A decent start to the New Year

Hurrah! I'm going to get paid for this month. Still staring unemployment in the face but at least I'm going to get paid. Hurrah Hurrah HURRAH!

Finger Food

Felix has now extended his finger food repertoire to include raisins, cereal hoops, pear, apple, muffin, banana cake, water biscuits, pasta and, of course, rice cakes. It still takes him a week to finish a meal.

Rubbish mum

Despite waxing lyrical about the joys of motherhood for a couple of years on this blog it's clear I'm actually a bit of a rubbish mum. Or perhaps I should say, I NEED TO WORK for my sanity. If I were to stay at home and look after kids all day they would just end up in front of the gogglebox for hours on end. As Jasmine has this morning because I've had my hands full feeding Felix (very slow) with a pinch of can't be arsed thrown in. My one attempt to be a super duper yummy mummy - aka bake muffins with Jambeans - resulted in her getting bored after 10 minutes and saying 'Bye mummy. I go watch telly.'

Let's play the lady

Unbelievably, I've become a gamer. Since boyfried treated himself to a PS3 (hardly seems worth the bother now I'm unemployed and he can have his pooter back in the evenings) I've become a huge fan of Little Big Planet. My fave sack characters are all sassy sack girls. Dressing them up like proper ladies and finding switch triggers are the best bits of the game IMHO. Jasmine is also pretty good at it and particularly loves the dressing up part and pressing the jump button. When we're bored we all go 'let's play the lady.'

The shorthand version of the longhand version of shitty christmas

I started writing this longhand version of why the run up to Christmas was so shitty, but it's taking forever and time is precious and all that, so the shorthand version is we were all horribly sick most of the time and 2 days before Christmas I lost my job because our company couldn't survive the collapse of the Icelandic bank system and I still don't know if I'm going to get paid this month.

Clearly, there is a lot more to get off my chest, particularly about being unwittingly unemployed in the midst of a deep recession, but we've finally had a good run of form so I'm not going to ruin it by moaning. Christmas Day at Auntie Seema's was most excellent. As was Boxing Day at London Zoo. As was the day after Boxing Day when La Gitane and Krusty came to stay before hopping on a plane back to HK. As was the day after the day after Boxing Day when Richard, Hilary, Danil and Seriosha came for a visit. I've eaten a LOT of cake. It feels good.

Food rebel

Felix is being a food rebel. It's taken us a few days to long to work it out, but now we realise that if it's on a spoon it's not worthy. So Felix' diet basically consists of toast and milk. The underlying premise being that it takes him about a week to eat 1 slice of toast, at the end of which time he's still hungry and needs to glug milk fast.

But his sloppy botty finally seems to be sorting itself out. We're on to sticky almost solid poo now.

shitty christmas

it's been a very long time since i've written anything in the blog. mainly, i've not had the energy. but also, i've struggled to know what to say, or how to say it. but also, there's been a BIG THING i haven't been able to say. a big stressy rubbish shitty thing and it's just inhibited me from saying anything about anything else really. more on that later...

good stuff that happened in the run up to christmas:

1. our washing machine broke but got fixed again. (note where this starts. this is the GOOD things list. and it's CHRISTMAS. this list of the best possible things i can say starts with a washing machine.)
2. it got warmer
3. i spoke at a local council meeting against the proposal to redevelopment the house behind ours into flats, and we got a result: planning permission not granted. babymomma equals skill. many people come up to me after and ask if i am a lawyer (?) - apparently i spoke that well they assume it's a professional skill. babymomma is chuffed ;-)

shitty stuff that happened in the run up to christmas:

friday 19th december:

babymomma wakes up feeling awful. goes to work feeling awful. head-achy-body-achy-nauseous-extra-tired-type-awful. believes it is related to the takeaway curry consumed the night before. spends much of the day with head on desk. attempts to leave work early but gets hit by a deeply shite friday afternoon work crisis. doesn't leave till 5pm. leaves with heavy heart.

on tube near home, babymomma receives message to say jasmine has chicken pox. aaaargh.

saturday 20th december, morning:

jasmine seems ok. bf seems ok. babymomma feels ok-ish. felix has diarrhoea. by the time 9am arrives he has pooed on me once and vomited on me 3 times.

desperate for outing we venture to whipsnade zoo. it's cold and windy. at the penguin pool jasmine has deep panic her hair is 'falling off' and insists on being carried everywhere. poo from jasmine's wellies is smeared all over babymomma. babymomma is haunted by acrid poo smell that no number of baby wipes can erase. (babymomma IS the acrid poo smell no number of wipes can erase). we struggle on regardless. see some giraffes. have lunch. babymomma flakes out. home. coma. boyfried manfully looks after everyone.

saturday 20th december, night time:

jasmine comes into bed with us, upset, uncomfortable and itchy with spots. tosses and turns against me all night = no sleep

sunday 21st december, morning:

