Brokety broke

/ Renae / Leave a comment

Okay, so we’re not broke. Far from it. But we drew up a new budget the other night and there really isn’t as much wiggle room as we were expecting, on a week-to-week basis. Hubs and I have been looking forward to this year for over 2 years (since I stopped working) as we would be, as we called it, “raking it in.” Turns out it’s not so much “raking” as it is slowly collecting in small amounts and seeing the money leave as fast as it’s coming in.

I think we were kind of kidding ourselves and it is finally hitting home that the next few years are really going to be (slow) building years. We are only on one salary, and a starting salary at that. People kept suggesting we were getting ahead of ourselves with all the excitement, but we couldn’t help it.

I know it’s really counterproductive, but I keep having thoughts of “if we were in Wang things would be so much better.” I happen to be fairly certain that if we had stayed in Wang, our thoughts would have been “we really should have moved somewhere different this year.” Well, maybe I would have thought that. But we would have been heaps better off financially (without having to move, and paying substantially less rent); I feel I would have been happier around my friends in Wang and closer to our Melbourne “family”; we wouldn’t be being harassed by our real estate agent (they are getting rude and nasty and we are fed up); Hubs wouldn’t have shingles; (oh yeah, Hubs has shingles and has had to stay home all week) and Hubs would have gotten more favourable rotations.

And maybe I wouldn’t be biting my nails again. Dammit.

But Wang was never offered, so there’s no point dwelling. I know that in a few years time, with some self-control and sticking to the budget, we can meet our financial goals. We just expected to be more comfortable earlier than that. But it will happen. Now that we have the budget I feel better about things already. I function much better when I have boundaries with spending, and we haven’t had that the last few months.

Sorry for the big whine. I guess I’m not quite over it just yet…

Jumping back in

/ Renae / Leave a comment

Hubs and I invested a lot of time and money in to setting up our cloth nappy collection for Chanbe, and I loved using them. I really did. The extra washing very quickly became a part of life, and it wasn’t that much extra effort. When I broke my foot a year ago, we decided (I decided) to give myself (mum) a break from the “extra work” and vowed to go back to them soon.

Then when we moved back to Wang, I started using them again but found it to be the straw that was destined to break my back (or spirit, as it were.) And that was that. I never went back to them.

Until now.

It has taken me a few weeks of adjustment with Quinn, but I realised a few weeks ago that I was excited by the prospect of using them with Quinn, and even starting to use them again with Chance, to try and see if that will make him more interested in using the toilet. (Making him uncomfortable in the nappy 😉 )

So today was day one, and don’t she just look a treat?

Next step? Nappies for Chance. That may take a bit more convincing on his part, but as I said, I’m excited!

Wifey!? Awayoo??

/ Renae / Leave a comment

“Awayoo? “That’s how Chanbe says “where are you?”

So here I am! Life is cruising along without too much to report. Well, not much interesting at least. Until today!

This is Hubs’ 3 day weekend, and after we got reprimanded by the real estate agent for the state of the garden*, I suggested that we spend some time on it this weekend. This is after I got a quote from a gardening business to prune and spray for $550. Granted, there is a lot of pruning to be done, but we have better things to spend our money on! (Here comes a tangent!)

Like things at garage sales. As well as gardening this weekend, I suggested we hit the garage sales for drawers for the office (mainly for my crafty and sewing stuff), bookshelves, a cot, and Hubs is always on the lookout for tools and lego. We cleaned up big time! We went to almost a dozen places over 2 suburbs, and I couldn’t have been more proud of Chance. He is very much in to doing everything we do, and doing things himself (“Chance do iiiiiiiittttt”) but we didn’t want to take him out at every place, so Hubs would go and do a reccy and decide if it was worth us all getting out. We probably all got out at half of them, and the other half I trusted Hubs’ judgement. And he was so well behaved in and out of the car. A very proud day for us 🙂

So, what did we score? Well. We got 2 lovely, pine tall boys for $50 each, complete with slidey drawers!! I assured Hubs that this was an absolute steal, though he wasn’t as convinced. I plan to use these in the kids’ rooms, and use the dodgy flat-pack ones that are currently in there for the crafty stuff. We also picked up a tent for $75 that retails for $500 new. It’s a few years old but has only been used a few times and looks like new. Very excited about that too. We should probably go camping some time!

I sent Hubs back to pick up the second tall boy and check out a garage sale that started at 12noon (weird!!) and he rang me from there, very excited, as he had found a work bench and a bunch of tools. So he brought that home and has left again to pick up the other tall boy and the tent. We also picked up random crafty stuff, a wooden train for Chanbe, and some kids camping chairs (for FREE!!)

