making albuqueque

been too long

I'm sorry, I do mean to blog, but computer time is usually limited to feeding time at the zoo and I'm afraid that typing one handed is too frustrating. So I guess I need to catch up on about a months worth.

The most exciting news first. Bella saw the neurologist last Monday......and she was discharged. She's now got reflexes in both legs (albeit hard to elicit, but definitely there). The discharge letter said she's got slight ankle weakness. We notice that her balance isn't great, especially when she's tired, but otherwise, she's normal. It almost seems weird. I still feel very cautious about her climbing on things, especially at the playground, but that's something I'll probably never lose. So now we can put the last year and a half down to medical curiousity, something that Bella can tick the 'ever had a serious illness' box on medical forms, a memory I'd mostly soon forget, but proved how stubborn our little miss is.

I do think there was a slight personality change, Bella is even more highly strung than she might otherwise be. But other than that, it's really hard to tell what's the after effects of the Guillain-Barre, and what's genetics. After all, I can't run or catch to save my life, so it's not a stretch to consider that Bella probably would never have been a sports star anyway.

Right, Morty, continues to grow. I got him weighed a couple of weeks ago. He was 7.16kg. He continues to grow and grow and grow. I succumbed to the buggy, not because I wanted to, I much prefer baby wearing to pushing a buggy. However, the maternity physio strongly suggested I stop carrying Morty because of the extra pressure on my pelvic floor. Ho hum, I've done it, we've got a buggy that has a parent facing option, and Morty gets pushed. Neither of us seem particularly happy about it but there you go.

What else. Matthew is enjoying his new job. I ask him most days how it is and he says boring, but boring is so much better than where he was.

Oh yeah, the other thing, I've been visiting schools. Yes, my daughter is not quite 3.5 and I've got to investigate schools. It seems wrong, wrong, wrong. Nevertheless, I've been visiting schools. I've been to two so far, and I'm coming to the conclusion that in our area most of the schools are not hideous, and that our best bet is probably to try for the smallest one, since I think that will suit Bella's personality better. I'm reserving judgement until I've visited the third school, but I think we'll end up applying for the first school we visited since Bella will know a couple of the kids and there's only one kindergarten class rather than 2 or 3. I think she'll do better in a group of 30 rather than a group of 50 to 70.

Right, a couple of photos.

Here's Morty's favourite game. He loves to be held standing and will do it for hours if you let him. You get bored of holding him up a lot sooner than he gets bored of standing looking at stuff.

 

The jack-o-lantern Matthew carved for Halloween. We went and bought a bunch of treats and then didn't get trick or treated at all!

 

And Bella and Morty from a couple of days ago.

 

And Bella from this afternoon at the park.

The incredible hulk

I cannot convey in words and pictures quite how big Morty is. I can tell you that the usual reaction to finding out how old he is when confronted by him is either 'GOOD GRIEF' or 'OH MY GOD' (intentional capitals and with apologies for the blasphemy, but that's the way of it). I haven't had him weighed officially since he was about 6 weeks. I haven't been game, and I'm not sure I want to know the answer. Morty is currently wearing clothes his sister wore between 6 and 9 months. He's 14 weeks old. Let that sink in a minute.

I do not, no way, no how, understand how I had one child who almost fell off the bottom of the weight chart, and one who is about to fall off the top of it. Surely you would expect some kind of synchronicity in their relative sizes. I know I'm banging on about it, but we had tiny tim on the one hand, and the incredible hulk on the other.

Now, before you go thinking that I'm calling my boy fat, and am all worried about his size. I'm not. He's in proportion, he's tall as well. He's just a strapping young lad. And hey, it's not like he's being fed any different to his sister. So there you have it. I expect that he must have gotten almost the opposite half of the gene pool to her. Otherwise there's no accounting for it.

No real proof in the picture, but here is Morty in the baby carrier on the weekend. He's a stickybeak as well. What is it with me and the stickybeak children?

