Sleepless in Sleep School

Bedlam is a word that comes from the name of Europe’s oldest psychiatric hospital. But if you want a new definition of the word, you should visit a Melbourne sleep school at 7pm. Our baby is not sleeping too well and we decided it was time to learn a few settling techniques. The truth is that she’s probably getting enough sleep and just enjoys waking her parents up every two hours for a chat. She’s a happy little kid and developing well. She’s only ten months old but took her first steps this week and has learned to put her arms around her Dad’s neck and give him a hug. And that means I’d be willing to get up every hour if I had to.

I don’t know if they have sleep schools outside Australia. They are run by the health service and offer a four day program to parents with sleeping problems (because to be honest it’s them that have the problem and not their kids). We checked in on a Monday evening and were put on a wing with three other families. Everyone was polite to each other until about 7pm when the first kid was put to bed. She screamed her head off in a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Exorcist.

Sleep schools are designed to give parents help in teaching their kids to sleep better and to therefore get more sleep themselves. You have to wonder then why they put you on a wing with three other kids. I reckon the four babies got together each day and worked out a crying schedule. Because none of them ever cried at the same time. They didn’t wake each other up but through a coordinated effort kept the parents awake all night.

In addition to keeping everyone awake, the school also ran a number of ‘Educational’ classes including one just for Dads. Four of us went to it and after a nice little chat from the facilitator about how we need to ensure that we hold on to the interests we had before we became Dads, he put up a few talking points on the board “what was it like before we were Dads”, “what were our Dads like” and that sort of thing. I was sitting on the right hand side and presumed he would come to me first, so I started rehearsing a story in my head about going to football matches with my old man and the acting life I had before I became a Father.

But he went to the guy on the left hand side first which meant I would have to go last and could relax. Richard proceeded to tell the group how he didn’t know his Father and therefore couldn’t speak to the first point. He told us he spent his youth in foster homes, started taking drugs when he was twelve and was generally a mess before he became a Dad. He was crazy about his kid but couldn’t live with the child’s mother due to ‘anger’ issues. But nevertheless they were still hoping to get married and have another baby.

We were all busy checking out the laces on our shoes at this point but he wasn’t finished. “Oh I have another kid” he said. “He’s nine and lives in America but I’d not allowed to see him”. The facilitator leaned in and placed a comforting hand on Richard’s knee. “Is his Mother being difficult?” he asked. Richard looked at him blankly and replied “You can’t get a visa to go to America if you have a criminal conviction”.

We finally moved onto Eddie and breathed a sigh of relief. However, it was almost as though Eddie wanted to trump Richard. He started off by telling us about his thirteen year amphetamine addiction before moving on to colourful tales about bi-polorism. In the midst of this, his phone beeped. He apologised and said that it was a reminder to take his mood suppression tablets. As the facilitator and myself exchanged nervous glances, Richard interjected to mention that he had been a heroin addict for seven years and for the next ten minutes he shared stories with Eddie about where to source the best grade A drugs in East Melbourne.

The third guy was a twenty one year old with the mental age of a young dog. He had stumbled into parenthood and his only real contribution was on the subject of bed sharing. His only complaint about being a Dad was that his girlfriend took up 90% of the bed. He reckoned the best thing about being a gay man is that you would get half the bed to sleep in. He also reckoned that this was why lesbians always looked miserable, because two women expecting 90% of the bed wouldn’t work.

He finished by mentioning how he had just joined the army and was looking forward to a posting to Iraq so that he could shoot people.

When it came to my turn to speak, I felt like making up a story about being raised by wolves in the amazon before spending years on the streets of Rio with a gang of seven year old cocaine addicts. My life seemed very dull in comparison to the other guys in the room but I felt very relieved about that.

We ended up by exchanging handshakes and nobody asked for anyone else's mobile numbers. It wasn’t that sort of meeting.

I shuffled back to the wing to listen to the coordinated attempt of four babies to keep a group of parents awake and they succeeded magnificently. I never knew how much I loved sleep until our daughter came along. No doubt in time, she will develop the same love. Probably when I’m trying to get her up for school. Till then I’d be happy if she could just stretch things out a little. 5am was a time of day unknown to me 10 months ago. Now I’m on first name terms and thinking of contacting Richard or Eddie to see if their dealers had any sleeping tablets for babies.

