Budding Pianist

I wonder if this will work....

We went to stay at Mark's mum's earlier this week (you can hear her talking in the background!). Cara was exteremly taken with the keyboard, as you can see. I particularly like her mouth playing technique.. She also adores watching the video of herself. Bless.

We're all a lot better round here, thankfully. Lectures start again on Monday. Bugger...

My poor baby

Cara's cold has been getting worse, and it is absolutely breaking my heart. She's still not horrendously unwell, or completely listless, but she is much grumpier and generally less spirited and outgoing than usual, as well as dripping with mucus from every orifice. She's waking up at all hours of the night crying her little eyes out and screaming with discomfort (she's also just cut her first tooth on top of it all, poor love), which has never happened before. The broken sleep, the crying and the not being able to put her down I can live with, but the experience of seeing her feel unwell is just awful. This is her first proper illness of any sort (she got a bit of a sniffle around the time I had mastitis, which felt like the end of the world at the time but I was all kinds of delerious). I know we are blessed to have made it 7 months without experiencing any sort of baby illness, and of course I know that a cold is nothing in the grand scheme of illnesses, but not being able to just take away her discomfort is agonising. I feel so crappy when I've got a cold-and I know what's going on, and can moan about it to people, and take all sorts of chemical filled cold remedies. She doesn't know why she can't breathe through her nose any more (poor love can barely feed, it's awful), or why she keeps throwing up mucus, or that she will ever feel better than this.

I dread to think what I will be like if (well, when, it's an inevitability) she gets really ill, or injures herself. I just want to protect her from ever feeling anything unpleasant, and I know that that's stupid and impossible, but I can't help it. She is my perfect little person, and it's not right that anything less than perfect should ever happen to her.

Here's the little snot filled love:

(At least she's got cool legwarmers-I made these yesterday whilst Mark took her to the doctors, using my old socks and this tutorial. I've made about 6 pairs now, they are incredibly useful for avoiding trouser putting on and taking off when in the house, or under trousers for outside, because trousers always ride up in slings. And they add a bit of much needed colour in this miserable winter)

We've finally got t'interweb fixed, so I'm in the process of putting all our Aussie pics on Flickr-there are a lot so it's taking a looooong time (I even upgraded to pro to fit them all on). Here's a Cara in Australia picture to contrast with the above misery:

Darn, can't resist so here's another:(there is summat really weird going on with my cheekbone there. I am really not that gaunt...)

Oh, my happy little love. I am so desperate for her to be back to her sparkling, outgoing, slightly hyperactive and a little bit looney self once again.

Euuugh

Bleh. It gets worse. Went to the doctor yesterday, I've got a chest infection on top of my stinking cold and am now taking antibiotics, which make Cara even more grumpy than the vast amounts of snot in her nose. She is OK still, not properly ill although occasionally having screaming fits the like of which I've never ever heard since she was born. Calpol puts a stop to them though so I guess she's feeling a bit achy/feverish. My poor little bunny. Most of the time she's her usual happy self though, just with more snot, so I guess we're doing OK (thank you boob juice). Being this stinking ill with a grumpy poorly baby on top of it all SUCKS, and I am very close to the brink of nervous breakdown (have tipped over the brink a few times in the last few days but been dragged back). And just to make it even more fantastic, I have an exam this afternoon. Hoo-effing-ray, 2 hours of writing bullshit about Gadda's use of free indirect discourse, just the thing to make me feel fantastic. I have done very very little revision and it's all going to shit, basically. Never mind, I've submitted a medical note as evidence of mitigating circumstances so they will hopefully take that into consideration.

Oh, the beach seems such a long way away.

Back home

Well, we are back. We had an AMAZING, truly amazing time. So fantastic and fun and warm and sunny and just damn good. And then an unbelievably crappy journey home. And now it's freezing, everything's broken (including internet, I'm cutting into essay writing time at uni to write this, bad Beth), I have a stinking cold, and I've got a shitload of uni work and a jetlagged baby. Woooooooooooooh!
It was so worth it though. What an amazing Christmas and New Year. I really, really want to move out there. Gently applying pressure to the other half. We'll see. Maybe little Cara will end up with an Aussie accent! But for now it's back to the cold cold Leeds winter and the daily grind of uni and all the rest of it. Well at least I have a tan...

