Friday, September 30, 2011

So I bought a wedding dress.
It's very strange buying a dress a size too big just knowing that I am going to get even bigger before the day. I thought brides were supposed to lose weight with nerves and do some sort of lemon juice diet in the weeks leading up to their wedding. It all feels slightly backwards.

Do you know what happened the other day in an entirely unrelated story? Well, I was helping Welsh do a letterbox drop of flyers for his building business. Because I don't work, I get quite excited by these outings. I print up the flyers, trim them, put them in a special little bag. I keep track of how many I have printed and the locations that we are dropping them in as though i am going to commit the information to a pie chart or something for the next board meeting. I obsess over the graphics, the wording, the font, and if Welshy dares question why I have failed to include half the information he wanted on them, then god damned it, he gets a lecture on aesthetics and a pretty balance of letters being of paramount importance.
One of the many strange things about this country is that people don't have letter boxes. How weird is that? Everyone has little slots in their front doors that you push the letters through. And also, in our village, if we are not home to get a package, then the postman just takes it to Welsh's parents farm. Remind me not to do any online shopping at Ann Summers.
So, the other day we were posting some flyers. Some people have like this weird brush stuff inside the slots to stop the wind coming in. Or something like that. So you really have to push your hand through to get the paper through the gap. We delivered about a hundred and were doing the area that Welsh's grandma used to live in. The sun was shining, he was telling me a story about how he stayed with his nana as a teenager and snuck out the window one night. The neighbours called the police and he got in big trouble. I was laughing.
Then i stuck my hand in a letterbox slot and a fucking dog bit my finger.
I went in to shock.
I am secretly half scared of dogs. I've been bitten so many times. They seem to like me. The worst time was when my aunty's dog bit me on the face.
Bite mark bruises started appearing on my finger. I tried not to cry.
"Let's do this street, then a few around the corner." says Welsh.
Are you fucking serious? A DOG just BIT me. I am never putting my hand in a letter box again. Apparently they don't have rabies in this country but Welshy may have just been saying that to make me feel better.

Then last night the phone rang. A woman left a message enquiring about getting some garden fence put in. Garden fence to stop her dog getting out. Her vicious dog. I checked the address. Correct, it was the same house, same letter box slot, same dog. So Welsh will find out once and for all if I am just a massive wimp or if he is an under reactor. I tell you what though, that dog had better be something bigger than a Shih tzu or I may never live it down.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Merry-go-round

Hi blogland!

Please excuse my absence from your wonderful world these last few weeks. I have no excuse except that my brain/creativity seems to have been snatched by the small person living inside my uterus.

So here are some updates:
Wedding plans are going smoothly. When i say smoothly, what i actually mean is that we have done very little towards organising it. We have a vague to do list stuck on the kitchen wall with things such as "Buy Welsh a ring" and "Research if pregnant people should wear high heels. If so, buy some, if not, cancel wedding."
It's the execution that seems to be the problem at the moment. I keep getting stuck somewhere between getting in the car and driving an hour to the jewellers and glancing out at the backyard and the sunshine and deciding to have a cup of tea instead. I'm quite half arsed about the whole thing actually which is not indicative of my enthusiasm to marry Welsh but probably a little telling about my enthusiasm to do it here, with no one I know and my family a million miles away. If Welshy had not hired a photographer, I would probably not even brush my hair on the day.

The baby is being a good girl and staying put. She kicks me constantly and I can already see the arguments I am in for, for the rest of my life. My dad thinks it's hilarious that someone more demanding than me is about to be born and Welshy keeps saying "what are you going to do when you have two babies?" the other baby being him. He doesn't realise that I am actually a child too and in 8 weeks, there will be three whinging infants in this little house. Someone is going to have to step up and I don't think it can be the actual baby. Chances are, Welsh and I are going to have to get it together sooner or later. I am not even talking about the big issues such as "how do we foster her self esteem?" more like basic survival stuff such as "Can i get drunk whilst breastfeeding?"

I've also been keeping busy doing Welsh's visa application. Why am I doing it when I am already an Australian citizen? You may well ask. Well a) I am a control freak. b) I am better and quicker at forms c) Welsh has a full time job and d) I get less overwhelmed by it all because i am used to working under pressure. I have turned the dining room in to an office and created to do lists for Welsh, to do lists for myself, lists of documents to be certified, lists of questions we need to ask other people, a file with evidence demonstrating our continuing commitment to one another and simple questions we need to discuss before i can put them on to paper (like "when did we start a relationship? Dating doesn't count.") I am actually thinking that my stat dec regarding the nature of our relationship could double as my wedding speech. We can lodge it just as soon as we get an extract of our wedding certificate and then send in an amendment once the baby is born. Hooray. Then we get to pay thousands of dollars to get plane tickets and then pack up this whole house, move back to Aus, try and find jobs/childcare and live with my parents! Awesome!! Then house hunt, unpack all our crap, throw a first birthday party for the small one and have an Australian wedding. See! This is why I need a good cuppa in the sunshine.

