My little monkey is actually a human!

I’m astounded at what a proper little person my boy is turning into. I know that sounds ridiculous, like what did I expect him to turn into, an orang-utan? But it’s just you get so used to them being these mute, helpless creatures, that you almost expect they are going to be 100% reliant on you forever, in an unquestioning way like an animal would be.

But H is definitely not unquestioning, nor is he all that helpless. He is strong enough to open drawers and lids that he shouldn’t be getting into, agile enough to climb onto beds and up and down stairs, crafty enough to open doors (and slam them shut as loudly as possible). He can now count to ten, completely on his own and unassisted. He can almost recite the alphabet, and will sing along if the song is playing.  He recognises many tunes without lyrics and will start singing. And he is making rudimentary sentences. They are usually things like: “Hamish do it” or “Mummy cuddle duck” or “no nappy change” but they are words strung together that communicate his meaning so I am impressed!

His favourite is “What dat?” which is the precursor to “Why?” I guess, and although it’s cute, it’s a little on the maddening side when he points to EVERYTHING and wants to know what it is. Perhaps this is mostly annoying because when I am frequently stumped for answers it makes me realise how little I know…

And he doesn’t miss a trick, so I can’t do anything in front of him that I wouldn’t want him trying out himself. (This means I am sneaking lots of snacks while hiding in the cupboard.) If I have a cup of coffee or tea, he does too – imaginary ones. He has little tea parties and picnics with his toys where he gives them all sips from tea cups and makes the slurpy noises. 

I am constantly impressed by his learning and marvel at all of these skills – it’s just not what I expected of him before he is even 2 years old! Especially considering I am not driven and ambitious about teaching him things. I am a warm, loving, attentive mother but I have always been fairly relaxed about his development. I am not in any rush for him to reach development milestones. He started crawling so early, then walking at just 10 months, so I knew he wasn't going to lag behind (and, if anything, those skills just made him more work than the slower, more sedentary babies!). There are no flashcards in our house and I do not drag him to dozens of “activities”. In fact I often feel quite guilty that I don’t take him to the gymbaroo, swimming lessons, dance classes etc that other kids attend. But clearly, he is doing OK without it.  He makes me feel like I’m doing a good job at parenting, even if there is no-one else to tell me I am.

Time to slow down

I’m 23 weeks now and up until now I have been willing the time to pass as quickly as possible, if I had a fast-forward button I would have been leaning on it heavily. But now, just now, I have finally thought I should probably stop to smell the roses, so to speak. Realising that this is my last few months of me-time and time to just focus on H as my only child, and there will be no turning back once Little Miss is here.

I have been feeling really positive about the pregnancy now and doing everything I can to relish it and celebrate it. I am even doing a spot of pregnancy modelling this week, just as a “normal” looking pregnant lady! But it will be so nice to have my hair and make-up done and feel pretty for a night. Plus I get paid in maternity clothes, which I am more and more in need of.

I have had a wonderful long weekend of enjoyable family time, with husby taking an extra day off between the public holiday and the weekend. And now, only one week til we take our “babymoon” down the coast with munchkin. I can’t wait.

Tomorrow I shall attempt to cook said husby a special birthday dinner, including birthday cake. This will be special if it is even edible, as my worth in the kitchen is limited to doing the dishes. Yep, I’m the type who can’t even make toast without burning it, I’m so domestically challenged I could probably burn water. Even the planning of this meal has taken me hours already as I had to familiarise myself with a bunch of herbs/spices I wouldn’t be able to find in the supermarket unless they had neon signs on them, and then go through the cupboards to check our stocks, since I don’t even know what we have.

Luckily it’s a slow work week for me (meaning no freelance work sadly), so the daycare day will be free for my kitchen f*ck-ups, I mean, gourmet experimentation.

If only I had buckets of cash, none of this DIY shit would be necessary!

Humanity

I have been crying a lot recently. You could say I am an expert at it. And although my own pain is often the reason, I feel like I have become a sponge for others’ suffering too. It’s going to sound ridiculous, but I think perhaps the pregnancy hormones, combined with the grief of a mother have made me some sort of empathy super hero. Call me Sympathatron. Or Mega-Wail. Or something.

Today my tears are not for me. They are for the families and victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. I have no words for the devastation it causes me to know that again, AGAIN, some f*cked-up people have felt that the best way of effecting change in the world is to hurt others - innocent, unsuspecting, unconnected individuals, whom represent nothing more than symbols of whatever misguided cause is behind this heartless attack.

