Gratitude 38, I Don’t Need Much

Today I am grateful for:

1. A bit of cool –  In England, a day like today would have people complaining about the oppressive heat and the papers warning of OAPs dropping like flies but, here, after the really hot days we’ve had, today’s middling heat felt incredibly refreshing.
2. A bit of rest — today M gave me the chance to lie in today to try to beat this virus we’ve all come down with over the weekend.  It’s given us all runny noses, sore throats, and that tiredness you get in your chests.  I’m glad it came on at the weekend instead of during the week, and I am hopeful that a restful day might have helped to send it on its way.
3. A bit of respite from the poo disasters!  After the run we’ve had lately, that’s all I really need to keep me happy!

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Gratitude 38, Saturday Help

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that it is Saturday, which means that I was not on my own today taking care of the girls after getting a scant few hours of tortuously broken sleep last night. Both girls have something that’s making their noses run and giving them sore throats (and me a bit too). They haven’t been breathing well at night — and when they don’t breathe, they don’t sleep. And when they don’t sleep, I don’t sleep. Between them, I didn’t get to bed last night until 2.30am, and then E2 had me up five times after that, before I finally got up at 9.30. I have been a zombie today.
2. The fact that it is Saturday, which means that M was here when E1 had a massive poo during her nap which rose up and out of her nappy and went everywhere. And he was here when I went in to get E2 and discovered that she’d taken off her clothes and found a poo in her nappy and spread it all over her cot, her sheets, and herself. She must have been playing in it a good while before I discovered her because it had dried and was an absolute devil to get off. I plucked her out of the crib and delivered her to her daddy, who deposited her straight into the bath next to her sister, and then I spent a full half-an-hour scrubbing that crib. And he was here when, about 2 hours later, she did exactly the same thing in the playroom. I was in the other room and heard M suddenly bellowing as he carried her to bath again, yelling, “Keep E1 away! And clean that up, will you?!?” This is the fourth time she’s done this now — and it’s not big and it’s not clever. I really need to figure out a way of thwarting her nudist, poo-discovering tendencies. Duct-tape on her nappy…?
3. The fact that it is Saturday and so, after an exhausting night and very trying day, M went off to the pub for a few hours after we’d got the girls in bed, and I stayed home to hold the fort. And even though I didn’t get to go with him, it made me feel really quite content for him to pop out for a drink. It felt familiar… normal… It felt just right.

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Gratitude 24, The Misadventures of E2

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that when E2 fell off backwards off a kitchen chair today, and landed with a great thud flat on her back and the back of her head, and then would not stop crying and couldn’t be consoled no matter what we did, it was only because she had bitten through the back of her lip and not anything more serious than that.
2. The fact that when M went in to get her from her nap and found her as naked as the day she was born (because he’d accidentally dressed her in E1′s vest she had wriggled out of it), she’d not found another exciting poo when she took off her nappy and the worst we had to deal with this time was the huge wet patch in the middle of the mattress.
3. The fact that at the moment when she did the biggest and most stinky poo right in the middle of Mass tonight, it was M who happened to be holding her, and so there was a sort of natural assumption that it was he, rather than me, who should have to carry her out to the car where the nappy bag was and change her on one of the seats in the pouring rain.

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Gratitude 7, A Great Deal of Poo

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that, when E2 took off her sleepsuit before I went in to get her up this morning, and then took off her nappy and discovered there a warm and squidgy poo, and sank her hands deep into it, and spread stinking clumps of it in great thick coats over the bed rails, her bedsheets, and every inch of her body — somehow getting it even under the mattress — and then stood naked, caked in it, grinning up at me in sheer delight with a lump of poo in each clenched fist, that horrid foul stench filling the room and with brown streaks smeared all over her teeth and lips, she didn’t get sick later in the day from ingesting too much of the stuff and I didn’t get sick from having to spend half the day cleaning it all up.
2. That, when I put E2 down for her nap in the other cot (crib) which we have (but which we haven’t been using) and she managed to strip off her sleeping bag and climb over the rail and throw herself out it, falling nearly four feet and landing with a great thud and an ear-piercing yowl on the floor, she did her little uninsured self no damage.
3. That she is sleeping soundly now in a clean and completely safe cot, in a sleeping bag she cannot get herself out of, a nappy she can’t get her hands into, and we can all start afresh tomorrow as if none of this ever happened.

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