So that's life for me right now. xxxx

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Maternal nuptials.

Maternity clothes are not cute.

Well actually, sometimes they are...until a pregnant lady puts them on. A pregnant lady who is not a model that is. Then they become less cute and more like a big shapeless bag that makes you look....well....pregnant.
Don't get me wrong, being pregnant is a beautiful thing. You look all ripe and gorgeous even whilst having murderous thoughts about your midwife. But there is really only the one look you can go with. The pregnant look. It's not very versatile. Some days i feel like wearing high heels...but then i do and I look like a cow in boots. Other times I find a really nicely cut tshirt but it will have something like "Does my bump look big in this?" printed on the front and I have to go outside to throw up a little bit.

Maternity wedding dresses are a league all of their own though. I mean for starters, white is not a fabulous colour to make you feel svelt, at the best of times. Unfortunately, Welsh has banned me from wearing a black dress to our wedding and for some silly reason, I am listening to him on this one. What about a colour? I hear you implore. Nope, the man is a traditionalist and has ordered a colour scheme of white to beige.

Here are a couple of dresses that don't make me want to punch a kitten in the face:


This one is from Tiffany Rose and is acceptable.


And this one from ASOS would also do the job.

Thoughts?

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The good things about a weird situation

My sister always has cool dreams. She dreamt once that Lady Gaga had her over for a party and gave her really cool gifts. She seems to have a talent for dreaming about fantasies and fun things. I dream mostly about really boring stuff. It's like my brain needs a break from the excitement of my day to day life. (This is a joke. The most exciting thing that happened yesterday was that my ex husband sent me a recipe for this delicious beetroot and beef casserole he used to make. Seriously, someone lend me a meditation CD because I am WAY too over stimulated right now.)
I actually have found that i dream way less than i did a few years ago. Trauma related? I might google it tomorrow if i have time between cooking a casserole and waiting for the Bachelor to start. Anyway, I had this anxiety dream last night that my rent was due, I was living in my old apartment, and I was trying to work out dates for when I'd be getting paid and for how I would manage to pay rent (budgeting has never been my forte.) I woke up all worried before realising that I was in Wales, 6 months pregnant and have not worried about rent for the last little while. It was a relief (until I put two and two together and saw the link between rent being due and a baby being due.)

So my point, and I do have one is this: I am so lucky to be living here and having this experience in Wales. It was not our first choice of residence but it means that Welshy can come to every single appointment with me and do cute things like hold up a little pair of baby slippers and say "awwww look!!" in a really uncharacteristically soppy, yet genuine, way. Because he has his own business here, there is no boss to call or ask for time off from. Thank god for this because i have an appointment every second week and they are BORING when you don't have a little friend to have a coffee with between pathology and radiology. It also means that the usual worries about money for rent are minimised so I don't have to work. I have not had an episode of bleeding since week 14 and I stopped work at 16 weeks, when i got here, and i think those two things are related.
Also, we get to live in a really close knit community where moses baskets and cots are passed from house to house every couple of years. Birth stories are told in the pub (sometimes alarming) and people share homegrown cooking apples (Welshy's mum) broad beans (me) and advice about prams (apparently the drink holders on Mothercare's range is the perfect size for a pint glass. Handy.)
And for crying out loud, there is a river next to our house that Welsh is currently fishing in and it doesn't get more peaceful than that. For the both of us. Ahem.
I am so lucky. I know not everyone has such a supportive partner, I know not everyone has financial security and I know not everyone has lots of people around them who are almost just as excited to have a new member of the village, as I am. (I'm not referring to the "it takes a village to raise a child" philosophy by the way, I mean the actual village that we live in.)
I guess having nannied in the past and worked closely with teenage parents just makes me so grateful. Grateful that we are doing this, that we are doing this here and that i am doing it with Welsh. It overrides all the scary statistic fears (60%-70% c-section, scary percent pre term labour) the painful steroid injections in my thigh and the bizarro jibber jabber that is the welsh language, medical speak and a pregnant mind, combined.

Yeah, I guess i just wanted to write about feeling grateful for a change.

I hope that there is lots to be grateful for in your life today too.

x