 

A Postcard from the Edge of the World

The cock he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill and I awoke in Rarotonga, many miles from Spancill Hill.

Shortly afterwards several more roosters joined in to provide a veritable dawn chorus. Except it wasn’t dawn. It was about 2am and while many people describe this place as a sleepy little island, you’d have to wonder how anybody ever gets to sleep with the colony of early rising wild chickens that populate this place.

Perhaps the chickens are just as confused about the time zone as the tourists. Most visitors to the Cook Islands come from or via New Zealand. To get here you cross the International Date Line and Auckland becomes 23 hours ahead of Rarotonga (the main island in the Cooks). That means that you gain a day when you arrive here and lose it on the way back. It confuses the hell out of most people, particularly these days when you’re in constant communication with friends by mobile text messages. It’s difficult to remember that it is Thursday here but Friday in Australia.

I don’t remember there being so many chickens when I was last here in 1996. Mind you a lot has changed in the world since then. The internet, mobile phones, satellite TV and globalisation come to mind. All these have touched the Cook Islands too. Heineken for example, is available in every shop and bar. Globalisation means that one brand dominates every market. Apple in computing, Coca Cola in soft drinks etc. It’s just a shame that when it comes to beer that the fizzy tasteless rubbish from Holland had to win out.

As a country, the Cook Islands have grown up. Back in 1996 there were just two resorts and they were full of Americans stopping off on their way to New Zealand or Australia. The occasional independent traveller like myself (we hated being called tourists but that’s a subject for another day) wandered into the country and had to do with whatever lodgings we could find.

These days the place is full of boutique hotels, backpacker lodges and houses for rent. But it has managed to retain its small island charm. The local tourist board call it paradise and I’d largely agree if it wasn’t for the bugs and the spiders. I can’t imagine that God would have included them in his design of heaven.

I’m trying to be all Zen Buddhist about this and consider that all God’s creatures have a place in the choir, even insects. But I’m writing this with a can of mortine in my hand trying to stem the incessant attempts to suck blood from my pale skinned body. My ankles seem to be the favoured destination of these vampire like creatures. My lower leg area has received more hits than the BBC website. But everything is part of the buffet of the universe and we eat animals, so I guess we can’t complain too much when they eat us.

But on the positive side, the sun is shining, the sea is a dreamy shade of turquoise and the beer is cheap. We’ve rented a house near Muri beach which is the picturesque highlight of island.

Back in 1996, there were a few Utes on the island, now there seems to be more cars than people. Tiny silver Nissans usually. Tourists who rent them must get awfully confused when they stumble out of a café late at night and see twelve of them parked beside each other. There are some bigger cars too but it’s hard to see the point when the speed limit is 50kmph and there is only one road and that’s only 35km long.

Wild chickens are everywhere except in the cooking pots of locals. All the chicken in the shops comes from New Zealand and the ones wondering around the streets seem to be revered in the way that cows are in India. You get attached to them after a few days and our daughter was fascinated by them. So when we saw a chick stumble and break a leg on our lawn one day it became the saddest afternoon of the holiday. The chick’s mother tried desperately to drag him back to wherever they were nesting. But nature is cruel and as the mother hen grew more desperate you could see that the chick was getting weaker. We buried it in a hedge among some wild flowers.

Heineken is not the only thing to make inroads here. The Chinese are also around and not the ones who run restaurants with MSG laden food. The Chinese government are investing millions in the islands, as they are anxious to get their hands on a rich seam of cobalt that runs under the sea between the islands. Rather intriguingly they have agreed to pay for the judiciary and Police Force which explains why the courthouse is the flashiest building in town and the police drive around in sparkling new four by fours. The communists in Eastern Europe believed that the way to control a country was to keep a tight grip on the interior ministry and the Chinese have obviously learned from this.

But the highlight of the trip is the discovery that fish burgers are a culinary speciality here. They are delicious and I’ve had at least one every day I’ve been here. Needless to say chicken burgers are pretty rare here. And as much as I’ve grown to like the fluffy little things in the past week, if they crow again at 2am tomorrow, I might be tempted to open the islands first branch of KFC.