Last week of winter, last week of work. Today there is a last minute scramble to get things done and scrambling is getting harder the slower I get. But it’s going to feel so great to go to bed tonight after a long bath and think “no more clients for at least three months!” – actually I should point out that my clients have almost all been amazing and wonderful ever since I got into this illustration thing. Web design clients?— well…some of them are ok too…

I am slowing down drastically… walking up hill takes me twice as long, turning over in bed requires concerted effort and attention and bending down to pick anything up off the floor is a very interesting maneuver. I too am so looking forward to getting my old body back and to wearing a normal pair of jeans and a top that floats gently down rather than stretches to the max around my amazing extremities.

The weather is slowly ticking towards spring – blossoms and blue skies, sunlight when we wake and a little more as we cook dinner. I have been looking towards this spring all year and now I can’t believe that it’s almost here. New beginnings and all that. My focus for so long has been my work – producing, improving style, networking, keeping up motivation levels and marketing. Suddenly all that is going on hold. I am quite relieved to let it all go for a while, to just relax and not feel the ongoing pressure to keep up the energy. But then I wonder how on earth I am going to manage to shut down that part of my brain. Is it going to be like when I would finish a round of exams at school and then collapse into a pile of exhaustion and have a big “what now?” slump that seemed to last the whole Summer? I am hoping that’s just a teenage kind of thing, but I fear not. Perhaps I will have a sudden flush of creative motivation egged on by the fact that none of it needs to be attached to the idea of earning money or furthering my career. I have a few ideas brewing that might one day see the light of day… perhaps when the small unborn child turns out to be a miracle sleeper. First things first; Next week I plan to make gingerbread men, and we’ll go from there.

While sitting up in bed sipping coffee yesterday morning I read some of a baby book (“Baby Love” – by Robin Barker) which gave me a comprehensive list of everything I will need and am yet to get in preparation for the grand arrival. I have already filled the baby’s room with boxes and bags of stuff – the pram is there, the crib is there, the baby bath, the clothes, the bunny rugs, the soft toys and so on, but there are all the little things that I would never even have thought of still left to gather. The list is seemingly endless:
blunt ended nail scissors, cot sheets, waterproof cover for pram, nappy buckets, power point covers, baby soap, baby bag, cotton wool balls, mattress for crib, night light etc etc.

Plus I still also need stuff for hospital and labour (pjs, snacks, heat packs, earplugs, film). I think I am in denial a little about the whole experience and delaying the big bag pack is just another way of hanging on to some idea that this is all just bloat.

While I was reading this, Big-P was sipping his coffee and reading about another adventure into the unknown in “The Dig Tree” by Sarah Murgatroyd. This is an account of the legendary Australian explorers Burke and Wills journey into the desert to find out what there was to be found in the middle of Australia. Their preparation list was also seemingly endless:
“Eight tonnes of food, six tonnes of fire wood, 200 kilograms of medications for the camels and horses and enough ammunition to win a small war… a large bathtub, an oak and cedar table with two oak stools… forty five yards of gossamer for fly veils…two sets of field glasses, two watches and only twelve water bottles”.

While I don’t think I will have as much as 20 tonnes of equipment I have a week peppered with shopping trips coming up.

Saturday night we had some folks over for dinner and Big-P impressed everyone with pizzas – the guest’s choice of toppings on top of incredibly good home made dough. There was much munching and much talk about Big-P retiring and opening a pizza restaurant.

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day on the couch feeling sluggish due to the onset of a late winter cold. This cold (and probably due to an incredibly wiggly baby) also prevented much sleep last night so I spent a couple of hours around 4am back on the couch watching Tony Robbins infomercials. At 4am Tony Robbins almost convinced me to spend five easy payments of $49.95 to get his Personal Power II tapes. But not quite. That’s some equipment I really don’t need right now, although Burke could have probably used them well.

PS. Please don’t send me any emails saying I don’t need any of this stuff – and that a baby will be fine in a bottom drawer / clothes basket wrapped up in an old towel. It’s not what I want to hear right now.

For the last few weeks our lights have been flickering a little which initially we put down to the weather (high winds, heavy rain) and then to power surges as the heating went on and off. Then we started having little blackouts. I would put a light on in the kitchen and it would immediately go out but then come back on again, we get up in the morning and the microwave time display would be flashing 00:00 meaning the power had cut out during the night and so on. Occasionally it occurred to me that we might be experiencing something serious enough to start an electrical fire – one of those scary fires that starts in the ceiling so that you don’t even know about it until it’s way too late.

So Wednesday I decided to do the responsible thing and email the land agent to report it as a fault. And then around 11am I went to make a cup of tea – switched on the kettle and all the power through out the whole house zapped out. I waited fifteen minutes and still no power.

