Good Enough Mum

We'll take a cup of kindness yet

Ten years ago almost to the minute, give or take the time it takes me to write this, I was following a man with a lump of coal in his hand into a house in Wales.  The New Year's Eve party I was at had decided to follow the first-footing custom in style, and the whole gathering had turned out to walk in through the door at midnight.  We were assured that this was, in Wales, all part of the custom; in retrospect, I suspect somebody there just thought it would be amusing to get everyone to go out in the cold.  Barry was the one leading the line, having been voted in by the gathering for the job of the official first-footer - he wasn't the darkest person there, nor (for one of the very few times in his life) the tallest, but was judged to be the person who best combined both attributes.  He was my new boyfriend, and it was the second time he and I had met.

Not that that anecdote is really going anywhere much, but it's a good moment to look back on.

I was surprised, yesterday morning, when the radio mentioned that this was the turn of a new decade; I hadn't thought about that aspect of the new year.  Of course, when you've lived through the turn of a new millennium, all subsequent changes of year tend to feel a touch anticlimactic.  But I still like New Years, and the feeling of fresh start that they involve.  A happy turn of year to you all.

Hot damn, but I'm good

A few days ago, faced with the imminent end of the year and the impetus to rush to get things organised that that usually triggers (Hurry! Hurry! Time running out for anything you want to feel you've achieved in 2009!), I thought it over and concluded that the three things I really wanted to get done before the year ended were:

1. Catch up on my accounts

2. Catch up on my letters and other paperwork at work

3. Get a blog post up for this month.

Which was, of course, like saying that what I'd really like to do right now would be to travel around the world - very nice to daydream about, but not actually anything that's going to happen in real life.

However, I then spent the past few days turning into a whirlwind of speed and efficiency.  Intermittently.  Between long periods of child-watching, website-reading, or just plain torpor.  But I spent my evenings logging on to the work computer (it's set up so that we can log in by remote control) trying to get letters done a few at a time.  On Tuesday, while Katie napped and Jamie went down to the shops with Barry, I blasted through I'm-not-even-going-to-tell-you-how-many-months of bank statement reconciling and ticked no. 1 off my list.  On Wednesday, I spent the day catching up on as much paperwork as possible.  By this morning, I had three letters and half an insurance form left to do.  By 7.30, I was at my desk typing, interrupted only by the need to sign the usual stack of prescriptions and see someone who turned up before surgery as an urgent extra.  Six hours later, after seeing a million patients (OK, we had a couple of no-shows, it was actually only nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight) and phoning five more about various things and checking results and scribbling madly on forms in every spare minute between patients (or while waiting for patients to get undressed, or for the automated cuff to take their blood pressure...), I was done.  Apart from the two visits, which took an extra hour.  And the time to log them onto the computer from home afterwards (we closed at 1.00 for the New Year's holiday.  Theoretically, anyway, though with the number of patients that had been booked and the number who booked in as urgent extras it was in fact somewhat after that, not even counting the extra hours for visits.)  And one incoming letter that I hadn't had a chance to summarise in the notes and had to do from home as well.  But apart from that?  Done.  The pending letters, the extra couple that arose from the day's work, even the darned insurance form.  Done done done.  I drove home for my afternoon off with a light heart.

So, there you have it.  Nos 1 and 2 satisfactorily crossed off my to-do shortlist, and if I can manage to hit 'Post' on this any time within the next twenty-four minutes it'll be three for three.  I can end the year, highly unlike the way I spent almost all of it, bathed in a warmly satisfied glow of achievement.

How the Good Enough Mum blog got its name

Well, the end of another month is approaching, which means I feel I should get a post up - otherwise there'll forever be a gap in my monthly archives, which disturbs my obsessive-compulsive soul far too much.  Which means I've been mulling over the question of what to write about.  While I have no shortage of potential post topics, I do have a shortage of potential topics short enough to complete a post on in the few minutes of spare time likely to be available to me between now and midnight on May 31st.  I had in fact sat down to have a shot at writing about something totally different, when I suddenly remembered that the topic of how I chose this blog's name was one that I'd saved up for precisely such an occasion.

