One Mum's Journey through Parenthood
Thursday 29 March 2012
Things I would never have done.....
Things I would never imagined I do before I had S
- Reading the same book over and over again every night of the week
- Being really really excited when your child gives you a squished up page with a wonky drawing on it
- Cleaning up poo and sick that wasn't mine
- Singing, dancing and pretending to be some sort of animal in public
- Having a serious conversation about snot and poo
- Actively encouraging someone to spit chewed up food into my hand
- Being woken at 7am and thinking its a lie in
- Consider food shopping ALONE to be a real treat
- Having a handbag full of stuff, none of which belongs to me
- Referring to people as a character like "Fireman Sam" a fireman, "Pat" Postman etc
- Sharing a toilet with more or more people
- Calling my partner Daddy
I'm sure there are plenty more, what are yours?
Friday 23 March 2012
Feeling like a bad mummy...
This morning I find myself feeling guilty and a bit upset, S only goes to nursery on a friday from 9am to 2pm It was awful this morning leaving her off she didn't want to stay and kept saying I love you mummy, don't leave me, I want you and I want to go home all through the tears. It makes me feel like an awful mummy, its my choice to send her there just because I needed a break, this makes me feel selfish. On the other hand I know that its good for her to have some time away from me but, I hate the thought of her being there upset for the whole time like she was when I last picked her up. I know I will sit here and worry about her and not enjoy the few hours I have to do the things I want so whats the point?
Wednesday 21 March 2012
The great conspiracy of Silence..
The unwritten rule of parenthood is that you never let on to non-parents what its really like. This was described by a sleep-deprived friend as The Great Parental Conspiracy of Silence. It goes like this......
Your friend announces that she is pregnant, you are of course, delighted. You meet for coffee (yours is a double espresso because your child has been up all night) to talk about it. She wants to know everything or so she says.
Heres what you tell her..
* It doesn't matter if she gets fat, the weight will drop off afterwards, especially if she breastfeeds
* The birth itself isn't that bad, and anyway your body is biologically programmed to forget the pain.
* Breastfeeding can be a little tricky to start with, but in the end she'll get the hang of it.
* You get used to not having as much sleep as you used to.
* The experience of looking after a newborn can really bring two people together.
Heres what you actually mean...
* Her stomach will never be the same again, not even if she goes to the gym everyday (which she won't be able to because she won't have the time)
* The birth is quite terrifying, gas and air doesn't work like they say it does, having stitches is horrible, midwives don't always get it right, there will be more blood and bodily fluids than on a episode of CSI, and having half the world staring and your most intimate parts while you make noises like a demented pig is not, in any sense of the word empowering.
* Breastfeeding can be very hard indeed, you feel like a useless failure if you can't do it, breastfed babies do get colic, you will leak in public, your nipples will feel like they have been sandpapered and your breasts, like your stomach will never really recover.
* You will go insane with sleep deprivation, you really will. Even the hardiest of military men were reduced to wrecks after 3 days of no sleep in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and you were not trained for this. There will be days when the very act of putting clothes on your shattered body will feel like a major achievement.
* Once the initial euphoria has subsided, you and your partner will effectively become shift workers: when he's awake you will be dropping of to sleep, and vice versa. You will become resentful of his ability to leave the house in the morning, bound by the comparatively stressless world of work. In the back of your mind will be the sneaking suspicion that he is staying longer in the office because he would almost be anywhere than at home sterilising bottles and dealing with a frazzled you and a wailing baby. Sex will be implausible, not so much because of the physical changes wrought by giving birth, but because you will both be so exhausted, and no one feels like having much sex when they're tired and smelling slightly of sick.
That is one side of the story: the disruption and chaos and then somewhere around week three, quite possibly as you are dozing of at 4am, with this little milky person asleep beside you, It suddenly hits you with the force of an oncoming train: you love this little person more than life itself, It is in the true sense of the word unconditional. It can on the other hand be frightening for the mother, whose happiness now depends on this highly unstable bundle, whose very sanity can feel as if it hinges on one tiny human continuing to breathe. but also for her partner Adjusting from being the centre of a person's universe to being a distance satellite is never easy, especially if the ego involved is male. All this is why you can't really tell your pregnant friend the truth. She doesn't yet understand the peculiar feeling of being hopelessly trapped and elated at the same time - nor will she until she has given birth. You have to let her experience it for herself, in her own way. Far better and easier to say that My child is a angel/genius/source of endless joy, I am deliriously happy being a mother, my partner and I have as much - If possibility not more sex than before and no, of course we do not miss the lie-ins/foreign holidays/actual freedom.
