Every day is a milestone with a new baby

I remember from my own babies how we knew exactly how many days, weeks and then months the baby was aged. Every day in those first weeks or even year seems like a milestone. And, of course, they do change hugely!

So the grandbaby. Monday – day 5 of his life – his teenaged father was offered (to his surprise) skin on skin contact. So he removed his shirt and held the baby. The next day I understand he shed tears as he departed for uni down south. But what can you do. He needs an education.

On my visit early evening of day 6, baby was sound asleep. Apparently he’d been very grumpy all morning. He’s hungry but until his bowel does whatever it has to do, then it’s tube feeding of nutrients and fluids only. The nurse reckoned ‘food’ was 2-3 days away.

Today – day 7? (well he was born a week tomorrow) baby’s mum tells me that he’s doing really well. Perhaps he will be allowed some breastmilk tomorrow. Perhaps he will be allowed home at the end of next week.

I am astonished. Is the right? What happened to the thing about ‘prem babies are kept in hospital until their due date or close to it’ – I thought we had weeks to go.

It’s hard to know what to do about visiting a baby in an incubator. Not much you can do really.

However, the really hard thing is: what are next big steps in my own youngest son’s (baby’s father) life?

A new life enters our world

The text on Thursday 5 May at 5.02pm: “C is in recovery. Baby is excellent. Cried when born. Breathing on his own. 1.7kg. He is healthy and lanky. C will be going to level 4 soon”.

And so I emailed a few friends the extraordinary news … “on Thursday we become grandparents – it’s all a rather bizarre story. We found out about 3 weeks ago that our son’s 18 year old girlfriend was pregnant – she’d neglected to tell anyone – her mother only knew a week ahead of us. Baby was due 3 July but expected to be brought on early because of some issues.

The emergency kit that morphed into a time capsule

Easter Weekend at home and the guilt surfaced – it was time to tackle the chores to avoid. The garden shed.  No surprise, it proved almost impossible to enter with rusting garden tools, paint cans, old toys and the earthquake emergency water and kit. This was at least partially the object of the exercise – I imagined it was time to review and perhaps refresh the water.

It sure was. The water was dated February 2005! Here I had been congratulating myself on how well prepared I was. Well, I was (kind of) back in 2005. So the kit (plastic box) revealed a veritable time capsule of what I must have thought would have been useful six years ago – clearly before we knew about the reality of real earthquakes!

There to sustain our family then comprising two adults, and three children aged 17, 15 and 12 was the following:

The love of baking + what part of putting things in the dishdrawer do my family not understand?

In the recent TV finale of New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker competition, the two finalists (Emma and Toni) basically wept over how much baking meant to them – it was all about “love”. Yes, that’s what they got out of it – it was about expressing love for the people they were baking for … so noble, so loving!

I enjoy baking and indeed I enjoyed watching the TV series. For me, some of it was about feeling greatly reassured when these supposedly top kiwi bakers stuffed up. That sounds a bit harsh – but when I misread a recipe, miss something out, under cook or over cook something – well I feel bad – like I’m stupid. And it seems a terrible waste (like all those eggs and olive oil that have to be thrown away every time I fail to make aioli – think I have now converted to Kato sadly).

So it was weirdly affirming that even the hot bakers muck up! But the “love stuff” – I’m not so sure about that.

Disposing of memories in the disposable age

Barney, Fantasia, Rocky Horror, yoga, Aladdin, Bananas in Pyjamas, Blue, Turandot, Suzy Aiken fitness … (the list goes on) but it has all gone – into a rubbish skip in my post-Christmas clean-out frenzy!

Videos is what I’m talking about. Why? Well who watches videos these days so who would buy them even on TradeMe. Indeed my children think CDs and DVDs are pretty much obsolete and prefer to download everything.

So I bit the bullet – and disposed of a huge pile of videos that represented many hours of enjoyable viewing time by those same children when they were young. However, one friend was horrified – and said to me “but why – videos are so much more reliable”.

The perfect present and staring into the eyes of the past

In the build-up to our Silver Wedding Anniversary (yes that’s 25 years) our 19-year-old said he had the “perfect present” for us. In his obsessive and self-congratulatory way we were reminded of this many times in the preceding months. What could it be? Funnily enough I thought “knives”. Silver – something practical that we clearly needed.

