Wow he's such a good baby, so sleepy!

Almost 6 months in you would think there would be more to taking care of this new life than constant relief that he is asleep. First, relief that he fell asleep! Then, relief that he stayed asleep after the 45 minute sleep cycle! Constant rechecking of the baby monitor!! 

The obsession I experience with Lucas sleeping well makes me look back at silly old me from Day 1 and ridicule Day 1 Mom's admiration of her newborn baby from the delivery bed: "oh he's so quiet! He's such a good baby! Falls asleep so easily!"

Those nurses must have smirked big time behind my back. I know I would have! (Yet another reason I could never be a delivery nurse) little did ignorant old me know that all newborns are sleepy and quiet. They are just shocked from coming out of the womb. Those first 24 hours when they are in the hospital, you think you have an angel, because all they do is sleep, without any intervention from you. You leave the hospital and all those experienced helping hands and they turn into crying machines that want you to help them sleep. Hahaha

That is why it's always relief to see this:

I can't complain though, my little man is a sleeper. That's all he wants in life.

Times when my baby freaks me out

- At 3am in a dark room lit only by a nightlight, when inlay him on the change table and his eyes pop open, darting about with an expression of sheer terror, as if he's looking past me at some boogie man over my shoulder.

- when fully drunk on milk, and being propped up for a burp, and his eyes roll to the back of his head as if possessed (he's falling asleep)

- RIGHT NOW, having woken up crying from a nap, but with half an hour to go until feeding, with the potential to scream and kick at me until then. That's when I plop him into a swing and avoid eye contact until he does this peaceful angel bit.

On pregnancy

Those nine months dragged on like nothing else and I have mostly forgotten everything from it with only some pretty annoying stretch marks to serve as a reminder of being like this:

I still can't really be bothered to brush my hair though and probably never will again.

New chapter, but still whoa vomit

Ever since March 2007, I have felt like my life was a little bit on hold. I had reached the point at which I had originally intended to leave London, but which really only marked about a quarter of the time I would end up spending as a Londoner. And despite changing jobs and getting married between then and my eventual departure in May 2012, it really felt like my life did not change that much during those five years, and that I was constantly waiting for the move back to Vancouver to trigger that next phase. True, the job change was "big" but I was still a professional working in the same field with my career progressing as I mostly intended. The wedding was a "big" thing to plan but it really did not change our relationship in the slightest. Cheesy as it sounds we had been committed to each other since about week 3 and always knew this was where we would end up.

So, for the longest time, Keith and I lived in a nice little insulated bubble consisting of doing whatever we wanted whenever we wanted. If someone suggested a drink after work, we were game. If we were invited to a wedding in South Africa, we were game, and could turn it into a big holiday complete with game drives and luxury tented cabins. If I wanted a spa weekend with girlfriends, I booked it. If Keith wanted to go to an ale festival on a Wednesday and drink a measly 5 or 6 pints, he did so. And this lifestyle went unchanged for all those years. We were the yuppy young professionals on Northcote Road outnumbered only by the yuppy yummy mummies whose strollers were always blocking our front door.

Now, less than two years later, we seem to be constantly making lifestyle adjustments. First, we moved to Vancouver, and while I had a good support network here, I definitely missed the friends that I was used to seeing once every week rather than once every year. Go figure - people have a tendency to move on with their lives if you live a continent and an ocean apart from them for seven years. And for Keith, it was an entire blank slate to start from - job, friends, hobbies. It wasn't easy, but we did find a groove, and soon Keith's biggest complaint was that he couldn't find any place where he could get bar service (quick and efficient and more condusive to binge drinking) rather than table service (slow and much more likely to result in eating food, which really slows down the inebriation). But as soon as we found that groove, we (ok mostly I) threw another wrench in there and decided to get pregnant. 11 months later, we have a beautiful baby who is almost two months old, and are going through the biggest lifestyle change of our lives. It's a good time to restart the blogging, to document this period for my own memories, because even the reactions I had in the first week or so after Lucas arrived are quickly fading as I move on to the challenges of each next phase.

There's still plenty of whoa vomit, just no longer coming from me, and of the milk rather than the white wine variety.