Sew Happy

I love sewing. The process of cutting up bits of fabric and putting them back together seems completely insane to some (aka, my husband) but I really can’t think of anything I would rather do with my spare time. I love fabric, I love trying out new techniques and colour combinations, most of all I love the sense of accomplishment when I finish something. Being a mother is such a thankless task, there’s no end point where you can sit back and say that you did okay, sewing gives me that feeling I crave of a job well done.

Of course, if housework gave me that feeling I would probably be richer and my house would be far cleaner, but that’s an ongoing task as well, which is why I avoid it to the best of my ability.

My Kid Is “That Kid”

I’m sure you know the one.

Declan was the toddler who would put a bucket on his head and spend half an hour running into walls at high speeds… just to see what would happen.

I’m “that mother”.

The one that let her child run into the wall repeatedly, probably bashing out any last bit of sense he had remaining. He’ll either get bored or knock himself out, right? But either of those options were far better than telling him that it isn’t wise to attempt to crack your skull open, even the mere suggestion of another activity will resort in a meltdown of Chernobyl size proportions.

When people ask me about Connor I tell them about his sweet nature, his awesome non-verbal communication skills and how much he loves to be cuddled.

When they ask about Declan, I generally use the phrase “He came out screaming, and hasn’t stopped since”.

Declan was a handful from day one, he was demanding, he was argumentative and he was possibly the most stubborn newborn you could ever imagine, he was able to argue with me before he could even support the weight of his own head.

Health wise he’s kept us on our toes, he was sick with severe reflux in his first year, started having febrile convulsions eleven months ago. Then on top of that we have all of his little “issues”, he can’t cope with day to day changes, his curiosity in how things work causes him to be incredibly destructive, he generally can’t focus on things for more than a few minutes and his independent streak leads to him getting in trouble far more than he should.

We plan every day around how Declan will react to what’s happening. I don’t generally allow anyone else to look after him, just because I know how much work it is, I don’t want them to have to experience that. It’s reached the point where I dread picking him up from a day at preschool. Once or twice a month we’ll hear how good he’s been, once or twice a week we’ll hear how feral he’s been, the rest of the time the report is “he’s been Declan”.

That’s sometimes the only way to put it. He’s been Declan.

At the beginning of February we started having fortnightly visits to a child psychologist, with the thoughts of diagnosing him (if there is anything to diagnose other than Feral Child Syndrome) and to teach Dan and I some coping techniques to make our life easier. I think I expected a magical cure. It’s not that I wanted to stop him being Declan, I just wanted our day to day life to go smoother, for my interactions with him not to be so constantly negative, and to understand how to parent him in the way he needs, to understand why he is how he is.

I just feel like we sit around and talk. I know that’s part of the diagnostic process, but I’m so frustrated with being “that mum” with “that child”, I’m fed up on the constant battles over every little thing and I would really like to drive to preschool without dreading what the day’s report will be like. I love my spirited little boy, but at the same time, I would just really like a break from it all. I know parenting isn’t meant to be easy, but it isn’t meant to be this hard either, I want that magical fix that will make everything flow more smoothly, I don’t want to be angry at my son all day and I’m getting so frustrated in waiting that to happen.

On the upside, Dan and I have worked out that with his persistence, temperament and intelligence, Declan is likely to either be a millionaire entrepreneur, or a crime lord, either way, we’ll be looked after in our old age.

Today’s post was brought to you by severe impatience and the fact that my bloody son decided to cut several holes into his tshirt with a pair of scissors today whilst at preschool.

Bunnies.

Today I made bunnies for Declan and Conman.

We went to the playground with the boys. I watched the families around us, the brothers and sisters interacting with one another, I got jealous of the large families, which quickly turned to bitterness as I sat there and tried to work out what I’d done wrong and those parents had done right.

Was it because I slept on my back? Or when I climbed up a ladder during my second trimester? Were the Wasabi cravings in the first trimester the reason for it all?

I just wish there was a way of knowing why I’m only making two bunnies for Easter instead of three.

Eighteen days till the autopsy results… time is going so slowly. I so badly want it to get here so I can get some reasons, some closure, but at the same time I don’t want the day to arrive, just in case they don’t have any answers for me.

We still haven’t picked up her ashes.

Verruca’s Red And Aqua Kitchen

I want a house. Possibly the only thing I want more than a house right now is a baby.

They are both quite a way off.

But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming.

I still wander around the shops and pick out clothes I would buy my newborn, sweet purple tops with owls, deep blue babygrows with pirates on them.

I read (and steal) my mother in law’s decorating magazines, read design blogs and bookmark things that I would put in my house. I dream about the day when we no longer have to live in a rented magnolia box and I can have the freedom to make a house my own, to paint the boys’ rooms, and not have to deal with rent inspections.

