Financial stuff (sorry, rather dull!)

Oh my gosh, it has been way too long since I updated!!!! I keep wanting to but there just isn't any time. Or there is but I need to eat or sleep. Or I use it to update my pregnancy diary instead.

But sooooooo much has been happening. Thank you so much for all the messages and notes since my last entry, esp those about the photos and videos of Arthur's party! :) I'm so glad you enjoyed seeing them!

Neil took Arthur to church this morning. I'm supposed to be resting, but I suddenly want to "get things done" - tsk! I want to sew and bake but I'll do that another time. I REALLY need to write some stuff here! I will try to be to-the-point - a rare achievement for me, so we'll see, hehe!

Okay, first thing - we are not moving after all. Neil got offered a job in Ipswich, big pay cut, clean air, more affordable housing, job that wasn't exactly what he wants to do but which might get him there eventually. We prayed and prayed about whether we should go or not. EVERYTHING in me was screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, don't go!!! I can't explain why. I talked to Neil about it, but the only explanation we could come up with is that I basically didn't WANT to go. I wanted to stay and nest and have a baby where I feel familiar. I did NOT want to start fresh in a town I don't know, and where I'm not even sure I want to live, with no family or friends for MILES and MILES. Nooope. I got scared. I felt like I barely coped at times with Arthur when he was in his first few months. The health visitor gave me support visits because she felt I was depressed. Suddenly I feared for my sanity doing it all over again (where EVER we are!) and moving to a new place all at the same time. At least here it is my familiar home and a couple of parts of my family are nearby, and my church who we know so well were around to support us. Without those things I feel like I might not make it through without some real problems. Suddenly moving to Ipswich seem like a CRAZY NUTS thing to do.

So we prayed. But didn't feel God was leading us in one direction or the other at all. We kept on praying. Neil's deadline for accepting or declining came, and he stalled them a week, as we had not had sufficient time to work all the financial stuff out.

Oh, that's another part of it. See, somehow we find ourselves really in a mess, financially. If we had moved to Ipswich we would have cleared debts and fixed it all in one swoop, so that was a big pro for going. We made a pros and cons list but it was too equal. Tsk!!! Nothing was helping us choose!

In the end, the second deadline came for Neil to make a decision, and he said, "Okay, let's just go" And that was the point at which I thought, "Ah. In the light of this reality.... I absolutely know I can't do it." I felt bad saying it because I felt selfish and like I wasn't yielding to Neil as the head of this household (which I feel strongly about him being), but I can not explain it. The urge to stay was absolutely uncontrollable. We talked about it a lot, and Neil said wouldn't I just feel this way about ANY move to ANYWHERE at any point in the future? Because we HAVE to move out of London sometime in the next year or two. We can't afford to stay - the houses are just too expensive, and Neil won't get a job in the field he longs to work in, in London. Also we need to find a place to settle and bring up our children, a place where they can be all ready to start school and live in a home that feels like the kind of family home your children will have cosy memories of, one that you can stay in for most of their childhood because there is enough space, and you can have several children before you have to move again.

I think he's right, I WOULD feel this way to a large degree. I am just a home bird. This is my home, and I am just the type of person who hates - HATES - to relocate and have things change. But I know I have to suck it up and get on with it eventually. But the timing.... I figured with the pregnancy and all, it would be better to stay for now. I don't need the stress. I feel so selfish, ugh.

But anyway. Neil's mum felt that it would be a step of faith to GO because the door was open. Neil kind of felt that way too. But, here's the weird thing (or is it? They have both been Christians sooooo much longer than me and so I feel a bit.... like they know better than me or something) - I felt like it was almost a step of faith NOT to go. Neil said he never heard of seeing a door open, having no major reason to stay, and choosing to stay anyway, as a step of faith. He said that sounded faith-LESS. I struggled with it, because maybe I just wanted to stay sooooooo much that I was willing to pass it off as ANYTHING so that it would get us to stay! I really did want to stay that badly.

Urgh. Anyway, Neil turned the job down. RIGHT AWAY, both of us felt fine about it. Neither of us gave it any more thought at all over the next week or two, so that felt good, because if it had been a mistake, I'm sure numerous things would have brought it to mind. It really didn't feel like a mistake to me. It felt like a blessed relief! I felt physically lighter!

BUT. We are right up a certain creek without a paddle, as far as finances go. We exceeded our overdraft limit. Neil's salary NEVER gets us in the black, we always stay in the red even with a nice big lump of money going in once a month. We have crazy credit card debts - I don't even know how they got so scary. Two weeks ago we couldn't make the repayments on the credit cards because we were over our overdraft limit and getting charged crazy huge amounts of money for it. So now our cards are frozen. Neil got paid 2 days ago - hoorah, because at least that frees up some money, even though we are in the red. Every month our outgoings exceed our income so we reach the overdraft limit quicker. Last week we had no money for food at ALL, until Neil unexpectedly found some euros from the last time we visited my parents, and walked two miles to the nearest Exchange Bureau with Arthur in the pushchair, and came back with £136.54p!!!!! Yay! That gave us lots of groceries and a winter hat for Arthur (whose head seems bigger than his age, so the 12 month hat I had ready for the cold weather does not fit him at all!).

For a week or two we have had big stressy discussions most evenings about finances. That has been one major reason why I have had no time to update. We figured we had no choice but to take out a loan, but the idea filled me with DREAD, since my parents have always taught me that a loan is a good way to financial ruin. You're always in debt and you're losing money the whole time. We decided to ask their advice, since they have been in all SORTS of financial crises over the time they were raising a family. Daddy runs his own (now very successful) company, and starting that up was hard financially. So we asked them. They were SO helpful, I mean, amazingly so. And so understanding. I'm so glad we asked them. They were totally non-judgemental, totally giving of their time and wisdom. Daddy offered to have Neil call him any time he wanted to talk about the stresses of finances and earning to bring up a family, etc. Neil has called him twice already! I love my parents :)

We all discussed our options, and when a loan seemed to be the only way, my parents told us that when they were at their most difficult point starting up the business, they took a loan from my dad's parents, which was offered to them with no interest. And they were so grateful and it made SUCH a difference to them, that they have decided to offer the same to us. We talked long and hard about it and decided to take them up on it. It comes with conditions, so that it's a serious arrangement, not just "Oh phew! Some money has landed in our laps! I'm sure we'll pay it back sometime..." We have to cut up our credit cards. Nooooo problem! I'll be relieved to! The only thing standing on our credit cards is the audioblog.com monthly bill - which is where I upload my videos so you guys can see them, and so that I can send them to my parents via email. Daddy said it's such a tiny amount that I should put it on his credit card and buy him an expensive bottle of wine every year, hahaha! ;)

Also we have to set an amount for monthly repayments to my parents, which we'll all agree on based on what we can afford. We have to sell a car - obviously. We are in no position to be a 2-car family. Neil has the little car he drives to work up for sale. I hope it sells fast, and I hope we get what we're asking for it. We need as much as we can get, because it needs to pay for our credit card debts. It may not cover them though. My parents will lend us the difference to cover our debts and overdraft. We still have to pay finances on our family car, but we need a family car. Neil will buy a bike with the first bonus he gets at work (hopefully soon!) so he can cycle to work and cut costs. We cut out some payments on our monthly statements. It broke my heart to cancel my sponsored child payments, but we just have to for now :( I have been sponsoring this child since my teens :( They were so nice about it when I called them, and thanked me for my long term support, and I told them I'll be back when we're more stable financially.

Soooo. That's it really. I can't believe this has taken me the WHOLE time that Neil and Arthur have been at church!! They are back - I can hear them pulling onto the driveway, so I have to go. Sorry this entry is so dry and financial! It was meant to have other stuff to lighten it up! I also meant to say that suddenly another job has come up that Neil could go for, with a HUGE pay RISE, and in the same town in Cambridgeshire that we originally had prepared ourselves to be moving to - one which I feel much better about moving to as well. Also it's right where Neil wants to be in terms of the type of work. So maybe THIS is of God? We have to pray. I don't want to pull a repeat of what I did with the Ipswich job if Neil goes for it and gets offered the job. I wish I had more wisdom....

I will try to write more soon.

Arthur's birthday party - photos and movie clips....

Oh my gosh, I am just so so so sooooooo behind!!! I have so much that I need to write about here, and I can NOT believe I have left it ELEVEN days since I last wrote! Yeurgh. I didn't even write about Arthur's birthday party, which feels like ages ago now :(

Thank you all so much for the birthday wishes for Arthur, and the lovely comments on the photos! Also I meant to say before, thank you all for the helpful advice or even just sympathy (!) over his constipation issues. I need to write about EVERYTHING at the moment. But no time. I will make this entry about his party, and then hopefully update again soon about other things. Maybe it will take me several entries to get it all off my chest?!

Okay, Arthur's party went great! I had not expected a BAD party at all, but somehow it was way better than I even imagined it would be! :) My grandparents and my parents were there, and my brother and his Sarah, and Neil's sister and our little niece, Ella. Neil's brother couldn't come because of work, and his parents obviously can't due to ill health and living miiiiiles away. But it was lovely!

We were so behind on getting everything ready, and my parents offered to come round in the morning and help (the party was 3.30pm). It took us till almost party time to get everything done! I'm sooooooooo grateful for my lovely parents' help. My daddy put balloons up all over the ceiling and a bunch on the front door with shiny ribbons :) They all had "Happy 1st Birthday" printed on them :) I love having balloons on the front door at a little one's birthday party. It tells the whole world that it's someone special's birthday! Anyway, we put 20 balloons up. Neil blew them all up the night before (well, I blew 3 but got exhausted!). Then we put up the multi-coloured fairy lights that Arthur loved SO much as a tiny baby! I was excited to see those up again. It made me feel nostalgic! They first went up in preparation for my homebirth. Ahhh, such special memories! :)

I decided we didn't have NEARLY enough fairy lights, hehe! So Neil bought TWO HUNDRED more coloured fairy lights when he went out to get some food and drink for the party! Wow! We had them all around the ceiling and the mirror. I LOVE fairy lights! They make me feel cosy and like a little girl again. Arthur loves them too. We still have all the decorations up and Arthur points to them constantly. He likes it when Neil gets home from work and lifts him high up so that Arthur can bop the balloons hanging from the ceiling! If the fairy lights aren't switched on, he points and makes sounds with direct looks at me, asking me to switch them on!

