baybeasts

In the interests of truthful reporting, I feel I must record that the night following our perfect day was a crazy three ring circus. Oh well. Swings and roundabouts and a bunch of similar platitudes.

Mostly, our days are a mixed bag, with laughs and shiny moments all smushed up against laundry and angst. But today was just one long lovely shiny jewel of a day.

It began for me with that sweetest of things, a sleep in. It was my Huey night (we take turns) and he’d been up in the night, manic and flapping with glee to be awake with us at 11pm, zooming around the carpet with the wooden trolley we got from the toy library. So when 6.30am rolled around and Arlo started clambering over us and chatting in his newly invented language, rather than joining in with a cheery ‘hey dah!’ as usual, Huey kept his head down and had a little cry. ‘I think you better get Arlo up’ I told bean, and rolled over, plugged Huey in and went back to sleep. Imagine my surprise when I rolled back and looked at the clock - nearly two hours had slipped by. Bliss.

Once Huey and I were up too, we headed out for a special treaty breakfast at a cafe we love. Breakfast out with the boys is so wonderful. There’s coffee, and good food, and no dishes to wash at the end of it. Heaven.

Huey’s sleep in plus the drive home then gave us another unexpected gift - the rare and elusive double sleep (we’re hanging out for when Huey is old enough for a one sleep day). Huey’s morning nap was late, and Arlo’s midday sleep early because he fell asleep in the car (and transferred to the bed!), and so we had a whole hour and a half of baby-free time. Usually we would use that time to frantically run around and do chores, but today we gave ourselves another treat - a bath. Just the two of us, lounging in the warm water, no slippery babies to manage. Nirvana.

After they woke up and we gave them lunch, we got back in the car and headed to the women’s hospital to visit the enough grows girls and admire adorable little Turkey. Charming!

The day was topped off by a delicious meal of lamb tagine made by bean and her gorgeous friend J who stayed with us on the weekend (so no cooking needed to be done). We drank red wine and watched Dr Who, and now I am writing this as bean writes in our book where we record stuff the kids are doing. Soon we will go to bed and snuggle in the middle and listen to the kids breathing peacefully on either side of us. Perfect.

Erin’s comment on my last post is the kick up the proverbial to get it together to tell you all the exciting news - Arlo is walking! And here’s proof:

Today is Arlo’s first birthday. At this very moment as I type, we’ve had him in our lives for exactly one year and one hour. Every moment has been so precious, from those first hours in the dim hospital room snuggled into us, through the rollercoaster of the early months when he was so unsettled, to the blooming of the bright, passionate child who now fills our days with books and cuddles and pointing and fun.

I really wanted to write more about Arlo at one year old - his unsteady walking, his crooning as he cuddles us or Huey or the cat, his delight in sound effects, his passion for books and ability to point out all manner of objects and incessant requests for the names of things - the list goes on and on, but I am so tired at the end of a big day that I only have energy for a retelling of the day.

We started by going out for breakfast, then came home and frantically iced the cake (nearly a disaster! the strawberries just would not stay put and had to be replaced with hundreds and thousands at the last minute) while the boys slept before heading out. We planned the party around what we thought Arlo might like. So we had cake at a cafe, who coped remarkably well with the influx of small children and their parents. Both boys got their first taste of the good stuff:

Then we headed to a playcentre which was hell on earth - loud, crowded with frantically playing children, and impossible to have a conversation with anybody. We hated it. Arlo and Huey, on the other hand, had a ball. Both babies quite happily wandered off in the toddler section and played with whoever and whatever was around. It amazes us how independent they are at times (and how needy at other times, like when we want to go to the toilet, for example).

We invited just a small group of people who have been important in Arlo’s life so far - friends with children he plays with regularly, the two friends who cared for him when I was in labour with Huey, and the boys’ donor and his wife and little boy. And bean’s uncle and aunt drove six and half hours to be here this week! They are the stars of our family - we’ve written about bean’s mum, and my family were spectacularly crappy today too. Not one of them called to wish Arlo happy birthday, and my cousin, who is the only one who lives in the same city, forgot to come to his party. Having bean’s aunt and uncle drive all that way and be here to play with the boys and help us prepare stuff and just be around has been a wonderful balm.

It wasn’t the perfect birthday, but it was pretty great. We’ve learnt a few things, and Arlo had a lot of fun so we achieved our main objective. We have a history of being rather bad at birthdays, but we’re determined to get better, and today was a good start.

