Quite a while ago I wrote a post called ‘Mum Tum: Lose It or Love it’ (read it here). It was about how, at that time, I wasn’t hugely bothered about my big post-pregnancy jelly belly. I wouldn’t say I was feeling super body positive or anything, but certainly not unhappy enough to do anything about it. But while on holiday last week, I realised that something had changed.
I’m currently sat in Costa with a coconut latte and a toastie, enjoying a rare couple of hours of peace and quiet. It’s half term and the twiglets are at a Playball camp for the morning. I’m trying to relax and appreciate the time to myself but I can’t help but think about the fraught, stressful few hours we had before we left the house earlier…
This post is probably going to be a bit of a ramble so please bear with me!
So I’ve quit my job! 😱 I actually resigned back in November but couldn’t really say anything until now as the children I teach (and their parents) didn’t know. I have pretty mixed feelings about it to be honest – on one hand, I feel hugely relieved as I wasn’t happy, but on the other, I feel a bit of a failure and like I’ve given up. Throw in a huge amount of anxiety about the future and what I’m going to do with myself, and my head’s a bit all over the place at the moment.
I thought I’d share a few of my memorable moments of first-time parenthood so far. I’ve used the word ‘alternative’ because they’re probably not the moments you might expect – baby’s first smile, baby learning to walk etc. Not those ones. These are probably a little more… silly. But sometimes it’s the silly little things that can make a significant difference to your life and how you feel about this crazy rollercoaster called parenting 🤪
Hello! So, as expected, I haven’t blogged since I’ve gone back into teaching. At all. Life has been super busy and it’s been a big adjustment for us all – I’m not quite sure even after half a term that we’re actually fully used to it yet. So I just thought I’d write a little about it and how we’ve been getting on 🙂
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I feel like there’s a lot of stuff swirling around in my head at the moment and I’m in the mood for writing some of it down… So here we are 😂
This is a question I’ve been asking myself basically since the day the twiglets were born. I felt utterly and completely overwhelmed in those first few weeks, even months, and constantly found myself wondering ‘is this normal?’ In the very early days, when we first brought our tiny bundles home, the midwives and health visitor were keeping a very close eye on me as they were concerned about my emotional state. I talked in previous blog posts about how I was pretty traumatised by their birth, and the problem with this is that you have no time whatsoever to make sense of it and come to terms with it – you’re immediately thrust into the toughest job of your life, with more responsibility than you’ve ever dealt with before. Not to mention the fact that my undercarriage was in tatters, I was desperately and futilely attempting to produce milk and get even one baby to stay on a tit for longer than five seconds, and I was a ball of raging hormones. When you put it like that, then maybe the fact that I could barely get a sentence out without bursting into tears was normal – I still don’t know and I don’t think I ever will…
I’ve never been particularly hot on New Years Resolutions. Mainly because I find that the more set on achieving something I am, the more likely I am to rebel against myself so that I don’t achieve it – queen of self-sabotage, me 🙈 For example, I’m not the type of person who can really go ‘cold turkey ‘ with things – it just doesn’t generally work for me. So cutting things out completely will just make me really desperately want those things and I won’t be able to stick to it – it’s usually much better for me to make more gradual changes.
So the other day I was reading a post on one of those Facebook parenting forums (jeez people don’t bite their tongues on those things do they?!) This particular one was written by a nursery worker who was bemoaning those ‘awful’ mums who choose to leave their children in a hellhole of snotty toddlers (aka nursery) even if they’re not working. It described how terrible it was that these mums would drop their poor kids off screaming and crying just so they could go off to Zumba or drink coffee or do the housework. I suddenly realised that I am one of those horrendous mothers they were talking about. I send my little twiglets off to nursery for two days a week and no I’m not working, yes I do go to a Zumba class and do the housework while they’re there and yes Cora does often cry when I drop her off in the mornings 💔 There were countless comments on the post from mothers who agreed, stating how much they love their children, or how wanted and longed for they were, maybe after a difficult journey to parenthood, infertility etc – so why on earth would they choose to be apart from them if they didn’t need to be? On the face of it, this made sense and I wondered if I must indeed be an awful mother for not choosing to spend every single possible minute with my, also much loved and long-awaited, babies?
This morning, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. I had a wardrobe clear-out…
Yes, that really is the extent of the excitement of my life 😂 But it actually was kind of a big deal…
