A night out for the “non-incubating partners”*

As I write this Chris is probably screaming out obscure trivia answers to a room full of drunk people and I couldn’t be happier. He’s gone out with the non-incubating partners* from our parents group for his first night out on the town since Rose was born. Yes, that’s over a year ago! After this year of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, he surely deserves to have some fun. And I honestly couldn’t have picked a better activity for him – he loves obscure trivia of all kinds, and knows everything from the NSW state floral emblem to the final lines to the novel “Jaws”. He’ll wipe the floor, I’m sure.

*It’s been called a night out for “non-incubating partners” because there are several two-mum couples in my parents group.

Mountaintop

We just got back from one of the best holidays we’ve ever had. Our cabin was located at the top of a mountain ridge with a view all the way down the Paterson Valley. I honestly could watch that view for the rest of my life. The resort did a fantastic job of making you feel that you were in a remote location, yet providing lots of useful amenities. Every evening you could go to the local restaurant and eat amazing food and drink fabulous wine. Yet most of the time you were hardly aware there were other people around. Chris and I went on a couple of hikes where we got freaked out that we were seemingly the only ones for miles, and if one of us tripped or had an accident it would’ve been tough getting help.

Our cabin was amazing: two bedrooms, spa bath in the bathroom, open fire (which required me dusting off my fire lighting skills – I forgot what an art it is!), and a porch you could settle into for an hour or more and wonder where the time went. We walked, we saw, we ate, we slept, we read, and we watching only a little bit of telly. Rose loved it. She loved the walks, and seeing kangaroos. She also loved crawling around our cabin opening every door in the place. Her favorite was the bathroom (we don’t let her into ours at home) – she sat there opening and closing the drawers, hiding objects and finding them again.

It didn’t start out that way. Our drive to the Hunter Valley was miserable: pelting rain, ominous signs of flooding everywhere (“Hey, look at that pond…. with the trees in the middle and the row of fencing leading into it”) and increasing remoteness. And then we got to the road where the resort was located – it was closed. Due to flooding. A quick phone call and we had to re-route along a long unsealed and potholed road. Where the hell were we going? A long winding drive up the side of a mountain had us even more sceptical – were we going to be in a remote cabin somewhere where we couldn’t leave if the whole valley got flooded? My fertile imagination, fueled by 80s horror movies (chiefly “Evil Dead”) was on overdrive.

But, fortunately, that all ended when we arrived. The rest of the time felt like we were nestled in a very private, beautiful, fantastic part of the world. I didn’t spend a lot of time taking photos, but I’ve uploaded a few to flickr.

1 year checkup

Rose had a one-year checkup with the pediatrician today. Everything is going great! She weighs 10.1 kilos (about 22 pounds, I think?), which places her at the 70th percentile, while remaining in the 97th percentile for height and head circumference (we’ve been joking around that she has “lots of brains”). Rose is happy, healthy, and beautiful.

In some exciting news, on Friday Chris and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. I looked it up and apparently we’re owed something “tin”. Harrumph. Fortunately we have something other than tin presents planned – we have booked a cabin at the Eagle Reach Wilderness Resort in the Hunter Valley for the weekend. Can’t wait!

Molars + haircut

Chris made an interesting discovery while I was away: Rose has grown molars! She doesn’t let us inspect her mouth any more, so the finding was made quite by accident when Rose was on the swings at the local park – apparently she was laughing really hard, so Chris got to see in. From what he could see, one was fully through, and the other one had its edges pointing through the skin, and looked a little angry.

The other development to note is that I finally gave Rose her first haircut. Her hair was getting ridiculously long and hanging in her face half the time. So I got the scissors out and hacked away at the front. It was kinda like giving a haircut to a bobcat, she kept bucking her back, flailing her arms, and squealing. That removed any romantic notions I had about the occasion – I didn’t really shed any tears as I thought I might – I was simply glad it was over. Her fringe ended up a little too short, but she still looks cute as a button, right?*

The other thing this photo shows you is that she can now open the top latch on her drink bottle all by herself! Learning this new skill makes her want to drink water all day long, which has had some unintended consequences in the nappy-changing department. I won’t go into all that, but suffice it to say that I hope she gets over the novelty soon.

*Unfortunately, to me she also looks a little like early photos of Bon Scott, erstwhile lead singer of AC-DC.

New Favorite Photo

Cher from my mum’s group sent me a photo of Rose from our painting session the other day. I think I have a new favorite photo!

