baybeasts

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.

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.

My mum moved overseas when I turned eighteen. She usually visits Australia once a year. Next month she is coming to Australia for a six month contract in Sydney (we’re in Melbourne). She finally emailed me her flight details today. She is coming to Australia three days after Arlo’s first birthday, and she’s going to visit other family in Brisbane before she heads to Sydney to start work, but not come to us. She has not even met Huey yet. Even though she lets me down every time I see her, I still feel so disappointed that I can hardly breathe.

One year ago today, the six cells that were to become Loey were transferred through my cervix and into my uterus for a quick swim before implanting a few days later. We are so head explodingly glad that he did.

Five years ago today, S’s mother died unexpectedly. I had not yet entered the picture, so I never met Kate, but I feel sure she would have been thrilled to have grandchildren. She had certainly predicted it for years, despite S refusing to believe it would ever happen. We think it is nice, in a bittersweet kind of way, that Loey was transferred on this day, and that Tootle is due any time now. It winds a little thread back into the world of Kate. We have bought shiraz and lamb chops and mint chocolate to gastronomically honour her death day.

Tootle update : Nothing on the horizon - it might still be two weeks before we meet the baby. We have started a crazed last-minute attempt to crochet another cotton baby blanket. Kate was a brilliant knitter, so I think she would approve…

Our midwife (who also doubles as our hero and saviour) keeps asking me how B2 is going, and I keep vaguely replying ‘oh, good, I suppose, wriggles a bit, tummy seems to be sticking out a bit more’. And last time I gave that reply she laughed and told me that I am having the experience of a second-time mum, one who doesn’t have the time or energy to think much about their current pregnancy as they are so caught up in looking after the children they already have.

It’s so true. And it’s kinda cool actually. Physically, I feel the best that I have throughout this whole pregnancy (sleep deprivation and heart-burn aside), and I don’t actually know if that’s because I just feel good, being in the second trimester and all, or if I am just so distracted that I don’t have time to notice all the various annoying things my body might be doing.

Emotionally, I feel more relaxed about B2 than I think I have at any other time. Since our little fellow arrived, I have understood how having a baby makes love multiply, and I am excited about a further expansion to the love in my life. That vague sense of fear about creating a baby with my genes is still there, but muted by the loveliness that is a tiny baby - I know that we will both love B2 with all our hearts, just as we love B1.

Bean is the nick-name coiner in our household - I’ve always been terrible at it. Lately she has taken to calling B2 ‘Tootle’ and it has stuck - it’s so cute! Today I felt Tootle hiccup for the first time, and because we could feel where the hiccups were, we had a rough idea where the heart would be - sure enough, when bean pressed her ear to my tummy she was able to tap out the quick tattoo of Tootle’s heartbeat on my chest, for the first time. It was just so lovely to have a moment of connecting with the little baby inside of me in the midst of our first-child craziness!

Our midwife also says that Tootle will be easier, because we will have a much better idea of what to expect. I hope she is right…my rough calculation is that it won’t be twice as hard to have two, it’ll be more like 1.5 times as hard, because there will be a whole lot of stuff that we’ve already worked out (like how to change a nappy in under 15 minutes, and how to adapt to new kinds of cry without thinking that we’ve broken the baby).

There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on too - bean’s family is visiting, which is overwhelming, and making me have all kinds of protective defensive reactions. I never thought I would identify with the ‘other mummy’ stuff because we would both be bio mummies together, the way we’ve planned it, and once they are both here with sharing breastfeeding and care the biological origin of each child will be less important. But in this small window of time before Tootle, I am feeling the full force of family not really understanding how we are both parents in this together - our little fellow is as much my child as bean’s, but because I didn’t birth him and I am not breastfeeding him I feel have to defend this title of ‘parent’ like a lioness. It makes for not smooth sailing with in-laws, but I expect that is not too unusual! Poor bean though, having to cope with my freak-outs AND her family…

But I should stop with this emo blogging now. I have a sleeping baby on my chest and I should be taking advantage of such a lovely deep sleep to be getting some myself (I am on the graveyard shift, where sleep is precious).

