(s)mother

This picture was too funny not to share, even though it does paint me in a terrible light.  Every time I kissed Dulcie's cheek, she would smile like a crazy baby, but as soon as I got the camera out to capture it, she got distracted by the technology and came over all serious and studious, making me look like the world's worst (s)mother.  I don't know how she puts up with me!  Gah, she is so cute these days.  Teething is awful, but the rosy cheeks do look adorable.

Excuse my bedhead, but do you see that little short bit in my hair on the right hand side of my forehead there?  I have a mysterious fringe (or hairy horns) growing in and I have seen the same thing on a couple of other mums so it must be a pregnancy/hormone thing.  I am hoping this means an end to post-baby baldness.  Hooray!

doof doof doofus

I've been getting quite upset watching EastEnders over the last week, what with the premature baby storyline.  The episode where the baby was born was the worst.  Being unconscious during Dulcie's delivery, I didn't witness any panic or resuscitation, but did have to read about it in the medical reports later.  I never saw Dulcie in person while she was on the ventilator for the first few days of her life and I found it quite traumatic to watch Janine's little baby (Patricia - amazing!) with her chest pumping up and down like that.  I was feeding Dulcie as I watched it and had to give her a tearful squeeze.  I suppose it makes me picture the scary things I was slightly protected from at the time and it is hard to think about Dulcie being in that situation even thought she is OK now.  Of course, we have laughed at all the dreadful inaccuracies (don't these shows employ researchers?! pah!) but mostly it is just quite upsetting.  There is also a premature baby in Home & Away at the moment, as well as a character who has recently been diagnosed with heart failure.  Didn't I say my life was like a soap opera these days?  

The positives to be seen in all of this are as follows: 1) Dulcie is a totally different (gigantic) baby from what she was back then and 2) if any character has to have a premature baby storyline then I'm glad it's Janine as she is ace and quite a good actress and not too hammy... for someone who is on marriage number four, has killed at least one husband and recently inherited millions from an elderly relative.

I gave up EastEnders for a very long time and only started watching again because it coincided with breastfeeding time.  (Breastfeeding is also my excuse for knowing what is happening in Home & Away and I'm sticking to it!)  For a while I found it painful to watch, but I am slowly beginning to enjoy it again.  Michael is a crap character though, as is Derek.  Get rid of them and Jean, bring back Dot and Pat and Stacey, and make sure Janine features heavily in every single episode.  That is my considered advice to you, BBC, and don't listen to anyone who doesn't approve of raising characters from the dead.

Right, I'm off to phone the number for people affected by the issues raised in tonight's episode.  Not really.

life in miniature

One of the fun things about having a baby is all the tiny samples of things you get.  I like the ones that come as a miniature version of the full-size item, in proper scaled-down packaging like this tiny pot of Sudocrem that lives in our changing bag...

...and this tiny tube of Bepanthen bum cream.

Yesterday I received this tiny bottle of Cif (you'll always be Jif to me!) which left me particularly excited, even though it did come with a leaflet about household hygiene that suggested you use this to (among other things) wipe down the changing mat "before and after every change".  Seriously?!  We had eight (yes, eight!) dirty nappies yesterday, plus all the usual wet ones.  This bottle would have been used up by lunchtime!  This is where I discover that everybody else does disinfect the changing mat before and after every change and that I really am that bad a mother.  Ah well, you can't have it all and Dulcie's immune system is going to rock!

the mother (and baby) lode

 May I, helped by my glamorous (still in her pyjamas) assistant, present to you the mother of all charity shop finds that I mentioned in my last post.  I found all these vintage girl's clothes in the rummage bin of the Salvation Army on Saturday and paid (wait for it) 50p a pop for them!  As you can see, Dulcie has a bit of growing to do before she'll fit into them, but hey, that gives me plenty of time to get that musty vintage smell out of them :)

 Even the man at the till, usually not very talkative, exclaimed at the cuteness of this one.

 Classic checks with a touch of lace on the collar and a big red bow on the back.

 Aw!  Might not be too long until she fits this one.

 This one is my absolute favourite and I nearly didn't spot it.  Yes, those are rosy red apples on the pockets.  Eep!

It really will be a long time before Dulcie can wear this one and by that time she might know her own mind well enough to be a vintage refuser, but given the anchors and the 50p price tag, I definitely thought it was worth a punt.

As well as these, we got two sun hats, two books and a computer version of Trivial Pursuit, which turns out to be far inferior to the board version.  That's like a lucky full day's haul and we only set foot in one shop.  Most satisfactory!  I joked (sort of) to Graham that if we didn't have a little girl to put in these clothes then I'd probably be setting up a life-changing online business with these bad boys.  Ah well, I'd rather see Dulcie wearing them than use them to start my multi-million-pound empire.  Honest!

Dulcie's expression is rather vacant/unimpressed in all these photos.  She's actually in a very bouncy and smiley mood today, thank goodness, but she's developed a bit of a fascination with technology lately and gives the camera serious contemplation whenever she notices it pointed at her.  She also loves the computer, my phone (if you can call that old thing technology) and the TV remote control.  Or maybe she just doesn't like vintage clothes?  Disaster!

saturday/sunday

 Yesterday we made the most of a break in the rain to go along to the Mela in Kelvingrove Park (via a charity shop, but more on that another day...) to see what was happening.  Turns out there were lots of exciting costumes, smells, sounds, sights and entertainments.  Dulcie enjoyed it too, when she finally woke up!  Excuse the glare of these and other recent photos, by the way.  I think something happened to my camera settings, but hopefully I have fixed it now.

