#northernmum mumblog mumlife

[northernmum-blog]

Please just stay the fuck asleep...

 So, I have absolutely no idea how Tumblr works... I have sadly been living as if Facebook was the only social media platform for many years, and the thought of expanding just sounded too fucking exhausting. However, several of my mums in arms have suggest I blog! Mostly I think maybe this is their way of getting me off facebook so I’m not clogging up everyones feeds with my babyspam (joke). So here I am... blogging... I really want to make a Anchorman ‘jogging’ reference here but I don’t think it’ll work. I hate back stories, so in a nutshell, I am a Northern mum... not a northerner as in north of the wall but we do talk a bit like them lot, so for all intensive purposes, I am a ‘wildling’. We also say ‘fuck’ a lot, and many of us are ginger. 

I have a belief that all mums blog... even if its just inside their own heads. Its this constant monologue the runs through day and night, commentating on the day to day buggery that we have to endure as mothers and partners. So here is mine. I will try and keep it amusing, but lets face it, kids just aren’t that funny. They think they are, and thats why they keep doing the shit they do, and we are just massive enablers, watching and smiling, giving them huge positive reinforcement as they shove carrot sticks into the cat food and pour juice onto your laundry. We smile because we say ‘they are learning and this is how kids learn!’... and because we are too fucking tired to fight them. 

My youngling is 13 months old, and I am also a stepmum to a 7 year old. Its actually not that hard, least not as hard as I thought it would be. You don’t need magical powers, or a list of approved coping mechanisms, when you have two adults who are co-parenting responsibly and respectfully, its actually not a bad job, and there is very little Disneyesque moments involving evil and singing mice. it also meant that our kiddo came into the world with a ready made sibling, and for wee one that has been just awesome, as she thoroughly enjoys her role as little sister. 

I don’t for a second believe this will become anything more than just a page that I water intermittently with the hopes that it won’t completely shrivel and die like my houseplants, I have no grand plans as a blogger. Mostly I just like to make people laugh... from my home, when I’m alone with a glass of wine and I’m avoiding being amongst actual real life people. I am one of those types. The omnivert. We didn’t exist before social media... back then we were just introverts with diaries. Now we can actually appear sociable and outgoing, hence ‘omnivert’. 

So cut to the chase. Today has been yet another day when I have thought ‘I can’t possibly feel more tired than this!’ I also said this every day first trimester, third trimester, for the first 3 months of Kiddos life, and again every day since she started crawling and then walking. I am very fucking tired, but thats nothing to the dawning realisation of the future tiredness yet to come... they are there, on the horizon, the days when both girls having d&v and have to be off school, or maybe when I stupidly decide to go out and drink cocktails and THEN they get d&v and are off school... oh the horrors. Thats it. I’m going to die of tiredness. No one can possibly live like this. This is why old people are so quiet and still... its not infirmity its the fact that they never got a break after the contraception bust and now they are so tired they can’t actually even muster the energy to close their eyes and actually sleep. 

On the plus side, some random comment I made on the Independent FB page got over 3000 likes *fist pump*. My interaction with the outside world is done for the day. I made a passing remark on parenting, and boom I am a celebrity. I tell the partner, I’m almost giddy and want him to ask me what I wrote, but he doesn’t so he loses another point (I am keeping score). He is equally disinterested in my appraisal of the daily dramas of facebook. We take turns closing our eyes by 7pm... Kiddo is still tearing the living room a new one, and he has work at 8. We had to buy two new sippy cups today because we are down to one and I don’t fucking understand how that happened. She usually hides them in the toybox but all I found was an old rice cake. She has no real routine anymore... we tried and she just kept throwing us gamechangers... teething, fevers, late nights with relatives... dead and gone are the days when I thought I could do this the way people say they do, or how its written in books. My advice? Just do it however it works for you... otherwise you will feel like failures before you even get to the hard stuff. Shes only woken up once since I put her down, which is fairly standard. The only reason I’m actually here is because she passed out before midnight and I had coffee at half seven. The last two nights she has been in bed with me while my partner worked away, and I know cosleeping is a thing people do on purpose, but if I am honest, sometimes I am too tired to physically walk up and down that corridor all night from our room to hers, so she snores next to me while I read Game of Thrones.