Melbourne

I got back from a whirlwind 30-hour visit to Melbourne last night. Thursday night was my first night away from Rose, and it felt awful. I missed her so much. Fortunately, since Thursdays and Fridays are my usual working days, she didn’t notice my absence too much. When I got home I crept in to her room and sat next to her cot, listening to her breathing and enjoying the calmness of being next to a sleeping baby.

When I got her out of her cot this morning she gave me a HUGE hug. I hugged her back pretty tight, too.

Mealtimes

If you were to ask me what one thing I don’t enjoy about being a parent right now I would answer in a heartbeat: mealtimes. Sometimes Rose is fussy and won’t eat what I’ve prepared; sometimes she’s full and communicates that by showering me with food, and then there’s all those hours of the day spent wiping down myself, her, the walls, the floor, cups, plates and spoons. It’s not fun. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

I can’t wait until I can microwave a TV dinner, put it down in front of her and say, “If you don’t like it, you know where the fridge is.” That’ll be about 20 years, right?

Ray of light

There’s been a lot of sadness around here this week. I can’t go into it, it’s not my story to tell, but needlesstosay, Rose is a fantastic distraction and she remains to be a pure joy and delight in our lives.

She learned a new word – Wow! – which she picked up from us, because that’s what we say whenever she stands up. Consequently, every time she stands up now she says, “Wow!” (although, it sounds a little like “Woa!”)

She’s also become very interested in picking things up from one room and taking them to another. It took Chris three days to find his car keys last week – eventually we found them in a drawer in her bedroom. Sometimes she’s a bit random – putting my dental floss in her toy basket, for example. At other times her industriousness seems, well, studied. One day Chris found a clean pair of socks that had been plucked from a pile of clean laundry on the floor in our bedroom. Was she really tidying up?

Regardless, she seems quite the busy bee, working out where everything goes and trying to make sense and order in a world of chaos.

The last time

Mostly with babies we’re focused on first times. First time doing this or that. But there are also last times. I remember the last time Rose stopped having exclusive breastfeeding poos, when she started solids. Sounds funny to remember that, but I do. Well we just reached another “last time” milestone. Rose stopped breastfeeding, almost exactly on her birthday, one week ago. I didn’t plan her one year milestone to be the end of it, but it turned out that way. The thing is, breastfeeding has been incredibly erratic for the last month, at least. It seemed that some days she just wasn’t interested. While we were in NZ she would sometimes refuse to feed, and sometimes she would just lie there with my boob in her mouth, not actually sucking. To me it looked like “out of respect breastfeeding”, a sort of “I don’t really feel like this but since mum seems keen I’ll go along with it”. Gee, thanks.

To be honest, my last remaining reason for breastfeeding her is that it’s been a useful tool for calming her when she’s very upset. Nothing works better. Breastfeeding has always instantly calmed her down and soothed her. But it’s been obvious that even that has become less important. A couple of times when she’s woken up in the middle of the night crying I’ve gone in to her and tried to breastfeed her. Lately she’s looked at me seemingly thinking, “What the hell are you doing?”

So I stopped. On the day after her birthday. I just stopped offering it.

Since then we’ve had a whole range of new behaviour and we’re starting to wonder if some of it might be related to the event. She’s been much more clingy – wanting lots of hugs, in fact lots of really tight, ‘holding on’ hugs. She’s also, in the last few days, woken up from her afternoon nap and been really weepy, crying, and upset, and the mood has stayed. This morning she got really upset when I turned the hairdryer on – and up until now she’s always loved the sound. More explicitly, she’s come up to me a few times and grabbed at my top.

Of course, all of this could be to do with the vast changes happening at the moment. She’s just gone through a huge growth spurt – she’s larger, faster and more vertical. She’s standing unassisted all the time, and today she started walking around with her trolley (not being interested in assisted walking before now).

And how do I feel? Pretty happy, actually. It feels freeing not to be so tied to her. I miss the closeness of the bond, but there are other ways of being close. It’s been a long, hard road, and I feel incredibly proud of my achievement, but it feels like the right time to move on.

How cows and babies are similar

Growing up in New Zealand there were always a lot of news stories around the time to change clocks for Daylight Savings time. Typically some farmer bloke would be interviewed in front of his cow shed bemoaning the fact that his cows were unsettled by the new Daylight Savings schedule. At the time I used to think, “Who cares about your bloody cows – it’s GREAT being able to sleep in a little bit later and have it so light at night.”

Now I find myself in the farmers camp. What a bloody hassle it is getting a baby into a different routine, even though it’s only one hour different! We decided to give Rose her lunch an hour later than normal, but she gave us so much grief about it we ended up giving in and feeding her early. She was actually standing at the kitchen gate, stomping her little feet, opening her mouth wide and making unhappy noises. Moo moo!