Three.

Dear Bhanshee Bhaji Nightshift,

As your maternal unit I love you, really I do.

I also love that YOU love ME, albeit to the point that I am finding it hard to find time to urinate unless I want to do it one handed (and have you ever tried getting your knickers down and up one handed, Bhaji? They get all bunched, love) and that strangers can never get you to meet their gaze when they pick you up because you’re too busy fixating on my spiky-haired self. I guess the glasses make me an easy target.

I get that you adore my b00bs. I’ve made my peace with that.

But, here’s the thing.

Sweet as it is to have you nuzzling into me between the hours of one am and daylight, you just can’t use my poor b00bies as pillows. Neither is it particularly okay to lie next to my knackered self in bed all night only interrupting your happy snoring sleep of the b00by-pillowed-replete to use my poor self as some kind of all-night nocturnal milk bar.

There’s love and there’s insane sleep deprivation, lovvie, and it’s a bit odd to be half woken up by somebody sucking on your n1pple all the time. The dreams are dead strange for a start and there was that time you gave me a bit of a mis-aimed in-the-dark b00by hickey that actually hurt quite a bit, you know.

Basically, Bhaji, I am glad that last night you returned to your usual sweet, settled sleeping self and spent a blessed six hours in your cot because, honestly, the previous four nights were seriously Not Cool. At least from my perspective.

So why did you go and spoil it by choosing just before six am to leave me a noisy number three in your nappy, up your pyjama back, in your swaddle and, only discovered later to my horror, ON MY SHEETS?

Love,

Your Mama.

Input requested.

Dear lovely mostly ladies of the Internet,

This is the post where I ask what you think, and don’t worry we’ll all still be friends at the end of this, I promise. You see, I never talk politics round these parts and also I come from the wrong part of the world to be especially involved in the merry game of who-has-the-most-hidden-mistresses/lovechildren/porn addiction/stuffed toy collection/nose picking habit etc that seems to be going on in one part of the world right now.

But seriously, you all get kind of up in your politicians lives over there.

Anyway.

I did have a question for you and it isn’t political at all. It’s about what to do with the extra breastmilk my poor freezer is carrying because the old girl can’t take the groceries I need to jam in there to avoid multiple shopping trips a week and thus my life kind of sucks right now in the way that repeatedly going shopping (popping out to the shops, ha!) with three children will do.

Bhaji doesn’t do bottles, I pump because of morbid fear of repeat mastitis and I keep taking the domperidone because I am not crazy enough to mess with what is working. There is only one milk bank in town and it only takes from women who delivered at that hospital and are therefore trustable sorts.

I did not deliver at that hospital and am clearly extremely untrustworthy I guess. Hence the bursting freezer problem.

Is it wrong to give it to Saag and Naan in their sippy cups in lieu of the moo variety?

On the face of it I can’t see a logical reason why not, per se, and there is a nice belated full circle element of closure about my utter failure to manage lactation for THEM at the appropriate juncture.

But.

The thought makes me feel a bit squarmy and wrong and I-can’t-do-THAT, I just can’t quite put my finger on exactly why.

I mean, it’s not like extended nursing, which is a bit of a social taboo even though there’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s just that we’ve all be cultured to not like hearing somebody’s three year old ask her Mama for her booby in the supermarket.

It’s just a sippy cup.

So why does it feel all odd?

Thoughts and opinions and suggestions for other use of human moo all welcome.

G

Jumble.

Today really has been one of those days.

You know, the kind where you could fry an egg on the bonnet of your car, if you were so inclined, there was a local stove shortage and your car was rather cleaner than mine is, but anyway, the principle remains.

Where I live you could have, really.

Needless to say when two polite but bloody early tradesman turn up at sparrow’s fart (also known as dressing gown and caffeine but hold the full bladder until the newborn lets you go pee  o’clock ) in the morning to fix one seriously prolapsed garage ceiling (all for free! whee! the builder rolled faster than a company who just heard the word ‘lawsuit!’ when I sent them a half-baked mobile-phone picture text message of the problem. Seriously. Not even an inspection was arranged to confirm prolapse. It was just fixed. Quickly) and one’s car is thus evicted from the garagey shade and dumped out in the blistering sun all day, leaving the house becomes an impossibility.

I don’t mind a little heat as much as the next person, but I am not a fan of gently roasting myself on the freeway while the newborn screams in the back seat and the twins quietly melt.

So, coming back to the beginning of my post, today has been one of those cabin fevered annoying, cranky days and it really didn’t help that LS got us off to a roaring start by accusing me of saying something that I totally didn’t, I swear, and then we had a blasted loud barney in full ear shot of the Men On Our Roof. Men who were suddenly Very Busy quietly rearranging tiles.

