Bedtime

Bedtime used to be a breeze in our house. Both kids have always been solid sleepers (a fact about which I suspect I may on occasion have been somewhat smug - boy is that karma now coming to bite me in the ass), and for four blissful years after he graduated from cot to bed Small Child seemed to have a cast iron belief that once he was in that bed, there was no possibility of leaving it until the morning - almost as if convinced that the floor was electrified and would shock him if he made contact with it.

Times have changed.

Bedtime (or "%^&@#$ bedtime", as it has come to be known chez nous) has somehow, out of absolutely nowhere, become a Groundhog Day-esque horror show, an absurdist game of whack-a-mole in which you tuck one child in to find the other hanging from the banisters, or rifling through the fridge, or covered in toothpaste, or naked. And once that offending child has been rescued/cleaned/dressed and appropriately chastised, you turn round only to find the other one doing something equally transgressive. And that cycle is repeated, again and again, until a point where there really is no alternative but to lose your temper - spectacularly, volcanically lose it - and doors are slammed on crying children sitting alone in the darkness, and everybody feels like they have failed, and apologies are made, and the child, feeling wronged and forgiven, takes the opportunity to push his or her luck and begin it all again.

Take last night, for instance. Last night was a doozy.

7.30pm: I get home from work. I am tired - bonecrushingly, viscerally, physically and mentally exhausted - I've run home, totalling 20km for the day and passing 434km for the month. The kids are watching Teen Titans Go and demanding jelly beans. My refusal is met by tears (her) and bile (him). I feel loved.

7.45pm: Mr H gets home. I ask the kids to go upstairs and brush their teeth. They have to be asked (nicely, I might add) nine times before they actually do it.

8pm: Mr H gets on a conference call and exhorts the house to please moderate their volume. I wonder at the relentless optimism required for it even to have crossed his mind that any such moderation might be an option. I read Smaller Child the compulsory four stories (which have been the same four stories, every day, for the last four weeks - but that's another story of suicide ideation altogether), and ask her to get in bed, before I realise that she is inexplicably wet. A long and fraught negotiation ensues over what would be a suitable replacement for her sodden top (me: anything that fits will do; her: absolutely nothing will do). We finally, after inevitable tears, settle on an oversized Ibiza Rocks t-shirt. She's clearly not convinced.

8.10pm: The cup containing her milk is wrong. WTF? It's the Finding Dory cup with the pink lid - which is the right cup (or has been for the last five days at least). After tearful remonstration from Smaller Child, I ascertain that of the two Finding Dory cups we own, HERS is the one that has the pink lid AND the (tiny) picture of Nemo on it. THIS cup is not HER cup. It is her lid, but not her cup. She cannot drink milk from any other cup. My (I think reasonable) argument that since the light is going off anyway she won't be able to tell the difference, is met with more tears. We are on the verge of hysteria, in fact. I decide the fight isn't worth it, go downstairs, replace the cup.

8.15pm: Twenty-five minutes behind schedule ("'Schedule'!!! HA!!!!") I tuck Smaller Child in, plead with her to stay there. She looks sleepy. I am hopeful. I am stupid.

8.20pm: I am reading The BFG to Small Child. He's throwing Lego around the room, making this more of an exercise in task completion than interaction. A crash comes from upstairs. I put down the book. Smaller Child is walking down the stairs, already crying in anticipation of my displeasure. I feel somehow chastened by her expectation of anger. She's sent a bag of coat hangers skittling down a flight of steps - noisy but no harm done. What was she doing upstairs though?! Forget it, I don't want to know. I cling to the brittle straw of hope that maybe the guilt at having already broken the rules will keep her in bed this time. Yep, stupid.

8.40pm: I am still reading the BFG. How long is this sodding chapter??? "Twenty-three pages", Small Child informs me, turning from his Lego looking gleeful and victorious. "Oh," he says, looking through the half-open doorway, surprised, "She's out of her room. And she's naked". He's half right - the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt is gone but she does at least have trousers on. I call time on the BFG. I pick her up, deposit her in bed without ceremony, slam the door, go downstairs, sit on the sofa breathing heavily and thinking about wine.