1. Sweet-Pills, 2. Kitchenology by Jenny & Aaron ~everyday is a holiday~, 3. bobb and cherries, 4. Kitchen, 5. heart apron, 6. Tea Towel Swap, 7. ::vintage kitchen swap::, 8. Fruity Photography, 9. Handmade Brooch Bambi fawn deer red white flower blue

Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to have a roof over my head, but sometimes that little brat inside me rears her ugly head and has a tantrum about not being able to paint the walls lime green.

I’ll call her Verruca.

This is Verruca’s dream kitchen:

The walls are bright aqua, the cupboards are clean and white, it’s perfectly accessorised with red canisters and teacups, there are plenty of polka dots everywhere. The dining table is large and surrounded by mismatched chairs, all painted bright cherry red. It has original art prints that she’s picked up from the local artists markets and a tin Coca-cola sign that she nabbed for $4 from an opshop. There’s never any flour splatters on her Kitchenaid, and the oven is big enough to cook for an army. It’s retro, but not overwhelmingly so.

Oh. And everything is self cleaning.

Verruca makes an awesome lasagna, she also lives in a world where she doesn’t have a stack of opened mail sitting on her worktop, just next to the pile of dirty dishes, she has angelic kids that don’t pull all the plastic plates out of the draw when she’s not looking and, most importantly, Verruca has a husband that doesn’t roll his eyes and say that red and aqua combined is the gaudiest thing ever, and no way in hell would he ever have a kitchen like that… oh, and by the way, mood boards are  “full of shit”.

Word of advice: Whenever you hook up with someone you may one day end up living with for the remainder of your life, make sure your design tastes don’t completely and utterly clash.

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ETA: Verruca’s husband also doesn’t threaten to delete her blog when she writes bitchy things about him, he’s nice like that, he also has a six pack.

My Parenting Theory

I took a break today whilst I was eating lunch to wander through some of the old photos on flickr. Connor is 1 month old in the picture above, Declan is around 20 months. They’re on my mum’s bed.

My Mum doesn’t like to make her bed.

She will usually wake up in the morning complaining of aches and pains, only to discover she’d been sleeping on a water bottle that got lost  in amongst her sheets, or her glasses that she’s been searching for the past week. There are always pencils and notebooks, if you sit on the edge you generally risk being stabbed by stationary lost in the mattress

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The little trip back in time got me thinking about the kids, and how I’ve raised them so far.

My belief is that our children are on loan to us, from the moment they’re conceived we slowly start paying back that loan, to them. They start off 100% relying on their mothers in the womb. They’re born and their body takes over the automated actions, but they still rely on us as parents, to nurture them, both physically and mentally.

As each year, month, even moment passes, bit by bit they lose their reliance on us, very slowly as they gain independence and step away from needing Mum and Dad. By the time they’ve reached adulthood you would hope that most of that loan is paid off, but it will never be completely finished, I think every parent holds onto a little bit of their child, even when they’ve up and grown and moved to the otherside of the world and had babies of their own.

Our children do not belong to us, we’re borrowing them, and just like when you borrow anything, you need to hand it back in good condition. With every parenting decision I make, I think how this will affect them, in the present, and in the future, whether that’s tomorrow or in their teens. I hope the boys feel nurtured, loved and secure and that they grow to learn responsibility, compassion and right from wrong. I want them to be comfortable in themselves, no matter what choices they make in life, but also to be respectful and understanding of those who make different choices.

Looking back at my boys when they were so little and helpless, it makes me think whether I’ve achieved that so far. I believe I have, it hasn’t all been roses, there has been mistakes, I’ve changed the rules half way through the game before, and sometimes even completely changed the game. But overall, I think that Dan and I have done an acceptable job of looking after the two little beings we’ve been placed in charge of temporarily. We haven’t been perfect, no one is. But, most of the time, when I look at my sons I feel a sense of pride in the fact that we’re still all in one piece, we’re all fairly well adjusted and we’re all content and happy.

Of course, when my kids are in therapy in their 30s, they may say something different.

Declan will speak about the time he asked for alpha-getti and I didn’t look at the tin properly and gave him number-getti instead, or possibly the time when he was mentally scarred because I made him wear his hood up when it was raining.

Connor will talk about the mockery he had to face at a young age for still being mute and immobile, waaaaay past the time that he should.

It will all be my fault, it usually is

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Hmm. I think the TLDNR version of this would be “don’t fuck up your kids”.

I prefer my version though.

Good Days

When someone asks me how I’m doing I’ll normally answer something along the line of “I have good days and bad days”, even if I feel fine at that particular moment, I’m very aware that if I say I’m fine then people will start to think I’m in denial and not coping. Then if I say I’m not fine then they’ll think I’m having a breakdown and, again, not coping. I have visions of them carting me off to the nuthouse if I say the wrong thing and so I try to remain neutral in what I say to most people. It’s true that I have good days and bad, most of the time I just don’t feel like going into details about which side of the scale I fall on at that particular time.

Maybe I just over think things.

Today was one of the good days. Both of the kids are sick so the house remained fairly calm, Connor slept most of the day, and Declan was content to read and play with his cars instead of spending the day bouncing off the walls.

