Clean

Flylady?  Meh?  It seems a little too slow for my taste.  Flylady is basically a self-help kinda thing, where you go about following their rules for cleaning your house, doing specific things each day and trying to change the habits you have a little bit at a time.  To be fair I've only ever dived into trying to change my habits cleaning-wise and it's always failed.  My house is too full of crap still, and now it's more full of baby things.  I'm giving it a try.  Can't hurt can it?  Personally I think there is too much effort put into some of the things, like I get cleaning your sink each night, but not using about five different cleaning products to make it shiny.  Or keeping your dirty dishes in the cupboard under your sink.  Eugh.  So I'm Flying, but my way :)

Ow my head

I've woken up with a complete evil of a headache this morning.  Pitfalls of being me.  I've always been awful at keeping up with hydration, for years I've been lasting on one glass of water a day which is 1/8th of the amount you're meant to drink.  Even when I was in labour, they had to hook me up to two or three drips to get me hydrated again.  Must get better!  I've mentioned this before but I think there are some days when things go right and some days when things just go so very wrong.  I'm having a bit of a wrong day today.

Smiley

Mornings are always the best time to get a smile from Katie. She smiles if you rub her belly, tickle her upper lip, tickle her left cheek and if you smile at her. Easily impressed apparently! She's been smiling since she was just three weeks and six days old.

Is it?

So we walk into the docs office today, and he asks us if Katie's a girl or a boy.

....

She's wearing a pink coat.

With a pink blanket covering her legs.

And a pink dummy clip attached to a flowery dummy in her mouth.

....

It's a boy :)

Dumb

I can never seem to find the right words. I can never seem to say what's on my mind. Do I think in words at all?

Promises?

So, it's been half a day and how did I get on? The TV is off, this is the second and last time I've been on the computer today, I've sorted out two boxes of games/CDs to sell/throw and I feel like the clouds are clearing from my mind. Success. Now to keep it up :)

Promises, promises

This year my new years resolution was to actually have the baby (she turned up sixteen days late). So now's the time to make a proper one. I always make impossible resolutions e.g. you might notice a few posts back I vowed to make/photograph a piece of jewellery every day. It takes hours to do this - at least two or three. And I knew already I'd be looking after a newborn. I can't emphasise enough how time consuming it is caring for a baby. And somehow I've become this 'house wife' and have started cleaning and getting in the kitchen and making sandwiches. Ha. I told myself I'd Wii Fit it half an hour every day and I haven't even managed to do that.

I think my house is too cluttered and full of all that junk I don't really need or want. I think life would be a lot easier, a lot more efficient if there wasn't so much junk all over the place. I mean, I have ornaments friggin everywhere. It takes so long to dust everything off that I never want to do it. It think my mind is too cluttered too. Information overload. There's so much information and stuff available out there on the net that I'm always seeking something out to look at, even though usually it's just a complete waste of time. I'm spending all this time doing stupid things I don't need to do, just for the sake of doing them. Same goes for watching TV. It's on all the time, and my original excuse was to teach Katie that the day time is noisy and for being awake . Now I find myself just watching all kinds of stuff, even stuff I've seen before, even stuff I've got on DVD! I watch all the ad breaks and everything, insane.

So, my new years resolution:

1. Cleaner desktop
2. Less checking and rechecking of Facebook/feeds/forums
3. Less looking at news websites
4. Less watching TV just for the sake of it
5. Throw/sell/donate more stuff that I don't want/need
   

Go!

Living in the moment

As a notorious worrier, I'm fast learning that it's better to live in the moment than to worry about next week, next month, next year. My little girl is growing fast and developing skills faster, so I'm having to remind myself to appreciate what's going on with her in the day-to-day rather than search for the next milestone and get too excited about a few months or years time when she's doing things she's not doing yet right now.

I think it's important to live day-to-day, not comparing days to other days, especially when you have a baby. One day might be a bad day where nothings going right, your baby has thrown up on you twice, on dry clean only clothes (learned my lesson there!), she's crying when you try to get her to drink and she just won't sleep at the end of the day. The next day might go smoothly, and you actually manage to have breakfast. I think it's really important to take every thing as it comes, and just live in the moment. But I also think that it's really easy to get stuck in a rut this way, to not make plans for the future and to let everything go. So where do you draw the line? How do you find the balance between actually living life (living in the moment), and making things happen (planning life)?