Anyway so it all looked pwetty and festive! I baked Arthur's birthday cake and decorated it really simply. It was a plain vanilla sponge cake with raspberry jam for the filling, mmmm! I made plain white water icing for the top and just made a big number "1" on the icing with hundreds and thousands. And put a single candle on top, of course! We completely failed to take any photos of all the important things, tsk, but I took some rather grey and grainy still images from the camcorder, so here are a few - first just the cake (weird colours though - the hundreds and thousands are really bright primary colours), then Arthur being unable to resist touching the hundreds and thousands just after we sang happy birthday and blew out his candle, and then Arthur eating some cake with Daddy:

Also, for your viewing pleasure (!!), a rather dark video of the birthday boy receiving his cake to the tune of "Happy Birthday to you!" :) I wish you could see his face more clearly. He was so excited. I blew his candle out and then he did this cute shy smiley thing at everyone. It's harder to see on the video than I thought, sadly. But here it is!

Arthur opened his presents from nearly everyone, except there were so many that I think he would have been overwhelmed with all of them at once - he was so eager and excited about each one! He tore the paper off the presents himself (with my help) and immediately started playing with each new thing. It was hard to get him interested in the next present to open, so we decided to leave 3 of them till the next day - the ones from my parents and grandparents, who didn't mind a bit. He got a Mega Blocks Monsters building set and a GREAT book with jigsaw pieces in it from SIL, and simple jigsaws and a Meg and Mog hardback book from my brother and Sarah (I LOVE Meg and Mog!!!). He was so keen on the jigsaws, but he likes to take the pieces out (they all have a peg on each piece to make it easy to lift them out) and then pile them up or stash them somewhere! He loves stacking and stashing at the moment. He can stack 3 cups on top of each other, and stack the whole set inside each other one by one. We are constantly losing things at the moment because Arthur has 4 or 5 hidey holes around the living room where he likes to stash things! He likes to find a hole to drop things down into. He goes around choosing things to put in it, and makes several trips, hehe! It's so funny! I usually find several clean nappies, half the jigsaw pieces, plastic fruit, toy cars, and unopened mail down there. He has also started taking a chosen item all the way into the kitchen and depositing it carefully in the washing machine or tumble dryer! Funny boy :)

Anyway, so he loves his presents! He tries to put the jigsaw pieces back on the board they came from, but just plops them down on the board so far. He is also trying to put the shapes through the holes on his shape sorter, though without any success so far. He loves that thing.

Anyway, PARTY! I have to hurry up - Neil has gone to bed, and so should I. He has to go to work early in the morning so I will need to be up early too to watch Arthur when I would normally get extra sleep while Neil watches him. I am NOT a morning person, and I am also a pregnant person who is still getting up several times a night to nurse the little one. So I neeeeed my sleep! I'll get on with it!

The party was so relaxed. We laid out some snacky food that Arthur could eat - pretty healthy food for a party! We had fresh fruit salad, cucumber and carrot sticks, and apple rice cakes!! We did have bowls of crisps for the adults, but they were high out of reach of our little monkey! Arthur's tea consisted of the party food. He ate EIGHT rice cakes!!! He stood by the food table (low table just perfect for his height) for 40 minutes, grazing at stuff! He would pick up a rice cake, take a bite, munch it for a while, then put the rest of the rice cake carefully down in amongst the cucumbers. Then he would pick up another rice cake, take a bite, and - you guessed it! - put the rest down in the cucumbers! He did this with 8 rice cakes, and then started working his way through the discarded ones in the cucumbers! He loves apple rice cakes. He did eat some fruit salad and quite a bit of cucumber too. We forgot to peel the cucumbers but he didn't bat and eyelid. He just chewed and chewed on the tough skins like chewing gum, merrily getting on with socialising (!), and then spitting them out finally after like 10 minutes, when he had had enough of chewing them. He spits things out neatly, it's weird. He is careful as he does it and then won't budge till he has our attention to show us where the piece is, so we can dispose of it. Only then will he move on. He is such a tidy little boy! So unlike his parents, haha! My mum says he must know what he's been born into, and knows the task he faces!!! ;)

He loved the birthday cake! We didn't give him any icing or jam, but the cake was sweeeet and he LOVED it! :) He used the flats of his palms to shovel it into his mouth and eat as much as he could in one go! He never eats like that really, so I know he must have really enjoyed it :) I like that it was a nice birthday treat for him.

Everyone loved Ella - she is such a sweet little girl! She was almost 5 months old at the time of the party, and quite smiley at everyone! She is mostly on formula now, and Neil fed her a bottle which was nice. He has never fed Arthur anything other than solids, as Arthur has never once had a bottle. Oh but he did help with syringe feeding him when he wouldn't take the breast at first. Ugh. That was a hard time.

Anyway Neil is very besotted with his niece! There was a cute moment near the end of the party where Neil took both Arthur and Ella on his lap. The babies just looked at each other and were very "respectful" towards each other! Of course everybody leapt up with cameras flashing ;) I got a few photos, and took a little video clip too, so here they are. Neil said he could get used to having two, and his sister said he would have to, haha! Actually I think that is on the clip. Arthur was so curious and lovely with Ella. He kept wanting to reach out and touch her, and see her face if she wasn't looking at him. He was sooooo gentle with her. Everybody said what a wonderful big brother he is going to make :) Anyway, here they are:

Arthur was not remotely tired of company by the time everyone left a couple of hours later. He was so perfect all afternoon, smiley and waving and clapping and cheerful. I breastfed him when he asked for milk, but I did it in the kitchen because there was no WAY he would ever manage to relax and nurse for any length of time in the living room with all the guests! He was so sociable. He kept cruising round everyone's knees, stopping at each person to smile and be charming, as though he was doing a receiving line, hehe! He seemed to have a great time.

The next day my parents were going back to France, but Mummy came round in the morning to see us and play with Arthur some more, before she went home. We opened Arthur's presents from them - this fab garage and cars! He LOVES it. It makes lots of different noises and has a lift that goes up and down, and he loves to shove stuff into the lift shaft (like plastic broccoli!). He has learnt to push the buttons for the sounds, and he makes such cute smiley faces when he hears them :)

I was so sad to see my parents go home again :( I always get that way though, no matter how long they stay. I just love them and miss them so much. I took a lovely photo of my gorgeous boy with my lovely daddy. They got on so well, and I love the fact that it has been so obvious on this visit that Arthur has inherited my daddy's hair. Did I mention that recently? Arthur has curly hair! I am kind of excited about it! Not the cute curl-ups that lots of babies have at the sides (though he has those too, sometimes), but the proper curly hair on top that won't lie flat and rolls back on itself like has been wearing curlers! It's the exact same type of curling as my daddy's hair, and his mother's hair too. Every other grandparent has straight hair, so I LOVE that this is a special and unique thing that Arthur has inherited from Daddy. I made a lame-o job of using the gene - my hair curled as a toddler but then was pretty straight, and from my teens it has had a natural wave to it. It's sooooooooo long at the moment - I have no idea HOW, as I had so much cut off it when Arthur was born! But it's a foot long at least. I need it cutting again. It's less wavy the longer it gets. Anyway, I am so pleased that Arthur is actually DOING curls with his gene, hehe! I am curious to see how curly he stays as the years pass. Daddy and granny had ringlets! Daddy had long hair in the 70s and it was all ringletty :) So, real curls! I hope Arthur has real curls too. I think it's kind of special. Here are the sweet "woolly" pair:

And last but not least, a photo of Arthur taken during his "wind down for bed after the party" (heh, yeah right!) time. He was still so wired, and didn't go to sleep for ages after he went to bed that night. I think he was up till 9!!!! Sooooooo late for Arthur! Anyway, he did a lot of walking at the party, just a few steps between people or to me mostly. There wasn't much room with all the people in our little living room! After the party he was walking towards me so I took a photo - the first one I have of him walking!

He wore jeans and a little shirt and waistcoat from Next at his party :) It had embroidered animals on it. He got lots of compliments :)

Oh I almost forgot, I have two more video clips to post - a teeny tiny one of Arthur on the morning of his party just after he got up, crawling cheerfully through a sea of balloons, hehe:

And the one I mentioned before, taken on his actual birthday, of Arthur with his Ball Blast toy that Neil and I got him, dancing to the music. That's my mummy who he is looking at, encouraging him to keep dancing. She was bopping about too, but stopped every time she thought the camera might be on her, hehe!

Okay, that has to be all for now. It's getting so late and I just nursed Arthur so it's even later than I planned to finish this. I will TRY to write more soon, maybe tomorrow, to catch up on everything that is happening here. Thank you so much Meg and Jeannie for missing me and asking if everything was okay! *hugs* I feel loved :)

Arthur's First Birthday!!!

Arthur is a big boy now!!! He is one year old today. I can not believe it. But also, it somehow feels normal. Some naive part of me had this idea that he would suddenly morph into a different child on the morning of his birthday - a "real" toddler, different from the little baby I have known thus far. But of course that was stupid and he's still exactly the same Arthur as he was yesterday and all the days before! Only one day cuter! :) And a big one-year-old boy instead of a monthy-baby!