You may, of course, have recognised the phrase as a reference to Winnicott's theory of the 'good-enough mother'.  If so, you're right, but only indirectly so.  (In fact, when I finally got round to looking up Winnicott's theory, I discovered it didn't have that much to do with the don't-sweat-the-small-stuff attitude I'd had in mind.)  I actually chose the title in homage to a post made four years ago on the Chez Miscarriage blog. 

For those who never read it, Chez Miscarriage was among the most well-known of the many infertility blogs on the 'Net.  The author, who posted under the pseudonym getupgrrl, was a DES daughter who was struggling - unsuccessfully - to carry a child to term.  After more miscarriages than you could shake a curette at, she finally opted for gestational surrogacy, had a healthy son, and ultimately exited the blogging world in a fog of psychotically sleep-deprived bliss.  But, as you can imagine, her surrogate's pregnancy was an incredibly tense time for her as she tried not to let herself worry about all the things that could go wrong.  One day, to distract herself from the nail-biting, she invited readers to post their experiences of what she termed Mommy Drive-Bys - those moments when a friend/relative/acquaintance/random stranger you just passed on the street decides that you can't possibly continue parenting without the benefit of their sage advice, and they'd better let you know exactly what you're currently getting wrong in your attempts to bring up your child.

The comments flooded in in their hundreds, ranging from the heartbreaking (mother who tried everything possible to get her extremely premature brain-damaged baby to nurse and ultimately and tearfully had to give up and resort to formula-feeding, only to be asked scathingly by someone who didn't know the history "Did you even try to breastfeed that baby?") to the hilarious (man who adopted a baby together with his male partner, asked scathingly "Did you even try to breastfeed that baby?)  But there was, apparently, a third category - misunderstandings (I put that charitably) of the original request.  Apparently, there were a number of people who took it as a request to provide, rather than relate, a Mommy Drive-By; they used the comments thread to make it clear just what category of Bad Mother (stay-at-home?  Work-away-from-home?  Formula-feeder?  Attachment Parent?  Non-attachment parent?  Person who dressed differently?) they disapproved of, and why.

I say 'apparently', because we didn't get to read them - getupgrrl deleted them all, and more power to her.  The reason we got to hear about their existence was because she was spurred into further action by a comment decrying all the 'stupid and dangerous' maternal behaviours prevalent today such as (brace yourselves) letting children go out without mittens and (the horrors!) feeding them apple juice drinks instead of apple juice.  At which point, she let rip with a scathing post on exactly what she thought of these sorts of attitudes and the expectations put on mothers, citing the good-enough mother theory in support of all us imperfect mothers out here who are, in fact, raising happy, healthy, thriving children despite our imperfections,.  It was a post as well-written, as inspiring, and sadly now as non-existent, as the rest of her blog; and, as I read it, I found myself thinking that if/when I ever got round to setting up my own blog, I would call it 'Good Enough Mum' in honour of that post. Unless I thought of anything better in the meantime, that was. 

I didn't think of anything better (at least, not at the time - I thought of 'The Mummy's Curse' a couple of years later, but by then the blog was long since established under the current title), and so 'Good Enough Mum' the blog became.  It's not the most eye-catching title in the world, but it's a small memento of a fine blog that is no more and should be.  And, most importantly, it's a reminder to me not to sweat the small stuff - to get away from aiming for perfection, and focus my energies on the things that matter.

Weekend

If you were paying incredibly close attention to my account of the day Katie was born, you might have noticed that, while I was in labour, Barry took the cover off the pushchair to wash it.  Fifteen weeks later, we finally got round to putting it back on again.  Since Jamie is big enough to walk and Katie is small enough to be carried in the front carrier, the pushchair has been redundant.  However, carrying Katie plus the small rucksack I use to cart the nappies and other paraphernalia needed for two small children is becoming an increasing strain on my shoulders (Katie was 14 lb 1 oz when last weighed on Monday, so this is not surprising), and on Sunday Barry reassembled the pushchair and introduced Katie to it for a family outing to the park.  It had been several months since I last pushed a pushchair, given that Jamie had been walking everywhere for some time before Katie's birth; it had, of course, been some years since I pushed a pushchair whose occupant was a small baby and not a large toddler, so I was pleasantly surprised by how light it felt.  Jamie had great fun pulling the hood up over her head and then back down again to reveal her ("And now Katie is awake!").  Katie was somewhat bemused by the whole experience.

