S.L.E.E.P

Alex absolutely refuses to drink milk from a bottle, preferring to go hungry and cry until I feed her mommy milk direct from the source. This means that I cannot sub-contract this part of child care to anyone. She sleeps 7 hours per night(bless her!) but it's the WRONG 7 hours for me. She sleeps from 9pm to 4am, and even though I try lying down and going to bed when she does, I usually end up reading, checking email and generally am unable to rest until midnight. And then Alex wakes again at 4am for a feed and diaper change and then 6am for another diaper change, and Sophie gets up at about 7am. Although they both nap in the afternoon, I find myself scheduling too many activities during their naps. Although officially on maternity leave, I cannot resist fiddling with my files, and accepting pro-bono work for a charity that I support.

A cumulation of all this makes me chronically sleep-deprived, and it comes out at the worse possible timings.

Today is Alex's full month party (a bit belated, but this was the only time that the calendars could match for everyone in my office). My collegues are coming over for breakfast in a short while and I managed to burn the pot used to steam the "baozi" that I intended to serve for breakfast. I thought I was going to cry. But instead, I find myself starting to raise my voice at our brats, and generally blaming my husband for not being more helpful (than he already is!) and then I find myself releasing an evil monster from some deep dark place and its ferocity scares me.

Actually we have a rule that on Sundays we do not have any ayi, partly because I believe that they deserve a day of rest, and partly so that we have some privacy as a family. But I am re-visiting that notion now. If we can just get someone to deal with cooking and cleaning, on Sundays, we might actually make better parents because it frees Fab and me up to just look after our kids.