Thank you so much for the messages and notes and emails (thank you for the lovely ecard, Jaya!!), and also to those of you who sent wonderful cards and even presents for Arthur!!! Also special thanks to Alex and Megan for the special birthday video for Arthur! It feels like the whoooole worldwide web is extended family to us! It's so lovely. Thank you all so much!!!

Arthur has had a really nice day!!! It's 9.30 now and he has been asleep for about 2 hours. He was really tired and ready for bed, rubbing his little eyes and generally acting like a birthday boy at the end of his big day!

My parents are here!!! It is so great to have them around. I love them and miss them so much, it's just sooooooooooo nice to see them in person. They spent most of the day here with me and Arthur yesterday, and today my dad had to go into London so my mummy spent the morning with Arthur and me and Neil, for Arthur's birthday. That was super special to me, partly because I love to share special occasions with my mummy, but also because she was there at Arthur's birth, and it feels like everything has come full circle to have her here again at the same time a year later. It felt really special. We watched the clock around mid/late morning, because Arthur was born at 11.28am. Neil or my mum kept saying, "Oooh, this time last year you were probably...." Neil insisted Arthur was crowning at 11.18am! Hehe. I told him there was no way he was crowning for ten minutes! It made it all EXTRA official when 11.28 had passed and he had definitely been in the world one whole year!

I keep thinking of Arthur's birth at the moment. It was so hard. Weird to think that a year ago, ALL of yesterday I was in established labour, the ENTIRE night before I had not had one wink of sleep due to painful contractions every 10 minutes the whole night long, and then I spent last night in the hospital with stalled labour and a fever, and then finally spent all this morning pushing him out!!!! It seemed CRAZY when I thought about it in that context today and yesterday! It seemed such a long time to be in labour. But I absolutely cherish the memories I have of labour, the whole thing, even the bad bits - though they were mighty hard - and I LOVE to relive it in my mind. I feel so fond of the experience. I'm so glad of it all, that I have been blessed enough to experience it.

We were just talking this morning about how it was a hard night, and we were all remembering this and that about it (Neil and Mummy were right there by my side throughout the whole thing), and then Mummy said she couldn't believe it was a year ago. I said, "Well, we'll be there again in just SEVEN more months!!" (less, actually), and she said (with exaggerated dramatism), "Yes... You mad fools!!!" Hehehe! She said she could never have coped with a small gap between children. I am kind of excited about it myself! Although I know it will be hard.

Yaargh, what am I writing?! This is not my pregnancy diary! And I'm supposed to be writing about Arthur's birthday!! Well, it DOES have connections to birth and stuff. I love to think back on every nanosecond of Arthur's life with us so far. It has been the most wonderful time, hard or not. Wonderfully wonderful.

Okay so Arthur opened his presents from us today, and he will open presents from other people at his party on Saturday. He did open all his cards and loved them! He opened his present from Sharon (thank you Sharon!!) which was a GREAT book with flaps concealing farm animals (this is exactly the kind of book Arthur loves most at the moment) and the last flap in the book had a mirror under it. He was so surprised to see himself under the last flap! He pressed his nose to it and stared and stared, and kept surfacing to grin widely at us, hehe! He's so funny :) Thank you so much Sharon! I could not have picked a better book for Arthur myself!

He also opened a card and a lovely present that came from Frances (thank you Frances!) - a little boat for the bath that has a fish which you pull on a string at the back, and it makes the boat GO!!! He was too tired for his bath tonight so we'll test it out tomorrow. Thank you so much Frances!!!! Arthur loves the boat already, even without the bath! The package arrived at lunch time today and that made for extra excitement for Arthur, with the doorbell ringing and a postman bearing a package just for Arthur!!! We opened it straight away, and he has literally spent most of his birthday with the detachable sailor sticking out of his mouth, haha! He loves to bite on the sailor's head! It is definitely a favourite! :)

We got him a mini trampoline! He just loves to jump on beds, holding onto the headboard, so we thought we'd get him a real trampoline that is safe for little tiny ones. It has a handlebar for him to hold onto. We have to put it together tomorrow but I know he'll love it. I'm a bit worried about accidents on it, but I have seen other babies his age on them at the mother and baby group and I plan to always stay like 0.13 inches from him at all times when he's using it!

We were going to get him a rocking thingy but we aren't sure he'll use one much now. He is so active and doesn't sit still for anything! He likes to jump and bounce so the trampoline seemed more fitting somehow. We also got him a Stand Up Ball Blast which he absolutely LOVES!! In fact, I don't have any photos of him playing with it from today because he was always having so much fun with it that I was always joining in, instead of taking photos! I did take some camcorder footage of him with it though, because it plays funky music, and as you know, Arthur loves anything musical. He has not really been dancing or anything yet, but today he was standing at his Ball Blast thingy and pressed the button (over and over!) for the music to play, and he bopped and danced up and down and side to side while the music played! He stopped when the music stopped, pushed the button, and started over again when the music played again! It was too cute. He always danced with a huge smile on his face! He loves that thing!

We also got him Cut-and-Play Vegetables! They are supposed to be age 3-8 because they are pretend play items, but Arthur loves the fruits that he has had for months now. When he was 5 months old, I took him to the church creche and they had loads of cut and play food, and the main admirers of the things were BABIES, not 3-8 year olds! They were the first things I ever saw him automatically gravitate to and stay interested in for a long time without wanting to play with all the other things around. So I bought him the fruit package. They have had SO much use! He loves to pull them apart (they are in two or three parts, velcroed together) and chew on them, or roll them on the floor. Or put them in and out of cups, bowls, the toy basket, the brick bucket, etc! So I knew he would love the vegetables :)

He had some good meals and a LITTLE more to drink than usual, plus his mama milk whenever he asked for it (a lot). I gave him an Organix gingerbread man and he LOVED it! I have been itching to get him those since I saw Jaya having one when went to visit one time! They are not for babies under 12 months so he couldn't have one then. I am amazed they have absolutely no sugar in them, just flour, oil, ginger and raising agent!! They are really nice considering that! Arthur LOVES them, and has absolutely no trouble biting and chewing and munching them down, even though they are REALLY hard thick biscuits. It takes him ages to chew them up but he works hard at it, which shows me how much he really likes them! He is used to softer finger food. He eats toast and hard things well, but even those are easier than the gingerbread men!

I am excited that he's old enough for Stage 3 baby food now! I bought one single jar of stage 3 spaghetti bolognese the other day, just to see what it looked like in comparison to the stuff he has had for months. I think he will manage it just fine. He eats very lumpy food that I make him. If he particularly doesn't want certain lumps then he just spits them out!

I am getting off track! So he had good food today. He had a great afternoon nap, which was a relief because Neil and I were sooooooooo tired. We were up so late last night wrapping Arthur's presents and talking about Neil's job thingy and whether he should accept it or not. I need to write about that, but this is not the entry for it. Today I have just felt breathlessly tired and had a bad headache by the afternoon, so I'm really grateful that Arthur slept well. He napped an hour and a half without stirring, so Neil and I got about that much sleep too. Neil took him downstairs when they woke and didn't disturb me, so I got a little longer.

Arthur loves the outdoors so we wanted to take him out somewhere today. We especially wanted to go somewhere with lots of birds flying about, because one of Arthur's favourite things ever is birds. He just loves them. He likes the ones on water that swim and waddle up to the pushchair, but he MUCH prefers watching more nimble birds, ones that flit and fly and flutter about. So we wanted to do things he loves on his birthday. But we just couldn't think of a good place with lots of birds that was nearby, and then the day just got filled up and I got headachy, and so on.

In the end, we all took a sunset walk just around the corner at a small park, and that turned out to be lovely! It was soooooooooo cold!!!! Arthur loved it, he was cheerful and smiley and chatty and pointy all the way. When we got back our ears were hurting from the cold! We had hot drinks, and Arthur had warm mama milk direct from the source!!

Neil and I didn't buy him a birthday card, because every time I looked in the shops, I didn't like what I saw. Any nice cards seemed to me to be ones that anyone could get for him. I wanted something more personal, that only his mummy and daddy could get him. But the ones like that all said things like, "For you, Son!" and similar messages that irritate the heck out of me, and aren't "us" at all. We never call Arthur, "Son!" so we could never buy a card saying that.

In the end, after our walk, we got out card, glue, paints, glitter, sequins and shiny paper shapes, and made him a birthday card! Arthur was quite upset when I had the paints out because he thought I was going to paint his hand. We made his party invitations last week and they involved me painting his hand with blue finger paint, and then printing his little handprint onto blank cards. I put sparkly stickers on next to the handprints! Inside I wrote in different coloured crayons, "Dear Nana and Grandy (for example), Please come to my party on Saturday 12th of November at 3.30pm. Love from Arthur xxxxx" I wrote letters to go with them, with more details in them. Here's a finished one:

Anyway, Arthur HATED the painting!! I had to do it sooo fast once I realised he hated it! He just hates to have messy hands. It seems he remembers the traumatic incident well, because he cried like he was terrified any time he saw me with a paint pot!!! Oh dear. I have traumatised my little boy with paint on his birthday! Neil had to take him in the kitchen till I was finished with the paints!

Our card is really pwetty! It sparkles and says, "Happy 1st Birthday Arthur" on the front, and inside we wrote that we can't believe he is already one year old, and that it has been the best year of our lives. That he is our sweet little boy, and we love him more than words can say. We both signed it, from, "Mummy and Daddy". I think that is the first time I signed anything, "Mummy". It felt strange, but WONDERFUL!!! I only ever saw those words on cards TO me, from my own parents before. How weird and wonderful that *I* am the mummy now!

Okay, Neil has gone to bed and just came out to complain that he can't sleep with my rattly typing! So I have to cut this short (haha). Here are all the photos from today - hopefully they'll be pretty self-explanatory now that I have written about everything we have done! They are in chronological order...

Arthur with some of his presents this morning...

Opening his birthday cards and reading them! :)

Helping Daddy put the Ball Blast together. He was sooooooooo keen to help hold the screwdriver, it was so cute!

