I cleaned out under the pram and found:

- a bunch of bananas (still totally edible)
- half a bag of seed potatoes (that really need to go in the ground)
- 2 empty nappy bags (which would blow away if it weren’t for said bananas)
- a christmas card
- the remains of a drawing from playgroup
- 3 pinecones
- sundry dust and dried mud and bits of leaves

What will accumulate there next week?

What does Wee Bull have that I don't have? Legs!

I am writing this less to inform you, and more to remind myself – this is pretty much the hardest bit.

Aichbee is 5 weeks old, all the visitors have been seen and we have been back to ‘normal life’ for 3 weeks. It is frigid and very windy again today, Elar is teething her molars and both Efbee and I have colds.

And it is the easter holidays.

Aichbee cannot be put down. If she was a first child she probably could be, but she is a third child and her brother and sister want to kiss her and move her head so she is looking at them, want to pick her up even though they are repeatedly told that they are not allowed. So she is in the carrier on my front and the combination of large baby and a 4+ finger gap between the two columns of muscles that run the length of my stomach means that i am about as clumbersome as i was 6 weeks ago, except now with a small precious head that might knock into things, feet and hands that might get too cold.

My bedtime is the same as the children’s -still! – a combination of end-of-the-day-knackeredness and who-knows-when-a-cluster-feed-might-strike?

And I have got it into my head that I should be keeping up with everything. The washing! The house! The mess that two small people under 5 can make while their mother is busy feeding the baby.

I told Jo (@ Darn it and Stitch) that I was hoping to start dyeing again in about 4 weeks and she (very) gently laughed and told me to start up again when I was ready.

And I am ready – in my head, at least. All these things I was determined to do once the baby was born – some how I forgot that what that really meant was a few months after the baby was born, once things settle down.

This is the hardest bit. This right now is the hardest bit. Aichbee is still very young and I don’t want to wish her early baby days away. My hands are full of small children and everything has to be done in the few moments when they are free. Or have to be done one handed. Or with my trousers almost falling down.

(Hi inbetween stage where my maternity clothes are hanging off me but my regular jeans won’t do up!)

In another few weeks Aichbee will be more awake, and can sit in the bouncy chair a bit, it will (hopefully?) be warmer, and things will carry on slowly settling down. But I have to be realistic about what I can achieve until then and I have to look after myself because everyone needs me.

And I have to remember to remember that.

She’s here! Dd arrived with a lot more speed than any of us were expecting, just after 1pm on Wednesday 27th February, at home.

She is 11lb 15oz (! I know. In fact out of the three births her’s was the fastest and most straight forward.) We are both doing well and the five of us are just slowly finding our way towards a new normal.

Her big brother and sister are smitten and everyday feels a bit like Christmas in the best and most overwhelming sense of the word.

I’ll hopefully be back soon with more of her knitwear and her blanket, and maybe even a birth story for those who like such things.

(NOTE – The following post contains two birth stories, and opinions about birth. Compared to many of my usual posts it’s massively TLDR. It is not meant to offend anyone.)

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Government Petition to Save Independent Midwifery – here.

If you are (or want to be) a member of 38 Degrees, please consider voting for Independent Midwifery as a campaign – here.

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I can’t write about Independent Midwives without crying.

(Maybe it’s because I’m at 37 weeks and all the emotions are everwhere? Maybe it’s because I can’t imagine how I would be having this child without them?)

I can’t write about Independent Midwives without assuming that some of you reading this are rolling your eyes and thinks ‘well it’s ok for *her*! She probably has tons of money if she’s off hiring Independent Midwives’. (I don’t. We don’t. We have held off having work done to our house, we don’t go on holiday, we don’t go out, we don’t run a car.)

(Me, 27 days before I gave birth to FB)

FB’s birth was hard – I didn’t realise how hard until I was pregnant with LR and it all came flooding back, all those things I had squashed to the back of my mind, because my priority from the moment he was born was to get FB feeding (which took about 9 weeks) and learn how to be a parent of this tiny child.

