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2005-10-30 - 9.05pm previous entry next entry
Lots happening
Hello!
Finally a moment to sit down and actually write a proper diary entry! Arthur is napping with his daddy, but I will go and resettle him when he wakes (which seems to happen every 30 minutes still, in the day). I feel very nauseous but oh well. I need to write my diary! So much has been happening lately, and will be happening very soon. Soooo many things are on my mind as well. I wish I had been able to update more often so I could purge a bit before it all got too pent up and cluttered in there! I am not sure where to start or how to write about each thing briefly enough so that this doesn't end up a mammoth entry and I don't end up feeling dreadful as a result! But I will just start and see how I go. I can always save it and try writing some more later.
Well that didn't last very long! Arthur woke and then I felt soooo sick that I had to eat (how topsy-turvy is morning sickness?!). Now I have had baked potato and cottage cheese and milk and I feel much better. Arthur and Neil are still sleeping.
Neil had a cold which Arthur and I thankfully didn't catch! Phew! I was so sure we'd get it. Now poor Neil has some sort of food poisoning. He bought sandwiches at a garage the other day. That is something I would NEVER do, but then I am paranoid about food anyway. So, now he has had cramps and diarrhoea for 48 hours and it's not going away. I remember he had exactly the same thing in New York after eating a hotdog in Central Park. I had one too though, and I was fine. Neil had cramps and the rest for nearly a week before we finally paid a fortune for a doctor to tell him to wait it out! It went in the end, but he was a poorly thing. I think it must be the same thing, because he says it's exactly the same. Poor Neil. I think he will go to the (free!) doctor tomorrow anyway.
Neil has been offered a job! He applied for a job in a different career, using his geography qualifications (and interest!). The work is all environmental and I just know it will suit him WAY better than the direct marketing job he is in right now. Which is thoroughly dull. And depresses him completely. We talked a lot about his feelings about work over the last couple of years, and that's why we decided he should do a masters degree in something geographical, to boost his chances at an environmental job. He does the mapping and planning and computery side of geography, and finds it really stimulating.
Soooo he started a masters. He did so great in his first year and came out top of his class! He had to defer for a year when Arthur was born as it was just too much on top of work. But when he enrolled this autumn for his final year, they told him he had to pay like thousands of pounds and they previously told him (at the very beginning) that the lump he was paying them was the total amount for the entire course. So needless to say we can't remotely afford it and he has had to drop out. Last week he discovered that his lovely lecturers are so appalled by the situation that they have arranged for his first year credits to be converted into a post graduate certificate and he has been awarded a distinction, yay!! So that's good :)
So then he applied for an environmental job which would mean us relocating to Cambridgeshire. He got interviewed but didn't get the job. They said he would be better suited to a job that they just started advertising for that week, and he applied for that. The closing date was October 14th (a Friday). He got his application in that same day. On the Monday morning at 9am (!!) he got a call from the company he'd applied to, saying that they wanted him for the job and weren't even going to bother interviewing anyone else!!! Wow. It all depended on him going there and meeting the team, and they would ask each other questions and find out if he was suited to the position.
So on Thursday he went. They are going to let him know if they still want him on Monday. It looks pretty positive that they will say yes. Neil thinks maybe he isn't quite experienced enough in some of the software but otherwise things look good. We have a TON to discuss and think over, some of which we have been doing already, and it's kind of a stressy time.
The job is somewhere completely different to the previous one. I had been gearing myself up for a move to Cambridgeshire and was finally starting to feel comfortable with the idea (I am like a tree. I don't like to be moved once my roots are down!) and now we may be moving somewhere different. East Anglia, near the sea. Or is it Suffolk? I can't remember which county the town falls in. I'm not crazy about naming places where we might be living in my diary! My mum has taught me to be nervous about stuff like that! So the county name will have to do. London is different. It's so huge. A bazillion other people live in London. I am just a lil speck here!
Anyway. If Neil gets the job, he has to decide whether to take it. This means a lot of long discussions and stressy things like meeting with financial people and stuff. The job means a big pay cut, which is okay since living out there will be much cheaper than living here. But the company is undecided on whether they will offer us any help with relocating. The job isn't in a bracket where they normally offer any help. Neil said he can't accept the job without help (as we simply can't afford it otherwise) so they are looking into what tweaks they can make to their policy to help us a bit.