8.41pm: Guiltily I am soothing Smaller Child's racking sobs. She puts the Ibiza Rocks t-shirt back on. "I won't do it again mummy". Surely, this time, she won't? (Stupid, again.) I go downstairs and open a bottle of wine. It's really the only way.

8.50pm: Noise from upstairs. I sit on the sofa with my ears pricked, wondering whether it's at a level where I need to deal with it (other than by drinking more wine, of course). Feet on the landing. Shit. One of them's out of their room. Climb the stairs. It's him. He's in her room. I tell him to get back in his room, close the door. She's wailing again. He's stolen her favourite toy. I retrieve it, repatriate it. The crying eventually subsides.

9.20pm: I've finally managed to eat dinner. Mr H has finished his call. More noise from upstairs - rustling, a dull thumping, the sound of feet again. Resigned, I climb the stairs for what feels like the thousandth time, as if going to the scaffold. Smaller Child is standing on the landing. She is wearing butterfly wings. From the waist down, she is stark naked. She looks at me, my mouth hanging open, my expression caught somewhere between rage, disbelief, and an almost irrepressible desire to burst out laughing. "I need a wee," she says. I have by this point made a clear choice to travel the path of least resistance this evening. I pick her up, plonk her on a toilet. She looks at me. We stay there together, silent, eyes locked, for maybe five minutes. She doesn't need a wee at all. Stupid, see? I take her back to her room, tuck her in for the fifth time. The entire contents of her wardrobe are on the floor. I pretend I haven't seen it.

9.40pm: Mr H has gone out. Small Child is downstairs. "I'm hungry". I tell him there's nothing I can do about that at this stage in the day, that he should have eaten his dinner, that he should go to bed. He ignores me, goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge, complains about the broccoli to chocolate ratio it contains. I shepherd him back upstairs, shut his door, rest my forehead against it, count to ten.

10.30pm: Small Child is downstairs. Again. "I want the cat in my room". Why is he still awake?! Despairing, I think about going to bed myself, the only surefire way to end the cycle of bedtime hell other than leaving the house, which may or may not end it but, from the perspective of the absent parent, is a merely philosophical question akin to that of the tree falling in the wood. Instead, I try to explain to him, as I have done so many times before, that it is late, that it is grown-up time, that I have had a long day and I'm tired and I just want some peace and quiet, and can he please just go back to bed and stay there. "But mummy," he says, "I'm basically a grown-up already. And anyway, don't you want to spend time with me?" There's nothing like an emotionally manipulative sleep-averse six-year-old to make you feel like utter crap.

11pm: I hear Small Child's door open upstairs. "Mummy..." he says. I give up and go to bed.

What feels like five minutes later, it is morning. Smaller Child is up first. She is wearing an entirely different outfit to the one I last saw her in. Not for the first time in the last 12 hours, I pretend I haven't seen it. Downstairs, she demands bacon. He, of course, is still asleep, having been awake until probably gone midnight, doing god knows what. I leave to run into the office, the cycle starting again.

Writing this now, I wonder whether this recurring bedtime nightmare is some kind of twisted rite of passage imposed on me by the cosmos, trapping me, like Bill Murray and Punxutawney Phil, inside an inescapable vortex of mundanity and ridiculousness on repeat, day in day out, until such time as I get it right.  Lord knows I have tried. I've tried starting the bedtime process earlier, tried starting it later. I've tried discipline, I've tried leniency. I have read Rainbow Fish thirty times in a row and not complained about it (much). I have substituted fun bubble baths for functional showers. I have weathered the seemingly endless nightwear-selection debate with a smile glued to my face, over and over again. I have found the Nemo cup, washed it, replenished it, handed it over cheerfully while cursing inside. I have climbed the stairs so many times I am seriously contemplating moving into an apartment. I have in the darkness trodden on Lego, got Shopkins wedged between my bare toes, so often I've lost count. I've cajoled, pleaded, negotiated, bribed, threatened, yelled, cried. Nothing works. Give her an inch and she'll take a mile, but say no and you are faced immediately with tears; and as for him, well, the problem with him is that, when all's said and done, he basically just doesn't give a shit.