I was convinced that my body didn’t work, I was still bewildered from the fact that – while in hospital – multiple medics of one sort or another had ‘joked’ that maybe I didn’t have a cervix. (After the birth my GP agreed to give me a extra smear just to prove that actually I did have one – turns out when you have contractions for days that don’t go anywhere because you’ve had a giant bladder infection that everyone thinks is pre-eclampsia, and thus you are massively sleep deprived, you start believing everything that qualified people in white coats tell you, even when you know they must be preposterous.)

I met my midwife (the wonderful Liz) through a local sling meet when I was 16 weeks pregnant with LR, nosing around for a newborn sling that wasn’t a baby bjorn. Initially I wanted to know if it was possible to do some sort of debrief of my first birth (because already – as I said – I was starting to feel the ‘omg I want this child so much but I don’t think I can do this again’). I went off and got all my paperwork from the hospital and we sat down about 6 weeks later to go through what happened.

And I learnt some surprising things. Like that when I was induced there was a 47% I was going to end up with a c-section. (No one had told me this.) Or that when I was being told to stop making so much noise they were writing in my notes that I was at risk of a ruptured uterus and needed to be monitored. (Yeah no one told me that either.)

I still think about FB’s birth – in the end I was given meptid, induced up to my eye balls and got to crowning without (more) added interventions (at which point I was exhausted and had pushed for 2 hours, and agreed to a kiwi ventouse to get him out that last little way.)  I still wonder if things could have been different? How they could have been different? Beyond not getting my first ever bladder infection just days before I gave birth for the first time. I still don’t know. It was what it was, but it’s taken a lot of work and time to get to feeling like that. And I’d still like to kick the people who thought they were being funny, when it was the very last thing I needed.

(Me, 33 days before I gave birth to LR)

Back to independent midwives – Liz helped me unpack my head for the rest of the pregnancy. Her care was superb and FB (then 2) thought she was wonderful and was a little midwife in training. And a few days after my due date I gave birth to LR, all 10lb 1oz of her, at home. Which not to say it wasn’t an eventful birth – there was a cervical lip to be negotiated, and I pushed for three hours (only to find that she was as big as she was and had a hand beside her face!) But I felt safe and protected and trusted Liz implicitly.

And – at a time when local NHS care has been reduced to one post partum visit – Liz continued to see us for about six weeks after the birth on a gradually reducing timetable that left me feeling incredibly supported (extremely helpful when our families were so far away from us.)

After that, there was no doubt it either my mind or W’s that if were doing to have the third child we hoped to have, Liz would be part of the equation.

(Me. About a week ago. Wow I look so tired in all these photos.)

What has surprised me about this pregnancy is how much I have still had to unpack. At around 30 weeks (just before Christmas) I suddenly became terrified of the pushing stage. I had worked so hard and for so long last time that it had felt endless and I had felt completely removed from what was actually happening. I hadn’t realised any of that was the case until I came closed to the time when I would have to do it again. I realised that during LR’s birth, I had jumped on the urge to push and pushed like someone was coaching the hell out of me (even though they weren’t. I thought that’s what you did.) I’m still not sure if that made life harder for me. But after a ton of reading (again) and talking, I’m starting to see that there are things I can explore when the time comes. That there are processes that I can work with rather than stomp over.  I’m still jealous of the women who make tiny babies and push them out with two pushes but I’m beginning to accept (all over again) that I’m not one of them.

Could I have done this work without an Independent Midwife? I’m not sure. There isn’t much continuity of care in our local area and I found not being able to talk to my community midwife after FB’s birth upsetting and confusing. Certainly I wouldn’t have the option (as a have right now) to be birthing while being cared for by someone who knows me and has already seen me birth before, and therefore knows what’s normal and what’s normal for me in particular.

I definitely think – when seeing LR’s birth on paper, particularly the final hour, (though her heart rate was superb all the way through) – that I would have ended up with some sort of major intervention if I’d have birthed her at the hospital. Liz and I both guess forceps. (I have a lot of friends who had major interventions with their second births in hospital, not just their first.)

