Think Frock it's Friday

I have been following the fantastic Think Frock it's Friday campaign on Lottie Loves for the past few weeks and been desperate to join in. I love the idea of wearing a dress because ... well, just for the hell of it. Who needs a because? Sometimes it's just nice to put the jeans to one side and wear something with a spinny skirt, just to lift your spirits.

I would have joined in earlier but for one problem. Despite me having a wardrobe full of dresses, there are very few I can wear at the moment. Some of them are too small (eBay here we come) and some of them just aren't suitable. I am breastfeeding C who, although now on solid food, still needs milk feeds throughout the day. My preferred method of discrete feeding is a stretchy vest under a normal top. The vest gets pulled down under my bra, the top gets pulled up and voila, we can feed away without flashing anyone who happens to be in the vicinity a glimpse of my Mum Tum or anything further North! Obviously you can't pull up a dress though!

There are dresses specifically designed for breastfeeding, with a dual layer top section, but they almost universally seem to be dull in both colour and design, hideously expensive or made from very non-summery sweaty polyester material.

And so began my hunt for the perfect non-breastfeeding dress which I could breastfeed in!

I did a lot of online research, looking for something with a stretchy front section which could be pulled to one side, paired with a long cardy or light shawl to cover up the top of my boob. In the 'proper summer dress' category (cotton and bright) with straps wide enough to hide a bra there was remarkably little.

In the end I had a chance high street encounter with this lovely thing from good old M&S


It is just what I wanted! The front section has plenty of give thanks to the lovely smocking at the back and it's a perfect just below knee length. I've lost just over half a stone in the last few weeks and, standing in the changing rooms, the shop assistant had to fetch me a smaller size. Result! It was also bargainous, coming in at less than £20.

Now you will see that, contrary to the 'rules' of TFIF that's not me in the picture there! Given I'm currently alone in the house with a baby and a toddler, neither of whom can use the camera or resist trying to knock over the tripod whilst I make an attempt at self-timing, you'll have to imagine what it looks like on me. I'll try and rope my husband into taking a picture this weekend and post it next week.

In the meantime, I'm off to swirl my skirts, kick up my sandals and revel in the fact that it actually just might really now be summer!


(This is a scheduled post. I'm actually off on my holidays now and will be back after the Bank Holiday weekend. If you know where I live, please don't break into my house. Lets cross our fingers for frock weather!)

Two-nager

T has a maddening capacity to eat very, very, v e r r r r r y, slowly. Of course he can eat quickly if he wants to, inhaling ice-cream comes to mind, but should we be talking peas (one at a time) or breakfast cereal (tiny amounts on the tip of the spoon as he natters on, and on, and on) we're on to a loser.

Yesterday I was the loser. Faced with a bowl of Weetabix rapidly starting to resemble concrete I lost my temper and shouted.

'Will you just eat a bit more quickly. Have a big spoonful. Now!'

Brown eyes wide he looked up, duly loaded his spoon and forced a mountain into his mouth.

He chewed carefully, squishing the mush from one side to the other. Then he looked at me.

'There Mummy, are you happy now?'

Two going on thirteen.

I am a lucky blogger

This has been a busy week. No sooner were we home from Leicester on Monday afternoon than I needed to start packing for our upcoming Bank Holiday weekend away in Wales. This basically involved tipping everything from a bag, into the washer, pegging it out and putting it back into a different bag. Well, until the sun went in. The forecast for Narberth this weekend is now looking suspiciously wet, as befits a British public holiday of course. I haven't unpacked the summer stuff, just in case, but have also added warmer clothes, raincoats and board games. Hmph.

Anyway, in my whirwind state of writing lists and creating piles this week I have been lucky enough to receive not one, not two but THREE fabulous parcels through my door which have all made me stop and smile and cheered me up for different reasons.

The first was my Secret Post Club parcel for May, sent by the fabulous Wendy at No More Excuses. I ripped open the envelope to find a book I've been meaning to read for ages but never quite got around to buying. Wendy had wrapped it beautifully and included a lovely note saying how much she'd enjoyed it. It's What Mother's Do and I can't wait to get started. As an aside how fab do Wendy's classes look? As the not so proud owner of a Mummy Tum I'd love to learn how best to get rid and definitely wish she was nearer!

The second parcel was a brilliant surprise from a lovely friend. Who knew you could buy cake, by the slice, online and have it delivered next day? Well now I do of course, and what AMAZING cake it was. I had the chocolate and raspberry which was dense and sticky, kind of like a brownie with chocolate cream in the middle and frosting. I absolutely loved it and will definitely be using The Cake Nest to order treats next time I'm looking for something to send. Go there and treat yourself, or even better a friend. I would have added a photo to the post at this point but I accidentally fell on the cake with my mouth open and inhaled it in one fell swoop.

