bread

The (first) week's assignment for my photography course is 'Our Daily Bread'. It took some insomnia to come up with an idea. But it's a good one; I can use it twice!
My dad will retire this November. He's worked for De Hoogovens, now Corus Steel, his entire working life. 47 years! I think that's impressive.
I had already planned to go to IJmuiden/Wijk aan Zee to take some pictures there, for a retirement-gift-idea my mom came up with. Moving that trip forward a little, we went last weekend. So I could use some of the pictures I took for tonight's assignment (not to mention spending a sunny, warm, early-autumn afternoon playing with sand on the beach, with Man & Baby Boy!).
Because Corus provided me, through my dad's hard work, with daily bread for almost 19 years of my life. And then some, on and off. There are still occasional days of bread (and coffee, cookies, and home-cooked meals...) of course, courtesy of De Hoogovens, when we visit my parents.
I sincerely hope to be digesting morsels & crumbs off the Corus table for years and years to come. By means of my dad's well-deserved and hopefully thoroughly enjoyed pension ;-)

juxtaposition

In this house - like I said before - you can eat off the floor.
Which means you can't really 'eat off the floor' as the saying goes.
Which is a bit of a contradiction, seeing that Baby Boy heartily eats off the floor on a daily basis...

sheer brilliance

Just now, Baby Boy said "hé dikke!" ('hey, fatso').
Either that, or he said "Heidegger".
I'm going with 'Heidegger'. I'm calling it early-onset genius.

brave

Finger painting with Baby Boy. Or should I say 'body painting' ;-)
'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. The title just popped into my head. Projection, projection... ;-)
I was called 'brave' on beforehand. And yes, it was. I was ;-)
Two baths later, I think the yellow paint came out of his hair...
:-D

aftermath

Baby Boy was here!

selfservice

Pappa is working late (not home till 11pm!). Mamma has a long day too, consequently. And Baby Boy is his usual self, which means active & baby-babbling away :-) Which is fun :-)
But when mamma needs to express some milk and pappa isn't there to pick up the slack, give the baby a bottle, mamma thinks - mamma knows - Baby Boy can hold the bottle himself for a few minutes.

Baby Boy is lying on the floor, half-heartedly holding the bottle, crying his eyes out. You're the mommy, I'm the baby, ain't no selfservice happening here!
Aw shucks!

fall

Autumn is coming for sure. It's still pretty warm outside, but you can smell it.
The grapes don't appear to care that we did next to nothing to sort out the garden this year...
Having a baby means making choices - & to be fair, letting the garden go a bit wasn't a hard one to make.
I so didn't miss getting my hands dirty ;-)

not okay yet

Baby Boy is 10 months old today. Ten whole months!
And he only drinks a live feed in the morning these days...
I'm okay with that. Which surprises me. One day, a couple of weeks ago, I gave up the struggle of trying to feed live during the day, and it felt like a release. It seems that you really do get to a point where it's okay. Which gives me hope. I hope that I will find myself okay with the idea of the End of Breastfeeding one day. Because that day is coming. I can smell it in the air like I can smell autumn around the corner. And it makes me sad. I'm not okay with that. Yet.
I'm so not okay with it, that I waste way too much precious time on expressing milk during the day, just to keep up production for a good morning feed. And that makes me sad, too.
I'm on a swing here. Part of me thinks I'm mad. That part is getting ready to throw in the towel some day soon. The rest of me isn't. The rest of me is sad. The rest of me wants to keep on breastfeeding forever. It wants Baby Boy to stay small, be cute & drink a live feed.
I know the rest of me isn't very realistic. A tad dramatic. Very sweet, but a bit away with the fairies. But part of me loves the rest of me, and the rest of me wins. For now.
It will last until it's okay to stop.

tv

Man was not too impressed just now. Baby Boy said "Pappa!" to a telivised Gordon Brown...

Edit: I'm sure there are implications for me, here, too. But I'm not willing to explore them. It's too scary.

etsy

I designed and ordered this stamp for - well, pretty much all my papercraft projects :-) I'm well-impressed by how it turned out! & it's only an inch in diameter! & it wasn't even very expensive at all!

I recommend this Etsy shop if you have any stamp needs! And I recommend Etsy in general if you are looking for an original gift idea, handmade by someone else (or you could shamelessly copy. Although I would never come right out and recommend that in black on blue in public, of course. Let alone that I would ever do such a thing...)! I also recommend Etsy for you to browse in a lost moment, just to see what people come up with and create! Love the concept of this online marketplace!
& no, I'm not getting paid by Etsy. Honest to your Higher Power, they don't even know I blog.

cold

From watching too many Detectives, Thrillers, and other edifying death-related television shows, you get the feeling only dead bodies spend time in the morgue... Not so: Michael Jackson did, too. He was buried last night. That means he spent the past 11 weeks in one of those drawers.
That really does send shivers down my spine!

(Don't even get me started on burials. I saw 'Return of the Living Dead' at a way-too-tender age - I was 10, I think - and have never gotten over it, really...)

itch

Paper is more my scene than fabric, really. Well, not when it comes to what to wear, so much ;-) But when it comes to crafting, I feel much more comfortable posting about my paperwork; I'm a Paper Girl!

