Inspiration

One thing I keep on hearing over and over again since Robyn’s birth is how “inspirational” I am.

I feel like a fraud.

I certainly don’t feel inspirational, in fact I think I feel pretty much everything but that.

Today I felt jealous. The green eyed monster planted himself firmly on my shoulder in the early hours of the morning and has resided there for most of the day. I’m jealous that suddenly everyone seems to have a baby but me. I crave a little newborn to hold and cuddle, I long to feel movement in my belly again.

I wake at 3am most mornings and lay there staring at the ceiling willing myself to fall back to sleep. I’m shattered most of the day but can’t bring myself to nap. I shouldn’t be suffering from sleepless nights because of the thoughts that run through my head, I should be suffering from them because I’ve been awake all night with a baby attached to my breast. The spot in front of the window where the cradle was meant to be haunts me.

I have so much hidden bitterness to the world around me right now, that I’m trying so hard to contain, that I feel anything but inspirational.

Weep Not For The Memories

The funeral is done. I feel like the first chapter is finished, the book will never end, but the first part is done and over with, and the rest will be easier to get through.

I’m still trying to put together all of the pieces of the last fortnight, it still seems like a crazy dream, and I can’t honestly work out how I got from the excitement of Thursday morning, my waters breaking all over the bed and making our way to hospital joking about everything we still had to buy, to cremating our daughter eleven days later. This isn’t something that happens to you, it’s one of those things you just hear about, a friend of a friend experienced it, but not in any of my pregnancies did I worry for a moment about my baby dying inside me in the last few weeks of pregnancy.

This entire experience has made me look at life in a new light, see things that I previously took for granted and appreciate them more, it’s made me want to make the most of this gift I’ve been given and to achieve so much more with my time on earth.

Midway through the service today everyone there stood up and placed a present or a flower on Robyn’s casket while Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears In Heaven’ played. I’ve always loved the song, but now it feels even more poingant, in particular, this part:

I must be strong
And carry on,
‘Cause I know I don’t belong
Here in heaven.

That has stuck with me through the past few days and given me so much strength. When I wanted to curl into a ball and never face the world again, that was all that went through my head. I need my life to carry on even though hers hasn’t, I need to celebrate Declan and Connor (even when they drive me up the wall!) and I need to look after myself and make the most of my own life.

Tomorrow is a fresh start, I have new goals for CraftBlog, I need to lose about 50lbs and get much fitter and I need to not dwell one what could have been, but instead enjoy every moment. I’ve learned how precious and fragile life is, and I don’t want to ever look back and think what I could have been, I want to look back and be proud of what I have achieved.

Robyn Jade

I keep on trying to write this post, and it’s either too short and clinical, or too long and I can’t emotionally bring myself to finish it.

Our very unexpected baby died in utero in the early hours of the morning on February the 19th, at spot on 36 weeks gestation. I was induced that afternoon and delivered a baby girl weighing 6lbs 13oz and 50cm long at 3:15pm. We named her Robyn.

There’s currently no rhyme or reason for what happened, although initial testing did pick up an infection in the placenta, it’s too early to determine if that is the cause, we have an appointment on the 16th of April to hear the full post mortem results.

It’s now been just over a week and both Dan and I have run through every emotion you could possibly imagine. I am focusing on the positives, I already have two beautiful sons, we’re lucky enough to not have any fertility issues, and I have my health (physical at least, mental is still up for debate).

The funeral is on Monday afternoon. I’m both dreading it and looking forward to the closure that I hope it might begin to give us. I’m still in shock more than anything, this just wasn’t something I was prepared for in any way.

The next few months will probably be talking about what’s happened a fair bit, I also want to write up a birth story, and, when I feel able enough to move them off the camera, I will be posting some photos of her. I know this is a sensitive topic, so I wanted to give some prior warning so that those who felt too uncomfortable could avoid the blog for a while, or take me off their reader.

