The True Cost of Working Away,

When my partner and I got together I knew that he was working in the type of role where he might end up working away, but the company he worked for at the point wasn't really getting him to work away a lot, if ever, and we had a long period of bliss where it just didn't happen, and from early on we didn't spend a whole lot of time apart.

Whilst we have been together he changed his role, which was good in some ways, and not so good in others (money, good, commute time, baaad) and there was talk about a lot more working away than there has been and part of that has been because his manager is a legend, and whilst we have been "enjoying" Little Man's newborn era (only in inverted commas because there are days when it is really rough) has been taking on a lot of the working away because he missed out on a lot with his own kids particularly in the early years, and he wanted to try and make sure that my partner gets as much time at home with our son as he can. (I'm so glad I'm out of the super hormonal part of post pregnancy, because otherwise I would be a weeping mess on the floor every time I think about how kind this is.)

But it's not all sunshine and rainbows, and when I was around eight months pregnant, my partner was needed to work away and as it's his job, obviously he had to go, but I think it was only one night (might have been two - my memory is terrible at this point) and the easiest thing was just for me to go and stay with my parents, because the idea of being thirty ish minutes away by car in case something happened overnight was a bit too overwhelming, and he was going to be over four hours away by car.

Naturally I did all of the usual soon to be mother panic and freak out things like making sure my birth plan was written out, making sure my hospital bag was with me at my mums, making sure I could charge my phone so if I needed to make a frantic call to him in the middle of the night, I could, and he did the soon to be dad freak out which I believe involves making sure that the vehicle is always brimmed with fuel, because no one needs to be looking for a fuel station when they need to start a mad dash to the hospital. As you probably already know, the mad dashes were not required.

Our baby boy is getting on for seven months, so it's been a while since the last time he actually stayed away overnight, but there have been a few locations where he probably should have stayed, but there wasn't the budget and or he hasn't wanted to leave us, so instead he's done long drives on top of long days and been utterly exhausted, but at least been able to sleep in the comfort of his own home and we've been together. And he was more than willing to do the same again, but I was worried about him, because driving tired is awful. Drinking Red Bull or similar so you are not too tired to drive is awful. I know he's used to driving and I know he's an adult and he can look after himself, but I also know it's not just that he wants to be at home to see me and to see our son, but also that he feels like he needs to be here to help, because babies are tiring. Babies are stressful. Babies are such a blessing, of course, and I love that kid so much, but that doesn't mean it's easy. He's a great partner because he wants to make sure I have support, but I don't want that to be at the detriment of his health, his wellbeing or anything else.

You can kind of see the stalemate we sort of reached here... but thankfully I promised I would get help, even if it was during the day, either go down to my mum's or go and visit family and such like, and reminded him that we have people around I can call for backup if needed (not going to lie, it would have been hard, my pride would have been hurt, but I would have done it, because I would have accepted that I needed to) and I've got through it just like tons of other parents do, but what's the cost been? 

For one thing, we didn't know until the last minute if he was definitely going, when he was going or if he was staying over, so it could have been a week of very early mornings (I apparently wake up, say bye and roll back over with no recollection of this most mornings) and very late nights where he would be returning home after our son was already in bed, or to a cranky baby who has been kept up to see his dad. None of that seems great for my kid. Because of that, things like food plans have gone out of the window and whilst I've adapted, it's been a touch annoying to say the least. 

As many people have, we've been watching the World Cup matches together and him being away meant that our last match of actually being in contention for the Cup we had to watch apart. Now, he might have been quite happy with that because I'm not a particularly big fan of football, but normally he is my barometer for when I need to look up from whatever else I'm doing (only when we're watching on the TV) so I don't miss the important bits... I missed England's goal but saw both the Argentina goals...

