I took the day off work today because Jo had been awake since 2:30am and had dropped a full bottle full of expressed breastmilk and had dropped and broken her Nintendo DS and by the time I woke up (I sleep through ANYthing) she was past tears and quietly hysterical at the idea that she was now required to spend the whole day awake and looking after a cranky baby.

She slept, and he slept, and I played around on the computer. I emailed my bosses and told them why I wasn't coming in, and haven't heard back. I'm not remotely concerned with what they think. For one thing, I am a contractor and don't get paid when I take a day off, so if I see fit to take a day off I don't see why I need too much justification. For another thing, they can't fire me because I already gave notice a few days ago.

Eventually Joshua woke up and started being cranky again. It was a bit of a mystery for a while but then the mystery cleared up in spectacular fashion. He hadn't had a poo for a whole day and a half (normal, apparently) and when I was changing his nappy his face turned reddish purple. I was like "That's an interesting colour Josh, what's up?" and he concentrated really hard and then WHEE out it all came, and some amount of dexterity was required to keep up with it and replace tissue as needed and deal with the brown gold in a tidy manner. In the end, it was a good thing he did it while I was changing him, because I think if he had had a nappy on and been in his bed, it would have filled up the nappy in about 10 seconds and started squirting out his sleeves.

Maybe I should have prefaced this daylog with a warning, "Do not read if you aren't really, really interested in poo."

Jo woke up and we went out and got Joshua his vaccine against tuberculosis. I thought "TB? Who gets TB any more? Is this really necessary?" then I thought "No one gets TB any more because we have vaccines, idiot." Then I picked up a leaflet which informed me that people do still get TB, all the time. I've never felt like a fool so many times in one month before.

Jo brought her DS back to the shop with the receipt and they said "Oh, sure, no problem, here's a new one," and then laughed because they knew from the expression on her face that she'd expected to have to fight for it and lie about having dropped it. She came home with a shiny new DS and a big grin, then slept some more while I had more adventures involving feeding, changing, and carrying around, in between the moves of a long, long game of Civ4.

Outside it's been raining hard and the river has been all churned up and greyish-brown. Even though all the papers are telling us the Irish construction industry has died, the docklands still sprout cranes like flamingoes in a dead pond. Thunderclouds that look like tsunami are rolling in over the distant parklands and bird sanctuaries of the north coast, and down towards the city centre the sun is a fierce orange circle, obscured by haze, sinking through jetstreams, crossed occasionally by seagulls. I bring Joshua to the window to show him "the big sky". He loves windows, always turns his head towards one if it's near.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.