Nocturnal Sea Pinapples

It is currently 05:11 in the morning and I am watching spongebob squarepants. Over the last five or so hours I have had approximately ten, maybe twenty, minutes sleep. My son is now for weeks old, having hit the magic number at 01:58 earlier tonight, and he is a spectacular fidget. He likes nothing more than to thrash about his Moses basket like a floundering fish writhing desperately for air. When he isn't doing his horizontal line dance to keep me from slumber he decides he will not sleep unless he is being cuddled tightly in my arms.  This isn't a most frequent occurrence, to be fair he sleeps relatively well for a four week old baby, but when he doesn't he makes sure he makes a proper job out of it.

He has never settled in our bedroom, he loathed it. This is one thing that is taken for granted in parent hood, it seems such an archetype that your baby will sleep in their Moses basket next to your bed and everything will be serene, but this is not the case. So this has meant that he has been sleeping in his nursery from almost zero hour, which as an unforeseen circumstance left us temporarily bereft of things that we didn't have, assuming that we wouldn't need them for a few months, like a blind or curtains. My partner and I take it in turns to sleep on an air matress in his room, until he is at least sleeping a lot longer between feeds and we're happy that he is truly settled. So, as I'm back at work on night shifts later this evening I bravely volunteered to have a little nap early last night before spending the rest of the night with my boy. This only seemed fair as my girlfriend, who is now sleeping soundly next door, will be spending the entirety of the next three nights tending to his every need. This still seems fair on paper, but now at the outer limits of tiredness, I do feel a slight twinge of regret and am missing bed slightly. No matter how tired I get though, I only have to look down at my son and some how everything shifts and it's all worthwhile.
So that's how I have found myself watching this sentinel of children's cartoons, that I can't quite believe first showed in 2001. Oscar likes watching the colours and the sounds and it somehow manages to send him to sleep, at least temporarily. That yellow sponge of innocence also manages to tickle my funny bone with a humorous feather, there is some clever insightful writing to be found laced inside the episodic stories.
It is now 16:46 of the same dreary Monday, which is testament to how time is an elusive mistress when one has a new baby. I say new as if he is fresh out of the wrapper, but he is in fact four weeks old already. Which again is further proof that time moves quicker when dealing with children. I am currently trapped in that dark penumbra, that hour or so before I have to leave to work for the night. It is in this time that I essentially go through the five stages of grief and search for jobs on the Internet in the hope that some miracle will occur and I don't have to leave. This was a normal routine before Oscar was born and now the knowledge that I have to leave my son increases the desperation exponentially. I don want to sound like an utter fool and don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have a job that pays my bills and provide for my family, with a little left over to fuel my comic book habit, but it is not the job that I truly want to do.
I am a writer. There is the minute detail that I am as of yet unpublished, but nonetheless I am a writer. I always have been and I always will be. The process of creating and moulding ideas into stories is what I truly enjoy doing, it makes me happy (not to say other things don't make me happy, but you know what I mean).  Most of my spare time (which is limited at the moment) is spent working on my stories, novels and scripts, attempting to make worlds and adventures to entertain, to make people think, cry and laugh. I write about what I enjoy and the capacity of what humans can enjoy is limitless. Writing isn't just a process to me, it's freedom.
It is now 16:33 the following Tuesday. Time has jumped forward once more and I am trapped in that same penumbra. In that time I have done a twelve and a half hour night shift, done the housework, fed and changed my son, played with my son and even managed to fit in a couple of hours sleep ready for tonight. I even managed to write a paragraph or two of a short story I've had floating around my head for the last week.
It is my aim to share one of my short stories with your good selves in the near future. Hopefully suing this blog as a platform, not only to vent, but to share and entertain with the world, so all that's left to say is, thank you SpongeBob.