Dalekboy

Just wanted to put the word out early that all our Continuum 7 plans may suddenly be cancelled. Both kids are sick, but Lex is really unwell, poor little bugger. He's been out of sorts for a couple of days, but today he's bad enough that he's voluntarily staying in bed, moaning, dozing, and asking me to come in and hold him every 20 minutes.

It's no good dragging him down to Melbourne if he's like this. It won't be fun or comfortable for him, and it certainly won't be fun for us. Mind you, with both kids at the con we were keeping our hopes for fun at fairly low levels. :)

Original plan was to leave Thursday. If Lex isn't substantially better by Wednesday arvo, then we start to cancel 90% of our travel plans. The remaining 10% will be me driving down to Melbourne on the Friday, doing the Chronos Awards, staying the night, then leaving Saturday after the Continuum 101 panel so Sharon isn't stuck with looking after a sick child and a baby on her own.

I have suggested to Shaz that she can head down with MaybeZoe, deliver the awards, do the whole con, and I'll stay here and look after Lex. I doubt she'll go for it, but have made the offer. It'd let her get to a con, and give her a few days off, albeit looking after one child. She could leave MZ here, but it would destroy our frozen breast milk supplies and leave us no reserves.

Naturally, if we do cancel Wednesday arvo, Lex will be right as rain Thursday. If we wait until Thursday to cancel, he'll be well Friday. If we go to Melbourne, he'll be sick and miserable the whole time. This is the nature of parenting :)

Fingers crossed he gets better and we can all travel down. I know he was looking forward to the trip as much as we were. And it's shaping up to be a fantastic con, so it'd be nice if we could see parts of it around children.

Last night I was so wrecked I nearly went to bed at 8pm. I ended up staying up later only because I wanted to hang out with Sharon, who was actually too busy to hang, so I went to bed at 10pm. After I went to bed, Sharon had a crook guts, which kept her up until 1am.

At 4am I awoke to the sound of Lex being loudly happy. I knew immediately what the result would be, if not the cause. When I went into the room, MaybeZoe was wide awake as well because Lex had decided to play with her. At 4fuckingAM. Took a while to find out Lex had a headache, and then I had to lie with him to get him settled. Meanwhile, Zozo got progressively more unhappy.

At 6am she showed no signs of settling. In fact she was getting louder and more unsettled. By this point nappy had been checked, she had been fed (I woke Shaz a quarter hour before her alarm would go off to feed bub), and given she's teething I'd tried pain relief. Nothing was working.

Then I remembered something. It was something I'd not used with her because unlike her brother, she'd seldom had a lot of trouble settling.

I tried throat singing. Within 30 seconds she'd quietened down. By the five minute mark she was asleep. Hooray!

Now if only I had someone to help lull me to sleep...

Might be time to break out either the Dead Planet soundtrack, or the Warriors' Gate one.

Just sick, again. Another cold, or the same cold. And migraines. I'm in one of my migraine periods where I have weeks of trying to head them off. Coming up on four or five months of colds, 'flu, stomach bugs, etc. Don't think I've had more than a couple of weeks without illness. Bit over crawling exhausted through my days and getting further and further behind on everything.

On the bright side, am keeping up with the child-raising duties. Not a lot of energy to do extra stuff, but getting the basics done is still better than some (grumbles about 5 year old kids going to school who have literally never opened a book).

Sharon and I are now referring to Swancon as my break. Suspect I'll spend a chunk of the con in my room, catching up on rest. But at least I have the option, and can catch up with friends.

Lex survived chicken pox with only minimal spots, MaybeZoe had even fewer spots when she caught it. MZ now has six teeth, five of which are on the same side of her mouth, all of which came up in a three week period. She's not quite crawling yet, but is mobile enough to cause trouble.

Lex is still being an awesome big brother. Biggest problem now he and MZ are sharing a room is that he keeps wanting to make her giggle and laugh when they should both be getting sleep.

Lex has been running around this morning, varying between playing with his toy drill, and carrying around and cuddling MaybeZoe's pink Minnie Mouse soft toy.

It's nice to watch. I like that he's free to play with whatever he wants. I know some of my relos would have been taking Minnie Mouse off him and giving him 'boys' toys to play with. As it is, I'm sure some will be quietly horrified.

What a shame.

As mentioned, lots of folks are having a bad time at the mo', hell, I've spent a chunk of the day in bed wishing I could sleep and being generally down and uncommunicative.

