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May 16, 2004
9 Months
We are still working away at things in the house, like organizing the basement and doing filing. We have set aside areas of the basement for certain areas of the house that we don’t have places for for the boxes and other paraphernalia that we have accrued. So, there is an office area, a storage area, a garage items area, an outside items area…we have set up a little office of sorts down there, with the second computer (we had to make sure it was working after the move for damage purposes, it just sits unplugged there though) and piles and piles of filing and things to sort through. It is astonishing how much paper work we have gathered in such a short amount of time and it all has to go somewhere, or be lost forever. Also, all of our file boxes, you know, the cardboard ones you can get, that I had carefully filled and labelled in Halifax had been really hurt by the move. I mean, these are really sturdy boxes, we had not been really gentle with them in Halifax, and they were bashed in at the corners, the lids were ripped, one lid was missing entirely, basically, I am going to have to go through them and transfer them to totally new boxes. We had gone out and purchased a brand new, sparkly, black 4-drawer filing cabinet from Staples for all our filing stuff. Our old filing drawer, a 2-drawer thing we got from Walmart when we lived in Victoria was dying. Well, to be honest, it was dead, and had been since we moved into the house in Halifax, 2 years ago. :-) But, you do what you can with what you can, so we kept it. We were able to buy this new one right now, so we went ahead and got it. Certainly, we need it for all the things that you collect as a house owner, but also all my thesis files, Simon’s work files and Iain’s stuff now too.
Anyway, that was one thing that we did on the weekend. The other was to set up the workout area of the basement. We have our Bowflex and are looking to purchase an erg (a rowing machine for all those not familiar with this other name). We would also like to get a treadmill, for me to walk on (my knees are so shot, running is no longer an option for me) and Simon to run on. And, I suppose, for Iain to crawl on, if he so desires. :-) So, we swept out the area right at the bottom of the stairs really well, and vacuumed the spare sofa that is down there now. Holy smokes, was it ever dusty, and only a couple of weeks down there! Although, I suppose, we have swept a few times already, it was REALLY dusty down there from all the construction, and all that dust in the air has to settle somewhere. So, now it is nice and clean and we took a spare king-sized sheet that we have for some reason and laid it over and tucked it in so that it acts as a sort of slipcover. That way we won’t have to work so hard to clean it next time. Also, when we are all sweaty after or during our workouts we don’t have to worry about sitting down on a nice clean sofa. We have set up the Bowflex now too, it is all ready with all cables and everything hooked up. Now, we just need to start using it! :-)
Now, about that erg. We found one for sale in the bargain hunter’s magazine here and I phoned the lady who was selling it. We set up an appointment to go and see it, but she must have forgotten about it that day, because there was no one home the first time we went by. We did a couple errands and went by again, this time the doorbell was answered, but the lady was still not there, her mother answered the door. That night we got a phone call from her, where she apologized profusely and we set up another appointment to go and see the machine, the next day, which happened to be Mother’s Day. We arrive, she is there and we check out the erg. It is great, the chain is really smooth as is the slide, there is hardly any wear on it at all. The only downside is that she didn’t have the manual or warranty information as she herself bought it from an elderly couple who barely used it. We tell her that we will get back to her either that night or the next day whether or not we will buy it. As we drive to our next errand we decide that it is too good of an opportunity to pass up and we will indeed buy it. I phone the next afternoon and leave a message for her. When she returns my phone call that evening, she has bad news, she apparently sold it the previous evening! How fair was that to us? She gave no indication when we were there that there was anyone else looking at it. If there was, we would have bought it on the spot, that is for sure. So, we are slightly ticked off at her for not disclosing this information to us and being fair. Now we have to keep looking for another erg and hope that it is either newer (that one was quite old, two generations back) or is in as good condition. :-( Simon would be the one primarily using it, but if I was really careful, I might be able to do some 20 minute pieces (workouts in rowing speak).