Bumbling along - baby bedtime

Who would have thought a four week old would be reluctant to go to bed? We'd got into a bad pattern of putting her to bed for the night at around midnight, simply because we were still learning the ropes and getting to grips with our own sleep deprivation and keeping the house running at the same time. Both me and Katie had ended up sleeping til around mid-day (with the feeds in between of course). So I decided that 8pm would be the latest bedtime would be, depending on when the feed was around that time. We found her very reluctant to sleep, and she'd stay awake for ages in her cot, crying on and off. Things seem to be clearing up now though, God bless whoever invented the Johnsons bedtime lotion! Not only does it help clear up her flaky flaky skin from being in the womb too long, but she seems to respond well to the relaxing qualities. I sound like I'm selling the stuff don't I? We actually had a random night this week where she slept through the night for five hours straight. I felt so refreshed in the morning! Bad mother I am... I'm looking forward to a long stretch of uninterrupted sleep on Sunday when my Mom is babysitting! I guess you've got to every once in a while, there's only so long you can go just having two hour stretches of sleep before you go completely insane. Especially since I was getting used to having 9 hours+ sleep a night when I was pregnant. Ahh well, time to go and enjoy the peace and quiet while the little lady sleeps.

Happy face

Our little girl smiled for the first time today. She's four weeks old tomorrow, although if she'd have been born on time, she'd have been six weeks old yesterday. I'd been doing the old routine, feed, wind, change nappy. I put her in her bouncer and started the silly baby talk and suddenly she beamed at me. I couldn't find the camera in time, but I'm sure she'll smile again :) Nothing in the world could melt your heart more!

Back in the Drivers Seat

I'm the only one who drives in our household, since one of us is still learning to drive and the other one is only three weeks old. I had SPD during my pregnancy, which got quite bad towards the end. Basically it causes pain around the hips and pelvis and made it difficult for me to walk, let alone drive, which meant that I hadn't driven for around four months... until today! It's a miracle my car even started after that long, and it's amazing how much you feel like you've forgotten after that length of time. I'm used to the car feeling like an extension of my body, like you sort of just flow along the road. Getting back in the car gave me that I'm-driving-a-giant-tank feeling that you get when you start to learn to drive. We made a little trip down to Ikea in the next town, and by the time I was pulling back onto our driveway, I'd got that wonderful feeling back, I can still drive after all! It was also the first time we'd taken Katie out without someone else to help us, since we'd been relying on other people to take us everywhere. It actually went quite smoothly, and she slept through :)

Welcome to the world, Katie Sofia

I moaned enough about being overdue! She eventually arrived (with a little help) sixteen days late, at 1.40am Monday 17th January. It's been a bit of a shock to be honest, I don't think there is anyone out there that can say they weren't a little overwhelmed at the beginning. It's true what they say though, it all gets easier with time, and she's three weeks old today. She's quite grown-up already for a newborn. She was 8lb 13oz when she was born, and grows more every day. She managed to roll from her front to her back at only eighteen days old! I'm so proud of her!

Geeking it up

So, me and Tom are the kinds of geeks that get excited when our local supermarket starts selling ramen noodles, since you usually have to trek to specialist stores to get them.
I had sesame flavour. Holy heartburn batman. Since I've been pregnant the weirdest things give me epic heartburn, such as eating on single cheese and onion Hula Hoop. Joy. These noodles though, holy cow. Also, we have a huge (small) wasteland behind our house because our house is part of a still-being-built development. I looked out the window...
He was literally staring at me for about ten minutes. Cute.

