This and That

I’ve been on leave now for eight weeks. My days are so full, I hardly ever manage to leave the house. I’m busy from morning till night, up and down the stairs, in and out of the garden, finally collapsing into bed by 10pm, thoroughly exhausted. But after these eight very full weeks, I would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is I do all day long.

There have, of course, been a few outings, here and there – into town to meet friends, on a shopping expedition, to the doctor’s. But these are invariably strenuous and tiring, and require a good few days’ rest to recover afterward. No, I would not say that I am gallivanting about, enjoying my last weeks of freedom. Instead, I dress each day in different combinations of sweats and sweaters, slippers and garden shoes, and embrace the multitude of tasks that lurk in every corner of the house, quickly forgetting that I ever had a busy life outside it.

I’m contemplating this as I sit in a lawn chair on the deck, with half-closed eyes and my legs stuck out into a patch of sun. It’s mid-morning, and I’m taking a break from the day’s activities. Prior to this, I was very busy sitting in a wicker armchair on the upstairs balcony, reading, and taking a break from what I had been doing earlier – namely, eating, and taking a break on the deck.

I stand up and make a decision – best not to delay the day too long – lots to do – best to get my nap over with right away. I head back upstairs and lay my foggy head on the pillow, gratefully closing my eyes. What a tiring morning it’s been so far.

So there’s part of the mystery solved. There seems to be a lot of getting tired and taking breaks going on. What on earth is making me so tired? (Oh, I mean besides the acrobatic octopus that’s renting rehearsal space behind my belly button and siphoning off a portion of my meals.)

 

The octoacrobatopus in profile

 

Strictly speaking, my day begins at 3am, when I am wake up for my scheduled bathroom break. Or because I’m being used as a human punching bag, turned inside-out. Getting out of bed on first waking is always precarious, as I can never be quite sure in what position my hips have fossilised, or into what position my slippers have disarranged themselves in the dark, or between which sensitive organs an exploratory baby foot has been lodged.

Upon returning from my strenuous waddle to the bathroom, my legs now fully awake and reinstated under me, it’s snack time. Piotrek, who would sleep through an attack of grenade-throwing tractors mounted on his pillow – Piotrek, who can sit up, answer questions, make speeches and compose ballads about the moon without ever waking up – suddenly seems liable to me to be ripped out of fragile slumber by the crunch of my crackers or the rustle of my plastic sandwich bag. (For successful, silent night time snacking, I recommend a banana – peeled slowly under the covers, to avoid the risk of echo – or a sandwich on soft bread, placed in a Tupperware with the lid balanced on top, but not sealed.) Like a well-trained spy, I take my precautions of subterfuge prophylactically, sometimes eating in the hall, sometimes even in the bathroom, sometimes hunched under the covers.

Next, it’s time to lie down and begin the Hunt for a Viable Position. (Baby K provides her opinion on this via kicks of disagreement.) As the season progresses, the time allotted to this activity grows shorter and shorter; by 3:30 I can see the first glow of daylight behind our white curtains, and by 4:00 it’s time to begin the next activity – Watching the Dawn. (Sometimes, I do this from behind closed eyelids. It makes no difference to the intensity of the experience.) By 4:30 or 5:00, I grudgingly put on a pair of earplugs (the birds have a standing invitation to join me in the dawn-watching activity, and are unmanageably chatty throughout) and an ever-flimsier eye mask.

Between 5:00 and 6:00 I usually devote the peaceful, earplug-induced quiet to contemplating whether or not I will be too groggy to get anything done, if I just get up right now. At 6:00 Piotrek’s alarm goes off, and he hits snooze. Inexplicably, I suddenly start to feel myself pulled into complex and mysterious dreams about the hidden second kitchen we’ve discovered under our stairs, or our journeys to distant lands to discover the truth about juice. I clamber out of these dreams a moment later, poking blindly (because of the eye mask) at Piotrek’s pillow to see if he’s still sleeping. He’s gone. It’s 9:00.

 

The sleepy 5am garden

 

It doesn’t always happen precisely this way; there are days where I manage to wake up in enough time for Piotrek to bring me coffee in bed, or when I get up early and even make him breakfast. But most of the time, I confuddle the creakings of the closet door and the thud of his dresser drawers with the strange inhabitants of my dreams, until I finally manage to wrench myself awake, alone in an empty house flooded with mid-morning light.

 And then I get down to the Projects.

 Like – reading. A very important part of the day. In bed if it’s cold, on the balcony if it’s not. Everyone says I won’t have time once Baby K arrives, so there are a lot of books to get through in the next month.

 Also – making lists. Someone’s got to do it. Lists of things we need to buy for Baby K. Lists of things we don’t need to buy for Baby K. Lists of furniture we need, and furniture we wish we had, and furniture we wish we didn’t have but will make the best use we can of it, because we are a family that Never Wastes Anything. Budgets. Lists of things that need to be repaired. Lists of things that are lying next to the wall where they hope one day to hang on proper hooks, or of holes in the wall that hope one day to host hanging things. Lists – sorry, excel spread sheets – of Baby K’s clothes (it’s hard to keep track of all those different sizes. Really.)

 Then there are the little routines. Every morning, as the sun advances, opening series of windows to let in the heat and warm the house. (Until this past week, when we had a heat wave, and it was suddenly all about letting in the draughts.) Eating First Breakfast on the balcony. Washing the dishes. Tidying the kitchen. Eating Second Breakfast on the deck. Putting on laundry. Hanging up laundry. Folding laundry. Minutely changing the position of chairs round the coffee table. Cooking, from time to time.

 I’ve also painted Baby K’s room with carefully-measured panels of folkloric flowers. I’ve unpacked All the Boxes, and All the Suitcases, and arranged everything, by type, size and colour, in proper drawers and on proper hangers. (This, I’m afraid, has thrown my poor husband into complete disarray, and he is now even less able to find any of his clothes than he was when they were all crumpled in a heap in an open suitcase.)

 On the rare occasions when I connect to the internet (did I mention we have no internet this month? Hence the frenzied activity in the closets and dusty corners, I suspect,) I do market research on our expected expenditure on exciting new items like nursing pads and disposable mesh underwear, and wet wipes and diapers, and diaper bags and baby slings. And I put them all in my budget (in excel, of course), along with the fridge (with freezer) and the new oven we keep meaning to buy, and wonder how many years down the road it will be before we manage to buy bookshelves, or put pictures on the wall, or hang curtains. And I add those to a list or two as well.

 I’ve packed and sealed boxes of clothes I have lost all hope of fitting into this year. I’ve stocked the bathroom shelves with our armoury of slow-depleting Christmas-gift shampoos. I’ve become the patron of missing socks, the sock matchmaker, finding a place of rest and comfort fort he happily paired as well as the celibate. I’ve been a weeding fiend, methodically liberating each fragile beet shoot from its prison of weeds, and a snail hunter, gathering the evil armies into my plastic bucket and catapulting them to the other side of the watery ditch at the bottom of the garden.

 And more and more, in the course of these exciting quests, I find myself compelled to sit down and take another break, sometimes from what suddenly seems like an unbelievably strenuous fifteen minutes of squatting in a garden patch, sometimes from nothing more demanding than eating a bowl of oatmeal on the deck. So putting it all together, the days go by pretty fast.