Observations

1. We think Jake was a kung fu master in a former life (see photo above).

2. It's amazing how well you can function on only four hours sleep (driving and operating heavy machinery not withstanding).

3. Where does the time go?

4. There is no warmth like the warmth of a baby sleeping on you.

5. When he sleeps, he sleeeeeeps. When he's awake, we know about it.

6. There is no such thing as wasting time anymore.

7. Remembering to and getting a chance to have a shower is a cause for celebration.

8. I've finally learned to gobble my food down.

9. Getting baby pee, poo and spit up all over you is not the end of the world.

10. I wouldn't change this for anything.

For more observations, go to Sunday Scribblings.

Life with Jake

My little wriggler

Baby Jake arrived on Wednesday 23rd July at 8:45am. He was born at home, weighing in at 8.5lbs, and only a day late!

The labour went well, an intense and quick 7 hours and was all natural except for a couple of hours while I was sucking on the Entonox resisting the urge to push till I was fully dilated. That Entonox is GOOD STUFF!!

Baby Jake is very healthy, a real wriggler! And he's definitely got his Daddy's long legs and feet.

He's crying a lot at the moment though, we think he's finding the heat a bit much, poor little fella.

Despite the lack of sleep and the heat, Paul and I are doing well too and are very happy and busy falling in love with our little boy.

Love to you all.

How to wait for your baby to arrive...

1. Go for walks (waddles) round the neighbourhood.

2. Try to remember that for every person who ogles your belly in disbelief, there is another who looks at you and smiles.

3. Enjoy everything you are still eating.

4. Watch all those films you've been saving for a rainy day.

5. Start reading a 637 paged novel.

6. Listen to Louis Armstrong.

7. Enjoy watching the new Mom across the street when she feeds her baby by the window.

8. Tell yourself it's perfectly normal to feel the need to pee every time you sit down.

9. Steep yourself in the joy and mystery of the sound of Buddhist monks chanting (and even join in).

10. Listen to Cat Stevens' Ruby My Love as many times as you want because it makes you want to cry with joy.

11. Moan as much as you want, but then be positive.

12. Seek out pleasures like peach icecream and the best jello ever to be made.

13. Write to that juice company to ask them why they put sweetened condensed milk in their fruit juice instead of just complaining about it.

14. Hug your partner, lots.

15. Enjoy the silence.

16. Remember that every mother on earth has gone through this.

17. Remind yourself that it is impossible to stay pregnant forever.

18. Belly dance to The Mercy Seat and Skokian, remembering what the true origins of belly dancing were.

19. Relax, breathe and do nothing else.

20. Remember this:

Blooming and growing...

...with three weeks to go, though now that I am at 37 weeks, I'm considered to be full term and he could arrive at any moment!

I'm finally on maternity leave, it was just the right time to finish work. I had a lovely send off, including this gorgeous bunch of flowers. The peonies are opening and blooming beautifully, giving me a wonderful image to focus on for the birth.

Hope you are having a fantastic summer, whatever you're up to.

Happy cats in their new home

New life

One of the first things we did after unpacking was to wash the clothes we're going to need for baby Jake's first few months...we've never had anything so adorable on our washing line before.

Scroll down further for baby Jake's first gifts, from his wonderful fairy godmother in Nipomo.


























I'm loving the tie dye look!! Thank you Changa!!

Moving and stuff

Well, we're moved in and all, and the flat is lovely! But we only have the internet on Paul's computer at the moment, and my photos are on my computer and Paul's computer is really uncomfortable to sit at, so blogging is gonna be a bit of a pain for a while.

Here is one photo of the day we moved in, clutching my beach ball belly. Even though I didn't do any lifting, it was still exhausting. More photos to come soon.

Meme

It's a rainy Friday evening and I just spotted this meme on na's blog, so decided to play along...

10 years ago I was 26 years old, renting an overpriced room about as big as a walk in cupboard that didn't even have it's own toilet. Everything was in one room, my single bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a shower, a two-ring electric cooker and a fridge. It was off the Portobello Road in Notting Hill. The walls were so thin I could hear everything my next door neighbours did and said. I hardly cooked because the smell of it would linger for days. So I visited the local chip shop far too often. I didn't think it was cool at all, it was dingy and depressing and my first taste of living alone in London. I despaired of ever finding anywhere affordable and decent to live by myself in London and definitely never imagined that in 10 years time I'd be expecting a baby. 10 years ago I probably didn't even want children.

5 things on my to do list

- Finish packing!

- Send out change of address cards to people not on email

- Buy some newborn baby clothes, nappies and a Moses basket before we move, just in case

- See the Hammershoi exhibition with Mad

- Go to the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward

Things I'd do if I was a billionaire

- Give millions of it away to good causes, I hate the idea of being that rich. Anyone that rich has probably had to exploit a lot of people to get that way.

- Use some of the money towards building a green home and setting up some sort of sustainable living / permaculture scheme to grow organic food for local communities

- Set up a fund so that such schemes could be set up all over the UK

- Put money away for my baby's future

Three bad habits

- Irritable when I am tired

- Very judgemental of noisy people

- Buying too many books that then go unread

5 places I've lived in the past

- Jerusalem, Israel

- Damascus, Syria

- Long Island, New York, USA

- Rawalpindi, Pakistan

- Nicosia, Cyprus

5 jobs I've had

- bit part in a Cypriot chocolate commercial

- babysitting

- envelope stuffer

- substitute ESOL teacher in a family hostel

- Administrator

Have a great weekend. I probably won't be posting anymore till after we've moved house.

P.S. The photo above was taken last summer, during a walk through Kensington Gardens where I found some fallen flowers, brought them home and kept them. I made several drawings of them once they had dried and I still have those dried flowers today!

