Seven Months and Thriving - An Update

My lovely little Imogen is now seven months old. Let that sink in a bit. Seven months. That went a bit fast for my liking, but when it comes to my girls, time always travels faster than it should.

Imogen, like her sister, started sitting independently soon after turning six months and now does it very well, except when her sister pushes her over; then she goes down like one of those round bottomed dolls and can't always decide whether to cry or not. 

She loves to play with her crinkly toys, her play mat toys and her musical walker. Her plushy little fox is also a firm favourite (that one was love at first sight. I gave it to her, she stared at it for a bit and then  brought it in close for a giant baby bear hug. Just too cute). She loves to smile and giggle and is oh so close to crawling it's quite remarkable. She's been rolling over both ways for ages and is quite the little babbler too so we like to pop her in her high chair to play safely while we do stuff (she has become a little too big to wear all the time).  

Many of Imogen's toys are hand-me-downs from her sister so we are still trying to figure out this toy sharing business with Liora, who occasionally has these moments where she insists on playing with the toys she has outgrown or claiming them and not wanting to share. These do not last long because her need to play with Imogen is much stronger than her need to assert ownership over the toys. We have also assured her that not all her toys are for sharing and her stethoscope, special fluffy toys and troll toys are just some of the things that are not shared.

The big little grower sprouted her bottom front teeth this week, mere days after having introduced her to solids, mainly porridge and fruit pouches. She is a good eater and we are once again, taking it slow, although I find the daily breakfast with Imogen to be such a sweet moment, also an amusing one because she is always fighting me for the spoon so she can put it in her mouth herself. This is going to be one independent little firecracker. I can tell.

Last night she started doing raspberries which was adorable. It would have been more so if it hadn't been the middle of the night.

Liora, my beautiful, brilliant Liora is now three years and three months old and obsessed with playing her doctor game, and I don't mean obsessed in the casual way the word is being thrown around lately; I mean it's all she wants to play. That and cooking in her play kitchen. The doctor game basically entails one or many toys being diseased or maimed in one form or another and Doctor Liora treating them, while mummy, the additional doctor or helpful nurse must assist her. She also enlists the help of her little paper doctor toys for which I must provide the voices, or 'use my mouth so they can talk' as she so beautifully explains. (For some unknown reason, the first time I did this with one of the figurines, I used my father's 'voice' and the doll became Doctor Grandpa - I was a bit emotional but Liora loves doctor Grandpa a lot, so he stays.)

She has two stethoscopes which she wears practically all the time - a black one from her late grandfather and a pink one from Wish. At one point she was wearing her pink one everywhere but the bath: to sleep, to school, out and about. Along with that went a little plastic thermometer and whatever other random medical accessory she could muster. She has a transportation schema, so likes to carry things around, mostly spoons (which are therefore everywhere because she has figured out how to extricate them from both cutlery drawer and dish washer). Recently, we have had to place limits on the stethoscope, for a variety of reasons, so no more school or bed. And hopefully one day, I will get my spoons back.

Liora's verbal and social skills are progressing at a pace that fills me with wander and she is now also independent of nappies while awake. It is quite unbelievable that in just on nine months, she will be starting primary school. I am screaming on the inside about this enormous leap but that's a whole other post in itself.

I feel very fortunate to have two such incredibly special, happy little girls in my life and I hope to do them justice as they forge their way in this world. Every day I look forward to see what they will do next and how they will surprise me. Loving them is a rush and I am addicted!

Enough With Your Opinions Already

Today, I was watching a few random YouTube videos. This is something I do from time to time, a pastime I am sure I share with at least a billion other people.

I came across a talk show segment that was discussing breastfeeding, where a guest was trying to defend still feeding her nine year old daughter, while another was sitting there and apologising so kindly, while tearing the first guest apart, with the excuse that she was simply concerned for the well being of this child she had never met, and who, by all accounts, was a happy, independent, well adjusted kid. 

This post is not about the merits of natural term weaning or whether nine is too old or whether it's strange, or even how it works, or anything of that nature. It is a post about opinions, and why so many people insist on having them and sharing them on issues that have nothing to do with them, whatsoever.