So, bad mummy/good mummy, present mummy/absent mummy, happy mummy/sad mummy... I've worn all the hats, and none of them had a rabbit inside. And thinking about it now, thinking about where that leaves me, I realise that although I may have no choice in or control over my feral offspring's nocturnal hijinks, I do have a choice as to how I let it affect me. So, as of now, I choose to enjoy it. I choose to interpret their egregious bedtime behaviour as a demonstration of love - to believe not that they want to torture me (which is what it mostly feels like) but that they want to spend time with me (which, in fairness, is probably much closer to the truth, no matter how questionable their methods). After all, who knows how long that will be the case? For sure it won't last for ever, even though, at 10 o'clock at night when you're wiping baby lotion off the traumatised cat, fishing books out of the toilet bowl, or trying to find the right goddam Finding Dory cup for the hundredth time, it may feel like it will never end.

In the meantime, I will cling to the hope that it's a phase, that we will emerge from this storm just as unexpectedly as we found that we had sailed into it... probably straight into another one, but one step at a time, hey?

And if, on occasion, that hope falters too... well, there's always wine.

Pre-July jitters

It's the eve of the 500km challenge and I am feeling more than slightly nervous, but at the same time very eager indeed to get going and start chipping away at that daunting target.

I've spent the last week weighing up the relative benefits of Strava and Nike+ and, being fundamentally technologically illiterate, I have not been able to reach any kind of decision so I'm gonna use both (yeah, dumb, but forgive me my option paralysis, it's been a stressful few weeks). I've signed up to the July distance and climb challenges on Strava so if you are going to join me (please do!!) then if you join the distance challenge too I can see how many kilometers everyone has done in aggregate, which I hope should be fun! So far I have friends here in Singapore, in Oxford, in Germany, and even my lovely mum in Somerset pitching in, so it is a global effort!

I'm also going to wear a pedometer, more than anything really just to see whether I can hit a million steps in a month - kind of a scary prospect when you think how damn hard it is to hit even the 10k recommended daily target, let alone more than three times that target (*panics*).

The idea is going to be to run about 16km a day, probably to and from work, on weekdays, and longer distances at the weekend. I'm going to split those longer distances up into an early morning (7am-ish) and a late afternoon (5pm-ish) run on each day of the weekend, both around the 10km distance. I will post on my Facebook page (D4D: 500/31 - please like it!) every Friday where and when I will be starting each of those weekend runs, so anyone who wants to join me can come along. Hopefully this will also have the side benefit of forcing me out of bed on weekend mornings, which I anticipate will be problematic even in the absence of standard overenthusiastic Friday night wine consumption. Those who know me will be (in some cases painfully) aware that I am not a morning person. In fact, as my alarm went off today and it dawned on me that it will be 6am starts every single day for the next 31 days, I could have cried. I think in fact the early mornings are going to be more of a challenge than the distance!

That said, a lot of people have asked me how I have trained for this. My answer to them has always been "well, I only decided to do it last week, so I've not really had a chance to train, but it will be fine, I run a lot". It only very recently (i.e. yesterday) occurred to me that this is not actually currently true. It is not true at all. In fact, according to my running app, I ran 27.5km in the whole of June, and - gulp - 8.52km in May. So, this should be... um... interesting.

Bearing in mind my fundamental lack of preparedness I guess the best I can do for myself is an early bed, rather than spending five hours making an explorer costume for a six year old who will in no way appreciate it. Sadly that ship has already sailed, but at least before I set off tomorrow morning I will get to see Small Child in a pith helmet covered in butterflies, which should hopefully keep me giggling to at least the halfway point.

0 down, 500 to go...