I'm using all kinds of scrapbook-like techniques when working on Baby Boy's photo book (which is probably why I have only just finished his first month...), but I'm too cheap to buy all kinds of bells & whistles. You can spend several paychecks on what's out there - it's unbelievable what they come up with; new stuff every day! I do enjoy looking around online & 'real life' craft shops for ideas, but to be honest, I don't even want to buy most of the embellishments that are available. I enjoy creating my own. I suppose you could say I'm actually scrap-booking ;-)

A couple of months ago, I discovered - all on my own! - that newspaper covered in acrylic paint is really cool to work with. You can see the print shine through if you don't lather the paint on too thickly. I used this flower, and others, in a collage, in BB's photo book and on a handmade card.

A few weeks ago, I sort of felt like I should make something again, as opposed to drooling over what other people get up to. Surfing the net, which is how many creative plans get conceived over here, I stumbled upon this beautiful newspaper snowflake garland tutorial. Don't ask me how I got there, suffice to say, I was spending too much time 'shopping around' again (trust me, you can click-read-click your life away quite easily) ;-)

But it was time, I felt the itch - I decided to celebrate Baby Boy's first official word by creating a newspaper garland with sheep, hearts & stars, along with a matching card :-)

I'm not much impressed with my photographic skills on this one, but I do like how this little project turned out (click the picture to enlarge, you'll get a better look that way!) :-D

train

Calling me 'mamma' is still in its infant shoes, as is Baby Boy. I know I blogged he picked up the pace, but that was then - way back then...
Since then, BB has started calling anything humanoid 'pappa'. At times questioningly, mostly quite convincedly.

Last week, I decided to visit my parents. Just on a spur. Which really was (and still is!) something to be impressed by. It meant taking Baby Boy in his sling and a huge backpack full of his stuff onto a train, changing trains in Amsterdam, and onward. 2 hours door-to-door, approximately. It seemed like a huge mountain to climb on beforehand, but while I was absolutely wrecked when I got off the train to meet my parents, it hadn't been as much of a challenge as I'd envisioned.

Sweetened by pieces of bread and a bottle of diluted applejuice, Baby Boy had been a dream! He looked alternately out of the window and at the people in or entering the carriage, calling everyone, invariably, "pappa!".

priorities

Baby Boy knows what's important in life.

"I'm in my favourite recliner (pappa), got the remote, got my booze, all's well with the world!"

monster

I finally found out what this is. And it's a bit of an anti-climax.
My parents have an ancient paper encyclopaedia. And under 'beetles', there it is. Apparently, it's so common, that it features in the only picture accompanying the beetle-entry, comprising about 15 drawings of beetle species (considering that 30-40% of all insects are beetles, that's not a lot). Now that I know what it is, I have googled it. It is said to be so wide-spread in European gardens, that I can't believe no one I showed it to has ever seen one before! It's not like it's tiny to the naked eye or something. The encyclopaedia is rather exact about it; it measures 2.9 cm. But hey, that was back in 1975 (as I said, the encyclopaedia is ancient). I'm pretty sure this one - and the one that passed through Tuesday a week ago, because once you see one, apparently, you see all! - was much bigger. At least, and I say at least, 3.1 cm.

It's a devil's coach horse beetle. Which does juice up my imagination. More so than its Dutch name, which is, literally translated, the smelly short-shield beetle. It's not poisonous, but its bite can be painful. Poor Baby Boy...

& did he learn a valuable lesson? No, he didn't. This is him trying to lift the glass off last week's visitor (before you worry, my hand is firmly on top of the glass, taking the picture with the other hand, doing what a mother does best: multitasking!).

Anyway. Mystery solved!

sick

We all have serious colds over here.
It started with Baby Boy, and that left me wondering what he caught when I didn't...
I shouldn't have. And anyway, with the type of hugs & kisses BB lavishes on me @ times, there was no way I wasn't going to catch it, too ;-)

A day or three ago, it was only Baby Boy who was leaking from all orifices. And he looked droopy. And we felt really sorry for him. Poor little mite! He was wearing a t-shirt which said 'STOER', which means 'cool'. But he wasn't cool - at least not where 'cool' isn't a superlative for 'cold'... So I went out and bought a baby nose spray. Which didn't really help him much.

Yesterday, I started feeling sick. And sorry for myself, too... Baby Boy is feeling slightly better, which is a good thing, because I have found out I'm no Mamma of the Year when feeling off-ish... Somehow, spending large chunks of time on the floor is the first pass-time to go off the schedule when I'm leaking and feeling like I'm fraying at the edges.

This morning I decided to use Baby Boy's nose spray for myself. I hadn't been feeling well enough to go out and buy my own (yes, I know, you're bringing out your violin...), and seeing that it wasn't doing much for him anyway, I decided to live dangerously & disregard the warning on the packaging leaflet ('Never use someone else's nose spray'. At 4 euros a spray, I would say that, too, if I was the manufacturer).
It was on the chest of drawers in a darker corner of the living room. Next to the synthetic oxytocin I had been using for breastfeeding. I have used a score of different aids to keep breastfeeding, but that is a long, and different story. I remember thinking earlier, to make sure I pick up the right spray. Which, of course, I didn't at 05.30 in the morning, feeling clogged and sorry for myself. Serves me right. I took three hefty squirts. Then looked down at the brown vial of oxytocin in my hand. And was left clogged. With serious let-down reflexes in both breasts...
Oxytocin is not a cold medicine.

long time...

... no blog!
But when you know your two-and-a-half readers have other things on their minds (and rightly so), and you go on a little holiday of sorts yourself, there isn't much pressure to put out.
Added to that the fact that I want to do too many things in too little time, blogging takes a serious backseat, and I prove to myself once again that I'm not sure this is my scene...

But I'm here now :-D Let's see if it sticks ;-)