Sometimes it is hard to remember when I was rowing, because I loved it so much, because I was so, so fit, because the sound of the blades turning in the locks echoed across the still lake water and I can still hear it. I miss the sport so much that it hurts sometimes, but I know that I can’t do it right now, maybe not ever again. My knees are just too far gone now I think to be doing that again. However, if someone came up and offered me a seat in the eight, I would take it in a heartbeat, the pain I would just deal with. There was something magical that happened when eight people were in sync, powering through the water, moving over the water like that and I will never, ever forget those memories. They beat in me, keeping me strong when I don’t feel like working out or doing one more set. They tell me that I worked my butt off for four months, everyday, no rest, and that I LOVED every minute of it. So, I can go out and do this walk, I can do one more set, because it is nothing compared to the work and effort that I put in when I was in full-time training. So, I still have that spirit in me, even though there is so much different about me now than the person I was then. I just have to uncover that spirit a little more, let it free, because spirits don’t do well caged up, do they? :-)
The other thing that we did this week was mount pictures in the house. Man, does it look SO much better in here now, with things on the walls. Feels much more like a home now, like OUR place, not just somewhere that we are living in. We put up almost every single picture we own, and I love the places that we have put them. They fit really well with the walls, the colours of the paint, the furniture locations... Just fantastic. I have a couple of posters that I want to hard-back mount at Costco and a couple of prints that I want to frame… oh, and I would love to buy a couple of Ansel Adams prints for a particular wall here, but that is about it. We still want to get something special for our bedroom, but are not quite sure what right now, so we will just keep our eye out. Something funny about this is that Iain was entranced the whole time we were hanging things. He would follow us from room to room and just stare up at the walls, looking for things to look at now. The picture of him, crawling around with his head craned upwards to check out if this wall was different is really cute and funny at the same time. He was quite taken with a particular picture downstairs, he kept crawling towards it with his head up, looking at it, then getting distracted at something else he could play with, only to find the picture and stare at it again. :-)
We almost have a garage. The slab was poured a week ago and the framing has been started. We have all of our walls up and the roof trusses got dropped off just a couple days ago and were put up just this weekend. Now, we just need the sheeting for the trusses, then shingles. Oh, and the stucco for the sides. But it feels great to have the garage there because it gives us a real feel for how the backyard will be. And it also gives us more privacy from the lane, which is great. I have no idea how long it will be until we can park in there and close the door, but even just to start parking in there now and get off the street will be great. But we have to wait until the roof is sheeted first. I just hope that it is parkable before the road is paved, otherwise we will have nowhere to park when the city comes around and starts the process of paving our road.
We have found and purchased a dinette set. But we don’t have it yet. I have been scouring the newspaper flyers for a little table and chairs set for our breakfast area for a couple of weeks now to no avail. Well, this past week I saw two potential tables. They were both pretty similar, metal chairs and table base, glass top, but one was a round table, where the other was a round square. That is, a square top but with rounded edges. We went into the store with the round square one and liked it quite a bit, it was slightly more expensive than the round one, but we really don’t like the idea of a round table, there is usually just not quite enough space for seating four people that it becomes too squishy. Plus, when you bring a high chair to the equation, it gets even more squishy. Because of the sale price, they were out of stock when we bought it and I was to phone in in a week and a half to see if there were any in. We were really hoping to have the table for when my Mum visits, just this past weekend and we lucked out. A couple days before she arrived, it came in and I went and picked it up. Simon was able to put it together quite easily and we LOVE how it looks in the space. Where there was a void in the space between the living room and the kitchen, it looks nice now, looks as if it was supposed to have a little dinette set there. :-) And the high chair pulls up really well to the table, so Iain can eat with us! Yeay! The only thing that doesn’t quite work is the fabric on the seat cushions, but I can easily put on new fabric, if I get a spare moment…When will that be? That’s right, when all four of my (present and future) children are grown and out of the house, right? :-P
Finally, the only thing left for the builder to complete inside the house are the holes in the concrete foundation downstairs. There are four holes, and two of them are drains. But he doesn’t understand that two are drains and are supposed to be drains, so he has come by several times to ‘inspect’ the problem. Wellll, one drain is for the hot water tanks, so if they need to be emptied, they can drain into there… and the other drain is for the entire basement, in case of flooding. The hot water drain is located right by the hot water tanks, the other drain is huge, to handle potential huge flooding. Seems logical to me, but… Ah well, it was supposed to be done when they were pouring the garage pads, but didn’t for some reason. Now it will be done when the sidewalks are being poured. We’ll see. The builder has started to gather a reputation for not following up on the details that need to be finished when you build a house. We’re starting to get a little impatient. I’ll leave it at that.
We have gone out and bought a sport stroller contraption called the Chariot, for Iain and his future siblings. It is like a jogging/bike stroller, but comes only as the carriage part. You can then buy whatever mount system that you will use. There is a stroller set, a jogging stroller set, a bike trailer set, a hiking set and a skiing set. Yeah, skiing, as in you strap little skiis to the carriage and you can go cross-country skiing or hiking in the snow, or snowshoeing. Isn’t that awesome? We are looking to become a lot more involved in outdoor exercising here, and winter is a major part of the outdoors here. We wanted a carriage system that could endure holding multiple kids and handle the outdoors as well and have found a fantastic system. Plus, it was designed by active parents who couldn’t find anything like this on the market and is continuously being updated to make sure it satisfies safety standards and usage. Plus, it is made in Canada. Sometimes I get really frustrated by baby products that are made in the US and just modified to meet Canadian standards, and you have to ship it out to an American location to get it fixed. With this, I know I won’t have that problem. Oh! The funniest thing about this shopping adventure was that the bike store that we went to was the same one that we were at when we bought Simon’s bike last year, when we were in town for my Uncle’s funeral. And…the sales fellow was the same guy too. He remembered us and the bike Simon got and I introduced Iain to him, saying that this was the little guy who was just a bun in the oven when you met him last. He is such a great salesguy, has helped us out tremendously, even discounting the system to match a competitor’s price just down the street.