Because about ten minutes later, Saag decided to start running around the house cheerily chirping ‘fu@king hell!’, ‘fu@king hell!’, ‘fu@king hell!’, a phrase I think my potty mouth abuses all to often. Especially when I am contemplating if the best way to a man’s heart is actually through his shirt front with a steak knife as some particularly aggrieved comedienne once observed.

Saag did moderate to a more sedate but also eerily thanks-be-she-doesn’t-get-the-meaning ’bl00dy hell!’ upon some frantic Not Making A Big You-Should-Trot-This-Word-Out-At-Creche-For-Kicks Deal but stop it and FORGET IT, NOW action and, although part of me found it childishly funny to hear a toddler say ‘bl00dy’ so happily, I think it is time for a swear jar.

Because by now and upon retelling the ‘fu@king/bloody hell!’ tale I feel a bit, well, yuk. Ashamed-ey?

Anyway, it’s been a long day, I’m knackered, it’s still hot but at least my garage doesn’t need the structural version of a big pair of knickers to stay up anymore and tomorrow I am not going to say fu@king. Not once.

Wish me luck, I think I need it.

G

The easy life.

I’ve been mulling this one over, because typing smug is generally the way to guarantee but one of two outcomes:

1. An ark-full of deathstares at perfectly innocent monitors, followed by rapid clicking on the ‘Eff off/unsubscribe with extreme predjudice’ button.

2.  Being rather accurately informed by a commenter that I am in fact being a smug pain in the arse and am generally sucking in the Making Friends department and simultaneously excelling in the Alienating People masterclass.

But, here it goes. Please don’t shoot.

One baby is EASY. I think I’ve got this kind of licked. Bhaji slept seven hours last night, again.

Sorry. I am cringing just a little at the words that just came out of my keyboard, if it helps.

But, honestly, compared to just-preemie-enough-to-be-rather-hard-work twins, especially when one has never actually had a baby before and has absolutely no real idea what one is in for until hit in the face with the full force of the misery that is sleep deprivation for months on end and fussy babies that never read those books that friends with only one damn baby keep trotting over with.

You know, the ones that go ‘How to have eight hours sleep and an insanely happy baby in only fifty easy steps  or you’re doing it all wrong (exclamation mark)’.

Because everybody knows that if you have been lucky enough to have a settled singleton then you are the best positioned person on the planet to advise a very tired mother of premature twins with severe reflux on how to do things better, rather than asking if you could do something useful like a load of damn vomit coated washing, instead.

Ahem. I think that was old wounds reopening just a tad there. Will stop picking forthwith. The very same person never returned my maternity tent or some of my favourite Saag and Naan clothes, either, after I lent them to her for HER next settled singleton.

Grumble.

Anyway, really, this is a whole ‘nother world.

I can just grab the baby and walk into a shop any time I like with something I really didn’t have last time- actual freedom of movement. I am not compelled to hoist a giant pram out of the back of my car, assemble it and juggle two precariously settled newborns into it before even getting started. Actually, I don’t have to laboriously strap two remarkably unhelpful with limb function newborns INTO the carseats in the first place. It’s amazing if you’ve never been able to do it before. Trust me.

I’m not stopped for an autograph by my uterus every ten metres like some kind of freak reproductive rock star, either.

I’ve had the odd baby admire, but I’ve yet to be interrogated about the role of my breasts or vag.ina in the emergence or nutrition of Bhaji.

Seriously, am tempted to get a ‘go on, ask me about my tits’ t-shirt I’m so freaked out by the general level of disinterest.

Nobody points at me and my ears don’t burn in the post office queue from blue rinse set deaf-eared slightly too loud conversations that were meant to be private.

I guess (if yesterday is any indication) I WILL still get asked what gender the isn’t-it-obvious-pink-swathed-to-within-an-inch-of-her-life ‘it’ is and nobody will congratulate me on the shape of my abdomen, but you can’t have everything in this world.

I could seriously get used to this and if only somebody could install a ‘stop squabbling like blasted cats over the last fish’ function on the twins, life would be brilliant but if you could excuse me, I have to go be the United Nations again.

G

Not Cool.

I have this friend.

Okay, I have these friends. They’re a couple, recent migrants who used to practise their English on me because I was their neighbour home all day with the young twins and, well, pretty safe to flub your tenses on.

When the common language became fluent enough (rather embarrassingly they learned my language far, far better than I have to date picked up any of their Mandarin, unless you count effusive THANK YOU’S as fluent speech) they asked.

I can’t recall exactly how it went, but clearly twins aren’t common in China. They were curious but without all of the sideways glancing and ‘do they run in your family (DID YOU DO IVF?????)’ bulldust that the locals do.

I told them the truth. All of it.

At this point, after about a year’s worth our informal cultural exchange, she told me about her miscarriage three years ago, newly arrived in a strange country without a word of the local lingo and little counselling or understanding of the process here.

She also told me she’d never been pregnant since.