I found this in a book I bought today called Backwards in high heels. I do think people tend to sugar coat information when your pregnant for the first time obviously not to scare the life out of you.
L x
Your friend announces that she is pregnant, you are of course, delighted. You meet for coffee (yours is a double espresso because your child has been up all night) to talk about it. She wants to know everything or so she says.
Heres what you tell her..
* It doesn't matter if she gets fat, the weight will drop off afterwards, especially if she breastfeeds
* The birth itself isn't that bad, and anyway your body is biologically programmed to forget the pain.
* Breastfeeding can be a little tricky to start with, but in the end she'll get the hang of it.
* You get used to not having as much sleep as you used to.
* The experience of looking after a newborn can really bring two people together.
Heres what you actually mean...
* Her stomach will never be the same again, not even if she goes to the gym everyday (which she won't be able to because she won't have the time)
* The birth is quite terrifying, gas and air doesn't work like they say it does, having stitches is horrible, midwives don't always get it right, there will be more blood and bodily fluids than on a episode of CSI, and having half the world staring and your most intimate parts while you make noises like a demented pig is not, in any sense of the word empowering.
* Breastfeeding can be very hard indeed, you feel like a useless failure if you can't do it, breastfed babies do get colic, you will leak in public, your nipples will feel like they have been sandpapered and your breasts, like your stomach will never really recover.
* You will go insane with sleep deprivation, you really will. Even the hardiest of military men were reduced to wrecks after 3 days of no sleep in Japanese prisoner of war camps, and you were not trained for this. There will be days when the very act of putting clothes on your shattered body will feel like a major achievement.
* Once the initial euphoria has subsided, you and your partner will effectively become shift workers: when he's awake you will be dropping of to sleep, and vice versa. You will become resentful of his ability to leave the house in the morning, bound by the comparatively stressless world of work. In the back of your mind will be the sneaking suspicion that he is staying longer in the office because he would almost be anywhere than at home sterilising bottles and dealing with a frazzled you and a wailing baby. Sex will be implausible, not so much because of the physical changes wrought by giving birth, but because you will both be so exhausted, and no one feels like having much sex when they're tired and smelling slightly of sick.
That is one side of the story: the disruption and chaos and then somewhere around week three, quite possibly as you are dozing of at 4am, with this little milky person asleep beside you, It suddenly hits you with the force of an oncoming train: you love this little person more than life itself, It is in the true sense of the word unconditional. It can on the other hand be frightening for the mother, whose happiness now depends on this highly unstable bundle, whose very sanity can feel as if it hinges on one tiny human continuing to breathe. but also for her partner Adjusting from being the centre of a person's universe to being a distance satellite is never easy, especially if the ego involved is male. All this is why you can't really tell your pregnant friend the truth. She doesn't yet understand the peculiar feeling of being hopelessly trapped and elated at the same time - nor will she until she has given birth. You have to let her experience it for herself, in her own way. Far better and easier to say that My child is a angel/genius/source of endless joy, I am deliriously happy being a mother, my partner and I have as much - If possibility not more sex than before and no, of course we do not miss the lie-ins/foreign holidays/actual freedom.
I found this in a book I bought today called Backwards in high heels. I do think people tend to sugar coat information when your pregnant for the first time obviously not to scare the life out of you.
L x
Only one... Surely not
I have decided that for the foreseeable I am sticking with one child but somehow society makes me feel like a freak for making such a decision with such comments as "You can't have just one a only child is an lonely child" "oh you'll change your mind" or the conversation me and my MIL had yesterday, I was telling her I had bulk bought some pull ups a couple of weeks ago because we were still using them at night and were £2.79 in Tesco. We have a lot left over because S is dry both day and night now. Her response "you should just keep them for the next one"
I am quite happy with one for a number of reasons.
Yesterday I came across this study that has proved to be quite interesting in reagards to only children.