We took the Chariot out for a test with the jogging system, I put it all together by myself because I wanted to make sure that I could do it by myself. After all, it will be me using it the majority of the time on the trail systems around here and I need to do it confidently! I only forgot one thing that Simon corrected, but overall, I did pretty good for the first time. We couldn’t test the bike trailer as we dropped off our bikes to be serviced when we bought it and they won’t be ready for a couple weeks. Iain had a ball inside, he had blankets and toys and just LOVED looking out at Brook running around us at the park. You have to have a helmet when they are in there as the bike trailer and we bought the CUTEST little helmet for Iain. Oh my goodness, it is so sweet. He had it on in the bike store and so many customers would point and smile at him crawling around with this huge helmet on. Oh, and it is oranges and yellows, with diggers and dump trucks all over it :-) Like I said, too cute. Simon took off with him to test that he would be okay with bumping and such and apart from holding onto his helmet with both hands, he did really well, no cries or fussing at all. So, we are all set for adventure!
We have had an offer on the house in Halifax, and our own real estate agents have been trying to scam us. They gave us some numbers of the offer, saying that it saves us this and that. Yeah, uhm, I don’t think so, we are smarter than that. We know all the tax numbers and the commission rates and have it set up in excel. Well, we put in their offer and it came no where near what they said it was equal to. We are starting to get irritated with our agents. I keep having to phone them to see what is happening on the house, and it’s not like I phone daily, more like every week and a half or so. It is harder dealing with a sale across so much distance, we don’t know what the market is doing there and have to rely upon other people’s information. They only just had the second open house on the property, and their contract expires this coming week. We are not going to renew with them, but go with another agency. When they talk to us it sounds too much like they are speaking from the buyer’s perspective, instead of the seller’s perspective. They represent us, after all, not the buyer. The buyer has their own agent. Just getting frustrated is all here, we are willing to wait, but at the same time, we need an agent who is actually going to work to sell the house too!
Okay, on to Mother’s Day! In some ways, I had a fantastic first Mother’s Day, in others, it was hurtful. Let me tell you about the latter first so that I can tell you about what we did that day and end on a happier note. First of all, our relationship with Simon’s parents, particularly his mother, has become increasingly strained. She has, in the past, always been a great mother-in-law, but with the arrival of Iain, something in her has changed. Yeah, I know, she’s a grandmother now, but that isn’t it, quite. Whenever we talk with her, she always is asking what Iain is up to (yeah, again, I know, but just wait) and then asks whether Simon did that development first. Like crawling, like going up stairs, like standing up on things, like standing by himself…We have gotten really tired at her asking things only to compare them as to whether Simon did them first or not. It’s like she is trying to make sure that Simon is besting my son at all his developmental stages. We finally got out Simon’s baby book to see when he really WAS doing things and have found out that Iain is doing things 2 – 6 weeks before Simon was. Oh, and something else rather disturbing that we found out from the book? Simon’s first word was BAD. What does that say about how he was parented??!! That that word was said so frequently and repeatedly around him as a baby that it was the first word that he said. Makes both him and I feel really sad and yet determined that Iain’s first word will be nothing like that.
Okay, back to his mother. She has also been anything but supportive of our move. When Simon was talking to her about his interview with the company, all she had to say was “Don’t get your hopes up.” Seriously, what kind of mother says that? Simon had been out of work since three weeks before Iain arrived, Iain was 5.5 Months old at that point, finances were starting to get strained at that point and his family knew it, and she says THAT? That was really the starting of the end for us with her. She has become increasingly disrespectful and rude to me in her phone calls, keeps giving formula advice even though Simon has been as clear as humanly possible with her that I am pumping and that Iain is getting exclusively breastmilk, she wasn’t happy in the least that we were moving closer to her, after bitching and complaining for the entire time we lived in Halifax that it was too far away. *Sigh* It’s just hard, because Simon is the eldest and he feels responsibility for taking care of his parents and making them happy, but he places his own family, me and Iain, above those responsibilities. So, he is sad and frustrated that she is acting this way and we have stopped phoning them on Sundays like we always did, we wait for them to phone instead, because we don’t want to deal with anymore negativity from his mother.