Another first from the weekend was Jamie's first experience of sibling rivalry (or, at least, his first to which he has given voice - for all I know, his feelings may have seethed within yet been repressed).  He normally takes Katie's presence on most family scenes in his stride, but on Saturday Barry took Katie for a few minutes while I took Jamie off for a nappy change, and we then started reading a story together, so perhaps the rarity of one-on-one time reminded him of what he was missing.  In any case, when Barry restored a hungry Katie to my lap, I found Jamie trying to push her off.  "Daddy wants Katie - please?" he pleaded.  It seemed a shame to cut into his time with me when he was obviously upset about it, so we compromised by using the time to try Katie with the token practice bottle we keep on giving her each day (to no avail, alas - the one she took several weeks ago did indeed prove to be a fluke, and she disdains to do any more than mouth the nipple and occasionally take a few swallows).  While this time was as useless as all the others from the point of view of persuading her to actually take any, it did buy us ten minutes or so for me to finish Jamie's story and choose the week's duvet cover for his bed with him, and the extra time with Mummy seemed to be enough for Jamie to accept Katie's reappearance with his usual equanimity when Barry brought her back.

The other noteworthy event of the weekend was that Barry completed the bookcase he'd been working on during the week, a glorious floor-to-ceiling affair waxed in a shade of pine colour designed to fit in a corner of our room (there was a bookcase there already, but it was only three shelves high and a plain cheap brown colour).  This now stands at the foot of our bed where I can admire it last thing at night on going to sleep, not to mention on numerous other occasions during the day.  In addition to being a thing of beauty and a joy for the few days that it's been up, this has also enabled me to clear the small bookcase in my study, moving the books to the new bookcase.  This is an initial step in a further-reaching plan that will continue with the moving of the small study bookcase upstairs into Jamie's room, thereby giving him some shelf space for his books and toys (we've put the old one from the bedroom in there as well), and the moving of Jamie's computer desk into the space thereby created where the small bookcase currently stands, thereby freeing up some much-needed floor space in my study and enabling me to regain access to the lower shelves of my big bookcase without needing to go through peculiar contortions.  All of this will lead on, by steps which I have not quite figured out yet but which I am sure will prove to exist, to the further reorganisation and tidying of both of the rooms involved and, eventually, get me that bit closer to my ultimate goal of having a perfectly organised and tidy house, at which point I am sure world domination will not be far behind.  In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy admiring the new bookcase.

A brief digression from my own tales of parenting

One of my current Sunday pastimes is visiting Jeff Vogel's website to read another installment in The Story About The Baby.  This is the on-line archive of Vogel's blackly humorous and cynical week-by-week account of the first year of his daughter's life.  He continued it on a monthly basis until she was four, and has also published the diary of the first year in a book called The Poo Bomb, all of which I have previously read.  However, I didn't discover it until Jamie was several months old and I had long since given up keeping track of what his age was in weeks, so I never really did much in the way of week-by-week comparisons of my parenting experience and his.  Since I like doing that sort of thing, I've been taking the chance to do it this time around.  Every Sunday, as Katie's age ticks over to another full week older, I visit the site and read Vogel's account of what happened in his parenting life in the week equivalent to both the one we've just finished and the one we're just starting (yes, I know this means I read all the entries twice).  Then I sigh if my experience of that particular week seems to have been lacking something compared to his, and smile smugly if it was better.  (It's usually the latter.  Vogel's general view on parenting a baby is that it's the part you have to go through to get to the point where you get to parent a child, but just because he accepts that fact doesn't mean he has to like it.)

By the way, I do the same thing with Dr Sears' Dad's Diary (the Dr Sears in question being not the famous one but his second son, Bob).  However, I like the IronyCentral diary better, because it's funnier and because Vogel does not subject me to repeated offers to subscribe to some newsletter.  No, Bill and Martha Sears, I do not want to subscribe to your free newsletter, I do not intend to be worn down into capitulating and signing up after all, and would you please get over your own egos, accept that possibly some of the visitors to your site just aren't that interested in your precious newsletter, and install a "Do Not Show This Offer Again" option already??