Jewellery January Week 1

I tried to do this one time before, I got as far as two pieces of jewellery, found out I was pregnant and very sick and couldn't carry on. I figured, what better time to try again than January, a new month, a new year! It's still difficult, seeing as I'm almost two weeks over being 9 months pregnant now, but I'm managing somehow to make one piece of jewellery every day! I'll be posting what I've done every week in a lump post, so here's what happened the first week:

Poupee Girl

For those of you that don't know, I'm a user of Poupeegirl. What is this? I hear you ask. Pupe (Japanese spelling) is a Japanese fashion/social networking site. You get an avatar in the form of a doll, and can buy virtual clothing and accessories for her with the currency of ribbons. You earn ribbons by simply signing in, dressing up your doll and posting photos of your real life wardrobe items and accessories. I know that there are girls on this website who struggle to find items to photograph and upload to the site - I feel lucky that I have an excessive collection of jewellery to post (since I make jewellery!). You can post up to five items a day, but to be honest I just can't be bothered :) It's something of an addiction.Here's my Pupe, she's called Miya :) I think that Pupe originally started off entirely free, but of course in the ever growing quest for money, the Pupe staff saw dollar signs (or yen signs) and began to churn out highly desirable exclusive items that could only be bought by exchanging real life money for a new currency, jewels. I've never bought jewels, and refuse to do so, however there are many girls who have spent upwards of $100 in their Pupe life in order to get these items. Crazy stuff.

The Internet is PUBLIC?!

I've heard horror stories about people having pictures of their family and their kids - their babies - used freely like stock photos around the internet and in publications and so on, all because they posted an image online. I will be posting pictures of my daughter on facebook, probably one or two on here, but I think I'd have to have a hard think about privacy settings and what I share. It's easy to think that you're in a little bubble on the internet, hard to think that people are actually looking around at what you put out there.
In other news, still no baby. I'm 10 days overdue, and although I've posted a really nice message on facebook telling people that all the repetitive every day questioning about whether she's here or not is stressing me out and that I'd tell them as soon as she's here, they're still sending messages. She's definitely coming by the weekend let's say, as the meds won't let me go past the two week late mark.I've started making a habit of wearing jewellery every day. I have an impressive collection of both precious and costume jewellery that I never wear. On the plus side I'm having fun with this pile of jewellery, on the downside, I'm buying jewellery again. Yes, I do make jewellery, but it's like being a chef, sometimes, you kinda wanna stop cooking and go out to a restaurant. I bought this elephant necklace from Accessorize and I love it :) It kinda reminds me of my childhood vaguely, something to do with a Christmas cracker prize, a bright green, plastic elephant.

Minna no Nihongo

I took a Japanese class back in September 2007, to try to keep myself in the books after graduating from university. It was a beginners' class, and the best fun ever, so relaxed and with a bunch of fantastic people. My tutor Eiko was lovely and was always excellent at going at our pace and answering our silly questions. I met some great people on this course! Eiko decided to stop teaching at the end of our class in June 2008 as she was expecting a son and so I decided not to take the next year of the course. I actually really regretted not taking the course and ended up joining again the following year with Tom in tow. Eiko was back, however because of the demands of so much teaching, our class (year two) was integrated with the advanced class (year three) most of whom had actually lived in Japan for months at a time. I found the class very difficult, and although I managed to bag myself a nationally recognised qualification in business Japanese, I decided to quit again.
I've been missing it of course, so I ordered the book the class was being taught from. It's entirely in Japanese, in Japanese characters too (kanji, hiragana and katakana) so it's nothing easy! We actually started from something like the 12th chapter in the class because the advanced class had already started from the start. I'm starting from the very start, taking it slow so that I don't get too frustrated with learning like I did with the advanced class.

Overdue

I'm only two days overdue, considering they don't do any major interventions til 14 days I'm doing pretty well! But if I get another text or email asking me if I've had the baby yet, or if I'm feeling any twinges, I'm going to go crazy. I've simply started ignoring them now, I think replying to them all would be a full time job - some people actually send the same question every day, regardless of what I say!

Happy New Year!

Happy new year to anyone who happens to stumble across this blog! It's officially my due date today, 9 whole months of growing a baby. She's showing no signs of wanting to come out, to be fair who could blame her, I suspect it's kinda warm and cosy in there. I do, however have a lovely cold right now after trying to hard to avoid the sneezers and the coughers. Do you think excessive nose-blowing can induce labour?! At least there's no debating now, she's definately going to be a 2011 baby, definately born in January... just... which day?!