emma_in_dream

This is my 2000th post on LJ. I feel I should have something profound to say to the few people left in this once bustling room….


What I’ve got are some dot points:


· Four more years of Tony Abbott. That vile, racist, climate change denying, misogynist, religious zealot. And probably more than four years as Labor appear to have learned nothing about either policy or leadership and seem to be continuing with their policy of shooting themselves in both feet alternately.
Abbott has announced his cabinet which consists of…. drum roll… nineteen men and a token woman, all looking quite white. Plus he has decided that for the first time since the 1930s there is no need for a Minister for Science. If he had one of those he might have to listen to people talking about global warming.
· Pearl hads an edudance concert on Wednesday. She did the Stray Cat Strut.
· Ruby has her paediatric review next month and I believe the doctor will be astonished that a girl who was not walking in March is now very nearly running. It’s certainly a very quick walk, but I believe that technically both feet must leave the ground at the same time for it to be a running gait? Is that why elephants can’t ‘run’ but merely charge?
· I love Ruby’s excellent vocabulary. She told me she was ‘astonished’ that I would not carry her and ‘baffled’ about why her sister would sit on the chair which Ruby usually claims.
· Pearl wrote the following sentence: ‘Today I am happy becos I see [Danielle].’ She had drawn a picture of two little girls together when she got to the hard to spell out ‘Danielle’ part.
· On the less bright side, Pearl continues to find it very hard to not scream and shout over the tiniest thing going wrong. I experimented with a system of rewards but had to stop because Pearl did not get a single reward in the space of a week, whereas Ruby got them almost every day. More often than me in fact. I think a lot has to do with innate temperament.
· *Crusoe* is still fabulous.
· I have been rewatching the *Back to the Future* trilogy in which 2015 is the unimaginably distant future.
· I have been doing a lot of craft.
· My children have been sleeping *incredibly badly*.

Had a hideous day yesterday. Not enough sleep the night before, then nowhere to go in the hideous heat on a public holiday so stuck at home with the cranky kids.

I was stuck at the bottom of the Mazlo hierarchy of needs, so tired that I literally kept nodding my head down and then jerking back from the micro-sleeps. I was just above the need for oxygen, water and not having a bullet in the head.

Ruby just went off in the evening - not sure what went wrong (except that I was tired and in a terrible mood) but two and a half hours of screaming when she was held, screaming when she was not held and screaming when she was patted. Jesus.

Absolutely rotten parenting on my behalf, dealing with it with anger and resentment. Poor Pearl also unable to sleep in her new room next to the banshee.

Have yet to decide if it is a good idea to have them in together. Pearl calms down if I sit in the room with her quietly; if I do that Ruby gets excited. Very bad combination.

All the books on decluttering talk of the feeling of satisfaction in clearing things away, but frankly I just feel exhausted and unsure.