Unsettled

I would love to write about something other than raising a baby - I have several items floating around my head - but the fact is that a newborn consumes every spare moment of your life.

Since last Saturday, evenings have proved to be a real struggle. Not unusually for a baby, evenings have been Alex's unsettled time. He refuses to go to sleep after his evening feed until (hopefully) his late night feed. That means that we can't rest from the time I get home from vwork until maybe 11pm.

On the upside he is often alert and can give you the most wonderful smiles when you play with him. However, too much play just exacerbates the wakefulness problem. My problem is that I end up absolutely exhausted myself, my whole body ready to collapse in a heap. Oh well, I still have some tricks to try.

Even after he is settled we still have to get up for his later feeds. The late-night television viewing continues. This week I discovered that while channels 7 and 10 both show the Home Shopping program at the same time, the remaining commercial station, channel 9 has Danoz-Direct which advertises the same products anyway. Collusion!

We have been mainly watching pre-recorded television anyway to get around the mundane nature of late night TV. The hilarious zombies of Shaun of the Dead. Kita ignored the melodrama of Rex in Rome until he heard the squeak of a dog toy. I prefer the Austrian version.

Yesterday we all attended Possum Cottage, where the nurses help you with feeding and settling problems for a day. They seemed pleased with us, but it was so nice to leave a sleeping Alex in their care for an hour while we had lunch in a cafe.

Possum Cottage is located at Sutherland Hospital. Their recent redevelopment has included some gorgeous courtyards, each different. My favourite was a bamboo forest with a pond of clear water bumbling over a mat of bamboo leaves, toy pandas positioned as if climbing the thick bamboo stems.