My tears are also for this wonderful woman, Lori, whose blog I just found and can’t tear my eyes from: http://www.rrsahm.com/ Her story is a true tragedy and yet she has risen from it with the courage and positivity that others can only dream of. She has been hurt, abandoned and traumatised by the one she loved and who loved her most, and instead of forsaking love, she has rallied and used her love to rise again, damaged but somehow cheerful. THAT is humanity.

And my reserves of tears seem to be boundless for Rachel, of http://www.mummymuddles.com/ whose eloquent expressions of grief are like a strange oscillating magnet to me, I am drawn to them, I have to read them but then I have to turn away because they churn me up inside.

I had a visit yesterday from the Baby Nurse I used to visit before I moved house. She was an angel, a beacon of light in the dark, treacherous, confusing world of new motherhood. Her advice, support and encouragement were my lifeline when I was unwittingly suffering post-traumatic stress after the birth of my son H, and she continued to keep me sane whilst I struggled with a baby who wouldn’t sleep more than 3 hours at a time for the first 7 months of his life.

Her approach to helping new mums has the personal, emotional, human feeling that the medical support services are gravely bereft of. She asks mums questions about themselves and their babies to really get to know them and then assesses them individually, suggesting things to try, but never prescribing a right or wrong way. She is always embracing new ideas and seemed open to learning as much from the mums she saw as she was interested in imparting her knowledge. But, most importantly she was always reinforcing what a great job I was doing, which, when you’re floundering in a foreign world and feeling lost and afraid and so goddamn TIRED you could accidentally wander out in traffic, is all you need to hear sometimes.

Her positive feedback and genuine interest in mine, and my son’s wellbeing were invaluable to me. Eventually, as I found my feet as a mum, I found I was visiting her clinic just for a chat, more than to seek out her professional advice.

But I had not seen her since we moved house 8 months ago when I was about 12 weeks pregnant with Benjamin, and after she heard of my loss just recently she tracked me down again. I am so glad she did. She came around for morning tea and we chatted for 4 and a half hours about life, babies, motherhood, politics and love.

If I am Sympathatron, she is the Compassionater. This woman oozes love and empathy. And to use a cliché, she is an Earth Mother, offering the nurturing care of a mother to all. This is not stretching the truth, as she not only raised her own 3 kids but looked after her friend’s 2 boys when they were orphaned and is now acting as a surrogate mum to a teen daughter of a friend who has gone wayward. She is the sort of woman who wants to give the world a hug and whose hugs are regenerative.

And after seeing her I feel a little bit more healed. Baby steps, as they say.

Be afraid, be very afraid

I am afraid of my son. I am not kidding. I wish I was.  He rules the roost and he rules with an iron fist. This is partly because I am a pushover who melts every time he smiles, cries or says/does something cute. But it is also from a lack of confidence.  I am afraid of most children in a way.

It is because I never really had that much exposure to kids beyond my peers. Sure, I babysat when I was a teenager but that involved sitting on someone else’s sofa, eating and watching TV while the kids slept most of the time. I never had to provide much supervision during waking hours and I had never changed a nappy before my son was born. I wasn’t all that interested in kids either (probably for the same reason). Because of my lack of experience I didn’t know what their age meant - how much independence they required or deserved, or what they understood - so I never knew what level of communication to strike with them. Use a “baby voice” and assume they know nothing and risk their scorn and derision – “well der, of course I know milk comes from cows!” Or talk to them like adults and hope they don’t find me as terrifying as I find them? There is a reason children make some of the scariest baddies in horror films – for your reference see Children of the Corn, The Exorcist, The Shining, the list goes on.

To the uninitiated, children have the incredible power of the unknown quantity. They represent walking time-bombs, we never know what to expect and fear the worst. If I tell them off for jumping on the glass coffee table or playing footy with mum’s fine china ornaments will they cry? Or worse, will they defy me and then tell their mum I abused them? Hate me and tell everyone they think I smell? They may be innocent but to me they always seemed so cunning…

I guess I am not what you’d call a “natural” at this motherhood gig. I was never a “chuck the baby on my back and off I go” kinda chick. I was the one struggling with the nappy bag the size of a suitcase and freaking out the minute the baby cried in public. I was the woman who was so flustered she forgot to put her boob away properly after breastfeeding in a park (only once, and thankfully I noticed before I got ALL the way home…)

In my experience, every day is about delicately balancing everything you do to keep them happy. Don’t, whatever you do, skip a feed, be late with a nap, deny them some toy or dangerous/expensive/fragile object. The whole day can fall into disarray. Take today for example. Thanks to the wonderful invention of daylight savings, which I am now petitioning be abolished, my monkey has been waking at 5am all week. This would be OK if he also napped early or extra long, which he did yesterday. But today, exhausted after a string of resist- and-cave tantrums over his lunch, I eventually had to try some tough love and left him crying in the cot. For 25 minutes. It was worth it though because now he is asleep. However the many plans I had for my day (see my To Do List post below) and the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes cannot tempt me and all I can think of doing is going for a little nanna-nap myself.

