Hello!
We braved the rainy weather this weekend and headed out to a friend’s bush block – about 2 hours drive from Brisbane, he has a little basic wooden hut on a co-op property in Northern NSW. We figured that we had planned to get out of the city, and rain shouldn’t stop us as we had our wet weather gear.
So we suited up and ventured out into the wild:
Ready for exploring in the rain
…
Hello!
Friday afternoon, you were practicing your climbing skills again by repeatedly climbing up and down the furniture in the lounge room and I thought, “great, a chance to get a video. Haven’t done one in ages.”. (more…)
Hello!
I award myself bad parent award of the week this week. For not realising you were sick and nonchalantly taking you to the doctor for a check as you were extra tired and a bit cranky on Monday, only to be told that you apparently have ear infections in both ears. Which reminded me what a tolerant and happy little thing you really are, as all I had noticed was the extra fatigue and a bit of extra whingeyness when you wanted something I wouldn’t let you have (which was enough to make me want to go to the doctor to check, but I was a bit surprised, I was expecting the usual, ‘he’s fine’).. The new doctor who we’ve never met before kind of gave me a kinda funny look as he told me you had an ear infection and that you needed antibiotics, and that “you need to keep up the pain medication, that is probably why he’s upset” as I’d just 3 minutes earlier cheerily informed you “no blocks until we’ve finished with the doctor… and gee you’re a bit cantankerous today!” as you pounded on the doctor’s door in an attempt to exit the consulting room and return to the blocks you were previously happily playing with in the reception… So yes, the new doctor thinks I’m a bad parent who doesn’t pay attention to her child’s needs and treats his health as a bit of a humourous aside. Well, maybe that is a slight exaggeration, but that look he gave me certainly indicated he wasn’t convinced I was the best parent either. Suffice to say it was the end of the day, you were ratty, and I was a bit more scattered than usual myself. So maybe appeared to someone who doesn’t know me a bit nonchalant. When really I was just a bit tired and distracted….
Anyway, all good. You’re on antibiotics and you’re already getting better. Today you played independently heaps during the day, and it reminded me how good and easy to look after you are when you are 100% healthy…. Which reminds me, it seems such a common thing that all babies are sick for ages after starting childcare. My mother’s group doesn’t meet up much anymore as almost everyone has gone back to work, but we still email a lot, and this week one of the topics that has come up has been the relative frequency of sickness in everyone’s kids since starting childcare. So it’s not just you. Which makes me feel slightly better. Starting childcare is a sickness-inducing thing in most kids. Which I knew, but it’s still helpful to have people at the same point as us going through the same thing and talking about it.
So. No swimming lesson today (thought that I’d win bad parent of the YEAR award for taking my ear-infected child to a swimming lesson). Instead: naked playing in the sandpit while I weeded the garden. A visit from little E (who you gave a dink to on your little trike – the cutest thing ever), a bike ride with mum and a stop in the park on the way home…
climbing at the park
..
All good fun.
Love and kisses
mum
P.S. Another photo from last week: exploring at the State Library. I just let you wander about wherever, and this is where you ended up.
exploring
Hello Little Poogie,
It seems that something has switched ‘on’ in your big brain, and you are going through a ‘learning progression’ in leaps and bounds. Well, that is how it seems to me anyway.
Following the incident two days ago when you told me you needed to have a sleep, which I thought was most-likely a one-off miracle, you’ve continued to do that for the past two days at every sleeping opportunity. In the morning for your nap, in the afternoon for your nap, at night before bed, and, amazingly, when you were crying in the middle of the night and I took you to the kitchen to comfort you: you told me through tears that you wanted to go back to bed. “So there! mumma, I know what I want even if I am crying!” You went back to bed and cried a little more but then fell asleep.
Weird!
Then today at swimming you pre-empted the teacher on just about every little exercise we do, throwing yourself into the water face-first at most opportunities to demonstrate that you knew your head was about to go under and bubbles were required. Almost caught me off-guard a few times.
