Showing posts with label Sleep deprivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sleep deprivation. Show all posts

Saturday, August 9, 2008

I'm a Little Airplane Neeowww

I’m a little airplane neeowww
I’m a little airplane neeowww
I’m a little airplane neeowww
I’m a little airplane neeowww
neeowww, neeoww, neeoww, neeoww
I’m a little airplane neeowww, neeoww, neeoww.

Just figured out the chords for Teo’s favorite dance song (above).
It’s off an ancient-of-days Sesame Street Dance Video
we rent every so often, just for that song.
The Toot careens around the living room with arms extended
stomping down or bouncing off all the stuff that needs to be picked up.

Watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic games
at 2:30 am last night (it’s finally darkish at night again...
I like it) trying to put Annika to sleep.
It was so odd, this weird ritual of the torch being passed
from Chinese athlete to Chinese athlete in a big stadium
(It may have been explained, I didn’t have the sound on)
and then an older athlete guy with torch was picked up by a sky cable
and was swung forward as he pretended to run
(his shadow was right, but the angle of the camera
catching his actual body made it look like senseless writhing,
which, from a political viewpoint, was just right) while his shadow,
as it projected on the surface behind him with a following spotlight,
unraveled what I took to be a 360-degree television screen rimming
the humongous stadium. Finally, as if he were lighting a fuse,
he lit the bottom of the mungo torch, and the fire raced up in a line
around the ribbony architecture of the torch, and instead of an explosion,
the torch began burning (putting off something like 20 million BTU’s,
enough heat expended in ten minutes
to heat our house for the next millennium. Or something.)
And you thought church ritual was odd and wasteful?

Like I said, I shouldn’t be blogging on no sleep.

Annika’s eating food for a week and remaining constipated.
Now, that’s stupid. The formula, the cereal, it’s all
jam packed with supplemental iron. Iron’s bad. Calcium too.
I have experience. The last time I thought my bones might need help,
two summers ago, the ensuing medical debacle almost did me in.
Anyway, so I’m trying oat bran on her, but it needs to be whipped
in the blender because she apparently doesn’t like grit.
Jury’s out whether it helps.

And here’s Matteo in heaven, in the cockpit of a Black Hawk helicopter
from the Fair last Sunday. He’s taken over Marin’s Airplane book,
it’s like Roger Tory Peterson’s bird book, three or four planes per page,
in categories like float planes, twin engine, commercial, and so on.

Matteo now calls out what the plane is (or what he remembers)
whenever there’s a silhouette on the skyline. “Dash Eight!” or
“Dee Cee Nine!” Or “deHavilland Beaver!”

Closer to home, he has his
“Eskimo Plane,” a six-inch Boeing 747 with Alaska Air decals on it.
It flies all around the house on pounding little feet,
especially when Annika’s trying to sleep.
Several balsa wood planes have met their fate in his care.
We have a balsa-wood-airplane parts shop now,
undamaged pieces salvaged from the various crashes,
and inadvertent but no less disastrous crushing missteps,
some while he was lofting the Eskimo plane,
with its fuselage and wings of metal.
And, about those plastic tail fins – well they’re long gone.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Six Months

Hiroshima day...

So Annika was six months old yesterday.

Didn’t sleep much last night.
Marin has been more willing to
wake me if Annika’s noodling at night.
“Would you be willing to do some reading?”

A good thing. Marin’s sleep is a disaster,
and she’s the one who has to work.

So I took the little one at 4 am,
not to do reading, I was not waking up.

By 5, it was clear she wasn’t going to quiet.
First she’s cooing that you’re lying there
close to her on the carpet, then she’s singing, then it’s shrieking.

Marin can’t sleep even if there’s a baby vocalizing
anywhere within a half mile.

So I put “Black Book” in the DVD player.
Dutch film. About a Jewish woman trying to survive
in Holland during WWII, working with the resistance,
sent to take an undercover role
with the occupying Germans, in the final months of the war.
Very intense movie. I love movies which keep the actual languages
even though I have to read.
Wow. I love Netflicks. I was still watching interviews
when Marin awoke at 7:30. Which is late for our morning routine.

Oops.
Now it’s tomorrow. The narrative is broken.

New narrative: If I start trying to write again,
I want to keep it up.

So I’ll post this and try
not to give in to the fatigue,
no, the exhaustion,
which comes from working
(I’m doing 15 hours at the Unitarian Fellowship
along with four guitar lessons each week)
and eating and sleeping and raising
two children.