 The best thing we saw, I think, were these dancers.

 Just look at this scary costume - claws and everything!

Today was a bit more low key.  I think I mentioned Dulcie is teething?  Well, she was up and crying from 5am and had already been up for a feed before that after going to bed fairly late, so today we were all very tired.  Graham went to visit his stookied mother so I was left on my tod with the grumpy girl and we had a pretty quiet time.  Well, quiet in one sense of the word, but very noisy in other ways!  Waaaah!

 We went for a wee walk to the park and the supermarket, the only event of the day, to see if Dulcie would sleep in the pram (she did) and I cheekily snapped these photos of our neighbours' window as I was leaving.  The little girl who occupies this bedroom had arranged all her soft toys on the windowsill, but look a little closer and....

...one of the toys was real!  Bo (Beau?) the lovely ginger kitten was having the world's comfiest snooze amongst them.  By the time we came back, only his tummy and back legs were visible.  Too cute.  Actually, that really is too cute, isn't it, for a grown woman to blog about?  But I'm sure someone reading this will be enjoying it as much as I did!

Tonight I reached a milestone achievement and gave myself a big pat on the back.  Since Dulcie arrived on the scene, I find it nigh on impossible to make dinner because her mood disintegrates rapidly from around 4pm and she becomes more and more needy and grumpy from then until bedtime.  This means Graham very nearly always has to make dinner for us both when he gets in from work.  I know it's not like I haven't been working hard all day too, but I do want him to feel appreciated and I want to get some non-baby things shoehorned back into my days (everyday chores seem like such a novelty to me now!) so I set myself the challenge of making dinner for us every day for a week.  Tonight was dinner number seven in a row (vegetable pie and roast potatoes no less - proper Sunday fare!) so I think I have broken the curse and will be able to fulfill my share of the culinary duties from now on.  I quite enjoyed feeling so normal and useful this week so I think I will try to keep it up a few days longer.  Hopefully Dulcie will get better at entertaining herself while I cook the more we do it.  And if she gives up the screaming tomorrow, I will also set myself the task of photographing yesterday's mother lode of charity shop hauls. Intrigued?  You should be!

dulcie update

 I haven't blogged about Dulcie in a wee while (oh, at least a week!) but she's been coming on great guns behind the scenes.  She's still absolutely loving her food and now eats two meals a day, sometimes two-coursers.  She's had avocado, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, butternut squash, peas, sweet potato, peach, banana, prunes (we had a bit of a constipation issue for a while!), cucumber, parsnip, peppers, melon, apple, pear, grapefruit, blueberries, beetroot and a tiny taste of curry.  I think that's about it.  So far she hasn't refused anything, although she didn't look too impressed with today's combo of broccoli, potato and butternut squash.  She likes to steal the spoon from me and feed herself and always wants to try what the grown-ups are eating/drinking.  At her weigh-in this week she was 5.16 kilos (11lbs 5oz) which is just over three times her birth weight!  She has finally started wearing the second size of nappies, although she still has plenty of room in most of her 0-3 month clothes.  Over the last three weeks she has mastered rolling over from her tummy to her back and, as you can see, is getting much better at sitting up.  She's teething at the moment so has been a bit rosy-cheeked and grumpy but can always be cheered up by a spot of singing.  She goes from red-faced roaring to full-on smiling in a split second if I sing her Ali Bali Bee.

Graham produces a similar (but slightly more hypnotic) effect by singing Summertime.  Here she is giving him a special father's day look of love as he sang to keep her entertained in Paisley train station.  Dulcie and I took Graham to Ad Lib for a very tasty lunch on father's day, but then we had to go through to Paisley to visit Graham's mum in hospital.  She had a very nasty fall last week and broke her knee and elbow.  She's back home now and on the mend, all stookied up.  Poor Granma!

four

This card is available here.

It is four years to the day since I started blogging.  My first blog post was mainly about the GSA degree show.  (This year I didn't get around to blogging about the degree show, so I will just say quickly that I really liked Kate Costigan's illustrations.)

I often feel like my life doesn't change much or that I'm just coasting along/not doing life properly, but when I think back to how things were four years ago, I realise a lot has changed.  Since then I have qualified as a primary teacher, left teaching (hooray!) and got a job as a subtitler, the first job I've ever had where I've felt comfortable.  I've blogged a lot, crafted a fair bit, set up an online shop, sold my wares at various craft markets.  I've had a baby (the best baby ever!) and been diagnosed with advanced heart failure.  That's like a full 30-minute episode of a soap opera right there, albeit one that probably doesn't do so great in the ratings.  Right now I'm living in the doof-doof moment of the heart diagnosis and finding that cliffhangers in real life are a lot less fun than those on screen :(

I had thought about having a giveaway to celebrate these four years in the business, but instead I have decided to do things a little differently and surprise four of my readers.  I will say no more about the nature of the surprise other than that it is pleasant, so no need to be looking over your shoulder or living in fear!  I have already selected the lucky four.  Could it be you?