We seem to somehow be in financial poo at the moment. I guess we haven't been paying enough attention to our finances for a while and suddenly we are in a fair bit of debt. Ugh. We need to sell a car. We need to budget sensibly. And go over the regular outgoings. They are somehow more than we can manage but I don't know which ones we can drop. Selling up and moving somewhere cheaper will sort this out, because we'll hopefully get a lot of equity on this house that won't all be needed for the next one. I hope! So we can pay off any debts and so on, and start a good healthy savings account. We have one of those already but it has an embarrassingly small amount in it!
The job is likely to mean relocating before the end of the year. To me, that sounds absolutely CRAZY!!! How are we supposed to sell our house (and get it ready to sell, for that matter! It's a dump at the moment with rubbish in the garden and at least 15 small DIY and decorating jobs that are not finished.) and buy another one, and make the move in the next month or two?!!! Neil has to give a month's notice at his current job, but that might be all we get. I do not know how it will be physically possible to make the move in such a short time. Neil is nervous and stressy because he doesn't see how we can sell the house in such a short time, and then his job will start and what will we do then? Will he commute (it's 3 hours plus each way, not including rush hour traffic)? Will he live away for the week? I don't know how we'd bear that, any of us, so I'm pretty sure we couldn't consider that option. Will we have to move there anyway and rent while we finish selling our house? I don't think we can because we can't afford to rent and pay mortgage on this house. In fact, as soon as Neil's salary changes to the lower one, we can't afford the mortgage payments (anywhere NEAR) on this house anyway, so he can't live away or commute while Arthur and I live here anyway.
Urrrrrrrgh!! So stressy. Everything feels so up in the air. And that's not even touching on the big issues of how we FEEL about moving there, or moving away at all. I am totally not prepared in my heart or mind to move to Suffolk. I haven't had time to prepare myself. I feel so insecure and anxious about everything. I am such a stay-in-one-place person. I have only ever lived in London, right here in this little suburb, except for my first 11 months in central London, and obviously I don't remember that. How strange to think that's how Arthur will see my hometown. He won't even remember it. He will just know he was born there and lived there when he was a baby. That feels so weird somehow, since my whole life (and his, so far!) has been here.
It feels such an enormous wrench to move away from here, even though there are fewer ties keeping us here now. My parents have moved to France. My brother is still here but he's moved further into London, and my grandparents are further out in Surrey. We have our wonderful church here. I have never been to any other church. I can't imagine leaving my church family behind and starting somewhere new. I know it will be wonderful when we find a new church that is right for us, and we'll have a new church family and be amazed that we haven't always felt at home there, a few years down the line. But right now it seems such a hard move.
BUT. Just these last few months I am finding more and more that I hate the area we live in. I can't think why I didn't notice it before. Maybe God is preparing my heart for a move. He is good like that :) He prepared me in a similar way for my parents' move to France. I don't know HOW I would have coped with that emotionally without God's gentle help in preparing me.
Lately when I walk Arthur round our local area in the pushchair, I am disgusted with what I see, the WHOLE time. It isn't a nice place to raise a family at all. We have a lovely little home which I will be so sad to leave, but just last week I was walking with Arthur in the pushchair past our local parade of shops, and all the bad things about it seemed to leap out at me for some reason. I always just saw it as a row of random shops with a post office in it. This time I didn't even notice the post office. I was too busy nervously steering round the blokes with cigarettes and beer cans (mid-morning) hanging around outside the betting shop and off-license that stood side-by-side. What made me feel most sick though, was when I glanced across the road and saw (HOW could I have missed this all these years?!) a p*orn shop. Yep, that's right. The streets were smelly and absolutely choking with car fumes. Litter and dog poo on the pavements. Graffiti on the street signs. Noisy building sites everywhere I look. I am so disgusted by it. At night lately I am increasingly unimpressed with this area too. Since we lived here the one thing we could never do was open our windows at night. The traffic is too noisy and smelly. But also there are very few nights now without people drunkenly yelling swear-words at some acquaintance of theirs who is obviously about half a mile down the road, going by the volume. It wakes me even through the double glazed windows. At the weekends you can guarantee there will be smashed glass on the streets somewhere. And what is with the sirens around here?!!! They drive me crazy because they wake Arthur. Even in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, when Arthur is napping, there are nearly always 3 or 4 sirens screaming noisily past our house, just in one normal nap - about 30 minutes. That truly sucks.
