clearbluecup

after a blissful week of putting the rest of the world on pause I'm back on my feet and starting to try to get some things done. I began by tackling the previous week's laundry, which was piled up in a mountain of (clean, dry) clothes on the couch. I got halfway through before being called away by the need for feeding, changing and cuddling. that was all I got done for the day.

thankfully there are two adults around so that while one is occupied with feeding, changing and cuddling, the other can run around like a headless chicken trying to sort out doing the dishes, cleaning the birthing pool, getting passport photos taken of beatrice, trying to find that envelope with her birth certificates and all our passports in it. no, I didn't hide it. no, it's not in the filing cabinet. no, it's not beside the nightstand with the other birth documents. oh, there it is. beside the toaster. of course.

but we are all hanging in there. some days are better than others, usually directly related to how much sleep I got the night before. but even on the nights I don't get much sleep I manage to have a nap or two during the day so I get by. beatrice eats every two hours around the clock, which is exhausting but she's gaining weight at a remarkable rate so we must be doing something right.

the movers are booked to come and pack our stuff on the 27th. so we have 21 days to prepare before entering the limbo-land of being homeless while moving. I have no idea how we are going to get everything done, but i'm sure one way or another we will come out the other side in october and start putting the pieces back together again. it's like that thing in star trek, where they dissolve you atom by atom and then put you back together at your destination. if i weren't so tired i could probably remember what it was called.

beam me up, scotty!

my horoscope:

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/sagittarius.html

I wonder what she dreams about.....

since my labour went so fast, I never got to do all the things I thought I would do during my extended 24 hour experience, like bake sourdough (my culture actually died in the days post-birth because we'd all forgotten that it was left out) or take one last belly shot.

so, here I am 10 days post-partum with baby beatrice. I am amazed at the incredible elasticity of my body.

in the last three weeks I've been noticing all the changes in my body and mind as I negotiate the transition from pregnant to not-pregnant, and in mulling them all over I've been trying to find the right way to describe the shift. I have found it difficult to put my finger on it exactly though. the best way I can explain it is as if a warm fuzzy blanket has been removed. while I was pregnant I felt insulated from the world. I was not expected to participate in everything, lift heavy boxes or walk great distances, and I felt protected from my own barbs of anxiety and self-doubt as well as feeling infinitely patient and forgiving with others. now that the blanket has been removed I am noticing old habits creeping back - within the first day I was slouching at the kitchen table again, shoulders hunched and back bent now that I no longer had an enormous belly forcing me to sit up straight. anxiety, impatience and self-doubt all made an appearance again. and after the first week or so I no longer felt like it was ok for me to be a non-participant. the blanket has been removed, and so my warm fuzzy protection is gone but that also means I'm sharper and more active again. I've started thinking about writing, characters from stories and novels I started have reappeared in my mind, and I'm thinking about writing here more as well. It's irionic that when I had the time I didn't really have the inclination to write, and now that I have the inclination I haven't got the time!

we are in full-on moving chaos mode now, alternating days between frantically packing up boxes and trying to visit all our friends one more time before we disappear out of this time and space and reappear on the other side of the world. we decided to pack the non-breakable stuff ourselves to save a bit of money in the moving budget as I felt physically and emotionally able instead of having professional packers do the whole lot in a single day. we were in limerick yesterday visiting friends who just had a baby girl two weeks before we had beatrice. It was amazing to see how the two girls were so similar and yet so completely different, two totally unique individuals already. while talking about my labour experience and getting breastfeeding established I noticed the recurring theme was that it wasn't as difficult as I'd expected. maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe I had expected the worst possible situation, or maybe a bit of both, but I am very thankful that I didn't have a horrifically long and painful labour, didn't suffer cracked and bleeding nipples, didn't (or haven't yet) succumbed to crushing post-partum depression. we had a plan b in case any of those things had happened (like the professional packers) but everything has been going smoothly and we haven't had to use plan b yet. tom asked me today as I was putting my sewing stuff into boxes, "you think we can do this?" "Moving?" I asked. "We're doing it." One day, one hour, one moment at a time we are tackling a seemingly impossible task and doing it.