 

Bella is continuing to be a monkey at bedtime. She also doesn't like being hurried. She'll dig her heels in and resist, resist and resist some more. This is expecially frustrating when we actually need to get out of the house 5 minutes ago. Please tell me this is typical 3 year old behaviour? On the up side, her general behaviour has been improving since Matthew has encouraged me to spend a little alone time with her each week. So just the two of us go swimming, or out for cake, or a walk or something. Just so long as there is a whole hour at some stage where she's not sharing me with Morty. It's tough when you remember when you didn't have to share your parents attention. Otherwise it's all Daddy, Daddy, Daddy and screaming and running away if I try and be involved in something like, oh, I don't know, helping her get dressed, or wiping her bum, or giving her a cuddle and kiss when she's hurt herself. Fun times.

She has got a very wonderful imagination. Here's evidence of the teddy bears' picnic we made on the lounge room floor the other day. It was wonderful, she shared out food for them, made cupcake soup, made drinks, and generally had a lovely time.

 

Things are on the up with her swimming too. She only met the pool 6 months ago, but she's doing remarkably well. She agreed to put her face under twice for me on Sunday, and she doggy paddled just holding my thumbs (albeit with a pool noodle under her arms). She's getting much more confident, and the next thing I'll be trying to teach her, is how to get back to the top when she goes under.

11.5 weeks

Yah, not so great at keeping up with the blogging at the moment.

So here's the last month or so in a nutshell.

• Morty is growing like a triffid. I haven't had him weighed in ever so long because frankly, I'm not sure I want to know. Suffice it to say he is almost 12 weeks old, and rapidly growing out of UK 3-6 month sized clothes, or Aus 00. He's long, he's big, he's strong, and he looks really fat, but he's not, he's just solid and long. Oh but he does have those lovely chubrolls on his thighs that we never saw with Bella.
• We had to move Morty out of the moses basket into the cot. It got so I kept finding him with his face mashed into the side of the basket, I didn't think that was safe, so up went the cot. He seems to have taken to it just fine.
• I am completely failing to understand how I could have one child who almost fell off the bottom of the weight charts she was so small, and one who is about to fall off the top. You'd think there would be some kind of similarity, but no, completely at opposite ends of the bell curve
• His head control is pretty good, and he can almost roll from his front to his back. I expect he's going to learn to move a lot earlier than his sister, purely so he can get away from all the smothering cuddles!
• Bella is continuing to display the worst of 3 year oldishness. I'm not terribly proud of the way I'm parenting her at the moment. Even when she's getting lots of positive attention, and one on one time with one of us, she's still acting out. She's also having lots of wee accidents, and being a right monkey at bedtime. Tell me this settles down somewhat. That said, she is a really lovely little girl when she wants to be. She's very caring of her brother (apart from not being quite gentle enough and treating him somewhat like a toy), she's very, very quick on the uptake (total mummy brag but she's just over 3 and can do 48 piece puzzles), she loves to cook, and draw, and paint, and play make-believe (currently we do a lot of driving trains and plains and busses and going reallyreallyreallyreally fast on any of those things). I love her to death but she does my head in quite a bit.
• Me, the recovery from the birth is going OK, breastfeeding is going OK, I'm just about managing to keep us all in clean clothes, the rest of the housework has gone to pot. Yes, even worse than my normal fairly lax attitude to housework. I'm getting a reasonable amount of sleep all things considered. Morty throws in the odd night where he'll sleep 10-11 hours, but then he'll have other nights where he wakes at 11, 3, and 6. His day sleep is similarly inconsistent. Some days he'll have only 40 minutes at a time, other's he'll sleep in blocks of 2 hours or so. Go figure, I can't work it out.

And here's a couple of photos. Morty has the best stunned monkey face when I first put him into the bath, and two days ago was the first time we managed to capture it.

And to be fair, here is my mischievous little girl 'trying an outfit on snorty'

shave and a haircut

The shave was me cutting Matthew's hair the other day. The haircut was Bella, this morning. Yes, I've finally done it at 3 years 3 months, got her first haircut. I think the months of violent objection to having her hair combed finally did me in, and I succumbed. I'm a bit sad about it, it's all so very grown up, and she's got short hair now, up around her shoulders. So here's the photo evidence.

Before - a real rat's nest

During

After - it's so short
 

And just to be fair, here's a photo of Morty for you.

