Now I Lay Her Down to Sleep

In all the emotion and confusion of moving and trying to get settled, it is easy to forget that — even though we have spent seven months living in a house furnished with only two chairs, a dining set, the girls’ cots, and our mattress on the floor, and even though our lives are still [...]

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A Sharp Turn on the Road to Home

It is a pretty well known fact that the six month mark is a particularly difficult point for expats — a time when homesickness often sets in with a vengeance — so last week was probably a bad time for M to go home to England for a week, but he did. I didn’t [...]

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Hunting the Lesser Spotted Six-Pack

There is no beer aisle in our supermarket. There’s no wine there either. In fact, there’s no alcohol whatsoever but, because I’m breastfeeding (and so drinking nothing beyond the occasional stolen sip of M’s beer at the pub), it had completely escaped my notice until I tried to find some beer yesterday afternoon. [...]

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Victory in a Coffee Cup

My daughter is three years old and she still drinks her milk from a bottle. I know this is a Bad Thing, but up to this point, I really didn’t care. Dealing with all of E2’s food and sleep issues took so much of my time and energy that I was happy to [...]

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Dispensing the Serious Medicine

I was washing the dishes when there was a loud, brief scream and then a sudden silence. This could mean anything. I counted silently, 1… 2… 3… 4… Ah yes, there it was — the ear-piercing wail to follow up. Someone was hurt. E2 came running in first, with big wet [...]

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Oh! Was I Meant to be the Designated Driver?

M got an emergency call-out yesterday and had to spend 5 hours of his Sunday dragging unwieldy supplies and heavy equipment up the three flights of stairs to the customer’s front door. He had a dolly to take it all from the truck to the bottom the stairs but, from that point on, it [...]

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The Murderous Mummy Poo

Warning: this story contains direct references to poo.
E1 did a big poo in her potty yesterday. As I bent down to wipe her bum, I could see that it was composed of some small pellet-like poos at the bottom, followed by a huge big cow-patty of a poo sitting on top.  In our world, [...]

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Keep This to Yourself

Shhhhh… Don’t tell anyone — and you didn’t hear this from me, but… On Tuesday night, E2 woke up and started to cry as normal twice, but never really got into a full cry, and then settled herself back down before I got up to go in to her. To my utter [...]

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Old Friends and New Sisters

Here is how I do friendship: I make friends slowly and I am very choosy about who I consider a friend (often to my detriment — I only ever a handful of friends) and they mean a great deal to me, but I am highly disorganised in my friendship to them. I don’t arrange [...]

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The Last Gratitude

I am going to stop posting my daily gratitudes on my blog. I’m not going to stop doing them, but I’m not going to post them on this blog anymore because I feel like they are stopping my other blogging. It’s odd, and I don’t really get what it is exactly, but I [...]

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