A Stereotype Is Born
The image of the lonely only — or at least the legitimizing of that idea — was the work of one man, Granville Stanley Hall. About 120 years ago, Hall established one of the first American psychology-research labs and was a leader of the child-study movement. A national network of study groups called Hall Clubs existed to spread his teachings. But what he is most known for today is supervising the 1896 study "Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children," which described a series of only-child oddballs as permanent misfits. Hall — and every other fledgling psychologist — knew close to nothing about credible research practices. Yet for decades, academics and advice columnists alike disseminated his conclusion that an only child could not be expected to go through life with the same capacity for adjustment that children with siblings possessed. "Being an only child is a disease in itself," he claimed.
Later generations of scholars tried to correct the record, but their findings never filtered into popular parenting discourse. Meanwhile, the "peculiar" only children — "overprivileged, asocial, royally autonomous ... self-centered, aloof and overly intellectual," as sociologist Judith Blake describes them in her 1989 book Family Size and Achievement — permeated pop culture, from the demon children in horror films (The Omen, The Bad Seed) to the oddball sidekicks in '80s sitcoms (Growing Pains, Family Ties). Even on the new show Modern Family, the tween singleton is a cringingly precocious loner with a coddling mother. Such vehicles have evangelized Hall's teachings more than his clubs did. Of course we ask when someone is going to have "kids," not "a kid." Of course we think that one is the loneliest number.
No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. An only child herself and the mother of one, Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China (where the government's one-child policy, the world's biggest experiment in population control, went into effect in 1979), drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence. The studies, mainly from the U.S., cut across class and race.
Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. No one, Falbo says, has published research that can demonstrate any truth behind the stereotype of the only child as lonely, selfish and maladjusted. (She has spoken those three words so many times in the past 35 years that they run together as one: lonelyselfishmaladjusted.) Falbo and Polit later completed a second quantitative review of more than 200 personality studies. By and large, they found that the personalities of only children were indistinguishable from their peers with siblings.
Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid, who gets all the dance classes, piano lessons and prep courses, as well as all their parents' attention when it comes to helping work out an algebra problem. That attention, researchers have noticed, leads to not just higher SAT scores but also higher self-esteem.
And as Falbo tells her students, the cocktail of aptitude and confidence yields results: only children tend to do better in school and get more education — college, medical or law degrees — than other kids. Not that having siblings will necessarily thwart you; Einstein had a sister and did just fine.
The full article can be read here The only child: Debunking the myths
Who's to say that in a year or 2 I'll change my mind but for now I am happy to devote time and full attention to S.
The full article can be read here The only child: Debunking the myths
Who's to say that in a year or 2 I'll change my mind but for now I am happy to devote time and full attention to S.
Tuesday 20 March 2012
Motherhood
Being a mother is quite possibly one of the
most complex undertakings you will ever embark on.
Modern motherhood is riddled with
contradictions, confusion and above all clichés, the have it all generation,
the too posh to push, the ticking biological clock, the work life balance.
Women who have children can never be just
mothers, there must always be a qualifier. Stay at home mums, working mums,
full time mums (although show me a mother who is part time and I’ll show you a
pig with wings) Earth mothers, alpha mothers, pushy mothers, single mothers,
teenage mothers, geriatric mothers and of course the yummy mummies.
Society sees all these women going about
the business of raising children and, instead of delighting in the continuation
of the human race It seems to go out of its way to judge them.
Monday 19 March 2012
Just going slowly insane
So the week begins again and I feel like screaming. Don't get me wrong I love being a stay at home mum but some days I just feel I would like to go to work or college just so I can have a adult conversation, to have a few hours without S demanding all my attention and to be me and not just a wife and mother.
I had have lots of conversations with fellow mummies its not just me who feels like this we all do from time to time. I also know a few mummies who would hate to be a SAHM. It is hard work and I do feel like I am going crazy sometimes especially when my husband is away and I really dont have any adult conversation at all.
That being said a SAHM can be really rewarding as well, I get to see all of her milestones which I would miss if I wasn't at home.
L x
Mothers day
Just a short post until I get more time later.
I had a wonderful mothers days and I got spoilt a little too much. Here's what S bought me with a little help from my wonderful husband.
The Cartier book we all thought was a book on creative writing, It was wrapped in cellophane and had nothing on the back. When I did open it yesterday it turned out to be a book on the history of pens :-) we did have a good laugh about that.
Heres the scarves I treated myself to, I love them.