So now I’m 37 weeks pregnant, uncomfortable and frankly ready to be done, and feeling heartbroken because if things don’t change quickly, Independent Midwives will lose their right to practice this coming October. Women who want to birth outside of the medical system (or as outside as they safely can be) or who want to ensure they get the post partum care they need for their own recovery, will have run out of options. Women with PTSD from previous births will have fewer places to turn, and midwives who have real experience of non-medicalised birth, breech birth and natural twin births will be suddenly far fewer in number, and those skills could well disappear.

I am a huge supporter of the NHS, and I am grateful that there are procedures available to protect seriously at risk women and their babies, or women and their babies, when something goes wrong. But for many, for most, birth is not a sickness. It is not something to be cured. And those births can only be understood by being experienced in their natural state, over and over again. Till they feel as normal as they actually are (or could be.) This is what Independent Midwives do.

I don’t want them to be gone.  Without them, my life, and our family life would not be as it is today.

I have so much to be grateful for.

—

Government Petition to Save Independent Midwifery – here.

If you are (or want to be) a member of 38 Degrees, please consider voting for Independent Midwifery as a campaign – here.

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Another week of Yarn Along…

In a post very much like this one, at the beginning of December I promised that I would finally finish reading The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein. And I did.

It wasn’t an easy read, but luckily for my my husband had read it first (when I first got it out of the library) and so I could look at him and talk about a particular chapter and he knew exactly what I was talking about.

It’s hard to find the words to explain how important this book is. (Made harder by the fact at least one of my parents sporadically reads this blog…) But important it is, because when you experience divorce as a child, it has a profound effect on you. Or rather it has a series of profound effects on you, that come up again and again throughout your life. For me, it was a relief to realise that was normal, rather than indulgent or a case of wallowing.

This book revisits a number of people, 25 years after they were part of a study looking at the effects of divorce on children. (They were revisited after 18 months, 3 years, 5 years, 15 years and 25 years I think – though I’m working from memory there, so the numbers might only be generally right. ) It also compares a number of the case studies with similar people who came from intact families, to see how they differed.

This is what I took away from the book:

Children of divorce are quick to grow up but slow to mature. Without positive relationship role models they find it hard to trust romantic relationships in general and either throw themselves into marriage on a whim very young, or settle down much later.

Most come from families where the death of the marriage was quiet and thus the split up and divorce was a huge shock that was never properly explained to them. (Only the children from violent marriages that got divorced had improved out comes, overall. For the rest of the people interviewed, divorce made their lives harder, not easier.)

Visitation, in general, sucks.

In an intact family, the parents are on the sidelines, helping their children along but staying ‘behind the curtain’ while the children are on the stage of their own childhood (wonky metaphor?) whereas during/after a divorce the parents get on stage and might never get off again, their children (even as adults) always on the look out for/dealing with potential blow ups or tensions at – for example – family gatherings etc.

Basically – though not all of that reflects my own experiences, I found I learned a huge amount about myself having read this book, and really would recommend it to anyone who went through divorce as a child or teenager (as well as adults contemplating divorce – there is tons of information about how you can make your child’s life more manageable.)

An important book then. Even if it doesn’t have all the answers.

And on to the knitting…

This is a cowl that I am going to have to stop knitting, because I have the baby blanket to finish knitting, and the shawl for my midwife to finish both spinning and knitting. (I spun the knit the first half in the late summer.)

It is the Five by Five Cowl by Felicia Lo knit in two strands of — (which I bought from the new yarn shop in Oxford, which I will link to as soon as I can find any sign of them online!) and a strand of Old Maiden Aunt Yarns Laceweight (the pattern calls for mohair but I didn’t have any, and anyway I don’t need to be *that* warm down here in the south of England.

It’s 52″ long, and I’m about a third of the way through. Ideally it would be lovely to finish before spring, but with these other projects, plus a couple more for the baby that I have my eye on, that might be a step too far. In which case it won’t be the first time that I’ve finished something and had to put it away for a good six months before it gets any use.

(At least when you get it out on the first cold day, you feel you’ve received a lovely present from past-you.

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/five-by-five-cowl

(Yes the children helped me decorate the cake. Why do you ask?)

Christmas was a blur. This was the first year that FB really got ‘Christmas’ and so things were a little too busy in our house the week before and the week of Christmas despite my best efforts. I have made myself a number of notes to help with next year, the first being that I took on too many projects in the run up the Christmas and paid the price*.

