Instagram

I have a new addiction, Instagram I love it. Heres a few Pics of S I've taken with it.

Things I would never have done.....

Things I would never imagined I do before I had S 

• Reading the same book over and over again every night of the week
• Being really really excited when your child gives you a squished up page with a wonky drawing on it
• Cleaning up poo and sick that wasn't mine
• Singing, dancing and pretending to be some sort of animal in public
• Having a serious conversation about snot and poo
• Actively encouraging someone to spit chewed up food into my hand
• Being woken at 7am and thinking its a lie in
• Consider food shopping ALONE to be a real treat
• Having a handbag full of stuff, none of which belongs to me
• Referring to people as a character like "Fireman Sam" a fireman, "Pat" Postman etc
• Sharing a toilet with more or more people
• Calling my partner Daddy   

I'm sure there are plenty more, what are yours?

Feeling like a bad mummy...

This morning I find myself feeling guilty and a bit upset, S only goes to nursery on a friday from 9am to 2pm It was awful this morning leaving her off she didn't want to stay and kept saying I love you mummy, don't leave me, I want you and I want to go home all through the tears. It makes me feel like an awful mummy, its my choice to send her there just because I needed a break, this makes me feel selfish. On the other hand I know that its good for her to have some time away from me but, I hate the thought of her being there upset for the whole time like she was when I last picked her up. I know I will sit here and worry about her and not enjoy the few hours I have to do the things I want so whats the point?

The great conspiracy of Silence..

The unwritten rule of parenthood is that you never let on to non-parents what its really like. This was described by a sleep-deprived friend as The Great Parental Conspiracy of Silence. It goes like this......

Your friend announces that she is pregnant, you are of course, delighted. You meet for coffee (yours is a double espresso because your child has been up all night) to talk about it. She wants to know everything or so she says.

Heres what you tell her..

* It doesn't matter if she gets fat, the weight will drop off afterwards, especially if she breastfeeds

* The birth itself isn't that bad, and anyway your body is biologically programmed to forget the pain.

* Breastfeeding can be a little tricky to start with, but in the end she'll get the hang of it.

* You get used to not having as much sleep as you used to.

* The experience of looking after a newborn can really bring two people together.


Heres what you actually mean...

* Her stomach will never be the same again, not even if she goes to the gym everyday (which she won't be able to because she won't have the time)

* The birth is quite terrifying, gas and air doesn't work like they say it does, having stitches is horrible, midwives don't always get it right, there will be more blood and bodily fluids than on a episode of CSI, and having half the world staring and your most intimate parts while you make noises like a demented pig is not, in any sense of the word empowering.

* Breastfeeding can be very hard indeed, you feel like a useless failure if you can't do it, breastfed babies do get colic, you will leak in public, your nipples will feel like they have been sandpapered and your breasts, like your stomach will never really recover.

* You will go insane with sleep deprivation, you really will. Even the hardiest of military men were reduced to wrecks after 3 days of no sleep in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and you were not trained for this. There will be days when the very act of putting clothes on your shattered body will feel like a major achievement.

* Once the initial euphoria has subsided, you and your partner will effectively become shift workers: when he's awake you will be dropping of to sleep, and vice versa. You will become resentful of his ability to leave the house in the morning, bound by the comparatively stressless world of work. In the back of your mind will be the sneaking suspicion that he is staying longer in the office because he would almost be anywhere than at home sterilising bottles and dealing with a frazzled you and a wailing baby. Sex will be implausible, not so much because of the physical changes wrought by giving birth, but because you will both be so exhausted, and no one feels like having much sex when they're tired and smelling slightly of sick.

That is one side of the story: the disruption and chaos and then somewhere around week three, quite possibly as you are dozing of at 4am, with this little milky person asleep beside you, It suddenly hits you with the force of an oncoming train: you love this little person more than life itself, It is in the true sense of the word unconditional.  It can on the other hand be frightening for the mother, whose happiness now depends on this highly unstable bundle, whose very sanity can feel as if it hinges on one tiny human continuing to breathe. but also for her partner Adjusting from being the centre of a person's universe to being a distance satellite is never easy, especially if the ego involved is male. All this is why you can't really tell your pregnant friend the truth. She doesn't yet understand the peculiar feeling of being hopelessly trapped and elated at the same time - nor will she until she has given birth. You have to let her experience it for herself, in her own way. Far better and easier to say that My child is a angel/genius/source of endless joy, I am deliriously happy being a mother, my partner and I have as much - If possibility not more sex than before and no, of course we do not miss the lie-ins/foreign holidays/actual freedom.