Looking Lovely In Lilac

This is me “turning my son gay” if my husband is to be believed. He doesn’t approve of the lilac nappy, the dark purple one is okay, it’s “like Shaft” apparently, but the lilac is just one step away from transforming Connor into Carson Kressley.

Coping Mechanisms

One of the main triggers of me going a little loopy is when there is too much inside my head. Brain dumps are my best friend, I need to hold my head over a sheet of paper and let everything that’s inside it fall out of my ear and allow itself to become more organised somewhere other than my skull. The house is always liberally scattered with sheets of paper with random scrawlings, doodles and numbers that at one point made sense to me, but now out of context, and usually with the same thought spread over different scraps of paper, they may as well be written in another language.

Inspired by this beautiful diary on Kikki.K I have resolved to empty my brain on a daily basis and give those currently wandering thoughts a home where I can make a little more sense of them. Unfortunately, I know that if I drop $30 on a book with nothing but numbers and a pretty cover I’m going to freak out about using it, the perfectionist in me will rise up and it will sit untouched forever more.

Instead I’ve gone for the McValue meal version: one $3 Derwent sketchbook and a sharpie, no new notebook=neat writing guilt, no beating myself up if I miss a day, just focusing on making my mental state a little more stable and clearing up the debris that is currently fighting for attention within my cranium.

I do hope that 2010 will be 365 days of awesome for me and for our little family. Although in comparison to the mental clusterfuck that has been 2009, even a mediocre year will look like peaches and cream. I know that nothing will magically become wonderful in three days time when the clock ticks over, but  I can’t help but feel excited about the fresh start, and hopefully this little book will be part of it.

And Breathe.

The festivities are over for another year and we came out of it relatively unscathed.

Once again I learned the hard lesson that the kids really couldn’t care less about whether the honeycomb set properly, whether the tags matched the wrapping paper or whether we left out oats or carrots for Rudolf. They (and my husband) care more about having a sane wife and mother instead of me stressing out because one silver ribbon is more metallic than the other.

Fortunately I got my meltdown out of the way on Christmas eve, allowing us to have a fairly calm Christmas day in the heat with Dan’s family. Christmas morning was a little overwhelming for Declan, meaning he refused to take a nap before we left for my in law’s house for lunch and more pressies. Before the seafood was even served he was crashed out on the rug and snoring.

I know officially I should probably be bothered by having Christmas lunch without my eldest, but eating an entire meal without getting up and running around to tend to his every whim was probably the greatest Christmas miracle ever, it’s amazing how much better food tastes when it’s fresh.

Now we’ve had a few days off and it’s back into the swing of things. Bring on 2010!

Not Such A Happy Christmas

Last night was Declan’s Preschool Christmas Pageant. He’s been practicing the songs for weeks, he had the actions down perfectly and spent all Friday afternoon telling me about Santa coming to visit preschool that evening. The whole family was excited about it and we’d even dragged the in laws along for the event.

I’m sure you can guess how the evening went.

I wasn’t prepared for how packed it would be, you would have thought we were attending Elvis’ comeback tour. I went into a full blown anxiety attack before we’d even got to the gates.

The PreSchool owner got up on the little stage to welcome everyone, and with a crack of thunder the heavens opened, it continued to rain for the entirety of the kids’ songs.

Not that it mattered of course, because Declan refused to get up on stage with the other kids, he wasn’t having bar of it, not even with the coaxing of his teacher. Instead he gave us our own performance under the shelter of the veranda, including some awesome Thriller-esque moves.

We were meant to wait for Santa in the individual classrooms, which Declan did great at, right up until other people came into the classroom. Seeing his room packed with the legs of people he didn’t know lead to another meltdown. No amount of promising that Father Christmas would arrive soon was enough to calm him down and we were out of there before you could say Rudolf.

No pageant, no raffle winnings, no visit with Santa.

Seriously. I made cupcakes for this and everything.

A Mum’s Take On The Clean Feed

Everyone’s busy shopping, finishing up a hectic final week at work and visiting with friends and family to celebrate the season. Steven Conroy is sitting in his office gleefully rubbing his hands, what better time could there be to roll out a new government policy that will affect everyone in Australia with access to an internet connection?

