NotSheep

I’ve been out this morning. Actually out of the house. In a car. With me driving.

The midwife told me to check with the insurance company to find out when I’d be covered to drive again. The insurance company said I could drive when my doctor said so. “Which doctor?” I asked, “The GP I’ve never met, or the obstetrician I’m never going to meet again?” So then the insurance company said I could drive when the midwife said so. The midwife said I could drive when I felt up to it. Clear as mud.

It went okay - although all I did was drive about six miles in a quiet-on-Sunday-mornings town. I’m not prepared to drive in heavy traffic yet, or through the city, but even being able to drive into our small town will mean I can get out of the house a bit. And, perhaps even more importantly, I’ll be able to get the children out of the house a bit. Even if all we do is go to the library or a playground, it will a) improve their moods/behaviour, and b) give me something I can do with them when their moods/behaviour is driving me up the walls. And it might save me from starting another round of people singing Abba songs on Twitter, which would probably be a good thing.

I’ve also been discharged by the midwife this week, so I guess all that means I’m recovering well. The scar is healing nicely, and I’ve yet to see any symptoms of all those nasties that the swab found a few days after the surgery - I’ve had no fever, no shivers, no feeling ill - so I’m glad I chose to hold off on the antibiotics. Usually there are almost no medications in this house at all - when Toby was born in August 2005, I had to send out for something for the afterpains, because there wasn’t so much as a paracetamol or ibuprofen pill here - and the painkillers that were bought then were mostly still here when Louie was born. Now I’ve got a supply of paracetamol, ibuprofen, codeine, two different antibiotics (actually three, because one is a combination tablet), as well as a month’s supply of another, stronger painkiller, which is only supposed to be taken for a few days at a time - but the midwife asked my GP to prescribe me some and he sent an entire box.

Scratchy has been back at work for a week, and we’ve all made it through. I’ve done very little around the house, largely because I’ve been sat on my bum with a baby attached to me - but as NattyEm wisely pointed out on Twitter, “that is just the best reason in the world to not do something” I have managed to delegate fairly effectively, though - having big kids is great, because they can do so much around the place. Barney made a batch of chocolate-chip cookies this morning, which means he now knows how to use the Kenwood Chef that I scored on Freecycle a few weeks ago - complete with lots of attachments - I was very pleased and probably would have blogged about it at the time if I hadn’t gone into labour before the next time I wrote a blog-post! Anyway, now that Barney can use it, I’ll be placing orders for all sorts of delicious things - especially as the rolling-pin, which had been missing for a few weeks, has been found (in a bookcase - well where else would you keep a rolling pin?)

I’ve spent some time with my nose buried in Louie’s hair, getting high on that new-baby smell. He’s four weeks old today, and the falling-head-over-heels thing has taken a bit longer with him than it did with the others (perhaps to do with lack of birth endorphins, perhaps to do with trauma), but I think we’re well on the way now. He’s gorgeous - very spotty right now, but almost all of my babies have been through that stage and it doesn’t seem to have made them any less handsome afterwards He is a much better sleeper than the others were - I’m regularly getting four-hour stretches at night, which is more than any of them did at this age - it’s more than George did at a year, never mind just under a month! He took to breastfeeding with absolutely no trouble at all, despite having a start which can sometimes make that more difficult - I think the fact that he was permanently in bed with me, even overnight in the hospital, made a difference. He’s getting bigger too - he hasn’t been weighed since leaving the hospital (unless you count me standing on the bathroom scales with and without him), but I’m sure his hands and feet and head are bigger, and I know he’s longer, because his feet stick out of the bottom of his nightshirts now. I notice little changes in him every day: in the past week he’s become more interested in watching things around him, he’s starting to give little smiles, and he’s waving his arms and hands in a more deliberate way. Watching him and my other children - both separately and interacting with each other - makes me want lots more children. I won’t have any more, for many reasons, but not wanting more isn’t one of them.

We had a visit from my friend L, who I hadn’t seen in just over a year. She’s a teacher, and between that and her children and elderly parents, she’s very busy during term-times, so most of her socialising is done during the school holidays. George and Freddy were particularly pleased that her son R came along - they used to see a lot of him when he lived across the road, but since they moved last year, R has become fairly reclusive - and especially has not wanted to come here, because it would have meant seeing their old house. But he enjoyed the visit too, and when L left, I offered to have R here for a while longer, and he quickly agreed to stay; I hope that now he’s taken the step of visiting us once, we’ll see him more often.