The third parcel was a present to myself. We'll be doing a lot of swimming this weekend (indoors in a well heated pool rather than in the sea thank goodness!) and I have been desperate for a new cossie for as long as I can remember. I bought my current one when I was a student which was (cough) ten years ago now and it's not only too small but also bobbly around the bum and almost transparent in places where the chlorine has eaten the fabric away. Not a good look. I found a fabulous swimming costume on the Next website (my bikini days are long gone!) only for it to be out of stock for a fortnight, so I turned to the man who sends me more post than even my bank, the lovely Johnnie Boden. I had some account credit for prostituting my friends, sorry, suggesting they might like catalogues, and used a discount code and it ended up being the same price as the Next one. It arrived this morning and it is truly the cossie of my dreams. Nowhere near as garish as it looks in the pics, lovely fabric, fab fit and definitely what you need to cheer up a wet Welsh weekend.

I hope your postie has brought you some treats this week too.

Other people's houses

Imagine if you can the most child unfriendly house in the world. Then add ornaments, and more ornaments, and some pot pourri.

We spent the weekend in my husband's 'Daddy flat', his temporary home away from home until we sell our house and buy a family one in our new area. It is almost perfect. A Granny annexe to a large house with oft-absent residents it has a fabulously large garden with swing seat, dark places to explore and plenty of grass to roll and play on. There's a park at the end of the road with a cricket pitch (toddlers like cricket, who knew?) and great play area. There's even a local duckpond. Then you go inside. I'm using artistic licence here, it's not that bad, but this Granny flat was until recently lived in by a real life Granny and she liked things pink, frilly and most probably found in the magazine that comes with the Sunday People.

Decor issues aside we had a lovely sunny weekend. I even got a lie in. On Monday I snuggled into the duvet as my husband came to tell me it was time to get up as he needed to leave for work. I ignored him. He started to pull back the covers so I resorted to desperate measures. 'Can I have a love?' He's such a sucker. He pulled me close and I fell back into almost-sleep, still relaxed enough to not care about my morning breath, but awake enough to clutch him closer when he tried to leave. Anything to avoid having to properly wake and Deal With The Children.

He soon sussed me of course and insisted he really HAD to go unless, you know, I fancied, well, you know ... quickly? I couldn't quite manage opening my eyes so I made a mental assesment using my ears. I could hear the strains of CBeebies from the living room. The baby was giggling. In hindsight she was also giggling when I found the toddler pressing a pillow on her face, so this probably wasn't a safe indication we were free to go ahead, but no-one was crying and he did say quickly.

'Have you got any ...?'

My husband jumped across the bed and rifled in the dressing table drawer for a condom. I waited. He rooted and cursed. I waited. He chucked a couple of t-shirts on the floor. I waited. He banged about a bit. Still waiting.

'Where did I put the damn ...'

The moment had gone of course. One of the children started crying. It's a good job the flat's shower also has a habit of going cold every couple of minutes.

Packing to go home in a moment of wifely generosity I grabbed the bag containing two weeks worth of his dirty washing, reasoning I'd probably be doing it if he still lived with us. We're going on holiday on Thursday and I do like him to look vaguely presentable when I take him out in public. Once back, as I dragged t-shirts, pants and trousers out of the machine something glinted and caught my eye. I pulled and four Durex appeared, safely hidden, as he'd thought, under a pile of clothes. They'd managed to survive a 40 degree stain removal cycle with added Vanish spray.

Still, maybe I should be thankful. All of those pink frills in the bedroom would probably have put me off my stride anyway.

Oh Seven Oh Oh

A little hand tugs at my arm.

'Mummy, it's oh seven oh oh'.

I reach for my phone on the bedside table and groan aloud. It is, in fact, 5.37 am.

'I just get in with you Mummy'.

I bury my head in the pillow as he takes over my husband's side of the bed. Stage whispering, to avoid waking his sister, T tells me variously that he is hungry, needs a wee, wants to wear his yellow t-shirt today and that the sky he can glimpse through the crack in the curtains is blue.

My, also hushed, admonishment that it's actually too bloody early to open my eyes never mind hold a conversation is ignored. Reaching for my phone he tells me he can see a seven on its digital clock so it MUST be time to get up. It's now 5.47 am. I admit defeat and crawl out of bed.

***

I love my blog stats. It's fascinating to see how people find this blog and how and what they read when they get here. One of the most interesting things is the Google searches that direct readers to these pages. I'm pretty sure that the individual searching for 'toddler locked in the house all day' will have been disappointed I don't have any advice for them, but of course a lot of people looking for advice on 'toddler sleep' (and variations on that theme!) click here and actually, in the last few months I haven't had much to say on the subject! Well, from the toddler side anyway. The baby's another matter, but who wants to read 'adventures of a sleepless baby'? It's not exactly headline news is it.

