Lack of sleep and clumsy accidents
For me when I am getting patching and little sleep, I become jittery and jumpy, clumsy and forgetful, not to mention accident prone. Also I am not sure if it is a primal motherly instinct or not but the sound of your child wailing and crying is very hard to listen too and makes me very disorientated and distracted. For instance, if I am driving and Eleanor starts wailing, I find it had to concentrate on driving as my instinct is my baby needs me and is in pain. In the early months of the 4th trimester when I was getting a patchy few hours of sleep here and there, the likelihood of me having an accident increased greatly!
For instance, I was giving the baby a both one evening, had bathed her and delivered her safely down to my husband to hold while I cleaned up the bathroom and dispensed of the bath water. I had a baby bath, which I had filled with water and bathed Eleanor in her room as it was warmer and cosier. So I needed to transport the baby bath with the water which was quite heavy back into the bathroom. However I was so tired and hence in clumsy mode. So I tripped on the way into the bathroom and spilt the water all over the bathroom floor falling down to my knees in the process.
Our switchboard for our house is located on top of the presses in the kitchen, directly underneath the bathroom ( ridiculous design flaw I know) The water leaked down through a crack in the tiles via the floorboards and onto the switchboard. This had sent the house into darkness. My husband heard an almighty bang upstairs and me falling, he ran into the hallway with the baby in his arms and his torch on his phone on, shining it up the stairs to see me on my knees in the bathroom. I had been so defeated when it happened, I just stayed on my knees for a few seconds longer than normal, gathering up the energy to get up and face the situation. My poor husband thought I was hurt and got an awful fright seeing me on my knees head down. ‘Are you alright’ he shouted. ‘ I’m ok’ I mustered. Once I regained my composure and we managed to get some of the power on, on one circuit, my husband used the hairdryer to dry out the switchboard fuse box.
My next epic fail with lack of sleep was smashing our oven door. I was in the kitchen putting shopping away and tidying, trying to fit everything into cupboards. We had a high press over the oven and microwave which was neither one thing or another, it had been a drinks cabinet before we had kids which had since been cleared and was now used for a vegetable overflow if the fridge was full. But there was some small glass tonic bottles still there from Christmas time. I kept saying to myself everytime I took out some veggies, ‘i must move those as they will fall and break’. I moved some of the vegetables and then was looking downwards. The very time I was reaching to remove the hazard…Smash! The glass tonic bottle crashed down onto the oven door which was slightly ajar at a 45 degree angle as I had just baked so was letting it air out. The oven glass door went everywhere, like when you see a bus stop smashed in, big thick double glazed glass chunks everywhere. My husband and the two kids were in the sitting room thank god and stepped into the hall to shout in and see what had happened.’ Im ok’ I shouted. The problem was it wasn’t a clean break on the glass oven door, some shards were still sticking out of it. I was trembling I got such fright, as I was so sleep deprived I was jumpy and on edge as it was, this gave me a bigger fright than normal. My husband, always such a calm head in a crisis suggested we swap, I take care of the kids and he would clean up the glass and try and remove the oven door. An hour later and he had managed to clear up the glass and remove the oven door. However this meant we had no oven in the middle of a lockdown, where baking had become my almost daily activity to entertain my toddler not to mention trying to cook dinners. We managed to source the oven door model on line and order it, but with brexit and it coming from a UK site, their was a delay with couriers. We were looking at up to 2 weeks with no oven. My best friend who lives close by the absolute legend she is dropped over her slow cooker and an air fryer to keep us going in the meantime and my mum and mother in law cooked us many a dinner.
Eventually the oven door came and my husband fitted it, hooray we could cook and bake again! However there was one snag…the handle on the old oven door didnt fit so we now have a wonky oven handle, my poor husband always such a perfectionist, felt defeated and just gave in ‘ we will just have to live with it’! I vowed to try and get more sleep so we could try and keep our house functioning and in the hope I could avoid any more clumsy accidents!
