is the first sign of potential inclement weather we’ve had in the 8 days we’ve been here, and to be honest it’s not entirely unwelcome. It’s been pretty hot for the last few days, although with our own private pool in the garden, it’s not been too difficult to cool down.
Not too difficult, although still pretty difficult mind you. Because when you’re on holiday with four small children everything is a drama. Back in the good old days of holidays pre children, you’d get back from a hot and sticky day out exploring your environs, and jump straight in the pool to cool off. Now, it takes four days of working up the courage to go out exploring, and when you do finally get around to it you’re reminded why you were so reticent – rural France was not built with double buggies in mind, so there’s an awful lot of carrying involved, as well as trying to remember drinks, change bag, snacks, all while trying to keep track of a hyperactive, accident-prone four-year-old and a hyper-sensitive six-year-old, both of whose primary objective on any day out is to seek out like laser-guided missiles every gift shop and ice cream stall this side of the Seine. When you finally get back, exhausted but gratified from having braved the world outside your villa, all thoughts of washing off the hot sticky day by plunging into a lovely, cool, azure oasis are abruptly put on hold. There are two nappies to change (oops, did we really forget to check what they’d been up to in the knicker department throughout the entirety of the day out), two babies to cook for and then feed, two children to figure out a way to keep entertained while repeatedly telling them it’s only a few more minutes until they can go in the pool, then what seems like an endless round of tidying up and sweeping underneath the chairs where the babies have just greeted the tea you’ve lovingly prepared for them by picking it up by the fistful and determinedly throwing it on the floor, before arriving at the heartbreaking realisation that there’s no way on Earth you can get away with not bathing them tonight after they’ve been crawling around in ochre-coloured sand and sweating in 34 degree heat. Once they’re clean and finally in bed you have no choice but to ignore their plaintiff wails in disgust at the concept of being separated from the rest of the family, as you wonder whether you still have the energy to get into your swimming trunks, and while doing so realise that the novelty of the idea of jumping into the pool at the end of a hot day has entirely worn off and now you’re just doing it because you had decided two hours ago that you really wanted to. Thirty seconds after finally getting into the water, while contemplating the fact that it would have been nice in the late afternoon when you were really hot, but now the sun’s gone down and it’s late evening and actually the water’s a bit bloody parky thank you very much, you then have to engage in a lengthy explanation of why daddy doesn’t have the energy to play the diving game, and yes I did promise but it will have to wait until tomorrow now.
The dark clouds I saw on the horizon as I started writing this have just started depositing little droplets on the screen of my iPad, so I had better continue this inside.
OK, screen dried, me safely deposited in a nice comfy armchair (why don’t I have one of these at home?), now where was I? The impression you’d get from what I’ve written so far is that we’re having a horrific time, but we’re not at all. It’s really quite lovely, just totally exhausting and it keeps hitting me just how incredibly far removed it is from the relaxing summer holidays you dream of, and which we used to be so good at long ago before we had children. Whether it’s mooching round the shops and cafés of a Tuscan hilltop idyll, sipping cocktails on a Caribbean beach, driving directionless around the hills of California, these are all memories that flood back into mind in the few moments of P&Q we manage to steal here, when the babies are having their afternoon nap and the big boys are safely ensconced in front of a DVD. But these moments of fantasy are usually rudely awakened after precious few minutes by a “daaaddy, can you wipe my bottom” or “daddy, watch me jump into the pool for the four hundredth time today in a slightly different way.”
The main thing that gets us through the day here in booze, in copious quantities. The local plonk is Côtes de Provence rosé, for which you struggle to pay more than 3€ a bottle, and which is significantly more delicious than the vast majority of other wine I’ve ever tasted, not to mention as drinkable as bottle of Evian. As far as I’m concerned, it would be rude not to open a bottle around lunch time, i.e. midday. Given that we’re rarely out of bed much before 10 I guess you could argue that we’re bordering on the alcoholic, but hey, we’re on holiday.