Unwrapping his cut-and-play vegetables (very keen!)...

Into them at last, and happily munching on a plastic avocado! :)

A not-so-great photo of the sunset on our walk:

Arthur watching the sunset and being generally happy and excited to be out on his birthday!...

Arthur and Daddy playing a game that Arthur LOVES - I go ahead and then they RUN towards me, with Arthur squealing and flailing about with joy, and I suddenly rush at them as they get close and we all stop with my nose MILLIMETRES from Arthur's little nose! Arthur loves this game :) Um, the photo is rather blurry, but what can I say?! It was live action! ;)

And finally, a perfect end to a perfect day, mama milk and cuddles :)

So that was Arthur's very first birthday. We sang him happy birthday and just gave him as much love and attention as we possibly could today. We love our little man sooooo much!!! I would love to write more about the feelings and things, but I must go to bed, and let Neil sleep too! I have been writing for an hour now and Arthur still hasn't woken. I think he will probably wake soon though.

Today has been so special. My baby is one year old! I feel like I just graduated the first year of Mummy School or something! ;) It's a wonderful feeling. I will finish this entry with a bit of nostalgia...

My teeny tiny boy as he was on this day a year ago! And now as he is a year later:

What a wonderful, terrifying, thrilling, crushingly exhausting, heart-expanding, joyful, exciting year! It has pushed me through my pre-existing limits of my capacity to love and of my ability to cope. Arthur is the most wonderful gift from God EVER. He is my precious little Boo, the absolute treasure of my heart. I love him so so so so very much. Thank you Lord for blessing me with Arthur, and for guiding us through our first year as a family! I pray for many many more, just as happy and special! Thank you Lord!

Due-date-iversary, and monkey man...

"Remember, remember the 5th of November!"

It's Fireworks Night, yay! The noise outside is unbelievable! It has been constant for hours now. Arthur is amazingly sleeping through it, and he even fell asleep while enormous explosions rocked the house from right outside our window! Amazing. He is sleeping sooooooo badly otherwise, so I'm surprised at how well he's taking the fireworks!

The thing I most remember about November the 5th, though, is that it was my due date this time last year! Arthur was due on Fireworks Night. He didn't show up till 4 days later, of course! Only four days till his birthday. That's just craaazy. I have been reading my pregnancy diary to relive those last few days of pregnancy, at this time last year. I feel so nostalgic remembering it all again! I am still so caught up in reliving Arthur's birth in my mind. All this time since he was born, I still daydream about it. It was so wonderful! So painful and soooo hard, but so so so wonderful!! I know I can never have it again, even if I have other births and future children. ARTHUR'S birth will never happen again. My firstborn. The first time I ever gave birth, or experienced labour, or held my own child for the first time. The first time I was ever a mummy. It's such a precious thing. I try to keep the memories alive and kicking, and anyway, I love to think about it!

Sooooo now I have an almost-one-year-old! He is doing lots of walking. He tries to run on his tiptoes and falls easily when he does that. I took him to get fitted for proper walking shoes, like the physio suggested. I figured it must be time, since he is definitely walking now. He still cruises and crawls a lot, but he's definitely a walker at last. Shoe-fitting went fine! I was worried that there might be trouble fitting him after what the physio said, with his wide curly feet and all. But it was fine. I asked for a stiff flat shoe. Ugh. They were tempting me with flexible cruising shoes, but I told them about his feet and that the physiotherapist said he must go into stiff non-flexible shoes. But thankfully they had some nice ones :) He is a size 3H - really wide! But at least they make H widths in normal baby shoes. He walks fine in them, though he turns his feet in just a bit, and sometimes falls over his toes when he does that, and he fits them well. They are so easy to put on his feet - what a difference when you actually have shoes that fit him! They cost a bomb though, ugh. I need to get him refitted in January, as he'll probably be a size bigger by then. Wow, their feet grow so fast! I think next time I will get him fitted to find out his size, but somehow NOT buy any shoes, and then find some next-to-new ones in the right size at eBay. I wish I had done that this time.

Arthur is behaving.... differently, lately. I don't know what to make of it, it is really perplexing me. He pushes all my buttons and watches for my reaction. I am so tired and hormonal lately and I find it hard. I guess I snap at him more, and feel dreadful about that. Maybe he is picking up on that? How awful :( He waits till I am indisposed (a rare thing, since I spend nearly every waking second doing stuff with Arthur, not my own thing or the housework), like maybe I am so nauseated that I HAVE to sit down and eat a meal. Or I need to fill in a form to get it in the post asap. While I am doing these things, he immediately starts doing every single thing that he knows we would rather he didn't do. He climbs around the sofa to pull videos off the shelves. He opens the glass cabinet doors and rummages in the video machine. He pushes the button on the TV to switch it on and off, on and off, on and off. He cruises to the door to the porch and opens it and closes it and opens it and closes it and opens it and closes it, etc. He finds outdoor shoes and tries to eat them. He tries to push the barrier out of the stairway so he can climb them. He opens all the drawers in the merchants chest and pulls out the financial paperwork, watching me to see my reaction with every individual sheet pulled. He cruises to the big mirror which he isn't allowed near as I'm worried it could fall if he touches it (I think I'm over-worrying, but anyhoo), and bangs the flat of his palm on it over and over, watching me all the while. If he can find any piles of clean clothing, he pulls them down, watching me of course.

I have to get up fifty million times while I am trying to eat a simple baked potato, and take him away from things or redirect him. He does not listen to anything I say, though I know he understands "no" and various other redirections that I use instead of "no". He is just really testing his mummy and daddy out at the moment! Little monkey! I hope this is just a phase!

Also he is super clingy and whiney. This is sooooooooo out of character for Arthur, I don't understand it. He wants to breastfeed ALL. DAY. LONG. I let him, because I don't want to restrict him if he wants to nurse. It's easier if we go out, because then he's distracted and doesn't ask. We should go out more - maybe he's bored? - but I just can't do it. I feel too awful all the time, and too tired. He is a busy boy in the house and stays very active, but maybe I am falling short because I should be doing more for/with him? Urgh. Some mornings his longest gap where he ISN'T breastfeeding is literally 10 minutes. He is off and on between playing and things, but he wants me close all the time, and preferably topless, hehe! He hates to see clothing covering my - correction, HIS! - breasts. He even hates my bras. Anything in the way gets pulled and frowned at, usually with some degree of whining.

It's so strange because he has never been a whiney boy. He is a happy, cheerful, laid-back boy! But he isn't being much of that lately. He still smiles and laughs a lot, but he is ultra grumpy the rest of the time. I keep thinking something must be wrong, as it's so odd for him, but I don't know what.

Also, he is waking like CRAZY at night at the moment. Every 2 hours or MORE. Uggggggggh. I can't, CAN'T do that. But suddenly he is completely intolerant of anything other than me and my breasts at night. He is also like this at nap times in the day. I don't know what to do! I can't nurse him till he falls asleep any more because it just hurts too much now that I'm this pregnant. I don't really WANT to anyway, as I think it is definitely time he learnt to sleep without going off on the breast. So I stop when he's sleepy, or before then if I can't bear the pain any longer. And he gets hysterical. Really hysterical. I stay with him. I sometimes cuddle him if he's really upset, but otherwise I play "asleep" - that seems to work best - or pat his back a little. That used to work, but now he just sobs and screams (REALLY screams, angrily) until he is nearly sick. He can keep this up for over an hour. If he starts retching I put a stop to it. I nurse him or I get him up, so sometimes he has no nap. Lately he is sometimes taking one nap a day and sometimes two, depending on whether he will let me put him down for a morning nap or not.

Ugh. I just don't know. He seems so.... like he is fighting me all the time at the moment. I don't understand why. He has plenty of lovely times when he is just like himself, but SO many times when he isn't now, and I feel kind of upset about it, in case it's my fault or it's getting worse because I am neglecting him in some parenting area, or something. Am I doing something wrong?

I took him to the doctor yesterday in case he had an ear infection or something wrong with his tummy, etc. Once or twice at night he has screamed and cried even when I offered him the breast, which is just totally all-out WEIRD for Arthur. But he was given a thorough check-up and seems perfectly healthy. His ears are fine, his chest is fine, his tummy is soft and fine. I don't see any changes in his gums, though he drools all the time anyway.

He is having serious problems with constipation. I finally got some advice from the health visitor and after a long discussion she said he has a really good healthy diet (yay!) but nowhere NEAR enough fluids. He has breastmilk all the time, and I still have plenty, but it's not enough with all his solids now. He simply refuses to drink though. He will take sips of water at mealtimes and when we offer him a drink throughout the day (which I try to do ALL the time to get him to drink), but after a tiny sip or two he pushes the drink away and refuses to let it near him again. We fill a sippy cup with water each morning and it never seems to have gone down at all by the end of the day.

The HV suggested diluted fruit juice - apple was her suggestion, partly in case it made him want to drink it more, and partly because she has seen fruit juice help sometimes with constipation in babies. So we did that for a few days. He makes a face but still sips it. But the level doesn't go down any more than it did for water. When we saw the doctor yesterday, she said she didn't like the idea of giving him fruit juice as it can cause cavities in babies' teeth. So we switched back to water. She prescribed him lactulose, but said that it needs to be taken with plenty of fluids - um, hello?!!! So I'm not giving that to him. It will make matters worse if he isn't getting enough fluids. Urrrrgh! So frustrating!