because I haven't yet put a link to our photo albums on the sidebar I will repost the link HERE. there are lots of new photos including a visit from tom's grandad, a visit we took to andy's in west cork, and yesterday's visit to limerick.

well, we made it.

to anyone I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to properly, I'm very sorry. one of our plan B's in case I wasn't feeling up to dealing with the move was for me to stay in west cork with tom's dad. when it came down to it I was ok with packing clothes & books into boxes, but the thought of standing around with beatrice in my arms while the movers wrapped up the furniture was just too much for me, so I escaped out to andy's from monday night until we left at the crack of dawn on thursday morning.

at 6:15am thursday morning, while shoving the last few bits of laundry and our toothbrushes into the bags, we discovered that louis had dissapeared. tom and andy set out with the box of cat treats in hand to try and capture him, while I changed a dirty diaper and contemplated the possiblity of having to leave louis behind. andy had been giving us a hard time about moving an ordinary "clonakilty cat" across the atlantic, but I think that really he was just sad to see him go and would have really liked to have louis around his place to catch mice and perch on the porch. tom spotted louis and with a shake of the cat treats he was captured once again and we were ready to go. at 6:40am we packed up the car with our 4 large bags, beatrice in her carseat, louis in his case and the stroller wheels on top of it all, and we started up the road to shannon. louis starting mewing immediately, and then pooed in his box within the first half hour or so. I was starting to seriously doubt my decision to bring him at this stage, since he sounded SO miserable and it was only just the beginning of our journey.

the airport experiences were smooth for the most part, despite the delays involved in importing a cat and having to get a work visa issued. we arrived at each gate just as the plane was being boarded, no earlier and no later, which is cutting it a bit close but we were never too close to make it. beatrice was an absolute star the entire time, sleeping through every take off and landing. air hostesses and fellow passengers alike stopped by to coo and exclaim, "what a quiet baby! how old is she?" everyone wants to stop and look at the baby, and it really is a good way to meet people. feeding in public spaces wasn't as embarrassing as I had feared, thanks to a tip from jane - wear a cardigan! I still had to change my clothes once after a milk leakage early on, and beatrice had two changes of clothes after poo blowouts, but we still arrived in vancouver clean and dry so I'm calling it a success anyway.

18 hours later we got into a cab and started driving to our accomodation. this is the only time in my life I've moved back to a city that I used to live in before, and it's been interesting to see what things I recognize and what has changed. some things, like the lights on the north shore mountains, seem eternal. like a constellation that hangs only in the sky above vancouver. other things, like streets full of boutiques, are totally different. yesterday, trying to keep ourselves busy in order to get over jet lag as quickly as possible, we went walking through stanley park. there is a statue on a rock beside the sea wall, and I remarked to tom that the mermaid statue was still there. when we got up close enough to see her and read the plaque, it turned out that she was actually just a girl in a wetsuit. we remember what we want to remember, I think.

anyway, like my experience of labour and delivery, our experience so far of moving has been that it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. beatrice did not cry the entire way. louis did not die of a heart attack in the airplane or jump out the window of the apartment immediately. he did try to crawl in a tiny hole beside the dishwasher, but he hasn't tried to do it since. nobody asked me to stop breastfeeding. and yesterday was REALLY tough (my own jet lag plus a wakeful baby who has slept on the plane for several hours is a bad combination) but we got through it without hurting each other and I feel like a new woman after a good night's sleep.

I know there will still be difficulties ahead. while we were walking around yesterday it really felt like we were on vacation. i kept saying, "we live here!" I remember feeling like that when we arrived in cork, and it took about two weeks for that feeling to go away and when it did it was replaced by an empty feeling that took much longer to pass. but I know to expect it now, and I'm hopeful that it won't take as long for me to make some friends this time around. we actually met a couple with a baby at the sushi place last night, who had the same stroller as us, and parted ways after exchanging emails.

So, in summary: we went through the hole and came out the other side, everyone survivied the journey in one piece and life in vancouver looks hopeful!