Best day of the year!

Seriously, it's better than Christmas.
I just love the liminal phase between Christmas and new year. It feels like a forced "opportunity" to reflect and review, and there's so much potential, so much possibility of fresh starts and new beginnings and hope. I suppose it's tied in with the passing of the shortest day, too - by now, you know you can make it through winter - but mainly it's just the chance to look back on all the great stuff in the year and think yes! It can be even better next year!

I'm not as pollyannaish as this sounds, but the more time I spend in my new phase of existence, the more I realise I've got, at least, a kind of resilience, which is a muscle exercised by having a small child.

So, the big things that have happened for me/us this year, in sort of chronological order:
1. I quit my job, because when it came to going back from maternity leave, the choice was 4/5 days a week or nothing, and I could not make myself leave my boy for more than half of each week. This was, without a doubt, the right decision for me - it's working for all of us, and giving me the chance to see every sweet moment of him. I'm so glad they turned down my 3 day request - I'd have hated it.
2. I set up some alternative income, a bit of part-time employed work (but home-based, and letting me do the hours whenever I want) and some freelancing. It's pretty taxing - I sit down to work every time that Isaac sleeps (though I did have Christmas day off) but so very worth it. And, what might be the biggest thing, I am actually, properly, earning a living through writing. OK, it's writing about accounting, but still, people are paying me for making words, and that has to be a start, a step along the path of getting paid for making words on other content that might inspire me slightly more.
3. I became very involved with the fantastic La Leche League - more of this to come
4. I finished my degree, fireworks, bells, whistles - it took me four years, which isn't bad for the OU. For the first two and a bit years I was working full time, then pregnant and with a new baby (I did an exam at the end of year 3 when Isaac was about 6 weeks, with him tied on me in the stretchy wrap for the second half of it), and then perhaps the hardest academic year was the last one, covering Isaac from about 5 months to 14 months, also overlapping with the start of all my new work. But, I did it, I got my 2.1, and I'm very proud of myself.
5. We packed up and moved away from grimy Brixton to beautiful, hilly, green Bath. We've only been here a few weeks and it's sinking in slowly. I can feel my insides responding to all the openness, to the hills I can look out on from the study window, to the way we can walk up the lane and see sheep and horses and mud and wondrous country things...
6. I've seen my unutterably gorgeous, compelling, curious, funny, loving, absorbing boy grow for another 12 months - he's 19 months now, and gets more interesting and loveable by the hour, I swear. Each morning I think my heart is full, then it gets fuller. 

The things I "failed" on, or want to do more on next year, take a bit more reflection, and merit longer than I'm going to give them tonight (self-imposed deadline, MUST get this post up tonight or it won't count). But broadly, (and these are in no order at all):
- I don't feel I've been anywhere near good enough at looking after friendships (this was really brought home to me when someone I have thought of as a very close friend indeed told me of her pregnancy when she was about 25 weeks - I'd been so appalling at connecting with her that she'd not felt any need to tell me earlier)
- I don't make enough effort to make the journey to see my family
- I am, in general, too wimpish about travelling with a toddler, which has definitely been part of my failings with friends and family
- I've been rubbish about writing the blog, which frustrates me, because I love having the record, and I love feeling that anyone ever reads it, and I know I'd have more chance of people reading it regularly if I actually wrote anything on it...
- Somewhere in the mix I'd love to work on my wifeness, on being sure to make sure that him downstairs feels he has a place, doesn't feel nudged out by my overwhelming absorption in Isaac and then work
- I'd like to get some kind of writing published this year that isn't about accounting
- I want to give some focus, sometimes, to things I used to love, like knitting - I don't know how to fit it in, but I know it settles and soothes me, so it seems important to find a way
- Of course I will eat healthily and get better at meal planning, and let's put domestic perfection in there too
- There are two non-bloggable secret goals, which I'll share if I manage them
-  I need better ways of keeping records of things that happen with Isaac - already I realise he's not a baby any more, and I can't always track what's changed - at the moment, if I needed to generate an archive, it would be mostly from emails sent to my mum, which is better than nothing, but I want to record, record, so I don't miss a minute and don't forget a thing.
- Also I will keep my desk tidy
- My mum really generously enabled me to get some new clothes for Christmas, and for the first time in years I feel as though my outside matches my inside - when I catch sight of myself, I look like my own image of myself. It's shallow, but I'd enjoy it if this carried on happening.
- I will be working on my frugality - a family with one part time income and some PhD funding doesn't have lots of spare cash to throw around, and I'm sort of relishing this challenge. After all, a walk up to see the horses is free...

This list doesn't please me. I feel as though it's shallow, in its stated goals in some cases (wear more skirts? really??) or in its expression of them in others. The punctuation is also terrible (but I'm on a ticking clock now - he's woken twice, and if I'm not there by the third waking there is considerable trouble). But then, part of the point of this for me is to look at what I want to think more about, and write more about on here - and part of the point of all of us is having a few hidden shallows.

Anyway, at least it's a start, it's something for me to work from when attempting a bit of accountability...

Happy new year! And here's just one shot of the Christmas jumper (his, not mine. Mine is on about its fifth Christmas, I think, there's some frugality in action already)...