Today we happened to discover a new absolute favourite food for Arthur - we gave him baked beans on toast for tea, and he LOVED it!!! He ate the whole lot eagerly, and the BEST thing is that this meal makes you very thirsty! So we offered him water after every 2 or 3 mouthfuls and he took more water than he ever has before! Yay! I think it was because the food was thirst-making though. The water went down a centimetre!!!! Woohoo! But that is still pretty bad for a whole day's fluid. Poor Arthur. It is making his poo very difficult for him. He sweats and shakes and cries when he poos :( Sometimes he bleeds. Often we have to rescue him if it's a bad one, by actually applying OIL to the completely stuck poo so that it will come out without making him scream in pain. Poor poor baby :( Sometimes he has a normal poo, and I don't know why because he never has much fluid to drink. I know it's really important to fix it because apparently untreated constipation in young children and babies leads to them losing the urge to poo, and they can need professional help to start again. Yikes. I don't know what to do though, because he just WON'T drink. And it's the fluids that are the whole issue.

If anyone knows what to do, please let me know!!! Otherwise please pray that he suddenly LOVES to drink and it all gets better :)

I have a TON to write about moving and stuff, because it's all up in the air at the moment. But I can't now, I am feeling really sick. I think I will go and eat something. It's too noisy outside for an early night, but that is fine with me because I am just longing for a snuggly evening reading in bed by some cosy lamplight!

I'm sure there were millions of other things I meant to say.... oh well. I can't remember them now anyway. I will try my best to update a little more over the coming week, as I want to get some of my thoughts down about Arthur before he turns one, and of course to write about his birthday and the family stuff afterwards!

I do just want to say that I LOVE my lil precious Boo. I hope I didn't come across too complaining about him. I just love him to bits. But I feel so worn and strained by stuff lately with Arthur. I wish it would all just get better and not be a problem, because I hate having any time at all where I don't feel wonderful about him at every moment. But I love him, love him, love him.

Here are some photos of the mischievious monkey man himself!...

Love him. To bits :)

Lots happening

Hello!

Finally a moment to sit down and actually write a proper diary entry! Arthur is napping with his daddy, but I will go and resettle him when he wakes (which seems to happen every 30 minutes still, in the day). I feel very nauseous but oh well. I need to write my diary! So much has been happening lately, and will be happening very soon. Soooo many things are on my mind as well. I wish I had been able to update more often so I could purge a bit before it all got too pent up and cluttered in there! I am not sure where to start or how to write about each thing briefly enough so that this doesn't end up a mammoth entry and I don't end up feeling dreadful as a result! But I will just start and see how I go. I can always save it and try writing some more later.

Well that didn't last very long! Arthur woke and then I felt soooo sick that I had to eat (how topsy-turvy is morning sickness?!). Now I have had baked potato and cottage cheese and milk and I feel much better. Arthur and Neil are still sleeping.

Neil had a cold which Arthur and I thankfully didn't catch! Phew! I was so sure we'd get it. Now poor Neil has some sort of food poisoning. He bought sandwiches at a garage the other day. That is something I would NEVER do, but then I am paranoid about food anyway. So, now he has had cramps and diarrhoea for 48 hours and it's not going away. I remember he had exactly the same thing in New York after eating a hotdog in Central Park. I had one too though, and I was fine. Neil had cramps and the rest for nearly a week before we finally paid a fortune for a doctor to tell him to wait it out! It went in the end, but he was a poorly thing. I think it must be the same thing, because he says it's exactly the same. Poor Neil. I think he will go to the (free!) doctor tomorrow anyway.

Neil has been offered a job! He applied for a job in a different career, using his geography qualifications (and interest!). The work is all environmental and I just know it will suit him WAY better than the direct marketing job he is in right now. Which is thoroughly dull. And depresses him completely. We talked a lot about his feelings about work over the last couple of years, and that's why we decided he should do a masters degree in something geographical, to boost his chances at an environmental job. He does the mapping and planning and computery side of geography, and finds it really stimulating.

Soooo he started a masters. He did so great in his first year and came out top of his class! He had to defer for a year when Arthur was born as it was just too much on top of work. But when he enrolled this autumn for his final year, they told him he had to pay like thousands of pounds and they previously told him (at the very beginning) that the lump he was paying them was the total amount for the entire course. So needless to say we can't remotely afford it and he has had to drop out. Last week he discovered that his lovely lecturers are so appalled by the situation that they have arranged for his first year credits to be converted into a post graduate certificate and he has been awarded a distinction, yay!! So that's good :)

So then he applied for an environmental job which would mean us relocating to Cambridgeshire. He got interviewed but didn't get the job. They said he would be better suited to a job that they just started advertising for that week, and he applied for that. The closing date was October 14th (a Friday). He got his application in that same day. On the Monday morning at 9am (!!) he got a call from the company he'd applied to, saying that they wanted him for the job and weren't even going to bother interviewing anyone else!!! Wow. It all depended on him going there and meeting the team, and they would ask each other questions and find out if he was suited to the position.

So on Thursday he went. They are going to let him know if they still want him on Monday. It looks pretty positive that they will say yes. Neil thinks maybe he isn't quite experienced enough in some of the software but otherwise things look good. We have a TON to discuss and think over, some of which we have been doing already, and it's kind of a stressy time.

The job is somewhere completely different to the previous one. I had been gearing myself up for a move to Cambridgeshire and was finally starting to feel comfortable with the idea (I am like a tree. I don't like to be moved once my roots are down!) and now we may be moving somewhere different. East Anglia, near the sea. Or is it Suffolk? I can't remember which county the town falls in. I'm not crazy about naming places where we might be living in my diary! My mum has taught me to be nervous about stuff like that! So the county name will have to do. London is different. It's so huge. A bazillion other people live in London. I am just a lil speck here!

Anyway. If Neil gets the job, he has to decide whether to take it. This means a lot of long discussions and stressy things like meeting with financial people and stuff. The job means a big pay cut, which is okay since living out there will be much cheaper than living here. But the company is undecided on whether they will offer us any help with relocating. The job isn't in a bracket where they normally offer any help. Neil said he can't accept the job without help (as we simply can't afford it otherwise) so they are looking into what tweaks they can make to their policy to help us a bit.

We seem to somehow be in financial poo at the moment. I guess we haven't been paying enough attention to our finances for a while and suddenly we are in a fair bit of debt. Ugh. We need to sell a car. We need to budget sensibly. And go over the regular outgoings. They are somehow more than we can manage but I don't know which ones we can drop. Selling up and moving somewhere cheaper will sort this out, because we'll hopefully get a lot of equity on this house that won't all be needed for the next one. I hope! So we can pay off any debts and so on, and start a good healthy savings account. We have one of those already but it has an embarrassingly small amount in it!

The job is likely to mean relocating before the end of the year. To me, that sounds absolutely CRAZY!!! How are we supposed to sell our house (and get it ready to sell, for that matter! It's a dump at the moment with rubbish in the garden and at least 15 small DIY and decorating jobs that are not finished.) and buy another one, and make the move in the next month or two?!!! Neil has to give a month's notice at his current job, but that might be all we get. I do not know how it will be physically possible to make the move in such a short time. Neil is nervous and stressy because he doesn't see how we can sell the house in such a short time, and then his job will start and what will we do then? Will he commute (it's 3 hours plus each way, not including rush hour traffic)? Will he live away for the week? I don't know how we'd bear that, any of us, so I'm pretty sure we couldn't consider that option. Will we have to move there anyway and rent while we finish selling our house? I don't think we can because we can't afford to rent and pay mortgage on this house. In fact, as soon as Neil's salary changes to the lower one, we can't afford the mortgage payments (anywhere NEAR) on this house anyway, so he can't live away or commute while Arthur and I live here anyway.

Urrrrrrrgh!! So stressy. Everything feels so up in the air. And that's not even touching on the big issues of how we FEEL about moving there, or moving away at all. I am totally not prepared in my heart or mind to move to Suffolk. I haven't had time to prepare myself. I feel so insecure and anxious about everything. I am such a stay-in-one-place person. I have only ever lived in London, right here in this little suburb, except for my first 11 months in central London, and obviously I don't remember that. How strange to think that's how Arthur will see my hometown. He won't even remember it. He will just know he was born there and lived there when he was a baby. That feels so weird somehow, since my whole life (and his, so far!) has been here.

It feels such an enormous wrench to move away from here, even though there are fewer ties keeping us here now. My parents have moved to France. My brother is still here but he's moved further into London, and my grandparents are further out in Surrey. We have our wonderful church here. I have never been to any other church. I can't imagine leaving my church family behind and starting somewhere new. I know it will be wonderful when we find a new church that is right for us, and we'll have a new church family and be amazed that we haven't always felt at home there, a few years down the line. But right now it seems such a hard move.

BUT. Just these last few months I am finding more and more that I hate the area we live in. I can't think why I didn't notice it before. Maybe God is preparing my heart for a move. He is good like that :) He prepared me in a similar way for my parents' move to France. I don't know HOW I would have coped with that emotionally without God's gentle help in preparing me.

Lately when I walk Arthur round our local area in the pushchair, I am disgusted with what I see, the WHOLE time. It isn't a nice place to raise a family at all. We have a lovely little home which I will be so sad to leave, but just last week I was walking with Arthur in the pushchair past our local parade of shops, and all the bad things about it seemed to leap out at me for some reason. I always just saw it as a row of random shops with a post office in it. This time I didn't even notice the post office. I was too busy nervously steering round the blokes with cigarettes and beer cans (mid-morning) hanging around outside the betting shop and off-license that stood side-by-side. What made me feel most sick though, was when I glanced across the road and saw (HOW could I have missed this all these years?!) a p*orn shop. Yep, that's right. The streets were smelly and absolutely choking with car fumes. Litter and dog poo on the pavements. Graffiti on the street signs. Noisy building sites everywhere I look. I am so disgusted by it. At night lately I am increasingly unimpressed with this area too. Since we lived here the one thing we could never do was open our windows at night. The traffic is too noisy and smelly. But also there are very few nights now without people drunkenly yelling swear-words at some acquaintance of theirs who is obviously about half a mile down the road, going by the volume. It wakes me even through the double glazed windows. At the weekends you can guarantee there will be smashed glass on the streets somewhere. And what is with the sirens around here?!!! They drive me crazy because they wake Arthur. Even in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, when Arthur is napping, there are nearly always 3 or 4 sirens screaming noisily past our house, just in one normal nap - about 30 minutes. That truly sucks.

