This past week has been kicking my butt. Pregnant & tired. Pregnant and too many appointments. Too many appointments causing me to have to work tighter hours at work, subsequently affecting how much 'downtime' I get during the day, or like yesterday, affecting if I get to eat breakfast before noon (although that was completely my fault as I forgot I had a meeting that AM). As soon as my blood sugar drops I basically hit the wall of exhaustion. The other day I managed to get Walter to bed and then disappeared into the bath for an hour with a diet cola, packet of crisps, and a murder mystery. It was heaven.
Maybe it's the special grace given to pregnant ladies, or married ladies, or maybe it's just because even with the tiredness & packed schedule things are still a big emotional improvement over the past year, but I've actually been able to notice all the awesome things that David does (normally I don't notice, because I'm not very observant, and then people have to point them out to me). The man is amazing, but at the same time no less than what I expected when I married him. So it's really got me thinking about all the negative expectations people seem to have about men.
I have a husband who can cook, clean, and more than competently look after a baby. I'm grateful, very grateful, but I also feel sad that people who don't know us that well always enviously tell me that I'm lucky, or look taken aback when I don't join in on complaining about how useless my other half is. I'm beginning to see why David gets so insulted that the prevailing attitude among those who don't know us seems to be that since he's a guy all he's really good at is watching sports and scratching his ass...
My point? Go tell your husband how much you appreciate him. And then go tell the world. Because at least among the guys I know, there are a lot of good ones who know how to be a true partner. I'm tired of being told that "most men aren't like that". If they're not, then they damn well should learn how to be... so let's start building our guys up.
I was thinking about stereotypes when I typed the above. Then I realised that I'm barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen... In my defense, I don't have a desk so I'm using the kitchen table, and we don't wear shoes indoors. But still.
Walter's doing amazing with his solids. He likes to eat what mummy & daddy eat, whether or not it gives him "tummy ache" when he goes to bed, and if I'm in the kitchen he is pretty much guaranteed to whine at my feet until I give him food. When I have time to be responsible, I try to give him cut up banana. The rest of the time I resort to baby biscotti:
The commute to work is giving me lots of time to read, which was the one thing lacking in post-baby-delivery life. David's been loading me up with old murder mysteries (like Murder on the Orient Express and A Man Lay Dead), whilst the free books I can get for my Kindle off of Amazon & the Gutenberg Project are introducing new authors to me (the best so far is Grant Allen). It's so nice to have time to read again, and it means that I can usually transition fairly easily from a busy work day to a demanding Walter thanks to the 45 minutes of peace & quiet on the bus.
Life is a bit too chaotic to get my Quick Takes out on Friday. By chaotic I mean that I now count Walter crawling around on the kitchen floor and eating up the crumbs that he finds as part of his weaning plan, because letting him learn to feed himself that way is just easier than trying to find time to do it in a typical "this is my first child and I'm middle class so I read books and over-plan everything" sort of way... you know, the stuff I had time to do before I had an actual baby. I should mention that the crumbs are on the floor because we let him feed himself while we eat (it's a good distraction), and his current method is to cram as much food as possible in both fists and then spill it down his front/hide it in his clothing/store it on the floor for later. On the plus side, at least my floors are getting a regular cleaning (both from the human-hoover and from the need to sweep them constantly if I want to avoid wading through a sea of crumbs).
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