5 lines

Hello to everyone taking part in 'Blog Every Day in May'.


My life summed up:

wife to Mark, mummy to Albert

caring, bright, sensitive, neurotic, fun, logical, enthusiastic, anxious

camping, tapas, swimming, gardening, skiing, photography, reading

white wine, cider, Cuba Libre, breakfast tea, peppermint tea, cappucino, pomegranate juice

Dan in Real Life, Into the Wild, Away we Go, Moonrise Kingdom, Moulin Rouge, Little Miss Sunshine

Thoughts at 4 months

Well it's fair to say life has been a bit hectic! I went back to work a few weeks ago and last week we moved to Salisbury. Life is pretty good, we have a huge house that we won't grow out of unless we have three more children which I don't think will happen any time soon, I'm still struggling to come to terms with PPH and one day I will get around to getting all the questions I have about that answered!!  

I'm literally giddy right now though I could be high on life because of that yellow ball in the blue sky that we haven't seen since before Albert was born!

We've settled into a nice three storey house and my new office is at the top.  Mark spends the day with Albie and given the amount of trips up and down the stairs I make for cuddles a cup of tea I'd say we have a very lucky boy who sees so much of his parents.  

Dislikes at 4 months

Tummy time.  We're getting there, I don't think practice has made perfect because Albie has not had much time on his tummy as he's been sick with a bug.  He has however mastered pushing up and can get himself onto his knees so I guess his body has just got stronger.

Sore gums. We are in the throws of teething (?) with high pitched screams, constant saliva rashes, soaked bibs and chewing everything. As a first time Mum I'm not sure if this is teething, this could be just life for a baby, it could be yet another growth spurt!

Likes at 4 months

Mummy and Daddy. Mark and I are hilarious!! Or at least we are to Albie. Today I had a visit to my office and as soon as Albie took one look at me he laughed his head off. He had me checking my face to see if I had anything funny on there, I hadn't said anything! 

Standing up.  If Albie is whinging we just stand him up, works every time.  As soon as those legs are straight we have smiles all around.

Thoughts at 3 months

3 months! If I've got it right, Albie is no longer a newborn. It's so obvious we have a baby on our hands now. I go upstairs and I can hear baby sounds whether it's cooing, whinging, laughing, or chatting. We do have a chatterbox on our hands so you always hear something and it's definitely not the sweet sound of napping we rarely get that in the daytime! At the moment we're not getting much feeding either we have a little pickle who doesn't know what he wants.

Albie is great fun though and a real heartbreaker with his smiles and giggles.

I'm going back to work in two weeks and while I was excited about it previously, I am now dreading it. It makes sense though. I went to uni, got into a silly amount of debt because of it and need to reduce the debt by working. In my head it feels wrong to have all that ambition as a youngster and spend all that money on education and then have a baby and struggle with all that debt with statutory maternity pay. My heart feels different though. I want to spend every day making my little baby smile even on the bad days when I can't get him to nap or drink milk and he whinges at me all day.  Oh if I could have a word with my 18 year old self and say "don't do it!! Get a job now!" All this dread means I'm not making the most of my time off and I'm sulking on the sofa a lot of the time.  I'm sure once I get back into the swing of things at work I'll have more precious moments with Albie and we will make the most of our time together. We have to.

Albie has definitey changed physically, he is holding his head up really well now. He really isn't a fan of tummy time and because of his flat head it's been suggested he sits in a "bumbo" - Albie is not a fan of that either. What Albie lacks in all those physical things, he makes up for with plenty of interaction so reading books and putting lots of colourful objects in front of him is a winner. 

Wandering with baby #2

Ah London. Since we're moving soon it's going to be much further away from us so one Sunday morning at silly o'clock recently we got on the train and were at Southbank in time for breakfast.

Albie was interactive for most of the day but seemed to sleep when we saw some of the sights like London Eye and Battersea power station later on in the day.

We made the most of quiet trains and took the tube to Brixton village for a walk around and a cup of tea.

I love venturing around London with Mark. We never make plans just plod about.  After Brixton we took the tube back into central London.  When we got to Pimlico I looked at the map and saw it was positioned by the river so we took a gamble (since the underground map isn't exactly the most accurate) and got off there hoping to walk down the river.  

After walking for some time along the river I got pretty tired and so we jumped on a bus to Leicester Square where we got some lunch in a bar where Albie lounged out on the chair next to me and giggled away.  He didn't sleep much at all and decided to catch up on it 48 hours later having a 12 hour sleep! Not seen that again so put it down to his exhausting day in London - shame really :)

Happy world book day!

Ahh this takes me back! I remember getting vouchers at school for a discount at a book store and I would enjoy perusing the shelves wondering what book I would spend the rest of the night reading (and then waiting for my parents to go to bed before switching the lamp back on and sneaking in some more time to carry on reading -  rebel I know!).

I was such a book worm as a child I loved getting back from school, hopping on my bike with my backpack and begging the local library to let me take more than the allocated eight books (eight?!) home.  I don't read super intelligent books, reading for me is an escape from the everyday worries I don't need fancy literature. I'd like to push myself though and read better books but for now I'm getting ridiculously excited to read old childhood favourites to my little man.  In fact half of me is desperate for him to get involved at story time rather than stare at the pictures as if to say "this is not a bottle mummy" but the other half doesn't want him to grow too fast, it's gone too fast already!

Wandering with baby #1

I thought I'd post a regular series of what I get up to with Albie. The weather when we got out was so dull so I thought I'd give these photos a moody black and white edit using the afterglow app it's amazing and so much quicker than VSCO CAM.  

I decided to wear the wrap so that Albie's arms could come out and he was much happier. I'm still having to hold onto his head, I can't wait until he can hold it up himself it should all be a lot easier then.