Anyway, the installment I've just read from The Story About The Baby contained the following anecdote, which I felt to be worth at least a passing comment:

"I have been getting our daughter to sleep for the last few months like this: First, I cram her full of food. Once she makes a sloshy noise when I shake her, I swaddle her really tightly. Once she looks like a sad little mummy, I put the pacifier in her mouth. Once she is being made artificially happy by a chunk of rubber, I set her down and turn off the lights. Badda bing. Sleeping baby.      

But I started to think that this series of peculiar steps might not be necessary. I thought, since she can suck on her hands now, she might not need the pacifier, and since she's three months old, she might not need the swaddling. Tried putting her to bed without either.      

Inside of five minutes, she was crying. I found her trying to suck on her fingers. However, she was trying strenuously to jam her hand into her upper cheek, which was not leading in any way to her fingers being in her mouth. OK, that's not working. So I put the pacifier in her mouth. Then she decided that she also wanted to be sucking on her hand. So she swung it up and punched herself in the eye. This is not conducive to getting to sleep....

So we're back to the mummy-plugged-with-rubber sleep technique. I bring all this up because I want people to know one thing. When I call Cordelia "dopey", it is not entirely an arbitrary judgment, free from all evaluation of actual evidence."

OK, Mr Vogel, let me see if I've got this straight here.  You were able to get your baby to sleep at night with practically 100% effectiveness and with no crying on her part, purely by the use of a technique requiring only a couple of minutes of minimum effort on your part (I'm not counting the time spent feeding in that time, since feeding your baby when it's feeding time is something you're generally expected to do regardless of whether it's part of a successful sleep promotion strategy or not).  To put it another way, you had a stroke of luck which thousands of parents would willingly have sold their souls to have.  Instead of falling on your knees and passionately thanking whatever gods might be in charge of parenting, possibly sacrificing the odd goat to them just to be on the safe side, you decide to abandon this technique.  For, so far as I can tell, no better reason than an arbitrary whim. 

And you think she's the dopey one?

As for me, I am in no doubt as to how lucky I am that swaddling and settling my daughter at night will buy me a few hours of good sleep, and I have no intention of changing that until I have to.  In fact, I've been trying to figure out whether I can get away with swaddling her at night until she's at least five.

The Year That Was

Although precise dates are tending to blur somewhat during my maternity leave, it has come to my attention that the year will be ending in a little over an hour.  This always leaves me feeling as though I ought to write some sort of incisive and preferably witty summary of the year to wind it all up.

The obvious thing to say about this year is that it has been wonderful.  On thinking about it a bit more, it would probably be more accurate to say that it was a year in which wonderful things happened - most of the actual year would be better described as 'exhausting'.  One of the partners at the surgery was on long-term sick leave during the year, with the consequent impact on our workload, and given that I was pregnant for most of the year, plus taking as little holiday as possible so that I could save up all my annual leave allotment for the end of my pregnancy (thus meaning I could save all the maternity leave allowance for after the baby was born - since we're limited in how much time I can afford to take off, this was important), this meant that I spent a large proportion of the year feeling absolutely zonked.  I'm actually less tired now with a newborn to take care of - at least I can catch up on sleep during the day, for the most part.  (Fortunately, I have a baby who's a good sleeper, plus a husband at home full time.  It makes a huge difference.)  But, my goodness, it was worth it.

So here we are at the end of the year.  I have a wonderful daughter who was no more than a twinkle in my eye at the start of it, and a son who has gone from being almost completely non-verbal to chatting away nineteen to the dozen (an appropriate turn of phrase, given how much of what he says is on the general subject of numbers).  Exhaustion or not, I'd say it's been a bloody good year.

A quickie

On the off-chance that perhaps not all my readers were breathlessly checking my About Page on a regular basis to look for any changes, I shall let you know that I finally got round to changing the photo.  I have a very nice one of the three of us that I've been meaning to put on for ages, and I thought I'd better seize this final opportunity to do so while it is still the three of us. 

