Weddings

It has been a busy few weeks in our household. As Isabelle posted a little while ago, our family has experienced rather a lot of big life events this year (birth, a death, marriage, moving house, retirement, redundancy...).

One of the biggest was three weeks ago, when my sister got married. While I can't claim I did all that much towards her wedding, it did occupy us for a while before it actually happened - Mum and I made several trips to the dressmaker both for L's dress and my bridesmaid dress, which had to be made at the last minute because we had no idea what size I was going to be, nine weeks post-baby. It was really nice to have an excuse to meet up with Mum and spend time with her (we became regulars at Cuckoo's Bakery for a restorative coffee afterwards).

I feel a bit guilty about not doing more towards the wedding. I realise that having a very small baby is a fairly good excuse, but my sister's best friend did a lot more than I did.



This is the only photo I have of us... we don't have the official ones yet.

Anyway, the wedding went off beautifully. My sister looked beautiful and just sparkled with happiness. Her other half is an actor/musician and many of their friends are musical too, so the singing (and signing-of-the-register jazz numbers) were of a high standard. She designed all the orders of service, stationery, place cards and so on, so it all looked very pretty, smart and uniform, and they did something which worked really well - they asked each guest for a "fun fact" about himself or herself, and made them into badges which they put at each place as conversation-starters. (The Peanut still has his, stuck to his car seat - it says "My womb name was Billy". You haven't accumulated many facts when you're only nine weeks old.)

The Peanut was very well-behaved throughout, even though we dressed him up like this:



This suit was a present from some family friends in Spain and we feel it has a certain retro charm, although it is perhaps not the most practical babywear ever. He did also have socks and shoes on. The Peanut spent almost the entire reception being passed from admirer to admirer (allowing his mother to do some dancing!) and eventually went to sleep in his car seat/carrier thing depite the ceilidh band still being in full swing. My great-uncle and aunt were staying in the hotel and lent us their room for feeds, which really saved the evening for us (especially as I had to take my dress off to do this - not really feasible in public).

I was surprised how much I enjoyed the wedding - not that I was expecting it to go badly or anything, but I haven't attended a party with a baby before and I had thought it was likely to make things a bit difficult. But ir really didn't. And it was lovely to see so many of our relatives over the weekend, and meet the groom's family, mostly for the first time. His sister and her husband are lovely and I hope we get to meet them (and their two little boys) again.

And then the next weekend we did most of it again because our friends R and E were getting married up in the Highlands. But that is another post.

23 weeks

The weeks of this pregnancy seem to be slipping past awfully quickly. People tell you that the time goes very slowly, and maybe it did in the earlier stages (especially when we were waiting to tell people) but at the moment it feels like it's whizzing along. I can't believe we're more than halfway through.

In part it's hard to believe this because I still don't look pregnant, or not that anyone would notice. I am not particularly small-framed and so far, my stomach isn't sticking out any more than it ever was (although it feels different to the touch). I'm not complaining - so far all my clothes still fit, though I don't suppose this will last long.

But we had the second scan two weeks ago and Billy Baby is growing on schedule and appears to have all the requisite organs and things. And he's a boy. Fairly clearly. We are going to have to think properly and seriously about names now (it won't actually be Billy).

I have been able to feel him moving around for a few weeks now. He seems to object to my sitting down for any length of time... and today, in the bath, I actually saw my stomach twitch in response to a kick, which was pretty strange.

Along with not looking particularly pregnant, I have also not had much in the way of health problems, fingers crossed. The only trouble I'm having at all is some pelvic girdle discomfort, and an increasing tendency for my hips and lower back to seize up if I sit still for too long (which is apparently part of the same problem).

Extra-stretchy ligaments run in my family, and all the oestrogen floating around in pregnancy makes them even stretchier, hence the troubles. Apparently my mum had them too. I've seen a physiotherapist, though, who has given me tips on good sleeping positions and some exercises to help, and I am crossing my fingers that if I behave sensibly, it won't get too much worse.

Meanwhile, J and I have been thinking about moving house. We are not absolutely certain that we'll get this done before Billy arrives, although that was the original plan - at the moment, we are concentrating on doing things which will be necessary if we move but still a good idea if we don't, such as getting new carpets to replace the worn-out ones which were here when we bought our house. This is proving a bit time-consuming, especially as I can't lift anything to speak of (unless I wanted to risk my back) or move furniture.

We like our current house a lot, so mixed feelings abound, but it would be lovely to have more garden and an extra bedroom (especially as we are hoping Billy won't be an only child). And we could do with being in an area with better schools. But all the houses we've looked at seem to have been on the market a long time - over a year in some cases - so we're not certain of being able to sell ours, in which case we may have to put the plan on hold. We'll see what happens.

J has not been too well recently, unfortunately. He's been having terrible headaches, and (probably unconnected) severe nosebleeds. We aren't certain why, although the headaches might be down to some sort of food intolerance, or that's the theory. He's been on a gluten-free diet for a couple of weeks in an attempt to see if that's the problem. So far, it is a bit inconclusive. He hasn't had as many headaches, but he hasn't been headache-free either. He's been tested for coeliac disease in the past, and it came back negative, but apparently it is possible to be gluten-sensitive without being fully coeliac. Tricky.