Naturally him being away affects our conversations, too, because when signal is crap and he's on the way home we can just say 'I'll see you in an hour, I'll speak to you when you're home...' or whatever it is, but when the only contact we'll have to connect over is the phone, it makes those calls far more important, and far more frustrating when the signal is shocking or my auditory processing disorder flares up (which happens a lot and is why there are subtitles on my TV permanently). I tend to have calls on loud speaker, because I can do other things at the same time then and that helps my brain stay "in" the conversation, but then it means that my son can hear his dad on the phone, and he smiles, he looks around and then he can't see his dad, so he looks confused. Honestly, that was rougher than I expected, because he doesn't understand when I tell him Dad's going to be home in a couple of days. He's still of an age where if it's not in front of him, it doesn't exist. (And joys of ADHD, I have times like that, too.) 

Earlier in this blog there were notes of triumph, because I've managed things okay. I've had help, but my son and I have been fine. He's been eating fine, smiling, laughing, and gone to bed when he should do. I've got washing done and tidied up and generally felt like something of a functional human, which is incredible, but I've also missed the hell out of my partner and I can't wait for him to get home. And yes, I do know that there are a lot of people whose partners work away and some are gone for months at a time or some go and they're working in war zones. I get it. Or at least I get that I don't get it, partly because I know I'm not built for that. In a big way, to me, working away sucks, and I'm pretty sure my little boy would agree. 

How Big Is Your Small Wedding,

And we're back onto weddings...

I may have said this before, but if I don't remember then what's the likelihood anyone else does? Actually, it's probable that someone else would remember better than me because my memory is terrible at the moment.

The smallest wedding that you can legally have in the UK (and probably anywhere, but I'm just writing what I know) is the two partners, two witnesses and then your celebrant(s), registrars or religious leader(s) which works out to five people at the very bare minimum, and the very easiest that you can do that is at a registry office, but even then you have to give notice and wait for twenty nine days (the day you give notice and twenty eight days afterwards) before you are actually able to get married. I will admit that I would have appreciated a wedding like that, partly because it's not having to talk in front of a bunch of people or having to have too many people involved or too many people's opinions and inevitably it's one of the cheapest ways to get married. I don't think it was ever something that we entertained though, because my partner wants his family with them and I do, too, and there are some people it would just be more hassle to not have there than it is to have them.

Thinking a little bit bigger would have been just including both sets of our parents, which for us would have meant the two of us, four parents and assuming that two of them could be witnesses (it's actually not a given) and then the registrars which would make for a room of eight people, or if we could have done something we did consider, at least for a minute, seven people by being married on a cruise ship and having the ceremony done by the captain. The problem with that being that my partners parents are raising one of their grandchildren, so we would have needed to include them, and then both sets of parents would likely have wanted us to include our siblings, which would have been another three, plus one sibling's partner, so four. Once you're including that number of people there are other family that we would need to include which then started to tick the numbers up even further, and as we went through it our small wedding seemed to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

This is one of the reasons, and there are a few on a list, but this is one of the bigger reasons why we weren't allowing plus ones for the wedding. To me, plus ones are just adding random people you need to pay for and accommodate and also tolerate to your wedding day, but they are likely people you don't know, have never met and will never see again, so unless necessary - like they are the spouse of someone who knows no one else at the event - they were something we definitely wanted to avoid. When other people have wanted to invite people to our wedding, it's been hard to say no, but for the majority of times it has been a no, because we didn't want some sort of massive event (and only partly because we didn't want a massive bill for it). 

By the end of it, we could have added probably another fifty people onto the evening do if we had really wanted to, but the most important thing to us was that it would be an event of people we are close to, who are close to us and it be something we can both enjoy and that our son can enjoy without being surrounded by hundreds of people we or he don't know, or have to spend the entire wedding introducing each other to half of the room. How big is our small wedding? Maybe a little bigger than we quite wanted it to be, but still small enough for comfort, I think.