Of course once you get your head around the nuances of your own spawn, the daily grind becomes much easier.  You develop the confidence to exert the ‘power of the big people’ and utter those arrogant words “because I said so”. But I still fear the wrath of a toddler and prefer the path to an easy life.

Milestones and setbacks

Here is the post I wrote yesterday BEFORE seeing my OB:

Halfway. I have officially passed the point where we lost Benjamin. This should encourage more confidence but I still panic at the slightest pain and worry when I think I haven’t feel the little bean move in a while. Lucky for me she is a pretty active little bean and there are plenty of kicks to comfort me.

I attended a Pregnancy After Loss meeting two weeks ago. It opened the floodgates to my grief and a room full of people got to witness the debacle that is me crying. I’m one of the ugliest criers in the world – it’s all gulping and sobbing and streaming, red blotchiness. It must be hard to feel sympathy for a blubbering, snot volcano!

Overall though, it was good to get it out amongst people who understood, were there specifically to hear it and had useful feedback. My major revelation was that I felt like I had less legitimate reason to be grieving than the others, that my grief was less valid because my baby did not go full-term. Technically my loss is called a “miscarriage” on the medical records at least. That is because babies that die before they are 20 weeks are not considered still-born – even though I had to give birth to him, the same way all babies are born.

I will never forget when I asked about claiming the body from the hospital the nurse simply saying I was not “obliged” to give the baby a funeral. She seemed not to understand that I wasn’t even thinking about a funeral, I wanted to take my baby home and it didn’t occur to me that they would not release the body. After some ridiculous bureaucracy was dealt with we were granted permission to receive the body after an autopsy (which we agreed to and still anxiously await the result of).

I never held a funeral or any type of service and I never really considered it, but I have his ashes and I may choose to scatter them privately. Or I might just keep them. That is my right, the very least I am entitled to.

The other thing I learnt was that if I want to get a positive reaction about my pregnancy from friends it’s up to me to convey it as a positive message. It seems so obvious now, but I realise I was “breaking the news” in such doom-filled way that people didn’t know how to react and so followed my lead with a sombre response. This made me feel miserable. So now if I tell someone new, I say it with excitement and omit the disclaimers of “hopefully” and “all going well”.

In short I am actively trying to embrace this pregnancy and “Operation Normalise” is on. I have taken my first bump photo. After we survived the milestone 19 week scan, or to be literal, my baby survived it, I celebrated by buying something for the baby. The fact we know it’s a girl helps. It gives me added incentive to shop as I always used to look longingly at all the lovely girls’ clothes in shops and it seems as though there is always twice as much available for girls as there is for boys.

I have even resigned myself to the fact that my clothes are not fitting anymore and dug out the maternity clothes bag. It is such a relief to wear comfy bras and jeans again! I have now resolved to tell anyone I see or speak to, and am ruminating over a Facebook announcement. The bump is getting too obvious to ignore now anyway.

…

So that was before seeing my OB. Unexpectedly he had the results from Benjamin’s autopsy – we had been told it could take up to a year so I was not expecting to know anything before this baby was born. The only indication they can find of a cause for death was that the umbilical cord was too long and hyper-coiled, so may have compromised the blood flow. 

I am feeling pretty conflicted about knowing this. In some ways it's good to know it wasn't a genetic problem or something likely to occur again. But also to know such random things can happen makes me feel so nervous that not just that could happen again but any one of a million other things could go wrong. I have gone from being like the majority of the population, thinking “it won’t happen to me” to being a big scaredy hypochondriac-style neurotic, who thinks that every complication is not only possible but likely to happen to me. This extends to my little man too, my mama-bear protective instinct is in hyper-drive and I foresee every possible accident or mishap befalling him. Husby thinks I’m insane I’m sure.

The next PAL meeting isn’t for another month and I don’t know how I’ll feel then. Will I need it, will it make things better or worse? I’ll just see. For now it’s back to embracing the positive and cherishing the kicks my little girl gives me on the inside.

The To Do List

I have never been a devotee of the To Do List. I just hate the fact that nothing ever gets crossed off it. But I am a big fan of the cheat’s version - the Already Done List, where you add things you just did and tick them off.

It is very hard to make the transition from busy career woman (although I feel like a total fraud calling myself that, not sure why) to a “stay-at-home-mum”. Ugh, I hate that expression. There is something so slothful sounding about it. You just imagine some woman sitting around, daytime TV blaring, ironing board up, kids running riot around her feet as she does something like update her Twitter status or write a blog entry…

Or there’s the alternate reality where you might imagine some 1950s super-domestic mum who bakes cookies and healthy dinners and organises educational craft acitivities for her kids, which she then sits down and does WITH them.