We're sort of hoping that gluten isn't the trigger, because it is such a pain to have to find complete meals he can eat, especially as he doesn't eat meat. We usually eat a certain amount of Quorn and similar vegetarian products, but only the "chicken-style pieces" are gluten-free. Most things you can quickly stick under the grill are out; pasta is out, unless it's an expensive gluten-free version; lots of sauces are off-limits, and so is anything containing malted barley (a surprisingly common food additive). I have had to get creative with lentils, experiment with baking gluten-free cakes and biscuits, and cook lots of dishes with rice or potatoes. It's not impossible - just slightly harder work.

And if it's decided that gluten isn't the problem, we will have to try something else, I guess...

Seriously overdue post

OK. I have been terrible at posting this last few months. For what it's worth, I've been a bit preoccupied...

J and I are having a baby.

You probably know this if you read my mum's blog. I have been finding it a bit tricky to write about, though. Which is why we are through the first trimester and halfway into the second before I've managed to do it.

We decided at the end of last summer that we were ready (if anyone is ever ready) to start a family, and then... decision made, in theory, we didn't start trying until the end of September. I had sort of assumed that we would need to try for a bit before we would conceive - perhaps because most of the stories one hears on blogs are about people having trouble - but we were lucky. I got a positive test at the end of October, just as we were about to drive down to see J's parents, which was a little strange for us as we'd decided not to tell anyone until the 12-week mark.

At that point, I was very tired, and having slight difficulty explaining why I was so tired. My father-in-law spotted this and I was convinced he was on to the reason why (but he says he wasn't!)

Luckily for me, I didn't have any morning sickness to speak of - I felt slightly off-colour and went off some foods I normally like, but that was all. For this reason I had a lot of difficulty convincing myself that everything was going OK. I don't know whether it was hormones, or what, but I stressed out a lot over whether the baby was healthy and what we would do if it wasn't.

The 12-week scan came as a great relief - the baby was actually there, moving, with a heartbeat! And arms and legs and things!



When this was on the screen, it was a moving image, and you could see the baby sucking its thumb.

That was the 28th of December. Yup, more than a month ago. Since then, things have gone remarkably smoothly. The occasional nausea went away, and I haven't yet put any weight on. I went back to see the doctor last week and all seems to be going well.

J and I are beginning to feel able to talk about this as if it is definitely going to happen. It still feels a little bit like tempting fate, but on the whole I have calmed down a lot. I thought I would get all stressed out again when the time came to take the triple test (for Down's, spina bifida and Edwards' syndrome) but I've managed to stay fairly calm; two weeks to wait for the results.

At the moment, we are 17 weeks along, and the baby is due in early July. We have plenty of time to get things ready before July... right?

The guinea pigs are all fine.

Happy November

So the last anybody heard from me, I was in America, having fun at WisCon. Which I did. I don't have many photographs of the actual con - too busy having fun - but Madison looks like this:



While I was there I tried the local delicacy (tastes nicer than it looks), had my hair plaited up like this, met up with Mum and Dad's old friends J and B and their grownup children (who were lovely) and my internet friend Cabell, among others, and had many, many conversations about Doctor Who and Lois McMaster Bujold books. I did a lot of live-tweeting of panels and felt, for once, as if I was at the cutting edge. I also managed to win a book token and come home with all of these.

And then I came home and was reunited with J and my piggies.



In August I went to the Edinburgh Ravelry meetup and rubbed shoulders with lots of famous-to-me knitters, and some genuinely famous ones. I have been knitting lots of shawls, and a few socks.

Then in September, I went with my lovely in-laws on what has become our traditional British holiday. We were based in Bamburgh in the north of England, where we went for walks and I took lots of wannabe-arty photos.

We also went to Lindisfarne:


and to the Alnwick Garden, which I really liked.



A good time was had in general.


When I haven't been on holiday, much of my life has been spent at work. For various complicated reasons, work has been very busy this summer and rather more time-consuming than normal. I have been finding that I haven't had a lot of brain left to blog with, hence the silence. I am thinking about what I can do about this.

In the meantime I have mustered enough braincells to make a boyfriend for our sock monkey:


to knit some ghosts:


and to make a pumpkin lantern for Hallowe'en.


So maybe I'm back. Hello.

2010

Despite the fact that I was quite happy saying "nineteen-whatever" for the first twenty years of my existence, I am having trouble thinking that this year is "twenty-ten". I'm sticking with "two thousand'n ten" for now, although I hear that most people seem to be quite happy saying "the twenty-twelve Olympics".

I'm hoping that this decade will have a good last year. I will finish my thesis. Maybe we will move house (though I'm sticking with "maybe").