So, instead of that very old one of Jamie as a newborn with the ghastly non-editing that meant that it was enormous and took ages to load (sorry about that - I always did mean to do something about it, honestly), I now have a more up-to-date one showing my family collectively engaged in our favourite pastime.  It's also a much more reasonable size.  In fact, it's probably gone a bit too far to the opposite extreme, but it's big enough for you to get the general idea.  I was going to tell you all to go check it out, but then realised that while I was on a roll with the techie stuff I might as well just insert it into this post:

There - that's rather a nice one, isn't it?  That was taken in my mother's back garden.  It isn't terribly recent - I think it dates back to summer of last year - but it's certainly a more accurate picture of what Jamie looks like these days than the one of him as a newborn on his woolly sheep.  The fascination with the computer screen is especially accurate.

In which I still fail to think of any sort of interesting title

Hell, this isn't even an interesting post.  Still, I feel like writing something.  Besides, it's Nablopomo again, so I've got an excuse.

Jamie had his orthoptist appointment today.  Everything is, it seems, much the same - Pat wants us still to continue with the two-hour-a-day patching regime.  This does not have even remotely the heart-plummeting effect that it would have had a couple of months ago, because the difference with the new patch design - the cloth one that fits over his glasses instead of needing to be stuck straight to his skin - has been awesome.  We did have to go through a few initial days of getting used to it and being very consistent about replacing it whenever he pulled it off, but, of course, that's one hell of a lot easier to do with this design, since we can simply pop his glasses straight back on, patch and all, without having to go through the rigmarole of opening another one up.  And the rapidity with which he got used to it is remarkable.  While he needed to adjust to having his good eye covered again after the months of having it free, this patch really does seem a lot more comfortable for him.  Plus, the way it can be slipped on and off so easily means that it's much easier just to put it on for a short time as and when we can.  One thing that was always awkward with the stick-on patches was that they could only be used once, and so I would find myself hanging on until I thought we could get the full time in one go rather than waste one.  Even on a one-hour-a-day patching regime, it can be surprisingly difficult to find a solid hour in a toddler's day when they aren't due to have a meal or a nap or go out anywhere and when you're around and available to supervise them and prevent them ripping the patch off as soon as your back's turned.  I wasted a lot of potential patch time waiting for the magic time slot that, in fact, didn't come up all that often.  Now that it's feasible for me just to slip his patch on any time we've got ten minutes to spare, I do so, and it adds up throughout the day - especially since, with our disorganised schedule, it's amazing how often that ten minutes to spare actually turns out to be forty minutes of good patch time.

So, I am facing the prospect of two hours a day patching for the foreseeable future with more equanimity than I ever would have believed possible.  Which is just as well, because I think now we're in this for the long haul.  Before, I could look forward to Jamie's squint surgery and hope that maybe the improved alignment of his eyes would render the patches obsolete, but now that we know that hasn't worked, there doesn't seem to be a lot else we can do other than wait and see how it goes.  Pat assures me that he will eventually reach a stage of maturity where his brain maintains the vision in the squinting eye without regular patching being needed to force the issue, but it isn't possible to make any predictions about how old he will be when this happens, so the patches are likely to be part of our lives for a good few years yet (even apart from the possibility of Katherine/Alfie needing them, something I have prepared myself for given that squints often run in families).

Progress report on everything else: Banisters - polished and ready to start going up tomorrow.  Paintwork - given final paint-&-grain coat.  Baby - still on the inside.  Contractions - still on and off but still more off than on.  Baby equipment - still waiting to be washed (the stuff that was in the loft needs cleaning over) but I'm hoping to get the Moses basket done tonight.  And that's about all I got to say about that.

More stuff

On Friday the NCT class had a go at a post-class meet-up.  Fiona couldn't make it because she was off somewhere for the day, and Jo seems to be currently incommunicado - she doesn't have a home e-mail address so can't be contacted by e-mail now that she's on leave, and when I tried ringing her number I just got mobile phone voicemail.  I did leave a message, but haven't heard back.  However, Alex and Moira, both of who have now had their babies (Alex's on 16th October by planned Caesarean, and Moira's on 29th October, if I remember rightly, by a very quick spontaneous delivery a week ahead of due date), both sounded pleased at the chance to get out of the house for a bit.

