daily bread

<sigh>

Resting is very dull. Especially by day 3. By day 3 you’ve run out of puzzles from this weeks papers, decent stuff on iplayer and maxed out the debit card online. Made more dull by the fact that everyone else is delighted I am confined to barracks and thinks this is A Good Thing. Need a wee rest before pushing that baby out.

Harumph.

Just when we were reaching the pinnacle of this weeks PNA (Planned Nesting Activities): a final (ish, no promises) trip to Ikea, I fell off the front doorstep and sprained my ankle (with all the elegance of a baby elephant being harpooned). Cue rest, crutches etc. I explained to Jayber how easy it would be to push me round Ikea in a wheelchair, how we could put Eli on my lap/get caleb to push him/ tie the children to the handlebars, but he was having none of it. Meanie.

I was very obedient and took myself off to bed and plotted my next Ikea opportunity which was to be this very day until I woke up with a tummy bug yesterday.( I might just add that sprained ankle and tummy bug aren’t the best combo). Cue more rest, more reckless online spending and quite a lot of grumpiness, improved only by the highly illegal watching of season 5 of Lost.

In other news, Caleb’s empathy training appears to be paying off – he has been most attentive and lavishing lots of strokes and kisses to his mummy and keeps asking how many days til I get better. Which was all very touching until I said ‘2 days, I think’ to which he replied “and then can we go to ikea?”.

Ah, he is his mother’s son.

Last night our lovely home group staged a surprise ‘graduation’ for Jayber complete with gown and even latin to celebrate him graduating his MCS from Regent. Real grad was a few weeks ago in Vancouver and quite the anti-climax to 2 and a half years of hard graft. So lovely for them all to mark the occasion and always fun to see Jayber looking ridiculous in a mortar board.

Maybe because it is my third, maybe because we just moved back home but I have been doing some serious nesting. In the past 3 months we have completely re-decorated and refurnished most of the rooms in our house (luckily, it is a small house) and redesigned our garden. The closer the birth gets the more frenzied I become. Saturday, for instance, saw me digging a flower bed in the morning and then pulling up a carpet in the afternoon whilst making an enormous pot of spag bol for the freezer. If you are wondering what the flip Jayber is up to while I am doing all this hard labour fear not, he has been given a list of jobs which he must complete by deadline on pain of death. Family members have been conscripted to move sheds, put up blinds, washing lines, bookshelves and curtain rails. Ikea has become Caleb’s primary child care provider and even Eli has been taught how to use a dustpan and brush.

All that’s left is the new patio (I have been dissuaded from laying the flags myself) and yet another trip to ikea to kit out the nursery.

And then maybe the baby could come and give me something else to do with my time.

After I have a wee rest

p.s most very thankful for my transformed wee house

So the midwife phoned to see if she could ‘drop a few things in’ for the forthcoming (we hope) homebirth. I’m picturing a few disposable mats and a set of scales. Half an hour and 4 trips out to her car later our living room is starting to look like a makeshift ICU and I’m starting to feel a tad freaked out. There’s oxygen tanks, an ‘instrument’ box, a suitcase full of wires and tubes and kidney dishes, a resuscitation kit, some mysterious bag that must be kept plugged in at all times, 2 tanks of gas and air (happy to make room for those), meds and most cheerfully a bright yellow box for the placenta. Nice. I had an interesting conversation with Caleb about that one.

The on-call starts today for the midwives so we are good to go. It’s all a bit surreal. I never would have thought of myself as ever volunteering for a homebirth and yet here I am, plastic sheets ready and waiting. Mostly prompted by a horrendous experience in the local hospital with Caleb I went in to this pregnancy demanding a c-section and slowly, slowly began to believe there may be another way, one that has the potential to redeem the birthing process for me rather than just write it off.

Who knows how it will go. Viability for homebirth is a precarious thing – you develop any risk factors or go too overdue and you are hospital bound. But for now I am thankful for the oppurtunity of facing the birth of this little one without terror and with confidence.

Now, just need to find somewhere to store all this stuff…..

A matinee movie, holding hands with jayber and feeling this little one squirm at all the exciting bits in Star Trek.

‘ARGHHHHHHH! OW OW OW! ‘@%*$£”‘

‘Mummy what happened?’, turns briefly away from Cbeebies.

‘A chair fell on my toe and it HURTS really BAD, Ow’,

Turning back to Cbeebies, ‘I’m glad that didn’t happen to me’.

‘Thanks Caleb’, as she limps away to find comfort elsewhere.

A little more education needed on empathy perhaps.

I’ve been hibernating away, retreating to the depths of my duvet for a while. Call it premature maternity leave, call it coping with transition, or recovery from the nightly torture of sleep deprivation that Elijah has been administering. It’s been a rough couple of months for Jayber and I as these huge waves of exhaustion and emotion keep crashing into us, knocking us off our feet. Sometimes we pull each other onto the life raft, other times it’s every man for himself – it’s hard to find grace for others when you’re drowning.

And then there’s this new wee mullan I’m cooking up. 13 weeks. Seems only Irish soil is good enough for wee Mullans. I had so many plans this last year of when this new baby might be born, in Canada for one thing with my lovely obstetrician and Mary for my Doulha. Then maybe before xmas, while JM is still studying and his hours are flexible. Or spring, I like having babies in spring. And each time a dissapointment, a grieving, a letting go. ‘Thy will be done’ through gritted teeth and clenched fists. Slowly the hands unfurl and lie open and I remember how small my grand schemes are and how little I really see of my own life or understand what I need.

Goodness, coming over all ‘espero’ there. Anyway, I think we are starting to feel a little more able to cope and I’ve missed posting and being part of this weird, warm invisible community and the chance to reflect and be thankful. I’d like to try and make it to 365 – even if it’s sporadic and takes me a few years.

So to begin, a belated piece of thankfulness for the refund of our Zoom money, a minor miracle.

Back to a wee bit of thankfulness…..

So, after weeks of buying autotrader, a few test drives and almost buying a clocked car, we finally have wheels. And very odd wheels they are too. We slashed the car budget to do some stuff in the house and so ended up with this:

It’s very dirty and a bit bashed up, but hey – it was cheap and it’s ours!! Caleb calls it The Fat Car and insists we must name it John.

We are also incredibly thankful that a kind and lovely friend lent us her sparkling new Focus to speed around in while we were looking, despite the fact that it meant she had no way of getting about. Sometimes people are just nice.

Now, anyone need a lift?

Shock, horror: espero is back………

Well, we’re here.

I’ve no internet yet so this is just to say we aren’t walking home from Canada, we did actually make it.

I’m doing…….so-so. Pretty much as expected – there are great things about being home, there are exhausting things and there are down right shitty things. I feel a bit like a big chest of drawers that got taken apart to go to a new house and they haven’t quite worked how to put me back together again. It’ll come, it’ll just take time. There are just a few pieces of me that I think they left in Canada.

I’ll be back when AOL get us sorted.

xoxoxo