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2006-01-06 - 10.27pm previous entry next entry
Christmas update (at last!)
Oh. My goodness. I have soooooooooooooooooooooo much to update on, as I haven't written in way too long, and there I was just thinking how I'd just write one long entry with Christmas, New Year, in-laws, France, and general ramblings and Arthur news all rolled into one! Plus all the photos. Um, no, I don't think so! For one thing, I just started sorting the photos and have stopped at 15 so far (halfway through the ones from France and not including the ones I've taken since we got home!!). So clearly I will have to make several entries. *sigh* I reeeeally need to stop leaving it so long between entries, or this is what happens! Plus I miss just splurging in my diary, which can never happen if I have a bazillion things to update about on the rare-ish occasion that I have time to update.
So this one will be the entry about Part One of life since the last entry - Christmas at the in-laws, with photos. Then a France/New Year's thingy with photos. THEN a general Arthurish update with more photos and possibly even time for a few ramblings from my own brain! But it's 9.30pm already and I still haven't eaten, so I guess I won't get all that done tonight. But I will try!
So here is the Christmas entry.
Christmas at Neil's parents' place went okay. I really have nothing to complain about but I have definitely had better Christmasses. But it was good to go and see them, as we haven't taken Arthur to see them since he was 11 weeks old!!! Toooo long. Neil's dad is really not good at the moment. He seems more fragile and has less of a quality of life than ever before, to me. Caring for him is so hard for Neil's mum and 19-year-old sister. Neil's mum just had a knee replacement so his poor sister has had her hands full. They don't get much help from outside. Well, a little, but not a lot.
So it is always kind of upsetting for Neil when we go there, as it's so hard for him seeing his dad like he now is. He has chronic leukaemia and has had something like 9 strokes now. He can't eat, swallow, speak, see much, or do anything for himself. He can grunt in a less communicative way than Arthur does, to get attention, over and over like a little child. He has lost all the sparkle in his eyes that was there last time, even though he couldn't communicate. He drools heavily and has lost unbelievable amounts of weight. He holds his head funny, and he CAN walk, but he rarely gets out of bed and comes downstairs anymore. He is so tired all the time. He needs carrying to the loo sometimes, and he needs showering and cleaning up after using the toilet and everything. He wakes more than Arthur does at night, sometimes 9 times a night, and needs attending to every time, which must just be completely exhausting. He needs medication and tube feeds so frequently that the schedule just boggles me even thinking about it. I have no idea how they manage. They are so cheerful about everything. It makes us feel bad to find it hard being there for just a few days, but I guess we just aren't used to it. We remember Neil's dad like he used to be when he was well, and don't see him like this except for once or maybe twice a year.
So that was a more difficult part. The great part was that Arthur was a complete hit, of course! Everybody loved him, and he charmed family and family friends alike. He LOVED our visit there! He thrives on social contact and improved his walking with a little more space to cover than in our little house. He did cry when we arrived and he saw his Grandma for the first time, which he has NEVER done before, but it was a LONG journey, a 7 hour drive in the end as we had to stop twice for Arthur to be changed and to eat a meal or two. By the time we got there it was later than planned, two hours past Arthur's bedtime and he had gone to sleep in the car. It was dark and cold when we woke him by carrying him out of the car and into a brightly lit house that wasn't his own, and a stranger greeted him enthusiastically. So he just cried and looked so pathetic that my heart squelched into mush and I held him close to me on my lap for the next 15 minutes with just the lights of the Christmas tree and the TV until he calmed down and got interested in the new place.
He had the most awful bedtime that night - 11.30pm!!! It was the soonest we could manage to deal with the huge palava of getting in, unpacking his night stuff, setting up his travel cot and then both Neil and I deciding there was no way we were putting our child in a cot after all this time co-sleeping, so taking it down again and taking the double bed apart to put the mattress on the floor like we have it at home. Finally the bed was ready and he went off to sleep. He was so wired and excited all evening until then, playing and "talking" with his favourite Auntie downstairs! He slept THE. WHOLE. NIGHT. But yeah, I realise it was a very different situation, with a bedtime that late. But it was GREAT!!! He woke at around 7am :) He was just so tired out, and needed longer naps for our whole visit just to make it up. Which was also nice :)
Anyway. He was excited when we were packing before we left, as packing is just the kind of fun thing that Arthur loves to be involved in!
But the journey there was horrible, two hours longer than it used to take us sans baby, and Arthur HATED it completely after about hour one. By the time we were halfway there, I was saying for the fifth time already, "We are never making this journey again!" Ugh. I know it's the only way to see Neil's parents and for them to see us and Arthur, and they totally can't help their situation and not being able to come to us, but the journey was just plain NOT FAIR to Arthur. He's too little for such a long journey, and our experience of it has confirmed that.