I'm Screaming Writing This,

I'm so mad, because I've been doing so well writing these posts and scheduling them because I know finding the time is impossible, but it's been a super busy weekend and whilst I took my laptop with me to London to go and see My Chemical Romance for the second time, I didn't touch it once! Why am I screaming? Because the schedule I made for myself is to post these at noon and it's already 11 am and I'm working against the baby having been down for a nap for a while already, juggling wedding admin that needs to be done by our last wedding meeting with the venue (which is so soon!) and also my inability to type very fast because I'm still getting used to having gel nails and they're great, they look fabulous, but my God do they seem to get in the way of life. I wouldn't mind, but they're not even that long!

This weekend has been the best in a while though, because my partner has been home since Thursday evening and we've been able to spend it together. 

Friday was a family event and we got to enjoy that as a little family of three, even though I managed to forget to bring bottles and had to try and get Little Man to have his milk from a cup. He's hated cups for a while and seems to either cry at them, drop them or try and throw them, so that wasn't really going to plan for a bit, until he realised it was his normal milk just in a different type of container and then he calmed down... as we were organising an emergency trip to the supermarket for a new bottle...

Then Saturday was his first sleepover. In the heat. We decamped half of the contents of our living room down to my mum and dad's place so that they could look after him whilst we went to see My Chemical Romance again and I cried my little emo heart out screaming along to every song, because there will never be a point where I don't absolutely adore The Black Parade in its entirety. The little guy was fine, but holy hell he didn't make it easy on himself with refusing to sleep, crying until he was so red in the face it was impossible to tell if he was too warm or just on strike from sleeping, and then clearly wasn't impressed at sleeping somewhere different.

Sunday was all about the drive home, and yes, I could have had my laptop on my knee, tapping away whilst I wasn't driving, but I was doing *redacted wedding prep activities* instead and given how close it's getting, that was more important at the time! 

So that's life. Still busy. Still messy. Still disorganised, but making it work as best as possible, and still getting this blog written and published by noon, because contrary to the opinion of the doubting voice in my head, I can do this.

What's For Tea?,

Some people are probably not aware of the fact that I have a lot of anxiety around food because I have a lot of anxiety about talking about my anxiety around food, so I just don't a lot of the time, but I've been trying to more in appropriate places and at appropriate times because I think it helps the scouts that I work with know that they can talk to me about their issues with food and know that I won't push them on things they're not comfortable on since I get it. Before you say, nobody would, trust me, I've been there and I've seen it handled badly.

Naturally, when it gets to a certain point in an evening, the conversation between most couples or families or sets of roommates if they eat together is to ask what's for tea or what do you fancy for tea, or what are we making for tea etc. We used to follow that question up with the word Mum because even when she wasn't making it, she was always the one deciding what we were having etc because she did the shopping and knew what was in the house. Yeah, we were kind of lazy. For Paul and I, it's a bit more complicated.

I've been a vegetarian for over two decades (yes, it really has been that long) and whilst I've taken part in Veganuary a couple of times I have never thought I could seriously go vegan for any long period of time, so much so that when our baby was having issues and it looked like either lacotse intolerance or CMPA (spoiler alert: it was CMPA) I had a good cry over the fact that I would have to stop breast feeding or pumping at all because I just knew that I couldn't drop all dairy from my diet to make sure that my breast milk was safe for Little Man. That might sounds selfish, but most of the protein in my diet is from things like eggs and cheese, and whilst I had at one stage got myself off drinking 'normal' milk in tea and coffee and started drinking Oatly, it's something I stopped a long time ago, and when I've tried to transition back to it, I just can't make myself do it. There is a taste difference and the longer it's been since I drank oat milk regularly, the more it tastes somewhat porridgy to me and it kind of ruins my drinks.

All that being said, Little Man is now of an age where he's starting to have bits of food and it's quite nice to be able to give him bits of things we're having, but that's not very possible given his allergy, so anything I'm making feels like I'm making three different versions of so we can all eat, or we're having to make two or three different dinners to get everyone fed and meet everyone's needs which is honestly making life much more complicated and I'm not even back at work yet! So here's hoping that it doesn't take little man too long to work his way through the milk ladder and outgrow his allergy to milk, butter, cheese, cream and all the other good things in life, particularly because most dairy free chocolate sucks. 

