Joining in...

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a wee bit anti social. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be, I value friendships, I like to have people around me that I can chat about the Bake Off with, drink ale with and recommend books to, but I find it hard, really hard.

When we first moved to St Albans at the beginning of Summer 2016 I didn't want to leave the house. Ever. Partly due to some mild postnatal depression, and mostly down to me being extremely anxious. Grayson was still throwing up after and in between every feed, he still wanted feeding at least every two hours, he was three months old, not napping and still waking every 40 minutes to 2 hours in the night. I was exhausted. I wanted to be at baby groups, my heart ached thinking of all the daft plans I'd had in my head of baby massage with my tiny newborn. I felt so much guilt. I just couldn't do it though.

Push came to shove when I won a place on a short baby course, I had to get out of the house every week for two hours. Other mums were there. 6 of us. Once we even stayed afterwards and had a drink. And then it ended, that was it. I didn't go to another group until my son was nearly a year old.

It took a lovely lady at the Sure Start centre to persuade me to come along to a messy play class, I was getting Grayson weighed, she worked there and reassured me, she even gave me her number and said I could call her and she'd walk in with me so that I wouldn't have to enter alone. I'm not sure she'll ever know how much that saved me.

The baby and toddler groups in St Albans were big, maybe because of that no one really spoke to each other, in the 6 months that I went to the groups (two or three a week) I only had one other mum talk to me, everyone either seemed to know each other or just kept to themselves.

I think that it was because of this that I was so nervous about going to new groups in the village after having moved. During the Summer holidays nothing had been on. I went to a couple of socials organised by people on the Mummy Social app and that was pretty much it for the first few months. 

Then it was September and it was time to jump back in. 

So far I go to two groups, one in my village on a Wednesday that is mostly attended by childminders and one on a Friday in the village across the road that is attended by some of the loveliest mums I have ever met. The smaller groups mean that I am forced to be in the thick of it, there's no disappearing into the sidelines here, and so far that's doing us just fine!

A whole new village

It's been a stressful few months, but it turns out not for the reasons I was originally anticipating. Going from a city back to a village - fine, having to drive pretty much everywhere instead of walk - fine, much much smaller baby and toddler groups - also fine, even unpacking everything that took me months to pack up at the beginning of the Summer was fine (turns out moving to a house with more than 4 rooms makes unpacking go a whole lot smoother).

Instead we've had issues with our previous landlord (still being resolved and still keeping me awake at night), issues with our deliveries - no one seems to be able to find our house, our fridge was a missed delivery twice, so we had nowhere to keep fresh food for the first two weeks. Our new fridge started freezing everything. It took them a month to come out and fix it. We lost over £100 worth of shopping due to it, bottles had exploded sending shattered glass everywhere. We all keep getting sick. I've cleaned up more vomit and shit in the last few months than I have in the entire time since Grayson recovered from reflux. I have a cold that never wants to end, currently surviving on flavoured coffee and strawberry cheesecake oreos to cheer myself up.

On the plus side I feel like I have the kind of family unit now that I had always dreamed of. Now that we're not constantly on top of each other and tripping over the dog everything is so much more chilled. This house already feels more like home than the last house ever did even though we were there for 13 months. We have the space to have people stay, my parents are literally 5 minutes down the road, we're nearly an hour closer to Tom's parents and my best friend. It feels like things are on the up!

8 Days 'til Key day!

Next Friday we pick up the keys to our new home. Then it's "goodbye St Albans" and "hello Maulden" again! I'm a bit gutted to be leaving such a wonderful community, it's a city that feels like a village. We meet other dog walkers nearly everyday in a group at the park, we go to messy play at the Baby Centre where the women who work there treat you as a friend, we go to the church baby and toddler group for coffee and squash and a chance for Grayson to blow off steam.

It took me ages to get to this point though. Nearly the whole time that we've been in St Albans I have been too anxious to join in. I avoided the other dog walkers in the morning as I felt like they'd see me as bad company trying to force myself into their group. I never spoke to other mothers at baby groups, heck I only started going to baby groups a few months ago! Anxiety consumed me. That's the problem with anxiety, it takes away so much of your life. I look back on my first year of motherhood with shame and embarrassment that I really don't want to feel. I've been living here over a year and I don't have any new friends. Maybe a dog walker or two that would meet up for a coffee if I was brave enough to ask. No mum friends. There's one lovely woman at the church group who I talk to regularly but have avoided getting close to as I knew we were going to move away. My brain tells me that there's no point getting close to people when you know you're going to move, but it's not logical and it's lonely.

I'm hoping that this move back to my parent's village will be a new start. It's less lonely knowing that they're not far away if I'm having a bad day. I think that it's ok to admit that, we all need a support system as parents. It's hard when you go from working 40-50 hours a week in retail, seeing people for most of your day, to it just being you and a tiny human most of the time.

