Things Go Moo In The Night…

Erlend: “I’m awa for silage at _____. What’ll thoo have for dinner?”

Me, instantly turning green. “Uhhh…”

“There’s leftover pasta with mince.”

I turn even more green. “Uhhmm…”

“You could have some of the mince-and-tatties fae yesterday.”

At this point I begin to salivate for all of the wrong reasons. “Oh gahd…”

“Do you want some o’ this porridge right noo? I made it with bananas for Elspeth. She loves bananas! I mashed them up…”

Me, swallowing hard… stomach churning. “Oh lordy…”

“Weel, whatever thoo want for dinner, you have that pasta and mince and the mince-and-tatties…”

I whirl around and run for the door, hand over mouth. “Erlend, please… just… DONT TALK ABOUT FOOD!!”

Baffled husband watches me go. “Oh. Sorry.”

Obviously I don’t need to buy it now but my pelvis is back to hurting like crazy so soon I won’t be able to sit down and surf the internet much.

I’m trying to find a twin pram-and-pushchair combo. There are lots of twin push chairs but a newborn baby can’t sit up! So I have to find one that also has a pram option…

Hmmmmmm.

(As I type, Elspeth is sitting in her bumbo seat and grabbing at everything in sight hahahaha! She’s SO CUTE! Babies are such a hoot.)

It’s 10pm and I just finished roasting a duck for Sunday dinner. The house is wrecked. It’s always wrecked. I clean it and it ends up wrecked again by the end of the day. I (almost but not quite) give up!

Elspeth is still asleep ~ will she remain thus or wake up looking for a sook? I’m going to bed either way! I never mind getting up and giving her a sook ~ as long as that happens before midnight hehehe! But really, once I peel myself out of bed and sit with her in my arms I don’t mind being woken up to give her a sook.

So, Little Miss CHEEKS is going to have a sibling!! Er… yeah. That happened quick! After 15 years of no cavities, I got 5 cavities with the last pregnancy and was supposed to get them filled at the end of this month. Now I’ll have to wait! (Is there any way to slow cavities down??) I wonder how many cavities I’ll get with this pregnancy??

My heart is giving me a very hard time. It’s gotten much worse in the past year. I’ll have to talk that over with the midwife!!! Now when I go to bed, if I lie on my side my heart hammers so hard and I get such awful chest pain. Which is so odd because why would my heart go 1,000 miles an hour when I’m lying down?? I’m not exactly exerting myself! I have to lie on my back in order to calm it down some. I wore a holter monitor for 48 hours and of course my heart barely misbehaved. That’s because it comes-and-goes on a whim. And there’s only like one holter monitor for the Highlands and Islands so it’s not as if I can call up the hospital and say, “QUICK! Fit me up to that thing again! My heart is really spazzing out this week!”

I’m about to go to bed. Will my heart let me sleep? I sure hope that my heart isn’t made worse as the pregnancy progresses… I’d like to live to see my kids grow up!

I’m so happy we can add a Fat Little Cheeks #2 to the mix!! Another Little Mini-Feets. Another Cute Little Bum, Fat Little Puggie, Little Bambino, Little “Cutsie Wootsie”… and the list goes on and on and on…

So, I bought this grey wool “Jane Eyre” style hat for ordinary everyday use. I figured that way I can save my colorful floral hats for kirk. On non-windy Sundays!

I put the hat on, pinned it into place and, smiling with delight, turned to my very honest husband. “What do you think?”

The look on his face was one of Oh. My. God. He stared. My smile faded. He gulped and then, “It, uh, makes you look old.”

…………………….

…………………………….

……looking old really isn’t an insult to me ~ I have nothing but great respect for age. Not only that but at 33 I’m more grey haired then brown. I’ll be solid grey by the time I’m 40. It’s genetic. But let’s face it: I’ve not the wisdom to qualify for the respect that is reserved for our elders! And if “It makes you look old” was the best he could come up with…. I must look awful.

But I’m wearing this bloomin’ hat anyway!!!

I almost lost my escape from the farm ~ husband is crafty. But I put my foot down and demanded my 5 days saying, “You would have been completely GONE if we’d been sooth ~ so there’s no reason you can’t stay away from the farm during the day time while we’re right here!” I pointed out that he’ll have mornings and evenings/nights to be a work-o-holic so he’d better give me the afternoons for our shrinking vacation. (Farmers.)

We once had a sofa. It’s now disapeared under a pile of baby laundry, blankets, a sling, packages of baby wipes, and a purple bonnet. I tried to get the house spic-n-span before vacation started but that’s hard to do when you’re also here, all day, using the same space that you’re trying to keep clean!

Elspeth has spent the past two days being in one of those horrible perpetually-fussy moods and so vacation (i.e. driving around Orkney in the afternoons) is going to be a very welcome relief. Usually by 7:30pm she’s in bed sleeping and I get a chance to relax ~ not just my body but also my brain! You can never really relax with a child afoot.

But lately she’s been waking up about 9pm and again at 11pm demanding sooks and so my evenings are totally shot and full of screaming baby. After an entire day of screaming baby one can forgive me for looking a bit haggard. I’ve noticed a very startling increase in grey hair over the past seven months!!

Being a housewife is grand but I can totally see why some women put their screeching weans in daycare ~ it’s either that, or their sanity. If anyone ever wonders what I’m on about, I’ll gladly send you a tape containing 16+ hours of fussing, crying, screaming baby. You’ll understand in about 10 minutes haha!

Now she won’t eat. It’s 7:40pm and she’s crying and howling but won’t eat. Which means if I put her to bed she’ll be up in an hour screaming for milk.

I can’t wait to lose myself in an exhausted, burned out, blood-shot eyed stupor as we toole around Orkney in the car with the wean babbling (not fussing!) in her car seat. One more day of this and I’d be drooling as much as the baby… **Twitch Twitch**

P.S. SHE HAD A GOOD SOOK! Oh… I hope this means she’ll sleep all night and let me fold some laundry. And then collapse into bed. I’d like to be rested for vacation but I’m not going to hold my breath hehehe

The wean is just not doing well with going hither and yon. She’s entered a stage where she wants to have her sooks here, and she wants to lay down to play there and when it comes bedtime she wants to be upstairs. None of this strange places all day stuff, thank you kindly! And our trip sooth will be nothing but strange places. Elspeth is also not happy if daddy is missing from her mornings and nights ~ and while at Pluscarden, I sleep in one guesthouse and husband sleeps in another so daddy would be missing every morning and every night for nearly a week. This did not bode well.

So we’ve decided to make our vacation right here in Orkney (with Erlend banned from doing any serious work) so that after hauling the wean around all day she can still come home at night. And she’ll still have her morning routine. (She’s actually ok with being oot-and-aboot all day if she has her morning and night routines here at home sweet home.)

Our little sniffle-head has been fighting a cold that I caught last week. We’ve had some very long, long nights full of crying, 10pm feeds, 11pm warm baths + a feed and 2am feeds. For some reason this cold has made Elspeth sleepless and hyperactive and kinda hungry at night! But we think she’s getting better…. at the moment she’s napping and not waking up after ten minutes.

Hopefully she won’t get into a routine of waking up for 2am feeds… **Groan**

Here’s to vacation ~ right here at home!