Musical beds

That house. The one I saw. We put in an offer today. Who knows what will happen now.

I am determined to go to bed early tonight, after last night's non-sleep-apalooza. Usually when I'm woken at 3am or whenever it is (I can't see the clock without craning, once I'm sleeping with Miss), I'm quite alert - no doubt from however many years it is now of being woken around then by one or t'other. But last night when I moved my arm and it was enough to make her splutter awake, suddenly totally bunged up with an insta-cold, it was only one-something, and I was still in the depths of wanting to be asleep. The exciting new nasal-congestion issue meant it took forever to get her back to sleep and I had to sit up (horrors!) to do it, so she could nurse and breathe at the same time (always a plus). And then gently ease us back down to a horizontal position an inch at a time, ending up with her head elevated on the pillow and mine falling off the back end, ensuring that I couldn't sleep myself.

It felt like 15 minutes later when Monkey appeared on the horizon. Every morning in the grey light I register the pad, pad, pad of his feet through my shallow sleep and raise a grim hand in warning to make sure he knows where his sister is and not to wake her, and hopefully to convey that I'm not at all pleased to see him and would be a much nicer mummy if he would just wait an hour or three. Then he slides under the duvet on my other side and says in an all-too-shrill whisper, and as if I didn't know, "Please may can I have morn-side?" (May can is his ultra-polite asking. I think it's because his father taught him please may I and I went with the simpler - I thought, for some reason - please can I, and both stuck. Sort of.)

His appearance has been getting earlier lately, from a very reasonable 6.30 to 7.00 a while ago to hours with 5s in them lately. This morning I looked at the clock, saw 4.30, and ushered him straight back to his own bed. But then I had to stay there with him, which I did for about half an hour and then, though he still wasn't asleep, I reckoned he should drop off so I left with a quick pat and an excuse about getting back to the baby. I crawled into my own bed once I'd ascertained that Miss was fine, and had 15 minutes or so of trying to get warm when pad, pad, pad, he was back. Lather rinse repeat. This time I fell asleep in his bed and was woken by B telling me very quietly that Miss was awake and looking for me, so then I had to go back to her, long-windedly put her back to sleep... or did she even go back to sleep? Maybe at this point it was 6.30 and I let her get up with her father and took myself back to bed, finally, for an hour's lie in... it's all a blur.

It's probably a blur for you too, in the unlikely event that you're still reading this, and you're no doubt wondering why I let my children walk all over me like this and why their father can't lend a hand. Honestly, I prefer him to get a solid six or seven hours and then be able to get up early with them than to disturb him during the night, when he's usually a lot more comatose than I am and finds it hard to get back to sleep once woken. And really, it's not normally this way: Monkey has been sleeping through the night very reliably for almost two years now, and Miss is having a particularly bad time just now with the stuffy nose and the five - yes, five - teeth she's working on. I just found a molar poking through this evening. The other molars are all right there, bumps under the gum, and the last incisor is so close I can practically see it, but it refuses to break through. Poor girl.

So today I forwent Monkey's nap, at great personal expense (oh all right, I mis-timed our walk and he was still awake at the end of it) and he was in bed early and I hope hope hope this will be enough to break the pattern and get him to sleep a solid twelve hours. Eleven? Ten? What are the chances? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

Also to see whether we're home-owners.

Houses and bloggers

I viewed a house today, and I liked it. I think I consider it a runner. It has the requisite number of bedrooms, the kitchen and family room are connected and on the level, it has a fenced-in yard and a nice deck, it has office space so that we wouldn't have to keep the filing cabinet in our bedroom any more, and it's in the right place, though a bit further up the hill than my absolute ideal house would be. It needs some work but nothing too major: floors refinished, walls painted (wallpaper removed), some windows replaced, closet doors attached. The kitchen is a bit dated but has plenty of space for improvement. We could have an island!

We shall see what happens with that. No chickens are being counted.

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What I wanted to do was expand on my blogroll, because all the people I've linked to down there on the right are really great and you should check them all out. Admittedly, there's a bit of a bias towards bloggers who were pregnant or new mothers when I was also pregnant, because I had a lot of time on my hands at that particular job, and was busy researching my upcoming job i.e. motherhood. But these ones stuck and became the people I read every day because of more than that: they're great, funny, engaging writers (and their kids are cute).

A Girl and a Boy: Leah (not her real name) lives with Simon and their baby, Wombat, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She's tall, blonde, and a book editor; he's dark, handsome, and musical, and Wombat is adorable and just a little younger than Miss.

All and Sundry: Linda provides me with a periodic look ahead thanks to her elder son, who is about six months older than Monkey. She writes with piercing honesty and raucous hilarity, and takes beautiful pictures of life on the other coast.

Amalah: I started reading Amy's blog when her son Noah was tiny and I was pregnant. We got pregnant with our second kids a month apart. She even lives near here. I stalk her sometimes, but she's way too cool for me: she wears skinny jeans and knows a lot more than I do about beauty products, and writes heart-wrenchingly of Noah's particular amazingness as a fabulous kid who just happens to have sensory processing disorder and dyspraxia and some other things going on.