I had a wonderful mothers days and I got spoilt a little too much. Here's what S bought me with a little help from my wonderful husband.
The Cartier book we all thought was a book on creative writing, It was wrapped in cellophane and had nothing on the back. When I did open it yesterday it turned out to be a book on the history of pens :-) we did have a good laugh about that.
Heres the scarves I treated myself to, I love them.
Hope you all had a lovely mothers day.
L x
Thursday 15 March 2012
Madness.....
After watching the Wright stuff on channel 5 this morning I am outraged at the comments made about stay at home mums. It seems some people think that stay at home mums are wasting their time being at home to look after their children. That women shouldn't be offered university places because they will have kids, come out of employment and therefore waste their degree and therefore shouldn't be educated!!!!
I do not hoover and wipe bums all day and I certainly don't think I am wasting my time. How can anybody judge what a stay at home mum does we don't have a job description do we? I can't think of a more valuable way a person could spend their time by educating and bringing up their children, and what an important contribution to society they are making by bringing up well rounded and happy children who will be the next generation of tax payers.
As a friend said Education never goes to waste, It enriches the soul and broadens the mind, and it makes you a better teacher to your children.
For me I am still undecided about having another child. If I don't have another one I will be going back to work in 2014 when S starts primary School. I won't be going back to the career I had before S I will be getting an education to learn a new set of skills. For now I am happy being a stay at home mum.
I do not hoover and wipe bums all day and I certainly don't think I am wasting my time. How can anybody judge what a stay at home mum does we don't have a job description do we? I can't think of a more valuable way a person could spend their time by educating and bringing up their children, and what an important contribution to society they are making by bringing up well rounded and happy children who will be the next generation of tax payers.
As a friend said Education never goes to waste, It enriches the soul and broadens the mind, and it makes you a better teacher to your children.
For me I am still undecided about having another child. If I don't have another one I will be going back to work in 2014 when S starts primary School. I won't be going back to the career I had before S I will be getting an education to learn a new set of skills. For now I am happy being a stay at home mum.
Tuesday 13 March 2012
A little about me...
I know theres that bit to the left that tells you a tiny bit about me but thought I write a post to tell you a little more.
My name is Lisa I am 30 hence the name of the blog :-) I live in Belfast with my husband and my gorgeous 2 year old daughter. I am a SAHM which 99.9% of the time I love.
I am a bit of a geek and would love to go to Comic Con (My husband being a geek himself thinks that this makes me sad!!!)
I love to make things, I have several hundred tutorials in my pinterest account I have still to work my way through.
I love to bake mainly sweet things and bread ( theres something very therapeutic about kneading bread by hand)
I love reading, since getting my kindle for my 30th my husband thinks I should get rid of my 'real' books, I can't I still love going to our local bookshops I could spend all day there if I could.
I have recently discovered a love for writing which is why I started this blog. I didn't actually think anyone would read it but you do and seem to like it. I have had some lovely comments from a few of you in the last week this really makes me smile. I hope to find more time to write now that our sick household is starting to feel better.
Friday 9 March 2012
KONY 2012
This video popped up on my Facebook page it was posted by a friend. I feel the need to share it.
Thursday 1 March 2012
How happy are we...
According to the office of national statistics 7.6 out of 10 is the official rating for how happy we are.
People who live In Northern Ireland are the most happy and content scoring 0.2 more than the rest of the UK.
Married people are the most satisfied with their lives.
People with 2 children feel their lives are most worthwhile.
Women are happier than men.
All very interesting but.... They asked questions on the survey relating to the the day they filled in the questionare surely its not really accurate research as some people could have been having an off day. I really don't see how we can measure happiness anyway.
According to all this I should be the happiest person ever as I am married, live in Northern Ireland have a child and of course I'm a woman.
So what do you think, can we measure happiness?
People who live In Northern Ireland are the most happy and content scoring 0.2 more than the rest of the UK.
Married people are the most satisfied with their lives.
People with 2 children feel their lives are most worthwhile.
Women are happier than men.
All very interesting but.... They asked questions on the survey relating to the the day they filled in the questionare surely its not really accurate research as some people could have been having an off day. I really don't see how we can measure happiness anyway.
According to all this I should be the happiest person ever as I am married, live in Northern Ireland have a child and of course I'm a woman.
So what do you think, can we measure happiness?
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