Forced pause

Been away from the blog a bit recently because I'm trying to set up our lives the way they need to be. Following on from my previous posts about work, I *think* I've got enough sorted to keep us going - a couple of different things that I can do from home, whenever I have available time, fitting entirely around my childcare priorities. I'd like to write about this properly, and will do (I've been loving the thought provoking posts by Cloud over on Wandering Scientist  about balancing work and home), but what it's meant in the short term is a renewal of my obsession with making time USEFUL, rushing to do some work or other, I don't know, USEFULSTUFF, the moment Isaac nods off.
As I say, I think it can work, and I think that I only need a wee time turner to fit in 15 hours a week of work with 168 hours of babylove, and I think I can even deal with my conflicting feelings about whether this means I am mothering him enough, which demographic it leaves me in, etc (so many future posts here!).
But today, my boy is poorly, nothing awful, but had a rough night and woke up blazing hot and so so sad. I've given him paracetamol and lots and lots of love and possibly even more time on the boob (I have never been so earnestly grateful for breastfeeding) and at this moment he is conked out on the floor next to me. I'm not rushing to do anything; I'm not even going to try and work or write important emails. Sometimes, you're called to stop, and reflect, and wait, and give things time, and today is for being right by my boy, ready for the moment he needs me, and letting myself take the time to recharge a little too. It could well be a long day, and we both just need to get through it.

Hardcore babywearing

Well, I count it as hardcore. I've always been terrified of woven wraps, but here we are with an ellaroo claudia, having fallen in love with it at the sling library. We have it for three weeks - watch this space for the moment I get brave enough to try a back carry (and the moment I start complaining about it hurting and Bonzo being just too heavy to be worn). But at the moment, one day into having it, I am smitten.

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.

Dejected

You can see I've not come up with any of the promised posts addressing my work-life balance issues: they are all brewing up in my head but none have made it out. Surprisingly, setting out my initial thoughts helped me quite a lot, and I have a couple of possibilities brewing up, one of which in particular would fit perfectly - it would be a steady-ish stream of work, but do-able from home to fit around bonzo, and would keep my specialisms up.
So why the long face today?
I think it's just, again, the daunting-ness of even trying to do anything at all with a baby in the house. I keep thinking it's going to get easier, that he's going to get less demanding, in the sense of having some reliable downtime. But it's all one step forward, one or two back. Today I'd planned a day basically at home so I could try and do some work to move forward my exciting possibility, so I took him upstairs for an after lunch nap, fed him, and he just wouldn't come off. After half an hour or so of sleep-sucking I gently detached him, and he howled, so I re-attached him, and half an hour later he was done. That was naptime, and I couldn't do any of the things I wanted to do, so all I did for an hour was despair about how he is never ever ever going to get over his infatuation with the breast; how he is the only 10 month old in the world still so besotted; how I will never be able to do or come to anything while he still needs just so much of me all the time.
And now he's having his brief early evening nap and instead of getting on with the writing work, I'm sitting here banging out a blog post about how I never get any time to do writing work....

Weighing it all up

I've a feeling my next few posts are all going to be on the theme of "what should I do with my life?" - there's a lot floating around in my head at the moment and it helps to write it down. To summarise my current position, I'm supposed to be back at work in two months' time, have got in an application to return only part time (3 days a week) but am trying to work out whether I truly want/need to go back at all.
The things I'm trying to explore at the moment are:
1. The potential feelings of guilt associated with opting out of bringing in any income, replacing it instead with committing to full time child/house care. Not, so much, guilt about asking the beloved to have/share that financial responsibility, but more the idea that I *should* be "working" and a concern that I would end up trying to do "useful" things with every minute of my time, constantly chasing little income streams that would fit around the baby, etc
2. The alternative guilt relating to the fear that I will deprive my baby by not putting him in full time childcare - what if he does need to be with other children already, and what if he gets bored of me?
3. A third kind of guilt, if I did go back to work, about leaving him without me. We are still breastfeeding (all the time), baby-led weaning, and generally doing attachment-style things, and he and I are devoted to each other. This makes the wrench of handing him over to someone else potentially that much more extreme than in mother-child dyads where a more detached style has been in place from the outset.
4. Terror about the prospect of leaving my job, loss of career capital, oh god I'll never work again
5. Terror #2, what if I do pack it up and then find the future to be a yawning void? How will we fill our days once all his baby peers' mummies have gone back to work?
6. Existential crisis - feel disconcerted at this desire that is growing stronger and stronger in me to nest, to maintain and bless my home and family as a priority over everything else. Have I stopped being an interesting person? etc

So I think each of these might get a post of its own, and by the time I've explored them all I'll be satisfied with what the right answer is. Easy!

Serene confidence

It's important to do this whole escapade justice by documenting the ups as well as the downs, and I'd hate it if the whole interweb thought I was miserable with my lot.
For over a week now we've had a new rhythm to this bit of the day: I have given up trying to fight bonzo into a nap in the morning and instead am doing my day's grocery shopping quite early, timed so we leave sainsburys as close as possible to 3 hours after he's woken for the day. I swear, for at least seven days in a row this has worked beautifully, he nods off without a murmur on the way home, stays asleep when we arrive home, and I get to sit in my (newly cleared) living room, drink some coffee, catch up on some emails, and be right by him for when he wakes. When I was writing my last post I was still feeling despairing but a few days further on, I've gained some hope again about these little oases of time to myself, even if I'm not doing a mite useful with them apart from self-renewing. And I'm back round the circle, feeling good about being consumed by him, feeling sure that every moment of investment is worth it, that this intense parenting is right for him, and that I might just make it out of the other side in one piece.
(of course, you can't know for sure that it's me writing this rather than a sneaky interloper determined to access the exciting world under the keyboard)