I really must learn to shut the hell up.

Wow.. where do I start.

First off, I guess I'd better warn you that I might have to dash off any moment if my child wakes up howling, because that's been the pattern of the last 24 hours. Poor little sod's got the flu (caught it from his mother), and he's not enjoying it at all.

Between tax season, GST time (that two month break seems like two days, sometimes), family duties (Mum's in hospital again), and motherhood.. well I'm not surprised that I've lost another couple of kilos from stress alone.

But the motherhood part is a hell of a lot of fun. Well.. mostly. I'm getting better at not falling apart when my kid cries (visibly, anyway). I even stepped outside today and left him snuffling unhappily into The Poodle because I had to answer a very important client question and couldn't hear myself think. Naturally I stayed just on the other side of the French doors, waving like a lunatic and "signing" incy wincy spider while chatting seriously about extensions of time and other serious stuffiness.

Yep, you know you're a parent when you can carry firewood, talk on the phone AND keep that spider on the trot.

Exhaustion has been the flavour of the last month or so. We fell (unwittingly & unhappily) into a pattern of constantly broken night sleep, which meant Karl (who did night shift for more than a decade) needed to get some sleep when Braeden woke at 5am, which meant Wayne was housebound until something like 8.30 when his wife finally woke and resembled something human, which meant he wasn't getting away from the house until close to 10.

There were many days when we stared blankly at each other and said "Ahhh stuff it. The landscaping can wait until tomorrow."

And of course "tomorrow" rained, hailed, sleeted or otherwise snotted something dreadful.

So that hurt the bank balance, and of course offended the bank manager. All fixed now but it was sausages & cabbage for a week or so there. If (and I mean "IF") we could be bothered to eat it. Sleep deprivation is a nasty thing.

Wayne decided that enough was enough, and seeing as it was unlikely we'd get the renovations done any decade soon, we'd have to compromise and soon. So one night (to test the theory) we crashed out on the couch and let Braeden have the whole bedroom to himself.

Guess which little baby-flavoured pumpkin pretty much slept through!

Ah-hah! Remove the snoring, wriggly parents and the snoring, wriggly dog (it's 90% dog : 10% parents on the nuisance factor), and the kidlet sleeps better.

Hence the parents might too?

So the big lounge is now tweeny, as we've put partitions up across half of it and tucked our bed in behind. Braeden has the entire master bedroom to himself, and is loving it. (Or was, until he got the bot).

Despite feeling sick today, he's had a great day. We sat in the playroom and played joyfully for two hours, then it was lunch and a nap (while Mum whizzed around cleaning up). Then we woke up crying (tooth #8 coming through), and got to nuzzle with Mum (dripping snot down her cleavage.. yum) for an hour or so, before becoming suddenly recharged and launching ourselves backward off Mum's lap and wanting to get down & parteeeeee!

Hallways are marvelous things in which to play tag with a baby. Extra good if you add in a couple of large rubber balls, an over-mothering dog, and a baby who can out-scuttle any crab.

Unfortunately Mum & Bub group is a no-go tomorrow, for obvious reasons. Bit of a shame, because most of the babies are now crawling, and last time was a real hoot with three of them racing each other up and down the step into the sunken lounge and off into the kitchen. Braeden was seriously outclassed by pretty Kelsey, (a totally gorgeous wee sprite with a mass of auburn curls and the brightest blue eyes), so he decided to get even and resorted to botty hopping.

The toddlers looked up from their "serious older kid play" and as one, they silently decided this looked like fun, and soon we had a congo line of botty hoppers following Braeden, who was trying to chat while bouncing. If you've ever bottyhopped and talked at the same time, you get a weird sort of verbal "buh-uhhhh-buh-hunnnh" effect, so of course the toddlers joined in on the sound effect as effectively as they did the bottom elevation technique.

We mothers laughed so hard we had to work hard not to spray each other with coffee. The host Mum ended up with some nicely buffed floors, into the bargain.

On a more serious note, poor old Mum is in hospital following a bladder infection that led to blood poisoning, and has some problems with what is sounding suspiciously like pernicious anaemia. She's had three blood transfusions so far and is in isolation due to reduced immunity to disease, and there are more tests coming.

Poor old gal. And I can't take Bub up to see her because we're riddled with the dreadful lurgy. What a shame her cellphone doesn't have pix capability.

(A darkly humourous aside.. this time I decided NOT to bring her cat home for the duration, given that we lost the previous moggie!)

It's time to explain the title of this update. I'm about to wander right off the point for a moment, and remind my mates from UC of the post I put up 18 months ago where I bewailed my month of misery (January '05), with Mum in hospital, a fight with the bank manager, two relatives and a friend dropping dead, and to cap it all off I said the fateful words. "Oh yeah. And I'm late."

With me so far? So when Mum went into hospital on Thursday, I turned to Wayne and said "remember last time, yada yada". He rang me later that day and said "Here's #2.. grumpy note from the bank manager."

Then the next day I got word of #3.. a wonderful lady who was sort of an honorary grandmother to me has passed on. Not entirely unexpected, but nevertheless not welcome news.

So I'm putting everyone on notice. Do not walk under any ladders, run over any black cats, or otherwise push your luck, because I really don't want to completely repeat last year's hellmonth.

But I could totally stand to be "late" again ;-) Especially now that I don't have to worry about waking the sproglet in the cot next to the bed. I think Wayne would prefer it if I got rid of the flu first, however.

Photos coming soon, I promise :-) Bub is now 10 months old.. can you believe it!!