They wanted help, wanted to know who to see, the words for the right kind of doctor. If there was any hope. The herbs sent from China weren’t working. Their parents were anxious.

I referred them onwards to somebody I trusted.

They got help.

Their first IVF worked.

…and then they had another early miscarriage.

We all spent hours talking it through and I explained the likely bad reproductive luck, the additional tests they could do to make sure, the normalcy of the grieving process. How awful it feels.

That it’s okay to be so sad and so stressed. To be scared of trying again.

They are trying again, now. Another fresh cycle.

…and LS keeps using them as babysitters for the twins while he dashes off to do this and that.

My memory may be faulty, but that is just Not Cool and I don’t know how he of all people doesn’t instantly get it.

It’s insensitive. He doesn’t get it.

G

 

In the ‘things they don’t tell you’ pile.

1. The instant your maternity leave clicks over to unpaid leave, thou shalt get a tax bill for five thousand terrifying dollars.

2. Followed closely by both car insurance bills, the home insurance bill, one car service bill, one car repair bill (other car), a year’s worth of electricity (they haven’t issued a bill in a full year because of a stupid meter upgrade drive that is meant to make us all more energy efficient goody two shoes but mostly has thus far cost a bazillion in new meter installations and caused half the population to have a coronary at just how much a full year’s electricity COSTS when the belated demand does arrive because, um,  holy heck), the gas bill  covering the last bit of winter and the expense of a gas-heated-and-hot-watered house where the occupants clearly like to be both warm and frequently bathed, assorted minor costs and a partridge in a gold-plated blasted pear tree.

3. Seriously. What just happened?

4. Fuck.

5. Do they think I’m made of it?

6. At least I got the electricity bill downgraded to a mere nine months mostly on accounts of careful researching of The Rules and they actually aren’t allowed to pursue a bill they haven’t bothered to issue after nine months and I am not volunteering out of the kindness of my proverbial to pay it anyway.

7. Accordingly, I wish I’d gone nuts with the air-conditioner rather harder last summer. That bit was free, as it turns out.

8. Bhaji will sh!t a gelatinous-yellow poo lake on my lap while I am on the phone pleading with electricity company to at least leave the TV when they raid the house for a thousand dollars worth of value.

9. Please don’t tell me that there’s another envelope with a sinister window in the front lurking in my letter box today. I don’t think I can take the stress.

G

I Think I Get It (The Breastfeeding Post).

I think I finally have enough confidence in how the whole breastfeeding saga shall end to actually write something about it. Probably.

At least as of today I do, and I am beginning to think that is part of the big secret. You see, at some point if you get enough ‘today’s’ then it just happened and you’re doing it because, hey, you did it. Regardless of how much like a boobie fraud I feel just because I haven’t been simply able to whip out a tata from Bhaji’s birth and soothe her utterly and totally without difficulty or pain whatsoever, whenever, wherever, I’m still doing it.

It’s all down to two small revelations. I am the insight queen, albeit the perpetually tardy insight queen.

1. Bhaji is five weeks old today. Ergo, I have actually been nursing for five weeks. I have done it and can do it and hopefully, barring disasters of nipple pain, I can continue to do it for as long as I want to. Yes, I am spending a fortune on domperidone and legions of time on pumping and really I guess the whole thing is about as natural as astroturf and probably no cheaper than formula but if that’s what it takes as of now it’s a price I am prepared to pay.

2. Breastfeeding might be as natural as syphilis and gonorrhoea, but that doesn’t mean it is any more pleasant or enjoyable in the early days, even if the general mechanism of acquisition is broadly similar. Put simple, it probably sucks for most people to begin with.

Also, the boobie thing is awfully snuggly addictive sh!t, isn’t it? I have to admit I would miss the bit where Bhaji is all snuggled up at five bleeping am, lying in bed next to me and talking to her food ‘mm, mm, mmm, mmmHHHH’ as she goes to town. I blame the oxytocin. Five am is not usually the highlight of my day.

As for the nipple-cheesegrater phenomenon, happily there IS less of the clenched buttocks and feet tapping complete with arse rising off of the chair at latch and more of the muttered ‘farking ow, ow, OW’ end of things. That helps. Nobody likes to feel like the wobbly bits are being sucked clean out via a small cheesegrater-lined mouth all day.

The supply, she is not what she should be but things seem to slowly be improving in that department, too. I mean I’ve, without really noticing it, gone from hand expressing drops into a tiny cup to using a real big girl pump and not having to even top up a frustrated Bhaji with expressed milk in a full week now. She hasn’t had formula in nearly a full month. I have more than a litre of my own brand of moo in the freezer.

Hot damn.

But then again, just when I get cocky, there’s days like today where this post has literally taken all day because Miss Nightshift is fussing and carrying on like a starving creature, alternately spitting out both bosoms with squawks of deep disappointment and giving me general stink-eye. Needless to say am not pumping much moo. Am trying to remain zen.

