Look me in the cleavage and tell me the truth

Guess what I did this week? No, I didn't hoover the upstairs carpet (though I did con B into doing that a couple of weeks ago, so it should be good for another, what, three months?); I called the number about laser eye surgery. My excuse for procrastinating has been that I can't ever make phone calls during the day, because as soon as the children see I'm on the phone, they rush over to yell in my ear or demand impossible things or fall over and hurt themselves or bring the toy shelves crashing to the floor, and only people I'm related to can be expected to deal with a phone call punctuated by "Stop that" and "Get down" and "In a minute" and "Just wait till I'm finished" and "Go! Away!"

So on Monday when I cunningly sent B and the children down the hill to the local egg hunt (postponed from Saturday when it had been raining), ostensibly so that I could ice the cupcakes for Monkey's party that afternoon, I also took five minutes to make the damn phone call.

And guess what? My themes interlock effortlessly, as it turns out I can't have laser surgery till three months after I stop breastfeeding. (Of course, they still want my money, so I'm booked in for a preliminary exam in a couple of weeks anyway, which is free unless I forget to ring them back and tell them that I won't be doing it, and how could I possibly forget that; but it's true enough that I may as well find out whether I'm a candidate up front rather than keeping the notion in the back of my mind for another year and then finding out that it's not going to happen at all.)

The nice man asked me when I thought I'd be done with the nursing.
"I have no idea," I said.
"How old is your baby?" he asked later in the conversation.
"Well, she's two-and-a-half... but she likes to nurse..."

I'm happy to find that I'm not suddenly planning to wean just so I can go and have people stick lasers in my eyes. I think my priorities are in the right place. But maybe this will prove to be the long-term goal I'm aiming for whenever it may happen that I decide it's time to call a halt. (Sometimes you really need a future subjunctive in English, don't you?)

Mabel's half-birthday is next Wednesday, and I've told her that she'll be able to go to sleep on her own after that, like a big girl, like Monkey does. I'm planning to (maybe, hopefully, we'll see how it goes) cut out the mid-morning and mid-afternoon nursing sessions she likes to indulge in if we're at home doing nothing much, and try to cut it down to just morning, naptime, and bedtime - but then to stop after ten minutes rather than nursing her all the way to sleep, and get her to work it out for herself. This will take some doing, and some will power (and frankly, I'm not sure I'm up to her weight when it comes to will power), but if we manage it, my hope is that perhaps she'll figure out how to put herself back to sleep without me when she wakes in the night too.

You can see by all my prevaricationary vocabulary there that I'm not entirely fully on board with my plan. But I have to start somewhere.

She's a big girl, after all.