Wakey Shakey: I Can Play This Game!

They love each other to pieces…

The siren was ON this morning at 3:30AM!!!  ‘Ughhhhh…. (insert the most annoying whining noise you can imagine)…MOMMY, I WANT BOOBIES!’.  Oh man… this was the second morning in a row!  I was just reading too, how in ayurveda (the ancient science of life) how it’s normal to wake up naturally an hour before the sun rises… Well, here, in Queensland, we don’t have daylight savings.  Ok, we actually live in New South Wales, but we run on Queensland time because we’re right on the border and Art works in Queensland, but anyway…  It’s nearly the summer solstice, which means right now, it’s getting light sometime around 4:30 in the morning!  Wow, aren’t I so lucky, Margo’s so in tune with nature that she’s up at 3:30!  Not only was she awake, but she was SCREAMING and CRYING all sorts of delirious jibberish.  Mostly something to do with ‘I want boobies‘, ‘Scratch my back‘, ‘I want to wake up‘.

I was super grumpy with her, and was completely adamant about not giving her boobs at 3:30 in the morning.  The girl has been night weaned for over a year, and even though it would have been nice and convenient to just give them to her and make her shut her pie hole temporarily, I didn’t!  She would not have gone back to sleep, even with them, I know this girl.  It was partially because she was screaming like a banshee and woke us all up, and partially because I don’t want to start a habit, that I didn’t want her to have boobies.  Plus, I had done it the day before and then poor Goldie woke up for a feed and there wasn’t much left.  I’m pretty laid back with feeding on demand… but, emmm… not my nearly 3 year old, and not at 3:30 in the morning!  I’m also stubborn, especially when sleepy!  So, no go on the boobs meant that we were all up by around 4:00.  Goldie was up for  a while too, and now, she’s very smart and likes to sleep, and can usually sleep through lots of screaming, especially at 3:30 in the morning.  But, after about half an hour of the ruckus, she woke up with a few yawns, looking at her big sister banshee like she was a complete nincompoop.

Art had to leave for work early to drop the car off at the shop.  So, by 5:30am, we were all on our own!  He wasn’t going to be home for about 12 hours, I knew it was going to be a long day, and we didn’t have the car.  So, right, TO THE BEACH!  I quickly shoveled some food down Margo’s face, put on our beach gear and walked down to the ocean.  I knew that it was low tide and there had been this huge awesome knee deep baby pool everyday at low tide for the past week.  Margo’s been getting pretty confident with swimming at her swimming lessons, so I knew she would be stoked.  Anyway, it would give Goldie a chance to knock off in the baby wrap, would get me out of the house and would stop the whining monster from thinking about boobs!

We LIVE for baby pools like this one! We hunt them down and at low tide pounce in them when they get all perfect-like.

Here’s where I felt a little revenge coming on. I thought, ‘Well, if Margo’s going to wake us all up at 3:3o in the morning, I’m going to make her so tired she’s going to be begging for sleep!.  I had her out of the house for two and a half hours.  Swimming, walking and running at the beach.  I even brought a change of clothes for her, for after baby pool hopping and trudging through knee deep water (which was waist high on her), and took her to the play ground where we played for at least 45 minutes.  Goldie is super easy to take out.  I just bring a few extra cloth diapers, a thin baby blanket, and I can take her anywhere.  I have this super thin wrap for summer that I made from a piece of fabric, sort of like a glorified bed sheet.  I actually have two because you buy one piece of fabric and cut it in half, and that’s your baby wearing device (full tutorial here).

Margo was swinging on her swing (she just learned how to swing herself, hooray) and this ten year old boy, whom we had seen at the playground, for the past couple days, was there.  He’s a bit of an odd one… this boy.  Odd, meaning that most ten year old boys would not be interested in talking to a mom with her two little kids.  But he was really sweet and sincere, he had absolutely no hang ups with starting a conversation with a perfect stranger a few days ago, and now that he knew who we were, he starting the jaw flapping straight away.  He was yapping away to me, and Goldie started to fuss, so I had to start thinking about feeding her.  I tried to excuse myself, but, this boy kept talking and talking!  I sat down on a bench near the swings, and he kept yapping.  So, I thought, well,,, too bad, he’s going to get a lesson in biology!  So, I pulled out the boob (very pro-ish by now, second child, I barely even have to look to see what I’m doing), and to my surprise, he didn’t even skip a beat!  It was like he couldn’t even see what I was doing!  It didn’t even register in his mind!  I mentioned this in another one of my posts about doing elimination communication in a public place.  People don’t see it because to them, that stuff doesn’t exist in their mind.  Just like the white man’s tall ships could not be see by the native American’s eyes!  It’s a very interesting story, if you’ve never heard about it.  You can read a cool article on it here.  Those ships did not exist in the native American’s consciousness, just like me breastfeeding my baby did not register in this 10 year old boy’s head!

Ho ho ho! Grumpy face! Notice our man, Russel, in the background, playing his didgeridoo, he’s there almost every morning with his didge and his boomerang.

Goldie was chugging away, and to my huge surprise, she did a giant poo!  Since we do elimination communication, (EC), I haven’t had a poo-in-the-middle-of-a-feed in ages!  I was so surprised, I jumped a little!  Ok, great.  Feeding baby with a big poo in her diaper and this boy will not stop talking to me!  I’m not even sure what he was saying… something about some movie he liked to watch.  So, when Goldie was finished with her feed, I had to gingerly pick her up  and set her down on the baby blanket (I don’t even know if these diapers can handle poos because she hardly ever poos in them!).  Of course, I didn’t have any wipes or anything with me, and nowhere to put this poopy mess, except wrap it up in the baby blanket and pray that it didn’t leak.  The extra cloth inserts I bring, for the diapers, are only ever used in case Goldie wees in them before I can EC her in the grass.  So, I did my best to wipe her up with the clean part of the cloth diaper and put a fresh one on.  By this point, even Margo was ready to go home (she hardly ever leaves the playground without a few cries of protest)!

We slogged home, and made some fruit salad.  Mango, banana, strawberries… Yum Yum, love summer in Australia!  Goldie fell back to sleep in bed.  The house was quiet and I said, ‘Margo, NOW is a good time for boobies’.  We talked about why it was a good time. Three thirty in the morning is not a good time, etc.  So, I was checking my email on my phone while she was having boobies on the chair and all of a sudden, I look down to see that she was fast asleep!  It was only 8:30 in the morning!  She hasn’t fallen asleep on the boob in months and months!  Usually because I’m too grumpy and only let her on there for about five minutes before I either get annoyed, or Goldie wakes up, or something distracts us.  So, I picked her up, carried her into bed.  She woke up for a few minutes and complained about this or that. But, I laid down with her, held her hand, and before I knew it, I woke up from some apparent nap we had all had and the best part of it was that only I was awake, the girls were still sleeping!

I quickly jumped up, did my morning meditation, breathing and yoga.  When they woke up from their nap, I was feeling super charged and they were all content.  Margo loved getting the crap worn out of her this morning.  I took her back again to the beach to do the same thing in the evening.  Except we were there for even longer!  She fell asleep again, in seconds, for bed.  A funny thing too, she was really easy going all day.  It must have been something about being in the ocean, all the negative ions making her happy or something.  All the physical activity too.  Now that Goldie is a little older, I need to keep wearing the crap out of both of them.  It’s summer, after all!  Time to get busy!  Time to publish this blog, just in case another 3:30AM wake up is on oder.  But, now I feel more confident.  I know what to do if we all wake up at the butt crack of dawn… Wear them out to the max!  Bwahaha!  Make them sorry that they ever got out of bed in the first place!