Spiral

One of the most common things that we heard before we left home was a series of comments along the lines of, “hope you’ve got your long johns,” or “You’re going to be freezing over there,” at which point we had to stop and point out to people that its actually summer in Fort McMurray at this point in time.

In the time that we’ve been here, the mercury has rarely dropped below 30C as a daily high and its been a struggle. Not so much because of the intense heat, because it isn’t as hot as it gets at home. The real problem is the fact that we’ve become accustomed to having air conditioning at our disposal and this has proven most problematic at night.

Because, in addition to the heat, there’s the rather extreme hours of sunlight to deal with. Take daylight savings in Adelaide and then extend it in either direction by an hour or two.

When we arrived two weeks ago, 11pm at night looked like early dusk and at 4:30am it was daylight again. In order to combat this, we put up tin foil over all of the windows in an attempt to darken the house. It wasn’t perfect, nor perhaps as effective as we’d like, but it did make a significant difference. The problem with it is that for it to work properly you have to close the window.

And the thing that they seem to have done really well here (and I put this down to the fact that in winter it gets down to stupid temperatures like -37C) is keep the heat IN the house. So when the windows and doors are closed, it’s like being in an oven. No air-conditioning, no fans, no breeze. It’s a bastard.

So every night, we try and get the kids to sleep and then get ourselves to sleep. And there’s nothing quite like laying in bed and feeling a bead of sweat traversing your forehead.

And it ends up in this painful spiral. The kids get up early because of the daylight, they go to bed late because you blink and suddenly its 8:30pm and you haven’t managed to mobilise them. And then they’re cranky because they haven’t got enough sleep and you’re cranky because you don’t sleep well in puddles and and and arrrrrrrgh!

But we’re getting there. Emily is possibly the worst to deal with because since we’ve left home we’ve been cutting out her day sleep (yes, amazingly she was still happy to have one most days even at almost 4.5 years … I think its because her mouth never stops and uses up all of her energy). So this spiral was accentuated for her. And then there was an added complication. We’d get to about 4 in the afternoon and she was bush-whacked. She simply couldn’t keep her eyes open and especially if she was in the car, she’d drop off to sleep.

Great. So at 4pm she’d get just enough sleep that when we did try to put her to bed on time, she’d be an absolute horror (yes, that angelic little face can hide a lot). And then it would be 9:30pm before we’d managed to wrestle her to the land of sleep bobo’s. But she’d still get up early because of the sunlight and those other things … what are they called? Oh yeah, brothers! Because they’re all doubled up in the two bedrooms that we don’t occupy and that means one up all up of course. And then because she got up early, she get’s to about 4 pm and can hardly keep her eyes open …

You get the idea.

The other night she was so tired and distraught that she won the honor of being the first. Through her desperate sobs came the heart wrenching cry, “I want to go back to my OTHER home!”

She’s been fine since though.

Bring on the snow, I say! (and yes, I know that will probably last for about 2 days before I am sick of it too).