And to top it all off, we're coming up to Bonfire Night here in England. It is November the 5th (Arthur's due date last year!). This means fireworks for a good two weeks either side. They started last week here. Last night we had an hour of the deep booming ones that echo for ages. Arthur woke of course. Tsk. I can't wait till it's past. I love fireworks but I hate the decibels they reach these days, and I hate how they wake my baby boy when he so desperately needs some good sleep and I so desperately need the same, or a nice restful evening.
So I know it is a GREAT thing that we are getting the chance to move away from this yucky area soon! London has become so overcrowded and noisy and polluted. I don't like living here anymore. When Neil went to meet the team at this new job last week, he said he had to stop on a main road when he reached the town, because he lost his bearings. He got out of the car to get the map out of the back. After a moment he said he suddenly realised how CLEAN the air smelt, even on a main road!! He was amazed, hehe! He stood there just taking deeeeep breaths for a while before driving off again! So that is exciting. I can't believe we have been breathing this muck in for so long here. I couldn't bear to bring my children up breathing the same. No wonder this area has the highest rate of childhood asthma in the COUNTRY!!! One in three children here have it. Soooo bad.
Okay Arthur is awake. I'll try to write more later.
Back, and it's now evening. I need to hurry up and get some more things off my chest so I can go to bed!
Arthur had me worried yesterday evening. He woke at 9.20pm crying, and when I lay next to him he wouldn't even turn towards me, which he normally does automatically to breastfeed. The breast always fixes any source of crying! But he didn't even turn to me. He lay all stiff and cried like he was in pain. We held him and he cried more. I was scared because he had such a frightened expression on and he was so stiff and unmoving. He was holding his head really funny, tipped back as far as it could go and he wouldn't move it even to turn his head to see one of us. I walked him and rocked him but he still cried so much and seemed scared :(
We tried to give him Calpol because we figured he was in pain, but he fought us giving it to him - again, odd for Arthur. He didn't have a temperature. In the end Neil said maybe he has painful wind in his tummy or something? He DID have his tea really late, like almost right before bed, which has never happened before, so perhaps he didn't get chance to get any air up from eating like he normally would. I walked him and patted him until my arms nearly came off, and eventually he burped and seemed WAY more relaxed after that. He still cried and wouldn't settle, but he relaxed his weird position and moved about more. Poor baby. I held him close to me in front of the mirror so he could see us both, and sang my favourite gentle church songs to him. They calmed me as much as him, maybe even more. I was really scared before, because I didn't know what was wrong, and something did seem soooo wrong somehow. I didn't know how to fix it for him. I hate that feeling.
Anyway we put him back to bed and he happily breastfed till he was almost asleep and then dozed off. He woke 15 minutes later crying and anxious, looking for me. As soon as he saw me, he lay himself down again and went to sleep! He has never done that before. I fully expected to nurse him but he just wanted to know that I was there. I sat with him till he slept. Then he woke at 11pm to nurse and after that he didn't wake till 5am!!!!!!! That's a SIX hour gap!! Go Arthur!! I'm so pleased! Of course it would be the night that the clocks went back so we lost an hour, tsk! So it was 4am really, but who cares, it was six hours for Arthur.
I couldn't go back to sleep after he nursed at 4/5am (whichever it was!) - another typical thing considering it was the longest he's ever slept!! I have stuff on my mind. I am feeling really upset and hurt about something at the moment, so much so that I am losing sleep over it. I can't even write about it here, darn it. Oh for a private diary! But actually that wouldn't make much difference in this case anyway. I am TRYING to put it out of my head but maybe I am just being all "pregnant" about it and blowing it out of proportion. Or maybe I am just genuinely hurt more than it seems reasonable to be hurt about this particular thing? Who knows. Anyway. It's a big thing on my mind at the moment and I couldn't even sleep yesterday afternoon when Neil took Arthur out for a short while so I could catch up a bit on sleep. I wish I could relax about things that get to me or upset me. It annoys me that I am sooo not good at that! Tonight I am going to try praying more, about the situation and the person involved. Hopefully God will make me feel better about it all.