Dollars for Dave: a new challenge

Recently I posted an update on my Generosity page about Dave's long road to recovery from his osteosarcoma. I imagine everyone reading this will know that in January of this year I shaved my head to raise funds to help pay for state-of-the-art medical treatment for Dave, involving removing the cancerous bone in his leg and replacing it with an electromagnetic telescopic implant that will grow with him as he gets older, both enabling him to walk and removing the need for any further invasive surgeries.

But as with all surgeries, state-of-the-art or not, there is risk, and following a minor corrective procedure to realign the implant, Dave contracted an infection in his leg. That infection proved to be resistant to most antibiotics, and so Dave has spent the last week in hospital on IV antibiotics in order to save his leg from this infection. He will need to take these drugs for at least six weeks. Those antibiotics cost $200 a day. Two hundred dollars, every single day, for another five weeks, is a lot of money, even before you factor in the doctors' bills, the hospital stay...

We were hugely blessed to have been able to raise a very substantial amount of money through the enormous generosity shown by people during the original fundraiser. Those funds covered the cost of the implant, the surgery, Dave's second series of chemotherapy, and part of the cost of the corrective procedure. But that cash is long gone, and we are struggling to be able to meet the financial demands of Dave's treatment regime.

Which brings me to the new challenge.

Originally when I realised I was going to need to try and raise money somehow, I had contemplated the idea of seeking sponsorship to do a run - specifically, the Angkor Wat half marathon last December, which I had registered for a couple of months previously. But when I thought about it, this seemed rather like asking people to sponsor me to go on holiday - nobody was going to pony up to see me run a distance that I could do on a Sunday before brunch. I needed something more, something shocking, something challenging, so I wrote off the idea of running, and I shaved my head instead.

But I can't shave my head again (or at least it wouldn't have the same impact second time around!), and the more I thought about it the more I realised that I had approached the problem in the wrong way. The problem was not running per se - the problem was that me running a half marathon was not a challenge. So I needed to find a running target that was actually difficult.

Which is why I will be running 500km over the month of July. Yep, five hundred kilometers in 31 days. Does that sound like enough of a challenge? It's nearly 12 marathons, 23.5 half marathons, almost 17 kilometers a day for 31 days, and I will be doing it while also doing a full time job. I will have to give up red wine, seriously compromise the servicing of my West Wing addiction, and get up at 6am every day. It will be horrible. But if it enables me to help pay for Dave to get better, it will be worth it - as going bald was worth it, five months ago.

So, how can you help? Well, there is an obvious way: please sponsor me! Lump sum, an amount per kilometer completed, whatever - everything helps, however small the amount may be. You can do this through the Generosity site or if you'd like to send money by another method just drop me a message through Google+ and we can figure it out. One thing I would say though is that if you do want to donate, then the sooner the better - we are facing an urgent cash crunch as the medicine is needed right now and we can't allow a gap in treatment.

I am aware, though, that I am asking the same people who were so generous the first time round to sponsor me again. So if you can't give cash, there is another way you can help: lace up your own running shoes, think about what distance YOU can do in July, and ask your friends to sponsor you. Not a runner? Even better! Everyone has to start somewhere, so commit to 10k, or 20. If you can't run, jog, and if you can't jog, walk. Can you get a team together, from your work, from your gym, from your kid's school, from anywhere? Join up, get off the sofa, and run with me, wherever you are in the world: let's create a global community of people running together to help this kid beat the crappy hand he has been dealt. And if you're in Singapore, come keep me company and run with me - it's gonna be pretty boring spending fifty hours over next month pounding the streets on my own. Every Friday I will post on here and on the page I will be setting up on Facebook where and when I will be running over the weekend, so please come along and cheer me up!

If there's one thing I learned from January's experience, it's the amazing power of human beings acting collectively for a cause. One person contributing ten dollars may not seem like a lot; a hundred people doing that begins to become a big deal, a game-changing deal; for Dave (and, to be completely honest, for me), a life-changing deal. So, can you give me ten dollars? Can you give me ten kilometers? Can you get your friends to sponsor you a hundred, two hundred dollars, for those ten kilometers, for twenty? Whatever you can give, and whatever you can get people to give, will make a difference to our effort to help Dave recover and to rebuild his life. And the more people we can involve in this effort, the bigger the difference we will make.

