21/52 2018

Week 21
21 - 27 May



Jamie is good at climbing and is steadily gaining confidence. He's also good at recognising and testing his limits - going a little bit higher, then checking he can get back down, then a little higher again. Meanwhile I am getting better at a kind of meditation where I tell myself to give him space, and that if he does fall he will most likely just bruise and learn, and if he does need to go to hospital at any point, social services do not swoop down with child protection orders for parentally supervised kids falling off council-maintained play equipment.

There is a second picture for this week, because it was our wedding anniversary:



I am so happy that we have kept up with the anniversary picture-within-picture thing. We have prints of the current year plus the original wedding picture stuck to our fridge.

7/52 and 8/52

A late update for week 7 on account of illness. After a couple of weeks of soldiering along with what seemed like every cold going, I developed a full-on chest infection with a few less-than-pleasant extras, and spent last weekend - and most of the last week - in a battle to keep hydrated enough to continue breastfeeding. Steve and Jamie have also been struggling, although thankfully with not quite the same spectacular symptoms, and we're indebted to friends, my PAs, and our lovely neighbours, for keeping us going.

Yesterday seemed to turn a corner though, so I'm going to put last weekend's picture into this weekend's post.

7/52 Bath Time!



Full-on baths are currently a weekly occurrence for Jamie and it's amazing how it's different every time. The first time, Steve was terrified to drown him (we'd agreed in pregnancy that baths were domain of Daddy) and afterwards he seemed to all but disappear into the hood of this towel. At four months though, Jamie is more robust and Steve is more confident. He still doesn't quite have the hang of playing in the water but he does seem to enjoy it.

8/52 Not Well



This is what happens when Jamie is ill. I mean, if he's running a temperature or he can't cope with his snot or something then obviously there's crying and distress and vomit (and Jamie's a bit upset too). But once those things are settled down, it's cuddles all the way, which is cute until your arms give out.

6/52

For me, this week's picture perfectly encapsulates what Jamie is like at 3 - 4 months. Awake, alert, content, thumb in mouth, eyes wide open, and just a glint of amusement. I still can't say that he looks like Steve or that he looks like me, but I love that he looks like himself, like Jamie, a little person and a personality all of his own.

Optimistically, 1/52

For quite some time now I've been enjoying Carie's 52 Project photos - one photo a week of each of her children. She's doing it again this year and asked if anyone else wanted to join in.

Truth be told, I'm rather intimidated by the mummy blogger scene and while I admire a lot of the events, projects, photos and of course blogposts that happen within... the community appears to be full of overachievers and that's not me. I like taking snapshots with my phone, but I'm not a great photographer and have no burning desire to improve. I like writing, but I prefer sleep, and when I do write, I rarely hit Post. I like cake, but I buy it from a shop. I can knit, but slowly, and not particularly well. My Kidston-fu is lacking. Online mums evoke an even more extreme response of admiration and fear than the cool kids at school did.

But, I have the great privilege of knowing Carie in "real life", and although the tag of overachiever would perhaps not be entirely misplaced... she's just too friendly, pleasant and cheerful a person to be scary with it. And I feel confident that if I join in with her on the 52 Project, she's barely going to notice the quality of my photography and won't give a hoot about my failure to change my blog template since, um, well, ever. She's just going to enjoy seeing Jamie grow in the same way I enjoy seeing Kitty, Elma and Pip grow.

So, I'm taking the plunge and hoping to stick with it. Here goes, with picture number one...



I like this picture because it encompasses all the best bits of having Steve at home with us for the holidays (that's his hand disappearing in the bottom right hand corner). While we tried not to disrupt the routine too much, having lazy mornings of the three of us all playing on the bed together was an absolutely brilliant way to start the year.

20 Weeks

My 20 week scan was a couple of weeks ago and everything was more or less exactly as it should be. Here's the picture:



The scan took quite a bit longer than the 12-week one, but it wasn't really a hardship gazing at the image of Offspring while a sonographer pointed out all the various organs that were positioned and working exactly as they should be. The baby was awake and wiggling at first, but seemed to fall asleep while the checks were being done on the head and face area, and then absolutely would not move to allow the sonographer to check the kidneys. In the end I was sent to the loo in the hope that it would wake the baby up enough to move just a little, which worked, but only just. That was a good thing too, though, as it enabled Steve to feel a certain amount of paternal pride that his child is taking after him.

The baby was measuring just a couple of days smaller than the exact average, but still well within the healthy/average range. From what we were told, the important bit is that a baby's growth is proportional all over, and a couple of days is neither here nor there.

