Sunday 29 September 2013

Isabel

Yesterday we went to see Isabel, our new niece and Charlie's new cousin. She was just one week old and very tiny (6lbs,11oz at birth).


Charlie was a little out of sorts but loved seeing the new baby. He's not been around many babies so was ever so curious, he kissed her head and smelt that new baby smell, he asked lots of questions particularly about breastfeeding, including "why is she licking her Mummy's tummy?" which had us in giggles.

We gave our presents and had cuddles with the baby. Tom was a doting uncle and little I had a big long sleep on him. C played with his trains and on the Kindle and helped Uncle S take the compost out (a treat, he loves doing this!), but kept coming back to see the baby.

The new Mummy and Daddy were not too tired having had 7 hours sleep the previous night and having N's Mum there to help out for a few days.

I'd made a lasagne for lunch (this brilliant cheats version from Waitrose (with added mushrooms)) and we had apple pie and custard for pudding. After lunch we went for a walk to the local play park. C burnt off some of his toddler energy on a big yellow slide, which he loved and then he was incredibly happy to see Granny and Grandad who called in on their way home from Norfolk to see both their grandchildren together!

So a lovely day meeting the newest member of the family.


Friday 20 September 2013

Today

20.09.13 - Today is the day I've been dreading, it would have been my due date for the baby I lost in March. I had hoped by now I would be pregnant again, but that's not happened and so there is nothing to soften the blow.
 
Miscarriage does not get any easier with time, in my experience it has only gotten harder. It's not any easier to hide my hurt and although sometimes I can go a whole day without thinking of the baby I lost, that broken empty feeling is never too far away.
 
I count the passing months by all the special dates that are missed. It's a blessing to have already had one successful pregnancy but also a curse that I know what should be happening when. When each scan should have been, when we should have been decorating the nursery and buying those necessities and when my maternity leave should have started.
 
I count the passing months in announcements, since it happened amongst my friends four babies have been born and six pregnancies have been announced, each time this news, which under any previous circumstance would have made me so happy, has been a physical blow to my very core. No matter how much my head tells my heart to be reasonable the intense jealousy I feel is overwhelming, here are ten lives which will be lived whilst the life I had within me for 12 short weeks will not.
 
I count the passing months with an ever increasing amount of ovulation and pregnancy tests caught in a cycle of hope and despair.
 
September has been very hard, it started badly with the pains in my lower back making me walk just like the pregnant woman I should have been whilst the pain meds made me groggy and I've found it harder and harder to keep my feelings in check as today's date drew nearer. But forcing myself to spend time sorting through these feeling has helped. I've read the Miscarriage Association and Saying Goodbye sites back to front, I've re-read all the posts I've written about what happened and I've decided that today is the day I need to put everything to rest, to post the posts and the weekly stats I started when I first discovered I was pregnant and to continue to look to the future. So here they are:

20.01.13 - Two little pink lines

I write this knowing I can't post it for 12 weeks, but I want to record my exact emotions and thoughts on this, the 20th January 2013, the day those two little lines showed up announcing the presence of baby number two.

We started trying a while ago and I was beginning to worry (quite a lot) that something was wrong. in fact we took a break over December and were waiting for my period so I could work out ovulation dates to start again. In a foolish way I was actually annoyed with my body for being 'late' and delaying us from trying. I was pretty certain I wasn't but Tom joked that maybe I was and that gave me the nudge to buy a test.

It's been snowing for the last 3 days, the car was snowed in so I took a solo bus trip to Sainsburys to pick up some essentials. Pregnancy tests are kept behind the chemist counter and I almost didn't get one as the queue was long. Back at home I made spaghetti for lunch, had a netmum collect C's learn n groove (yes we gave it away for free) and put the boy down for his nap. I then took the test. Almost instantly (no waiting 5 mins for me) two pink lines appeared and I couldn't stop smiling. I told T immediately and for the next couple of hours whilst C slept I allowed my thoughts to fully focus on all things baby. I'm so excited about this little bundle I can't wait for the next eight months to whizz by. 

On a frivolous note the test I took for C showed two blue lines, this little blimp's lines are pink...


 
 

Wednesday 18 September 2013

A very fine uncle

My Great Uncle Gordon died yesterday, he was elderly and it happened suddenly. This post is dedicated to him; I wanted to share the memories I have of this kind, jovial man.

Gordon was my Gran's younger brother, she had an older sister too, Betty. Gran grew up in Cheshire and moved south after she was married settling in West Sussex where my Mum and Aunty Pam lived for most of their childhoods. Gordon and Betty stayed up in Cheshire and as children Mum and Pam would tell us stories of wonderful family get togethers of aunts and uncles and cousins. Because these three siblings didn't see each other very often, when they got together the sense of fun they all shared made for some wonderful meet ups.

We didn't see our Cheshire relatives very regularly (there is also my Great Aunty Jean, my Gran's sister-in-law and of course the rest of Jean, Gordon and Betty's families) but I do remember staying up there for big events, a few weddings when I was very little and my Gran's 60th, where my cousins and I spent most of the night fascinated by the glass washer and happily collected everyone's empties to wash and shine.