So, like the good daughter-in-law that I am, I went out to specifically buy Mother’s Day cards, signed and sent it off to her. She ALWAYS makes cards for us. Valentine’s, New Home, Christmas, New Year’s, Anniversary, Birthday… You name it, she sends off a card. No card arrived from her. No card arrived from my own mum (but I wasn’t as hurt, she is somewhat more scatter-brained on these things and it’s really hit and miss with her, I’ve lived my whole life with her like this). On Mother’s Day, there were no phone calls, not from my mum (I was more hurt by this, but again, have been hurt by her so much in my past that I have grown immune to it really) but more so, it was also a Sunday, and there was no call from Simon’s parents. They have been ecstatic grandparents, quite doting, and I am the one who MADE them grandparents. I refuse to cry over this, but I am quite close. I mean, it was my very, very, very first Mother’s Day, I will NEVER again have a day like this, and they didn’t even bother to make their standard phone call, let alone a semi-special one to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day. :-( And I had mailed her a card, making sure it would have arrived before the day, so she could open it that morning. What makes me feel better about this is how upset this has made Simon as well. He really doesn’t like how his mother has been treating me and Iain and fully supports me in my feelings about this, which relieves me as at least I don’t have to pretend or fight against him to show him what she is doing. So, we are united as a team against her, so to speak.
Okay, on to what we did that day, which is much nicer than talking about Simon’s mother. I awoke late, having not been woken up by Iain because there was only silence from his room, went to pump and then had a lovely, long, hot shower, all by myself. That is to say, I didn’t have to go get Iain when he woke up and change his diaper, in fact it wasn’t until I was in the shower that I saw him, when Simon and Iain came up to visit while something was cooking downstairs. Iain is a hoot when we are in the shower, because the shower is 4.5 feet long and has a glass wall for him to look through. He’ll stand up and bang on the door, following our hand if we reach out to touch the glass too. And he does all of this with a huge grin on his face. Anyway, I even was able to shave my legs in the shower, how luxurious! When I was done slathering myself with lotion and dealing with my hair, I went downstairs to see what had been happening while I was making myself beautiful upstairs. Simon had made me waffles and sausages, the sweet man! They were a little cold, for which he felt really badly about because he wanted to serve me a hot breakfast. I told him that this was probably the most edible Mother’s Day breakfast that I would have, because next year, and in future years, Iain will want to help, and it might not be so ‘edible.’ So, having slightly cold waffles and sausages was just fine, given that I was able to eat them without pretending that they were good! :-)
I phoned my best friend in Halifax to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, her first as well. I got a little teary-eyed with the phone call because I knew that if I was in town, we would probably be doing something together on this special day. She phoned me back just before we were heading out, and it was really great to talk with her. I can’t really say how much I miss her, it’s really intangible. I mean, we didn’t talk every day when I lived in Halifax, but the fact that I could call her up and talk with her whenever, well, I can’t really do that here because of the time difference, and well, it just isn’t the same. So, I miss her and it was really great to talk with her on Mother’s Day and find out how her little girl, Fiona, a.k.a. Iain’s girlfriend, was doing. So, like I said, she had phoned me back just before we were going out. We had an appointment to go and see that erg that I have already talked about. We went out and I packed my pump so that we wouldn’t have to go back home for me to pump, we could continue on our way doing what we wanted to do that day. After looking at the erg I got in the backseat and hooked myself up to the pump, and pumped as Simon drove us to the mall. I finished up pumping in the underground parkade and we headed to the food court for lunch as a special treat. After lunch… Old Navy, here we come! I got to go shopping for a couple of summer dresses :-) I got three dresses and one skirt and two shirts, all summery and lovely. I can’t wait to start wearing them, I just hope that the weather holds up to wearing something so summery. Or, perhaps what I am wearing will inspire Mother Nature to oblige? A girl can always hope!
The next stop was a chocolate shop, but not just any chocolate shop, the best one in the world. Okay, that may be a personal opinion, but it really is good. I grew up with this chocolate shop’s candies and confections, my grandfather knew the founder back in the day (it’s really old, circa turn of the century 1900’s). I even worked there for a summer when I was a student in Victoria. So anyway, I got to choose a whole 1lb box of chocolates, picking my favourite chocolates… I couldn’t wait until that night when I could eat them! :-) We headed home after that, Iain didn’t fall asleep as I had thought he would and he was itching for a nap. We also wanted to watch the end of the Hockey game that was on. I can’t actually remember what we had for dinner, I think it was just a regular dinner, and afterwards I got to eat my chocolates, sharing of course with Simon! Iain did indeed go down early, but woke up a bit just before his last bottle was ready. Simon rocked him in the nursery while I got the bottle ready. When he gave him to me, he said that there was one last thing, and there was, I had forgotten about it.
