mother writes at night

 The kids had a strep infection in March, which I did not realize at the time was strep and therefore did not treat, and it broke their sleep. We are now in the middle of May and R(7) who used to sleep through the night is still waking up nightly needing an adult, and A(9) has levels of anxiety I had not realized were possible given how high his anxiety already had been. So I have been hyper focused on getting all the supplements and probiotics into him, and it is a big job.  Meanwhile I learned that the likely reason I am so tired and bloated and grumpy is that my leptin is high. So that is another job. On top of my 3 days a week actual job where I have to actually work. I am exhausted. Today I had hypnotherapy, which I did not find as impactful as other times, and then on my way home I picked up some groceries and stopped at a Salvos to see if they have a bedside lamp for me (nope) and then Cetnaj to see if they sell a red incandescent bulb (nope). Then I came home. I had sw...

Being a parent often means contributing unwieldy amounts of waste to the landfill. The children love spending their pocket money on all manner of cheap plastic crap, and shops like Kmart and Big W are rife with cheap plastic junk that ends up broken and in the bin months. I think there are two problems here - one is the quality of the stuff, the other is the affordability. Their love child is higher quantities of junkier stuff than you might accumulate if it was pricier and better quality. Every Nerf gun comes with dozens of foam bullets that end up floating around the house, sometimes someone might absentmindedly fidget with one and break off the tip and then voila, you have a piece of trash. Parents don't have endless pockets of time or space to accumulate bits and pieces of toys that need to be glued back together.  I introduced a new rule recently that I am no longer allowing the purchase of items that contain or are made up of things that will end up in the landfill by th...