The days are punctuated by mealtimes. Actually punctuated probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like dominated. The babies are generally screaming blue murder by the time we get them up as it’s been 15 hours since they last ate/drank and they are quite frankly appalled by the shockingly poor parenting skills that would leave them in bed a second past 7am in the name of attempting to get some holiday R&R. How dare we. So we rush to give them breakfast, followed by the big boys and finally us. About three hours later we decide it’s time to feed twins again as the only way we can cope with the afternoon is to get them into bed for a hopefully lengthy afternoon nap. They generally flat out refuse to eat any lunch, being firmly of the opinion that they’ve only just finished breakfast and what the hell are you doing trying to feed us again so soon, you rubbish parents. Once they’ve finally screamed themselves to sleep, we feed the rest of us, a process which tends to take up the majority of nap time, so within a few minutes of any planned afternoon rest time, a desperate cry, or two, finds its way down the stairs and it’s time to entertain the little’uns again. Before you know it it’s time to feed them yet again, and it was their tea this evening which prompted the surreal-sounding title of this post. You see the climate here is so lovely that we’re often tempted of an evening to move their highchairs out on to the patio for a little dinner al fresco. And the ants of Provence must think it’s Christmas every day that the Hirschkorn twins are in town, thanks to the aforementioned sport of liberally depositing the majority of the contents of their plates (and often the plates themselves, too) on the floor. There are an awful lot of ants here, and they appear within seconds of even the tiniest droplet of fruit juice hitting the ground. But they haven’t had to make do with tiny droplets. Today alone they’ve been treated to great big hunks of baguette, scrambled egg, ketchup, fruit purée, fish fingers, chips, carrots, barbecue sauce, salmon, and Prince biscuits. I can happily report that salmon is a particular favourite of the provencal ants, with swarms around one chunk that fell from barbecue (my fault this time, not the twins) to rival any gruesome horror flick.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, we are having a lovely time. The highlights so far have been mostly, apart from the wine, getting to spend real quality time with the children, all four of them. I’ve been teaching son number 1 to play chess and I can see that he’s going to have a real gift for it. I’ve been helping son number 2 to get over his fear of being in the water without arm bands and he’s making real progress. Twin 1 has been hard at work on his very recently acquired skill of walking, and spending time with his parents has really brought out the sweet, jolly side of his personality. And twin 2 has just been making us laugh and coo with his limitless bags of charm and good humour. On top of all that, I’ve got to spend real time with my wife, not in front of the television, and it’s been lovely to steal the odd moment in amongst feeding, cleaning and entertaining to remember some of the things that brought us together in the early days.
Well, another day is over, and if we manage to make it out of bed any reasonable distance before midday tomorrow, then another day out exploring Provence beckons, so I’d better call it a night.
I’ve just discovered that the WordPress app I have on my newly-acquired iPad is actually iPad-optimised, which means it will be a lot nicer to use than the iPhone version, which you can’t really use to type anything meaningful. I’m typing this on the on-screen keyboard and I’m amazed how much it is like typing on a real keyboard.
The upshot of all this is that it marginally increases the chances of me reviving this blog, which it seems I have not updated for six months. Only marginally, mind you. I’m not going to write anything of interest now as it’s getting late. We’ll just have to see if I come back in the next few days. I know, I know you can barely contain yourselves.
There are not many times in your life when the cliché in the title of this post can be used with any real meaning, but now is one of those times. This week I made one of the biggest decisions of my life and I’m in equal measure excited and terrified about the turn life is about to take. I was about to say “my life” but it’s not just mine. My entire family is affected by this decision: my wife, all four of my children, even my parents.
A bit of history: when I was growing up, I always swore I’d never end up doing the same thing as my dad. Now don’t get me wrong. I have an enormous amount of respect for my dad. He’s been very successful for a lot of his working life, and he’s very good at what he does, which for the sake of simplicity can be summed up as follows – buying clothes, and then selling them for more than he paid for them. This line of work has taken on various guises over the past 35 years, from running a high street shop, to a being in charge of the manufacturing for a major high street brand, from being a wheeler-dealer wholesaler to running a distribution company responsible for the interests of a range of big-name American labels. The trouble for me was that, well, it just wasn’t for me. I have about as much interest in clothes as my wife does in the result of last weekend’s Grand Prix. So it could be argued that it wasn’t exactly my finest hour when, a little over 5 years ago, I totally ignored my own lifetime of advice, and joined the family business. If I’m honest, it was a bit of a heat of the moment decision, having recently entered the world of parenthood and being seduced by the promise of a regular income, which seemed so much more appealing that the daily grind of pitches and rejections that was my freelance career.