Who knows?

It could all end tomorrow, but that’s always the case and there’s no point worrying about what I likely cannot change. If it goes pear enough, I gave myself permission to give up five weeks ago. I have to be okay with whatever happens because, for now, I am breastfeeding my child and I never thought I’d be able to say that.

G

PS. It’s a shame that Naan just looked at my belly and said ‘why is your tummy all wrinkly?’.

Mostly because when I told her all about where she, Saag and Bhaji all lived to begin with and the surgical version of their birth, complete with scar flash, what I got back was ‘You need some stippy (sticky) tape. Your belly is all wrinkly and you have a line on it’.

Thanks, kid.

Zinger

Bhaji is fine. Gaining adequately and seems to have settled herself nicely on the 25th centile for thigh rolls as of extrauterine existance. She started on something rather fatter but I think that had more to do with my antenatal fast food habits than anything else.

Nevermind. I’m learning that lesson right now, too. A second on your lips, about a day in your large bowel and a million little lumps under your bottom later and you have where I seem to be and I am not even going to start talking about my abdomen because it turns out that skin that managed a fundal height of fifty centimetres the first time round is actually less and not more able to cope with a repeat more normal-sized pregnancy.

I hear shar-pei is in this season.

Miss Nightshift is also ninty something centile for length, and unless she’s grown four centimetres in a month, they got it wrong in the hospital and ergo on the pretty card I’ve stuck in her photo album. Am moderately narked because I can’t get a redo of a proper bleeping birthweight and length, but now understand why newborn stuff mostly was too damn short and why her hands and feet look kind of big. It’s because they are and her hair also seems to be kind of ginger.

Go figure. Unless something changes, I’ve got one of all the major options and a non matching set. DNA is a funny thing.

LS and I had the kind of all day bitter drawn out fight about the kind of can’t-settle-them issues that has left me with a sick headache and a complete inability to type anything much about it right now.

It’s a good thing I can quote numbers about the beanpole baby and reminisce about how she compares to Miss Naan and Saag and how is is recognisably like both of them in some ways and traits but indisputibly herself.

It’s funny to look at a little person and think that they only exist because you wanted them to so very badly.

Spellchecker dead. Posting regardless. Sorry.

G

 

Weigh in.

In brief.

1. Bhaji slept for eight hours last night and no she was not given any pharmacological help and nor was she in a coma or anything else dire. Don’t tell anybody she sleeps, will you? It might break the spell.

2. My tits weren’t circulated a memo of warning. Neither was I. I could have fit one of those pointy Madonna-esque contraptions snugly when I woke up at five thirty am with twinging tatas. Pissed since I could have pumped a Precious Stash and Bhaji would have been none the wiser for the sneaky nighttime theft of Her Boobs.

3. I seem to have five kilograms (um, 12 pounds ish) to go and thusly my scales hate me because I swear that’s what I had a week ago. Perhaps I should buy some skinny scales that are less honest.

4. Bhaji’s repeat weight in is tomorrow and unlike myself I would like some fat thoughts, please. I need them.

5. Will be good girl and take obligatory deflat-a-thon picture today and at some point show you the last several weeks lack of progress. Sob. At this point with Saag and Naan I was, um, actually slightly worse off than now.

6. That feels a tad better right up and until I recall that I gained 34 kilograms (um, 70ish pounds) with the twins. Thus, my shrinkage rate sucks comparatively.

7. I could console myself with the gentle reminder that pre eclampsia meant I urinated my way to fat jeans last time as twenty kilos of oedema exited the building in the first week post partum alone and this time I have the fat part of my fat ass alone to kiss goodbye and everybody know it is harder to permanently misplace fat than water.

8. But I’m still fat now.

9. Sigh.

G

Heart

We’ve had a watershed moment Chez MII and it doesn’t feel at all good.

I thought the twins had adjusted very well to the big sister role, I mean they dote on poor Bhaji to the point that Bhaji needs to be placed in twin cuddle safe zones for a much needed kiss and slobber break from time to time.

I figured they were enjoying being home more, albeit with a tired Mama stuck with a newborn attached to her wincing chest half of the day.

I might be right and it might be pure co-incidence but not half an hour ago Naan just bit Saag.

Unprovoked.

She left a perfect set of dented toothmarks all the way around poor Saag’s wrist.

Saag now runs screaming when Naan gets too close.

I know it’s nothing big and this sort of thing is in the Toddler Manual right along with Tantrum Chucking and Dummy Spitting and Embarrassing Your Folks in Public by Loudly Asking Why Somebody Is Very Fat but we’ve never had a hint of anything like this before. Not one. Saag and Naan have been inseparable.

They’ve always been the very best of little hand-in-hand friends and my heart, it is so heavy right now.

G