So I've updated my Mush account and my Mummy Social to find new local friends, there's no "Maulden Mums" Facebook group unfortunately (St Albans Mums Facebook group has been a lifeline!) but I'm hoping that with those apps and some baby groups we will end up less lonely and who knows, maybe we will even make some friends!

Shopping for boys

One thing I've found super frustrating since becoming a mother is the difference in what is available for girls vs what is available that is unisex or designed for boys.

When I was pregnant I didn't want to find out Grayson's gender, I wanted a surprise, I didn't quite realise though how little there would be available clothing and bedding wise in high-street stores that wasn't pink or blue!
I purchased a Stormtrooper onesie and a couple of little batman ones, there was a small selection of white or beige items available and that was kind of it. Mothercare had a few nice brands such as Little Bird and My K but there aren't many Mothercare stores around and those brands are a slightly higher price range than the generic own brands.

It has become more apparent though as Grayson gets older that the stores all seem to be buying more generic "girl" items in than "boys" items.  Maybe this is because parents buy more for their daughters than their sons, but I find it crazy. Our local Sainsburys for example had 15 girls swimwear options during this recent heatwave and only 5 for boys, out of those 5 most were brands like Angry Birds and designed to be really garish. (Don't even get me started on how nearly all the girls options were pink).

River Island had a huuuuge sale on when I went in on Thursday, I'm talking a massive childrenswear markdown, the stuff of my dreams, until I realised there were 24 girls rails and 4 boys ones. And there were even girls things mixed in with the boys as they had run out of room. Now I am totally fine with shoving my mini me in "girls" clothes if they're unisex enough but there is a cavernous gap in that market too.

It was a similar story in a large Asda store I visited recently. I love Asda bedding, if you haven't seen the cute prints they keep producing then you are missing out, I'm talking mermaid cats, llamas and adorable biscuits here. But pop to the kids bedding and suddenly you're in a sea of pink and blue and the blue section is a hell of a lot smaller than the pink. It's exasperating.

Lots of independent stores have cottoned on to parents wanting more gender neutral items, cute print leggings, tees and dungarees but unfortunately with the high-street stores not following suit it makes shopping for a little human somewhat harder, the same way that you might not want your daughter pushed into wearing princess items and slogan tees about being cute, I don't want him ending up in football gear or Angry Bird merch when he's only 15 months old and wouldn't have a clue what any of it is about!

3 Hours.

That's how much sleep I've had each night for the last four nights.

It's hard when your child just won't sleep. When Grayson was born it felt like everyone else's babies were settling into a routine apart from him. He still wanted feeding every 2-4 hours right up until he was eating 3 full meals and snacks at 10 months.

People would say to me "Have you tried just putting him down?" as if it was some sort of magical cure for a hungry, refluxy, screaming baby. We tried milk thickeners for his reflux, comfort milk and hungry baby milk alongside the breast milk as I was becoming paranoid that I wasn't providing enough fat to keep him full, it took a trip to A&E to get him prescribed with Ranitidine. It took the edge off for a few days. I became sick of people telling me that he would grow out of it, that I should let him cry it out and then the disapproving looks when I would try to explain that if he cried for too long he would violently throw up all over himself, sometimes choking on it.

I felt judged all the time.

I was tired from basically being  a walking boob. I'd be up during his worst periods 9 times a night. or just all night, because there wouldn't be any point in trying to sleep in between. I tried giving him some bottles at night to make it easier to put him down but I found myself falling asleep and dropping the bottle, startling myself and him awake. It was scary.

We tried white noise and a Sleepyhead, combined they gave us a little extra time each night. Once he started eating large meals he went to only waking twice a night. He would still neck a full bottle each wake up. Yet he's never been a chubby baby. It baffles me.

By 13 months he had finally started sleeping through the night regularly. I haven't yet dropped the bottles like the Health Visitor suggests. I just can't. He's 15 months old today and if we went out to eat he would easily wolf down an entire children's meal portion to himself, he usually eats two slices of toast and fruit for breakfast or a larger bowl of porridge than I would eat, he'll have lunch and dinner with a pudding, and healthy snacks in-between. So if drinking a bottle of milk helps get him down for his nap and sleep at night then I'm all over it. I just can't go back to being that zombie again.

This week has been hard, he's been up from 12am -3/4am for 4 nights in a row. Nothing will settle him. It's amazing how hard it becomes to function so quickly. Walking the dog in the morning goes from being a chance to get out to seeming like an impossible task involving far too much to get ready, carrying Grayson on my back feels like I'm being pulled into the ground with every step. I stop eating properly because after preparing him fresh food I just can't be bothered to do my own, so I drink my cold coffee and listen to him whinge and pray that the nap will last two full hours.

And then I'll spend that nap feeling guilty that I wanted rid of him but also dreading when he wakes up. 