Can You Play Musical Chairs At A Wedding?,

Genuine question because it would honestly make certain things in life, or at least during wedding planning, a lot easier, but it would make things a lot more difficult.

On the plus side, it would take out the need to do a table plan, which is a big thing, because it's not just the display, the ideas of how you do the display, how you put it up (does it go on an easel or a stand or have it's own legs or what?) or about everyone who tries to get involved and say who they will or won't sit with or anything like that, but it is the sitting down and thinking which personalities will mesh well, who is going to clash and who will bring the drama and who will calm the drama. It's about who is going to be shy or feel awkward, who gets nervous and word vomits all over who they are next to (and how the person next to them is going to take that) and all of the other bits that you worry about when you're putting people together for a stretch of at least an hour and a half. If you tell everyone it's a game of musical chairs you take the stress out of it for yourself, but then the problem is you pass it onto your guests and for us that would be horrible for a few people, because a few of them are travelling to the wedding on their own. For people that don't know anyone, it would be really hard.

As if passing the stress on isn't bad enough, and let's face it, it would be bad enough because some people are quite vocal about their disapproval of certain things at weddings, if you've planned a plated meal like we have, it would make it impossible for the venue. I read of a wedding group recently that someone was trying to do a plated meal but without options, so if you could find a dish that worked for everyone then yeah, maybe that works, but we have multiple people with allergies, people with multiple allergies, dietary requirements and sensory food issues, so unless we did something like chips, which let's face it, is not a meal, it wouldn't work. 

I mean, I suppose the answer to all of that is to have a buffet, but I would still worry that it means guests who have come on their own would struggle, and people you would genuinely like to introduce may never meet, and also buffets are, at least to me, somewhat problematic, because it all just feels like snack food and a wedding is a long day (or at least ours feels like it could be) and I need more than snack food to get me through it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

We started on our seating plan weeks ago and honestly found it a struggle, as many people do, but when we sat and looked at it again, pretty much determined that we were going to get it done that evening come hell or high blood pressure, we didn't even argue. We debated a couple of things, looked at it from personalities and also the maths of how many people fit on each table, but then it didn't take too long to come up with something that we thought actually fit the majority of people or was at least the best that we could do. 

And if all else fails, or someone tries to bring the drama, or a couple of people get too into their politics or anything like that, it kind of becomes musical chairs at the evening do anyway, because there are a few more people and the assigned seating kind of idea goes a bit out of the window, doesn't it? In theory people will move around, chat, dance and all that, or at least I would hope that they would... 

Little Library,

No, my library isn't a Little Library like the type people have in their front yard where you can borrow a book, or do a take one leave one kind of idea or anything like that, nor is my library little when it comes to the size of it, but I was struggling with what to call this post and that was the best I could come up with, so sorry and all that.

Today (day of writing, not day of posting) I have been wandering around the house trying to find something. Today is just another episode of an ongoing sequel of me trying to find said thing which is currently missing, and during said frustrating sequel, I have found other things I had stopped looking for because I had solved the problem in a different way. Which is somehow more annoying. Probably about as annoying as me being so vague about the whole thing really. 

The original missing thing was my birth certificate, which generally isn't overly big of a deal because it's not like it's something I need on a regular or even semi regular basis, but I did need it for my and my partner's appointment to give notice ahead of getting married. As I don't have a valid passport, I needed my birth certificate and my mother's birth certificate, and because I had already lost mine and looked everywhere for the damn thing, I had to order another one, so insisted that my mum come with us to the appointment because it was bad enough losing mine, I wasn't going to lose her's as well. That appointment was about three months ago, but I finally found the birth certificate in the loft whilst I was up there looking for my expired passport, because you need the expired one to renew your passport. Who knew?