Lucky we are getting paid this week!! I plan to do lots of reorganising around the house in the next week or so, and hopefully have the rest of our stuff unpacked and sorted by next weekend. The only things we are still missing are a cot and some bookshelves, so I’m afraid the 5 boxes of books will remain packed at this stage. But we are getting there!

Oh, and we might actually get some gardening done at some stage as well……

(Random cute photo to keep you coming back!)

*I wouldn’t mind so much, except we have had outstanding maintenance requests since we moved in, 2 months ago, and have had to deal with 4 different agents from the same place because of staff turnover, and have had to resubmit the requests each time, as they have gotten “lost”. So yeah, my feelings about how renters get treated by certain real estate agents hasn’t changed.

Call the Waaaambulance

/ Renae / Leave a comment

The last year, as I have documented frequently on this blog, has been tough for me. This time last year I broke my foot, and that pretty much set the tone for the following 12 months. Well, I let it set the tone. I have been quite caught up in how hard my life is, except that it’s not. Not really. I think when your (well-meaning) family and friends (and strangers!) tell you how hard it must be to move around so much, especially when 36 weeks pregnant; to start again in a new town; for Hubs to be starting a new job etc etc etc, it’s hard not to accept the sympathy and empathy and get caught up in the drama of it all.

Hubs and I make choices, and sometimes those choices come with extra challenges, but the pay-off is worth it. We have had such wonderful experiences with each move we have made, and I can quite confidently predict that the same will be said of this move. We have already made some friends through the hospital, and  have plans for more social events coming up.

I don’t want to make light of feeling overwhelmed with a new baby, but if I really think about it, I can feel those feelings and work through them and come out the other side much quicker than in the last year. I will accept help when it is offered, and I will let myself feel whatever I’m feeling, but I am also committing to focusing on the positives; to taking each day (and sometimes each hour) as it comes, and to know that, when it has taken me an hour and a half of trying to get Chanbe to go to sleep during the day, and he is still awake, that it’s okay if he skips a sleep that day, and that “this too shall pass.” I’m committing to less “whining” and more “beering” and “spiriting”.

Onwards and upwards.

This is the story, of a lovely lady

/ Renae / 6 Comments

Quinn’s birth story. (G Rated. Mostly 🙂 )
It all started Friday lunch time, when I wasn’t feeling so great, so I took myself off to the hospital to get checked out. Before I knew it, they were telling me I was having the baby that night. They wanted to induce me asap because of suspect blood results (that turned out to be probably nothing!) It was 2pm by this stage, and everything was happening very quickly. Frith, who was due to finish work that day around 4pm, came over to the birth suite and we realised that this was “it”. Funnily enough, even though I was over 40 weeks, I didn’t feel prepared! 
The doctors tried to break my waters, and even though they weren’t entirely successful, it was enough to get me started. I was having contractions without the syntocinon drip (the fake hormone stuff they give you to induce labour) but it wasn’t good enough for the doctors to be happy, so once Frith arrived after 4, they started the drip. Because I was induced with Chance as well, I knew what was coming, so by 5pm I asked for the eipdural and the anaesthetist arrived around 6pm. At 6:30pm, with Colin Hay’s song “Overkill” playing in the background, the epidural was put in and relief was on the way. Or so I thought. Although it took away a lot of the pain, it wasn’t a full block, and I still felt every contraction in a certain spot, so I just kept sucking on the gas. Man that’s good stuff! 🙂
I laboured this way for another couple of hours, and when they examined me around 9pm, I was told I was fully dilated and it was time to push. I had topped up my own epidural a couple of times, so I was quite numb, but very happy to push! About 20 minutes and 7 pushes later, our little baby girl sprung into the world. She was completely perfect and fed within 45 minutes of being born. And she hasn’t stopped since!!
I was immediately in love. Because we had picked out the name “Quinn Maria” (this was the inspiration for her first name, and this for her middle name) for Chance if he was a girl, I have had the last 2 years to get used to the name and have looked forward to the possibility that one day I might have a daughter named Quinn. 
I have had “the weepies” a bit more than expected, but my hormones and moods are starting to balance out a bit now, except of course at 5am when my newborn is fast asleep and my toddler is wanting “bekfest”. But as I said, we’re getting there. 

Week 1

/ Renae / 3 Comments

I have spent a longer-than-usual time in tears in the last week, but if you asked me how things are going with our new baby, I would tell you things are great! Because they are. The tears were due to a combination of hormones – the 4 day blues were quite brutal and lasted a few days – extreme pain from my milk coming in, and exhaustion from dealing with Chanbe’s response to Quinn’s arrival.