I feel like we haven’t been updatey enough on this blog. We post tantalising little bits of ourselves, but so much goes unreported. The biggest thing at the moment that we are totally failing to convey is how much B1 has become a true, alive, wriggly presence in our household. It’s not just the two of us anymore - there are three in the bed, three on the couch, and sometimes I can’t fit through the door at the same time as bean because there are two of them in the way, not just one. B2, on the other hand, is still in the realm of theory, even though ze is apparently about 6cm long and wriggling too, if imperceptibly (and the nausea is finally beginning to subside - hurrah!).

So, these are some of the things that we have been noticing about B1.

I’ve said it already, but I’ll say it again - B1 is a wriggly little bugger. Ze kicks and squirms and generally keeps hirself busy in the rapidly shrinking space available within bean’s tummy. My favourite thing is to lie in bed, spooning with my bottom hard against bean’s tummy, feeling the kicks on my lower back. Luckily though, ze sleeps when bean does, and mysteriously wakes up when she does too. It’s weird. And hopefully it will stay that way when B1 is in the outside world.

B1 also often kicks when ze feels pressure from the outside - for example, almost every time I put my ear on bean’s tummy to hear B1’s hearbeat, I get a good punch or kick to the head. I somehow have a monopoly on the heartbeat finding - I can almost always find it, with a bit of poking around to work out where B1 is hanging out first, but bean is frustrated because she can’t ever seem to find it no matter how hard she looks.

We often try to work out which way B1 is lying - transverse, head down, etc - and try to give positive feedback on the rare occasions ze is head down and anterior (back facing out rather than in), because this is the preferred position for childbirth. All this working out where B1 is necessitates a heap of poking and prodding by us. Come to think of it, it is no surprise that B1 is so wriggly and kicky - after all, we have both been poking pretty incessantly ever since there was something to feel, so I guess ze is just trying to communicate back!

The other gorgeous way that B1 makes hirself known is by getting the hiccups at least once a day. It’s hilarious! bean and I can’t believe that the hiccups can make such a tiny baby make such vigorous movements.

So B1 feels very real and alive. And we are both getting more and more excited about the day when ze decides to join us on the outside. Last weekend we went to a very intense, very amazing pregnancy and birth workshop, run by the delightful if slightly zany Lina Clerke. bean and I are probably more well informed than your average pregnant couple, what with bean being a midwife, and me reading piles of her better midwifery books during the time that we were trying to get pregnant, so there was a lot of the workshop that was a bit repetitive for us. But despite that, we still got a helluva lot out of it, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who thinks they want a natural birth. Most importantly, we both feel really excited and motivated about birth, especially about making choices that will increase our chances of having a natural, physiological birth rather than the highly managed, intervened in birth that most women in Australia end up with (mind you if anything does go wrong I will be utterly grateful that I live in a place where we can get advanced medical help in a matter of minutes - we have a tertiary maternity hospital only 5 minutes drive from our house). Lina was full of great ideas about positions, ways to manage pain, and the emotional intensity and physicality of the process. She also had a lot of really great videos that were pretty honest about the pain and the poo and the sheer hard work that giving birth involves, but also about the rewards and the joy too. So now, rather than being a bit scared of how I would support bean through labour (not to mention do it myself), I now feel excited and empowered and ready. It’s going to be such an amazing couple of days, whatever happens. It will our babies’ birthdays!

Another exciting thing is the collection of amazing baby things we are amassing. The latest joy was a parcel from bean’s mum in Germany, who bought us a collection of pure organic wool pilchers to put over our cloth nappies, and a set of exquisite organic cotton rompers with the most gorgeous printed patterns. So beautiful - I was so touched. We’ve also received a heap of free baby stuff from friends and colleagues, like two bassinets, two change tables, a pram, a cot (we may end up needing it, who knows!), loads of clothes, um, heaps of other stuff that I can’t remember but that bean knows in itemised detail. We feel very blessed at the moment (especially now the nausea is on the wane - hurrah! It’s exciting enough to mention twice at least).

