Hardest Job in the World

My hat - if I was wearing one - goes off to every Mum that ever there was.  The good ones, bad ones and even the indifferent ones.  It is .... beyond words.  It's the hardest, most difficult, most rewarding, most upsetting, most worrying, most wonderful, most amazing job you can ever have.  It absorbs you entirely and takes over every fibre of your being.  Initially any sense of your own individuality is squashed by the mere fact that your baby needs every ounce of you right now!

No-one tells you how hard 'it' is.  There's masses of books on pregnancy and labour and tons of information on how your baby will grow but there isn't much on how rubbishly brilliant it is going to make you feel and how the devil you are going to deal with it.  Tears have possibly become my new best friend and I can't do it my latest mantra followed in the next breath by my other bestie the mega-smile and the catchphrase OMG I'm a Mummy!

Blog has been lacking these past 6 months, unsure as to why writers block should rear its head so massively at a time when so much was happening and changing that there should have been multitudes of paragraphs skipping off my fingers.  Such is life.  The plan, as ever, is to kick start the words and maybe that will offer some comfort in the wee small hours of the morning when my tired brain is trying to figure out how long he's slept, how long I've slept, when the next bottle is due and by the way is it still 2013?

All quiet on the western front

It's that weird limbo between having finally seen your baby dance on the fuzzy screen to being able to actually feel it swimming around inside. You don't look pregnant per se, more like someone who ate all the pies. Depressingly it is back to the waiting game, 170 odd days to go before we get the meet the little sproglett and despite it being fairly quiet in the womb area someone forgot to tell the hormones.

They are partying like 90s kids on speed. It goes up and oh my it comes back down. I just had my feelings bruised in a light hearted fashion over dinner and I am not entirely sure when the floodgates will close again. The tears just keep on coming. It seems a little pointless to say to the dearly beloved that I'm fine when rivers are running down my face and the snot volcano just exploded.

For a grasshopper whose existence is lightly sprinkled with flakes of depression from time to time anyway this raging roller coaster of hormones makes those flakes blizzard like. Some days the fight is on to get out of bed, I wrestle with the concept of showers and toothpaste, getting dressed becomes an unconquerable colossus and the very idea that something might be achieved in those daylight hours is beyond laughable.

It will pass and the world will once more rotate within its expected rotation instead of grinding to a halt or spinning with wild abandon but until then I'll just keep that mountain of tissues handy and try not to lose the entire plot within the egg aisle of Tesco.

Big sigh of relief

Ahhhhhhh! I've never been very good at keeping secrets especially when it's something really good and exciting so I am so pleased to be able to shout to the world - I'm with child! Or as the dearly beloved put it, I have a growth. Not my favourite description but who cares, I bunned the oven.

We went to the first scan with me under the most tension I've ever had in my life. I was so insanely nervous that there wouldn't be anything there or there would be something wrong or they wouldn't be able to find it or, or, or, or. I think you get the idea. I got the letter with the date of the scan 3 weeks before I had to go and I don't think I've ever been so nervous waiting for something. What made it worse was not being able to tell everyone, we didn't want to jinx anything. I barely slept, had terrible nightmares and completely trashed my digestive system. Thank you stress-related IBS.

I have never seen anything so magical in all my life. Of course I cried but I managed to hold it together and just had one or two tears escape one eye whilst being glued to the screen. It was like entering a sacred space as the ultrasound gradually revealed a tiny baby shape nestled inside me. I instantly grabbed dearly beloved's hand and possibly crushed the life out of it. And then Gus moved. Legs were kicking, arms waving and then it looked like he (for the sake of ease we'll use he although we have no idea) had hiccups as he kept jumping up and then settling back down again. He was so active, it was just amazing and really brings home the miracle of life that this little 9.6cm person is existing within me. I could have stared at that screen all day and I cannot wait to see him on screen again in March.

Smells like November

It's funny how smell can automatically transport you to a memory or place. Whilst walking to clear out the cobwebs today I was convinced it was November. It smelled of fireworks and burning bonfires with that sharp tang in the air - nothing at all like January. Although I am not quite sure exactly what January smells like - I'd like to think it would be snow and pine needles - we cannot guarantee snow here unfortunately.

With today being the official day that Christmas decorations should come down on I suspect many homes are looking peculiarly drab and empty. We get so used to change so quickly that it can feel like a massive upheaval when everything goes back to normal again. Whilst the dearly beloved looks at the empty corner with pleasure, I feel somewhat lost and bereft. Nearly all the sparkle has gone.

One good thing about walking on Sundays is that you don't have to battle your way through the army of chuggers that seem to plague our streets these days. I do not like to be accosted whilst out eranding and I certainly don't like to be made to feel guilty that I don't stop to 'chat' to the scarily chirpy individual. I definitely think this job deserves to be somewhere on the top ten worst ones ever as I rarely see anyone stop and respond positively to them, most ignore, some extremely rudely. I cannot believe that it is a cost effective marketing scheme for the charity involved as the bad feeling towards the chugger could easily be transferred to the charity brand. If someone wants to give to charity they will, they don't want to have to field a dozen money grabbers on the lunch break.

The other thing that gets me with them is their lack of ability to recognise you. Now I might not be the most observant person in the world but if someone walks past me once and ignores me, I'd like to think I'd remember not to bother them a second time. Let alone a third. The headphones in the ears and talking on the mobile are the best avoidance ploys, try not to make your avoidance route too obvious as that usually attracts unwanted attention and whatever you do - don't make eye contact!!!

New Year, New Blog

2013 is a year full of fat possibilities and what a sunny day for the beginning of the year, makes a nice change from the apparent 6 weeks of rain that we are meant to be having. I realise now that I've jinxed us to a massive downpour but it was lovely to spend the morning bathed in sunshine - bring on the vitamin D!

In other news the lemonade made a vicious attack on the laptop. It's in a recovery downward dog position and has been for the last 24 hours. I'm hoping, somewhat vainly that the situation will resolve itself and miraculously I will be able to turn it on and everything will work wonderfully. I cannot even begin to list all the items, program's, photos (sob) ad infinitum that is stored on there. I'm wondering whether a little hair dryer manipulation will help but I don't want to fry it further. There is a grand little IT shop at the other end of town which has been there since the 80s and despite it's rather unassuming decor, we are desperately confident that they will be able to extract all the salient information. Just goes to show that you can't trust carbonated beverages.

The intense smell of the dying Christmas tree is making me sneeze and sneeze and sneeze. I know we are supposed to wait, traditionally, until 6th January before we take down the decorations but I'm not sure my nose will survive that long or necessarily whether the Christmas tree will last that long! Perhaps there will be a smidge of sale shopping in the form of looking for an artificial tree for next year. Then again my aversion to any and all shopping that doesn't include food is pretty much clad in stone.

Last night I watched Julie & Julia - again - and loved, loved it so much that I decided to refresh my blog and hopefully engage in lots more cooking. I'm not saying that I'm planning to cook 500 odd recipes in a year but I truly hope I can make excellent use of the many cookbooks I own. I just hope that our waistlines can survive!!