Fast-forward five and a half years, and I have been increasingly plagued by thoughts that, at 34, I can no longer claim to be young and have my whole life ahead of me. I’m not quite at the stage of mid-life crisis just yet, but I have been hit by the realisation that if I don’t sort out my career soon, I could suddenly find myself in my mid-to-late 40s, regretting that I wasted my working life doing a job that was neither challenging nor fulfilling.
I’m not sure if “synchronistically” is a word, but I intend to use it in the current context. Synchronistically, the amazingly talented, creative paragon of organisational prowess who is my wife, has defied all logic by having a career that is going from strength to strength, despite having given birth to sons number 3 and 4 less than 10 months ago. As well as regular appearances in national newspapers (not to mention on television and radio) she has launched, edited, and provided swathes of content for various consumer-focused public sector websites. The volume of work she’s had coming in has placed a serious strain on her work-life balance, as it won’t come as any great surprise that finding anyone willing to take on a childcare role for four boys aged 6 and under is quite a challenge, notwithstanding the fact that she’s their mummy and she’s not overly keen on farming them out, when nobody can care for them as well as their parents.
MrsH was getting overwhelmed with work to the point where she was considering jacking it all in to look after the kids. And then it occurred to me: where would be the sense in throwing away the exciting, and increasingly frequent, opportunities that are coming her way, in order for me to pursue my career that didn’t appear to be going anywhere fast? And so it came to pass, on Wednesday 2nd December 2009, that I decided it should be me to give up my job for the sake of redressing our family’s work-life balance.
Now this is, sadly, not a license for me to become a full-time househusband, being kept by my superstar journalist wife. Not at all, in fact. But what it is is an opportunity to get off the road I’ve been going down for the last few years thanks to a questionable career choice, and get back to doing the things I have a passion for, which include writing and being a professional geek, while at the same time having more time for my family. The short-term goal is to relaunch my career as a freelance writer and IT consultant – so if anyone’s reading this with whom I used to work in those sectors, rest assured that I will be in touch soon! In the long term, MrsH and I intend to collaborate on a variety of projects, combining her prodigious writing, researching and organisational skills with my technical knowhow and business experience, so we can share our lives and responsibilities much better than we have been for the last few years.
So for those of you who have been wondering about my cryptic tweets and posts on Facebook of the last few days, now you know. And to all my friends and colleagues in publishing and technology, I look forward to working with you again soon.
I don’t know if it’s down to the stress of having four children or whether it’s just because I’m getting old, but I have become a total physical wreck in recent weeks.
As I have posted (probably at great length) previously, I have developed a most upsetting tendency towards coming down with tonsillitis at the drop of a hat. It seems not a sniffle or bug can pass through my house without the bacteria who inhabit my throat thinking this signals party time. I have had confirmed cases at least five times in the last couple of years, three of which have been in the past few months, and two since the twins were born. The last time was particularly horrendous, to the point where I decided it was time to visit an Ear, Nose & Throat specialist to get something done about it. Not surprisingly, his recommendation was to get a tonsillectomy. As he put it, “No tonsils, no tonsillitis.” So I’m booked in for the big op in about 3 weeks time, and it sounds absolutely horrific. Recovery takes two weeks, which as I’m sure you can imagine MrsH is totally delighted about, as the sous-parent will be out of commission for much longer than is acceptable. I’m lead to believe that the pain will be severe, and if you look at the list of medication I will be receiving post-op, you’d think I was opening my own pharmacy. When my throat isn’t hurting, I often wonder why on earth am I putting myself through this. But within the last few hours my throat has started to twinge again (two days after my last course of antibiotics finished), reminding me that I am living my entire life in fear of the symptoms returning and knocking me out from both my work and parenting duties for days at a time with worrying frequency.
As if this wasn’t enough, I have developed the mother of all bad backs in the last week or two. It started as a little twinge in my lower back, which I put down to the unusual position I keep sitting in, on our increasingly knackered sofa, to feed the babies. But as the days have gone by it has got worse and worse, to the point where I sound (and feel) like an old man every time I sit down, get up, bend over or roll over in bed. I’ve never before experienced so much difficulty at putting on my socks, not to mention the constant desire of at least three of my four children to be carried everywhere (the two smallest ones often need to be carried simultaneously).