This evening the Australian government greenlighted the plans to go ahead with an internet filtering scheme.

From the SMH (emphasis mine):

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said today he would introduce legislation just before next year’s elections to force ISPs to block a blacklist of “refused classification” (RC) websites for all Australian internet users.

The blacklist, featuring material such as child sex abuse, sexual violence and instructions on crime, would be compiled using a public complaints mechanism, Government censors and URLs provided by international agencies.

[...]

“Most Australians acknowledge that there is some internet material which is not acceptable in any civilised society,” he said.

“It is important that all Australians, particularly young children, are protected from this material.“

There are so many flaws here that have been listed by plenty of other bloggers and websites, and I won’t even start on the issues that would arise from a public complaints mechanism, there’s no point in me repeating everything that’s already been said, and probably far more eloquently than I can put it.

What I can give you is a mother’s take on the whole thing.

My sons are growing up surrounded by computers. My almost two year old know that Mummy and Daddy use them for work, he has his own laptop to play DVDs on and he’ll even ask to watch a certain music video or film clip on YouTube – recently The Proclaimers have been on high rotation.

As odd as this may seem to his grandparents, it’s not odd for his generation. He is being raised in an age where the computer and the internet is king. The entire world is just the touch of a button away, and I’m quite happy to sit down with him and allow him to explore that world, under my supervision.

Not under the supervision of the government.

Because I am fully capable of looking after and monitoring my own children, I don’t need Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy to do it for me.

My issue lies with the fact that once censorship is brought in the lines become very grey. If my teenage son starts to think he may be gay and goes to seek an online support group to help him come to terms with who he is, will that be banned? If one of the boys decide that they’ve had enough of my heathen ways and wish to look into some religious groups, will those searches bring up red flags? If I ever have a daughter (or one of my sons doesn’t shrink wrap it) and she ends up in a situation where she needs to look into the options available for ending an unwanted pregnancy, will she still be able to see an unbiased argument from a range of different opinions?

In all of these situations I would hope that my kids would be comfortable in confiding in their parents, but I also know teenage-hood doesn’t work like that. If their first step is using the internet as a form of support through a difficult time in their life then I don’t have an issue with it, what I do have an issue with is the government cutting off that support, because some of those opinions may differ from what is considered “right” by the governing bodies.

I want my children (and of course myself) to have access to the WORLD WIDE web, not the PG rated version filled only with content that our government deems safe.

I like to think that I’m a capable mother.

Capable of teaching my sons what is and isn’t acceptable.

Capable of sitting down with the boys to teach them about internet safety.

Capable of looking after my family without Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy fighting a battle to “save the children”, a battle which does nothing more than infringe on my, and my family’s rights.

I strongly advise every Australian (or not) to contact their local representative and let them know that this is not a wise use of our tax dollars, to encourage them to move forward instead of back, and let them know that the rest of the world is laughing at us as a country.

A Hot Sweaty Version Of Scrooge

…and I don’t mean hot and sweaty in a naughty way, I mean hot and sweaty in that it’s hot enough to cook steak on the pavement and I’m knocked up and dripping bucket after bucket of sweat from every available pore.

I am still adjusting to the Australian Christmas. Christmas in the UK is just such a different experience. I can’t help but feel like it’s just some big elaborate make believe that the entire country puts on just to wind up tourists. I love Australia, I am very happy to call it my home, but December always brings with it a strong longing for the motherland. Homesickness, combined with being 7 months pregnant and the ridiculous heat ends up with me becoming Scrooge.

Last year the Christmas tree went up when Declan went to bed on Christmas Eve and came down 24 hours later the following day, and even in that short space of time Declan still managed to pull the entire thing down about five times. This year we have double the trouble with a now mobile Connor to add to the mix, and there was no way I was putting that much work into a tree just for a day of the pretty. So instead the scrooge in me splashed out fifteen bucks on ebay and replaced our tree with stickers.

