Thoughts?!

Ok, Blogger still won't let me post comments on my own blog...any idea why?!

So, quickly, Polly - :) that's what I meant, I was just sorry I made you angry at all!
MM and Kezzie - thank you :) I'm a lot less hormonal the last few days and thus a lot less all over the shop!!

Pity Party

Lately I have been feeling a little sorry for myself.

I am getting to the point of counting as VERY LARGE with Martian. Husbink is revising so hard for his upcoming exams alongside working long hours at a hospital over an hour away that the only help he can give me is about an hour to lie in on a Sunday morning and doing bathtime with Diddy G on the evenings he happens to be home in time (currently not very many.) Diddy G is absolutely amazing, extremely fun and increasingly funny too. But. He's very hard work, I feel like i'm letting him down a lot of the time when I simply don't have the energy for a bit of Quality Parenting and if we have all day together without any respite, I often lose it with him around bedtime and have no patience with the tantrums that are after all part of being a toddler. We make up very fast usually but I still feel completely hideous for shouting at him when he won't brush his teeth/lie down for his nappy/stay still/come here.......

So I've been feeling a bit...exhausted...by all that. And then a few weeks back there was a teeny tiny straw that broke the camel's back of any sense of perspective that I might have had left. A very good friend said something along the lines of "Ooh, Husbink's home for the weekend isn't he? Hope you have some lovely family time and do lots of nice things." I saw Husbink for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I saw Husbink as I made my way up the stairs to bed and he made his way down the stairs to unwind after finally finishing revising. I saw Husbink plenty while I failed to sleep overnight and he slept deeply (and noisily...). That's it. That's our weekend of lovely family time.

So I've been having this lengthy pity party and getting cross with everyone who just doesn't get it. I have the odd moment of clarity and realise that i'm sure there is plenty I don't get about other people's situations and I can't assume that all is easy with them. The clarity doesn't make me feel particularly less sorry for myself but at least less grumpy with everyone else!

It all means that we're into mega countdown time. To the exam. The the due date. To the date Martian actually arrives (a little tricky to count down to!). To the date we find out the exam result... Not a way I like to live but sometimes it just happens. I'll get back to "the moment" soon enough I hope!

Riiiiiiiight....

So apparently when signed in as myself, I do not have the right to add comments to my own blog at the moment. Ok blogger...

So thank you Polly and Kezzie for your kind comments. Polly, I'm sorry I made you angry! I did have a bit of a meltdown after writing it but seem to have recovered for now!

Let's see if Blogger let's me publish a post now...!

Long Lost Friendship

(Sorry for the absence, won't bore you with the whys...)

When I was 16 I briefly went out with a boy. Let's call him Dougal. Prior to our little interlude of dating, Dougal and I had been very good friends. We hadn't always been. For a long while, I tolerated him. But ultimately we were very good, possibly even best, friends. Then we dated. Oops.

It ended extraordinarily badly. I'm still, in some ways, not over it. I don't mean I'm not over him, that went very quickly, but what he said and what came out in the break up was the most hurtful stuff that has ever been said to me. It wasn't what he thought of me, it was what other members of his family thought of me. Unfortunately, they continued to be relevant to my life being people from my parents' church. Scrap that, if i'm going to get anything off my chest, I might as well do it properly. His dad was the vicar. He said (allegedly) awful things about me. He also said that they were common opinion in the church meaning that all kinds of people that I trusted (youth group leaders and the like) also thought these things of me. (I've since come to realise that that part at least was not true.) The night when all this came out was actually a couple of weeks before we split up and I still remember that night so clearly. I was staying at a friend's house. I didn't sleep all night I was so upset. Just waiting for it to be a decent enough time to phone my mum and tell her. It was horrible. Anyway, a few weeks down the line, Dougal split up with me saying that he'd never been really sure anyway but he thought that it would make his dad happy if he had a girlfriend. Having found out what his dad thought of me, that logic crumbled rather.

We continued to be "friends" because...well, I'm too polite sometimes. And we had friends in common. And he was at boarding school most of the time so I didn't have to see him much. We kept in touch most of the way through uni but then, thankfully, we didn't. His dad had left my parent's church by then and although I spent years being terrified of bumping into him (the dad) somewhere, it all slowly died away. I did see the dad once, about seven years ago now I would guess. It was therapeutic. He was out right rude to me. I felt that was a whole heap more honest than all the years he'd spent saying "how nice it was to see me" whenever I went to my parents church (you'll be surprised to hear I left and found my own "home".) This isn't meant to be about the dad though. (I'm still working on forgiving him actually, I keep thinking I've managed it and then I realise the huge upset that builds up whenever I think about it all...and relax...) This is about Dougal.