Now, not much can be done about the hormones, so I just went with it and let myself bawl my eyes out for hours on end if I needed it. It was therapeutic. I wasn’t crying over anything in particular, and I wasn’t actually particularly sad, but I was in pain.

When my milk comes in, my milk. comes. in. (You don’t mind me talking about this, do you? Good. 🙂 ) I had the same problem with feeding Chanbe. My milk came in and it had nowhere to go. It was painful for a couple of days and I got some excellent help and advice from the lactation clinic in Wang, and all was well very quickly. Not so much this time around. My milk came in Sunday night, and it wasn’t until yesterday that things started to regulate. By Tuesday night I was fully engorged (yes, that’s as bad as it sounds) with a rack that would rival Pamela Anderson. I can’t remember the last time I was in that much pain, and I had just given birth a few days before!! That was until Wednesday, which was even worse. All I could do was take pain killers, lie on the couch with ice packs and cry. It was truly painful. The thing is, it’s a blessing to have such a great milk supply, so it’s not a bad problem to have, except for in those first few days. But with some help from lactation consultants up here, (and the pain killers) I’m feeling much more human now.

And then there’s Chanbe. My beautiful boy whose world has been turned upside-down. Not only is he dealing with another house move, moving into his “big boy bed”, and being introduced (very very slowly) to the “big boy toilet”, he now has to share his Mama and Dadda, as well as his Gran, Grumpy, Ouma and Poppy with this tiny little squirmy baby that can’t even play with him. 90% of the time, he is brilliant with her. He loves to give her cuddles, he knows not to touch her when she is feeding, and he knows to be gentle with her. Then there’s the rest of the time. The time that all the textbooks warned me of. This, combined with him not wanting to go to sleep without me in his bedroom has made for a tough week.

We have a few strategies in place for when he gets a little, um, shall we say “over excited” with Quinn, but we don’t yet have a plan to get his going to sleep habits back in check. But we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. In the mean time, we’ll be enjoying a lot of this:

And this:
And definitely this:

It’s a girl

/ Renae / 6 Comments
Quinn Maria was welcomed into the family Friday 1st February at 9:21pm weighing 4.05 kg (8lb15) and 52.5 cm long. She is absolutely gorgeous – she looks very much like Chance did when he was born!
She’s feeding really well and Chance is already completely in love with his little sister. Thank you for your thoughts and wishes.

Come fly with me

/ Renae / Leave a comment

There is so much I want to tell you about Chanbe’s “big boy bed”, but first of all, let me show you:

Oooooooh yeeeaaaahhhhhhh. When Hubs and Uncle Ben told me they wanted to make Chanbe a “big boy bed” 3 days after we arrived in Towsnville, I was skeptically supportive, wondering when it might be finished, and how much of a “big boy” he would be once he actually got in to it. Well, I was proven wonderfully wrong. Just over a week ago, the bed was flown in from the work area, and it has been an absolute hit. Chanbe has slept in it almost every night and day, with a few exceptions, but we are very proud of this milestone.

There are dozens of “in progress” photos that I hope to one day share with you, or better yet, let Hubs (finally) do a guest post about!!

And hopefully we’ll have some baby news for you soon. I’m officially 40 weeks now (well, depending on who you ask) so, literally, any day now!

Happy birthday to me!

/ Renae / 1 Comment

Today is my 30 + gst birthday. Nothing much is really going on – we had a rough night with Chanbe for some reason, so my plans to do more unpacking (no I still haven’t finished!!!) have not come to fruition. I am treating myself to daytime air con which I normally don’t do at home. It’s making sitting on the couch somewhat more comfortable.

I am 38 weeks + 2 days pregnant, so really, any day now something could happen, although after my appointment on Wednesday, and if Chanbe is anything to go by, this baby ain’t budging until absolutely necessary. And even though I’m still surrounded by damn boxes that I can’t shift, I feel quite settled and at home. We still have a couple of big ticket items to purchase (mainly a dining table and chairs, and a desk for the office) but otherwise we are mainly set. I’ve done the ooohing and aaahing over the teeny tiny baby clothes and nappies; my hospital bag is packed, I’ve made extra meals that I’ve put in the freezer, and I feel ready for this baby.

I actually feel quite zen about the whole thing. Sure, I could focus on the messy house, the incessant itching of my arms possibly caused by cholestasis, the continuous pregnancy-related heartburn that keeps me up at night, my big fat fingers and toes, and the fact that gravity fights me every time I want to stand up, but who wants to hear all that? They are all temporary glitches that will be a thing of the past in a matter if weeks.

Right now, it’s all about the air con, breakfast for lunch, ice cold water (the only drink that doesn’t give me heartburn) and time with my boys. Happy birthday to me 🙂