Of course we're both completely besotted. Every hand or foot was without question the most wonderful hand or foot ever to have been seen, because sure, most babies probably have hands and feet, but no matter what their parents think, Steve and I know for a fact that these hands and feet are just cuter.

And here's the outside view at 20 weeks:



(I decided to ditch the leggings-and-vest combo for the photos. It made me too self-conscious and it's not like the internet really needs another exact sequence of matching bump pictures. It's also not like there are any other photos of me while I'm pregnant, so I'd rather that I'm happy with the ones that do exist.)

20 weeks marks the half-way point of pregnancy and we might have made a bigger deal of it if we hadn't spent the last few weeks grumbling along with a horrible cold, which was not only giving us bunged up noses and sore throats during the day, but also causing us to more or less continuously wake each other up throughout the night with coughing fits. It's better now, though, so I'm trying to think more about the end of this month, which will mark the point at which, should this baby try to appear early, it would be considered viable and have a chance of survival outside the womb.

16 Weeks

Time for another monthly bump pic. Well, 4-weekly. Ish. Week 12 turned out to be almost-week-13 and this is week 16-and-a-bit. It seems so strange to think that I'm almost four months along. Every day of it has taken an age and yet part of me is thinking I can't have been pregnant that long! Steve's preferred method of tracking our progress is a percentage counter to the due date, which today tells us we're at 40%, which seems very substantial. Another alternative would be to take the long view - I'll likely live another fifty years, and worry about my Offspring every single day of that, so right now, at 16 weeks pregnant, I'm not even 1% of the way through.

Nevertheless. I'm actually going to post two pictures. Here's the official one:



... which I don't really like. Taking these pictures against the bookcase and wearing the same outfit seemed like such a good way to definitely be able to see the progress. Instead, the outfit makes me feel self-conscious about my body and I think that's the first thing that comes across in the picture. I'm overweight and most of that weight is in the areas least flattered by leggings. The leggings were a sensible choice in that I should be able to wear them all through pregnancy but I don't want to be wearing that worried, how-enormous-does-my-bum-look grimace all the way through the record of my pregnancy.

I prefer this picture:



... where you can actually see that there *is* a bump now. It's not huge, granted, but this weekend is the point at which my favourite jeans no longer fit comfortably and I have two small but definite stretch marks. Bumpage is definitely there. Also, while it's still not a photo that makes me look good, I'm giving the bump a cuddle and genuinely smiling about it. So in many ways, this is a much more accurate bump picture, if we're going for experience rather than pure size.

Hopefully there will exist some other happy pictures of me while I'm pregnant. A friend very kindly passed along some really nice maternity clothes which feel comfortable to wear and make me look pregnant rather than fat. There's supposed to be a lot of growing over the next few weeks, so my hope is that we go on plenty of little jaunts out and about in the sunshine during the early summer. We have a trip to Eden coming up as well.

Meanwhile I need to decide whether to give up on continuity and do the 4-weekly bump pictures in different outfits (and possibly places), or if I declare that I've Started So By The Gods I'll Finish Dammit with the vest/leggings/bookcase combo. Input welcomed!

First Anniversary

It seems hard to believe, but Evilstevie and I have been married for an entire year.

Truth be told, the year, while not tragic, has not been a terrific one either. His work schedule has involved a level of "out of hours" work rather higher than we had expected and this extra work tends to crop up at extremely short notice - we rarely know in the morning whether we will be having an evening meal together. His workload over the last twelve months has been so heavy that it was January before he was able to take time off work for our "honeymoon" and he is still accruing "time off in lieu of hours worked" faster than he is getting a chance to actually use it. For my part, chronic illness does not respond well to such chaotic routines, so my pain and energy levels are no longer as well controlled as they once were, which in turn means the carefully balanced dominoes of my overall health and ability to Do Things (work, socialise, eat properly, manage disability bureaucracy) have crashed. It's all a bit of a mess, really.

On the bright side, we're very much still hanging on to each other and making each others' worlds that little bit nicer. This is definitely a more positive outcome than the alternative, which would be each of us yelling at the other "this is all your fault!"

And on the even brighter still side, at the beginning of May, Evilstevie came home with the biggest grin I'd seen in a long time and proudly announced that he'd booked the week of our anniversary off work, and we both squeaked and hugged each other and began to make plans.

On the morning of our anniversary, we had a quick photo-session to try out an idea I'd picked up via Ravelry. This was to take a picture of the two of us holding a picture of the two of us from our wedding. We took several - this is one of my favourites, although you can click through to see the others:



Then next year we print off one of those pictures and do the same thing again... you get the idea.