So, we lost touch. But then, of course, Facebook happened, didn't it? And perhaps about three years ago, Dougal befriended me on Facebook. I ummed. I ahhed. It was weird timing, he did it within days of my only other significant ex also befriending me on Facebook. I don't like refusing people on Facebook. (I've done it twice - once with a guy I really truly can't stand and once with a girl we knew in NZ who made Husbink's life very difficult by trying to blur his professional and private lives too much (she spent a lot of time in A&E with psychiatric issues...).) So after a bit of ignoring, I accepted Dougal as a friend.

We didn't "catch up", we just started to appear on each other's news feeds. After a while he "liked" a few things and then started to comment. A while longer and I "liked" things back and made the odd comment. That's all the communication there has been but it has made me really rather sad for friendships lost. Because the kind of bitesize bits you get about people's lives on Facebook, well, I still "get" pretty much all of his. We still like the same things, we still make the same references to films that we loved as teenagers. There are certain status updates that I know he'll be the first to comment on because I know he'll understand. If only we'd never dated we might still be friends. Yes, there is still the potential that the "stuff" would've happened but it might not have been such a big deal given a different context. Sometimes I wonder about emailing him about it, asking whether it was really all true and so on. But I think it better to let sleeping dogs lie. And I think it better to just remember the friendship. It's never coming back now. But perhaps a good thing from Facebook is that I at least don't think badly of Dougal anymore.

Sorry...

Apologies for the absence. As Kezzie requested more baby sick stories...well, no, actually, there wasn't any sick, just a lot of not well. :(
First there was me with a pretty horrid flu-cold. Then as I was almost better, Diddy G got it. I was glad I had had it because I was a lot more understanding of his need to sit up for two to three hours every night coughing his lungs up because I knew exactly how it felt. Then just as we were both almost better, Husbink got it, though for once less bad than us. We've been mostly well for a couple of weeks now but all still coughing, not funny.
Then we swapped ill health for nightmares. Actually, again, all round, which is a little random. A nightmare from Diddy G is utterly heartbreaking because it is very hard to explain that it is all going to be ok. He understands a lot (scarily a lot) of what we say but not enough for that just yet. My nightmares were largely of the thriller blockbuster variety so not sooooo scary but very tiring. Husbink's...well, Husbink's are just of the "under an immense amount of pressure at the moment, have to leak somewhere" variety.
So it hasn't been the most fun five weeks or so since I was last here but on the plus side...
Our playroom is finished and Diddy G can now make a huge mess and we can shut the door on it at the end of the day. We are hugely blessed to have had the opportunity to do this and all together, it came in at only about £50 over the budget for just the building part so it went fantastically well.
Despite all the illness and general pregnancy exhaustion, I have started nesting which has largely taken the form of a lot of baking so far so our house has been a pretty fun place to be in amongst all the germs. Diddy G has assisted with some of the baking which is hugely fun and almost makes me cry it is so brilliant. Gush, gush! You can get toddler tower things for the kitchen which I'm on the look out for so that I don't have to hold Diddy G every time he wants to see what is happening on the stove or sit on the floor to beat cake mixture so he can join in.
We are going away to Husbink's parents for a few days next week so that Husbink can do huge amounts of revision and not have to worry about me being exhausted because someone else will be doing large chunks of the Diddy care. Which may mean I get more time to do things like this, we'll see! :)

My Millenium Falcon

When my brother was seven, all he wanted for his birthday was a toy Millenium Falcon (it's a spaceship. From Star Wars. Just in case...) My parents felt it was a very extravagant present for a small boy and said no. How they lived to regret it. Finally, when my brother was twenty-one and the Star Wars trilogy was once again in cinemas in its digitally remastered, "improved" form, Millenium Falcons were once again in the shops and my brother was bought one. It was too late. Not until his thirtieth birthday (or there abouts) when he got  the Lego Death Star did you feel that the hurts of the past were finally being forgotten. (If not entirely forgiven. We'll not mention the drum kit.)

So, over the past few years, I have come to realise I have my own Millenium Falcon. When I was about fourteen, I wanted a new pair of Doc Martens. I'd inherited (I can't quite remember who from) a pair of black eight-holes but they were really starting to hurt they were falling to pieces so much (inheriting them probably means they were in my size too). I desperately wanted to replace them with a pair of eight- or ten-hole cherry reds. Desperately. However. Two things happened that stopped this. Both were my mother. First, there was a market stall that sold DMs at about 25% off full price. My mum very much wanted to get my boots from there as she thought full price DMs were a rip off and didn't believe that I would wear them for long before the fashion changed. (She was very wrong on that.) The second thing that happened was my mum not imagining me wearing my DMs but imagining her wearing them. Or something like that. And she felt that cherry reds were too statement, too out there. (Considering I ended up with a pair of gold boots from Camden a few years later...) I'd never wear them. And so, these factors combined and I was persuaded into a pair of not-quite-navy ten-holes. They were good boots. I wore them for years. I only ditched them a few years ago when I really couldn't ignore the fact that they were now very painful to wear (the soles were pretty much gone, amongst other more minor issues.)
My parents have gotten away with this (unlike the Millenium Falcon) as I don't think I've ever mentioned to them that I still think about the beautiful cherry-reds I could have had but poor Husbink hears about it on a pretty regular basis (though hasn't taken the hint I might add!). However, I've just had a birthday and been given quite a bit of money that I don't have any other particular use for. And I was just having a little browse...mmmmm!