Below are some of the drawings I made from the flowers...

From our trip to the seaside

But we did take a break from the packing and went on an impromptu trip to the seaside, just before the weather turned stormy the day after we got back...






















There are more pictures from that trip on my other blog.

Suddenly it's all happening quite quickly...

So here's Lottie "helping" me pack. She loves climbing into containers. I wouldn't be surprised if she accidentally gets packed into a box on moving day.

If all goes well, we should be moving in just over two weeks. We've been giving stuff away, throwing stuff away, selling stuff, packing, sorting through donated baby clothes, going to ante-natal classes and I have been trying to see as many of my friends as possible without tiring myself out.

Suddenly I'm 32 weeks along and in the process of moving house and changing midwives. And I have about 5 weeks of work left before starting maternity leave!

Some days I take it all in my stride, other days it seems so unreal.

Life and all that...

So after not drawing for many months, I had the urge to pick up my pen the other day. Not with the aim of making a good picture or creating art, but just to look and see and be quiet and be in the present moment and draw. So here it is, my page of just drawing...and yes, that is Jakey in the bottom corner there. He settled himself in front of me and purred away happily.





























The sun has also finally graced us with its presence, it's actually really warm now, it actually feels like the season has changed and I can wear my summer dresses! Hurrah!! Indeed, here is a photo of me enjoying one of those dresses, with a view of the bump from above. Not even the hoardes of tactless acquaintances and perfect strangers remarking on my enormousness (and I only have about 3 more months of this to go!!!) can put me off enjoying the sunshine and my summer dresses!

Only thing about the warm weather is that I feel less like knitting. But perhaps I will start a little hat knitted with cotton yarn soon.














And finally, after the reprieve we got from our landlady, we decided to move sooner rather than later after all. We got talking to some people with kids and they all said it would be easier to move before the baby comes than moving with a newborn. So we went out and found ourselves a gorgeous flat to rent in my old neighbourhood. Not only is it cosier, homelier and lovelier in many ways, and on a quieter street, it's also cheaper. Sometimes, it's easy to believe that life is on your side.

Wishing you many happy sunny days...

It's finished!!!

26 weeks

Some of you have asked about tummy growth updates. Well, this is me, right now, at 26 weeks. And trying to stay positive about having to move soon. We just found out our landlady wants her house back. This is one of the perils of renting of course, but why did it have to be now? We have a month or so to sort something out.

UPDATE: Our landlady has given us a 6 month reprieve so we don't have to move now till November. Phew! I had been considering showing up at her door and guilt tripping her with the bump but now I don't have to.

For Na (shadowsandclouds)

Thinking of you. With love.

my first baby hat!

Here is my first ever knitted baby hat! It's for the Save the Children hats for newborns campaign that I mentioned a few posts ago. Yes, it really is dinky - the circumference measures 10 inches. This is because the babies they support tend to be small.

I really enjoyed knitting this. I followed their pattern and it was the most complicated thing I have knitted so far. Considering my lack of experience, I am very pleased that I figured out how to do it all by myself! It even looks like it should! Yay!!

The wool was a skein of handspun Debbie Bliss "Maya" that I bought about 5 years ago when I first thought I'd learn to knit, but never used. Sometimes I'm glad I never throw things away!!

Have you knitted a hat for a baby yet? Tell me about it!!

All the squares!!

So I finally finished knitting all 56 squares for my baby blanket. Now I just need to sew them together!!

Here are all the squares laid out in the design I want to use. I had to change the layout slightly from the earlier design, as I ran out of wool for certain colours and had to make more squares in other colours to compensate.

This sewing together looks complicated! Every other square needs to be rotated 90 degrees and I still need to work out which is the "right" side of each square and which is the "wrong" side! They look the same to me! Wish me luck.

Painting the cat

So here are the next stages of gessoing and then painting the papier mache cat... I decided to make him as a tribute to our beloved Caesar who passed away in January. That's why he's blue and has stars on him.















He just needs some finishing touches until he's completed, though I'm still not sure what colour to paint the stars.

For those of you who asked, I only used newspaper (folded into a tube, balled up, or twisted or manipulated into various shapes as needed) and masking tape to make the cat's body, tail, paws and head. Card was used for the ears. No wire or other support was necessary, but you can be quite creative about what to use as support - including the cardboard rolls from finished rolls of toilet paper, old plastic yoghurt pots, pipecleaners, chicken wire, you name it. It doesn't have to be fancy and it all depends on what shapes you are trying to create.

You just have to make sure everything is tightly packed and secured before you start laying down the strips of newspaper with the paste, and ensure you paste 3 - 5 layers of newspaper over the entire cat. Then, leave to dry completely before painting. Don't worry if it seems messy while you're pasting. Once it's dried, it looks much better.

I did reshape the cat after one round of pasting and drying, by cutting away bits I didn't like with a craft knife, adding new bits, and then repasting and drying again before painting. Use acrylic gesso as a primer, then acrylic paints for the colour, and if you want to varnish it, you can use an acrylic gel medium instead of other types of varnish.

Crafty weekend

Hello all, here are a few pics from my recent crafty weekend making a papier mache cat. Finally! I've been wanting to do this for years. I have my friend S.S. to thank for the inspiration and starting it off with me. Sheila McGraw's book Papier Mache Today was also a great help.

The cat's not finished yet, he still needs gessoing and painting which I will hopefully make a start on today.

I had planned on taking pictures from the beginning and through the different stages, but it was too messy! I made the paste out of flour and water and used my hands to apply it. I haven't gotten that messy in years, what fun!! It was a lot easier than I thought it would be too.

P.S. Only 5 squares to go on my baby blanket!!