New mp3 players have arrived for Barney and George. This means that Barney has had to be convinced that it is not a good idea to drown out the sound of approaching cars whilst cycling, and that George, rather than singing the same song for days on end, has been singing a variety of songs, and talking at the top of his voice (because he can’t hear himself over the mp3 player). I’m not entirely convinced that’s an improvement.

I’ve given the children some studying to do - the weather has been horrible, and sitting down with books for a while each day keeps things much, much sweeter around here. They’ve mostly only been doing an hour or so a day - although certainly the impression of hot-housing could have been given when Toby (not quite three) started trying to teach Louie how to use a calculator! - and he does insist on having “work” of his own while the older boys study:

But quite a lot of the time has been spent thus:

I will post more photos of Louie soon; it’s just a bit difficult to take photos of the baby in your own arms..

A month ago today:

Scratchy took that when Louie was brought out of the operating theatre - it was taken with his mobile phone, because we weren’t at all prepared for going to hospital, and had almost nothing with us; we certainly hadn’t brought a camera. It’s not that we never considered the possibility of a transfer - I think almost everyone planning a homebirth does - but we weren’t expecting labour to occur until two weeks later. At the time that photo was taken, I was under a general anaesthetic, and I didn’t even know it existed until Louie was three weeks old. I’m glad to have it, even though I cried the first time I saw it. I’ve spent a lot of this morning checking the time and thinking “this time one month ago…”

Anyway. Here he is, one month old:

He does lots of little things I forgot to mention when I wrote before - for example, he laughs in his sleep. Great big loud chuckles, with heaving shoulders. It makes us laugh too. And there are new things, even in just the three days since my last post: he’s starting to smile more and using his hands to take hold of things. Every day there’s something else, some little change.

Yesterday Barney rocked him to sleep for the first time - which pleased Barney very much indeed. He’s rather keen on Louie, although he’s still just as fond of Toby as always:

More photos below the fold.
(more…)

This is a three-year-old:

A rather cute one, in my opinion.

Toby’s birthday was on Thursday, but we celebrated today instead - although I did buy them all drive-through corporate burger-type food for lunch on Thursday, as a) I was out doing errands and b) the cupboards were bare - so he got two lots of Happy Birthdays sung to him. Today’s singing was just the standard version, but on Thursday his brothers regaled him with that as well as the zoo version and the dalek version. No, I don’t know that one either.

Barney has been alternating between Kevin-style teenager, when he gets all upset and tearful any time he’s told off, and marvellous big kid, when he makes me breakfast in bed, or when he looks after Louie so I could eat it. While I was eating, Toby came running into the room, stopped in his tracks, demanded, “Where’s Louie?!” and, when I told him Louie was with Barney, ran off to find them. Oh I know where I stand

After having had hardly anyone come to visit in the last month, we had not one but two lots of visitors yesterday. The first was a woman from another home-ed group - neighbouring, but not local - we’ve been emailing one another for a while, and she came with her teenage daughter. We’d never actually met before, so it was good to put faces and voices to the emails. We found we’d a lot in common, and I enjoyed meeting her. Later, my friend J and her three children arrived - her older daughter has just turned 14 and Louie lay peacefully in her arms for about ten minutes, so she can come back anytime

On Friday night Toby threw up - into the bathroom sink, which I thought was very considerate for a just-turned-three-year-old. Freddy told us that Jack had also thrown up, but Jack denied it, although he didn’t seem to be feeling great. They both went to bed and slept well, however, and woke up full of energy and apparently fully-recovered.

Sometimes the scenes in this house are quite…um…well, I don’t really know what to call this:


















He’s a lizard, by the way, in case that wasn’t obvious. But it’s Jack, who will tell you the obvious anyway, because how on earth would you know anything at all if he didn’t tell you?

Toby made it clear that Jack was not welcome in his photograph!




















George was grumpy, and was trying to make this a terrible photo - but I don’t think he’s capable of it.

The bigger kids all got involved with cooking today, with Barney and Jack making stinky pizza for lunch, and then George and Freddy preparing dinner together: honey-mustard chicken fingers and hash-brown potatoes, all made from scratch. It was all delicious. Here is the child who normally insists he hates chicken, but who kept eating until it was all gone












And here is the child who said he didn’t like it because it was spicy (presumably he meant the mustard, as there were no spices involved), but decided, when he remembered how much fun he’d had making it, that he was going to eat it anyway, so he could make it again
















And here is the only one who didn’t give it at least nine out of ten
























This is the birthday cake, being presented after dinner:

A split second after that photo was taken, Toby blew the candles out - long before the cake was placed on the table and well before the rendition of Happy Birthday To You was over. And as soon as the cake was on the table, he dived in to remove the candles and attack the cake itself. Hm, anyone would think he had older brothers with healthy appetites…

It is my belief that there is a design-flaw in women. I think that each time we have a baby, we should grow an extra arm. Because we need it. I’d have eight arms by now - the two that I was born with, and another six - and I might just be able to keep up.