Photos taken, we packed ourselves into the car and set off to use an outstanding wedding gift from some very generous friends - a night at a luxury B&B in Devon. The weather steadily improved as we drove south and by the time we arrived I was regretting my failure to pack sun-cream and sandals. Instead we got a chance to sit in the shade looking out at glorious countryside, with tea and knitting for me, and coffee and camera for Evilstevie. Dinner in a nearby pub/restaurant was delicious and falling asleep in a beautiful room under crisp, fresh sheets felt like the holiday had properly begun.

The following morning, after guiltily declining most of the humongous breakfast spread on offer in the B&B's dining room, we loaded back into the car to go to one of my favourite places on earth - the Eden Project.





We first visited the project in January, and if you GiftAid your entry fee then you can get a year's pass to return as often as you like (or at least, as often as you can, because I think I could go every week for a year and not get bored). A brief stop to share the joy with Twitter, and then we spent the morning trekking up and down the outdoor areas, the idea being that if it started to rain, then we could head for the indoor biomes. Of course it didn't rain at all, and by the time we'd decided to stop exploring outdoors and head for the Link, my shoulders were about ready to drop off. We had a break for a late lunch, but I felt that I wouldn't manage much more pushing and that I'd like to just go into the smaller Mediterranean Biome to relax, instead of trying to hike around the larger, steeper, hotter Rainforest Biome. Evilstevie agreed and we made our way across.

That was where we found "the Back-rub team" offering 15 minutes of reiki back massage for £10, which to my burning shoulders and floppy exhausted arms seemed like a wonderful idea.

It really was. I mean, I didn't leap up and dance my way around the citrus grove or anything, but after a bit more of a rest and stretch I was able to not only get around the Mediterranean Biome but in short bursts I managed the Rainforest as well.

That night we crashed out at an unremarkable Travelodge in Bodmin, with the idea being that in the morning we'd be able to head home or elsewhere as the fancy took us. I'm sure nobody will be surprised to hear that in the morning, despite being shattered, we went straight back to Eden - we didn't find the back-rub team but we caught the Storytelling and had a lovely lunch before reluctantly heading for home and a couple of days to recover.

Engaged!

Potted Summary for people in a rush who can't be bothered with all these words: This weekend, Evilstevie proposed to me. It was very romantic. I said yes.

Extended Version, with pictures**:

It all started a few weeks ago when Steve borrowed my phone and inserted a "Top Sekrit Weekend Away" at a location defined only as "Elsewhere" for the 13th and 14th of February. Nothing too unusual in that, we've had quite a few weekends away somewhere, why not do it for Valentines' Day? It's as good an excuse as any.

As the weekend drew nearer, Steve told me he was trying to figure out where to eat on the Saturday night. What with it being Valentines and all, it would be best to book a table somewhere rather than trusting to luck, but he was worried about showing me restaurant options because it would make our overall destination less of a surprise. So I told him that I thought I could guess that much anyway. I was fairly certain that he had arranged for us to stay at Rhyd Hir*, a lovely guest house run by the parents of a friend. After a moment's silence and a query about whether I'd been copied in on the reservation emails or something, he confirmed that I was correct.

Although this made deciding on a place for dinner that much easier, it did make Steve fret a little over the next few days about how much I had guessed and whether there was a security leak. Meanwhile, I was being so smugly self-satisfied about my skills of deduction concerning our accommodation, that it never occurred to me there might be more to figure out...

Forward to Saturday, and after a fairly lazy morning we got ready to leave. This took its usual pattern of me getting ready and then sitting with a book for a while so that Steve could flit about the place rearranging his camera bag, swapping lenses, hunting down memory cards, and so on. Nothing odd there. By lunchtime we were in the car and on the road, with a plan to grab some lunch on the way and then enjoy a nice, leisurely drive to Wales, diverting our route as usual on the basis of tea-breaks, interesting-looking brown tourism signs, and pretty photo opportunities.

We found the restaurant about two hours before our table reservation, so instead we went for a bit of a cruise around finding somewhere nice to watch the sun go down, which was very romantic regardless of the date. Then it was back to the restaurant where dinner was both delicious and plentiful - so much so that when we arrived at Rhyd Hir, we eagerly accepted Diane and David's kind offer of a cuppa but emphatically refused their offer of a slice of cake or a biscuit. Once we'd both regained the ability to fold in the middle, we made our way up to a nice, warm, comfortable room where a bed about the same size as my old flat was a very welcome sight indeed.