The whole time I was watching this segment, I was thinking what's it to you, lady?

Why is this an issue for you and what makes your input in any way valid at all?

The child would be teased or ostracised for being weird, she said. But would they be? What is weird to kids and who teaches them what is normal and what should be mocked, if not their guardians?

Adults are the ones who set the agenda for what social norms are and for who is worthy and who is shunned. Children simply observe, learn and repeat, until their minds develop to the extent that they in turn become the ones to define what is acceptable.

So is it really strange, or are you making it so simply by holding that opinion. It may not be the norm or the mainstream, but again, why do you feel you have to point your finger and go 'Witch Witch burn the Witch!' basically.  

This woman who felt she had to stop breastfeeding her child the moment the baby was able to verbalise the need for her milk felt it was appropriate to judge someone else for doing things differently to her and allowing her child to stop at their own pace, and for being confident enough in her personhood to be vocal about allowing that. 

She did not seem to me to be a woman who needed breastfeeding to maintain her bond with her child or to feel validated as a parent or even to fill an emotional need of her own, as natural term weaners are often accused of doing. 'They are forcing their children and infantilising them because they need to hold on to their babies,' people say, or 'they are just too lazy to find alternative ways of comforting or bonding with their children.'  

I found her self control in the face of this bizarre 'I am a stranger, but I know what is best for you and your child' narrative incredible. I would have been rather more rude and my tandem breastfeeders are only three years old and seven months old. (to be fair, I do wish the tree year old would stop already.)    

I cannot understand how this kind of breastfeeder shaming is acceptable at all, especially since bottle feeding mums are always banging on about being shamed for their choice to formula feed. 

I though we were past the era of the evangelical zealot trying to validate their existence and opinions by making everybody else share their views, but here we stand, in a world where every issue is like a fence, with zealots on either side, shouting down the other, trying to break them down, usually online.

I respect the right of every person to hold their own views and opinions on whatever issues cross their field of perception, but hold your views, just hold them; don't try to impose them on everyone else. 

No one is the arbiter of another's truth. No one is entitled to belittle another's choices in the guise of 'I know what is right better than you' but some people just can't seem to be able to help themselves. It is really OK if others do not see the world or experience it in the same way you do. the Earth will not explode. 

The reality is that there will always be those who want to impose their world view on others, be they religious extremists, pro-lifers, anti-vaxxers, vegans, anti-smoking, anti gay marriage or Breast is Besters (they aren't immune to this either), you name the issue there is someone out there with a really strong Opinion on it that they insist everyone must share. 

Not only must you modify your behaviour to suite them and their world view, they are quite happy to inculcate those views into law so that they can feel the moral high ground firmly under their feet, even when it is nothing more than sociopolitical astro-turf.

Family Time with Team Awesome Gorgeous.

My youngest daughter is now six months old. Six months old - it's hard to believe.
She is sitting unassisted and very elegantly doing the splits before moving into a horizontal position. It's quite a sight to behold. I wish I had half the flexibility of my children.

She is also babbling. She spontaneously started doing it mid nappy change last week.

This weekend, she spent some time in the garage with Dad.

He is custom making a sound system for our car. For him, it's a therapeutic process that allows him to centre himself and cope with the stuff that life has thrown our way.

This isn't the first one he's built here. After Angelica passed away, we had to buy a car so we could go to the cemetery to bury her. not the nicest reason to buy a car, but it was a good little car and MrC decided that building a sound system in the car would help him with his grieving process.
It was pretty impressive, but the day it was ready, we decided to go get some takeaways before he wired it up and tested it. Some idiot  decided it would be a great idea to jump a give way sign and wrote of the car.

We were both traumatised by that. I just remember putting my hand to my belly to protect the baby that was no longer there and that reaction devastated me. I simply crumbled.

So he waited three years before trying again. this time, there is a lot more joy and many more interruptions from our team Awesome Gorgeous.

 

This month has also been a big one for Rainbow 1. She is now settled in her preshcool and in the reception preparedness class. She goes to primary school in September, five days after turning 4. She is lively and friendly and wears her grandfather's stethoscope everywhere and at all times, except in the bath, not that she didn't beg. Mommy said no.