The meet-up therefore consisted of me, Jamie, Barry (once he'd taken delivery of a large number of banisters and could leave the house), Alex with baby George, and Moira and Sean with baby Edward.  We seem to be on quite a theme of boys with the names of English kings - this makes it three out of three, or four out of four if you count The One I Made Earlier.  And, of course, there is currently still a 5% chance that I'm cooking up an Alfred William rather than the expected Katherine Abigail - if so, then that would fit in nicely.  Jamie, of course, was more impressed with the fact that one of the babies had the same name as a Thomas the Tank Engine character.  It's a shame that Fiona couldn't make it - he'd have been over the moon with having a Henry Thomas there as well.  As it was, one baby with an engine name didn't seem quite sufficient to him.  "There was a lady with a baby called George," he commented to Barry that evening as he bounced up and down on the bed he was supposed to be settling down to sleep in, "and there was a baby called Edward.  But I don't know about Donald and Douglas.  Or what happened to Gordon."  Seems Jo's got her shortlist drawn up for her.

Alex sympathised with me, and with Jo in absentia, over getting left to the end while everyone else had already got their labour out of the way - did it leave me feeling nervous?  Not about the labour, no - having been through one which went straightforwardly, I'm feeling quite blasé about the prospect of a second.  This may well be unwise and I'm trying to get myself mentally geared up to deal with all sorts of disasters, but, for the most part, I figure I'll worry about it if it happens, whatever 'it' turns out to be.  What does unnerve me is the prospect of dealing with a newborn again.  I've just been sorting and washing all the baby clothes, and the main memory this brought back is that of just how utterly freaked out I was through the entire time Jamie was small enough to fit in them.  Once I got past the initial wildly hormonal stage of being terrified for Jamie (how could we have brought such a small and fragile person into a world filled with meningitis germs and speeding cars and cot deaths?  What had we been thinking of?  How could we dare to hope that this tiny baby would survive to adulthood without anything ghastly happening to him and thus ripping out my still-beating heart by the arteries and leaving me a hollow shell?), I just felt terrified of him.  Newborns are scary.  They are hopelessly unpredictable, they don't talk, they have no way of letting you know whether they're seriously unwell or just have a bit of wind, and they don't sleep.  What I mind most about being last is the prospect of going through that terrifying newborn stage again when most of the rest have already been through it and are settling into life with a baby.  Though, of course, it is possible that second time around everything will seem a bit less unnerving - after all, at least now I have the best possible evidence before my eyes every day that I am fully capable of raising a newborn into a human being of excellent quality.

After this, Barry and Jamie and I went on to get haircuts, so now I can cross that off my List Of Things To Do, and then we picked up a couple of bits and pieces from the shops and headed back home.  While we were on our way back, I started getting more of the Braxton-Hicks and mild crampy pains that I'd been getting intermittently for the past several months, though without them seeming to be particularly different from any of the previous pains apart from their increased frequency.  So Barry and I had a rather inconclusive discussion about the possible significance of this and whether we ought to be aborting Project Banister Replacement and/or putting grandparents on standby, but everything seemed to settle down after a bit so all I actually did was pack my bag for the hospital.  Seeing it next to the door, all packed and ready with my maternity notes sitting on top, gives me rather a pleasant glow - it's such a tradition of pregnancy, and one that I never actually got round to the first time around, since I went into labour while packing my bag and never got round to moving it out of the baby's room before the time came to head to the birthing centre.

This weekend Oi 'ave been mainly sorting children's clothes (for both the born and the unborn).  It seems that my method of storing baby clothes in the early months was simply to shove them all into the same bag until the bag got full, without regard to the likelihood that it might in future be useful to have the 0 - 3 month sizes separate from the 3 - 6 month sizes and even a few 6 - 9 month sizes that seemed to have got in there.  So, when we finally got round to getting them down from the attic on Saturday, I had to sort them all out, which took quite some time as I have a lot of 3 - 6 month sizes.  Not only was this a stage when the whole new baby thing was novel enough to people who knew us that we were still getting presents, but at the time I gave birth my sister was working on a television programme with teenage twin boys whose mother celebrated the happy news by sending along their 3 - 6 month baby clothes.  I'm not quite sure why that was the particular age chosen, but probably that was just the nearest bag in her attic, or something.  At any rate, I certainly appreciated them - it came as quite a rude shock when Jamie turned six months and I realised I'd actually need to start buying my child's clothes - but stuffing them into the same bag with the 0 - 3 month sizes was not the best-thought-out of plans, since it left me with a lot of sorting.  However, that is now done, and I've put them all through the wash, and then my mother came to visit on the Sunday and took care of Jamie while I sorted out the vests from the Babygros from the mittens, etc., and found some drawers to shove them into, not to mention sorting out all Jamie's 2 - 3-year-old clothes and storing them for the attic so that he now has space in his drawers for the 3 - 4-year-old clothes we've bought.  I also cleaned the sink in his room (I realise that sounds a bit excessively Flylady with all the other stuff that needs doing, but it just needed some cleaning stuff to be left on it for ten minutes to soak in and then wiped off and was one of those things that, despite not actually taking long, doesn't ever get done because there's never a time when I'm in the room for that long and Jamie isn't, or isn't needing me to go and check out what he's up to in another room) and washed down the paintwork next to the stairs ready for Barry to paint it as part of the whole banister replacement thing.  So, once again, warm glow of achievement.