And to top it all off, we're coming up to Bonfire Night here in England. It is November the 5th (Arthur's due date last year!). This means fireworks for a good two weeks either side. They started last week here. Last night we had an hour of the deep booming ones that echo for ages. Arthur woke of course. Tsk. I can't wait till it's past. I love fireworks but I hate the decibels they reach these days, and I hate how they wake my baby boy when he so desperately needs some good sleep and I so desperately need the same, or a nice restful evening.

So I know it is a GREAT thing that we are getting the chance to move away from this yucky area soon! London has become so overcrowded and noisy and polluted. I don't like living here anymore. When Neil went to meet the team at this new job last week, he said he had to stop on a main road when he reached the town, because he lost his bearings. He got out of the car to get the map out of the back. After a moment he said he suddenly realised how CLEAN the air smelt, even on a main road!! He was amazed, hehe! He stood there just taking deeeeep breaths for a while before driving off again! So that is exciting. I can't believe we have been breathing this muck in for so long here. I couldn't bear to bring my children up breathing the same. No wonder this area has the highest rate of childhood asthma in the COUNTRY!!! One in three children here have it. Soooo bad.

Okay Arthur is awake. I'll try to write more later.

Back, and it's now evening. I need to hurry up and get some more things off my chest so I can go to bed!

Arthur had me worried yesterday evening. He woke at 9.20pm crying, and when I lay next to him he wouldn't even turn towards me, which he normally does automatically to breastfeed. The breast always fixes any source of crying! But he didn't even turn to me. He lay all stiff and cried like he was in pain. We held him and he cried more. I was scared because he had such a frightened expression on and he was so stiff and unmoving. He was holding his head really funny, tipped back as far as it could go and he wouldn't move it even to turn his head to see one of us. I walked him and rocked him but he still cried so much and seemed scared :(

We tried to give him Calpol because we figured he was in pain, but he fought us giving it to him - again, odd for Arthur. He didn't have a temperature. In the end Neil said maybe he has painful wind in his tummy or something? He DID have his tea really late, like almost right before bed, which has never happened before, so perhaps he didn't get chance to get any air up from eating like he normally would. I walked him and patted him until my arms nearly came off, and eventually he burped and seemed WAY more relaxed after that. He still cried and wouldn't settle, but he relaxed his weird position and moved about more. Poor baby. I held him close to me in front of the mirror so he could see us both, and sang my favourite gentle church songs to him. They calmed me as much as him, maybe even more. I was really scared before, because I didn't know what was wrong, and something did seem soooo wrong somehow. I didn't know how to fix it for him. I hate that feeling.

Anyway we put him back to bed and he happily breastfed till he was almost asleep and then dozed off. He woke 15 minutes later crying and anxious, looking for me. As soon as he saw me, he lay himself down again and went to sleep! He has never done that before. I fully expected to nurse him but he just wanted to know that I was there. I sat with him till he slept. Then he woke at 11pm to nurse and after that he didn't wake till 5am!!!!!!! That's a SIX hour gap!! Go Arthur!! I'm so pleased! Of course it would be the night that the clocks went back so we lost an hour, tsk! So it was 4am really, but who cares, it was six hours for Arthur.

I couldn't go back to sleep after he nursed at 4/5am (whichever it was!) - another typical thing considering it was the longest he's ever slept!! I have stuff on my mind. I am feeling really upset and hurt about something at the moment, so much so that I am losing sleep over it. I can't even write about it here, darn it. Oh for a private diary! But actually that wouldn't make much difference in this case anyway. I am TRYING to put it out of my head but maybe I am just being all "pregnant" about it and blowing it out of proportion. Or maybe I am just genuinely hurt more than it seems reasonable to be hurt about this particular thing? Who knows. Anyway. It's a big thing on my mind at the moment and I couldn't even sleep yesterday afternoon when Neil took Arthur out for a short while so I could catch up a bit on sleep. I wish I could relax about things that get to me or upset me. It annoys me that I am sooo not good at that! Tonight I am going to try praying more, about the situation and the person involved. Hopefully God will make me feel better about it all.

My parents are coming over for Arthur's birthday!!!!!!!!! I am SO EXCITED!!!! :D I can't WAIT to see them. I miss them so much. I thought they would just visit for like a weekend or something (not staying with us though, they will stay with my grandparents, but at least we'd get a couple of visits from them), but I was so thrilled when Mummy told me that they are coming for almost a week!!!!!! Yippeeee!! They have to spend time with other family members too, obviously, but yay, I get to see my mummy SEVERAL times in one visit!!!! And my lovely daddy too, but Mummy is like my best friend. I miss her so much, even though we talk pretty much every day on the phone. I can't WAIT for them to see Arthur! I know they'll love him to bits and be so proud of all his changes and how gorgeous he looks! I am so proud to show him to people :)

Talking of the little man, he is walking a lot now. Not all over the place yet or anything, but he tries his steps out frequently during the day. He loves to walk from me to Neil or Neil to me, and he loves getting clapped and cheered for it! He starts the clapping himself if we aren't quick enough, and waits for us to join in! :) Today he walked 8 steps, at two different times. Pretty soon we are going to have to stop counting his steps, hehe! He also took off several times today from cruising along furniture, which he hasn't done before. And he has walked to his toys and things today, not just to one of us. He is getting so much more confident. He launches himself eagerly into walking whether he has got himself ready and balanced or not! He sometimes goes down on his bum quite hard if he didn't get his balance before starting out, but he doesn't mind that. He is also doing this thing where he walks so fast that he looks like he is running. Today he took 6 steps from me to Neil and literally ran them, bobbing up and down, bending his knees and everything! He looks so toddly and cute when he walks! I know that this walking thing officially makes him a toddler. How scary that I really have a toddler now! But I guess he has to go there if he's going to be a big brother :)

Arthur currently wants to eat everything and anything that we are eating. He is becoming so adventurous with food - which is so strange considering how he was a few months ago! I thought he would never be that into food, but here he is! He wants to try everything we have. He is not on cow's milk yet. I am not sure how best to introduce him to that in a gradual way, but we'll start after his birthday. He suddenly seems ready to tolerate really lumpy or scratchy foods. He'll readily eat dry water crackers and somehow chew them up and swallow them. He likes toast and sandwiches, and he's just as eager to eat the crusts as any other part. I'm going to try him on stage 3 baby food soon. I think he will cope just fine. The meals I make and freeze at home are lumpier and coarser than his stage 2 jarred stuff and he is fine with that.

Sooo food is going well with Arthur. I am looking forward to the foody aspects of his birthday party, as I now know he'll be right into it! I think we'll have some snack-type foods for the adults that Arthur eats. I want to make sure we have some of his favourites. The party will fall over his tea time so he'll have his meal sharing our food, and I like that. Then birthday cake, which I also know he'll love! :) He has only had cake once in his life, and that was a little tiny piece. I am going to put icing all over it but I don't want to give him a piece with icing on. He does not need to eat pure sugar! But cake, yay! It's his birthday. Birthday cake is an absolute "must" tradition in our family. I know he'll love it, but I would never force it on him just for a photo or anything. I can't believe my baby is going to be ONE!!! In just ten days!! It is going so fast.

I am going to decorate the house with balloons and fairy lights. I discovered that he likes balloons recently, or at least, they interest him. And they're partyish so I'll get some! Fairy lights are a particular favourite of Arthur's. We discovered that when he was only weeks old, as we still had some pretty coloured fairy lights up around the big mirror from my homebirth (I wanted pretty soothing things to distract me!). He totally loved them, and I remember for MONTHS they seemed to be the only thing that would calm him when he cried. So we'll have lots of fairy lights. I know he'll love those!! I feel quite excited! I've never been the mother of a birthday boy before!!

I have to send invitations! I wanted to make them but I don't think that is realistic, so I'll probably buy them if I can find some nice ones.

Anyway.

Arthur's hair is getting so long! It hangs over his ears an inch at least and I'm constantly tucking it back behind them! He has worn his hair a little thin on one side at the back (not sure how!) but the other side is getting really long. I don't want him to have his first haircut till after he is one. It feels toooo soon otherwise! But I don't want him sporting a mullet, hehe! So he will get a little trim soon :) On top it is still curly and won't lie flat, so I don't think it needs any taking off there. I love his hair. It always smells so good, and it is so soft and fine. I love the colour, actually it is very like mine. I think he will have very dark hair when he is grown up though, because he has quite dark hair for a baby really. Mine was very light brown when I was a toddler, and almost blondish in the summer. Arthur's hair is more like my brother's colour when he was a baby, and I don't know anyone whose hair is darker than my brother's, so I think Arthur will be very dark when he's older. I love that because he has lovely brown eyes! He still has some grey in his eyes but maybe more brown now than grey. Neil has blue eyes and I have mixed - mainly grey with a small hazel ring right around the pupil. The only person in the family who could have given Arthur his eye colour is my mummy, who has very brown eyes. I LOVE that :) He has my mummy's eyes. Not even mine. Mummy's :)

I have some photos of Arthur feeding himself his yoghurt, which he much prefers to do these days! But I haven't resized them yet so I'll do that next entry. He is very good with a spoon. He always gets it right in his mouth and gets most of the yoghurt off it. Then he turns it upside down to get the last little bit out of the deepest part of the spoon with his tongue! Then he hands it back to me to "reload"!!

