Yet another blogging mummy

Did you ever really taste your boiled eggs  before having kids? After probably the two most challenging years of my life (although that's only up until now, mind you!) today I had a day off. Off work, off stress, off being a mummy. 10 precious hours of just..being...me. This summer, granted, I have had two days a week completely free, but mostly during that time I am rushing around trying to clean, cook, organise, sell, plan, and by 2 pm I feel exhausted, empty and unproductive, which leads to me lying down guiltily and fitfully for the next few hours until it's time to pick up Pickle again.  But last night, my superhero husband spent two hours cleaning the house, so that this morning after I had shipped Pickle off to nursery, I could come home to a clean house. Let me explain...a clean house to me, means that all the toys are shoved in more or less the same place rather than strewn lavishly and with wild glee in every conceivable space in the house, the potty, playdough bags,...

  The part-time trap The funny thing is, without us having babies, the human race would go extinct pretty damn quickly. And the planet would be overrun with rats and wasps and cockroaches. So why is it that our society makes it so hard, almost prohibitive, for women have children? I feel like I have been punished for having a child, and I am continuing to pay the price.  When I got pregnant, I really wasn't thinking about my career. I naively believed that I would waltz back into my role as a class teacher after my maternity leave had ended. What I couldn't have been prepared for was the scrabbling, panicked uphill struggle I faced trying to secure part time work when I went back. It was as if the governors and my head teacher saw me coming from afar, and as I approached, holding a newborn baby, they meticulously laid out an all but impossible obstacle course for me to navigate. No, they said, after months of waiting for their reply. There are no part time jobs here for you. B...

I am sitting at my desk on a warm but rainy morning, having just dropped my daughter at nursery. It is the first day I have had to myself without any pressures of childcare or work for a very, very long time. Too long, in fact. In my gratitude diary today (yes, I do that now) I have written "I am simply grateful to have time. But I am so, so tired."  Having a day off without recharging for so long doesn't mean, I discovered, that I bounced out of bed at 6 am, eyes shining with anticipation, and whizzed around like a mad Mary Poppins cleaning and sorting after running a 10k, or that I have boundless amounts of energy that will culminate in creative, life changing outcomes by the end of today. Quite the opposite. As I heaved myself reluctantly out of bed this morning following a night of constant wakeups as a result of a wailing little bean who was too hot to sleep, I felt surprisingly depressed. Even as I did my yoga just before I sat down to write this, I could feel that ...

                                                                                                                                                                      "Relentless"                                                                                   ...

                                                 OMG  She's 2! Pickle turned 2 a couple of days ago. For the past 6 months I've been waiting for and carefully observing the signs of two-nager hood to grace our house, in other words, the arrival of an evil spirit who inhabits my child for the next few years. For around 9 months there have been daily tantrums for no discernible reason, regular refusal to eat or drink, even the food that she loves the most more than anything in the world, spitting EVERYTHING out the moment it goes into her mouth or eliminating the middle man and just chucking it onto the floor, (let's be honest, 80% of the food ends up on mostly chewed on her person or on the floor. It's a miracle these little people survive or grow at all) violent distaste for nappy changes, an undisguised abhorrence of a...

                                    The moments that matter     When Pickle was very young, about a month old, I was doing the usual first time mum panicking at everything she did and everything she did not do, thinking I was a bad mum for doing or not doing everything and anything, thinking she would die at any moment because she was sleeping or not sleeping, not kicking or kicking too much...I actually remember gasping out the words "do you think she'll die?" when my husband suggested I was slightly overenthusiastic with the amount of nappy cream I applied one day.  I would panic if she woke up too early or too late. I would panic if we were slightly late for a baby music class or if we missed one, or if she drank too much or too little milk, it was ridiculous but also, as I know now, extremely normal. I would be meticulous about the timings of everything for the first part of her ...

                                                     Is it a mum thing?                         I love my daughter. I love being a mummy. I really, really do. I don't want to sound like I'm complaining in these posts. I guess the point of them is to let some stuff out, vent a little, and for anyone who reads them to think "Ahhh! so I'm not the only one! That is such a relief!" because I know that through reading millions of mummy blogs and mums forums and facebook mama groups, knowing that I am not the only one gives me a lot of encouragement and hope.  A little like Sean Lock (RIP you genius) can identify what traumatic events he has been through by differentiating his forehead worry lines, I realised that I can tell the last time I had a shower by the length of my leg hair....