Carrying 1/10th of my body weight

Sorry, the file size on the photos is going to be very inappropriately large, you'll cope I'm sure.

I took this half an hour ago, trying to get a photo of Morty's delightful smile. It's a bit tricky photographing those fleeting moments.

I still can't see anything of myself in him. If I hadn't given birth to him I would hardly believe he was related to me.

He's big too. After having Bella almost fall off the bottom of the weight charts, Morty is heading for the top of them. He had a check-up on friday and he's now 91st centile for weight and head circumference. So when I've got him in a carrier, I'm now carrying around about a tenth of my body weight. He's such a guts that I'm only 2kg heavier than my pre-pregnancy weight and it's not quite 8 weeks since his birth. He's growing out of clothes at a very rapid rate of knots. He's just about in 3-6 month size (or 00, almost 0). He's a big fella!

This photo was also taken this morning, under demands for a landscape photo of Bella and Morty having a cuddle. Ask and ye shall receive.

Bella still loves Morty to death, and can't get far enough away from me. I wonder when she'll stop punishing me for bringing Morty into the fold?

Have I mentioned that bedtime for the two children is a two-parent, two-hour exercise in frustation for us? I wonder when that settles down too?

  My mother-in-law has been out visiting for two weeks. I think both children loved it.

We took Anne to London for the night to go on the London Eye. Naturally mr greedy guts decided it was feed time while we were on the Eye. Was that a completely inappropriate place to breastfeed? He turns into a very angry young man if the food is not forthcoming when he wants it.

It was a good visit, but extremely busy and I'm exhausted now.

Matthew starts his new job tomorrow, he's moderately nervous, but looking forward to it.

Other than that life goes on in it's usual chaotic way. I never realised that the work of having two children was not just twice the work of one, but exponentially more. I can't leave the house within an hour and a half of wanting to get out the door, I'm barely managing to keep us all in clean clothes, the rest of the housework has gone to pot. I'm hoping that will settle down one day.

And now there is a very angry young man who is rather unhappy about the lack of boob in his mouth. More sometime soon.

I think we've walked this road before

So you know how they always say that all children are different, and you'll never have two the same? Well why do I have a sense of deja vu so often? There are some things in Morty's behaviour that are so similar to when Bella was tiny. Morty feeds really frequently during the day, he poos a lot, he sleeps pretty well over night, he's hard to get to sleep during the day, and almost the first thing many people say when meeting him is 'he's very alert isn't he?'. That's almost word for word how things were with Bella at a similar age. The biggest difference is that Morty is huge compared to Bella at the same age, and that if he does go to sleep during the day, he'll sleep for longer than she did. He's also a lot more cuddly, he likes to be held...a lot.

So yeah, deja vu, different child, same story. We'll see how it pans out in future.

Bella is continuing to be both a delight and a frightmare. She spends a lot of time screaming at me to drown out whatever I'm saying that  she doesn't want to hear, which is most of what comes out of my mouth. She only wants to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. Typical of most threenagers I expect, but horribly frustrating, and I find myself losing my cool with her way too often. On the other hand she loves to read, she loves to cook, she is sensationally caring with Morty, she can also be intensly shy with people she doesn't know, and she seems almost frighteningly intelligent or at least perceptive. That's entirely too like me.

Life continues mildly chaotic although not as bad as it has been. I'm just about managing to stay on top of the mountain of washing created by one child who likes to change clothes several times a day, and another who is a master of pissing on himself at every nappy change. You would think I would learn some trick so that he didn't wee on his clothes every time, but I haven't yet.

What else? We're still chasing down quotes to get the floor fixed where the fridge delivery guys gouged it. Oh and Matthew got put on garden leave last week. (Garden leave = put off on full pay till the end of your contract because they don't want you in the office). I'm liking this husband home every day thing, and his mood has improved dramatically since he walked out that door. Me, still most likely anaemic, still tired, still not got the breastfeeding latch fully sorted. Oh and got to go see the physiotherapist about the perineal tear and crappy pelvic floor tomorrow. Fun times.

Apologies for no photos today, I'll get onto that sometime soon, I promise.