But I don’t have eight arms; I have two. And they are both engaged, a great deal of the time, in holding, nursing, changing, carrying a baby. And when they’re not, they’re usually rushing about the house (attached to the rest of me, of course) trying to do all the needing-to-be-done things that have occurred to me while my arms were busy with the baby and the other children.

Hence, very little blogging recently. I can’t blog with one hand; I just can’t. It’s not that I can’t actually physically do it - my typing-speed with one hand is actually not bad, considering it’s one hand - but it doesn’t come anywhere close to my speed with two hands, and that’s just too frustrating.

(Also my trackball mouse has been slowly dying; I’m awaiting the arrival of a replacement. I did try a Fish Mouse, and I love the concept - a trackball that needs no surface on which to rest it - but it just wasn’t responsive enough, even set to the highest speed. And I cannot be doing with these stupid touchpad things that you get on laptops; I hit it accidentally way too often even when I’m not using it.)

Back to your regularly scheduled etc.

Another reason for the lack of posts here is that there hasn’t been much to say. It has rained. And rained and rained. Fortunately we weren’t affected by the flooding, but that doesn’t make me any less fed up with all this rain. According to a friend, because the country is getting warmer and wetter, we can expect summers like this for the next few decades. In that case, i need to move. I don’t need the Bahamas; I just need somewhere that has at least a couple of months of reliable sunshine and warmth each year.

Since we’ve been stuck indoors, the boys have done a bit of studying, and Toby has joined in: he has been bringing me the Superphonics book and demanding that I tell him what the sound is on the page it’s open to. He’s also been drawing a lot - particularly spiders, most of which even have eight legs, and some of which also have eight eyes. It’s a pity he wasn’t around when they were designing women - he might have given them some useful ideas.

I’ve read The Diary of Anne Frank aloud to the older boys. They were beginning to complain that it was boring - and then I read the words “Anne’s diary ends here”. They looked at me in shock and confusion - they’d been expecting a happy ending, or at least a resolution of the tale. As I read through the rest of the book - what happened to Anne and the other residents of the Annexe, the discovery of Anne’s diary and the results of its publication - they were all blinking back tears. Then each of them in turn chose to read the book again.

It was a good time for them to encounter it, I think. George and Freddy have been reading a lot about the Second World War, but it’s hard to comprehend the suffering of huge numbers of people, and I think Anne’s diary made it more imaginable for them. We can think about those who lost their lives, but I think the diary helps us feel it. I visited Bergen-Belsen in my late teens, and have never forgotten the impact. I would very much like to take the boys there sometime.

But back to the present. I need to work through all the stuff - mainly books - in my dining-room; I did try to attack it last week but only managed about ten minutes before Louie demanded my presence and attention again. I also need to do some orgo-planning (it’s a home-ed thing), and I need to do some programme-planning for Beavers; I’ll show up and be a countable adult leader for the next few months, but I doubt I’ll be much use in terms of actually physically running games and activities over the next few months. Programming, however, seems to have become my responsibility. I don’t really mind that; I’ve almost two years of Beavers programmes worked out already (because I’ve been clever enough to keep records of what we’ve done! ) and since the longest anyone stays in Beavers before moving up to Cubs is about two-and-a-half years, once I’ve another year of programmes sorted, I can just recycle them all. But for now, I have to get that year of programmes done. I hope to have at least up to Christmas sorted by the time we start back in September.

My attempts to get organised have not been helped by Twitter’s decision not to send any more text-messages to its users outside North America. I’ve been using I Want Sandy a lot, largely due to its ability to send reminders and details to my mobile phone via Twitter direct messages. Now that Twitter isn’t sending me any messages, it’s 95% less useful, so I’ve been looking at alternatives. Brightkite is still invitation-only, so isn’t very busy, but I am very impressed by both the service and the responsiveness of those running it. And it sends text-messages. It doesn’t work with Sandy yet, unfortunately, but nothing else does in the UK. Bah.