Just now, our own house seems quite big and commodious since the Christmas tree went back in the loft. We have to move the sofa to accommodate it, so we lose a bit of floor in the living room; strange how much difference it makes.

During December, the guinea pigs' living space underwent some renovations:



They're now on a fleece blanket (over newspaper) instead of wood shavings. The wood shavings get kicked on to the carpet, and they also create huge amounts of dust, which was annoying for us and possibly not that healthy for the piggies. The room's been much less dusty since we swapped, and the pigs seem to like the fleece.

They also now have a play-pen in the spare room (which folds away when we need the room), which is what we were making in my last post. I tried to get some pictures and video of them trotting about in it, without much success yet - it's been too dark.



We have not been as badly affected by the snow as... well, as most people we know. Our street is very snowy, but it's not on a slope and we don't have a car, so it could be worse. The main roads are clear, the buses haven't stopped running and the supermarket is within walking distance. It could be a lot worse.

The beasties, of course, are not hugely disadvantaged by the snow (though it would come over their ears if they went out in it). They do seem to think it's hibernation season, though:



It seems like the weather for knitting.



No, I haven't gone completely nuts - these are the toes of socks which I'm making for a "travelling knitalong" (the sock gets passed around a group of five people, each of whom knit a section and finally get their original socks back again). Should be fun. They make good guinea pig hats, don't they?

I cast on a non-travelling sock on the bus when I went to meet up with Loth and Mum on Monday. Mum said she was disappointed by my lack of progress a couple of hours later. I dunno - I don't knit particularly fast, and I thought this was quite good for one day's knitting...



This was rather a rambly post, wasn't it?

In other news, my sister and I are signing up to do a yoga class this year, so as to be calm and serene. "And to have thighs the size of pencils" - sister. Wish us luck with that one.

A blogless month

Yes. OK. I don't think the February daily posts were meant to be. It's been a while since I've gone a month without posting at all.

February was a rather depressing month in many ways. The weather was horrible. Lots of credit crunchiness on the news and on everyone's blogs, and the Australian bushfires. We are lucky not to live in such a flammable country; we're also lucky in that we, personally, haven't felt the effects of the economy in any serious way.

Lucky in many ways, in fact. I wish everyone else wasn't having such a bad time, though. (We're also worried about J's grandfather, who hasn't been well.)

What have I been doing while I wasn't blogging? Well, J's brother visited and we went for a snowy walk at Vane Farm, a nature reserve in Tayside.


(Click to go to my Flickr and a lot more photos - it was a beautiful day).

Then his parents came up for a weekend and we went to Crail (in Fife). J's grandfather was stationed there during WWII, so it has a bit of historical interest for the family. (This photograph does not fully capture how cold and windy it was.)



Apart from that, I did a lot of knitting:





This is my latest - the Halley's Comet Hat designed by Marnie McLean. It has a pretty flower (or comet, I suppose) on the top:



It's the first lacy pattern I've knitted and I'm very pleased with it. I also went to the Woolfish festival in St Abb's on Saturday and bought lovely handpainted and hand-dyed sock wool, so probably more socks are on the way...

The other thing I did this month is get back into the gym. My old gym is offering six-week basic training programmes, including a free one-hour induction. I've been out of the gym long enough that I felt I needed a refresher course, so I signed up. The induction was excellent (thanks, Bob) and I'm now halfway through my second week of weights and interval training on the treadmill.

I'm somewhat irritated by how weak and slow I am, but nonetheless, I've now been running more times than in the whole of 2008!

My fourth blogiversary was last week. 2008 was not a good year for fitness, mostly because I was working too hard (I seem to remember this happened last time I did a Master's degree...) Let's see if 2009 can be better.

Siblings

My sister's company moved offices a week or so ago, and handily for me, her new workplace is a stone's throw from mine - I can even see part of the building out of my office window. So we've decided to have a sisterly lunch every Thursday. This week, my brother was in town as well, and he came along too.

I get on well with both my sibs, though we're all very different. I will never be either as organised, imaginative, or stylish as my sister, and I'll never be as witty or grounded as my brother. They're very good company.

We've always got on well. Apparently when my sister was brought home from the hospital, I thought she was the best thing ever, and she was my boss from then on. When my brother arrived, she and I instantly co-opted him as an extra doll. The poor kid spent the first few years being dressed up in a variety of outfits, put in a doll's pram, and arbitrarily re-named for whatever imaginary game we were playing.

We did this a lot. My sister was always the guiding spirit, and there are plenty of pictures of us dressed up to play circuses, schools or Peter Pan. We also drew and made things with paper and sellotape ("There are lots of little bits of paper all over the carpet again...") and built intricate structures out of Lego. We didn't always do the same things - my brother was a big car enthusiast from an early age - but we did often play together, and were closer than most siblings I know. I'm glad we all still like each other!



This photo was taken almost 22 years ago - I'm seven, and the others are almost six and two. Doesn't the weather look lovely?

It is minus 5 degrees (only celsius, but still) outside at the moment. It seems impossible that sandal weather will ever arrive again. But it will. Patience.