Halfway to One.

The baby passed the six-month mark the other day. She's still such a baby baby - it boggles me when people start their four-month old on solids (I've become very good at quoting the WHO's policy on solids and flippantly spewing "Food before one is just for fun!" in a slightly demented and pat manner).
Sometimes she rolls but mostly she doesn't. Sometimes she sleeps well during the day but mostly she doesn't (this morning is a rare, RARE exception. I'm awaiting talkies and squawking any second).
She smiles a lot and is irresistibly ticklish, and baths have just become great, awesome fun.
Recitals and concerts are like second nature to her now; she sat through my teachers' concert and then a student fundraiser the next weekend; the last two Mondays have been ballet dress rehearsals (Mummy in a tutu is apparently quite THE entrancing spectacle) and I wonder how this idea of normal will behoove her. We live in such a strange world, of ipads and touchable technology, and yet not strange at all, as I crochet a dress for a Steiner doll by the time-honoured method of measuring against another that fits. Then I stop and realise that to a baby knitting is just as strange as a blinking cursor, and that all my normal and strange is just - to her - new.
Last week we moved out the bassinet and moved in the cot, and all over again our 'big girl' who wears 00 grow suits was transformed into a tiny new baby. Much as I love putting her weight down and watching her sleep, I think I like scooping her out again at three am better, because the next time I wake it's to her soft sleeptalking with eyes still firmly shut, waving hands that rub her face and a sweet pout. She's awake.

Five months.

Dear Audrey,
Tomorrow you are five months old. You wear 00 most of the time now, size medium Bambooty nappies, and on warm days we've even cracked open the Huggalugs and you examine your toes with great interest. I am doing my best to stay clear of dairy, gluten and soy. It's easily as difficult as it sounds. For four of the last five weeks your dad has been overseas and you're not adjusting well to the change. After three weeks away you pouted and cried, and took several days to warm up to him again. Then he had to go on trip number two. Tonight is not going so well. At 9.38 you are still an awake baby, and I am still a tired mommy. Your dad is fantastic at cooking (even with the new totally restricted options) but he doesn't really 'get' that this adjustment period has been just as unfun each time he's gone and returned over the last month, and you don't want to settle for this stranger who happens to be in your room tonight. Fair enough, I feel. Let's hope tomorrow (kicking off with porridge and rice milk like always, progressing to almond/apple/sweet potato muffins and then onto a bland vegie soup for lunch) is a better day.

Pay it forward.

It feels SO good when something goes right. I was presented with an opportunity to do a nice thing for some people last week, and with a bit of craftiness and planning today my sneaky, sneaky plan came to fruition. I just got the message that lets me know I pulled it off and I'm sitting in front of my computer talking to Audrey (we have some LOVELY conversations now) and grinning like a maniac.

You know that load of bull we're all fed as kids that it feels better to give than to receive? I say load of bull because when you're a self-centred five-year-old or a monumentally self-centred twelve-year-old it IS a load of bull.... however, as a very grown-up-twenty-nine-year-old (sh! I can dream...) I can say it really does feel better. It feels DAMN good. And it's kind of addictive. I'm going to go see what other nice thing I can do today. Pay it forward, share the love, spread the karma, whatever. Just do something nice for someone else today.

Four months...

Since we brought you home from the hospital, our tiny five pound fiver who was still ten days pre-due date.
The last 48 hours have been horrible, thanks to some bread with more milk solids than the label disclosed, but my whole avoidance of dairy and soy is becoming second nature. How could it not, when an accident like this triggers two days of miserable refluxing and not very much sleep for either of us?
The only way to get through today was to bottle-feed you "safe" milk from the freezer while I expressed and you watched me accusingly. Trust your father to be out of the country ;)
You're rolling onto your side now, grinning maniacally and gumming away at your little fists like a whole set of teeth might appear any second. Th sweetest times are scooping you out f your bed into mine and falling half asleep while you feed, spooned in the crook of my arm. Teaspoon is your new nickname, by the way.
In the bath you kick ecstatically, watching your feet intently. I just put away most of your 000 clothes, as your long legs started to push out the toes. Cloth nappies don't help either; in your wondersuits you look like a skinny teletubby!
Serious little moppet, you're taking everything in and growing up... Well, not too fast yet. I can feel every day accelerating just a fraction of a second, and I know that when I look back again this whole sweet time will have been over before I blinked.