It felt normal, and normal is all I need right now to consider it a good day

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

[picture from our frame painting yesterday, see the post on CraftBlog]

Anyone that follows me on twitter knows that we have on going issues with Declan going to sleep, if it takes less than an hour between putting him into bed and him falling asleep then I consider it an achievement, but it can sometimes go as long as two, sometimes even three hours. He’ll ask for drinks, he’ll ask to go to the toilet, he’ll even poo in his nappy so he can get up and get his bum changed.

So when he came running into the lounge at about 8pm tonight, it was nothing unusual, nor was it unusual for him to announce the moment he stepped through the doorway, “Mummy, Daddy, I just pooped!“.

Was wasn’t expected was the follow up to that.

“…and it was BEAUTIFUL!!”

My kid takes pride in everything he does.

Including bowel movements apparently.

One Month Down

Yesterday was my due date, the magical 40 week mark that I still have yet to hit with any of my pregnancies, it also marked one month since Robyns birth and death.

I guess that officially that should be death and birth, death came before birth for her, which is just an odd concept to wrap your head around.

I’d been dreading the anniversary, was preparing myself to be a wreck for the entire day, but it came and went without a tear shed. Why should one day hurt any more than the previous ones simply because it’s a full month, year or decade. Anniversaries are what we make them, so I made yesterday a celebration of Connor’s 18 month birthday, with cupcakes that spilled out of their wrappers and a bright yellow crown that was too small for his head.

The emotions are different now, the grief and pain isn’t completely overwhelming, it ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s just a pang, like this morning seeing a pink and black newborn outfit I would have bought, sometimes a scene in a movie will set me off (FYI, when you’ve just lost a child, Kill Bill is probably not advised) it’s like I’m drowning in tears and I need Dan there rubbing my back and helping me to calm down.

I’ve come a long way in a month. For the nine days in between her birth and the funeral I wrote daily in a private journal, it helped me process things. Just reading back on those first few days shows me how far I’ve come, logic and sense have returned.

The overwhelming desire to steal someone’s baby has left and although I think about getting pregnant almost hourly, I also know that’s not going to be a good move for me, mentally or physically, right now.

I no longer feel guilt for walking away and leaving her in the hospital, instead sense has returned and I understand that there wasn’t anything else we could do.

The haze of confusion has made way for a whole new wave of ambition and determination. I was so insistent that this all had to be happening for a reason, something good must come from it, and if that something good is me being a better mother, and more enthusiasm to achieve bigger and better things in my personal goals, then I’m happy with that.

We still have more hurdles to jump over, we got a letter a couple of days ago saying that Robyn’s ashes were ready to be picked up, we need to scatter them, and then the dreaded autopsy results in just under a month. But overall I feel each week my mental state improves a little bit, the individual days, and even hours, are up and down, but if you step back and look at it on a bigger scale, I’m getting there, I don’t think the pain will ever heal, but ever so slowly it’s easing, and that’s all I can hope for right now.

Smile, Though Your Heart Is Breaking

If I come out of the other side of this learning one thing, it’s to truly appreciate what I do have, to enjoy the moments that make me smile and keep me going each day.

Like the love Dan has for the boys and myself.

Connor’s refusal to ever grow up.

Completed projects.

And interruptions

In Waiting

My not so strict internet ban is working well. I’m focusing on my home, on the kids, and on a hell of a lot of sewing. I feel much better mentally not having unavoidable reminders of Robyn, babies or pregnancy, although I am missing mummy blogs, but at the same time I’ve found some wonderful craft blogs to fill their void for the time being. Surprisingly I’m not yearning for twitter as much as I thought I would.

I still don’t have the iPod set up to distract me, so sewing is one of the few times my mind wanders and I think of everything that has happened. I still feel so much guilt surrounding my pregnancy. I keep on replaying the scene in my head when I peed on that stick and two lines came up, where I swore, slammed the doors and lay in bed sobbing telling Dan that I didn’t want a baby, it was so unexpected. I was in tears on the phone to my mum several times, panicking about finances, buying a car to fit everybody, moving house so we could have enough space. It wasn’t until probably around 30 weeks that I really accepted that we were going to have an addition to our family and started to get excited.

Everything I was concerned about over those months seems so trivial now, never once did it even cross my mind to worry about my baby dying.

The autopsy results are just over a month away and I’m starting to panic about them. Dan and I have agreed that if it’s something that can be replicated, like a genetic issue, then we’re going to call our family complete. I can’t comprehend the thought of never being pregnant again, at the moment it’s the only thing I feel can heal me, but at the same time I don’t think I could cope with losing a baby again. Right now I feel like I’ve come out of this stronger, but if I had to live through it again I think it would just break me, and I don’t really want to be broken.

Then I think of how negative I was through my pregnancy, and how that will make me feel if I find out it was my last, I hate myself for not celebrating it like I should have.

I feel like I just have this ticking clock over my head, counting down until the 16th of April, to get the next step of closure and to have some test results decide the future of our family.

Waiting.