We had gone to a jewellery store the day before to look at charm bracelets. Simon had thought and thought and pondered and pondered about what to get me for my first Mother’s Day. He wanted to get something that with each sequential child, we could do exactly the same thing. He thought of naming a star after each child, but didn’t like how the program was run, but the other thing he thought of was a charm bracelet. It is somewhat old-fashioned and sweet, and suits me perfectly. So, we headed to an old jewellery store, one that has been, I don’t want to say a constant in my life, but I have known about it since I was a little girl. It is another Canadian company, and they have absolutely STUNNING stuff. They had the typical gold bracelets, but they were really cutesy, and not me. There was a silver one though, with thick links for the chain, and a two inch plate where the chain was attached at one point. The charms for this bracelet were the letters of the alphabet, which is so lovely, because the letter I will get will be the first initial of every child’s name. :-) So, as I held my son in my arms, in his darkened room, Simon brought the box to me and I opened it up, officially. It was so beautiful in the box, such a wonderful gift, I am truly blessed to have such a caring and thoughtful husband, and a wonderful, playful, independent, snuggly son. :-)
The next day my Mum phoned me back, I had missed her and left a message for Mother’s Day. We were just talking when she suddenly said that she forgot to phone me and wish ME a Happy Mother’s Day. Her shock and dismay were so genuine that it immediately made me feel better about the whole thing. Like I said earlier, my Mum is really hit and miss with these things and I am SURE that she will remember next year. So, I feel a little better about her not phoning.
Oh, one other thing about Mother’s Day… It snowed. Yeah, it’s late May and it snowed. Gotta love Canada! LOL. It even continued to snow on Monday and Tuesday a bit, so we had the lovely white stuff on the ground for a few days there. It is gone now and the weather has again turned for the better, but who knows around here… Could be anything, anytime. :-)
We had our first visit just this weekend, my Mum came. She arrived on Thursday afternoon, at the perfect time. I was able to let Iain sleep through his nap, I was able to pump and finish up cleaning and tidying the house and then I picked her up. It was GREAT to see her again, as I mentioned above, and in previous entries, my relationship with my Mum has not been smooth, but has been better in the past two years or so than in the past 24 years. We haven’t seen her since she came to visit us in Halifax when Iain was just 3 weeks old… So, a lot has changed since then! LOL Iain is just a wee bit bigger now, among other things. We had a great hug when we met and she immediately bent down to also say hi to her first grandson. He was a little reserved initially, but quickly dropped the façade and wanted to touch her face, one of the things that he seems to do now. We had a great dinner that night, I had marinated salmon and we sat at our new dinette.
The next morning, I picked her up bright and early from her hotel, we had sh-sh-shopping to do! Brief note why she doesn’t stay with us, and it has nothing to do with Iain or us. Whenever she has the chance to get away from her house, she likes to stay in a hotel because she can really rest and relax by herself there. So, we offer again and again for her to stay with us, she stays in a hotel. Just a little quirk of my Mum’s. Like I said, we had shopping to do. My Mum has bought just about all of Iain’s clothes that he has worn since he was 3 weeks old. We did a gigantic shopping excursion when she last visited us where Simon and I were, to put it mildly, absolutely astounded at how much she spent. But then again, he had clothes for the first 9 months of his life. She came to visit this time because he has no clothes that fit him anymore, and she wanted to ‘do her duty’ as she said. Now, before people start to get upset at this whole thing of her buying so much, this is what she does. She has a very hard time showing love the way that most people show love, she grew up in a family where you got a present to show that you were loved. So, this is her way of showing how much she loves Iain, and Simon and I by default. I follow her lead in what she wants to buy and how much, and just go with the flow.
We brought the Chariot to act as a ‘sherpa’ as we were calling it and I brought my pump so that we didn’t have to go home. We hit this great outlet-type baby store first, because it had sleepers there that I wanted for Iain. The sleepers had a zip closure, absolutely essential for 3 am diaper changes, and just as importantly, had little no-slip feet, very important now that Iain is cruising on the hardwood floor for him not to slip when he stands up. She also bought two valences for the window in his room that match his bedding set and a laundry hamper too, two things that I didn’t expect her to buy, I just showed her the display of the bedding set and she asked if I would like those two things. I had been trying to convince Simon to get them, but he couldn’t justify it, but having Mum buy it was great! I wore Iain in the Bjorn in that store and by the time we were done, my back was getting really tired. That boy of mine is getting big!! :-) We carried on to the best baby store mall here, and went from one end to the other. We started at Sears and literally went to town. I got a ton of shirts, snappy-tees and pants, in three different sizes to fit Iain down the line until next spring, hopefully. Sears also has this fantastic designer that Iain has a couple of outfits from already. I think we got five, maybe six new outfits from this designer, all the way up to 26lbs, which should fit Iain with the way he is growing into the winter at least. Iain was content for a little bit to just sit strapped into the Chariot, but halfway through Sears, he started to get fussy. I unstrapped him so that he could roam about, using the Chariot as a literal rolling play-yard. He had a ball in there, and that is where he stayed almost the entire time we were at the mall, apart from a couple of times where we had to hold him – he just was getting a little bored in the Chariot and needed some personal time with someone.