Anyway, luckily for all of the Google searchers out there, T has decided that sleep is for, well, babies. Unluckily for me he's timed his new super early wake-ups perfectly, meaning he's bouncing around about 15 minutes after I've gone back to sleep after C's last feed. Knackered does not cover it!

Sadly I think, as with most things child related, time might be the healer we're desperately looking for. We have had wakeful periods before, often coinciding with leaps in his development or times of change like the one we're going through now, and come out the other side, slightly darker of under eye. But time doesn't make an interesting blog post does it? So we're trying something new. We've purchased a Gro clock, a sleep training device with a simple star and moon on the face which aims to encourage toddlers to stay in bed until it's 'officially' morning. As an added bonus, it also features a digital clock, so T can double check it's 'oh seven oh oh' before getting up for the day.

Online reviews are generally positive so I have high hopes. I'll report back in the next few days and let you know how we get on. The sleepless toddler is back!

Bath poo

I feel I am relatively lucky on the poo front. With a toilet trained toddler and a baby on solids we now have very few poonami anecdotes to tell, until tonight that is. I listened gleefully at tea-time whilst T told me about one of his nursery peers who'd done a giant poo in the playground this afternoon and the ladies' attempts to stop the others standing in it whilst cleaning it up. I should have taken it as a sign.

All three of us were in the bath. 'I need a wee wee' whined T. I toyed with telling him to do it in the water but thought he'd probably grass me up to Daddy, so securing the baby under one arm I heaved him over the side and onto the bathmat. He did a great impression of a scrawny drowned rat. I fed him instructions ... stand on that little ledge, now onto your step with your knees, now turn around, bottom down, look you got on all by yourself! He's a titch - two and a half and still in 12 month trousers - being lifted on and off each time he needs to go so this was a major achievement, plus I didn't have to get my wobbly bits cold. Result. He sat and made a familiar grunting sound. Sigh. I fed him instructions again ... OK, now down you come, turn around, pass me that packet of wipes there. I did the necessary one handed, still in the bath, and chucked the dirty one into the loo, hole in one! Thank heavens for small bathrooms. T passed the antibac soap from the sink ledge and, once heaved back into the water, we both washed our hands thoroughly.

I was feeling quite smug. There we were, all pink and cosy and warm in the water. Only snug stories, milk and sleeps to come. Then a noise. The water's gone a strange yellowy colour. Ah, that'll be the baby then. Evacuate! Evacuate!

I drained the water and showered the children. Once they were asleep I bleached and scrubbed the bath, and the bath toys. I cursed my earlier laziness. If I'd have speeded up that toddler wee, that baby poo would have landed in a nappy rather than just above my left knee. On the phone my husband reminds me that last time he was on the receiving end of this treat, but it was a toddler poo which needed to be caught rather than washed away. I put away the Flash and think it could have been worse.

A Little Less Conversation

I am fascinated by the idea of comfortable silence, the notion that if you're truly happy with someone, if you know them inside out, you don't need to talk. Well obviously you need to talk - pass the ketchup, that sort of thing - but not all the time, and certainly not the sort of nervous garbling I tend to revert to when faced with a roomful of people I've not met before.

One of the things I've missed most about my husband being away is actual adult conversation. This morning I'm ashamed to admit in tiredness I cried down the phone to him as I described the awful night we'd had (there's a post on sleep coming soon!) and, with toddler T at nursery, he suggested baby C and I had a lazy day today so I could rest. I cried harder, 'But I don't want to stay in the house all day, I want to talk to someone'. Yesterday I said only a handful of words to other adults, a quick transaction in the Co-op and more than half of the other ones with my mouth wide open to the dentist, 'ahhh ah ah ahhh, ahh ahh ahh ahh ahh', well he appeared to know what I was talking about. I wasn't schtum for the rest of the day of course, but there are only so many conversations you can have about 'cloud monsters' before you start to go a little crazy.

This afternoon I met a fabulous friend for a catch up chat. It felt very, very good to talk. But as we put the world to rights over hot chocolate and smoothies (yes I know real grown-ups drink tea and coffee, but not us two!) I wondered whether this week in a fit of melancholic pique I am actually mourning something I never really had.

Were my husband here right now, what would we be doing. Well I'd probably be doing this, typing on the laptop, rubbish telly in the background, and he'd probably be doing what I assume he's doing right now in his new flat, playing on his phone, rubbish telly in the background. Even in the same room, sharing the same sofa, chances are we absolutely, definitely would not be talking to each other.

So instead of complaining about the lack of conversation, maybe I should be celebrating the fact that the comfortable silence remains. The more things change, the more they stay the same.