And I am sitting here feeling too pregnant to move.

Amelia has gone off to Mini maestroes with my mum leaving a delicious silence in the house. I read some baby star signs the other day and while they said that Librans (Amelia) are sociable, talkative, bright and curious, Geminis (the next one) are even more so. How incredibly exhausting. As somebody who needs quiet and space from time to time I find the idea of constant attention seeking chatter and behaviour terrifying!

We watched the Family Stone the other night which is all about a big family and the big personalities and there was lots of noise and chaos and drama. I quite enjoyed that aspect. I am drawn to the fantasy of a big, noisy chaotic family… some of my favourite books and films are about sprawling, brawling usually slightly bohemian families including I Capture the Castle, Cloud Street, The Royal Tennenbaums, Brother of the more Famous Jack (apart from some of the more outdated and outrageous racist stereotyping), the Boyd Family biography, My Family and Other Animals, Brideshead Revisited to some extent and so on. I have no idea what it is that appeals to me about these narratives. I obviously need to do some more soul-searching and personal insight stuff! Clearly!

But I wonder if it came down to it I could handle being the matriarch of an enormous, constantly jostling family or if it would be just too much noise in my head and I would need to retreat to my hermit-hut and read novels and eat apples for long periods of time. Perhaps there could be a compromise.

Anyway, I thought I might also post some links I have been enjoying – firstly Sarsaparilla, a new group blog which is about “Literature, media, and culture, from Australian points of view” and all of Tania’s inspiration links for April and May (top left sidebar). I am truly inspired!

This morning I had just hobbled and wobbled with my enormous belly out of Amelia’s kinder room and I was staggering through the school back to my car when I had to stop and wait for two little kids to barge through a doorway in front of me. They were probably in prep or grade one but the little boy stopped and said to me

“Hey! Are you a new kid here?”

“Umm – No! I’m a mum!”

“Oh!” he said and they hurried away.

Did he just not see my large girth? My great age? Or even simply my lack of school uniform?

Surely there is no better way to make a large, puffy pregnant woman feel young? Huh?

It made my day! Well, it made me laugh anyway.

Oh what a week it’s been. Not only did we launch Kiddley and incidentally had a lot of late nights, but we all had some of the grumpiest few days I can remember, and then Amelia came down with croup again (perhaps that explains the grumpiness on her part) and now has a doozy of a cold. So life has been busy and as I approach week 38 I have been getting very, very slow. We walked around IKEA today and I could barely manage to get through the carpark at the end. I found some cute linen though so it was all worth it.

The baby’s room still isn’t finished. Dad and Big-P have been working on it over the weekend and keep being bamboozled by annoying little things like patching up spots with the remaining teaspoon of paint from the bottom of the tin, only to find that for some reason it’s much paler than the rest, so another tin needs to be bought from Fitzroy and then another coat painted to even it all out. And then dad attempted to remove the tape from the ceiling only to find that it removes the ceiling paint so that will need to be redone as well. Etc.

I have decided not to finish the quilt until after the baby is born as for the last two weeks I have (for some unknown reason) been completely convinced that we are actually having a boy. If that’s the case then I shall simply extend the quilt further and turn it into something for Amelia’s bed. I know a newborn is hardly going to care whether his quilt is covered in girly motifs or not, but I want this to be a keep sake too. It is my first quilt after all!

So due to sickness, slowness and grumpiness we haven’t been doing a lot of the crafty, fun, experimental activities that we can publish on Kiddley — instead we have been resorting to great finds from the web. We did have one afternoon where we attempted some finger print art but I think it’s important to remember to test the water-proof nature of the ink-pad before unleashing a three year old.

She stamped her fingers, palms, forearms, elbows and chin before we discovered the stuff just does not wash off. She was brightly tinged for days. She did have a lot of fun though, and came up with some lovely designs. That’s Captain Hook down in the left hand corner.

I did end up ordering the Ed Emberley finger print book from Amazon, so I will have to find some water soluble ink pads before we embark on stage two of the project.