I went to call the landlord to say “emergency! please help!” but the phone was dead when I picked up the receiver — ahh yes — you need power to work these fancy-pants phones we have. No phone, no electricity, no car, legs that don’t work very well… I almost dissolved right there and then in a pool of self-indulgent misery.

So I put on my walkin’ shoes and hobbled up to our local shops in search of a phone box. I couldn’t find one anywhere and I was beginning to worry that my legs would give up altogether so I staggered into the local butcher to ask him if he knew where the nearest public phone could be found. Brett (“The Incomparable” according to his window blind) who knows me and knows my mum even better cleaned the meat globules off his phone and I got to tiptoe around behind the counter and out the back through the hanging carcasses to call my Mum. Whaaa!

To cut a long story shorter… back at home, after having gone to my parents to call all relevant parties (land agents, electricians etc) I sat around in the cold and dark doing a little cross stitch until I couldn’t make the stitches out as the sun set while various electricians came and went examining switches and metres. Finally we discovered that the cable to the house had melted through and burnt out completely at the point where it meets the house at the meter and it had started to burn away at the wood. No wonder I could smell wood smoke just outside our front door every now and then. The electrician who discovered this told me the “big trucks” would have to come to fix this and that might take another few hours… Big-P arrived home from work and we got take-away pasta for dinner while we huddled around a couple of pathetic little ornamental candles, stomping our feet to keep warm and having a conversation rather than watching TV as we ate. We had to leave for our first parenting and childbirth class at 7pm so Mum and Dad very kindly came and sat in the dark to wait for the big trucks for us.

When we got home all power was back on and apparently the men in the big trucks said that it is a very lucky thing that we don’t live in a timber home, and Mum said she was sure she overheard them saying how “lethal” it was. Scary stuff.

The parenting and childbirth class at our hospital was pretty good – lots and lots of people there all due at the same time as me so I hope I get a birthing suite and don’t have to deliver in a corridor. Big-P and I had to introduce ourselves, tell everyone what our occupations are and what are hobbies are. While everyone around us had hobbies like football, stafordshire bull terrier breeding, water skiing, racing cars, hunting, carpentry and so on, we realised that we didn’t have any hobbies that we could just announce to the room like that. “Ummm, browsing the internet and ummm, writing about my life on my website” would sound a little freaky to this footballing, dog breeding crowd, I’m sure. So apart from looking like the lamest couple in the room it was an informative and even entertaining evening. We discussed how to tell when you really go into labour and saw lots of demonstrations of weird, filthy dolls being pushed through plastic pelvises. There was even a knitted pink womb and couple of purple placentas as props just like in Kaz Cooke’s pregnancy book “Up The Duff”.

We have five more of these classes to go and by then we will be experts. Apparently I should have already packed my bag for hospital incase of early labour. I better go out and get some decent pajamas.

Today I had to pay the next month’s rent. That means we have been in this new house for a month… where does the time get to?

We had another crazy busy couple of days which ended with us flopping into bed on Sunday night and declaring to one another that we had a good weekend. Saturday we attended Tiny-Small’s first birthday. There were thousands of people there and a cake that looked like a train and balloons and gifts and fairy bread! Tiny-Small seemed to appreciate the cards more than the gifts themselves – I wonder how long that will last? Not only did we attend the party but I drove us there. That’s a lot of driving down unfamiliar routes and through parts of town that were chock full of traffic. On the way there I did ok – only scaring Big-P just a little bit twice. I got to the party and had to sit in a corner, exhausted, for a couple of hours. After I felt a wee bit better, we sang happy birthday and then we set off again and I discovered that driving when one is feeling tired and incredibly vague can be a dangerous thing. I scared Big-P a little bit twice and I scared both of us a large bit twice as well. I didn’t actually hit anything but I came awfully close.

I had to keep saying in an outraged voice “How is it that people like me can get their license?!”. Big-P thinks I am being awfully hard on myself and he probably got tired of hearing me moan about being a terrible driver for the rest of the weekend, but there should be some other plate that gets put on the car after obtaining a license. When you are learning you get an L-plate which basically says “stay out of my way, I am likely to be erratic and dangerous” but then as soon as you get your license you get a p-plate which stays on your car for three years and says something like “get out of my way, I am an 18 year old male and I drive like a freaking maniac”. There should be a plate that says “I have just got my license, and that was by the skin of my teeth, so you should stay well back, and do NOT under any circumstances sit in a lane beside me because the concept of sticking to my lane is still beyond me”.

But I didn’t do too badly really. I just have a lot to keep learning.

Sunday consisted of cleaning, cooking and caulking. Big-P has filled every single tiny gap in the kitchen with poly filler in hopes of keeping the hoards of ants at bay. And he cooked bread again – this time with olives in it. It’s true love, baby.