I can’t believe we forgot to post this. It’s priceless! Note in particular the way they both very carefully step over the sharp edge of the tiles.

This last week, we have forgone our customary Evening of hot drink, dessert and tv in order to work on a Very Important Project. This Project is not only important, it has been fiendishly difficult, involving much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands. It is the Great Photo-Culling Project Stage 1: Arlo.

Not long after Huey was born, we received two photo albums from a friend in Japan. They are covered in kimono material, with the boys names and birthdays embroidered on them:

We decided that we would fill these albums with the very best photos from their first year of life. It’s a nice idea, yes? But we have taken over 4500 photos in the year since Arlo was born (and that’s just the ones we kept - we’ve probably deleted the same number again of blurry and bad shots). And each photo album will fit about 100 photos. Gnashing of teeth ensues.

But we did it! We painstakingly picked out our favourite 100 or so photos of Arlo, and have sent them off to be printed. But one last obstacle remained. The very first page of the album is reserved for a 8″ x 6″ portrait, and bugger me if bean and I couldn’t agree on which photo it should be. Solution? A photo shoot! 150 photos later, and we have our winning shot. Isn’t he divine?

It’s rather terrifying to think that in just three and half months we will have to go through this whole process again with Huey. The digital age is a curse, I tell you.

(Coming soon to baybeasts: eight months of Huey, and one year [ONE YEAR!] of Arlo)

My mum would have been 61 today. 61! It’s hard to imagine her growing old. I just know that she wouldn’t have done it gracefully - she would have fought it every step of the way. Her hair would still be long and auburn (dyed, of course), her clothes velvet and flowing, and her laugh as vibrant as ever. She would have loved our boys, I know that for sure. I often used to tell her that I would never have kids, and she would laugh and say ‘You wait, you’ll have six!’ There is so much that I wish I had asked her, about her labour and birth (I know I was born on the dining room table with hippies meditating in the next room but I don’t know who was with her or how long it took or any other satisfying details) and about me as a baby (my aunts didn’t meet me until I was nearly one, so there is nobody who cares enough to remember). I look at Huey and I can’t play that game, that ‘how is he like me as a baby?’ game that so many people can play. Every day I think about the conversations that she and I are missing out on, in this new phase of my life.

I am also fairly sure that she would have been madder than ever. When she died six years ago, she was so up and down, and it was in the middle of a psychotic episode that the heart attack hit. Somebody found her on the side of the road, in her favourite town two hours drive from where she lived (she always got in the car when she was psychotic - it’s a miracle that it wasn’t a car accident that carried her off). I don’t know if being a nanna would have grounded her or made her crazier - maybe a bit of both.

We’re missing so much in the way of the family support that most people take for granted. My mum gone, my father unknown (I am the product of a one night stand in northern NSW in the era of the Aquarius Festival), only a distant and dysfunctional half-brother in the way of siblings. And bean - well, her father is absent and she is an only child, so her mum is really it in terms of close family. It’s no wonder she feels a bit of pressure from us! I feel sorry for our kids - no aunts and uncles, no cousins, only one grandparent who tries to do her duty but doesn’t seem to care deeply for them. We feel it most at times like now, when we are all sick (except Huey!) and so, so tired.

That’s why our friends and cousins and aunts have become so important to us - they look after us and listen to us, but mostly importantly they dote on our boys, and we need that so badly. And nanna Kate isn’t totally absent - her imagined warmth towards our boys lights up our hearts. And our house is full of her - her paintings that Arlo loves (every day he points at them and we talk about them with him), her plates that we eat off, her couch that we sit on (the beautiful green one in so many of our photos) and her books that line our walls. And she herself sits in the corner of our living room, in a small plastic box covered with red velvet. She’s finally visiting me in Melbourne like she always wanted to, until I can take her to her favourite beach up north and finally set her free in the waves that she loved so much.

Sometimes, when we are at the end of our tether, when we are exhausted from the unrelenting imperative to look after the every need of two small beings and feeling rather sorry for ourselves and wishing we had grandparents who could pop over and help out now and then - such as this week where we’ve caught a bog load of illness (first S with gastro, then me with gastro and a woozy cold, then arlo with the gastro and then tonsillitis - yes, it’s been a bloody awful week) - huey, who has miraculously remained unscathed thus far, bestows upon us a goofy grin of such delight, whilst surrounded by his halo of happy hair, that it doth break through our miserable fug and restoreth us to greener pastures and whatnot.