Moaning & groaning

I have the lovely pleasure of meeting with the court social worker & my ex once again today. A new report has been at the top of the news in Israel during the past few days - including the recommendation that mothers not be automatically awarded custody of children under 6 (which has been the standard so far). I am sure that in many cases, this is the right thing, but I can't imagine how much more I would have had to give up if my ex had tried to get custody of my kids and actually had a chance. As it was, I gave up a lot (financially) just to get out. I think that there needs to be some sort of labeling for abusive partners so that their ex-spouses don't have to continue to go through hell with them just because everyone naturally assumes they're decent human beings. I mean, the fact that the social worker thinks it's fine for me to have to have my ex agree to the kids going to the scouts - in writing - before he has to pay for it is insane. He doesn't want to pay for anything, therefore he just won't agree. How smart do you have to be to understand that???


It also made me really mad that my ex showed Lilach a piece of blank paper with the bank's logo on it as 'proof' that he has no money. I think it's really slimy to try to take advantage of the fact that he thinks she's not very smart. (She's much smarter than he thinks. She came home right away to ask me if that really means anything or not. I assured her that it does not.)

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Here are some pictures from yesterday:

Yirmi loves being on this blanket and he bats at things - not deliberately, but it's a start...

Nomi, holding the license plate Hadas found and plans to put in her new dorm. Check out her orange shoes...





Ohad and Yirmi in the garden. I love to see them together :-)

Learning something new each day

Abigail has nodular episcleritis a severe version of episcleritis (a sudden patch of red blood vessels on the white part of the eye. The nodular version has something that kind of looks like a raised zit in the middle). On Tuesday, her eye looked a little red. By Wednesday I saw the nodule and immediately made a doctor's appointment. I could tell by the doctor's reaction that whatever it was was rare. She also called in the other doctor in the office to take a look (both of these doctors are great) and gave me a rush referral to the eye doctor who agreed to see her today. Even by Israeli standards (which I think are far better than those in the US) I found this to be very efficient.

Starting today, she'll be on steroids & strong antibiotics (all topical), with the hope that by this time next week it will be completely gone. Apparently it has a habit of recurring. And it's associated with a whole bunch of things I've been accused of having (like Lupus, which I honestly believe I don't have. I may have had symptoms, but they miraculously disappeared along with psycho-ex...)

I'll have to pick her up every day in the middle of the day to give her the second dose. This should be fun, because you have to actually put the ointment inside the eye, like rub it on the white part. I bet any almost-3-year-old would love that... Fortunately, other than that she's mostly a pleasure to have around. Maybe G-d has a plan for us to have pre-baby bonding time.

Tossing & Turning

After CSI (which comes on here at 11, but airs commercial-free) I finally fell asleep at around quarter to one. I was trying to figure out how someone could be so cruel to his own daughter as to say that she can only take the entrance exam for the high school that she wants to go to if her mom (me) would say that he would no longer have to pay child support if she got in... This with it being a private school that costs more than 5x as much as her current semi-private school (for which he pays nothing). Hadas was literally in tears.

At 2:55* I woke up to find that our cat had hidden in our room. At least she didn't jump on the bed... I got up to let her out and, of course, went to pee.

At 4:18 something was tickling me. Usually it's my hair, but this time it was an ant walking on my face. Lovely. I got up again (to pee). After that I had trouble falling asleep because I was trying to figure out how I'm going to finish my seminar paper when everything's moving so slowly and I need a large sample to run my experiment on. I turned from side-to-side about 10 times, which means moving my pillow collection around with me. Finally, sometime around 5 I fell asleep.

At 6 I woke up all sweaty, went to go pee and then back to sleep. (I'm still sleeping in a t-shirt, with a summer blanket, I'm just really warm at night.) At around 7:30, we woke up...

During the time that I did sleep, I managed to dream that my doctor's secretary called to say they'd rescheduled my next appointment for May 10th (my birthday). Only once I got off the phone did I realize that the baby should be at least 2 months old by then...

I've got to admit that this is a typical night for me anytime (pregnant or not), usually with very vivid dreams, complete with color & sound - including background music sometimes. (On Friday night I woke up wondering what I should do when my dreams were so silly that they were like a show I wouldn't let my kids watch on TV for fear that their minds would turn to mush.)

This morning Ohad (who, as usual, slept through all the times I woke up) called the school that said that Hadas can be tested without her father's signature. My lawyer said we can get a court order that will allow her to study there if she gets in... so basically she's all set for now.

Maybe tonight I'll sleep a little better. What are your nights like?
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*We have a great projection alarm clock that projects the time onto the ceiling, so I always know exactly what time it is when I wake up in the middle of the night.