MrsH has pointed out that I’ve started to remind her of a certain chronic hypochondriac member of my family (who will remain nameless – we’ll refer to him/her as Relative A). The rest of the family long ago gave up starting conversations with this particular person in the generally accepted, polite way – “How are you?” – for fear of being regaled with hour-long stories about the latest stomach bug, ingrowing toenail or worse. It feels pretty awkward greeting someone with a “Hello” and then launching into the rest of the conversation with the requisite “How are you?”, but needs must…As far as I’m concerned, the principal difference between me and Relative A is that I am actually suffering these problems, whereas Relative A is usually just ill because they believe themselves to be. But maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe Relative A really does have a genetic propensity to suffer from every imaginable condition under the sun, and my own genes that I share with Relative A are starting to exhibit their phenotype as my defenses are weakened by the continual influx of children into my life. I bloody hope not.
To top it all, my smugness about having twin babies under three months old capable of sleeping through the night came back to slap me in the face last night. Because when you have four children, it doesn’t matter if they’re all good sleepers. On any given night, there is a pretty good chance that at least one of them will be ill/have had a big nap in the afternoon meaning they’re not tired/have bad dreams – delete as appropriate. In the early hours of this morning – at about 12:30 in fact – it was son number two’s turn. He woke up screaming, so I rushed downstairs to find he’d had a nightmare, and refused to go back to his own bed. In my semi-comatose state, I was defenseless against his demands to come into our bed. Cue virtually no sleep for the rest of the night as he wriggled, rolled over, continually whacked me in the face with an errant arm, and kneed me in the back. And just as I was thinking that I might get a couple of hours of peace at around half past five, who should awaken but baby number 2/son number 4, the model baby who never wakes up before 7am, who had taken it upon himself to choose this morning from hell to get the munchies an hour and a half ahead of schedule. Incidentally, upon further quizzing this morning, it turns out that the nightmare had involved Elmo and a cat – hardly the most threatening of protagonists, you’d have thought.
If I didn’t have enough excuses to feel like wreck before, I certainly bloody do now. I need a break, which in other circumstances would be an example of extremely fortuitous timing, given that a three-day weekend will be upon us in a matter of hours. But in the chaotic world that is a house with four small children, something tells me this particular May Day break is not going to be all that restful.
12 hours. That’s how long the babies slept last night. And I thought last week’s jump up to 6 hours was impressive.
Their ability to sleep quite so long was discovered rather by accident. The night before last, we were exhausted so went to bed early and I set the alarm to wake me up for their bedtime feed at 11pm. Only, in my hazy brain state, I actually set the alarm for 11am. So I woke up at around 1 in the morning wondering (a) why the alarm hadn’t gone off; and (b) why the babies hadn’t woken me up anyway. Never mind, I thought. I’ll just wait for them to wake me whenever they’re ready. I then proceeded to have a horribly disturbed night, waking up by myself about once an hour, wondering what on earth had happened to my babies. They eventually decided to make their presence felt at 5am, not the nicest time of day to have to get up, but considering their last feed had been at 5 the previous afternoon, this got us to thinking.
So yesterday evening we fed them at a more normal time of 6:30, and decided to test the theory of how long they would go after that. I was woken by a complaining Jonah at 6:30 on the dot this morning.
This is huge. Assuming, of course, that this is a pattern they intend to continue, and not just a temporary blip for a few days. It means no more sleepless nights, no worrying about what time to go to bed. The ability to get consecutive, full, unbroken nights of sleep marks a return to normality that makes life with 4 children so much more bearable.
Of course, 4 children still take something like 3 hours to get up, fed and dressed in the morning, so even with a 6:30 start today I was still rushing to get Max to nursery at 9:15. But we’re making progress. In a few months’ time, we might even be able to be out of the house within two and a half hours.
Have you missed me? It’s over a month since I last posted (sounds like a confession – forgive me father, it’s been five weeks since my last blog post). The reason I haven’t posted is because in between looking after four children, doing stupid amounts of household chores, getting very little sleep and trying to keep my business afloat in the middle of a recession, I haven’t exactly had much in the way of spare time. When you have two babies in the house who need to be fed every four hours, you find yourself living from one feed to the next, using the two-and-a-half to three hours between the end of one feed and the start of the next to wash and sterilise bottles, sort out vast piles of laundry, sneak a minute or two to play with the other children, or sleep. We always knew that the first couple of months with newborn twins was going to be a slog, and boy were we right.