She is also (sorry future Lolly) dry. It took a bit of patience and effort, but looking back it was mostly quick and painless. She amazes me all the time with her language skills and her ability to express herself.

Her love for her sister, Imogen's blatant adoration of her warm my heart so much; watching them together is a constant source of warm and fuzzies.

Despite my challenges with mental health, things are pretty good right now, and I have found my happy place, right next to my lovely girls.

Binge Writing is a Thing

My last post got me thinking about the way I have always written - going for a long time without writing and the POP! Something clicks in my head and I feel compelled to write something or anything.

It's a bit like binging, I thought. Then I thought about the other things I binge at.
I must confess, I am a bit of a binge eater, hence my roundish kind of shape, well, mostly hence. I also binge tidy, clean, organise and fold laundry, off the top of my head. (I also binge studied, which I do not recommend.)

So I googled it, as you do, a lo and behold, binge writing is a Thing.

A thing that other writers write about. Imagine my relief when I discovered that I was not unique in my approach to writing. Then I thought, of course you silly woman. There is nothing new under the sun.

There is no catch-all method to writing and if I had thought about it before, which I clearly did not, I would have realised the the x number of words per day method was not very Irissy and I should not have felt bad about not being able to do it, which I obviously did.

So now that I have stumbled upon this plain and obvious truth, I am going to embrace my bingey nature (writing-wise) and go with it, cos it's basically the only way I can roll and the only way I will ever get any real writing done.

It's either that or spend even more time feeling bad about not being consistent, which is just dumb.

So, come binge with me, it'll be fun.

I am a Writer. I Must Write

It's 10pm on a Wednesday night. I'm lying in bed with a baby in the cot next to me and a toddler snoring in the bed with me. Mr C. is still downstairs doing his thing.

I don't really know why I'm writing, especially since I'm doing it on my phone, which is not my favourite medium.

Having said that, lately I have felt the pull to write more and more. I used to love writing. I could spend hours on it and yet, in recent years, I have let my writing fall by the wayside, to the chagrin of my husband and my mother.

My excuse was that I felt uninspired or had no story ideas. I would say I had the skill to write but I not a talent for story telling so I was just kidding myself that I would ever get a book written, let alone published. In short, I gave up on myself.

But I just want to write now. Right now.
Just random stuff. I keep wandering how to work all this out in my blog and whether I should just start  new one. I always feel like becomingiris is not the right place for experimental writing work, but I have to start somewhere.

I feel all lost and foggy in my little rut; even a little bit paralysed by my own over-thinking.

I remember getting a flash of an idea, back in the day, and sitting down to write. The weekend would disappear and the words would seem to write themselves. Once the first sentence was done, the rest would just flow. But that was a decade ago.

Wow. A decade. It's quite amazing how time can just slip away from you when you aren't paying attention. When you are going through stuff and you're counting moments, years can pass before you manage to look up and take a breath.

Maybe it's time I looked up, took a breath and stopped sleepwalking through my life. My kids will thank me for it, not to mention my husband.

I may start with some writing prompts. I like that idea.

Let's see what happens next.

She is Frickin' Cute and I Adore her

On the 27th of April, by Caesarean section, my sweet little Imogen Enye was born.
She weighed 3.160kg and has filled our lives with even more love.

Liora loves her sister, despite having had a bit of an adjustment and going through a bit of a tough time with being two going on three.

As I said in my previous post, I struggled with pregnancy, but I am glad to say that our little addition, which has completed our family, is incredibly cute.

At three months, she laughs and smiles and plays with her doll and her dragon fly and her "O" ball, shaking it so it will rattle. She is cute and cuddly and bright as a button (a really shiny one).

There are challenges and difficulties, not least of which being Imogen's ability to shred ear drums with her screams; a talent which she exercises often since she has a combination of reflux and colic. 

The colic means that every night, like clockwork, at around eight pm or thereabouts, She screams like a B-grade horror actress.

Infacol helps. Gaviscon helps. Having cut out all dairy helps.

