The Sheer Glamour of Birth

With the weather warming up, the snow is now nothing more than melted squelchiness - though still, I am sure, there will be children who'll head to the farm slopes just beyond with their homemade sleds! As my due date gets nearer and nearer, the danger of icy roads recedes into the past as a thankfully distant memory and exists no longer as an possibility!
All that needs to be done in Layla Rose's nursery is for Craig and Gary to put up the blind - a lilac, thermal, black-out blind.(After months of confused pottering, I've at last discovered how to add a hyperlink - so if you see text that is blue and underlined, it means you can click on it and it'll take you to photos or something else to juice up the story!) Otherwise, my TO DO LIST has only my hospital bag to shop for and then pack. (Sleep eludes me as I chase down all these niggling things I still need to do... Even my dreams are saturated with obsessions relating to birth, bodily fluids, crying babies...) Unfortunately, going shopping for the contents of The Hospital Bag, is not a glamorous affair -- and you will know this only if you are a)a midwife, b)a mommy or c)someone with rather sick, sad interests! From ultrathick maternity pads to those see-through gauze disposable knicker-things. Blech. Perhaps it's a shopping expedition best accomplished in solitude? I don't think Craig will ever look at me the same way EVER again...

Wishes DO come true.

Alone all day long with just my belly
to talk to, the days can be treacherously long - and I find myself counting down the hours and then minutes until Craig arrives home. Fact: men need to speak less than women do - and by the time Craig gets home from work, he's all talked out and ready to just chill out. But then like a tourist at a zoo, I poke him verbally as though he were a sleepy wombat to perform. Ya. Poor guy. I know. But hey - I get lonely!

THANKFULLY, I made a couple of very special friends when I taught at that little school in Kettering. The one is Tamara - another South African- who came over to the UK with her husband in August last year. She has been a Godsend - and has visited me twice on her way home from work even though she has an hour long schlep home to Peterborough from here... And then there's Wendy.
From the very moment I met Wendy, I hoped we would be friends - beyong the confines of colleagues' politeness and school hours. She just has this incredible warmth - like a glowing hearth-fire I craved to warm myself before. She was an absolute Godsend at work, literally being able to help with any situation or answer any, however random, question. (Personally, I think she should move her talented behind outta there and start her own company! She is DYNAMIC!)
Last Wednesday, in the pitch blackness of 4pm, Wendy arrived at the front door to what must surely have been an avalanche of far too many words - but bravely, she took it all in her stride (lol!) Hanging up her coat, she managed to get a sentence out inbetween all of mine: "Oh, and here's a little something for you."

She handed me a camera.

What?

A camera. I didn't know what to say. I didn't understand. Was she loaning it to me till I could get one of my own? Eventually, I understood the depth of it all: Wendy was actually giving us this camera - and it was gleamingly brand new, stocked up with the very best rechargeable batteries and a 4GB memory card!!! Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Completely and utterly blown away. I felt like a bit of a fool - inadequacy of verbiage for once paralysing me into silence. I could hope I appeared as grateful as I felt...
We had a couple of cups of tea, a few nasty little sugary biscuits I discovered in Craig's corner of the tea/coffee cupboard -- and altogether the most wonderful conversation I've been treated to in simply ages! (Craig looked grateful seeing someone else have to absorb my daily quota of words.)

I guess what I'm really trying to say is THANK YOU, darling Wendy, for the most incredible gift - a gift with long-reaching meaning: Layla will have her childhood lovingly archived because of YOU.

(To showcase all my latest photographs, I got us set up with Google's Picasa! Here is the link to my 'Nursery in Progress' album. As usual, I would LOVE comments!)

Candid Camera

Right now there about a thousand images I wish I could capture for you -- the sight of my pale, ballooning belly, laced with pale blue deltas of veins, the delicate wood carving on the antique wardrobe I've spent hours painstakingly stripping of years of paint, the giant pile of softness in whites, pinks and pale yellows: all of Layla's newborn babygrows, jumpers and blankets sent all the way from her granny Sally in South Africa...

{this pic of me was taken at Christmas time: I am now uncomfortably rotund at 33 weeks, though the midwife says my uterus is full-term/40weeks in size: GULP!!! And how will the next 7 weeks pan out?! Can my skin really stretch anymore?}

But alas, the awful little camera we bought from a colleague of Craig's needs 2 brand new batteries to take just 3 or 4 grainy photos before agitatingly konking out. My 5 weeks of working at Avondale Juniors (blood, sweat and many, many heartbroken tears later)and the money I earned was used to pay my dad back - though I was promised, as part of my employment contract, reimbursement for mileage driven and 7.50GBP a day for lunches. HOWEVER (insert 'thunderous glare' here) the company who processes the payments, MyKeyPay, insists they have absolutely no record of me - and because I am on maternity leave, there is nothing they can do about it. To put it kindly, I'm bloody pissed off as all hell!!!! I followed the correct protocol in terms of registration, filling in forms and posting them back etc. I EVEN received a telephone call from one Gaelic-sounding Sean CONFIRMING my registration two days after the fact. SO. WHAT. IN. THE. HELL. HAPPENED?? A South African colleague of mine who teaches at the same school, hired by the same company, blah blah blah: SHE gets all her expenses paid. So why not me? The most frustrating part is that I was hoping to use that 200quid to buy a camera and various other things for Layla Rose's arrival. And now I can't. You can't have a baby without having a camera. (I know it sounds somewhat insane - but after my own mom has documented our lives so exquisitely in album after gorgeous album, I can hardly imagine not having captured Layla's growth from wriggly little newborn all the way through to first steps and messy icecreams...)
I have someone from my employment agency looking into it for me - so perhaps I may be paid after all: I told him I was writing about MyKeyPay on my blog - and that he better warn them that a feisty little journalist was gonna take 'em down if they didn't sort me out with some cashola!!! (Said in jest. Sort of.)

Anyway, if any of you have an old camera lying around you're not using, could you please send it my way? THANK YOU!!

PS. I thought I was a really cute 'n cuddly baby - but since I put my baby photo up on Facebook as my profile picture, absolutely NO-ONE has commented on it. Think I better take it down - and replace it with one of my arty pics which always elicit enormously good responses. lol