I found this in a book I bought today called Backwards in high heels.  I do think people tend to sugar coat information when your pregnant for the first time obviously not to scare the life out of you.

L x

Only one... Surely not

I have decided that for the foreseeable I am sticking with one child but somehow society makes me feel like a freak for making such a decision with such comments as "You can't have just one a only child is an lonely child" "oh you'll change your mind" or the conversation me and my MIL had yesterday, I was telling her I had bulk bought some pull ups a couple of weeks ago because we were still using them at night and were £2.79 in Tesco. We have a lot left over because S is dry both day and night now. Her response "you should just keep them for the next one" 


I am quite happy with one for a number of reasons. 


Yesterday I came across this study that has proved to be quite interesting in reagards to only children. 






A Stereotype Is Born

The image of the lonely only — or at least the legitimizing of that idea — was the work of one man, Granville Stanley Hall. About 120 years ago, Hall established one of the first American psychology-research labs and was a leader of the child-study movement. A national network of study groups called Hall Clubs existed to spread his teachings. But what he is most known for today is supervising the 1896 study "Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children," which described a series of only-child oddballs as permanent misfits. Hall — and every other fledgling psychologist — knew close to nothing about credible research practices. Yet for decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that children with siblings possessed. "Being an only child is a disease in itself," he claimed.

Later generations of scholars tried to correct the record, but their findings never filtered into popular parenting discourse. Meanwhile, the "peculiar" only children — "overprivileged, asocial, royally autonomous ... self-centered, aloof and overly intellectual," as sociologist Judith Blake describes them in her 1989 book Family Size and Achievement — permeated pop culture, from the demon children in horror films (The Omen, The Bad Seed) to the oddball sidekicks in '80s sitcoms (Growing Pains, Family Ties). Even on the new show Modern Family, the tween singleton is a cringingly precocious loner with a coddling mother. Such vehicles have evangelized Hall's teachings more than his clubs did. Of course we ask when someone is going to have "kids," not "a kid." Of course we think that one is the loneliest number.

No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. An only child herself and the mother of one, Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China (where the government's one-child policy, the world's biggest experiment in population control, went into effect in 1979), drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence. The studies, mainly from the U.S., cut across class and race.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. No one, Falbo says, has published research that can demonstrate any truth behind the stereotype of the only child as lonely, selfish and maladjusted. (She has spoken those three words so many times in the past 35 years that they run together as one: lonelyselfishmaladjusted.) Falbo and Polit later completed a second quantitative review of more than 200 personality studies. By and large, they found that the personalities of only children were indistinguishable from their peers with siblings.

Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid, who gets all the dance classes, piano lessons and prep courses, as well as all their parents' attention when it comes to helping work out an algebra problem. That attention, researchers have noticed, leads to not just higher SAT scores but also higher self-esteem.

And as Falbo tells her students, the cocktail of aptitude and confidence yields results: only children tend to do better in school and get more education — college, medical or law degrees — than other kids. Not that having siblings will necessarily thwart you; Einstein had a sister and did just fine.


The full article can be read here The only child: Debunking the myths




Who's to say that in a year or 2 I'll change my mind but for now I am happy to devote time and full attention to S.

Motherhood

Being a mother is quite possibly one of the most complex undertakings you will ever embark on.

Modern motherhood is riddled with contradictions, confusion and above all clichés, the have it all generation, the too posh to push, the ticking biological clock, the work life balance.

Women who have children can never be just mothers, there must always be a qualifier. Stay at home mums, working mums, full time mums (although show me a mother who is part time and I’ll show you a pig with wings) Earth mothers, alpha mothers, pushy mothers, single mothers, teenage mothers, geriatric mothers and of course the yummy mummies.

Society sees all these women going about the business of raising children and, instead of delighting in the continuation of the human race It seems to go out of its way to judge them. 

Just going slowly insane

So the week begins again and I feel like screaming. Don't get me wrong I love being a stay at home mum but some days I just feel I would like to go to work or college just so I can have a adult conversation, to have a few hours without S demanding all my attention and to be me and not just a wife and mother.

I had have lots of conversations with fellow mummies its not just me who feels like this we all do from time to time. I also know a few mummies who would hate to be a SAHM.  It is hard work and I do feel like I am going crazy sometimes especially when my husband is away and I really dont have any adult conversation at all.

That being said a SAHM can be really rewarding as well, I get to see all of her milestones which I would miss if I wasn't at home.

L x