The summer has gotten the best of new mommy APRIL DREW, who’s beating the heat with a series of crazy dreams that have her questioning her sanity!

Well, we are halfway through our last summer in New York, and if I’m being honest I’m not making half enough effort to enjoy its potential. 

Once a sun worshipper, I now find New York summers a little too much to handle. The heat makes me a cranky mamma. So as a result I spend Monday through Friday in my air-conditioned apartment with Colum, my seven-month-old.

I do, on occasion, meet some of the girls for a natter at lunch or arrange a playdate with friends who have young kids, but our summer days are mainly spent indoors playing games, watching re-runs of The Bachelorette and surfing Facebook.  And like any good stay-at-home mom/wife, I regularly clean and make dinners.

Putting all this down on paper is a clear realization that I need to get a life.  Colum will ask me when he is older for a list of all the fun things we did together that one summer in New York, and what am I going to tell him?

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As a family we do make up for it at weekends, but I think it’s about time I embraced the sticky heat and begin to fill up my final summer days in New York with fun things to do.

Next summer the Irish weather may very well force us to stay indoors in our home in Ireland if this year’s weather reports from there are anything to go by.  So this week I’m planning to get a Westchester parks pass and spend at least one day a week in some of the beautiful parks and beaches that surround us in New York.

But it hasn’t been all doom and gloom while staying indoors!  I’ve got time to Skype our family and friends in Ireland -- mainly my mother -- every day. I’ve spent time teaching Colum sign language, and I think he signed the word “milk” for the first time today.

I’ve also just recently set up an email address for him. Why on earth would I do that, I hear you asking.

Well, my friend Sarah suggested I give Colum his own Gmail identity so I can email him photos, videos and send little messages to him every week. Fantastic idea I thought, and why not.
 
So now Colum James Mooney is officially a Gmail registrant. When he is old enough, I’m thinking maybe 12, I will give him his email address and password and he will have 12 wonderful years of information on himself and love notes from his mammy and other friends and family.

But certainly the most consistent thing I’ve done on a daily basis while cooped up in our apartment is dream. Yes, you read correctly -- dream.
Colum naps for about an hour in the morning, and more often than not I take this opportunity to lay my head down too, but it’s never a peaceful sleep.  I have had the craziest dreams -- sometimes hilarious, sometimes bloody scary!

For example -- last week I went to JFK Terminal Four, where Aer Lingus disembarks passengers, to pick up our “friends” who were visiting for a few days. John stayed outside in the car with Colum while I went in to retrieve our guests.

But these were no ordinary guests. I could see them in the distance. They did a great job disguising themselves. No one knew who they were except me.
It wasn’t until they got outside the terminal and into our five seater Ford Taurus that they took off their hats and glasses. John welcomed Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip to New York and informed them that traffic was heavy on the Deegan because of a Yankee game, so he planned to take the Bronx River Parkway home.

They weren’t pushed and we spent the whole car journey talking about Colum. Boy, was I glad when we got home to our air-conditioned two-bedroom apartment that I had a chance to clean it earlier that day. After a bit of lunch -- take away from Eileen’s County Kitchen in Yonkers -- John took Prince Philip to BJ’s wholesale store and Colum, the Queen and I hung out and watched Good Day New York.  The Queen commented on how cute the host Greg Kelly was!

Now if someone could please interpret that dream for me. Maybe I fancy myself as a bit of a royal!

Staying with “important” people later in the week, I found myself having a steamy affair with President Obama. A secret affair naturally that neither my husband nor Michelle Obama knew about. We always met at fancy bed and breakfasts in Ireland.

But on one particular occasion his cell phone rang and he told me he had to leave early. I was devastated, but nothing prepared me for the following hour of exhaustion.

Someone ratted us out. I spent a whole afternoon being chased around Cork City by some bad guys. They finally found me hiding behind a rack of dresses in a small clothing store.

Thankfully I woke up abruptly from that one, so what they did to me for punishment was left behind in the dream world.


And then there are the bad mom dreams. A few weeks ago while napping with Colum beside me I kept dreaming that I had forgotten my son everywhere I went.

At one stage I arrived home, put away the groceries, had my lunch and then remembered that I left him in a shopping cart in Stop ‘n’ Shop in Cross County.

In the same dream I was too busy eating my popcorn and drinking my Diet Coke that I never realized Colum had crawled away from me at the movie theater. (For the record I have never taken my baby to a movie).  But in the dream he was found in the car park playing with a dog.

Colum’s first tooth cut through this past weekend, but he has been teething for a few weeks. And one of the dreams I had put the fear of God in me.
I dreamt that I was sitting with him in the back of our car while John was driving somewhere.  I looked over at him and all of a sudden his teeth started to grow.

One at a time they cut through his gums and up they grew. It took approximately five seconds for each tooth to grow, so within a few minutes he had a full set of teeth.

And the really scary thing was Mammy April in the dream thought this was normal and applauded him for doing such a great job!

But the best part came when I had decided not to tell John. So when we were stopped at some traffic lights I asked Colum to turn towards his daddy. He obeyed his mammy and flashed his daddy a full shiny set of white teeth.
Needless to say John (who didn’t assume this was normal) was extremely freaked out and thought I had the wrong child in the car. Now I know they say dreaming of teeth falling out is supposed to mean a windfall of money… but what does it mean when you dream of your son getting teeth all together?

I’ve always had a very active imagination when awake but it’s beginning to scare me a little while napping. Although some of them I enjoy, like hanging out with Queen Lizzy was fun, the affair with Obama, nah, not my type, but some of the others are just plain disturbing.

I guess the only solution to get some sort of normality back is to get that parks pass, and instead of napping in the morning take up swimming at the pool with my baby. At this stage I think I need it for my sanity!