Circular Life

I was writing a post in my head while washing up and giving Diddy-G his milk. The more I wrote, the more familiar it seemed. And I realised that I'd written a very similar post about a year ago on the previous blog. Sigh. So here's something else circular I've noticed.

The last week or so has been a bit challenging one way and another. I've had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about super-mummies and a bit of a general grump on about "life". It's reminded me quite a bit of how I felt as a student. Life is good, life is doing what I want it to do at the moment in that I am very happy to be at home with Diddy, to have made the decision not to return to work at all (for now) and to be expecting Martian (by the way, I don't think I've said, but we found out last week, that should be "Martian-ette"!). However. I feel a little "ghetto-ised". I spend all my time with mums with children approximately the same age. We sometimes talk about "outside" things but mostly we talk about sleep, eating, illnesses, new skills, new words...(I try to avoid these last two as much as possible, they are not good for the sanity.) It's all good, I have lovely friends, but it is all the same. I love going to church on Sundays because I see other kinds of people. Older people. Younger people. Single people. And that's how I felt as a student. You spend all your time with the same kind of people. There are differences, arts versus sciences, caring versus not caring (about the study) and of course different types of personality but all approximately the same age and all doing approximately the same thing and sometimes I just had to get out.

So I'm wondering what to do now about "getting out". I know part of the reason I'm "in" is that other people, not in the same boat, find those of us in this boat pretty much insufferable. "Do you know what little darling did today? That's right, he managed to eat half his yogurt himself - that's only half that he spread over me, over his clothes, over the table, over the floor and even a little on the walls! What an improvement! How clever he is!" But there must be something that I can manage in this increasingly fat, soon to be comatose all over again while coming to terms with night feeds, zero hours sleep, blah blah blah, that in some small way doesn't entirely revolve around my child(ren)?! I have a few thoughts. I'll let you know if anything interesting happens.

(Oh and by the way, you've had a narrow escape - having realised the post I was thinking of writing was darn similar to an old one, you've escaped some minor detours into the land of wees and poos!)

Quality Parenting

I try to do something "quality" with Diddy-G every day. If we are out and about at a group, that often does the job, especially if it is a middle-class-ish-educate-your-tiny-child-class (more of that some other time I'm sure) but even if it is just running around with friends, I think that is pretty quality in terms of what is good for Diddy-G just now. Other days if we are home alone it will be things like playing with musical instruments together or doing something in the garden or some colouring or a big sit down with books or or or...

Today's act of quality parenting involved a jug, a mixing bowl, Diddy-G's stacking cups (with holes in the bottom...) and a lot of water. It was brilliant fun. Diddy-G kept looking up and beaming at me as he worked out a new thing he could do with the cups or the jug or the bowl. He spent a long time trying to pick up water between his fingers and transfer it from one place to another (fascinating to watch all the methods he built in to try to make this possible.) Of course, it was also extraordinarily messy. Diddy-G was soon utterly soaked. Really, totally soaked. The kitchen floor was not dry either. Somehow I'd arranged myself to only just marginally wet, less wet than an bathtimes, not quite sure how that was achieved. On realising just how totally soaked Diddy-G was (and regretting that I hadn't considered a swim nappy necessary for this activity) I began to wonder what really makes for quality parenting. On the one hand, Diddy-G had learnt a lot and done a lot and had a good time. On the other hand, he was wet and cold and his nappy was disintegrating. (It was interesting to see just how willing he was to get changed after this activity when normally suggesting a change of clothes is met with protests at the moment.)

I think this does come down on the quality side - we were at home and he was soon changed and warm again - but it did make me wonder if there is going to come a time when I actually have to behave a bit more responsibly around my children and not always go for the most fun option. Hmm!

Politics

I'm not desperately political. I think at least in part because there isn't a party that I feel I would really like to align myself too. I'm often very opinionated but I have learnt that my opinions are rarely black and white these days and that they do often genuinely shift with time. Thus I don't feel like shouting about them quite as much as I used to.

Here are my questions for the day, following yesterday's elections and various bits of TV, radio and web comment from the last twelve hours or so...