The next store was this great place called The Children’s Place. I have to say, I LOVE this store! Price points are pretty good, and the clothing is really boy-like. Not baby boy, but rough and tumble boy, which is really what I like dressing Iain in. So there are tough jeans and nice striped snappy-tees, and oxford shirts if you need a nicer outfit for a wedding etc. Great place, love everything there. Did a lot of damage again :-) I made sure to get stuff in sizes up to 18 months which again should fit Iain well into the late winter next year. We had lunch at this point, and I left Iain to go and pump in the family room. I lucked out and found an outlet to plug my pump into but had to drag a chair over to it. I was a little in the way, but there really wasn’t too much I could do about it. The pumping was good and I chatted with the couple of Mums who were also in there nursing their babies. Iain drank the fresh milk when I came out and I learned that he and my Mum had gone on the Carousel in the food court – his first time! Apparently, he LOVED it, I just wish I had a photo of it! :-)
We carried on to two other stores, only getting a couple of things in each of them as we had already clearly done quite a bit of damage. I had already had to go out and dump the Chariot out into the Van, there was no room for Iain! We picked up Simon and had dinner out that night at one of our favourite restaurants. Iain had a great time tasting all of our food, he really loved the mushroom soup that Simon had as a starter. The next day we picked up Mum and went shopping for clothes for me, something that I hadn’t really expected. We went to Old Navy and I literally filled up one of their carts with clothing. Being a Saturday, the store was packed, but I finally got into a changing room and started the marathon of trying everything out. I ended up getting some great capri’s in one style, but in several colours and shorts again in the same style but different colours. Same for sleeveless shirts in a tee-shirt fabric and in a cotton. I got a couple of skirts and a couple of jean jackets too, for the warmer months here. The great thing was that I didn’t have anything like the things that my Mum bought, all I had was literally long winter skirts and sweaters in a shirt style and turtleneck style. I had been rapidly running out of things to wear, because in previous summers I had been working in an office and so had summer office wear. Nothing that I could wear while running around chasing after Iain…so I know that all of these things are going to get a ton of wear out of them. Plus, it’s not like I could wear any of the things I was wearing LAST summer… :-) Don’t have the belly to fill them up quite the same way!
I will say one last thing about my Mum buying all this stuff. If you see her, you will see that she is genuinely having fun and is genuinely happy doing this, like I said, it is the way that she knows how to say and show that she loves me. I have tried for years to show her that all I need her to do is say that she loves me, but oddly enough, doing that has had a negative effect on our relationship, she grows more distant when I try to show her how little I actually need from her. So, instead, I let her be happy, which in turn makes her a nicer person to be around, and our relationship blossoms. Just the way it is with her is all. We all have our quirks.
Sunday we got all dressed up and picked her up, we were going to brunch at one of the city’s landmarks. It was spectacular. The day was sunny and perfect, the best day you could have a Sunday brunch on and we had a great time. The food was impeccable, fresh and hot (or cold) to the last dish and our server was great. Simon and I celebrated with Mimosa’s. We treated the brunch as a belated Mother’s Day brunch, a wonderful way to celebrate with my Mum here. :-) Iain was pretty well behaved…he has started to get quite upset if we are eating, and NOT sharing with him. So, he sat in the highchair and I fed him little pieces of this and that. He loved it. We took a lot of photos, I can’t wait to see how they turned out. Afterwards we went to visit my cousin, my Mum’s niece. She is a darling girl, quite shy unless you have her around her precious horses, and then the change is startling. She completely commands this gigantic animal (okay perhaps not gigantic to me, but I am tall, she is only, maybe, 5’ 2”, so a 16 hand horse to her just towers over her) with a couple of softly said words. And the horse just follows her around like a lost puppy, it makes the sweetest picture. We put Iain up with her and took a couple photos too. And she LOVES Iain, we have approached her to do some baby-sitting and she has just lit up at the prospect, so that is great. Perhaps Simon and I can go out to dinner and a movie? HOW luxurious! We left so that we could drive Mum to the airport, and that was the end of it, a really great visit. :-)
Pumping issues…I was late to pump one weekend morning and really, really engorged. When I get that way, my nipples aren’t as sensitive to the suction of the pump and I can often turn it up higher, sooner, than I normally would. Well, I guess I turned it up too high, because they were really sensitive afterwards. They then continued to be sensitive to pressure and me brushing against things, even with the nursing pads in my bra, as I always have. It wasn’t until my afternoon pump that I examined them – I had blisters :-( Blisters are rotten, I am quite familiar with them from trying to nurse Iain, but I hadn’t had them in a looooong time. Darn it! The problem with blisters is that they cover up the ducts and it takes a long time to pump because you don’t have as many ducts squirting milk. And then the other thing is that they are so sensitive that you can’t have the suction up high at all. So, it takes forever, I mean forever, to pump. I can usually be done pumping in 25 – 30 minutes, but I was taking closer to 50 minutes. That is a really long time when Iain is awake and needs attention etc. It took about a week or so for me to heal from those to where I could turn up the suction more and the pumping time took a little less.