Oh I keep forgetting to say, Arthur is really into putting things IN to things now. He only took things out for the longest time, but now he is really keen to stack cups inside each other. He is pretty accurate now, but he got very frustrated at first, bless him! He is so cute at tidying away too. He loves to help me tidy away! Sometimes he spontaneously starts doing it by himself too. I find a dozen bricks in his toy basket (they live in the brick bucket) where he has carefully put them over the edge, one by one. Or the remote control in the stationery drawer! Or a letter that arrived through the door that morning carefully posted into the very centre of the wires with beads on, on his activity cube! He can now reach everything in the kitchen, urgh! He can get his little fingertips over the edges of the surfaces, and open all the drawers and cupboards. And the freezer door. He LOVES the freezer!

I am teaching him hot and cold. He makes the cutest little sound when he touches something that is unexpectedly hot (not burning though) or cold. He is always eager and excited, but the moment he touches it he snatches his hand back and his face gets a sort of concerned expression with his head tipped to one side, and he looks at me and says, "Ohhh!" in such a sweet, slightly doubtful tone, one that seems to lovingly warn ME that it's hot or cold! I tell him "Hot!" and he says, "Hoe!" He doesn't say anything for cold (like the freezer) but seems eager to touch it again right away! Funny boy!

He has taken an age to tell us where his nose, etc. is when we ask. I don't think he has understood the question, "Where is your....?" until recently. Anyway now he points to nose and ear and stuff, but only on me :) He is much clearer about objects. Maybe I have been more consistent with those things and not given him much practise with the body parts? Probably. If I ask him where are his bricks, he goes right over and picks one up, holding it out to me and saying, "Aht!" He does the same with books, and I'm pretty sure he knows "cups" (his stacking cups) now too. He knows where "music" is when I ask if he wants to hear some. He will look at the hi-fi straight away even if he is busy doing something else with his back to it. He also now understands the sign for music, which I have been doing with him for a couple of weeks. He smiles BIG when I do it :)

He still loves his music. He sings and dances to it now, bouncing and making little wailey sing-song sounds. It is seriously the cutest thing ever. I love my boy!

Okay I have managed to write a lot which is a relief! I am beginning to try and catch up on other diaries now, where I can. So far I have a TON to read because so many diaries have been updated since I read them last, and most people have written eleventy entries since then too! So far I am getting a lovely blur of beautiful baby photos, and the odd MOVIE (how exciting!), and feeling very excited to be catching up on people's news. I will try to leave some comments soon, as I catch up! Thanks for the notes and messages here while I have been sort of absent. They are lovely to read when I get chance to come back :)

Steps and slacking!

I can't believe it has been NINE days since I updated last!!! Urrrgh, I have been longing to update, I have so many thoughts that need writing down, and sooooo much to write about my little man and how I am feeling about life with him lately! I just feel too sick or tired to update. I just want to say that I have not even been able to read favourite diaries, let alone leave messages or return emails. I'm so sorry! I miss my diaryland buddies soooooo much! But I get so little time where I feel able to be online. I use it to check my due date buddy group, my email and messages in case of uplifting pick-me-ups (!!) and if I get chance, to write my diaries. I honestly cannot WAIT to be feeling up to my usual online activity again! I just have no time, or if I do then I don't feel good. It will pass though, and then I'll be back to normal here :)

Okay I have soooo little time as it's 11pm and I needed to be in bed like three hours ago!

I haven't taken photos of Arthur in way too long!! I finally took a couple yesterday. The house is in SUCH a state, and we have been trying to make a dent in the mess over the weekend. Of course, Arthur LOVES any sort of mess, and he particularly loves it when messes get tidied! He loves to help! Here he is helping his Daddy with the Great Laundry Crisis - he just loves "sorting" and "folding" clothes:

Basically, he has watched me sort the clean laundry a million times, and he loves to pick up an armful of clothes, swing to one side and drop them in a new pile, then pull a few of them and twist them about in a business-like manner (!!), and then add a couple more things to that same pile in the same way, before starting to transfer the items to a "new pile" all over again, hehe! He is so cute. He has such a serious expression of concentration on his face while he does it! It will keep him busy for such a long time, he just loves sorting the laundry! He likes to pull down my piles of neatly folded stuff too, which isn't quite so helpful! He also likes to chew the odd item!

I wish I had been updating lately. Arthur is taking his first steps at the moment! I am so excited for him! He spends much of his time excitedly standing and balancing without holding onto anything. He can stand for ages and ages now, but he really only does it for show, so once the excitement wanes, he takes hold of something again so he can be on the move again! This boy rarely stays still! He is always crawling or cruising somewhere. He's so active, it makes me tired to watch him sometimes, hehe!

Anyway, his thing when he stands alone is to make his body soooo tense with excitement! He makes his arms all stiff and locks his knees, and he has a particular way of holding his hands out which we are familiar with as an expression of the MOST excitement he has ever had!! It's so sweet :) He is just SO thrilled with himself when he is standing! He makes these excited roaring sounds and smiles and smiles with his eyes shining at us! We always cheer him and say, "Look at YOU standing, you strong boy!!" and things like that. He LOVES the attention over it :) We are so proud of him!

Today I FINALLY managed to capture him doing this on camera. He has been doing it for a few weeks but here he is standing and making excited sounds with his "excited hands"....

He doesn't wobble at all any more when he stands. He took a wobbly step once a couple of weeks ago, and then another single step twice since then. Yesterday he took two steps in a row while Neil and I were cheering him on for standing. Much fuss was made, of course! :) Then this morning I was sitting on the sofa feeling green and Arthur was cruising along the sofa, and suddenly he started doing his excited roaring, and I looked and he was standing with his hands all flexed like he does, so I got down to his level on the floor and cheered him, and held my hands out to him. He immediately took a step, followed by another, and then ANOTHER with that first foot!!! It wasn't wobbly at all, though he had reached me by step 3 so he sort of fell into my arms on that step. Yay for Arthur though, I'm so proud!!!! :)

Then Neil got home from work tonight and Arthur was soooooo cute. He has spent a LOT of time with his daddy this last week or two, as Neil had a whole week off work to spend time with Arthur, and then last week he was off 3 days with a bad cold. So Arthur has seen him around a lot, and has LOVED hanging out with him. When Neil got home he was so excited, and I have never seen him do this before, but he was showing Neil his toys and telling him all about them! He sat down at his little wooden workbench and started making his babbly talk which now sounds like real language, just not in words we understand! He would look at it, poke a few things on it (all the while "talking" earnestly) and keep on looking at Neil as though he was asking him to see what he was doing. Then when Neil sat with him playing with the workbench and talking to him, he quickly moved onto the bricks, and took a few out of the bucket to show Neil, babbling about them with really communicative expressions as he handed them to his daddy. It was so cute!

Then he wanted to stand and roar and be cheered, so he did that, and I told Neil about his three steps. Neil held out his hands to Arthur and said, "Come to Daddy!" and Arthur walked four steps right to Neil without any hesitation!! I thought he would never attempt it because Neil was far enough away from Arthur that usually he would just get down and crawl the distance to cross it. Anyway it was so exciting!!! Arthur was so pleased, and Neil swung him up in the air and we clapped and cheered until Arthur started clapping and cheering too!!

I LOVE my little boy!! He is too precious.

Anyway I reeeally wanted to write about that!

There are only two weeks until Arthur's first birthday!! I can't believe it! I keep wondering what I was doing this time last year. How amazing that I was pregnant this time last year, and I'm pregnant now as well and it feels like I've been pregnant for ages even though it's only a few weeks! That's a lot of pregnantness in a year or so! ;) This time last year I was 38 weeks pregnant and we were doing a trial run with my birth pool. I was crampy and huge and wondering what on earth it would be like to be a mummy. I can't even imagine NOT being a mummy now. I can't remember what life was like. It has been the most amazing change of my life EVER. I can't believe how wonderful it has been!

We are having a family party for Arthur on November 12th. Did I say that already? I haven't figured out who, what, where, why, and when yet though. Although, here - obviously - and probably somewhere between 3 and 5.30pm. Arthur LOVES company so he will have a great time! I am going to bake him a birthday cake but I haven't thought too much about the details yet. Something simple though, nothing gooey or thickly coated with toxic coloured sugar, and probably no super special design. Just simple. Arthur ate cake this weekend when a friend from school came to visit and brought some light fruit cake with her. He was so cross that I wasn't sharing it with him (!) so I gave him a bit, and he LOVED it! He ate the raisins and everything. So I think he will like birthday cake!

I just love him so much. I am trying to think of the million other things I'm sure I needed to say about him since last entry, but all I can think about is how much I love him love him love him. I just can't think of anything else. He is so affectionate. He gives hugs and kisses very readily, even to strangers if he has spent an hour with them and decides he likes them, and they are giving him a cuddle or something. Often he chooses to give cuddles or kisses at really touching moments, like when Neil has been blowing raspberries on his tummy till he can hardly breathe for laughing - he will catch his breath a bit, and then lean over and give his daddy a gentle kiss on the mouth. I love that when he has enjoyed being close or having fun with his daddy he will respond with a cuddle or a kiss, almost to say "Thank you Daddy, I love you!"

Or when I am nursing him. Nursing him at night - although tiring! - is magical. He is either snuggly and sleepy and newborn-ish, which is cuter than cute and makes me feel utterly tender inside, or he is more interactive. I love when I can just make out the shape of his cheek as he nurses, and a curl of hair at the side of his head in the shadows. He randomly pops off the breast just to gaze up at me. I can just make out his teeth and eyes shining so I know he is smiling at me. He makes the softest sound, like a whispered "aaahhh" sound, and his hand reaches up and strokes my face. Sometimes he gives me a kiss then too, before suddenly going back on the breast with enthusiasm! I love my gentle affectionate boy. He is so precious! It is so wonderful to begin to really see him showing us that he loves us. There is just no feeling like it!

I need to remember to show God how much I love him, more often. Being a parent sometimes reminds me, like with sentences like the last one. Since God is my Father and I am his child, I am beginning to see how incredible the love is between parent and child, and how he really must love to have me come to him and tell him I love him. How awesome is that, that God - God himself! - loves me - ME! - that much?! So amazing.