Next time I have some pictures from our recent jolly to London.  We took our more sturdy carrier out with us at the weekend and we survived!

  

Thoughts at 2 months

Blimey where has the time gone!? Our baby isn't such a baby anymore. When I said how big he is to someone the other day there was a hint that we might be over feeding him as he does guzzle a lot before bed time. However, he guzzles so much so that he sleeps for longer and in that we are blessed! He is also thin and long in fact I took out the tape measure last week and he is measuring well over the 100th percentile. I'm not sure if I'm measuring Albie wrong or whether we have a giant on our hands!

With all the growing we are saying goodbye to some very recent purchases: size 0-3 month clothes, the inner lining for the car seat, his moses basket and cloth nappies size tiny and small. I say goodbye, it's going in the loft for "next time" ha!! I'm disappointed most with putting away the cloth nappies because we bought a starter pack from gnappies and loads of cloth inserts and never used them! It was really hard at first and we agreed to use them when he's older so that we can adjust to being parents first before adjusting to extra things like the cloth nappy system! The problem is the size small nappies are too small after 13lbs and Albie was measuring 13lb 7 a couple of weeks ago...too late!! I'm not sure whether to put the nappies away and buy some medium sized nappies so that we use the cloth inserts or just sell the lot and be done with it. If anyone wants to make me an offer for a whole load of tiny gpants, small ones and some cloth inserts please do!

The cot issue has been tormenting me the last couple of weeks. Albie has been having problems getting to sleep at night and we tried everything even Ewan the sheep couldn't help us! The only solution was picking up the moses basket and rocking him to sleep. With Albie growing so much I knew we had to stop the rocking, put the moses basket in his cot and get him used to the new home.  When you're so sleep deprived though and knowing that rocking the basket would help you get some much needed sleep we kept giving in. Likewise, practising putting Albie down in the day in his cot just wouldn't work his hands would dash out and he wouldn't have his usual security and so the waterworks began. This weekend we just had to do it, I saw Albie sleeping with his neck bent and knew we had to transfer him asap. It had a shaky start but we're almost there. We can't quite leave him to fall asleep on his own at night he needs to fall asleep on us but in the day he's able to coo and tire himself out for a nap and for that I'm a very happy mummy!

There is something else that gets me down a bit and that is the babywearing journey I so want to be on. I love going for walks and really want to be able to wear Albie to do this but I'm really struggling.  I found the carrier that a friend gave us quite hard on the back and so I thought a wrap would be better but Albie is again so long his head pops out and since he can't support it yet I have to walk holding it, not the hands free experience I wanted!

While I love blogging and looking through old blog posts I really want to look through photo albums of Albie so I printed a heap of photos at the weekend and made keepsakes for Albie's grandparents.  We visited Mark's parents too and they were overjoyed to have photos. I guess you can digitalise everything but it's still nice to hold a photo rather than look on an email or on facebook.  It's why I love and really need to get back to taking photos with film cameras it's far more romantic.

I bought a stash of clothes for next to nothing second hand recently and there was a really cute t-shirt that made me smile. I realised I had been to most of the places illustrated and visited them in a different way to how we will visit places from now on. Mark and I tend to sit in coffee shops and bars to watch the world go by and try new food or just walk miles seeing what we come across. We're not big on sight seeing and while I'm not saying we will suddenly take Albie to see big sights when we go to new places with him I love the little captions on each landmark that suggest we will be putting a child like slant on everything from now on.  Speaking of travelling, I have a big obsession with buying new york maps and have a few in our house that we couldn't resist buying one for Albie's room.  I hope we can return and see New York through the eyes of a child one day.

In between evil growth spurts our days are filled with smiles and laughter. Well, I say laughter more like smiles with a funny cough behind them they certainly make us laugh loads and he just carries on it's brilliant! I didn't think we would be entertained this early on, I'm so glad we are though there is only so much feeding and sleeping I could handle I was desperate to interact with the little one.

Subject to change

We're moving again....!! Because we have to though and to be honest Albie has outgrown our house already his stuff is everywhere we can barely move.  The landlord wants to sell the house and so we have to go the question is where do we go?

First we came up with Manchester.  We fell in love with the place when we moved away from there, we didn't realise how good we had it until we were gone. My Mum's home and it's where her family is apart from three things, her children and her grandchild. It's just too far for us to return to for now.

So what about Dorset/Devon we love it so. Mark and I love to go there for holidays and of course visiting my parents couldn't be easier. We had visions of us strolling to the beach with Albie, teaching him to swim in the sea and having BBQs (or breakfast!). It was so romantic and the house prices are amazing you get a lot of house for each £ but there's a reason for that...there are no jobs it would be too risky.  The other thing that put us off would be the insane traffic in the summer.

And so we have settled on going back to Wiltshire, Salisbury in particular. It's a place that holds lots of memories for Mark and I as children. Mark says every time we've driven past the hospital it's the place where he was born and nearly died (minutes to live when his appendix exploded, thought he had food poisoning and didn't want to bother the doctors stubborn bugger he is!!).  I lived in Salisbury twice I think, it's hard to keep up I was very small and we travelled a lot while my Dad was in the army. Eventually we moved to Trowbridge but Salisbury was somewhere my Mum and I visited on the train a lot so I have very recent memories and the place suits us well.  It's big enough to have lots to do but since it's Wiltshire there will be plenty of countryside to run around with Albie and the New Forest is a stones throw away.  The best part it's in the middle of all of Albie's grandparents so win win!

We just need a house to live in now and 3 beds are pretty scarce so fingers crossed the right one will come along soon.  At the weekend we took a look around Salisbury and we got so excited that Albie will have memories of the place just like his parents.