Then, I got a milk bleb. A milk bleb is where a blister fills up with milk instead of the watery substance that usually fills up a blister. It, for some reason, is not as painful as a blister is, thankfully! And also, you can go ahead and pop the bleb, so that the milk comes out, it helps in healing the situation more quickly. I think that the entire past two weeks I have had pumping issues, but thankfully, finally, they are through and I am all healed from all of them. Mostly. I still have a little bit of residual scabbing from the worst of the blisters, but that decreases almost daily, so I should be done with it in a couple more days.
Apart from that, I am freezing milk like a fiend, Iain is still drinking the old frozen milk. We put all of my milk into big frozen chicken breast boxes that we had in Halifax and made the mover’s move for us. They were wondering why :-) I can fit 34 bottles in one box, and I’ve got two boxes now I think. Oh, and they are 6oz bottles too. So, that’s about two weeks of milk for Iain. I need to have at least three weeks, but that won’t be a problem given how much I am pumping and how much he is eating nowadays. Oh, I should probably explain WHY I need to have three weeks of milk! Okay, in the extreme chance that something happens to me, or I need to take medication that is not breastmilk friendly, or is not breastfeeding friendly, that is, reduces my supply, or can get through to Iain, I need to be sure that there is milk for him to drink if that scenario occurs. So, that is why the reserve of milk. It’s not for if I want to go out or whatnot, as an exclusive pumper, that just never happens because I am always pumping for him.
Now for the part of my entry that I dedicate solely to what my precious and precocious baby boy is up to! :-) As I had mentioned above, Iain is starting to get upset when we eat, and he doesn’t. He makes this whining sound and throws his head back, straining his body, clearly in some sort of pain that he his not receiving food into his mouth. Have we created a monster? Or is this something that would have happened regardless, just because of his strong and stubborn personality? I don’t know if we will ever know the answer to these questions. We had a warm streak of weather and one night had popsicles. Iain was intrigued. Simon offered him a taste and he tentatively opened his mouth a little bit. It only took him a moment to process that he really liked this new thing and he opened his mouth up wide for another taste. :-) Well, Iain and Simon shared that lime popsicle, Iain just sort of sucking as much as he could into his mouth and then retreating with that taste, Simon biting off chunk. When Simon finished it, Iain got upset! I asked for him because I still had a significant portion of my popsicle. I offered it to Iain and he bit off a huge chunk!! LOL The expression on his face was hilarious, have you ever seen a baby with brain freeze? Simon was just laughing as I am trying desperately to get this huge chunk of food out of his mouth before he chocks…After that, he didn’t want any more and the next day, I made him popsicles of his own, so we could eat ours in peace.
When we were at brunch, the only way to keep him quiet was to continuously feed him food. He had blueberries, orange slices, cucumber, strawberry… I have a fantastic photo of Simon feeding him an orange slice. :-) Now, when we sit down to dinner, he wants what is on our plate, and is starting to NOT want what is on his, usually some sort of pureed food. We try to feed him the pureed food first and then give him ‘real’ food. This is starting to not work as well as it first did, he is just getting too upset with the pureed food, especially if we have brought over the other food and he can see it. Oh dear, what have we done?? I think that the trick may be that we feed him as fast as we can the pureed food, and then bring over the ‘real’ food and feed him that. We’ll have to see!
The other thing is that he is on a new eating schedule. Since he began eating so much solid food at dinnertime, he wasn’t finishing his 8oz bottle at 10:00, eating only 6oz. So, we have completely changed his bottle schedule. He still gets all of his regular bottles until 6:30pm, but then he doesn’t get the 8:00 or 10:00 bottles. We have substituted in a 8oz bottle at 9:30. The other reason for the schedule change is that he used to go to sleep with the 8:00 bottle but lately has been staying up until 10:00. Now, he is going to sleep with the 9:30 bottle, but most importantly, he doesn’t seem hungry afterwards, he just drifts off while eating and I put him into his crib, fast asleep. So, the schedule is working :-) He went down from drinking 32oz to 27oz and seems perfectly content. How do I know this? Well, the other thing is that if he has a long or late nap, he doesn’t eat his 2:30 bottle at 2:30, but rather closer to 4:00 or 4:30. And he is, and always has been, very clear with his needs, particularly hunger. :-) That boy knows what he wants and when he wants it.
