Turncoat

Me, I mean. I had another counselling session today, and this is a direct result of that. It's not an effort or an exercise; it's because I've been kind of embarrassed to write this before and, well, that's pointless. What possible purpose could embarrassment serve?

My baby is the single best baby in the whole world ever. She's the prettiest, and the cleverest, and the cuddliest, and the smiliest. She loves me madly and I love her even more. All I need to do to cheer myself up is to think of her - I should remember this more often.

Rob is almost infinitely patient. He's the best Dad Linnea could ever have, in spite of having had no experience with babies before meeting her - he'd met a child or two, but no babies. He loves her visibly and vocally, tirelessly picking her up at night and playing with her by day. They have long conversations that are a joy to listen to.

My house is great. We bought it whenever-it-was, 3 or 4 years ago, and have been nibbling it into shape like that peculiar artist did with 7 selfportraits each in chocolate and lard when I was about 16.

The front room is the library - one wall and two alcoves entirely taken up by books, one wall taken up by a bay window, and one by the visual and audio equipment (The TV That Ate West Reading) and, um, more books.

Rob and my mother made the window seat while we were waiting for Linnea to be born. I can lie on it and look up at the sky. It's a south-facing window, and in the mornings Linnea stands on the seat and leans on the glass and looks hard at everything. Apparently it's fascinating even when nothing much happens outside. We also have two wing chairs. It really is a room designed more for us than for guests; we don't have a sitting room for guests.

That's because we have a dining table which can - and has - seat ten, in the dining room. Which now has a wall entirely panelled in pine, covering two under-stairs cupboards full of junk, but let's gloss over that. Linnea's highchair is beside the window, so that she can't tip it over in any direction or lose spoons too far away. This is where she does her best declaiming - to pieces of carrot, spoons, or Daddy-in-the-kitchen; Rob can look out the kitchen window and in at her through the dinign-room window. It used to confuse her but now delights her, like mirrors. We have a sofabed in there too - we like overnight guests.

The kitchen is small but nice enough, the bathroom small and a bit chilly.

I really like our house. Yes, we'll have to move one day to get all our planned children in (don't ask us how many, we don't entirely agree) and still fit guests, but right now, this house is great.

The lovely efficient professional gasman who services all our gas appliances last year called me yesterday to say it had been a year and did we want them done again - this is so far from the bodge-it-and-dodge attitude I expected from um anyone that I am thrilled to pieces; he impressed me a lot last year with the neatness and thoroughness of his work and now I know he keeps records, too. Clever man. He'll go far - at least, as far as he wants to.

I have proven I can knit, which is satisfying, and I almost never seem to need my painkillers any more, which is delightful, and people like my Linnea Pomes which I find very exciting; I have long wrestled with the delusion that I ought to write somehow "highbrow" things and it's nice to know that the little simple things I pattered out there were enjoyed.

We are getting better and better at not generating rubbish - landfill waste I mean - though I'm not sure how. We don't buy things in packaging, which might be the main thing; I really thought we'd reduced to our limit. Obviously, things went a bit funny over Christmas, because of presents and so on, but we're doing ok. We salvaged a lot of wrapping paper too, so it can be reused at least once before it has to be recycled. We're not too hot on electricity usage though, and we need to work on that. I don't have the energy to keep checking it any more; daily meter readings really did reduce our usage.

Given how little of that kind of thing Rob grew up with, he's learned amazingly well to Always Think About The Damage You Could Be Doing before doing things. He's always willing to learn, if he can find a way to teach himself.

Linnea's not a bad learner, either. She understands Ah-ah (meaning Don't Do That!) and bye-bye and she can make all sorts of babbling noises and stand and sing and crawl and walk holding on to things and pick things up and put them down and hand them around - she even knows not to hold her hand out for things which are offered her but beyond her reach; she claps instead.

She has a piece of advertising from the free paper now; she looks at me and puts bits of it into her mouth; I say ah-ah, she stops. A while later, when she thinks I'm not looking, she tries again. Dastardly monster!

Hee hee. And Rob is emptying all the recycling bins in the house; I'm not sure why; no-one asked him to and he doesn't know I just wrote about his leet recycling skillz (That's what that was about, in case you were wondering).

So my life is pretty much exactly how I want it, apart from the one looming bugbear, but there's only one of it, and there's such a lot else...

Hey. I am allowed to talk about the good stuff too. Journals are entitled to have occasional entries without angst and drama.

(Just don't tell LiveJournal I said that).

The year in review

January: I was pregnant, had the gas fires serviced, and went to Sweden for pregnant tobogganning, and the Netherlands to see Lord of the Rings with Dutch subtitles. I also started the sidesplittingly funny Aquanatal classes. And I discovered Ebay.

February: We got Rob a provisional driving license and made a will. One of our cats mysteriously vanished but returned unharmed some days later. Baby gifts and antenatal classes arrived.

March: I went into early labour towards the end. It was Rob's mother's birthday party and the people closest to me had a very racist conversation which they commented was "politically incorrect". Linnea had hiccups - too cute!

April: I spent April in early labour, and Linnea was born on the 30th. My sister stayed with me the first week, and my mother the rest of the month.

May: We all got to know Linnea.

June: It was all about Linnea. I managed a day without codeine.

July: Competitive Parenting got up my nose and I posted a score sheet. Some people took me seriously.

August: A friend died. We went to Ireland and showed Linnea the Atlantic and more new people than she'd ever met before. She ate banana for the first time. We also went to the Discworld Convention where a lot of other people met her, and I heard that an equally 'normous baby had been born to a friend of mine.

September: September was hard. We went to Sweden and Linnea met her Gammel-Mormor, who died a fortnight after our return. I was getting more and more PTSD symptoms and feeling like a burden. But the time in Sweden was great; it was lovely.

October: I got red suede boots, a scheduled repair operation, and a trip to the Baby Show, which was fantastic and we spent a lot of credit. Linnea was 6 months old on the 30th and celebrated by learning to cruise along the furniture. October was great.

November: My birthday, and a month of wallowing.

December: Surgery. And Christmas. Christmas was good. Surgery was cathartic and successful. But Christmas day was unreservedly good.