We stopped at two different Welcome Break service places on the way to give him a break, and coincided them with meals for him or time for a nappy change, etc. Here is a photo of Arthur parking the car at a Welcome Break, haha! Not really - we were eating in the car and Arthur got fidgetty so he sat on his daddy's lap in the driver's seat and LOVED "steering" the wheel and watching the people coming out of the main entrance. He would keep on shouting at them to get their attention, never realising that they couldn't hear him from inside the closed car, hehe! Anyway, here he is:
One of our stops was an hour long because he ate and got changed, and then was so desperate to walk and burn off some energy, so we let him walk through the HUGE building full of fast food places and stuff. He walked the furthest he had ever walked before (by far!), with this expression of complete fascination at all that he was seeing! He cried so much every time we had to put him back in his car seat, no matter how long we had given him for his break or how much he had walked or seen before going back to the car. Poor lovey.
The way home was worse. We hit a huge jam on the M1 due to an accident, and had to eventually pull off and find an alternative route. Which set us back some. And we ended up having to stop FIVE times for Arthur, because he was just hysterical after an hour (or sometimes less) in his car seat. Plus we needed meals twice. The journey home was nearly TEN hours. Urgh. Never again. Ever. We have basically come to the conclusion that we will have to go a different way if we go again, until he's 3 or something. But then Sprout will be Arthur's age-ish, so that won't work. Urrrgh! Oh well. We'll have to think about it. But we're not driving. No way.
Sooo back to Christmas. We felt bad that we didn't have presents for anyone, but we had pre-warned them and they were so good about it. We simply had zero money (less, actually) to buy anything, even something small. We did set ourselves a �5 budget for each other and for Arthur from us, just so that we had a little something from each other to open when we got home after Christmas. That sounds so sad! But we really didn't mind it at all, and we had no choice with the way our finances are right now. We didn't have any access to cash or credit cards to buy anything more. The only thing we felt bad about was not having gifts for family as we sat there opening theirs to us. But I guess we shouldn't feel bad, because it's not meant to be about getting people presents just because they got you one, or because it's expected of everyone at Christmas. I'm glad nobody thought of it that way and it wasn't mentioned at all. But it still felt kind of weird of us all the same.
Arthur got some toys, some of which he LOVES and the others he isn't remotely interested in! He got a sit-on/push-along car thing which he instantly loved with all his heart and spent the next few days that we were there pushing it around the house with a smile on his face :) He is NOT thrilled about sitting on it. He prefers to walk behind it and push :) He also prefers to do this with one hand, and he also walks backwards holding on to it with one hand, to move it out of a corner if he has walked it in there and got it stuck. Anyway that is definitely his favourite present from Grandma and Grandpa! It was actually a birthday present though. Here he is with it at their house:
Arthur REALLY loved opening presents! Much more so than on his birthday, though he did like it then too. He loved tearing the paper off all his presents, and he ended up helping everybody to open theirs too! Nobody minded, in fact, quite the opposite, as he was so cute in his eagerness to tear open the wrapping! He did it with so much concentration too :) Here he is opening somebody's present:
One other big milestone about the visit was that they have a cat, and so it was Arthur's first introduction to a pet of any sort, and more specifically to cats. I had no idea what to expect or how he would react. My parents have a cat too, and I knew Arthur would not see hide nor hair of him because of how scaredy and shy he is. He would just be a tabby blur disappearing into the distance the instant Arthur came into the room! But the cat at Neil's parents' place is more sociable and not the type to run away. I was kind of nervous about him getting scratched, as this cat does do that sometimes. In fact he bit and scratched me the ONE time I went to stroke him this visit. I don't like that cat. So I didn't actually want Arthur getting too near him.
Anyway, Arthur LOVED the cat!!! He was so excited the first time he saw him, and squealed and pointed and followed him around the house, etc. We had to be careful because he was so un-timid about approaching the cat and we didn't want him being rough with him and getting scratched. So his contact with the cat was mostly heavily supervised by Neil and his brother and youngest sister:
He was so excited, bless him! He loved the cat. We kept on telling him "Cat!" when the cat was around, but he still doesn't say it. He isn't that fast on his speech still, but oh well, it will come. He just made one of his "important" words (one that is very short and sharp and reserved for pointing out very important things!) into a shout and combined it with an excited pointing gesture every time he saw the cat, so I guess he was saying it in his own way :)
He slept quite well, longer naps than usual (due to the catch-up like I said) and some good nights where he only woke once, but he did have a night where he woke frequently. He was also hard to get down to sleep at bedtime a couple of nights. Reeeally hard. Both Neil and I were with him trying to get him to sleep for over an hour. Urgh. But it went well. I am so glad we put the mattress on the floor. I slept on it with Arthur, and Neil made up a bed on the floor in the only walking space in the room! I was kind of glad to be going home again, I have to say. Also I love my MIL but she always manages to get under my skin by about day 3 or 4. This time, with irritable pregnancy hormones on top of that, she was driving me crazy about some things by day 2! It's always nice to go and see them but I never fail to be glad to be going home again come the last day.
