Like father like son

I bought an old bouncinette on trade me last week. It's ace. Harper loves it, just like his Dad seemed to back in 1970.

The best laid plans of mice and mums

This year, as well as having Harper and getting him to through his first year without major mishap, I have a couple of plans. (Insert Mr Burns-style evil hand gesture here)


These plans are:


1. Learn to play the bass with the intention of playing on an actual stage with an actual band, and write a small book of essays about why chicks who play bass totally rule. In order to do this, I will actually have to pick up my guitar, dust it off, tune it, and learn to play it. I have a set of DVDs that I bought when I first got the guitar nearly two years ago that I have watched maybe once. This goal will also require me to cut my nails. I bit my nails like a cannibal until 2004. Till now I have kept them pretty short and functional but thanks to the beauty of nature, being pregnant made them steely strong and fast-growing, so I let them get a bit longer and prettier. They are exactly how I always wanted them to be, but to really conquer the frets, the nails must go.

A gratiuitous shot of my pretty nails, so you can all see the sacrifice I am making for art.

2. Learn to sew in order to clothe my new body shape, which despite me 'shedding my baby weight' as women's magazines like to say, is rather a bit larger than it was before. My hips in particular, which rattled like a cage when I was pregnant, now say 'no' to that old pair of jeans, they say 'get out of here' to shorts that used to hang off me, they say 'who are you kidding, girlfriend?' to that once-too big skirt.

Now that I have got through the first messy weeks of motherhood and feel a lot more on top of things, I feel like I can get on with introducing these two plans into my life. How long they last, however is another thing...

Six weeks

Tomorrow, our wee lad will be six weeks old. This is a magic number for me because so many people have told me that things will get easier from now on. I cannot believe it was only six weeks ago that the Postie and I had lunch at Ernesto's, did a few chores and trundled up to the hospital to have Harper. We took pictures of me beside the sign pointing to the delivery suite, and when I was admitted to ward 12, we chuckled about the view of Hutchison Road from my window - for me that road will always be where a bus load of people went past while I was sick in the gutter as I walked to work, back in the bad old days of morning sickness. Being in that room knowing my pregnancy was about to end felt like the end of a long, arduous but exciting journey. I feel nostalgic for the good bits of it now and then.

During our week in Auckland I noticed a few things going a bit wrong - H started to cry after feeds and his latching onto my bosom was a bit sloppy. This got worse when we came home, and developed into a ear-shattering scream after feeds and he refused to eat at times. He's been diagnosed as having reflux, which while it's not as bad as being told your child has some life-threatening condition, is still heart breaking, for want of a better word. Hearing him cry in pain and knowing there is little I can do about it is tough - I want to immediately give him some magic remedy to take the pain away or call someone for help. I have to remind myself that while Harper is only six weeks old, I have only been a mother for six weeks, and to go easy on myself when things aren't Madonna-and-child-esque. I'm very impatient, and Harper forces me to slow down. So it's 3am and all I want to do is go back to bed, but he needs to sit upright for half an hour before having the rest of his feed? Like my sister said to me when I was freaking out about becoming a mother - you just do it. You rise to the challenge and then they challenge the challenge. It's like Survivor: Newborn.

To try and help this relux go away, I'm endeavouring to follow a dairy-free diet for a few weeks to see if it could be a reaction to cow's milk. I LOVE dairy so this will be hard for me, but not as hard as hearing that screech when Harper's in pain. I swear my ears ring afterwards.

Otherwise, H is just dandy. He smiles and chats and is generally a hit with the ladies. A plunket nurse warned me the other day that we'll have to watch him when he's older.

A wedding, some presents and a little brown suit

While Harper, now a very mature five weeks old, is the most chatty, charming little baby born last month, he was not above trying to upstage his aunty and his grandfather at his aunty Elizabeth's wedding last Friday and be the centre of attention. Not only did he bellow through the ceremony at Auckland's Cornwall Park, he made a bit of a ruckus during the speeches - especially his grandfather's speech - and had to be taken home early for some cuddling and rocking. He was admired by many a relative, his mother actually had to keep them away from him the next day at the after-match function to stop him getting overtired/too much of a big head. There seemed to be as many presents from Harper's new fan club as Elizabeth and Nigel got for their wedding. We had to borrow a spare suitcase to get them all home to Wellington.

The aunty's got my baby! Newlyweds Elizabeth and Nigel with their nephew

While in Auckland, I managed to catch up with some pals from journo school, get down to Hamilton to visit pals from there, I also met a lot of the Postie's family and friends, and had an almost constant stream of cups of tea from his parents. Awesome. One of the highlights of our week up there was catching up briefly with one of my oldest pals Lisa who got back to New Zealand a few months ago after a massive journey through Africa. She and I spent quite a bit of time looking at Harper and saying, 'wow, crazy'. It was weird to be sitting there with this woman I've known since I was 11 showing her my baby. Harper was wearing a particularly cute little suit that day sent to me from Melissa in Norway, but at the rate that Harper is packing on the weight (he has rolls where before there were no rolls) he won't fit it again. It's a shame - he looks awesome in it and it's such a great fabric with little owls on it.

Check out my guns