But today, I am feeling more human than I have felt in a very long time. The reasons for this are twofold. The first, and most important is that the last few days have been momentous in the life of our newly expanded family: the babies seem finally to have cracked night time sleeping. They have been going at least 6 hours at night for about the last five days, and last night they managed a near miraculous 9 hours. I didn’t bother setting my alarm clock this morning (as I haven’t for many weeks) as I expected to get woken up at some point between 5 and 6am. When I was finally roused at 7:45 it was actually by Max, not one of the babies (although they did wake up a couple of minutes later). It’s incredible the difference it makes to your psyche, when you get to have a few unbroken nights’ sleep. And it’s not just because of saying goodbye to getting up at 3 in the morning night after night, which leaves you feeling like a zombie for the rest of the day, even if you get to go back to bed for a few hours afterwards. It’s the little details, like getting to go to bed at the same time as your wife, instead of creeping around in the darkness trying not to wake her after the late night feed, so that she can get enough sleep to deal with early morning feed and similarly creep around trying not to wake me. Of course this may not last, and I may be getting way ahead of myself here, but I have to work on the assumption that we are past the worst. And boy does it feel good.
The second reason is that I am all alone in the house tonight, for the first time in years. Ursula, in her misguided efforts to get through the school holidays in one piece, decided to take all four boys down to her parents for a couple of days. I say misguided because, if you’d seen the amount of stuff she had to pack in the car this morning for a two day trip to country, you’d think it would have been considerably easier to just cope on your own with four kids for a couple of days.
Now you may think being alone in a house that is normally residence to six people would be a lonely affair. But you’d be very, very wrong. If I stop tapping on this keyboard, the only sound I can hear is an occasional car passing by my living room window. I have not had to bath anyone tonight. I have not had to read any stories. I have not had to shout at anyone for eating their dinner too slowly. I have not had to tell anyone that no, tonight is not a special night so they have to go to bed now, not in two hours’ time. I can go to bed whenever I choose, without having to think about how it fits in with babies’ feeding time. I will sleep more peacefully than I have in years, knowing that the only sound that will wake me will be my alarm clock tomorrow morning – if I remember to set it when I go to bed. In the morning, I will have one person to wash, dress and feed, not five (no I haven’t taken to showering or clothing the wife yet, although I do sometimes make her breakfast). There will be no school run, no arguments over when was the last time they had coco pops and whether they’re allowed them again, no bottles to wash, no screaming babies. The P&Q in the title of this blog refers to pure, unadulterated peace and quiet. Sheer bliss.
Now there is a possibility that by this time tomorrow, the loneliness will have started to kick in. I might just miss the cuddles with the babies, listening to another one of Jacob’s flights of fantasy about aliens or spaceships or being a pilot or a scientist, trying to keep a straight face while failing to instill any discipline into the irrepressibly cheeky Max, snatching a rare moment to have a conversation with my wife in between putting the children to bed and the start of The Apprentice. But if I’m honest, probably not. I have a feeling I can probably cope with just one more day of solitude without too much pain. When I get home from work on Thursday, mayhem will have returned, and there won’t be another break from it for the foreseeable future. So I intend to make the most of this very rare opportunity.
For the record, much has happened in the last month, which, were I a more dedicated blogger, would have been reported in more detail. The key points are:
1. We finally took delivery of our new bus, aka the Renault Grand Espace. It’s absolutely, in fact slightly scarily, enormous, but so far I’ve been very impressed with it. It may not be much of a looker but it’s incredibly practical with room for all six of us and plenty of space to spare, very comfortable and pretty well equipped, and it’s much nippier than you’d expect for something that ought to have a big number 23 sign above the windscreen. Ursula has been reluctant to cede full use of her Nissan Qashqai to me, eager to feel as much as she can that she’s still a yummy mummy rather than a bus driver, but all in all the upgrade has been a success.