And language. (more…)
So, one of the things you’re really getting into at the moment is exploring the wild places in life. Like our back garden.
exploring the garden
Which is all great fun. You’ve mostly stopped putting absolutely everything into your mouth all the time (now it is just most things about 20% of the time), so I feel more (more…)
Today I’ve
my bike set-up and your rocker... We're feeding as I take this..
you and me. you're getting your fill
Gee its busy being a mum
love your attempting to get back into regular exercise mum
ps. oh, and I wrote this post at the end of the feed and its now only 9:06 am.
Hello Little Speckle,
Well, doctors, doctors, doctors. Have spent the majority of yesterday and some of today around hospitals and doctors.
We (you and I) had a fun (not) morning yesterday in the oncology ward at the hospital, watching all sorts of people get needles and drips and what not. Lots of waiting, waiting. I was a bit stressed and then just got used to it. You were pretty content with it all. Not the funnest place on the planet to be, but not as bad as I expected it to be.
Then today we went to the specialist for my ankle, remember I sprained it back when you really were only a little Speck? Well, as they suspected, the orthopedic surgeon confirmed that my ankle needs surgery to repair it so I can walk, run and use it properly again. They are going to have to tighten up my ligaments, reattach / move the reticulum around the ankle tendons, and then hopefully my tendons haven’t torn and all they need to do is strengthen them out and carve a deeper groove for them in my bone. If I’ve torn them all to shreds they are going to have to take some tendon from somewhere else in my leg and then use it to repair the ankle. Bone-grinding goodness. Yay. But as we knew, I have to wait until you’ve popped out before any of this can occur. And once that happens, I am going to be unable to move around so much for a while, so basically I need to be able to pick a time when I can then afford to be on crutches for six weeks post-op to recover. Yay yay yay lucky me. So more fun stuff to look forward to.
Otherwise all is well. You’re kicking around like normal and I’m feeling like a whale. You and I are off to Sydney for the rest of the week tomorrow morning. It should be our last plane trip on the way back, as I’m getting up to the no-fly time for pregnant people. Its going to be busy, but hopefully we’ll get some time to chill out a bit too – not coming back until Saturday afternoon, so a little bit of hang-out and do non-work-stuff time in there too. Anything special you feel like doing? Well, you let me know…
love you
mum
Good morning Speckle,
It’s cold! I actually got under the duvet last night for the whole night. First time this year – I’ve been so hot that usually I let your dad have it all (a treat which he is enjoying as I am traditionally a duvet stealer but since I’ve been pregnant I’ve been hot and haven’t wanted it). Bbbbrr. Going to the bathroom five times in the freezing cold is tough. So I stayed in bed until 7:30. Lie-in. Mmm.
I’ve been a busy fat waddler this week. Running about to my yoga and exercise classes. I’m getting quite proficient at rolling my hips around on a fit ball. You generally just seem to sleep through it all, so who knows if you even realise that I’m exercising. I ordered a new fitball for us at home but it hasn’t arrived yet. My favourite exercise is squats against the wall with the fitball – the rolling motion of the ball on my back feels a bit like a massage and helps relieve the pressure that has built-up. I’m not convinced by the “Yogababy” pregnancy classes yet though. Too many people in the class and just a bit of a mish mash of movements like rolling your hips, with maybe warrior pose thrown in for good measure. I think the normal yoga classes with some modified poses are better.
You are very much awake this morning and rolling around down there. You aren’t too bad though – earlier this week I think you managed to get your foot wedged in the space between two of my ribs and just jammed it back and forth for at least 20 minutes. I apologise slightly, but after attempting to get you to move gently I resorted to some relatively strong pushes to get you to move (read – you jab me and I jabbed you back when it got intolerable). At the moment you seem to be active first thing in the morning, and then usually again around 3pm and then again around 6pm. Either I’m sleeping better as I’m going through another really tired phase, or you’re also sleeping through most of the night too. Hope you keep that up! I’m sure you won’t.