My parents are coming over for Arthur's birthday!!!!!!!!! I am SO EXCITED!!!! :D I can't WAIT to see them. I miss them so much. I thought they would just visit for like a weekend or something (not staying with us though, they will stay with my grandparents, but at least we'd get a couple of visits from them), but I was so thrilled when Mummy told me that they are coming for almost a week!!!!!! Yippeeee!! They have to spend time with other family members too, obviously, but yay, I get to see my mummy SEVERAL times in one visit!!!! And my lovely daddy too, but Mummy is like my best friend. I miss her so much, even though we talk pretty much every day on the phone. I can't WAIT for them to see Arthur! I know they'll love him to bits and be so proud of all his changes and how gorgeous he looks! I am so proud to show him to people :)
Talking of the little man, he is walking a lot now. Not all over the place yet or anything, but he tries his steps out frequently during the day. He loves to walk from me to Neil or Neil to me, and he loves getting clapped and cheered for it! He starts the clapping himself if we aren't quick enough, and waits for us to join in! :) Today he walked 8 steps, at two different times. Pretty soon we are going to have to stop counting his steps, hehe! He also took off several times today from cruising along furniture, which he hasn't done before. And he has walked to his toys and things today, not just to one of us. He is getting so much more confident. He launches himself eagerly into walking whether he has got himself ready and balanced or not! He sometimes goes down on his bum quite hard if he didn't get his balance before starting out, but he doesn't mind that. He is also doing this thing where he walks so fast that he looks like he is running. Today he took 6 steps from me to Neil and literally ran them, bobbing up and down, bending his knees and everything! He looks so toddly and cute when he walks! I know that this walking thing officially makes him a toddler. How scary that I really have a toddler now! But I guess he has to go there if he's going to be a big brother :)
Arthur currently wants to eat everything and anything that we are eating. He is becoming so adventurous with food - which is so strange considering how he was a few months ago! I thought he would never be that into food, but here he is! He wants to try everything we have. He is not on cow's milk yet. I am not sure how best to introduce him to that in a gradual way, but we'll start after his birthday. He suddenly seems ready to tolerate really lumpy or scratchy foods. He'll readily eat dry water crackers and somehow chew them up and swallow them. He likes toast and sandwiches, and he's just as eager to eat the crusts as any other part. I'm going to try him on stage 3 baby food soon. I think he will cope just fine. The meals I make and freeze at home are lumpier and coarser than his stage 2 jarred stuff and he is fine with that.
Sooo food is going well with Arthur. I am looking forward to the foody aspects of his birthday party, as I now know he'll be right into it! I think we'll have some snack-type foods for the adults that Arthur eats. I want to make sure we have some of his favourites. The party will fall over his tea time so he'll have his meal sharing our food, and I like that. Then birthday cake, which I also know he'll love! :) He has only had cake once in his life, and that was a little tiny piece. I am going to put icing all over it but I don't want to give him a piece with icing on. He does not need to eat pure sugar! But cake, yay! It's his birthday. Birthday cake is an absolute "must" tradition in our family. I know he'll love it, but I would never force it on him just for a photo or anything. I can't believe my baby is going to be ONE!!! In just ten days!! It is going so fast.
I am going to decorate the house with balloons and fairy lights. I discovered that he likes balloons recently, or at least, they interest him. And they're partyish so I'll get some! Fairy lights are a particular favourite of Arthur's. We discovered that when he was only weeks old, as we still had some pretty coloured fairy lights up around the big mirror from my homebirth (I wanted pretty soothing things to distract me!). He totally loved them, and I remember for MONTHS they seemed to be the only thing that would calm him when he cried. So we'll have lots of fairy lights. I know he'll love those!! I feel quite excited! I've never been the mother of a birthday boy before!!
I have to send invitations! I wanted to make them but I don't think that is realistic, so I'll probably buy them if I can find some nice ones.
