Tortillas at Midnight

 I know. I know . I’m writing about sleep again aren’t I? But this time, instead of me moaning about sleep yet once more, I want to write a little about baby sleep. And toddler sleep. And child sleep too.  I want to write about a concept that is entirely fake, packaged up, marketed, and sold to millions of utterly exhausted parents around the western world. I do want to begin with a disclaimer, though. I am not writing about sleep training as a whole (that mountain would require an entire series!). Nor am I judging parents for partaking in sleep training or the pursuit of “self settling/soothing”. We were vulnerable to it too and tried it out for a while. And sleep deprivation - in an immensely isolated, individualised, western society where parents don’t have a literal village, let alone support in many cases - is shocking in ways that one cannot understand unless you’ve lived it. Sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture, it can skyrocket mental health issues, and...

Last night I got an uninterrupted four hour stretch of sleep. Absolute bliss, let me tell you. Absolute bliss. I feel like I preface everything I write here with an evaluation of the sleep stitch. Kind of like the parent version of the diet gurus who eat 4.7 medjool dates per 3 mile ratio and then write about it. The dates dictate their day, so they say. And same goes for sleep. So here I am, feeling remarkably more refreshed and able to conquer the day! Because it has been a while since I’ve written here, I’m going to do a little round up of sorts. But not like the weed killer version, because that stuff is notably more effective than I, but more a lumping-miscellaneous-bits-and-bobs-together version of the word. So without further ado ... 1) There’s a bloody mouse plague over the ditch, isn’t there? Yes, apparently mouse plagues are a real thing. I dare you to watch the video of thousands of mice all squirming in a bucket. I dare you. This whole thing sounds almost biblical. And wit...

I’ve written my fair share about sleep deprivation on here, and you’re probably well and truly sick of hearing me go on about it now. For that I do apologise; it’s just hard to write about different things when your brain feels like mush day in and day out. Hopefully one day I’ll have enough brain power to write about something more exciting, like how awesome it is to feel awake! I can only dream . . . Anyway, in terms of major fiscal holes in the interwebs, I reckon there is a giant one when it comes to advice on how to cope with sleep deprivation, rather than trying to fix it. I’m not going to delve into the whole sleep training or not yada yada, because it’s kind of unproductive and mainly because I can’t be bothered. It might also have something to do with that I can’t articulate anything even vaguely coherent right now. Rest assured though that this is a “spend $1276 and your baby will sleep 15 hours a day until they’re 25” free zone. I’m more just going to focus on what helps me ...

I’m always on the hunt for new internet rabbit holes to venture down during all these long nights. Sometimes I’ll just read random articles or follow a Wikipedia chain or read up about conspiracy theories just for the fun of it. I’m not too sure how I got into investigating (okay, that’s way too strong a word for staring at a screen to stop my eyelids dropping) the animals for sale on TradeMe, but here we are. Upon reading several listings and gasping at the price of these creatures, I began to notice some particular themes within each subset of seller. And because I don’t have anything better to do during these ungodly hours, I’ve categorised these sellers into neat, little boxes. Healthy stuff. Let’s start with the pigs. Surprisingly, pig sellers tend to be of very few words. I was lowkey disappointed because I expected an almost rambunctious air about them, verging on mildly jolly. However, most listings just include one or two blurry photos of the pigs at least 5m away in a paddoc...