Your dad started building the new decking path from the front gate to the front verandah yesterday. He dug a big hole in the middle of the front garden for some support posts, moved the massive piece of rock under the deck that acts as a step, and sledgehammered the step from the footpath right away. The wood and stuff arrived on a big truck (which incidentally took out a large branch on the black bean tree – very unfortunate as it was a branch that gave the front of the house a lot of shade in summer), and he has done some priming on the joists (or whatever they are called) so that today it should all be ready to start laying the structure from the path. The plan is a ramp that goes right from the footpath down to the level of our front deck, so we can just roll you on in your pram. Also, it will be easier for people to walk – less tree roots, and general compost material to trudge through. I think the decking we bought matches the front deck, so hopefully it will look ok. We’re not planning on putting any handrails on it though – so I’m sure as you get bigger you’ll stack it off the side many times – to a 30cm max drop. We’re planning on mulching up around the sides and putting some more garden bed in, so it should at least be a soft landing.
Hope you’re well.
love mum
Hello there speck,
Hope you’re sleeping well…. I certainly didn’t. My maternity pillow certainly helped, but all in all it was a horrible night. I tossed and turned (albeit not with the speed and ease I’m used to) all night, kept awake by a plethora of exciting things: back pain, the nightly possum migration from the neighbours to our house and visa versa via the window awning directly beside our bed, pubic symphysis pain, and a rowdy and recurring bat fight presumably in a fruit tree nearby. Yippee!
Your dad and I walked up to the first of six antenatal classes at the hospital last night. It was a manageable walk, we were both thinking that when the time comes it might be easier to walk to the hospital than drive. That said, I’m glad we have five more antenatal sessions to get to: your dad is directionally challenged at the best of times, and I can forsee him getting me to the oncology ward instead of the mother’s hospital unless he gets to practice how to get there at least a few more times…
The class itself was kinda funny. It would be really hard to pitch a class like that to such a mixed audience – it was the “changes in your body” or something like that class, run by a phsyio. Essentially we talked about some of the obvious changes that can happen to your body, and did some exercises to stretch our pelvises and relax and stuff like that. All pretty straight-forward, and if you hadn’t worked it out by this point in the pregnancy you’d have to have had your head under a blanket pretending you weren’t pregnant.  There were about eight couples in the class, ranging from 25 to 31 weeks pregnant.   We practiced getting in and out of bed and picking a baby from the floor and putting it on a bed and picking it up again. You were played by a big white hospital pillow. Well acted. While it was ok, I’m looking forward to the bit run by the midwives where we get to see the birthing suites and talk through more about baby stuff and less about pubis bones. I think that will be more relevant to me.
Had another appointment at the obstetrician today. I’ve hit a new milestone in the weight department. Yippee again. Still walking / cycling / yoga or something nearly everyday, but I guess I’m eating more than normal too. Oh well. Have a glucose test and a bunch more blood things scheduled for Monday, so hopefully that will prove that I’m all ok and just a bit fat (i.e. not diabetic or anything).  Not much to report from the obstetrician, all he did was ask if I was ok, at which point I burst into tears, and then he hustled me in to take blood pressure and hear your heartbeat. My blood pressure is all good. And your heartbeat was a bit irregular but we poked you and it went back to fast again. Apparently its normal for your heartbeat to change speed a lot, often as I change position etc. He also palpitated my uterus and your head is pointing down where it should be. Which I knew already as your kicking my ribs on the bus on the way in indicated where you were quite clearly.
Otherwise. Starting to think more seriously about the fact that you’ll need a name. Your dad and I have a few options that we’ve come up with, and one or two we even like. I guess though we need to ponder some more. And see you.
Keep safe.
love mum
p.s. last night in between anxiety attacks and nightmares consisting of work and family-related melodramas, I dreamt that you were born, but that somehow there were four of you. I was trying to leave the hospital and having difficulty working out how to get four babies home. My dad (your grandad) and my mum (your grandma K) were both there. I remember I just kept saying over and over to your grandad, “I don’t understand. There was only ever one when they did the scans. Where did the other ones come from?”. He just shrugged and continued to try to help collect you all…
You are either really excited or just a bit antsy like me. You have been kicking, turning and generally pummelling my innards non-stop for three days. Perhaps you know I haven’t written in a while and are worried that I’m not paying you enough thought attention. Aerobics workout. Rest up, you’ll get a chance to tax your dad and I when you come out.
Love you
Mum
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