Anyway.
Arthur's hair is getting so long! It hangs over his ears an inch at least and I'm constantly tucking it back behind them! He has worn his hair a little thin on one side at the back (not sure how!) but the other side is getting really long. I don't want him to have his first haircut till after he is one. It feels toooo soon otherwise! But I don't want him sporting a mullet, hehe! So he will get a little trim soon :) On top it is still curly and won't lie flat, so I don't think it needs any taking off there. I love his hair. It always smells so good, and it is so soft and fine. I love the colour, actually it is very like mine. I think he will have very dark hair when he is grown up though, because he has quite dark hair for a baby really. Mine was very light brown when I was a toddler, and almost blondish in the summer. Arthur's hair is more like my brother's colour when he was a baby, and I don't know anyone whose hair is darker than my brother's, so I think Arthur will be very dark when he's older. I love that because he has lovely brown eyes! He still has some grey in his eyes but maybe more brown now than grey. Neil has blue eyes and I have mixed - mainly grey with a small hazel ring right around the pupil. The only person in the family who could have given Arthur his eye colour is my mummy, who has very brown eyes. I LOVE that :) He has my mummy's eyes. Not even mine. Mummy's :)
I have some photos of Arthur feeding himself his yoghurt, which he much prefers to do these days! But I haven't resized them yet so I'll do that next entry. He is very good with a spoon. He always gets it right in his mouth and gets most of the yoghurt off it. Then he turns it upside down to get the last little bit out of the deepest part of the spoon with his tongue! Then he hands it back to me to "reload"!!
Oh I keep forgetting to say, Arthur is really into putting things IN to things now. He only took things out for the longest time, but now he is really keen to stack cups inside each other. He is pretty accurate now, but he got very frustrated at first, bless him! He is so cute at tidying away too. He loves to help me tidy away! Sometimes he spontaneously starts doing it by himself too. I find a dozen bricks in his toy basket (they live in the brick bucket) where he has carefully put them over the edge, one by one. Or the remote control in the stationery drawer! Or a letter that arrived through the door that morning carefully posted into the very centre of the wires with beads on, on his activity cube! He can now reach everything in the kitchen, urgh! He can get his little fingertips over the edges of the surfaces, and open all the drawers and cupboards. And the freezer door. He LOVES the freezer!
I am teaching him hot and cold. He makes the cutest little sound when he touches something that is unexpectedly hot (not burning though) or cold. He is always eager and excited, but the moment he touches it he snatches his hand back and his face gets a sort of concerned expression with his head tipped to one side, and he looks at me and says, "Ohhh!" in such a sweet, slightly doubtful tone, one that seems to lovingly warn ME that it's hot or cold! I tell him "Hot!" and he says, "Hoe!" He doesn't say anything for cold (like the freezer) but seems eager to touch it again right away! Funny boy!
He has taken an age to tell us where his nose, etc. is when we ask. I don't think he has understood the question, "Where is your....?" until recently. Anyway now he points to nose and ear and stuff, but only on me :) He is much clearer about objects. Maybe I have been more consistent with those things and not given him much practise with the body parts? Probably. If I ask him where are his bricks, he goes right over and picks one up, holding it out to me and saying, "Aht!" He does the same with books, and I'm pretty sure he knows "cups" (his stacking cups) now too. He knows where "music" is when I ask if he wants to hear some. He will look at the hi-fi straight away even if he is busy doing something else with his back to it. He also now understands the sign for music, which I have been doing with him for a couple of weeks. He smiles BIG when I do it :)
He still loves his music. He sings and dances to it now, bouncing and making little wailey sing-song sounds. It is seriously the cutest thing ever. I love my boy!
Okay I have managed to write a lot which is a relief! I am beginning to try and catch up on other diaries now, where I can. So far I have a TON to read because so many diaries have been updated since I read them last, and most people have written eleventy entries since then too! So far I am getting a lovely blur of beautiful baby photos, and the odd MOVIE (how exciting!), and feeling very excited to be catching up on people's news. I will try to leave some comments soon, as I catch up! Thanks for the notes and messages here while I have been sort of absent. They are lovely to read when I get chance to come back :)
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