Pither.com

Last Sunday (28th) my mum was in a car accident.

Thankfully her physical injuries, while initially worrying for doctors with potential internal bleeding, now seem to be relatively minor.

However there does seem to have been a toll on her memory. It has been getting gradually better over the last few days and she can now remember most major things, if not the details. Although her short term memory is currently minimal, if at all.

Two other cars were involved in the accident, with three other people also going to hospital all with relatively minor injuries.

I believe that all three cars were written off.

I wish my mum well and hope that she makes a full recovery soon.

This morning Edward took the last dose in his course of antibiotics and he seems to have made a good recovery. Certainly our fear that he would be allergic to antibiotics appears not to be the case. :-)

The strange rash that doctors couldn't identify has also largely cleared up and will hopefully completely vanish in the next few days.

He has also been making up for lost time, being especially mischievous today - trying to play with cables, the Sky box and attempting to eat a radiator!

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

For a first try I don't think it's gone too badly. I have found that trying to nap in the early afternoon is practically impossible with such a small house and so many (2) other people in it.

However moving the nap to lunch time did largely resolve that.

It didn't help to resolve my other main "problem" - the girlfriend factor! Apparently it's unreasonable to stay up until 1am each day when your partner is still going to bed at a more normal time (although often only an hour or two earlier here).

My plan had always been to start out staying up late, as I find it much easier to be up late than I do getting up early. Then once I was in the swing of things, to move it around so that I had a more normal bed time but got up much earlier. Hopefully this would be less disruptive to a relationship.

It does have some downsides though, namely:-

• I'm not a morning person
• I work best in the evening/night

Anyway, bowing to the pressure after only three days, I switched to an earlier bed time along with an earlier start. To my slight surprise it actually wasn't all that hard to stick to.

Then the weekend arrived! Without the structure of a working day yet with the extra parental duties, chores and general time guzzlers that tend to occur during the two "restful" days of the week, I completely failed to find any nap time!

A fairly late evening meal out on Saturday led to the complete break down of the system. Both Saturday and Sunday were a write off.

So next week I start again. Hopefully with early to bed, early to rise plus lunch time naps. We'll see what happens.

For a long time I have been intrigued by the idea of getting more out of each day. More waking (and productive) time.

I have looked at polyphasic sleep especially the most famous form, Uberman's sleep, on several occasions in the past. However it has never really been practical for me to try it out.

Sadly this is still the case, but the slightly less ambitions biphasic sleep sounds like it might be possible.

The basic plan is to get a 1.5 hour nap at some point during the day (most details I can find suggest early evening) and then a 4.5 or 6 hour main sleep at some point during the night.

For some years now it has been quite common for me to only get 6 hours sleep or less on several nights a week. However I would always catch up by sleeping half of the weekend.

As a relatively new parent, the extra weekend sleep is no longer possible and my regular nightly sleep is still only a maximum of 6 (or on a really good night 7) hours. Plus with this now being our 10th month of parenthood, sleep deprivation is kicking in to help make a good portion of that sleep restless and less effective.

So if I can take my existing sleep time (6 hours) and transform it from "always over tired bad sleep" into "good sleep" simply by splitting it into a 1.5 hour nap and a 4.5 hour night, it sounds ideal. Further more as I'm already sleep deprived, it shouldn't even be too hard to get into.

So I have a plan, now to see if it works!

Today was my first attempt at taking an afternoon nap. I picked a time in late afternoon/early evening (which seems to be most popular) that I hoped would cause the least disruption to both my work and Liz/Edward.

This is what I've learnt:-

• it's difficult getting to sleep with a baby shouting in the background, even if someone else if looking after them
• in a house this small, even this fairly non-disruptive time is actually quite disruptive
• to use an alarm clock that actually goes off
• that laying down for 1.5 hours is not the same as getting 1.5 hours of sleep

I'm hoping to change a number of these points (especially the last) by adapting my plan slightly. Tomorrow I will try out taking my 1.5 hour sleep during an extended lunch break. While I can't guard against screaming babies, hopefully this will be a less likely time of day for disruptions. It's just a bit different to most other accounts I've found of biphasic sleeping.

So with about 30 minutes of nap sleep this afternoon, it's now ~1am and time for me to get to bed. For tonight the plan is a 6 hour sleep. I will reduce to 4.5 hours once the 1.5 hour sleeps are in place and working.

Last Saturday Liz, Edward and I went out for a meal to celebrate a friend's birthday. This isn't the first time we've taken Edward out for an evening meal and his reactions so far have generally been good, although he can decide that there are just too many new things to look at for any sleep to be taking place. So it can take a while, often with at least some moaning to get him to sleep but that isn't really the point of this story.

Saturday's outing was to The Priory Grill and Bar in Haywards Heath. The entrance is a little hidden from the main road, but is sign posted and is certainly easy to find if you look at the directions on their website.

On arrival we were slightly concerned by the shouts of excitement (it was an England rugby night) however the arrow for the restaurant pointed in the opposite direction to that for the bar, so there was hope. We passed a room with a very, very large TV screen in and continued down the corridor to a room at the bottom of a large stairway. There was an open door to a store room but no sign of where to find the restaurant!

Paul was sent on a scouting mission up the stairs and thankfully confirmed that was the way. As a reward we let him carry the pushchair up the stairs on his second ascent. I got the job of carrying Edward.

The restaurant is a very grand and impressive looking dining room. It takes up what is now the top floor in the converted church, complete with the tops of stain glassed windows, religious paintings and a fantastic high ceiling.

Despite Edward objecting slightly to having been taken out of the car, and me being rather concerned about carrying a rather unhappy baby into a quite quiet (the shouts from the bar could not be heard at all) and well presented dining room, the staff were very welcoming. They were happy to help fit Edward's pushchair in and even offered us a high chair.

Edward was generally very well behaved once we got settled. He enjoyed a few pieces of bread as a treat and did eventually decide that sleeping would be better than looking around at all the new things.

As for us adults, we got to enjoy a very pleasant meal. All of the food was excellent and while the menu was a little limited we all managed to find a couple of dishes to make a tough decision between. We ended up with duck, beef and rosti mains though and they were all very good.

Again the desert menu was rather limited, personally I would have liked a chocolate option that didn't also contain nuts. However I went for a creme brulee which was still very pleasant.

Overall the service was excellent and the food tasty and enjoyable. We all had starter, main, desert and coffee with a bottle of wine between four; for just over £30 per person.

We all had a lovely evening and I would highly recommend the restaurant, I look forward to eating there again.