2. We had the week from hell as far as family health was concerned. Ursula started proceedings by spending the weekend laid up with a nasty virus involving a sore throat, aches and pains and unbearable fatigue. I promptly caught it off her just as she was recovering and spent a couple of days feeling pretty ropey myself. Just as I thought I was getting better, I realised that my sore throat was, if anything, getting worse. Within 24 hours it was apparent that my illness had mutated into my traditional tonsilitis, the worst bout I’ve had in a very long time. At one point I was in so much pain it actually made me cry, something I don’t think has happened for about 25 years. All in all I was out of commission for five days, not ideal during the busiest time of the year at work, or when you’ve got two 7 week old babies that need looking after. To top things off, on the Friday, which was my worst day, Jonah came down with a very high fever, something that is very rare, and very worrying in such a young baby. Ursula took him to A&E and he ended up getting admitted, and spending 48 hours in the hospital. After a barrage of tests, it turned out that it was just a viral infection, probably the same one we’d both had, and after plenty of calpol and TLC, he was well on the road to recovery. So all was well in the end, but it was a very scary and traumatic few days, and I don’t think we’d have got through them without the amazing help and support of both Ursula’s and my parents. We’re very lucky to have so many people around us who care so much about our family.
There’s plenty more I could talk about, but having now spent the majority of my night off in front of the keyboard, I feel I ought to go and do something more appropriate like crack open another beer and fire up Resident Evil on the Wii. The reality is, I’ll probably go to bed in a minute. Oh dear.
It’s pretty unbelievable that Zach and Jonah are already a month old. You don’t notice the changes so much when you see them every day, but when you think back to a month ago, the most marked difference is in their size. When they were born, they seemed unimaginably tiny. I had to rush out to Mothercare on the day we got home from the hospital to get a load of tiny baby sized clothes and nappies because, being twins, and being born a couple of weeks before their due date, they were a fair bit smaller than average at first. They comfortably slept side by side in the hospital crib, and then in a moses basket when we got home.
The tiny baby vests and babygrows have long since been consigned to the top shelf of the wardrobe, never to be worn again. And no, this time they will not be heading into a box in the loft, because we will most definitely not be needing them again. And the babies are now comfortably filling out a moses basket each, and it seems absurd that they could have gone in one together so recently. At their most recent weigh-in, they were both hovering around the 8lb mark. For Jonah, that means a 33% increase in body weight. When you look at it like that, it’s no wonder they seem so big now.
The other thing that grows hand in hand with the babies is the amount of formula they get through. The stuff costs a bloody fortune, and between them they’re getting through one of those big tubs of powder about every three or four days. We’re thinking about moving them up to the next stage (level 2 “for hungrier babies”) as they’re frequently polishing off their bottles and I can’t imagine it would be good for them, or even feasible, to ingest any more fluid in a day. I am also living in the vain hope that this will encourage them to go longer between feeds, consequently allowing us to get more sleep at night. Well a man can dream, can’t he.
As I write this, the baby monitor is sitting across the table, flashing and squawking at me, the signal that it is once again time to go and attend to my fatherly duties. So I’d better cut this short…
I’ve been working on this blogging business for about six months now. Ursula started hers (at fourdownmumtogo.blogspot.com) a few days ago and already it’s funnier than mine, and getting more reaction than mine. I guess that’s the price you pay for being married to a professional writer.
…when you’re having babies. The little monsters are three and a half weeks old already, and as you may have noticed, I have very much struggled to find the time to sit in front of my computer and add anything to this blog.
I was at home on paternity leave until the end of last week, and as far as I recall, I spent pretty much every waking moment (and a large proportion of my non-waking moments!) either feeding or changing one or other baby, or washing bottles or doing laundry or some other delightful task. I have been back at work since Monday and in four days haven’t come within a country mile of clearing the backlog of stuff that was created while I was away.
To be fair, this week has been a heck of a lot easier than it should have been, thanks to my totally bonkers mother-in-law who has done the night feeds for the last 5 nights. I know exactly how awful she must be feeling by now, as I did a 7 day stretch the week before. It’s not the number of hours of sleep you get that does you in – it’s quite possible to get a total 6 or 7 hours a night in 1 and half to 2 hour chunks – it’s the lack of any long stretches of sleep. Five hours of unbroken sleep is an awful lot more restorative than 7 hours in bits and pieces. Tonight is the last night of the night-nanny service for a while, so I’d better make the most of it. Ursula and I are still working on the details of how the nights are going to work when we have to do them by ourselves and all get up and out for school and work in the morning. It’s not going to be fun.
