The time is out of joint

The child woke and fed at six-thirty this morning, then slept until half-past noon. Bugger! We've got an infant not yet three weeks old that *would* sleep through the night *if* we could get its internal clock in sync with real time.

The midwife had a theory (well, it may in fact have been scientifically proven) that babies don't like to sleep at night-time because it's too quiet - they're used to all the mother's internal gurglings, you see. And it's true that ours went to sleep just as the traffic noise started this morning. Heck. Ah well. We had a very nice bath that was curtailed only by the production of an explosive poo that reached every corner (yes, I know baths don't have corners - at the round bath's imagin'd corners, then) in five seconds flat.

We still haven't worked out the cause of night-time screaming - the child does genuinely seem less happy at night than during the day. Or maybe it's really us, and we don't get so bothered by day-time screaming, or don't even notice it so much? Anyway, A's catch-all diagnosis is wind, or colic: I'm increasingly thinking that any shriek is a demand for food. Especially as having fed at one-thirty after the bath, we did it again at a quarter-past two. The nice thing about demand feeding is that I don't feel obliged to keep track of the timetable - but it's certainly an erratic one.

A book in this morning's post - not yet opened. One of the best things about internet shoppping is that you finally get some interesting post after years of marketing circulars and loan offers. Btw, my favourite tip for revenge on the offerers of unsolicited loans: tear all the forms and the envelope it came in into tiny pieces (this in itself is therapeutic), then pack them into the reply-paid envelope. And post them back. Nothing to throw away, and whoever wasted your time pays the postage. Neat, huh? Anyone know any other urban revenges of this type? (If anyone's reading this - I'm not sure that even A is...)