Well, it’s really nothing like that. Either version. Except maybe the blogging bit.

I honestly don’t know where the time goes. When H is home (which is most of the time – he is only in daycare two days a week) it’s a constant cycle of feeding/cleaning. I don’t know where mums find the time to “prepare” delicious healthy meals, because somehow when its time to have lunch or dinner all of a sudden there is this urgency about it, like if I don’t serve up his meal in the next ten seconds I will miss my window and all hell will break loose. So all the food prep I do is reheating or making sandwiches, it’s really not that hard. But there is truly nothing messier in the entire world than a toddler eating. Especially mine.

So then there is the clean-up, and since my toddler likes to run around while he eats the cleaning stretches across multiple rooms. If I try to get too involved in the cleaning though, this is abruptly put to stop by H. He will even get in between the sink and me and push me away from it with impressive force. If he didn’t do it to my husband too, I know he’d think that I was making that up to get out of washing up.

Anyhoo the To Do list begins to form in my head on the night before a daycare day, when I start dreaming about how productive I’ll be while H is away. It usually looks a bit like this:

• Drop H at daycare
• Shower   - this seems odd since I love my showers and would love nothing more than to start every day with one like a normal person, but since I can’t do it while H is awake - I’m not sacrificing sleep for it! - they have been relegated to nighttimes. And often by the time I’ve gotten him into bed and sat down to eat my dinner I become a prisoner of the sofa until I realise it’s time to drag myself to bed and then it’s just too late.  So even on daycare days, by the time I’ve dressed and gone out and come home, it’s easy to forget that part of the routine that usually happens pre-dressing.
• Do the dishes – see passage above about trying to do them with H around.
• Vac and mop the floor – this it the one that often gets passed over in favour of:
• Do a couple of hours work – this is fine and usually happens first, as I can sit on my ass with a cuppa and a piece of toast and get right into it, checking Facebook periodically.  But once the actual work part is finished, the sitting on my ass part seems to continue indefinitely…
• Eat lunch – never fail to complete this task.
• Do some laundry – I often leave this to last as I think I can manage it with H around.
• Clean up before picking H up – seems to be optional.

Today’s list has the added activity of waxing my legs and underarms. The boredom plus pain factor of doing this makes it fairly unappealing. As you will see from a previous post, this is something that occurs quite rarely and I am currently writing this to avoid doing it.

Stay tuned faithful readers to see if by next time I am able to wear short-sleeves without shame!

NB here's an update. You will be pleased to note that I vacuumed, mopped AND waxed today. To reward myself I am now eating an entire packet of BBQ flavoured sakatas. The baby wanted them. It told me. 

Happiness is...

I decided I wanted to write a completely positive entry. Because it feels like everything I've written so far is a bit whingey, and granted things haven't been that great recently but life is what you make of it, and I believe in doing everything I can to take control of my happiness.

And what's the one thing that I can find good in no matter what? It's no thing, it's my boy! So this is going to be an ode to his sheer awesomeness. Avert your eyes now if doting motherly pride sickens you.

My boy is many, many levels of awesome. Let me count the ways he makes me happy.  I love watching him on the video monitor sleeping with Quackers, the big, soft, yellow duck who is his beloved bed companion. Generally Quackers starts the night reclining across my boy's face, but since H moves around more than a rabbit in a blender they inevitably get separated at some point. It looks like there's been a lovers tiff when they are positioned at the furthest ends of the cot to each other. Then somehow H will end up lying on top of Quackers with his bottom in the air, their quarrel resolved.

In the mornings – if he’s in a good mood - when I enter his room he squeals and insists we play dancing and singing games with Quackers, who is a fan of show tunes and Barry Manilow. He chants “more, more” before we even finish the ducky dance.

When we read his favourite book, Captain Flynn and the Pirate Dinosaurs, he sings the Pirate Dinosaur song throughout, although he only knows his favourite bit of it, the rest is a jumbled rush to get to the “Go Go Go!”  When we tickle him, he lifts his shirt and gives his own belly a tickle. Sometimes he’ll take a wipe and “help me” when I’m changing his nappy.

I love his incomprehensible gibberish, uttered with such conviction. I love that he pronounces yoghurt "yuck-ett". I love the funny straining face he makes when he's pooing. I love his cheeky giggle whenever "someone" guffs (farts) - not me of course, as I am a lady and never do things like that.

I just LOVE his feisty, cheeky, indomitable spirit. Just look at him with these bubbles!