In the morning I woke up to birdsong outside, which is nice at this time of year when 'dawn' more or less coincides with a reasonable clock-time to be waking up. We'd agreed with Diane and David that we would be down for breakfast at about 9am, but this was another advantage to the small-guest-house not-a-huge-hotel thing - I didn't have to wait for Steve to be up and about and showered and awake so that he could help me traverse miles of corridor in search of a semi-decent cup of tea. I could let him get on with his shower in peace while I took myself downstairs and was rewarded with an actual pot of tea, and indeed a sofa to sit on while I drank it. This was a good thing because it meant I was properly awake to face Breakfast, a meal which deserved full attention and a capital letter. I almost regretted having cleared my plate at dinner the night before. I was utterly baffled by Steve's decision to only have porridge.

After breakfast, and in his role as "father of a friend" rather than "host", David took us for a bit of a tour around the local area, including some spots where Steve could get some nice pictures. Lots of it was places where we wouldn't otherwise have gone - in some parts of rural Wales it can be hard to tell what's a road leading to somewhere and what's someone's three-mile-long private driveway.

David took us back to Rhyd Hir, and then we picked up our bags, said our goodbyes, and set off for Lake Vyrnwy. At one point, we stopped at a viewing area with a gorgeous aspect on the lake. As Steve fiddled with his camera gear, I pulled out my phone and wondered out loud whether it was worth turning it on to see if there was a signal from this vantage point. I really should have noticed the panic with which Steve told me there wasn't and started getting back into the car saying he'd get better shots from somewhere else.

The 'somewhere else' we ended up was a place we'd been to before - still part of Lake Vyrnwy, but rather more secluded. There's a pretty waterfall, a stream, a nice grassy area with wooden picnic benches, and if you know the road (track) is there and where it goes, you can drive right up to it. Steve had told me that he wanted to try and get a nice picture of the two of us there.


So here's the nice picture of the two of us, complete with hillside, waterfall, stream and cuddle. The camera is on a tripod about two metres away from us. The car is about five metres beyond that. There is a remote control in Steve's left hand (away from the camera) which he is using to operate the shutter. I have happily stood there for a couple of minutes in my role as a marker while he takes test shots, scuttles back and forth making adjustments and so on... nothing unusual is happening. Happy with his camera setup, he keeps whispering jokes and sweet nothings to make me smile and every so often he clicks the remote to take a picture. It's all very romantic and lovely and, although I'm starting to get really tired, I'm having a great time and am really pleased that we've had such a fantastic and relaxing weekend.


Then Steve drops to one knee and asks me to marry him. Not believing him to be serious, I basically tell him not to be silly, the weekend has been fabulous and he doesn't have to start proposing in order to make it better.


Steve assures me he is serious, it's not a spur of the moment thing, he's not just trying to make me happy in the immediate sense, and that he has a ring to prove it. If you zoom in on this one, you see me gaping in shock and turning a funny colour, and him looking both smug and relieved that I hadn't guessed all of his surprises...


Predictably I've lost concentration on standing as I am slightly overwhelmed. At least now we both have wet knees. Steve gently reminds me that it is traditional for me to give him a yes-or-no answer. It's a yes.


As the good old Welsh drizzle picks up, we whisk ourselves and the camera back into the car. After a lot of giggling and deep breaths, Steve changes lenses for a shot of the ring in place. We find our way back to the main road and from there to the Lakeview Tearooms for a well-earned cuppa and something to eat - the appetite which had deserted Steve at breakfast has for some reason come back with a vengeance.


As we drive back to civilisation, Steve also explains to me why he'd been so twitchy about my phone. Knowing that we would be out of signal, he'd set up his server to upload this photograph, and tweet it with the words "fingers crossed @batsgirl says yes..." at lunchtime, so that when we got back into signal (after the proposal) our twitterfriends would have begun to respond and it would be all squeaky and yay. But in his increasing pre-proposal anxiety, he started worrying that the tweet might have gone through early, and I might see it before he'd actually asked the question and he really didn't want to inadvertently propose via twitter.

Knitters will notice that the ring has a bezel setting rather than a prong setting, so that I don't have to worry about it snagging on anything. Apparently Steve had done his research and decided on this before he set out to buy, but had a hard time explaining to the various jewellers that yes, prong settings are very pretty, and very traditional, but he wanted to get me something I could wear every day rather than something to store in my jewellery box.

I'm still getting my head around it, and we haven't set a date yet - we've got as far as "probably summertime" and "probably not this year". We're still too busy giggling to have a sensible discussion about practicalities.

*Access note: Rhyd Hir isn't wheelchair-accessible and the bedrooms are upstairs. But it's not much bigger than a large-ish family home and there's parking right by the door. So if, like me, you can manage indoor-wobbling, it's not a big challenge - plus, there's no epic trek along miles of corridor to find anything.

**All pictures are used with permission, copyright Evilstevie, all rights reserved. Click on the pictures to see the flickr pages for each photo, complete with notes.