So for those of you who are cheered by such things, I present photos of the kids.

( several shots below the cut, including one that's probably NSFW, depending on how idiotic your workmates are... )

I could be answering emails, but screw it.

Apart from MaybeZoe being born, haven't done a photo post in a while, and someone said not so long ago that they'd like to see some photos of me with Lex, so below the cut are pictures of the kids and I, in chronological order.

Warning, contains one shower shot that should be completely safe anywhere, but just in case, consider yourself warned.

( Read more... )

April 1st, 2006, that's when the universe decided to play a practical joke on me - it gave me a migraine. One that lasted for two weeks. The upshot of which was that the effect on my brain was the same as a mini-stroke. Oh, how we laughed!

So, in a matter of weeks I went from being bouncing, energetic Danny to constantly giddy, no concentration Danny. What made it worse was that after months of waiting to see a neurologist, the one we got was pretty useless. He always seemed to disregard the migraine as a starting point for the problems I was having, concentrating instead on the giddiness, and basically suggested that I take it easy until other symptoms presented themselves so he could make a diagnosis.

It wasn't until a little while after we moved to Canberra that we got someone who joined the dots in a truly Sherlock Holmesian manner. Asking weird questions and putting my answers together. I still remember when he'd said he was 90% certain that I'd had a Basilar Migraine - one based around my brain stem - and I brought up something I'd forgotten to mention, that the scent of my body had actually changed, and he nodded and said that it was just more evidence backing up his theory.

Of course the first and most important thing to do after a stroke is to start retraining one's body and brain, something I hadn't been doing because I'd essentially been told to take it easy. I had started jogging a month or two before the diagnosis because my legs had been getting weaker, but I was basically ten months behind. The doctor we'd seen said that while there was no reason I couldn't eventually make a full recovery, these things are unique to each individual and I may not.

So, where am I at? ( Read more... )

Sharon has been having a terrible time settling Lex (he's teething - big, painful rear teeth), whereas I'm having some trouble, but nowhere near as much. I was trying to come up with anything I did differently, couldn't think of anything, but mentioned that I now always finish with the Venusian lullaby from Doctor Who. It's the one Pertwee uses to hypnotise Aggedor, the royal beast of Peladon.

No, really. I couldn't make that up.

Anyway Sharon tried to settle Lex tonight, and he would not settle. She headed off to resettle him again, and this time it worked! When she came down, I told her I was surprised, and didn't think he was going to settle.

She mimed patting Lex's back and then starting singing a rough version of... you guessed it! It's the easiest he's settled for her in a while.

Here's the only copy I could find on Youtube.

Had to make a trip to Belconnen today, with mum and Lex. I didn't take the stroller because on two previous occasions with Lex holding my finger as we walked, he's been fine.

And he was again today. We walked around for over an hour, and he was fine the whole time. I'm still amazed by this. I know he's a pretty good kid, but even so, we're out walking in a big, wide, interesting place with lots of shapes and colours and people, so I pretty much expect him to want to run off and explore everything. They're naturally curious, and everything is new, so of course they want to investigate.

But Lex is happy to hold my finger and walk along, twisting his head and body wildly in an attempt to take in as much as he can. The two points where he saw something he just had to get a better look at (balloons, and a random shop window), he grabbed my finger more firmly and gently pulled me in the direction that had his interest. So we'd have a look and then, because I knew he'd happily look at this stuff for an hour, I'd lead him away and he'd come with minimum resistance.

I've always been told that I was a really good, quiet child, and so far, that describes Lex. He usually only plays up when he's over-tired, or in discomfort, neither of which one can really blame him for.

So, maybe he takes after his dad in that respect. I wonder if he'll be a quiet teenager too, until he finally finds the social group in which he feels comfortable, and then look out world!

Well, stephiepenguin did a post on pictures that she took during 2009. So I'm pinching the idea and doing the same. All pictures of people, many of whom are holding Lex for some reason, and they're in chronological order. Every photo was taken by me, or was pretty much entirely set up by me and then I had someone else press the button.

I was quite pleased when I compiled this. I had felt like I'd hardly taken any pictures this year, but in actual fact I had hardly taken any travel pictures. There's plenty with people.

Goal for next year - more pictures of people (and hopefully some travel pics).



( +34 more, includes some harmless nudity, but consider yourself warned... )