Since our internet isn't working I can't put my 750 odd photos on t'interwebs for now, but here's one a friend out there took and put on Facebook of the three of us mucking around in her (very rich) friend's (very fancy) swimmng pool;

Aaah, good times...

Busy-ness

Oh lordy me, this blogging thing has somewhat fallen by the wayside again. Well, it was to be expected really as I don't exactly have much in the way of free time at the moment. Especially this week, and yet here I am writing a post....
Life is pretty good really, rather stressful but that's better than boring. I have a lot of uni work to do this week because (drum roll) one week tomorrow we are heading off to Australia! Hell yeah, Christmas on the beach, sunning ourselves in Sydney instead of watching the rain fall and freezing our tits off in Leeds. I am so excited. Ridiculously so. Yet also a little nervous and stressed, because a) it's taking almost 4 weeks out of my time to get work/dissertation especially done, and I probably could have done with those 4 weeks, b) oh god that means everything has to be finished before this Sunday if I want to avoid writing thousands of words with severe jetlag and sleep deprivation when we get back, c) shit, I really want to come back to a clean house for the new Year, so I'd better get that done this week as well, and d) 24 hours flying with a 6 month old. And baby jetlag. And baby acclimatisation to hot weather. And did I mention the 24 hours on a plane with a 6 month old? Plus layovers. Plus a train trip to London just to catch the flight.
So I'm a bit stressed to be honest, although the tantalising lure of sunshine in December is more than enough to get me over the stress. It will be a busy week though. I still haven't started my dissertation. Damn.
And, probably inevitably, the fact that I really need to devote all of my 'spare time' to academic pursuits these days has left me desperately craving to create, to craft, to knit and bake and (whisper) home make. And with no time to do any of those things. I have so many ideas but no chance to carry them out. I think mothering does definitely bring out creativity (well-there's a small person to make small clothes for, so of course it does), so it's frustrating not to be able to express it. Damn it, I can't win, I know that if I'd decided not to go back to uni and to fill my days with crafts and cooking and 'motherly' things I'd be chomping at the bit now and probably even more frustrated, but I just desperately want to make pretty things, and I can't.
Cara is great, but I think she's teething because she is crabbier than usual. She is fantastic though, and so worth any and all stress she causes. And to be honest, she doesn't cause that much stress. I love being a mum. I really didn't think I'd be able to say that. I knew I would love her, but to be honest the whole motherhood business was kind of scary. But I love it. I know I have been extraordinarily lucky in a lot of ways, and that has obviously helped. Cos I just never thought it would be this much fun, and come so naturally to a girl who hated dolls as a child and hadn't held a baby till a month before she got knocked up....

This whole studying and mothering thing...

...it's really, really hard. I am drowning in work. The work I'm getting done is beyond shoddy in its standard. I cannot string together an intelligent sentence in english, much less italian. My dissertation proposal was shamefully poor and I just can't even start actually working on it.
Final year is so much harder than all the others. First and second I could have managed fairly easily even with baby-I was out almost every night getting pissed, skipped most of my lectures, and still got a 2:1/first for everything. But this is very very different. It is so hard. So so hard. The 2 days that Mark has off work to take care of Cara really aren't enough, especially since I just physically can't spend every waking moment studying even on those days. And because he has those days off he has to work weekends, or else we'd starve, so I get no work done on weekends either.
There is so much work.
So much.
And today I had my IUD fitted, and then I felt awful (I am such a big wuss. Yeah I had a drug free childbirth but thats different! You're made to do that, but this is wholly unnatural). Spent the day curled up on the sofa knitting (with occasional tearful arguing-not sure where that came from). So that's one half of my non baby days wasted for the week. Fantastic.

Ah, but she's lovely.