28 days later

4 weeks

• 10lb 5oz (or 4.7kg), that's up 2lb or 1kg on his birth weight
• still not in cloth nappies, too much poo, too tired, it's the plan for next week
• breastfeeding has been up and down. I've now borrowed one of the chairs from the local breastfeeding clinic. It's helping a little, we're still not brilliant, but it's not affecting his weight gain thank goodness
• I've made my first ever batch of jam, raspberry, very tasty. We're eyeing off the damsons in the next door neighbours garden, I'm going to make more jam, making jam rocks
• I'm still waiting the second quote on fixing the floor from where the fridge delivery guys gouged it
• Bella's behaviour has ups and downs. She's not acting out against Morty unless she's extremely annoyed at me. I'm fine with that, mostly she's being a cow to me, wants more attention etc etc etc
• I've been back to the breastfeeding clinic three times. It's not that it's going atrociously badly, but it's not going great either. I've got some seriously bad habits, and who knew feeding Bella for so long would make it hard to relearn to breastfeed a newbown!
• We went to a wedding on the weekend, Bella looked completely adorable...and then she fell in a pond. It was a small pond, less than a foot deep and less than half a metre square, so the only harm done was to dignity, and we ended up with one soaking wet, hysterical toddler, covered in duckweed. Only our child could do it. Thankfully one of the other guests, who lived across the street had a 3 year old girl and lent us some clothes.
• I went to the GP yesterday and she took one look at me and asked if I was anaemic. Well, yeah, probably although I've not had my haemoglobin checked even though I lost quite a bit of blood during Morty's birth. So I have a brand spanking new prescription for iron tablets. 
• The stitches have healed up pretty well, although some of them are a lot less dissolvable than others.
• I can't believe it's been 4 weeks already. There's some major ups and downs with me managing both children when I'm here on my own with both of them. Some days Bella and I go OK, others we're at loggerheads the whole day. Yes, I know that's to do with me and how I manage her, rather than anything else, but honestly I don't think she could possibly find any more ways of pushing my buttons. It drives me absolutely crazy.
• Morty is a fairly easy baby, he can be slightly sleep resistant, not completely sleep allergic like Bella was, but slightly sleep resistant. It's hard to get him to go to sleep in the day unless he's in a baby carrier. He's pretty good overnight, waking at about 1am and 6am. I wont be sorry when he can sleep through that 1am waking, but I don't see him dropping it any time soon.
• From initially feeding every 1.5-2hours during daylight, it's now more like 2.5-3 hours, which is much more managable, and gives me a much greater ability to do stuff.
• Did I mention Matthew got a new job. He had the interview when Morty was a week old, and starts in about 3 weeks time. It's much closer to home, which will mean he'll be home earlier.
• That's enough of an update for now, but here's some photos.

Bella in her borrowed clothes at the wedding. Unfortunately there are no pre-pond photos.

All of us at the wedding, 3 in handknits, and one actually looking stylish. My goodness, I didn't realise how fat that dress made me look. It was an interesting choice, I had to strip to breastfeed, thankfully it was in the bride and groom's garden, so I could hole up in there room at the appropriate times.

Sneaky photo Matthew took of me being gooey at Morty at the wedding.

I really love Morty's facial expressions. He really does have an amazingly expressive face. It's slightly mean of me, but I really love some of his crying faces, they are quite delightful, and handsome in a really weird way. This one was taken during some on and off attempts to get him to go to sleep in his bouncy.

apologies

I'm apologising now for the lack of photos of Morty and Bella, for not replying to comments, emails and not phoning you if I should have. The general level of chaos in Casa Underhill is still pretty high!

Since I last updated....

• We've bought a new fridge
• we've had said fridge delivered
• we've discovered the fridge delivery guys gouged the floor
• I've been back to the breastfeeding clinic twice but still got bruised nipples. I think we're improving
• I've lost count of the number of times I've told Bella 'leave your brother alone, he is sleeping' or 'don't squish his face'. She's killing him with love!
• Bella has a cold
• Matthew has got a new job, which he will start on 1st September
• plus general lack of my ability to get anything done, even when Matthew is doing an ace job of cooking and looking after Bella. Housework....what is this housework thing you speak of?
• We've been awash on a sea of poo, Morty poos a lot.I used to think Bella pooed a lot as a newborn but she had nothing on him!