It was when I was about 14 that I got to know Gordon better, by then his wife, Audrey, had passed away and he and my Aunty Jean (who were friends though not actually related: he was my Gran's brother and she was my Grandad's sister) started what became an almost annual event of coming to stay with us in Wiltshire for a week in the summer holidays. Those weeks were something to look forward to, we would take Gordon and Jean for days out to the seaside, or local places of natural beauty - hills and woods etc. - for pub lunches in pretty rural villages and to visit my Aunty Pam and her family. And there were also days spent at home, picking fruit in the garden, playing scrabble and walking the dog. Gordon would bring Flossie, his one-eyed Sheltie (Shetland Sheepdog) a lovely tempered little thing, who terrified our cats but made everyone else smile, particularly Jean who loved spoiling her. Here are some of my favourite memories from those weeks:

- Gordon's pipe. The smell of pipe smoke was irrefutably his. He smoked outside during his stays in our non-smoking household, but, for me, the smell of tobacco gave him an exotic air. He'd wander in the garden, particularly in the summer evenings having a quiet smoke and if I were to join him he would point out some little detail he'd been watching, birds or clouds, or talk about something from the day.

- Gordon's accent. My mum inherited her northern A's from her parents, I inherited mine from her, but growing up in the south tempered this somewhat, at secondary school I tried to change to southern A's with mixed success (my brother did it better) and Charlie has inherited some northern A's from me, which Tom points out quite regularly. So having this booming voiced, happy, jovial uncle arrive and fill the house with his quite brilliant northern accent helped show the teenage me that there was nothing wrong with having northern A's (check out the film below, where after just a few days with them, I'm already mimicking that accent!). He also had some sayings I'd never heard before, a family favourite was 'What a palaver' attributed to him saying it when things went wrong i.e. one time we had a whole episode of chasing an escaped duck and her ducklings and after we'd caught them we found out they were actually wild. My brother used the 'What a palaver' saying (spoken in Gordon's accent) to very good effect!

- Gordon's car. In the summer when I was 17 my driving test fell in the week that Gordon and Jean came to stay. I was having to take the test in a car different to my normal instructor's one and it was exactly the same as Gordon's. He let me sit in his and practise before the test. This turned out to be a waste of time as the test was voided (the replacement car broke down) but it was good of him to let me practise anyway. We had lunch in a particularly lovely pub that day and both he and Jean gave big commiserations and helped cheer me up.

- Flossie dog. Flossie was quite elderly when they first started visiting and only had one eye, which made her a bit snappy if you came up suddenly on her blind side. But she was ever so friendly, well trained and adored my uncle. We would take her to a local dog groomer for a wash and trim and I remember feeling mortified because I accidently hit the car boot onto Gordon's head one time when we went to pick her up - he made a big joke of it afterwards. Jean once brought back a half eaten ham hock for Flossie from one of our pub lunches.

- His memories. Gordon once told us about the war and how his Dad kept open containers of petrol in their cellar and also about having to use whisky to clear the car windscreen when driving in a snowstorm.

So finally here's a film. I took this with my first digital camera in 2002, I was 21 and home from uni for the summer. The camera I had bought with some of the inheritance left to me from my Gran, who died in 2001, and I loved it. By today's standards the film is of poor quality and the camera would only shoot 80 seconds at a time. It shows Jean and Mum and Gordon at a canal side pub, my filming is atrocious but I love it anyway as it's one of just two films I have from those holidays.

Gordon and Dad, August 2002

Friday 13 September 2013

The changing of seasons

Summer here has fallen quickly and suddenly into autumn. The warmth replaced with a chill at the beginning and end of the day. For the first time we've had the heating on for that first hour when 5am starts are made worse by the cold.

My walk home from book club last night was a glorious mix of summer and autumn. The sky was navy blue with a chill so dense you could have cut it. The air was seasoned with wood smoke from someone's cosy fireplace yet the heady scent of summer's roses grasped at me as I walked passed the neighbourhood gardens. I was pleased I'd worn my winter coat and the faint clip of my boots was satisfying after months of flip flop use.

This morning was another story, the house was freezing but when I left for the 6am train the weather was wet and mild and so fir today the promise of a crisp autumn has retreated.

Monday 2 September 2013

The Pickerupper

5 weeks ago I hurt my back. Real bad. No one thing did it but the doctor said I'd pulled a lower muscle, that I shouldn't bend over and prescribed a strong painkiller for 3 weeks and 7 nights of tranquilizers, boy did those knock me out and made me groggy all day.

Anyway the doctor was right, 3 weeks later I was back to normal. And the biggest thing I've learned is that I am The General Pickerupper. Over that time I've watched my house gain a sea of debris on the floor which ebbs and flows as my son and husband pick them up or, in the case of the latter, move them to another patch of carpet. There are toys (of course, I live with a three year old), but without me doing a daily whiz round the toys stay where they were dropped.

There's more than toys though, there's a piece of white thread that's been shouting out from the hall carpet. There's the bits around the waste paper bins, the dry cat food not in the cat bowl, tiny pieces of clear plastic that you can only spot in a certain light, the list goes on.

Then there's the things I couldn't do for my son. Little man has had to walk all the way to nursery instead of being carried, getting him in and out the bath or on the toilet was a challenge and picking him up for a hug was a no go. He has been really good about it, asking me about my back and helping me out as parts of our daily routine were tweaked.

So now my back is fine, as if it never happened, the house is clean and everything is in it's place but it's  good to remember these things because although it doesn't seem too big now, at the time it was massive.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...