Our family looked after us well but to be honest I never really got my head in the game. I’m preoccupied with things coming up in the next couple of months – like giving birth and having a newborn in the house – and getting done the things that need to be finished before the birth happens (oh I hope that’s how it goes!)

(There were some good family walks though. Christchurch meadow was flooded, as expected.)

However Christmas had it’s surprises, even for me despite the fact I am chief organiser in our house, and on December 30th we took possession of two beehives from a much loved friend of ours who is moving to Australia in April. We have been talking about getting bees for about 3 years now, and had just decided to put it off again in 2013, but this was an offer too good to turn down.

So now we have bees. Very exciting!

Apart from that I am reading a huge amount (more on that tomorrow…), having a HUGE CLEAR OUT in the house, and getting ready to start dyeing again later this week. (More Chunky Yarn for Darn it and Stitch, plus more of everything else to rebuild very depleted stocks.)

*Mind you, I’ll still show you all the stuff I made, once I photograph them.

It’s wednesday… time for the Yarn Along.

Firstly, apologies for the awful photos but we are still sick. Or rather FB is healthy again and bouncing off the walls (though luckily he is out for most of today), while LR and I are slowly coming back to something resembling normal. She still screws her face up in pain when she coughs (it’s on her chest so it makes her muscles hurt) and I’m blowing my nose every few minutes, and my energy is stuck at about 50%.

Hopefully another quiet day today will help.

Anyway… Knitting!!

One good thing about us all being unwell is that there has been unwell is that we have been floopy on the sofa a lot and so I have got some knitting done. I am making dolls clothes for the dolls for christmas (which I’ll post about soon), and as you might expect they knit up super quick. Following on from that I came across Tiny Pants and a new knitting obsession was born.

Seriously though, they are cute knitted shorts for newborns and they take a 50g ball of DK. Thus they knit up in no time and are ripe for stripes, patterns or embellishments.

What is not to love?

I cast off my first pair yesterday, and cast on the second pair a couple of hours later.

After two october babies, this March baby will need a slightly adjusted set of clothes (any excuse to make more things for new tiny people.) I’m hoping that these shorts will be useful, though you never know how March will go – sometimes we’re shovelling snow, sometimes we’re out in the garden sat on the blanket.

Regardless it’s lovely to be using up some much loved balls of yarn in my dwindling stash that have been there for a number of years now.

Reading wise I just finished Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield (which you can get free from Project Gutenberg here, and as a free audiobook from Librivox here). I had never read it before and I really enjoyed it. From an adult point of view it’s about the power of the parent and how that can stunt or set children free. From a child’s point of view it’s about a little girl who goes to live on a farm and finds out that she can do a lot more than she thought she could. It’s now on my list to read FB at some point.

Apart from that, caring for sick children (and sick me) hasn’t left much time for reading. However next on my radar is The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein which I borrowed from the library a couple of months ago, only to have W run off and gobble it all up in about a week. Since then I’ve been putting off reading it even though he says it’s amazing and that I really should read it. Tomorrow I have to take it back to the library to prove it still exists (fair enough) and then I really need to knuckle down and read it.

I guess I’ll tell you more about it next week. (How’s that for accountability, eh?)

All is quiet here due to the lurgy.

In the meantime, here are my finished socks -

(Ravelry page here)

And here is the next pair I have cast on in OxfordKitchenYarns 100% BFL sock yarn.

(Ravelry page here)

When I’m not serving ice cream to help ease sore throats or trying to fit two wiggly small children on my rapidly shrinking lap space I’m also deep in my elving, sorting out Christmas in the hope that things will get done early and I can have a calm December. (The plan is coming on, but it’s a stretch.

I’ll be back with that Chunky Cowl either at the end of the week or next week, depending on when the lurgy leaves us.