She has gone through degrees of suffering. She started screaming for hours on end, then I cut out dairy and started her on her regime of "meds". She got somewhat better; much better, in fact. To the point that I thought she had adjusted enough to reintroduce some dairy from time to time. Then she got sick and had to go on antibiotics for a week. I think that had an impact on her gut bacteria and colic levels. So now it's a nightly battle and challenge to find the quickest, most efficient way to soothe her poor little tummy so she doesn't suffer so terribly (and deafen us and our long-suffering, very understanding neighbours - who incidentally, have adopted our cat, Wednesday. She is boycotting us at the moment).

We have also had a heatwave, a really long and uncomfortable heatwave that neither me nor my kids are particularly loving.

Mr C hates it too. A lot.

All in all, my girls, my Team Awesome Gorgeous give me more joy than I could ever have imagined (and more stress, anxiety, frustration, and sleeplessness). The pangs of guilt when I look at my beauty collection or think of my blog have gradually lessened, but my desire to write is starting to resurface. I am going to go on a bit of a tangent with this blog and just write about random stuff for a while and see how it feels.

Read it.
Don't read it.
I don't mind.

This Post is Not About Beauty

It is March 2018.

I have not written in this blog for a very long time.

I virtually abandoned it, or any pretext I had that I could sustain the blog in any kind of meaningful way.

I look at my desk and the gazillions of beauty and skincare products I have not used with a kind of dispassionate indifference.

My nails are brittle and varied in length. My skin is dry to the point of flaking. My beauty routine is a thing of the past.

It has been almost seven months. I could have made the time. I could have summoned up the energy to take better care of myself. Maybe. But I doubt it.

I am not entirely sure of the cause of this lapse. It could be the fact that my amazingly gorgeous daughter is now two years old and made up of energy. It could be my depression, which I seem incapable of managing particularly well. Or it could be the fact that the day before my daughter turned two, I found out that I was pregnant.

I am now 31 weeks pregnant with another baby girl in a harrowing, and decidedly final pregnancy. Not just final because I am 40, but because (and little baby, if you ever read this, don't take it personally) this pregnancy has been worse than horrible.

It started out with being constantly tired and having endless, unstoppable nausea and vomiting (hyperemesis gravidarum) for which I needed to be medicated. Then came my booking in appointment with the midwife (I was late for the first one as I made a mistake with the time - the second one, she was 2.5 hours late for). It was a disaster. it took ages and I cannot count the number of risk factors I seemed to have. I was told I needed to self-inject heparin daily and take aspirin too. I would be considered high risk because of my age, weight, and history with Angelica and would be treated as if I had gestational diabetes because I had it with Liora.

According to my hospital, that meant being ignored to the point of threatening to complain to the NHS before any appointments were made for scans etc, being neglected by my designated midwife, who I have yet to meet, and my daughter, and therefore my husband being banned from entering the room where I have had my scans done. Literally less than minimum care. I may as well not have bothered to tell them I was pregnant at all. Thankfully this kid moves regularly because until she started to I was losing my mind.

This is the opposite of the amazing care I got through Barnet hospital when I was pregnant with my two-year-old. When they say it is a post-code lottery, they are not joking.

Now my symptoms include tiredness, low mood, anxiety, nausea (now only occasional), heartburn, round ligament pain, spd pain, back pain, basically 24 hour all over pain. (and I need to pee every 5 minutes)

I am never doing this again. And this baby better be frickin' cute.

She is due in May and I cannot wait to meet her and introduce her to her big sister. I am terrified that the pregnancy will go wrong. I am terrified that the girls will not get along (I was really badly bullied by my sister) and I am worried that I won't be have the same level of patience or devotion or won't be good enough for the second one. I want to be a good mother but I have self esteem issues so I always doubt myself.

Deep down I know I will adore this little girl and dote on her as I did her sister, but my brain niggles, so here I sit, kicking baby within, pouring my guts out onto this blog for all to see.

Wish me luck. I have 8-ish weeks to go and hope it will go fast, but somehow, I get the feeling it will be the longest 2 months of my life.

Good night. I need to go get my Gaviscon.