So yes, a lot going on, every day, often in small ways, despite our lack of attentive blogging.

after a hellish week at work, we’re off to brisbane. hooray! it’s a funny thing - when we first arranged this trip i was reluctant. i knew that this would be a really busy time at work (it’s turned out to be even worse than i feared), and i resented having to take leave. i also resented not being able to stop off in sydney and visit my family.

but over the last week or so i have really started to look forward to this trip. i love bean’s family - it will be amusing and (mostly) relaxing to hang out with them. and i can’t wait to show off bean’s bump to them all. hopefully b1 will behave and kick a few of them! also, brisbane is beginning to feel like a second home, and so i am finding myself looking forward to that sense of place - the smell of the air, the big green leaves on the plants, the wide lazy streets.

i’ve been slack with blogging because, well, there’s not much to say. i’m knitting madly (current projects: a very cute tiny vest and a funky striped jumpsuit); b1 is kicky and gorgeous and every day i smile at hir profile which i have put on my computer desktop as the background; bean is obsessed with nappies (they probably deserve a blog post of their own); the lawn is lovely when it’s mowed; bean has a new haircut and it is really funky and sexy (and is making me think again about cutting mine); i’ve had a small promotion at work but it’s only an acting position which is annoying, and i’m tired of applying for jobs but it’s really time to get paid more; i don’t think that starbuck is dead (it was too sudden and there was too much other mystical stuff around it - shell come back somehow for sure); um, i can’t really think of anything else.

what a boring blog post. but i thought maybe some newsiness would be appreciated by some of our readers. i’ll try to get back to my usual literary standard soon. (and i’m sorry for not talking about the elephant in the room. i just can’t bring myself to.)

oh, and it’s lovely being linked to - hello to those of you who found us via the twinkle, lesbian family.org, and babes in blogland. welcome!

We have come home from our excellent holiday at St Leonards to work and a very bad case of beach and friend withdrawal. I’ve also come back to find I’m not fitting into my work clothes anymore which probably has more to do with the vast amount of very fine food I ate than with the growth of B1. This photo shows the view outside the front door of our beach house. It was unreal!

It feels like a very long time since we had the scan and it’s hard waiting for the next one. I wish I could feel some kicks already, or develop special (safe) x-ray vision to see what is happening. We can feel the bump of the uterus easily now-not just when I have a full bladder. Sometimes I have a lot of pressure in my bottom and I have to sit down carefully.

The morning sickness has settled quite a lot, but I still have an hour or two every day when it comes back at a low level. My digestion is very wierd and I often puff up after eating food. Breasts are enormous. Bra situation critical.

In more festive news, a gorgeous son was born to our lovely friends S and K. I was lucky enough to be at his homebirth as the second midwife and I just hope I can be as brave as S was!

I wanted a picture from the scan of B1 with some profile and some limbs, and this is what I came up with. Feet!

It was such a relief to see a little wriggling baby in there and so pleasant to have the scan performed abdominally rather than via wang cam.

Morning sickness has been easing a little, but last weekend was quite rotten. It was the return of the miserable ever-burping-bean. S hates it. Nevertheless, things have much improved. I can drink glasses of water now and not only be in the kitchen when S cooks, but last night I chopped onions and garlic and made butter chicken from scratch. Pregnancy is giving me strong Indian food cooking urges. Or maybe I’m just going through phases. At 8 weeks, I liked nothing better than salad with Thai dressing.

We started being able to feel the top of the uterus (fundus) by poking my tummy just above the pubic bone from about eleven weeks which was really exciting. We also had a brief scary moment when we thought we’d lost my cervix. We found it a few minutes later, but in a completely different spot, so strange things are afoot, internally.

We are going away for a genuine beach holiday next week and S is faint with anticipation. It is with some very good friends and we can’t wait to bask in the fresh air.

bean is still sick and tired. but there is light at the end of the tunnel - in two weeks we are going for a scan. we thought long and hard about it, as we do about most things, and eventually concluded that seeing little B1 floating happily inside bean’s belly would make up for the weeks of nausea and general feeling rottenness.

tomorrow we are off for five days to (even) warmer climes. first family christmas with bean’s lot - i am really looking forward to it. they are warm, lovely people, and there is always a lot of happy banter and walks and afternoon rest periods and wholesome, yummy food. i am a bit sad to not be seeing my lot this year, but hopefully we can make up for it next year, with baby in tow.