In the meantime I had also lost the V5 for my car (not my car I actually drive but my first car which has been sat like a large lawn ornament for a few months other than the few weeks my dad needed to borrow it) and I wanted to be able to sell it, and just when I was looking at ordering a new one, but then found someone who wanted to buy it, we found the V5, ordered a new one to update details and then had a nightmare trying to get the tax sorted so the new owner could actually take it home. Oh, and my car keys. For my actual this is the one I drive car. I had the spare, but the spare has a dodgy battery and no keyring loop on it, which means it's smaller and easier to lose (clearly an issue for me). Thankfully that turned up in the pocket of a jacket I barely use, after I had put the spare into a pocket of a bag I always have with me so I knew where it was.

In my head, I can see myself putting the expired passport down the side of a book. It's not into a book, but down the side of a book, with the idea that I don't need it now, won't need it later and it's not something I need to worry about. I wasn't intending to sort out a passport until after the wedding, because it just sounds annoying to have to add it to the already long list of things I need to change my name on, but then we changed our minds a few times about what we want to do as a honeymoon and several of the ideas we are happy with require me to have a passport, so I was looking into doing mine and my son's. Except I can't, because my old one has either crawled away and is laughing to itself (not literally...) or been taken by The Borrowers to be used as a tent for a camping weekend or similar. Seriously, I'm running out of places to keep looking for it.

You might be sat there reading this thinking, there's got to be another way around it and there is, of course, because I'm neither the first, the last nor the only blinking eejit to lose my passport or assume that an expired passport has no value, but having to cancel the old passport and have it replaced takes longer and we're already running into the time of year where passports take longer than usual. Or should I say one of the points of the year, so I want to try and get it to take the least amount of time as possible, though I appreciate that doing so is meaning that I am wasting the amount of time that would have been added on by the cancelling, but it's a bit of a sunken cost fallacy now and trying to convince myself to just abandon the search is annoying me, because I know that the second I have done it, the missing one will turn up and it will bug me.

What does this have to do with the library? Well for one, between my future husband and I we went through the... several hundred... books on the shelves to check that the passport wasn't between any of them, and it wasn't annoyingly, so today I put all of the rest of the books from the boxes in the front room onto the shelves so I could check between the rest of the books, and it was still not there. As I was unpacking everything there was a buzzing through my head about the number of books I have and all of the comments people make about the number of books I own (to which I say, shuddup) but, possibly as a byproduct from having watched The Testaments recently, but my head went Gilead and the fictional worlds of Christine Dalcher and how owning books was prohibited for women, and the world of V for Vendetta where owning certain books was prohibited, most famously the Quran. I remembered a moment of standing in a street in Berlin where a piece of artwork built into the floor depicting empty shelves to represent all of the books that were burnt why the Nazis. All of this is to say that there are times in history and times in fiction where owning books, or at the very least a certain type of books, is considered to be an act of treason or an act of rebellion. Obviously I like the rebellion idea a little better.

Now, I'm not trying to suggest that that's the reason I own them all, because it's not. Even before I was aware of having ADHD there were signs and signals for the right person to pick up on, even if no one did until I was in my thirties... When I started collecting books (to the best of my memory it started with Goosebumps when I was about nine) these ideas were completely alien to me, but it might be part of the reason I continue to own them, even though I have been making efforts to at least slightly slim down my collection. It's also worth noting that although, as I mentioned, some of these worlds are fictional, I wouldn't be the first or only person to draw parallels with certain political figures, parties, ideologies etc to those worlds, so it's really not that out there to think that it's possible that during our lifetimes, owning books, whether specific or any sort, could again be an act of rebellion. Just a thought.

Sht Happens,

I feel like pre-baby, I vastly overestimated the amount of 'blow out' nappies we were going to have, and whilst I appreciate that might sound like a really privileged thing to say, it is not, or at least not in my view.