Da Da Da DAHM

So this week I found about about something called the Life Aware Australia Movement; it's basically a campaign to tell us that while we're good at insuring our stuff, we suck at insuring our future should we suddenly not be around to participate in it.
This got me thinking since my husband is currently overseas and has (in my hyperchondriac mind) an enormous chance of dying before he returns home safely. Let's not address the emotional fallout for the minute, but just the (loose, castle-in-the-air) math.
We don't have a huge mortgage or debt load.
I have my own business, I own my car, I have a ridiculously full wardrobe and more shoes than I can wear out. Audrey has doting grandparents (three sets) and if I ever NEED to buy that child a thing it will be a miracle. So surely if my darling husband failed to return from his latest sojourn abroad we would be fine.

Except: I'd need to hire a chef. (It's been 36 hours since the incumbent chef left; I refuse to disclose the quantity of ciabatta and peanut butter that's been consumed thus far.)
I'd need daycare. But not actual daycare, just a few hours every evening and nappies on the weekend daycare. The kind you really can't buy.
I'd need someone to put the bins out and keep my computer online. Ok, I can totally do those things myself, but why would I when someone else has it down to a fine art?

Basically I'd need a wife to support my 'lifestyle' (part-time self-employed, part-time SAHM) What's the going rate?
Doesn't matter. I couldn't afford to pay one. Neither could hubby, should I happen to be hit by a bus tomorrow. Neither of us bothered to insure our lives. According to stats based on IFF/AIST formulae, the average death cover is only $189K, but the average required is $431K. That's a lot of extra violin lessons I won't have time to teach without a husband, and a heck of a lot of app sales and research papers hubby will try to write while bouncing/feeding/changing a teething baby.

So I followed the call to action (this is the part where I say you too should go visit the life insurance calculator from Life Insurance Finder and then compare life insurance plans to find the right option for you) and I have a new topic to bring to the dinner table... why we need life insurance.

0. I am participating in the LIFE Awareness campaign. I received a VISA gift card for this post courtesy of Life Insurance Finder via Digital Parents Collective. I am also in the running to win an iPad3. As always, all opinions are purely my own.

Sixteen weeks.

Dear Audrey,
You're starting to laugh. Telling us about your day with many raised eyebrows and quizzical looks, dobbing on my feeding you to sleep or complaining about the three changes of clothes you've endured because something I ate last night once waved hello to a soybean.  I bathed you in the sink yesterday and was sad that you don't really fit in there anymore. Not the way you used to, from head to chicken legs and monkey toes. Now you have to sit up, or kick your legs over the side to immerse your torso and (still) bald little head. It's wonderful we can laugh at the paediatricians and all (with their gumpf about reflux meds you never actually needed) but seriously, could you slow down the growing just a tad? I still like taking pictures of you next to common household objects; I remember as a child how much I liked to see JUST how small I was. You might be a little freaked out, but trust us - you were drowning in those quintuple zero suits.
You've been to your first dance (Strayhorns, September 1st) and have the child-size noise-cancelling earmuffs to prove it; you've had your first sleepover at my parents' place (memo to self, must replace absent child with pump) where according to report, you mostly laughed at the bulldog.
(You WERE laughing at the bulldog, right? Not us?)

7.11

"what time is it?"
"seven-eleven."
"that's a special time because..."
Yep. That's what time Audrey was born.
"little one, you're exactly some number of weeks and days now."
He's clever, but sometimes you'd neve know it. "fourteen weeks and two days... That's one hundred days!"
Creepy. So, today, darling daughter, on the very day that we told the paediatrician my radical diet change fixed your "reflux" and I was treated like an idiot for half an hour, and ten some strange (unrelated) woman tried to undress me in public (see previous post) and then you endured three hours of violin.... Today you have been earthside for one hundred days. I hope we're living up to expectations.