Iain is phenomenal at recognizing the edge of something, like our bed, but hasn’t realized yet that the edge does not mean a wall. So, he will happily crawl around on our bed, going all the way to the edge and then sit himself up, with his back to the edge. Silly boy! He has, I admit, fallen off a couple of times, but then again, I have caught him hundreds of more times. I don’t know when he will start to gain this knowledge that the edge means that he can hurt himself, but I don’t mind right now. The fact that we can leave him on our bed and play while we get dressed without any real worries is a great thing. I don’t think that many other babies have this ability. It is the same thing that he does with the stairs, that I talked about in my last entry I think. He doesn’t try to go down them face first, instead recognizing that there is something greater than him there and it is dangerous.
Iain has, on two occasions, gotten upset as Simon expressed sadness or dismay. The first time they were playing in the van while I was in a store doing something or other. Simon had taken Iain’s soother in his mouth and when Iain tried to take it out, he would whimper. Well, the second time that he tried to take it out and Simon whimpered, Iain started to cry! Simon said that it was really sweet and cute, that he was clearly so upset that his Dad was upset. The second time he got upset was when he was being changed by Simon. Apparently, Iain had done a tremendous job at filling up his diaper with poop and Simon was doing all he could to try to make sure that he didn’t put his hands in it or his feet, while still trying to clean him up. Well, Iain managed to get his feet free I gather and plunk his foot right into the middle of the diaper. Simon exclaimed “oh no!” and Iain started to cry again! Simon then had to soothe him and still try to clean up. :-) Quite cute though, despite the reason for Simon getting upset!
Iain’s hair is changing. It is coming in really quite thick now, and has also seemed to change from the fine baby hair to a thicker, denser hair shaft. This is Simon’s hair, and the reason why he shaves his head, because you either have to have it chin length so that it stays down, or shaved with clippers close to the scalp. It is just too thick to manage in a typical men’s hair style. We have had a discussion on whether or not we will cut his hair, with me saying that we would not and Simon wanting to. Then, I finally said that we could, because the hair over his ears was getting really quite long, and Simon said that we would not cut it :-) Geez! So, now we are not going to cut it. For now.
My baby boy has his own style of sitting. He doesn’t really like to sit with his legs stretched straight out. He prefers to sit with both legs bent in one direction. I have noticed this again and again, and that is why I am writing about this. I have no idea whether other babies are so particular in how they sit, I never would have thought that it really made a difference. But I guess that to Iain, it does, and so this is the way that he prefers. That isn’t to say that he never sits with his legs stretched out straight, he does sit like that too. But if there is a choice, he sits in his own style.
Iain also has been playing with his soother more now and when he puts it back into his mouth, it has to be the right way around now. Before, he would put it in any old way and happily munch away on it. But starting just last week, he twists it so that it sits in his mouth the right way. I find this quite amusing after so long that he really didn’t care one way or the other, just as long as it was in his mouth. Don’t know what brought about this change, it was suddenly one day he wanted it in the right way, and has ever since!
Okay, last thing I think. Iain has gotten really quite good at transferring from the sofa or ottoman or our leg to something else, without going down into crawling to get to that second location. His balance has always been something that I marvel at, but lately he has been really excellent. I don’t know if walking is far behind this developmental step, I hope, for my own sanity, that it is still far down the road. I have still yet to come to terms with him crawling so much, so walking I know would drive me bananas. We had initially said when he started crawling so early at younger than 6.5 months old, that he would be walking by 9 months. Well, I am glad that we are wrong! :-) He will reach out for the second object, move his feet over until he can really get hold of it and then transfer his second hand. He is also able to let go and just lean against things like our legs or the bottom of the stairs quite confidently without really wavering at all. Oh, and when he does fall down and bonk his head, it is almost always because he is tired. And it is more the shock of letting go than the bonk that he fusses about. He generally doesn’t really cry if he bonks his head, Simon and I have really worked hard to condition him when he ‘hurts’ himself that if it really hurts, he can go ahead and cry. But if it doesn’t it is okay to smile and laugh about it. We have done this with him for many months now and it works great. Even when he does cry, he usually settles really quickly unless it is a giant fall.
**Talk to Me**
Do you have any fitness equipment in your home, if so, what is it and how much do you use it?
How was your Mother’s Day, and have you ever had something like what happened to me, happen to you?
Did your baby ever get upset when you were eating and not sharing with them, and what were your strategies to avoid the whining?
Namaste, Laura and Iain
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