Quick Fixes and Making Things Work

There are so many parts of my life that I cant fix, its actually rather nice when I find a bit that I can fix, or at least improve on.
Bit by bit I am starting to get to understand how Lucas works, Following some(more) really difficult days with Lucas and his feeding I phoned my friend A who gave me some tips to try and told me to begin pumping(again) to keep my supply up. He is fussy at feeding, constantly distracted, crying to be put to the breast and only feeding for 3-5 minutes and I was really beginning to think he needed food. I got straight on to Google and discovered the 'four month fussies' which summed my little man up perfectly.
Advice is such a funny thing. On one hand you have people saying, 'oh he's hungry, give him a bottle', 'Try him on some food' and 'No we haven't had that' and you begin to think your baby is the only one doing that - something MUST be wrong. Then you type your issue into Google and suddenly everyone is going through it; quite reassuring at times.
So how to 'fix' him then:

• Co-sleep so he can feed at night.
• Feed when sleepy or as he wakes from napping.
• Feed in a quiet place
• Try a 'nursing' necklace
• Express to keep us supply
• Top up with expressed milk in a cup if he is particularly fretful.
• Chill out (ROFL - this is me we're talking about)

He is slightly better today but still distractable. Everyone says it doesn't last. I hope not! In my bid to help nursing I have also discovered how to nurse him whilst standing and, even better, whilst walking around. What   I find hardest is the screaming. Proper angry screaming; screaming when he wakes, screaming for sleep, screaming to feed, screaming for boredom. It doesn't end. *sigh* I just need this phase to be over with.
This week we also set up our cot so it was attached to our bed. We tried to buy a 'bedside' cot but kept being outbid so gave up. As DH is a man who can, he modified the cot bed so the base was flush with ours so now I can just grab Lucas when he wakes.

We have new uses for our household appliances too. Our vacuum cleaner runs at 8am, 11am, 2pm and 5pm but are we vacuuming? No! But the minute it comes on Lucas goes to sleep, its that instantaneous. And dour hair dryer dries hair, yes? In this house it defrosts freezers instead!
We spent yesterday tidying the bottom room (again!), defrosting aforementioned freezer - I did that after DH said "cant we just scrap it a bit" Err, no dear, we can't!, then went and did our pre-Christmas food shopping. It was mainly freezer stuff seeing as we had a newly defrosted and almost empty freezer, but we bought store cupboard stuff and used our Tesco vouchers so the bill was only half; probably a good job seeing as we spent £251. Eeek!I cant believe the price of food these days. This is still only enough to feed nine of us for three days over Christmas, and I didn't even buy Chocolate!

DH managed to burn his hand on Thursday by trying to throw petrol on a bonfire. I know- I told him it was a dumb thing to do too!! So he had to get his hand dressed on Saturday, then he had a reaction to the bandages so he had to go on Sunday too. Looks like he'll need to do this for about 2 weeks until its healed. Men!!!

Over the weekend I printed off all the bits Abi might need for Wednesdays interview at KM. I am in two minds whether some kind of personal statement and CV(record of achievement) would be a good idea. And do I take all her health documents or not, ponder ponder....

I have a list of other things a mile long that need to be done but Im not going to get there any time soon.