Books books books

I've been on a bit of an Amazon binge lately. For some reason I was overcome bythe urge to not only read lots of new books, but also own them and keep them on bookshelves for future reference, and thankfully also discovered that you can get some damn good deals from Amazon sellers (dont really understand how that works-books in brand new condition that retail for over a tenner in store sold for under a pound?? Well, I'm not complaining.

Predictably enough, almost everything I've read has been related to parenting. I've attempted to read other things in preparation for my very daunting very soon return to university, but it's the parenting books that hold my attention and don't let me put them down. Funnily enough, although I read voraciously on everything concerning pregnancy and birth, I neglected to read much concerning what comes next. This was partly deliberate, actually, as I did and still do baulk at the idea of raising children 'by the book', but I have now found that books about child rearing can be fascinating and not merely prescriptive. Our only 'manual' is Sears' Baby Book, which was very useful in the first few weeks when I got the 'don't know what I'm doing' panics, and now generally only comes out when I get paranoid about something medical (err, like the time we noticed that she had a throbbing soft spot in the middle of her head and started panicking......hehe. Still freaks me out, mind). But now we're pretty sure of what we're doing day to day I've started to want to read more and more, particularly about ideas that I've seen mentioned extensively in online communities, but originally dismissed as a bit out there.

Attachment Parenting by Katie Granju was a quick read that really just backed up most of what we've been doing instinctively. Although I appreciated the extensive research that was cited in it, I did think that it was perhaps a little dogmatic and even unkind, especially when it came to formula use (although the facts and scientific evidence about problems with formula must be put out there for all to consider, I think it can and should be done in a kinder way). I did enjoy the book, but I think if I hadn't already been doing most of what it suggests, I would perhaps have been put off the whole concept. Although I've just read the Amazon reviews, and maybe I'm way off the mark with that... Hmmm, anyway, the general concept is very good, and I do love a book with nice clear citation that points a reader to numerous other sources to back up a point. Wow, the academic in me is still alive after all!

Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept was far more gripping and challenging. I'd previously heard about this book only on a fairly hardcore AP message board in the context of discussions about babies being present when you're having sex and the like, and I'd kind of resolved not to agree with it. Actually, I'd resolved not to read it, because it's so much easier not to agree with something when you haven't even read it (oh, bad bad bad me for admitting that!). But when I saw it mentioned very favourably in a much more mainstream book (Imperfectly Natural Baby and Toddler by Janey Lee Grace, my 'fluffy' purchase with lots of links to places to buy ridiculously cute organic baby clothes, aaagh!), I decided to give it a go. And it was fantastic, thought provoking and inspiring. But infuriating at the same time, mostly because of how much it made sense, but how very far away we are from achieving a society that comes anywhere near the ideals laid out in the book. It's a damning indictement not just of modern day parenting, but of society in general. Sometimes I felt she leapt to conclusions somewhat, but to be honest they were common sense, and it's a return to instinct (innate common sense, perhaps?) that she is advocating. I hope I'll manage to use what this book taught me in my own child rearing, although it is damn difficult when living in this 'non continuum' society.

Today Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn arrived, and I'm already gripped. I know that this will really challenge me, and I hope that I will find it convincing. Because although in theory I would love to be a paragon of unconditional, patient, nurturing parenting, I know that in reality I can be very quick to snap, and have a profound fear of what others think of me-something I really don't want to pass on to Cara. But that flaw also means I'm terified of raising a 'brat'. I know we've still got a way to go before discipline becomes an issue, but I want to get my head sorted on this one in advance. So lets hope this helps.

I love having new books on my bookshelf. I want more. I want all my Amazon wishlist and more. Of course, from Monday, I wont have time to read for fun. Or craft, or cook, or watch TV, or sleep..... Well, I dunno, maybe it won't be that hard, but wow I'm scared about going back to uni. Final year, same workload as all my peers but with the added responsibility of A WHOLE HUMAN BEING, whilst everyone else drinks heavily and then complains about not having done their work....Yeah, I'm worried.