Time for another Yarn Along…

I have taken a short break from the socks (LR pulled the needle out and thus I need to sit down and sort it out *sigh*), to knit a cape for LR because it’s cold and it will be useful when we go out to pick up her brother… that is my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

This has been in my queue for AGES, and I had a suitable yarn in my stash – Katia Peru, and I was in need of a quick knit, while I got the OKY Chunky dyed up. Something that I could complete and get used. I’m 4″ from finishing the hood so it should be done in the next few days. I’m thinking chunky wooden buttons – maybe even some of the ones W and FB made, if they fit through the button holes.

You can find my Ravelry page here.

Yesterday was an awful day – probably because I am vaguely ill, though I didn’t realise that until I looked at my flushed cheeks in the middle of the afternoon and sure enough I had a bit of a temperature. Given there isn’t much I can do about it, apart from take small amounts of paracetamol and get as much rest as you can when you have two small children and another on the way, (and run you’re own business), I treated myself to All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, which is pure comfort reading to me. (This is high praise, I promise you!)

So right now I’m enjoying that, and trying to take things easy. Or easier. Or something.

Firstly some OxfordKitchenYarns news – A third of the remaining Chunky Yarn is labelled up and ready to go.

The rest are in the dyepots. Later this week (probably this friday) I’ll post a preview of the rest of the current chunky collection, and then off to Darn it and Stitch they will go on Saturday (assuming everything has managed to dry in time.)

I’m also planning to show you the cowl I knit up so that you can see the yarn in action. (I love the stitch design it gives when you just knit up stocking stitch.)

Until then…

…or a list of good things.*

Tomorrow (until next monday) there is a great ‘Learning Through Play‘ ebook bundle going on through Raising Playful Tots (more on them later!) and NurtureStore. (You can see a great preview here at Bird and Little Bird.) £60+ worth of ebook for £6.30.  I’m a big fan of a good bundle, (and a good ebook for that matter!) and have had great success with the ones I’ve bought over the last year or so.

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I really enjoyed Finding Time to Read When You’re Mothering Littles over at Fimby. Personally I have always relied on digital readers – first a palm pilot and now a kindle for reading in bed when there are small children around. That way I can read in the dark and hopefully not bother them. (I do most of my internet reading that way – cutting and pasting things that look interesting and then reading them hours later in bed.) Right now – unless it’s a read aloud – actual paper books (despite my huge love for them) are harder to read, though now I have a tiny book light I should pull my finger out and read some of those too in bed. But yeah, last thing in the night, and – right now – first thing in the morning, since I keep waking up before my alarm, I read. I would be lost without it, in a way.

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Since the children both had their birthdays I have continued to make batches of Nigella Lawson’s Roll-out Cookies (which can also be found in ‘How to be a Domestic Goddess‘.) Both the dough and the cooked biscuits freeze really well. In fact I tend to cook the entire batch and then freeze half. I just add them to the biscuit box (still frozen) later in the week and they are totally fine. Each time I’ve made them I’ve played with the recipe – rolled out and cut out and then ice, rolled out and cut out and left plain, cut into circles and then a large chocolate button pushed into the middle (thanks Kim – the chocolate was great!) and today, rolled into balls and then rolled in cinnamon and sugar.  NOM!

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I am also making TONS of playdough right now. (In fact I have Christmas playdough plans which I must get onto!) My mum gave me her recipe, which I lost. However the same recipe turned up in Let’s Play Dough which is a free ebook from the NurtureStore which is full of good ideas and well worth checking out.

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I said I would talk more about Raising Playful Tots. I came across this podcast because they interviewed Annie Riechmann from Bird and Little Bird (and the creator of Alphabet Glue, which I LOVE!) a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve been slowly downloading the archive and having a good time listening to older episodes. I am really picky about podcasts and right now the only other ones I listen to are the Friday Night Comedy podcast from Radio 4 and Savage Love, both of which I can only listen to when the children are asleep or I’m on my own. Raising Playful Tots however can be on during the day. Which is great. If you have small children it’s worth checking out.

So there you have it. A short list, of mostly interlocking things that are of interest to me right now. Maybe they might interest you too.

*Btw NONE of these links are affiliate links. Not that there is anything wrong with affiliate links, but I’m not currently affiliated to anything (apart from the shops that sell my yarn, maybe?) I’m just putting these links out there because I genuinely think they are good things. Have at them, if they also seem interesting to you.