Morty is a much suckier baby than Bella was, sucky in that he wants to suck a lot, not sucky in that he bites the big one. He's not a hugely happy chap, but I think there's a bit of colicyness that is entirely related to our breastfeeding latch. The couple of times we've had really good feeds, he's been a completely different baby....and pooed a lot less. I think we're getting closer to getting the latch right though, so hopefully things will settle down soon. Oh an getting a newborn to sleep when you've got a preschooler running around who is trying to smother them with love and can't do 'quiet the baby is trying to sleep' is almost impossible. He sleeps fine during the day on the days Bella is at preschool, but not so great when she's here. That said, he'll sleep fine in a baby carrier even if she is here. SO I'm looking at more baby carrier options, to find something a little more comfortable.

Other than that life is going well for a house with an almost 3 week old. Sleep is going OK overnight. Morty usually wakes sometime between 11.30 and 1.30 for a feed, and then not until 5.30, so my sleep overnight is reasonable, and I think I'm getting more than most people with a newborn in the house. Matthew is already sleeping through the night wakings (well until I start swearing about nappy changes he is!) Bella loves her little brother to death. She's only tried to hit him once and that was when hungry, overtired, and pissed off at me. Usually she's killing him with kindness, lots of kisses, cuddles, and imitating us giving him a finger to suck on. Us she's not so good with, lots of acting out, pushing boundaries, and she particularly doesn't like me right now, it's all daddy, daddy, daddy. All that is as expected though. Morty is putting on weight like it's going out of fashion. He's already so much bigger than he was when born.

So, just one picture. I keep forgetting to pick up the camera.
 

BAH to mechanical breakdowns

So I think today averages out as fairly shit, fairly expensive, but overall positive.

The fridge broke, we lost all the food in the freezer, and quite a bit of the food in the fridge. We had to buy a new fridge. I tell you I've had it up to there and beyond with expensive mechanical breakdowns. We got a guy out to look at it this morning, but he said it was terminal.

So that was all incredibly stressful, but almost 350 quid (including the service call) later we've bought a new fridge, which will be delivered on Sunday.

We had to take Bella to the Trauma clinic for follow-up. Oh didn't I mention that, the last majorly chaotic day was Monday, Bella had to go to A&E because she broke her thumb at the playground, I had to wait for the shopping to be delivered, then get to a breastfeeding help bus, got back to visitors, and the midwife came to check me over and get Morty's heel prick tests. CHAOS. So today amid the stress of finding a new fridge, we also had to take Bella to get her thumb checked. We waited an hour for a doctor to see us for less than two minutes, and the only reason it was only an hour is Matthew pulled the newborn card and jumped the queue a little. Anyhoo, her thumb is pretty much healed now. But oh my goodness, trying to keep a three year old from climbing the walls and doing things she shouldn't when she's totally bored and over waiting is impossible.

So after the trauma clinic, Bella goes back to nursery, we get home to eat something, then out again to buy a fridge, take Morty to Matt's office to show him off, back to pick up Bella, home, bath 2 kids, feed all of us, get Bella to bed and amid all this change Morty's nappy 50 kazillion times since he likes to poo 50 kazillion times a day, mostly just after he's fallen asleep. ARGH.

On the positive side, Matthew has been notified he's the preferred candidate for a job he interviewed for on Wednesday. They've just got to do referree checks. Keep all crossed, although the references would have to be atrocious for it to all fall through at this point and who gives a bad reference?

So year, expensive, shit, but because of the job and thumb news overall positive I guess.

Photos of Morty

Here's a couple of photos for your delight.

40 weeks 1 day pregnant. Excuse the undies shot, but I was in labour, and this is the most dressed I got.

Morty at about an hour old, the first photo we've got of him.

Bella was extremely excited to meet her new little brother, and she's remained besotted since.

And here you can see how much he's the spitting image of his father. My genes don't appear to get a look in at all.