Okay. It's soooo late. I know there was a ton more, but I need bed and I am feeling sicker than when I started. Bed will help that a LOT so I'm going now! I hope I will be able to update again soon. I really need to write my thoughts and feelings down as my little boy approaches his first birthday, if only to keep me sane, hehe! I can't believe my baby is going to be one. Wow.

10 years....

Thank you for all the nice comments about the photos and Arthur's 11 month birthday!

This is such a lame-o entry because I wanted to write a big thing about something and I feel so utterly miserable with nausea today that I can't :( I swear I have never felt so sick. For so many hours without a break. Except that I know I did the last time I was pregnant. But ugh, all the same. I'm so thankful because it means my baby is probably thriving inside me, but I am finding it hard to deal with this evening, after a day of being utterly unable to do a THING for the awful nausea, and feeling like I could throw up at any time, and it being soooooooooooo hard to chew and swallow food, and sip any fluids. Tonight I have a headache, and I know it's because I am dehydrated, yet I can't shove enough into my stomach to fix it. I feel so bad, like I'm letting my body down, and my baby, and Arthur, because he needs a mummy who isn't dehydrated, and also he needs his mummy to make his milk for him like usual. Ugh. It has just been a hard day and I'm tired of feeling so sick already :( It feels like an eternity before I'm at the stage where it might pass or ease off. I know this should be in my pregnancy diary but oh well.

What I MEANT to write tonight is that this evening it has been 10 years since I became a Christian. October 15th 1995, somewhere around 8pm :) I wanted so badly to write a big entry about my feelings about that and my history, but I feel too gross.

But I WILL say that I feel too gross to write about it because I am experiencing blessing number fifty million and one (!!) since I let God into my life! Of course he was blessing me so much before that, but somehow it feels amazing to acknowledge him in everything since. God has literally - literally - turned my life around since I gave it to him to deal with. I will write the short version:

When I became a Christian I was suffering from depression. The clinical, diagnosed, suicidal kind. It started in my last year at school (age 16) and I was 19 when I became a Christian. It did continue for a while longer though. I went on Prozac. Prozac and I did NOT get along. It turned me from somebody who was depressed into somebody who was depressed and UNSTABLE, seriously. It was on Prozac that I attempted suicide. Stoopid Prozac. Anyway, I was a brand new Christian when that happened, like only a few months or something. I was at my workplace and after my attempt failed I just walked out and kept walking till I reached the nearest hospital, where I tried to check myself in. They told me I needed a referral, and basically, "Buh-bye!" Can you believe that?!!

So standing out in the car park, I didn't know where else to go or what else to do. I felt utterly unsafe and like I had no idea who I was. I had left my coat and bag at work (I never went back there either), and I only had the clothes I was wearing. I rummaged in my jeans pocket (I NEVER put anything in my jeans pockets) and there was a church leaflet folded teeny tiny. Somebody's phone number was on it, but I knew that lady was a school teacher and it was term-time and during school hours so she would not be there. I phoned anyway, and there she was. She drove right over and picked me up, and we spent the afternoon talking and praying, which I had never really done before with anyone like that.

Anyway. I felt compelled to come off the Prozac. I didn't want to see my doctor or follow advice, so whether it was wise or not, I just stopped taking it. I never had one single day of depression since that day. Not even the next day! Not ever. I have felt depressed sometimes, but it's so different. Back in those days, it was literally like a taste in my mouth. I could feel it was chemical. Sometimes I think how the Prozac must have jump started me or something, though my doctor couldn't really figure it out, nor my therapist. But actually I'm pretty sure it had much more to do with God than anything else!

Thank you God for healing me from hideous depression and setting me free!!

Okay, then there was Neil. We were already dating at this time, because we met on the Alpha Course which I started at a church in Wimbledon right after I became a Christian. I met Neil in November 1995. Nearly 10 years! He was on the course too, and the same friend invited us, though we had never met before. He was on her degree course and had been brought up in an actively Christian home, but had lost any desire to pray and stuff during his time at Uni. Sooo I met Neil. We became really good friends. I never had a good male friend before! We had so much fun together. I drove and he didn't have a car (I drove my mum's) so I would give him lifts everywhere.

How we fell in love is a whole 'nother LONG story that I should go into another time, but basically I began to realise I was falling in love with him, as more than a friend. I had no idea if he had any feelings for me like that (I presumed not) and I was scared about having such feelings. I went with a new friend from church to a prayer clinic, and explained my new feelings and that I was afraid to even consider a more-than-friends relationship with a man because I had been sexually abused several times (at 7, 14, and 19 - all completely isolated incidents from each other) and felt terrified of men in general. Hence no male friends I suppose. So they prayed. I felt SUCH an incredible sense of freedom as they prayed that I asked them to pray that Neil would have feelings for me, and that he would miss me while he was away at home over the half-term break, hahaha! Sneaky me :) Anyway, God answered that prayer right away, hehe! Neil told me he really missed me that break and it surprised him how much. Mwa-ha-ha! ;)

Okay I was so confident that on the way out from the prayer clinic I stopped at the Christian bookshop and bought a book on weddings, hehehe! My friend said that was a bit premature, but I just knew :)

So needless to say, God blessed me with my wonderful husband. Long lonnng story of how it all happened, but that's for another entry. I could not IMAGINE a more perfect husband for me. God has blessed me so much :) Thank you God for blessing me with my wonderful husband!!

I got sick with M.E. right after we married and was housebound for 2 years, and that was a MISERABLE time, but most of you already know that God healed me, November 10th 2001!! Thank you God for healing me when I was sick. I LOVE you Lord.

The most precious gift I was ever given here on this earth is my baby boy. I know he is a gift from God. November 9th 2005. Wow, nice things happen to me in November, don't they?! :) Thank you Jesus for my precious little boy. What an incredible blessing.

NOW I have mucho-nausea and a teeny tiny beating heart deep in my body - yet another blessing from God! Thank you Lord for my precious second child who I know you are knitting together even as I write this.

I am just so blessed. God has done so many other amazing things in my life these last 10 years, too many to write about. He has literally provided thousands of pounds from absolutely nowhere when we have been stuck financially - twice. He blessed us with our first two homes. One of them would not have been ours to live in without God's amazing financial blessing. He provided the exact amount we prayed for. God is just awesome.

Soooo many tiny things that God did that could not be explained any other way, much to the annoyance of my parents, who were extremely against my being a Christian! Like the time when Mummy lost her wedding ring in the garden and we all searched for HOURS, and she was so upset and crying and saying it was gone for good, and suddenly I thought I could not believe I hadn't thought to ask God! I stood there in the garden and prayed silently, and immediately had a visual image in my mind's eye of a branch with twigs coming off it in a certain way, with the ring lying at its root. It took me all of 10 seconds to find the branch exactly as my mind saw it, and there was the ring at the foot of it :) My parents were soooo confused when I told them what God has showed me!

Or the time I lay hands on my cat and prayed that his arthritis in his little front paws would go away, and he leapt up like I touched him with a hot poker and stood there shaking his front paws about weirdly (I kid you not!) and immediately lost his limp, haha! Yup. They couldn't explain that one either :)

God is so incredibly awesomely wonderful, and I love him so so so so so much. It's a different type of love I suppose, but incredibly intimate, and I would definitely say that I love him more than I even love my own son. For those of you with children of your own, or even those of you who have an idea of how much I totally LOVE Arthur, you see that my love for God is overwhelming. I have a living relationship with God, I think that's what it is that makes me love him so. Only it's much more than that also. I don't just choose to believe in a set of beliefs. I just KNOW God, personally, like I know Neil or my mum I suppose. It's different though, but hard to explain.

Anyway, I love him! Love him love him love him! I wish I had stuck closer to him over the years. I wish I was closer to him NOW than I am. I get distracted by life and forget to tune into his presence every day. I feel sad about that, especially when I think of all those things he has blessed me with. Those are like the solid part of a cake. The filling and the icing and decoration have been the countless times I have spent in his presence, just "being" with him. Or crying my heart out and begging him to draw me close to him, and suddenly feeling something that can never be described, as though somebody just communicated to me that they loved me beyond my brain's capacity to understand it or my body's ability to feel it. I love the times where I have just felt "lost" in God. Like there's nothing else in the world but God and me. Like nothing else matters. I could sing of my love for him forever at those times, and spend the rest of my days talking with him and praising him. Sing sing singing when he puts music in my heart and I feel it run through my veins and pour out of my tear ducts as I sing it.

I can't imagine continuing my life as I was before I gave my life to Jesus. I just can't begin to imagine. I am so glad that I didn't. I can't even tell you. I would not be where I am now. I would not have the people in my life that I have now. I would not be the person that I am now. Maybe I wouldn't even be around now?

Anyway, I am so thankful to God for these last 10 years! He is the main definition of what my life is about. Now if only I could live that out more....

Well, that is what I wanted to write about tonight. I also needed to update about Arthur's physio appointment with his feet. We have to go back at the beginning of December after he is a year old. If he is walking by then, we'll see how his feet do, and fit him into STIFF walking shoes, ugh! If he isn't walking by then, he needs one or two more sets of full-leg plaster casts!!! :( I am so bummed about this. But his feet just aren't quite getting straight enough on their own, and they will only cause him problems in the future if it's not fixed. I am still hoping that he will start walking and we'll fit him with boxy stiff shoes and those will correct his feet as he walks. But it does seem likely that he will be in plaster casts yet again. Only one or two sets though, she hopes, and once that is done it will be sooooooo worth it. My poor Boo! So we wait and see till December.

Okay, this was much longer than I thought it would be - I'm glad I got to write about it in more detail! I feel grim now though, so I'm going to bed. No photos today, must take some new ones soon!