Finding the pattern

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

The end of the year is a really sucky time to do anything.

We’re living in a predominantly Christian society which means we started getting introduced to the Christmas stuff early (I think some places started in October) and now we’re drowning in it. Most of Perth is out Christmas shopping which means we’re doing ours during the week when it’s nice and quiet coz everyone else is at work. We don’t even really do Christmas, not in the sense everyone else is used to anyway which I think is either pissing them off or they think it’s weird and just steamroller over us in an attempt to keep everything normal for them. I deal with it.

Going to Christmas Island on the 11th. I had explained to me what was happening with the house but still don’t quite get it. I’m sure it will be explained again closer to the time. We finally got a decent passport photo for Smidge. Got the next door neighbour to be guarantor. Now we need a witness to watch us sign the bloody thing or at least write their name on it to say they saw us sign the bloody thing. Then pay extra money so we can get the passport within two days rather than ten because we don’t have ten days.

We want to renew our Dockers memberships.

The house needs a clean. I can’t seem to find the time or motivation to storyboard or 3d, mainly coz by the end of the day I’m tired and braindead and it seems to numb out the bits of my brain that do arty things. My desk needs cleaning and the entire house could do with a declutter. The dining suite is getting delivered tomorrow, then we rearrange furniture and see where we can fit a couch and perhaps a single seater. Also need to pick up that other futon frame someone said we could have. I can’t remember who, it was one of JJ’s friends.

It’s all just a leeeeeeeetle bit hectic and stressful.

I thought when uni was over we could chill out. And we are chilling out just a little bit. JJ is a lot happier and has slowed down. I have my JJ back, the easygoing guy I originally fell in love with. We have a bit less time to spend together seeing as we have two kids and I tend to spend a lot of time not talking to him partly because perhaps out of habit he’s preferring to watch tv or just muck around on his computer to chill out rather than spending too much time with me. He is spending a bit of time with the kids though which is a good thing. Especially for Tiny who has missed his daddy lots. Mainly though not a lot has changed coz we’re still being antisocial with each other and it’s silly season so we’re spending a bit of time Christmas shopping. Good thing we’re only doing it for family otherwise I would have needed to start in June. Smidge’s Welcoming Party is being held on Saturday so we get to spend some time with whoever rocks up, seeing as we prefer food and friends for solstice rather than drowning in presents. We get the food and family deal when spending Christmas with family but still drown in presents. I know it’s meant to be a side effect of Christmas but it always seems to take over, specially when the predominant Christmas questions for kids are “have you been a good boy/girl this year?” “Is Santa going to come?” “How many presents did you get?”. I’d like to hear more “Did you have fun?” “What did you do?” type questions more. But that might be wishful thinking, we do live in a consumerist commercialist society.

JJ is headed out to Raytheon tomorrow to give the presentation to the navy brass. He’s going to be a while. I’m trying to decide whether to take the kids out to Freo and try to do the Christmas shopping we didn’t get to do much of today because I’m an idiot and forgot the pram and after that couldn’t get the kids to sleep coz JJ was too busy pimping our ride and is deaf and thus couldn’t Smidge screaming her head off which prevented Tiny from going back to sleep and subsequently me screaming at him to come get her. Which ended up with me tandem feeding and then Tiny buggering off and spending the rest of the afternoon cranky because he wouldn’t go back to sleep, and me feeling annoyed with JJ and tired and unable to get my break for the rest of the day. By the time I got both kids down for the night I couldn’t be bothered storyboarding which is what I’d been hoping to do this afternoon during the kid’s naptime and tonight. And at some point or other maybe reconnecting with JJ, but to be honest I have absolutely no idea how to do that. We’ve been so busy leading our own lives while he was at uni that it feels like we’re more very close housemates than anything else. That Pattern is so ingrained it’s really hard to change. I guess it doesn’t help that I want to change it but he doesn’t seem to see the need to change it so that doesn’t help. And it’s not really going to matter even if I do talk it out with him coz he is extremely habitualised and even if we decide to make changes, he’ll just fall back into the old pattern. And I’ll get bored of trying and do the same.

Still, I guess something should be done on that front.

I also really need to improve relations with my son. The last three weeks of him needing to be babied, plus teething, plus refusing to eat, is taking its toll. Add that to his constant night wakings and the lack of sleep I had from when I was pregnant and it makes for one cranky bitch mum. He’s been boundary testing lately and throwing tantrums when refused things, and I’ve been reacting very badly and spending a lot of time yelling at him and even smacked him once, which pissed me right off coz I don’t smack him and I don’t believe in smacking either. Today was another great one where we were ducking over to see the neighbour and she wasn’t home yet, so headed home. Tiny didn’t want to go home coz he wanted (yet another) outing (coz the trip to Freo wasn’t outing enough) so refused to come inside. He’s not allowed out the front because there is no fence and we’re spitting distance from a major road, so I pulled him in and he was so busy throwing a tantrum that he whacked his head on the doorframe, which of course was my fault coz I was pulling him into the house at the time.

I know he really needs more interaction and things like that from both me and JJ, and more attention and all that other stuff. I guess JJ is pretty tired as well recovering from uni and also having the occasional sleepless night with me, and when tired I tend to stick to the computer. Think I need to get back into the habit I had earlier of not hitting the computer (or at least not hitting it much, I join a few Yahoo groups and I start getting spammed, fucking Yahoo) while Tiny is awake, and just doing stuff with him unless he wants to do stuff on his own.

Also need to try to work out a new pattern for our lives. We’d then need to rework it again once JJ starts working (whenever that may be) and again when Sprat moves in. I reckon it’ll be great when she moves in and everyone else can’t wait coz they think it will be just great when she does. Point is, we can’t really do it now coz everything is in upheaval. And I hate this kind of transition.

Guess we’ll make it somehow.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License