With heartfelt thanks from all of us for your generosity to date, and hopefully to come.

Isabelle xx

The big night: less than a week to go!

As announced on my Generosity site, the termination date for my barnet has been set. Next Wednesday, January 13, at 10pm upstairs at Harry's Boat Quay, my hair and I will part company. Adam's and my combined fundraising efforts are now approaching the $25k mark but I am hoping to see that grow substantially before Wednesday. Come on people, what price vanity?! I've even allowed my brother-in-law to call me Kojak without physically assaulting him (though to be fair, he lives 7,000 miles away. If he was in the same postcode I doubt he would be so lucky. Keep running James!).

Harry's have very generously provided a fantastic venue free of charge and will be giving us a percentage of their total takings from the night as a direct cash donation to our fundraiser - so please do come down and eat and drink as much as possible!

The evening will kick off with a quiz starting at 7.30pm. The tables (teams of six) are filling up fast so please do contact me through Google+ or on iclaisse@yahoo.com if you would like to book one. If you haven't booked a table for the quiz, you can of course eat and drink downstairs at Harry's before the doors open upstairs - but please let them know that you are there for the fundraiser so that they can give you a wristband and your bar spend will count! Mr Hooker will be acting as MC; if his last performance as quiz host is anything to go by, it should be pretty entertaining and involve impromptu singing while standing on chairs followed by an apocalyptic hangover for poor Mr H the morning after.

We will then have a charity auction starting at around 9.30pm. We have been given a variety of awesome auction items including a fantastic Specialized racing bike, hotel packages from Unlisted Collection and Lantern Sri Lanka, dinners in restaurants including Bistecca, Donna Carmela, Stellar, and The Line, yoga memberships at Sweatbox, bootcamp packages from ooberfit, vouchers from Simone Irani and Hannah Lee, massage packages at Footworks, booze provided by Urban Remedy, Drinks & Co, and of course Harry's, some beautiful interiors items from Singapore Trading Post, and hopefully a variety of other lots that I will put together over the course of the next week by shamelessly whoring myself and my extreme new haircut across the island. Please bring your chequebook and get as drunk as possible while still remaining able to (a) raise your hand; and (b) sign your name.

And finally... *drum roll*... the main event. Adam, Mariza and I will be losing our locks immediately after the auction, at around 10pm. I'm still trying to find someone to wield the clippers so if anyone knows a hairdresser with a sadistic streak and a portable barber's chair please let me know.

And after that I plan to drown my sorrows sufficiently comprehensively to make my reflection in the mirror the next day blurry - although I guess the tears will probably do that too (*plays sad tune on world's tiniest violin shamelessly to extract sympathy and cash from potential donors*).

So I hope it will be a fun evening and that we will raise a lot of money. And that brings me back to the serious side of this, which is why we are doing it all. Dave has now had his third and final round of chemotherapy before the surgery, which is currently scheduled for the end of January. The impact of the chemo drugs on his little body is just heartbreaking, as you can see. But the end of his treatment is in sight and I am so grateful to every one of you who has reached out, for helping us to make that treatment a possibility - and I look forward to the day when I can write a post on here attaching a photo of Dave looking like he looked twelve months ago when he was here in Singapore: healthy, happy, and living the active life that in an ideal world every child, wherever they are, should be able to expect as a birthright.

So thanks for your support, whether through the Generosity site or in person next Wednesday. I have been immensely touched by the kindness and humanity of people's responses to our campaign. In what has been a very dark and difficult time, a light has been shone on our lives by the generosity - both the financial generosity and the generosity of spirit - of friends and strangers alike.

Postscript: I am having some issues with my Generosity site. If you can't make the payment system work, please try Adam's site instead! And if you want to donate but would prefer to use a lower-tech method (or trying to make Generosity work is making you want to defenestrate your IT hardware), you can send a cheque made payable to Robert Driver marked for my attention at 9 Kreta Ayer Road, Singapore 088985. 

Thank you!