girl with goat

I have so many images saved to my hard drive that I thought I might start sharing a few on my blog. I haven't had any luck finding the photographer or the source for this beautiful photo of a Mongolian girl and her baby goat, so I apologise. One time I fed goats at a farm/petting zoo and they were very aggressive and I got scared and I climbed on a rock and they followed me and climbed up too because they are goats and I was holding the feed above my head because I was scared that they would bite my hand and they were jumping up and my husband had to save me by taking the feed off me and distracting them while I ran away (I was on my honeymoon and I was twenty-nine years old).

back to work

Image courtesy Southern Methodist University, 

Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library via Flickr Commons 

I've gone back to work for three days a week. I had an entire year of maternity leave, and even though it was the shortest year of my life, it feels like forever since I've sat at a desk. The first week it felt like I was doing some strange new exercise, sitting and typing instead of the usual laying on the floor/crawling on hands and knees/carrying a ten-kilo baby on my hip while I try to fill a kettle. Also I can wear jewellery, as temptingly shiny and dangly as I like, and there is no-one to try to pull it off or eat it! Three days is an excellent number of days to work. It's enough for me to feel grateful that I get the rest of the week with Peanut, and the four days with him is juuust enough to make me feel grateful to go to work.

Peanut is 11 months old and is developing so fast it's daunting.

 

He loves buses and blueberries and balls and books and probably also things that don't start with B but I can't think of them right now. If you say "Cheeky grin!" he gurns manically and shows you all six teeth. If he enters a room with a fan, he will spot it immediately and let you know it is off and probably needs to be turned on. He is affectionate and he loves seeing photos of himself and when his father or I walk into the room he smiles like he hasn't seen us for days. Looking at this photo and thinking about him is making me miss him and want to scoop him up and kiss him. I keep thinking, I don't want him to get any older! But then he does and he's even more beautiful and interesting and fun. It's tiring feeling so many different things at once.

good reasons to have a baby

1. You're wondering how dirty your floors really are. I mean, they're pretty clean, right? (No)

2. Your social life is too taxing and you can't think of a good excuse to not attend anything ever again.

3. You want to see if these antidepressants are really working.

4. You want someone to appreciate your singing voice.

5. Your stomach is too flat.

6. You think burps and farts are really funny.

7. You always order too much food and need someone to help you eat it, or at least throw it on the floor.

8. You're researching the impact of sleep deprivation on basic motor skills.

9. You fucking love doing laundry.

10. You may need to harvest healthy, compatible organs in the future.

socks and shoes

Shoes by Asos, socks by Richer Poorer, tiny hand coming to grab the tassels by Peanut.

a poem about my day

Pushing the pram against the wind,

the wind pushes back

and presses an insect against my chest

like a tiny brooch.

spring

The mulberry tree in our front garden is fruiting and the birds and I are racing to get the ripe fruit first. If you've never tasted mulberries, they have a subtle sweet flavour that makes me think of greenness and  growing. The taste is evocative for me; my great-aunt and -uncle had a mulberry tree in their huge (in my memory, at least) back yard. I have a clear memory of standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror, crushing mulberries in my mouth so that the juice ran down my chin, so I could see what I'd look like as a vampire. Clearly Peanut would be a very messy vampire.

this baby is finally paying off

I love vintage Fisher Price toys. The Chatter Telephone, the little people: classic, adorable design. Sometimes I get lost in an eBay hole looking them up, but they can get really expensive. When Grug emailed me to let me know that Fisher Price have rereleased some of their classic toys from the 1960s and 70s, my first thought was, "I'm so glad I have a baby right now so I can pretend I'm buying these for him!"

The record player and the TV are adorable, but I restricted myself to the two that I think will get the most play, not the ones that would look best on my shelves. I cannot live without this milk wagon, and I think the sorting and removing and replacing will be fun for Peanut:

AND IT HAS CHOCOLATE MILK. AND ORANGE JUICE. And I cannot resist the idea of Peanut banging away on this piano like Schroeder:

We're going to give them for him for Christmas, which seems fitting as neither the toys nor the holiday are really for him at this age, they're all about us pretending they're for him.

My mum also found him an old Chatter Telephone which he likes, although he would have absolutely no idea what it is. I love the idea of babies playing with toy versions of completely obsolete technology. Someone less lazy should write an essay about it.