The girl done good - a post with pictures

Mood swing alert!
I feel the need to document how blithe and cheery I am feeling tonight.
1. The baby is wonderful. Our relationship is just getting better and better as his ability to communicate (and mine to understand his communications) improves, and I surprise myself each day with a new depth of joy in the good bits. 
2. I gave blood today, frst time since before I was pregnant, and I HATE HATE HATE doing it, but I did it, and I'm pleased.
3. I am slowly chipping away at making my home a nicer place to be. Having become obsessed with flylady, I truly am following her routines and very very gradually things are improving, and I'm not letting myself become disheartened with how slow it is. My aim is to have a set of things I always do, then each day to make one incremental improvement or bit of sorting, so for example today I went through a box of OU materials and threw out rubbishy notes and the CDs from past modules, choosing to keep the books and nothing else. A million more sorting sessions like this and everywhere will be beautiful.
4. The baby is also finally starting to eat. It's still pretty small quantities, but having him join us for dinner has helped him to enjoy the social side of meals and tonight he shoved several curls of pasta down (penne were rejected. He refused to listen to reason about them all being made of the same stuff)
5. I have been commissioned to do a couple of (teeny tiny) pieces of paid writing work. If if if I do them well, and if if if the people I do them for find a budget, it's just about possible that they might want to keep paying me to do more, in my own time, fitting around baby sleeps, ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for my lifestyle, etc. And I'm managing to carve out little slivers of time in the day to work on them, a bit during morning nap, perhaps a bit during afternoon nap if he's having one that doesn't involve me wheeling him around, even the occasional bit while he's awake and absorbed in sucking some buckles.

6. Did I mention the baby's wonderfulness?
7. Most evenings now I am going up to bed at a respectable time and spending at least a little time reading, fiction reading, reading for pleasure. It's nothing like the volume I could get through pre-motherhood, oh, but it gives me pleasure. If only I could stop finding fascinating books about motherhood, and borrowing a different hippy book each month from La Leche League, I'd have more fiction time, but it might need to wait until I've found a time turner.