Felix is doing early shifts (as in pre-6am) and after our crappy night's sleep bf and I feel like total shit. Jasmine, oddly, is totally well in herself and being an absolute angel. Felix is a bit on and off. No diarrhoea today but he won't eat properly - just wants milk. He seems ok for the best part of the day until we give him a square millimetre of chocolate biscuit and he grabs it and palms it and shoves it in his mouth and giggles and coughs and smiles and jiggles on daddy's lap and then OH MY GOD he does the most enormous vomit everywhere. Bigger than the Witches of Eastwick. Worse than the Exorcist. Not a surface of either daddy or the sofa is spared. Babymomma is too busy drinking tea, eating biscuits and laughing her head off to be of any assistance whatsoever. Bf is agog with disbelief. Felix is smiling innocently and gurgling with satisfaction. Not even a spot of vomit has landed on him anywhere.

Monday 22nd December, wee small hours of the morning.

Middle of night. Babymomma wakes up feeling... a bit weird. Spends the next 7 hours running to the loo every 15 minutes with the most horrendous you can guess what

Monday 22nd December, day.

Bf is feeling queasy, achey, nauseuous too. We bundle Felix to nursery and take it in hour shifts to sleep/look after Jambeans

Tuesday 23rd December

Bf still ill and stays at home. I still feel like shit too, not having had any time to recover from whatever bug crawled up my bottom and died there. Jambeans still covered in spots and in quarantine. Felix still not 100% and still being bundled to nursery. Babymomma's company gives notice to appoint administrators today and I, effectively, lose my job. My supposed career defining move hasn't lasted 3 months. It's 2 days before Christmas. I had known since Friday it was coming but it still feels like shit when I hear the news. When I pick Felix up in the evening I am informed he has had diarrhoea today, and therefore is banned from school tomorrow.

Wed 24th December

Exhausted, sick unemployed babymomma looks after two moaning sick kids. It is Christmas Eve.

the boy is back

After 5 weeks of anxiety and stress and snot and diarrhoea, Felix is definitely back.

Ignoring the deep permacrust of snot around his nose, he's back to his usual, bouncy, smily, energetic self. So, for the last few days he's been busy cruising for bricks, throwing books off the bookshelf (including dictionaries and encyclopaedias, though he's not managed to dislodge the medical reference breeze blocks quite yet) and playing 'putting things on a surface, and taking them off again, ' as well as 'coming over for a look and grab.' Wrestling matches at the changing mat are back on the agenda, but on the helpful side he's getting the hang of pushing his arms through sleeves. He's also (finally) getting into finger food, leaving me totally lost for inspiration beyond the inevitable - toast, rice cakes, soft carrots and broccoli spears.

But best of all, what has returned again with full force is the happiness - that deep, intense feeling of love and discovery as I watch, and help my little boy grow up.

din-o-saur. scary. wagging tail.

so it's pretty clear now that time to write blog entries is going to be snatched, and they will variously contain

(a) moaning about working too hard
(b) moaning about not having time to do anything
(c) updates on various effluents that are the product of kiddy illnesses
(d) general moaning about other stuff
(e) some mention of interrupted sleep, lack of sleep, desire for sleep or generally feeling tired

so. onwards.

granma left on saturday and the kids were in a fairly stable state. felix' eyes were clearing up. he was fairly bouncy. jasmine was finally getting over her cold and cough.

come monday morning, jasmine's eyes were totally stuck together. since nursery was not an option daddy took her to the natural history museum as a treat, followed by lunch at the v&a, and they had a whale of a time. since then it's been a constant litany of "i go mu-se-um. saw din-o-saur. grrrrr. scary. din-o-saur wagging tail. like a doggy. tee hee tee hee. i go 'nother museum. have lunch and pudding." (past tense, still a nascent skill)

come tuesday both kids are in nursery and we think, finally, we're able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. till i got a call to go and pick felix up because he was ill. so more frantic calls to the bf ensued, and we tensely "negotiated" whose diaries are more important with neither wishing to give way, imploring messages were left with nani (my mum) to come to the rescue and i rushed home to pick him up.

he's got the nastiest of bugs. we're talking lots of diarrhoea, some copious vomiting, persistent fever, suspected ear infection, more eye-goo (blocked tear duct?) and a lot of crying, screaming, yelping and insisting I carry him everywhere. nani looked after him for two days and has been a stalwart oasis of calm. even when she was cupping handfuls of watery vomit to prevent any more from going all over the sofa, and particularly when i was having a near total stressy meltdown. superwoman. lifesaver. granmas are great. what more can i say?

tomorrow bf and i are doing half days each. then bf will keep him home on monday in the hope that all the sickness flushes out.

work continues to be fast-paced, chock full and challenging for both of us.

needless to say, we have both lost a lot of bounce.

but then there is jasmine. beautiful, patient, radiant, funny, energetic, gracious, gentle jasmine who is well again, on great form and going from strength to strength.