Today, apart from writing this post, my main job has been to keep Jamie out of the way while Barry works on Day 1 of Project Banister Replacement, which all seems to have been achieved successfully - the bit next to the stairs has been painted brown to match the new banisters and the banisters themselves, plus handrails and spindles and whatever other assorted pieces of wood are involved in such a project (some of the technicalities escape me) have all been waxed.  Tomorrow is the graining of the paintwork and the polishing of the waxed bits, and then Wednesday and Thursday are the actual changeover days for the banisters, with Friday to allow for any overrun of bits that have taken longer than expected.  So, we're still keeping fingers and legs crossed for the baby to hang on inside for at least that long.  So far, so good.

Stuff

I see I managed to post my last post before falling asleep in my chair, which is good.  I did have vague memories of barely summoning up the energy to hit the 'Publish Now' key before the grey mists of exhaustion dragged me down into a state of near-coma, but I was glad to find that it hadn't just been a dream and that I had, indeed, managed to get the post up there (and, for bonus points, it even consisted of coherent sentences).

Anyway, Monday (37 weeks) was my last day, complete with a very nice send-off from the other doctors (flowers, chocolate eclairs, and a pink fuzzy bunny with a jingly bell inside), and now I can finally catch up on some sleep, as well as getting on with the rest of my to-do list.  By the time I'd written down all the things I needed to do to get ready for the baby, all the things I needed to do to get ready for Christmas and Jamie's birthday, and all the things that I'd like to do before the baby arrived while I still have the chance (get a haircut, catch up on blogging, reconcile my credit card statements, read and summarise the existing research on exclusive vs. mixed breastfeeding...) the list ran to a second page.  Well, that was with double spacing, but you can see why I rolled my eyes somewhat when my colleagues told me I'd have the chance to put my feet up for a bit.  However, while I'm not exactly a lady of leisure now, it does make an incredible difference to be able to sleep an extra few hours in the morning and get a proper nap in the middle of the day and not have to spend the time in between on lengthy commutes or struggles to figure out what the hell is wrong with each of a succession of people and what exactly I can do about it.  I'm rediscovering what it feels like to have some energy, and I am, slowly but surely, working my way through the things that need doing.  There is even a remote chance that I may manage to report on the last two NCT classes at some point, if this baby can hold off long enough.

Another reason for hoping this baby hangs on for a bit longer before putting in an appearance is that next week Barry is going to be replacing our banisters.  If you're thinking that this is perhaps not the optimum time for us to be embarking on a home improvement project of such magnitude then I will not argue with such self-evident truth, but the problem is that our current banisters are not safety-proof against crawling babies and, although we have admittedly managed to raise one baby through at least the latter part of the crawling stage without mishap while living in this house, we would prefer not to chance it a second time.  Between now and the time when we actually have a crawling baby, now seems like our best bet for getting the job done - at least there's a fair chance that Barry can get it finished before I have a second child around to distract me from the project of keeping the first out of his way.  However, there is the inevitable risk that I will add to the chaos of next week by going into labour at a point when half our banisters are missing.  I am swallowing so much fish oil that the poor tyke is probably glued into the amniotic sac by a sea of it and will come out with gills and fins, and avoiding pineapple and sex in case there's any truth to the old wives' tales, but ultimately it's all in the hands of Fate.  We shall see.