It's just really not easy, so to any mum that's currently in the same position, whether your baby is 3 weeks, 3 months or 13 months, it might not always get better fast, but somehow you'll cope, and in the future you'll wonder how! And to any mother whose child does sleep, that's great, but please don't pass on condescending advice, if it was really as easy as putting the baby down, using a dummy or a warm bath, we'd all have amazing sleepers by now! Just agree with us that it's a bit shit and pass us the coffee because we bloody well need it!

House viewing woes...

Today I was up at 6.45. By the time my partner got up at 9.20 I had already hoovered the house, fed and dressed the toddler, cleaned the kitchen floor, done the washing up, cleaned the mould off the bathroom ceiling and showered.

I asked him to walk the dog.

He got annoyed because I usually do it. And it's not a break for him doing things like that at the weekend. Never mind that it was his bloody dog before we got together.

Anyway, I digress...

Today we had two mini open house type things going on as the landlord is keen to fill the house as soon as we leave. That's fair enough. Hence the mad cleaning. I'm pretty sure I've done nothing but housework and childrearing from the moment I have woken to the moment I have fallen asleep for the last few days.

What I wasn't prepared for however was how horrible it feels to have people walking around the house, judging it whilst I was still inside.

I get that our house is small,but it's big compared to what else was on offer at the time for the price we pay. I also think it's got lovely sized rooms and nice big windows. I don't really know why I was getting offended by people remarking on the size, maybe because it feels like they're implying that it's not good enough for them, even though I know that's not true, if it's not big enough then it's just not big enough!
The other thing would be the comments on the state of disrepair that the house is in. When we moved into this house it was literally falling apart. The stairs carpets had been munched by moths, the lights in the hallway and porch didn't work, neither did some of the kitchen lights, the house stunk of dog, they had painted over mould, the oven door was hanging off, the garden was overgrown...I could go on....

We reported all of these things. Just like those who rent after us probably will.

But they'll be bloody lucky if they get fixed.

It took them a month to send someone out to fix our downstairs lighting when it all blew over Christmas. We were using beside lamps plugged in all over the place to see in the mornings and evenings.
They fixed the living room and kitchen lights and then boxed the hallway and porch ones off saying that they'd come back. They never did.
Yet I could overhear the agent telling people it would all be sorted before they moved in. It felt really insulting. I've got emails from when we first moved in, asking them to fix the oven door. We used to chase it all up regularly and it made no difference. I just don't trust them at all.

I hate the idea that whoever moves in here will think that we left it in this state, when in reality we just inherited it this way.

To end on a positive, here's Grayson playing in the garden with the dog....

An overflowing mind

Earlier in the week I came across a Guardian article here , which featured a comic by a French illustrator called Emma. For those of you who haven't seen it, it describes how even when men take on chores in the household, it never works out even due to the amount of things that we have going on in our minds.

Now before I get anyone jumping down my throat, of course I'm not saying all men, or that working men don't also have things on their mind, but it is something that I too have noticed about the differences that mum's and dad's seem to have.

My partner does a lot of cooking for us, but all of the washing, cleaning, childcare etc. is down to me. Which is ok, he works full time and I don't. This is mostly due to the fact that where we are living the childcare costs the same as a months wages for me, so if I was to include travel and parking into the equation we would actually be worse off if I had gone back to work after maternity leave.

It does however mean my day often starts before his and ends well after. I was also doing all the night duty with our son up until he started sleeping through regularly at around 13 months old. I'm usually up at 6.30am and get Grayson settled for 7.30pm latest. During the day I'm on the go constantly, walking the dog, baby groups, shopping, cleaning, washing, tidying, cooking, basically whatever needs to be done. Alongside this is a constant narrative of extra things....

So the every day stuff; baby needs to be fed by this time, dog walked by this time, in order to get to baby group by this time and then back in time to make lunch and then clean the bathroom whilst he naps and get the washing on and the bins go out on this Friday and so on.

Then it gets mixed with the other things; wedding this weekend, visiting family on this day, when's my car MOT due? what about my partners, our house insurance, have I been neglecting friendships? Does Grayson need to visit the dentist yet or is he still too young....

And the even bigger picture. We're moving house. Soon. And both sets of estate agents are being wankers. Emails multiple times a week pressuring us to move faster (we're renting and in no way want to be paying for two houses at once), or organising viewings of the house we're currently in without asking us if we're in that day and offering to let themselves in - last time they left our front door open, I don't trust them at all. We also have a dog who will be very confused if a stranger lets themselves into our home.

I'm also planning a hen do for my best friend, chasing people for RSVPs, trying to get accommodation booked, wondering if I can loose enough weight by then to fit into my old dresses....

So I'm not saying that men don't worry, but whoever the majority of household chores and childcare falls upon ends up under a whole bunch of pressure, especially as there are a lot of women who will be working part time (or full time) and taking all this on as well.