How About Renaming it MMS?

PMS is such a misnomer. Like Morning Sickness, which is not limited to the morning but rather is all-day-nausea, PMS for some is all-month-evil. To carry the analogy a little further, with Morning Sickness, upon puking (which normally one would assume would make one feel better) one still feels just as nauseated *and* has vomit-breath. With PMS, at the start of bleeding when one would expect relief from the symptoms, the opposite is often the case. Now not only is one moody, miserable and depressed, but bleeding.

Did you ever see those commercials where the slightly disheveled, clearly put-upon woman is trying to get a shopping cart out of the cart line to do her grocery shopping? She wrestles a little with the thing, then bangs her hands on the handle and slams the cart into the others to a voiceover saying "Why does this always happen to me?" I used to slightly grin at that commercial thinking "We all have those days. No need for Prozac."

Heh. Hand over the drugs. I've dissolved into tears recently over something as little as a packet of laundry tablets refusing to open cleanly. I've yelled at The Toddler for -- well, being a toddler. And poor Mr LSG gets his head taken off routinely. He deserves it, you know. He puts his knife in the sink instead of the dishwasher.

Did I Say San Francisco?

I think I married my father.

When I was young(er), my father would torture me with this really cool mind-game of his. He'd have a decision to make: red tie or blue? Volvo or Sunfire? He'd get us kids involved in the debate, get us to come out in favour of one thing or the other, and he'd agree that we were right, the red tie or the Sunfire was the decision.
Then WHAM! He'd flip. "No, it's the blue tie." "Actually, the Volvo is better" (okay, so he was right there).

Sometimes, if he was really feeling mischevious, he'd get us to agree with the flip -- only to flip back. "You know, I think you were right before. The red tie it is!"

Now that I'm older, married (happily, thank you!), have a child of my own, I think I understand that he was trying to get us to think for our own and stand by our decisions in the face of pressure. But holy shit, was it frustrating.

Mr LSG and I are doing a similar dance lately with the "where do we live" question -- as soon as we say "Right, we're blowing this clambake" we start to feel as if we might actually like to stay in London for a while. Damnit.

The Caffeine Monologues

Let's talk about children. Most of us have this -- let's face it, narcissistic -- need to procreate. And when we do, our lives go all topsy-turvy on us. We now understand sacrifice, tough love, and discipline in ways that were completely incomprehensible before baby. We have experienced how sleep-deprivation is a form of torture and how we never ever ever could have prepared ourselves for it before baby. And we still love these instruments of our undoing in a fundamental "of course" way.

Now let's talk about caffeine. If you are like me, you gave up caffeine for the length of time it took to fall pregnant (1.5yrs), be pregnant (37 weeks) and breastfeed (4.5 months and don't get down on me for this, I wanted to go longer). Previously, I had one to two cups of coffee in the morning only, and reveled in the clarity it brought me for my morning commute and early work day. When I gave it up, it wasn't too difficult (blinding headaches nonetheless) and I went on happily drinking decaffeinated teas, patting myself on the back and being grateful I didn't have to hunt down a cup o' joe on holidays and at other people's houses.

Unfortunately, after I stopped breastfeeding, that devil in me that says "go ahead, indulge, you are no longer directly feeding another being" perked up when I stopped breastfeeding. She was in a stupor from the sleepless nights and days and needed CAFFEINE and CHOCOLATE. I was helpless to resist. Especially when I discovered the Mocha Latte.

So once again I find myself a slave to caffeine. It's a love-hate relationship. Love the buzz. Hate the dependancy. Unless The Toddler learns to sleep through the night, I absolutely cannot contemplate life without caffeine. So can someone tell me: just how am I going to kick it the next time we want to conceive?

BrainTunes

"Toot-toot chugga-chugga, Big Red Car; We'll travel near and we'll travel far!" The Wiggles, "Big Red Car"

I remember pre-Toddler when I would get a song or jingle stuck in my head and it would be annoying. It was always a fragment of the tune. Never the entire song. My, how times change. Hours after having dropped the Toddler off at nursery I will still be humming some child's song that we sang together in the morning. The entire song. With hand motions.

I wonder if that's the reason for the odd looks? Or maybe it's this morning's rejected yoghurt in a lovely Rorschach blot on my shirt.