I do have to wonder if one of the reasons we've not had as many 'blow outs' as the internet and other parents led us to believe we would is because my son has had digestive issues since he was only a few days old, leading to us spending far too many hours in the hospital when he was 4-6 days old (and yes, that was over the Christmas period) so yes, we've gone through difficult periods of constipation, but that normally results in the kind of thing that you would expect to cause a 'blow out' and it very rarely does. In completely honesty, the only real problems we have had have either been when we haven't realised he's pooped immediately and he's been sat in it for a bit of time, or when we've checked if he's pooped by pulling the frilly bit away from his leg, and then there is a leak... There have been more times when he has peed through his nappy, but even that hasn't been overly common. From what I understood in the before times, I thought it would be the sort of thing which happened at least a couple of times a week.

Why does it matter? Surely this is meaning that parenting is easier than you expected it to be? Well, no, not really, because you very quickly learn that cleaning up a dirty nappy or even a very wet nappy is not as complicated as you think it is, even when you accidentally leave the packet of baby wipes on the table when you're repacking the nappy bag. That might be because we carry wet bags (the type from reusable nappies, even though we're not using the reusable nappies at the moment), at least two extra outfits and I recently left the packing cubes of clothes we took on a road trip in the car because they had extra clothes, extra muslins, extra bibs and extra wet bags in the car for a week in case I needed them each time I went out, but I like to think that's just normal preparation... 

So, why does it matter? Because when you are planning how many clothes you are going to need for your baby it is a factor, and if I was being really nerdy (which I can be) I'd say it's the thing that takes you from thinking, how many clothes do I need, the answer is n, and turning n into like 10n (or 10 times n). You over plan, over buy, and then have to store all of these clothes that you just don't need. Some of it you bought, some of it friends and family bought and gifted to you, some of it you inherit from other people who've had babies, and some of it will never come out of the wardrobe, or it will be worn once or twice before the baby that was so tiny in it the first time you put it on is now spilling out of it in all directions, and you probably didn't even get a photo for the person who bought it for you. (I had always planned on getting a photo of the baby in each outfit that was bought for them and sending it to the person who bought it, and I have really tried, but I have also lost track of so many of the gifts, because there were a lot and there was a lot going on, obviously!!) 

Now, I know some people will say prioritise the gifts, but even doing that there was still a lot, or don't have them or let them rewear something that has been stained with food or anything else, but particularly when they get to the age little man is at the moment where they are eating purees, some things go on the outfit no matter how many bibs or wipes or anything you use, and then they never come out. And if you choose not to reuse things because that has happened, you'd just be spreading out the amount of things you were getting stains on, because like I said, it happens. There is a reason that some people keep one outfit, or set of outfits for nursery, and it's not just because kids play with glitter and paint and other messy stuff, but because they are messy when they learn to eat. My son was wearing a vest, t-shirt, shorts and a bib for about ten minutes this morning, because he dribbled his porridge down his bid and his shirt (and a tiny bit onto his vest) and smeared his porridge on his shorts, so everything but the vest had to come off, and that was only because I didn't have the energy or motivation to take him upstairs for a tiny wet patch on the vest which would be dry in no time thanks to the current weather, or would get bigger when he dribbled through or around his next bib. Last night, following a rather successful encounter with a pumpkin puree pocket (try saying that three times fast without tripping over the letters...) I had to put the whole baby in the bath because it was everywhere, and that's just where we're at along the weaning journey at the moment, so unless I stick to foods which won't stain (which sound beige and boring) we're probably more likely to be going for multiple changes a day now, even more so than when he was tiny, and I'm fine with that.

But I'm also still finding and packing up his nought to three month clothes and some of the newborn, first size and tiny baby ones as well, including the pram suits and realising that even though pram suits are generous in size so mostly you can wear them a little longer than some of the baby grows of the same size, they're still not in them for long and you don't need three or four to give you time to wash and dry them because they don't get that dirty on every wear, babies don't sweat like adults do in puffer jackets and, most importantly, most baby clothing is actually tumble dryable, so it can get washed and dried in between uses pretty easily, as long as parents can keep their eyes open long enough to run the machines.