Ask Moxie: This one isn't so much a blog as a vital parenting resource: I recommend it to anyone I know who gets pregnant. Moxie will assure you that nobody knows your kid as well as you, and that nobody can parent them better than you either, and that whatever gets the most people the most sleep most of the time is probably the right thing to be doing. If you're tearing your hair out about that baby of yours, look no further for support and information from Moxie and her great posse of commenters.

Balancing Everything: Jessica is a crazy, crafty, home-schooling, cloth-diapering, flour-grinding Mormon with four beautiful kids in Idaho, and I love her. She'll sew you a custom camera strap, thrill you with her amazing birth stories, inspire you with her love for her children, and have you laughing at her candour about their chaos.

Better Now: Kristen lives in Vancouver with her four-year-old son and her boyfriend's abs. (And the rest of him, but his abs are, um, memorable.) I've been reading since she was debaucherous and dishevilled in Calgary and unexpectedly pregnant. Her life and her blog have imploded and exploded since then, and she writes lyrically about it all.

Dooce: The grand-dame of them all, Mommyblogger extraordinaire, Heather is irreverant and hilarious and has two daughters with the most astonishing eyes you've ever seen. She swears like a sailor, takes amazing photos, and is going to be the new Oprah, I believe.

Finslippy: Alice is a little too good a writer: I can't read her too often or I'll just stop trying. I just re-read her son's birth story and nearly woke the baby laughing: I'll just say that it has Dan Rather and Jerry Orbach, and leave it at that.

Here be Hippogriffs: I have to admit that Julia is probably my favourite. She battled infertility and multiple miscarriages with unbelievable fortitude, and is now mother of three beautiful and precocious children. If she wrote a treatise on the political state of Outer Mongolia in 1436, I would read it because it would be highly entertaining. I want to be her stalker, but she lives in Minnesota, which is a little off my radar.

Secret Agent Josephine: Brenda is a graphic designer who lives near the beach in southern California with her photographer husband and their 4-year-old daughter, Bug. Brenda takes gorgeous pictures, makes free illustrations for you to download, gets crafty with cardboard boxes and her nieces, and made lemon scones the other day.

Tomato Nation: Sars knows a lot about baseball, New York City, movies, and answering random questions about love lives, cats, ethics and books you read a long time ago. Way back when the Internet began I used to read her recaps on Dawson's Wrap, and now I read her opinions on everything else (except the baseball, because I'm just not interested in that).

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Am currently sitting on my hands, metaphorically speaking, trying to let B. mull over the concept of this potential house in peace. It's really hard.

Home thoughts from abroad

Thinking. Stuff. Head churning with it. Mommybrain still, but maybe some of the grey matter is coming back. Just as well I've a job lined up, becuase otherwise I'd go and buy a house or something just to have a reason to make more lists. You'd think a trip to Europe in July was enough planning to keep me going.

Here's my rationale. We've been here nearly three years already, with no end in sight and a more "permanent" job coming up. I don't want to suddenly turn around and find we've been here another three years and kept sinking money into rent when we could have bought a place. I don't want to discover we're in the wrong school district in two years' time when Monkey is ready for kindergarden. At the bottom of it, I suppose I'm just sick of living in this seat-of-our-pants, temporary style.

We could take a portion of the money we have at home squirreled away for buying a house that hypothetical day when we return to the promised land of our forefathers, and spend it on a 3-bed here, now, where we actually live - up the road, in the other school district and in walking distance of handy stuff. Nothing huge, just enough space for the two kids we now find ourselves with and maybe a few more places to put things. (An office area, wouldn't that be fabulous? No more filing cabinets in the bedroom.)

It would be spreading our investment in case (heaven forefend) the bank at home went belly-up and the government didn't have it all guaranteed after all. It would be investing in equity rather than just paying rent. It would be buying in a buyers' market and therefore getting a good price. It would be tempting fate to suddenly send us a job at home, in which case we would sell or rent it out for a couple of years, whichever recouped our money best, and hightail it back to the land of our etcetera etcetera.
Mostly, this idea feels right to me. It quashes the antsy feeling I've been having. It makes me feel like we'd be moving forward in a sensible manner, not necessarily capitulating that we'll live here forever, but just recognising that we might be here for a few years yet and it's okay to put down a root or two. Just in case. Instead of stubbornly continuing to say "We want to go home" and living accordingly, when there's no possibility of that in sight.

This last trip home convinced me more than any other in recent years, more than I've felt since we moved up from Texas, that I really want to be there. That Ireland feels right in a way that America doesn't. That I want my kids to grow up where high fructose corn syrup is not in every (second) thing they eat and where they can be snarkily dismissive of the Paddy's Day shenanigans. Where the rugby is important. And maybe, conversly, that's all exactly why I'm starting to feel like we have to buy a house here, on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Something needs to happen.