So that was Christmas. We watched way too much TV. I have a real pet-peeve about households where the TV is on ALL the time and everything takes place around it, even conversations and meals and stuff. Urgh. My mum was brought up in a household like that and we were pretty strictly brought up the opposite way as a result! She hated it and did not want us brought up with the TV on all the time. We did watch it though, she wasn't a complete TV-nazi. We had to turn it off the moment there was something else happening, like if we wanted to do something else WHILST watching TV, that was a no-no. Or chatting to someone - TV went off. We were never allowed to eat in front of the TV, and it was in the furthest room from the dining table in any case. We were a family who always ate every meal together around the table. I love that. I soooo want it for my own family, but we are not doing great at it so far. We have no dining space and a cluttered kitchen table with no room for eating at, so our meals ARE on our laps in the living room. Urgh. Neil and I watch TV often while we eat our evening meals. We like to wind-down that way after a busy day and settling Arthur down for the night - we just find it relaxing. BUT it doesn't do our relationship much good, probably. We have less time to just chat and be close and stuff if we spend our precious time watching TV. So that needs to change sometime. We are soooo getting more eating space when we next move house!
Anyway, I digress! Where was I? Oh yes, so Neil's family is one where the TV is on all the time. It. Drives. Me. Insane. NEIL has always driven me crazy with how if a TV is on, he simply can't avoid looking at it. It's like it's hypnotic for him. If I talk to him and the TV is on, he might reply whilst gazing trance-like at the TV, or he might not even reply, such was his devotion to some crappy not-worth-watching advert for home insurance or something equally crap, which then makes me feel practically enraged (these days anyway!) because he's giving an insurance ad more attention than the thing I was saying to him about Arthur or something to do with the house or a family member who phoned earlier, at one of the rare moments when we even get to catch up!!!! Gaaah! As you can see, it IS a real bug-bear for me. And Neil's family are just like it, only worse, because in their house the TV is on all the time.
Arthur got loved and he did get attention but it drove me crazy when he would try to get Grandma's attention with smiles and giggles and she would turn from the TV to say, "Hello Sunshine!" and smile at him adoringly (which is GREAT) before turning back to the darn box seconds later, leaving Arthur still trying to engage her on something (NOT so great). It was also on way too loud. Urgh. I played MIL at Upwords (and won 3 times out of 3. Smugness :) ) one evening and the other three (Neil and his brother and sister) watched a Star Wars movie INCHES away from us at deafening volume. It was so hard to get my head around words and stuff that I wanted to put down on the board. But I still won :) Heh.
Anyway so the TV drove me out of my tree. But it always does. Another reason why I am so glad to go home. But we DID have a good time with family over Christmas, and it was long overdue, seeing Neil's side of the family. We ate our turkey on Christmas Eve as it thawed early. Everybody ate turkey casserole the next day but I had seen how long that bird sat out on the counter the day before, and being somewhat (haha) freakish about food safety, etc, I ate different food on Christmas Day! It worked out fine because they ate breakfast and then said, "Oh we'll eat lunch at around 4pm" WHAT?!!! Hello?! I am pregnant and cannot possibly wait that long between meals at the moment. Unless you want me fainting and feeling pukey? I was kind of irked that they didn't think of me that way, but hey ho. So Neil and I figured I would have a light lunch at LUNCH time, and then a proper meal (not the turkey) which I would make in the evening. Neil told his mum this, but she seemed to have completely forgotten by the time the 4pm turkey casserole was served, as I had a serving too, and she did not give me a nice look when I reminded her that I had already had lunch and would not be joining them. That REALLY bothered me. Not as much as it bothered Neil though, who nearly lost it and had "words" with his mum. I love that he is so protective of me :) Anyway, it blew over. I didn't eat the turkey (from which nobody got sick), and I got to eat the three meals that I need in my "condition" on a daily basis!
Talking of which, I need to get some food. I am so bad. It's 10.30pm! I am having a Braxton Hicks contraction. And that is all. I will have to update tomorrow I think, with the next installment. I feel much happier about the visit to my parents than to Neil's (which I guess is kind of normal) so I'm looking forward to writing about it, and I have lots of photos to post too! I hope everyone had a great (belated!) Christmas!! :)
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