One thing I have managed to do is establish what my holiday cacti actually are - this was do-able with one hand because it involved reading lots of plant websites. The plant that I thought was a Christmas Cactus turns out to be a Thanksgiving Cactus, and the one that flowered briefly in June turns out to be an Easter Cactus, and the third, which hasn’t bloomed yet (at least, as long as I’ve had it) turns out to be a Christmas Cactus. Confused yet? I took some cuttings from the Thanksgiving Cactus a few months ago, and despite my opposite-of-green thumbs, they seem to be thriving. They’re not big enough that you could actually say they were plants yet, but perhaps they could be called plantlets. So I got all confident and took some cuttings from the other two as well, and have planted them with high hopes.

And that’s your lot, because writing this has taken absolutely ages, and I’ve a to-do list as long as several of the extra arms I’d have if this whole reproduction thing had been done properly.

That’s an A* up there. I’m feeling quite proud of my 13-year-old

So here I go again, trying to remember what has happened in the last week or so. Given my current brain-fuzziness, this is going to be a random assortment of anecdotes, I think.

The big news was, of course, Barney’s achievement of an A* in his French GCSE. We’re very proud of him - and he’s very pleased with himself too. I knew his French was good enough to get an A*, but I was concerned about his laborious handwriting and lack of organisation letting him down - but the kid done good. The process was, as I’ve written before, as important as the result - but it’s great that he got a good result too. We all went out for lunch on Friday to celebrate, and once again did our best to put a local Pizza Hut into bankruptcy. One of these days they’re going to ban us from the all-you-can-eat buffet Freddy ate heaps of pasta, George ate lots of pizza, Toby ploughed through an impressive amount for one so small, Jack ate huge piles of nachos and coleslaw(!) and Barney ate masses of everything on offer. He commented that Pizza Hut was “better than McDonald’s, because at McDonald’s they give you a limited amount of food” - all of this with hand-gestures demonstrating just how little food that was, a tone that said “and why?“, and a baffled look on his face.

We also made it to the library for the first time in months, and returned a pile of books and apologised for the two we can’t currently find (one of which has now turned up) and repeated that we’d returned the two that they still think we’ve got which we’re sure we returned. I was surprised by how busy the library was, but I’d forgotten it was the school holidays.

Freddy found a muffin recipe in the back of a story-book he’d read; it wasn’t an amazing recipe in any way, but he wanted to make them, so we munched on those all day on Sunday. I traded with someone on Freecycle: she got some of my huge pile of plant-pots and I got her folding bicycle. I don’t know if it will ever get used - I can think of times when it would be useful, but I don’t know if we’ll be organised enough. If it’s not used by the end of next summer, I’ll put it up on freecycle again. I also acquired, again via Freecycle, a double stroller. I have good intentions of getting out walking, since will be about the only form of exercise available to me over the next few months, and walking with Toby alongside is a bit slow to count as exercise!

Over the weekend I let Barney try my electric toothbrush - with a new head on it, of course - and he realised what we were right when we said that he doesn’t do a very good job of cleaning his teeth. Having experienced what it was like for them to be genuinely clean, he agreed when I suggested buying him a rechargeable toothbrush of his own - but then all the others said they wanted them too. I investigated and found that there are indeed rechargeable toothbrushes for children, and that they aren’t cheap. Figuring they might cost less on ebay, I went ebaying - and indeed I found someone selling them at a very good price. And then, even better, I discovered that the seller had a shop/warehouse only a few miles from here. So yesterday we all went off in search of toothbrushes. Barney and George got rechargeable ones that pause and buzz at you after one minute and again after two minutes - the idea being that you clean your top teeth for the first minute and then your bottom teeth for the second. Freddy got one that plays a tune after each minute, and which came in a package containing a baseball cap. Jack and Toby, not wanting to be left out, got battery-powered ones (at half their usual price). So yesterday I had several episodes of children begging to clean their teeth. Long may it continue…

Barney, George and Freddy have made manga versions of themselves on FaceYourManga - which emphasised how much they all really do look alike, because in trying to replicate their own faces, they kept choosing all the same features

I’m hoping Barney’s grumpy mood this morning improves - he was up late last night because of Air Cadets (he’s still keen on that, despite the summer camp being cancelled). We’ve got a friend of the boys coming today - R, who came a few weeks ago, when it was the first time he’d socialised with anyone in a very long time - and he’s happy to return And then, later this week, we’ve other friends coming (and staying overnight) - all of these children are schoolies, so we have to do our best to get to see them while they’re still on parole