So I’ve got a few minutes to kill before the bedtime feed (hence having time to write this) after which I will hand back over to the mother-in-law and not see any babies again until I get home from work tomorrow afternoon. I was planning to catch up on some of the contents of the Sky+ box while waiting to feed the boys, but that hasn’t been too successful, owing to the implementation of the famous Hirschkorn let-the-buggers-scream-themselves-to-sleep plan. This is a tried and tested childcare method which I’m convinced is the reason that both Jacob and Max are good sleepers, while so many of their friends and cousins are not. It’s also one of the hardest things you can do as a parent. The theory goes like this: if your baby is fed, winded, and clean of nappy, then they’ve got pretty much everything a baby could need to make them happy. If said happiness is not forthcoming, there is frankly buggerall you as a parent can do about it. Sure, you can pick them up and cuddle them, you can keep running up to their room every two minutes to stick a dummy in their mouth, only for them to start screaming again the second the dummy falls out, you can sing them a song, you can put them in a bouncy chair. But the second any of these activities stops, the baby will start crying again. And the more they associate this crying with all these forms of stimulation, the more reinforced these behaviour patterns will become, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve when you’re attempting to teach your baby that most useful of life lessons, that night time is for going to sleep.
So if your baby needs nothing but is still crying, let ‘em cry. I know it sounds incredibly cruel and heartless, and you have no idea how close it brings a parent to tears of their own, listening to their newborn child screaming their poor little lungs out, but Jonah cried for about 20 minutes and is now as soundly asleep as you could possibly imagine. There are many caveats to this theory: I’m sure it wouldn’t work for everyone as all babies are different, but it sure as hell worked for our older two children and I’m determined it’s going to work for these two; I’m not under any illusions that this is any easy solution – Jonah will probably repeat exactly the same pattern tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, but give him a few weeks and he’ll have cracked it. The funny thing is that Zach has slept right through the whole thing, and that seems to have been the way with these babies so far. Either one or other of them will spend the evening fussing on, but rarely both. And while one is most selfishly disrupting his parents’ televisual viewing, the other sleeps on, totally oblivious to his brother’s bad behaviour.
The benefit of having done the baby thing twice before is that you know there is light at the end of the tunnel. This really hard part with sleep deprivation and all that only lasts a few months, and it won’t be long before life will return to some semblance of normality. A few things need to happen before that is the case though. Ursula needs to finish recovering from the c-section. She’s doing amazingly well, although has suffered all the way through from her typical inability to relax, and as a result has probably slowed the recovery somewhat. She’s pretty physically active now, although keeps overdoing it and finding herself completely knackered by the evening. Once she’s properly back up to speed, and also once she’s able to drive again, things will be more manageable.
Which brings to mind another that needs to happen before things go back to normal – the arrival of our new car. It was supposed to be here last week, but now every time I speak to the dealer, which is pretty much every day at the moment, there’s another delay. It’s now supposed to be here by the end of next week, or possibly early the week after. Until it arrives, we feel a bit like prisoners in our own house, as we can’t actually go anywhere with all six of us together, apart from to the park, which gets a bit boring after a while. If Ursula could drive, we could at least go out in convoy in two cars, but so far the only way we’ve been able to do that is to recruit an extra driver in the shape of my parents. So going out has been a bit of a drama, and will continue to be so until the car finally bloody well turns up.
Speaking of going out, Ursula and I actually managed to go out last night for our first night out since the babies were born, again thanks to night-nanny extraordinaire. It felt most odd, as if we were somehow breaking the rules by spending an evening on our own while our three week old twins were at home. It was great though, and for a moment we almost forgot about our millions of children. But not for long. Oh and Clint Eastwood’s low grumble from Gran Torino has now become a regular part of our family vocabulary.
One last thing: after months of coercion, Mrs H has finally succumbed and started her own blog, which will probably be much more interesting than mine as she’s going to have to figure out how to cope with four boys on a day-to-day basis while I get the easy option of going out and earning the money. I would thoroughly recommend you take a look.
I have now been typing for so long that I’m half an hour late for the bedtime feed. Oops. Still, the babies are both fast asleep still, so that’s another point for the leave-em-to-scream plan.