Best. Idea. Eva.

It took me five minutes to put up. It looks festive without being too in your face OMG CHRISTMAS!! Declan’s delighted with counting the balls and telling me what the pictures are. And best of all, come January the 6th it will take me five minutes to pull down, and there’s not even a hint of having to battle with fairy lights or vacuum up glitter until June.

Christmas decorating win!

Five Things I Should Have Done More Of Before Spawning

My friend, Tamsyn, is scheduled to have her first baby on Tuesday. It’s been awesome reading her blog and bringing back all of the feelings I had whilst pregnant with Declan. Her last weekend of being without a small being dependent on her for his every need has got me thinking about my life before kids, and what I wish I had taken advantage of whilst I didn’t have children.

Don’t get me wrong, my kids are (mostly) awesome, but there are a few things I am kicking myself for not doing more of before they fell out of my froot loop.

1. Gone to the cinema: This is our number one regret as a couple, we used to go every fortnight or so to see a movie, and it’s something I miss terribly. It’s not that we can’t go to the cinema, it’s just that it now it’s a huge production with many players. We have to arrange a time to go, arrange my mother in law to babysit BOTH children (Connor isn’t an issue, Declan is a whole other ballgame), prepare the kids, pack up toys and snacks, listen to Declan screaming as we leave and this is all before we’ve actually agreed on a movie. Before we would go out to lunch, drive past the cinema and decide on the spur of the moment to go and catch whatever film was on next. Of course I can also rejoice in how much money this is saving us, last time we went to the cinema it cost us $40!

2. Indulged In My Hobbies: This one is a little different, I’m very lucky in that Dan is more than happy to watch the kids whilst I indulge in sewing, but I long for a day when I can sit down in the morning with an idea in my head and spend ten solid hours bashing it out on the sewing machine. Everything is done in bits and pieces now, what would have previously taken a day now takes a week or even two. I can get some stuff done in the evening assuming everyone is in bed in a timely manner, but my creative brain works better in the early morning for some reason. Unfortunately, Declan was my reason for learning to sew, so I only got a month of uninterrupted sewing before he came along.

3. Eaten Hot meals: Like most mothers I have adjusted to lukewarm food and drink. We eat about half our dinners as a family around the table, and the other half I cook for the kids and then cook for Dan and I when they’re in bed. Family meals are spent fussing over who wants what, replacing Declan’s green fork with a pink one to avoid the breakdown and telling Connor off for throwing food at the wall. Meals with just Dan rarely go without being interrupted by Declan coming out of his bedroom with various requests or Connor deciding that sleep is for the weak. Although they’re more regular than they were during the newborn stage (try breastfeeding whilst eating Honey Mustard Chicken!) those hot fresh-out-of-the-pan meals are still far and few between!

4. Had wild monkey sex: I’m sure you know the kind, the kind of shag that pisses off the neighbours. Similar to the cinema trips, sex is a huge production: Both kids asleep? Check. Total silence to ensure things stay this way? Check. Suitable position to navigate around the gigantic pregnant belly? Check. Complete lack of enthusiasm and spontaneity? Check!

5. Enjoyed the floor: I promise this isn’t related to point four – perverts. Not until you’ve stepped on a Duplo brick in the middle of the night, tripped over the Corn Popper and taken your shin out on a Tonka Truck will you truly understand this one. I haven’t seen my lounge room floor in three years. I can spend 3 hours cleaning it all up only to walk into the kitchen for a drink and return to find it covered once again. On those odd occasions that I do manage to get the floor free of toys I roll about on the carpet like a cat in heat, right up until a stray lego that’s leaped out of the toybox jams itself into my shoulder.

I love the kids, I love the change that they have brought in me and my life, but every so often I wish this whole Mum job had better holiday benefits. Just give me a week off with movies, wild sex, hot food (and cold cider) a quilting bee and clean floors and I will be a happy woman.

What’s your advice for Tamsyn, what should she spend her last couple of days enjoying?