What do people think would be gained from ousting Nick Clegg? And who would want to take over from him anyway? Is he really the bogie monster?

Is it actually feasible for Scotland to be an independent nation? (Don't read an opinion into that, I'm genuinely curious because my understanding would be that their economy couldn't do it but I'm sure those in the know know more than me!)

What's a brain?

Last night, Husbink wanted to practice the lecture he was due to give this morning on me. I wasn't really in the on zone for a lecture Advanced Life Support and specifically Acute Coronary Syndromes but what can you do?

Turns out, it was really interesting. Really, really interesting. More interesting than it should have been. I've picked up a reasonable amount over the last few years in terms of terminology and so on partly just from hearing about Husbink's day and partly from helping him revise. (There was a point when he thought I had as good a chance as him of passing one particular MCQ exam. This was not true.) I could follow most of the lecture fairly well and by the time I was hearing it for the second time through, actually had some (vaguely) intelligent questions to ask. (ECGs really don't make sense to me though on the amount I know about them currently.)

It was nice to be taught something. I had forgotten a bit that when people witter on about learning styles and how classrooms/lecture theatres need to develop new techniques etc etc etc the reason I think of it as "wittering" is because actually, being lectured to really suits me. So I can probably still tell you most of what Husbink said even though a reasonable bit of it (those pesky ECGs and something called ST or non-ST elevation were the bits that really foxed me) made no real sense at all.

It also slightly alarmed me that I actually found the content really interesting. Not in just a passing "ooh right" sort of way but in a really, really interesting sort of way. I refuse to allow this to be the start of the slippery slope to Husbink being right. (That would be being right when he tries to persuade me to follow in his footsteps career-wise.)

Nice to have a brain though, if only briefly.

The things you pass on

What?! Day two, post two?! Shocking! Don't expect it to last!

Anyway. :)

Those of you who have met Diddy-G will know that he is a mini-Husbink, not a mini-me. There are times when he looks like my brother or my uncle or my cousin but only the briefest of moments when he looks anything much at all like me. Which is not a problem - though I do find it interesting when people make comments like "my goodness, I didn't realise til I met Husbink...he's the spitting image! ... Of course, Diddy-G looks like you too!" No, he doesn't.

But I have passed on other things to my son...

This weekend has been a bit tough. It's been about ten days since it's been just me and Diddy-G all day long but that's what we had on Friday. Husbink is on long days so leaves the house just before 7am and gets home sometime around 9pm. He doesn't see Diddy-G at all (except sneaking in for a bedtime kiss) and they both hate it. The only adult I spoke to on Friday was the check out lady at Tesco early in the morning. Add to that Diddy-G deciding not to really bother with a nap and we had on our hands the perfect recipe for an awful afternoon. However. The trait I'm currently aware of having passed on to my son is the desire to make people laugh. For him at the moment, it is really just a desire to make me laugh (since for a little longer at least, I really am the centre of his universe). So as the afternoon wore on, he started to be the clown. Rushing about, jumping out at me, squashing his face on the patio doors while I was the other side of them. And mimicking me. Particularly when it came to sitting down pregnant-stylee (collapse, sigh, rub whichever bit aches now, close eyes...). So then I would ham up my own sitting to make him laugh and he'd ham up his imitation...and so it went on. Instead of reaching bedtime utterly desperate to be rid of the monster, we just had a nice relaxed time with more giggles. I can't say I wasn't glad when he was in bed so I could put my feet up and sigh dramatically in peace but still, I'm glad he's caught this one off me. It makes him a whole heap of fun to be around. Sometimes!

Time To Start Again

Once upon a time, I was known as AdventuringJen. I lived on a different continent and did things like camping and cycling and an awful lot of wine tasting...

Then we moved back to the UK and I was adament that life could still be an adventure so I kept the blog going but it rang less and less each time I tried to post.

Now I have a really rather spectacular 17-month-old (let's call him Diddy-G) and an 18-week bun in the oven (Martian for now. To be replaced!). Life is certainly an adventure but a very different one to that which I used to post about. Adventures now involve new words, new experiences, new abilities...Mine and his. But they sometimes come around really, really slowly. Sometimes everything is exactly the same hour after hour, day after day...it often feels like month after month but that is rarely actually the case.

And so, having overcome the strange worries of disloyalty and fickleness that were keeping me tied to the old blog, here I am. No idea what I'll be writing about (but promise as much as possible to keep the wee/poo/snot/vomit stories away) but I have this general desire to start thinking in longer sentences again - I used to think in novels when I was younger, then it became blog posts, now I'm down to facebook statuses and I'd rather not be. Perhaps I'll make it back up to novels by the time Diddy-G leaves school. Only time will tell...