But no, the perfect present was a picture – a photo taken at the time of our wedding in a studio (as was the thing in times past) of the husband and I with our parents – enlarged and mounted on textured canvas. Cute! yes indeed I’ve always been obsessed about capturing our lives on film and this was a fresh new treatment.

What it did was made me really think about those people pictured on that day back  in 1984. How funny that we are soooo young (I was 26 and really believed I was pretty “old”  or “been around” by this stage).

Am I jealous?

My friends and I were discussing an encounter we’d had with a “friend of a friend” at a recent social occasion. This woman hasn’t worked since she had children and now they are off her hands effectively. She effusively told us how they (she and hubby) had three houses now (two holiday  homes) and she was about to head off to play chalet girl to the sons down south.

And so we speculate … what does she do all day? And -  are we jealous?

We agree she’s looking pretty good. So it has to be about gym, beauty treatments and hanging out with the ladies who lunch. Apparently “someone” does the garden.

Desperately seekin inspiration – again

It’s another long gap between posts. As I start on the ritual checking of my oldest son’s adventures on Jivin’ Jimmy in Japan it occurs to me again that surely one should be able to find inspiration in one’s daily life and not just take it for granted in its mundanity. Or if it’s mundane, do something about it!

There’s J in a new country where every day is a new adventure – because it’s different, the challenge of making the shower work is an amusing story in itself. I’m thinking praps I should really commit (again) to the blog thing, partly to entertain the Jimmy.

So … what can I say. The O-one has taken to recording on his podcast his uni readings – this means reading it all out loud for hours. It may well be a good idea, but he certainly does like the sound of his own voice! He came home close to 5am Saturday (propping up the bar of the old Transparent chum) but to be fair, he did manage to go out with the grandparents and assist them in buying a new TV and DVD. That’s a task that takes massive patience!

The tall-T remains permanently attached to his laptop and buried in his room. I do find it kinda strange coming home and everyone is locked off in their little electronic spaces. A call from Telstra has meant that we have finally officially upp-ed our useage so we’re not paying thru the nose for extra downloads – god know why we hadn’t sorted that before!

And the old-one is attached to the sport on the TV or cacklin over QI. No film festival for us!

Train spotting and me

It’s a mystery sometimes how your children view you. Take Friday night. I came home from a long day at work – ready to chill out in front of “NZ Top Model”.

Husband was at rugby. Middle son insisted I read law essay immediately and then didn’t like my feedback. I thought I had REALLY extended myself given that I spend all day reading, writing, editing and thinking. That’s gratitude for you!

I was really really ready to “chill lax” as my kids say.

Anyway so I got to see the beautiful young things and one get voted off, and then  the 16-year-old and I discussed movies to view or download. It’s not easy to find a common ground with a 16-year-old boy. But I know that in a few short years my baby will leave home so I must treasure these moments he wants to share with me, good caring mom that I am.

But why – why did he think “Trainspotting” would be just the ticket? He had seen it before – I hadn’t. Deliberately. Because I knew what it was about and had heard about the really disgusting bits. So who needs it?

Anyway we watched it. Actually it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. But I still don’t get quite why he thought it would be really my “kind of a movie”!

Times really r tough

oh the embarrassment as I look back at one of my occasional posts (20 July 2008) when I talked about the “tra la” around the economic crisis.

So yes, I admit it. It is a BIG deal! And I kinda regret my leap into the world of contracting as a start to changing my life.

But meantime, the middle child (yes the Commerce student and right winging type) continues to pronounce that jobs are “so easy to get”. He who has veered from discovering that selling KiwiSaver wasn’t so easy, is now full of the joys of after school care. Yes – that’s about beating 9 year olds at chess and discovering that playing soccer with primary school kids is exhausting.

How weird is that! He also has scored an internship in his second year of uni so is apparently on track for not only summer jobs, but a job at the end of the degree. So nauseating to the bros.

So an update on the BA. He’s off to Japan on the Jet programme to teach English – yay! From a mom’s perspective this means a trip o/s, a salary unlike the hand to mouth existence here and a time to grow up a bit and discover what to study next . Excellent!

What a relief. Still think he is destined to be a teacher (for a bit) [ie postgrad dip]. It’s not like it’s a lifelong commitment but a route to other things as his great grandmother, grandmother and mother have all discovered!