Where did May go? - posted by Sylvia

Darcy in her wet dressings, still smiling.

I'm not sure what happened to May but it did happen, it just looked like I blinked and missed it. I know from downloading the photos from the camera at the very unfriendly hour of 3am in the morning (Miss Darcy is teething and won't go back to sleep) that we:

• Celebrated Michelle and Kardia's birthdays with a lunch in Darling Harbour. That was a beautiful afternoon.


• Joss' school fete happened, I baked a lovely cake for it and helped out at the cafe for 3 hours while Tung manfully took care of the kids. He was so ready to hand Darcy back over after as she is now v. heavy and it wasn't actually relaxing chasing Joss between rides at the fete.



• Tung went on several bike rides with the boys somewhere. He is now on 8 demerit points and received a warning letter from the RTA. Admittedly, some points not his fault as he got one for violating a t-junction when following ambulance containing his mum to hospital last year.


• We trialled the idea of alternating nights with Darcy because as I pointed out to Tung we both work full-time and a lot of my grumpiness would be due to lack of sleep. We lasted a couple of nights of this approach until we realised that Tung is a lot grumpier then I am on the same amount of sleep. It's sunshine Sylvia versus techy Tung. So Tung sleeps with her sometimes on weekends.


• Darcy has learnt to crawl and she is a pro, she's starting to try to stand up as well and we have trouble getting her to sit on the ground. I tip her forward onto her hands or I have to sweep her legs out from under her.


• Darcy also eats some adult food now just blended into small pieces. She ate the family bolognaise the other night with cm long pieces of spaghetti and didn't choke once. I'm still cooking baby meals as well, at the moment we have white fish, salmon, beef stew, spaghetti bolognaise, spinach, zucchini, broccoli & white sauce in the freezer.


• I guess most of May was spent anticipating the awful 5 day hospital stay really. In the end it was a bit of an anti-climax and I was desperately bored the whole time. I even ended up taking Darcy for power walks (in my case zombie walks) around the hospital grounds in a desperate attempt to get away from our lovely motel-standard room. I am grateful for being taught the whole wet dressing technique because after the week Darcy's skin looked fabulous and I've had to do it again at home a week later but it only took 3 days to make her skin look wonderful again. I was pretty unhappy after the first day of wet dressings though because she cried so much and that hasn't gotten any better just that I'm more stoic about it all because the outcome is so good. We also had the skin prick test done and Darcy came back negative for everything like cockroach mix(?), grass etc to milk, eggs, shellfish so I was very relieved. All of our dust mite prevention measures appear to be working as she never seems to break out anywhere near as badly as before. We even had the carpet steam cleaned recently as well. Now we just have to convince her mum and dad's bed is nowhere near as comfortable as her cot (good luck!). At the height of her itchiness I needed to hold her tight in order for her to fall asleep.