I suspect my blogging ability may have fallen victim to creativity atrophy. It’s been more than 4 weeks since I last blogged. I know this because we took Aidan for his second round of vaccinations this week. The vaccination dates are 4 weeks apart and the last post I wrote was in part inspired by a very grumpy baby one day after his first round of vaccinations, though I hadn’t realized that was the cause at the time. Somehow if felt very personal when he didn’t want to feed, but I know better this time.

I didn’t want this blog to be a journal. It was intended to be a place to exercise my creative juices. I knew I would be drawing posts from personal experience, but I was hoping to present that experience in such a way as to make it an adventure or maybe a reflection, not just an account. Lately I have found that I can’t produce much other blow-by-blow accounts of my experiences with motherhood, so I haven’t gotten round to putting any posts to keyboard. The problem is, the longer I leave it, the worse it gets.

I read many journal type blogs, and I enjoy them, but that just isn’t what I had planned for my little space of the interwebs. I was going be a writer. I was going to produce something that was practice for the novel I want to write one day, the best-seller that will free me from the 9 – 5 and allow me to pay off the mortgages of my family. I suspect my family will have paid off their mortgages the hard way before I produce a best seller, but hey, we all need a dream, right?

So, lets just get back on the horse shall we? The longer I wait for creative juices to return, the less likely that becomes. What you’ve missed while I’ve been away:

- Aidan is now 12 weeks old, 6.85 kg’s and 62 cm’s long. He has blue eyes, chubby cheeks and a button nose. He loves his hands, he tries to stuff both of them in his mouth at once. He does a technical ‘sleep through’ on occasion: 6 hours between feeds, once a night. It doesn’t feel like a sleep through to me. He’s a happy friendly guy who still manages a smile even when his tummy hurts or he’s waging internal wars on nasty vaccine gogga’s.

- I’m still in the worst shape of my life. I can hide it enough so that people remark that I must have lost all my baby weight, but I know the truth. 4 stubborn kg’s still to go, but so much more work to be done to put things back in their correct places.

- I’ve been back on a few horses a few times, but my own only once. He was reasonably behaved, but time hasn’t worked any miracles, he’s still the same nutty creature he was 10 months ago.

- We’ve celebrated our first Christmas as a family, but the spirit was missing. I’m not sure what went wrong. I suspect that Hunny & I have both realized that Christmas no longer belongs to us anymore, but Aidan was too young yet to appreciate it, so it kinda slipped through the cracks. But lest you think we are terrible parents, we did buy him presents and entertain him excitedly tearing off the wrapping paper on his behalf.

- Hunny’s spider bite, remember that? It’s finally healed. It took six and a half months, regressions caused by infections, and several roles of plaster gauze and granuflex, but at last it is done. The scar looks like a bullet wound scar.

- I graduated from my part time studies, top of my class. Proof that you don’t have to succumb to baby brain.

We have had an extraordinarily blessed year, and for that we are most thankful. Thank you God for being there in the bad times and the good times too, even if we forget you then sometimes.

Merry Christmas everyone!

At least once a week one disappointed person a week gets here looking for brown recluse spider bites and photos of brown recluse spider bites. Hunny hasn’t posted his picture story yet, because well, it’s not done yet, so a here’s quick update on that story: Nearly 3 months on, Hunny’s arm is still not fully healed. He stopped applying the dressing properly for a while which resulted in a bit of back-sliding in the healing process. Since he started doing it properly again (for about the last month) the skin/scar tissue is growing back, but it’s still not closed up yet. In short: those bites are nasty things and if you suspect you may have been bitten by a brown recluse (also known here in SA as violin spiders), see your doctor as soon as possible. The sooner you catch it, the less dead tissue they will have to remove.

I feel marginally bad about the 1-2 searches a week that still reach my blog looking for smiths motorcycles. But only marginally, because in truth that really was a kak* service experience. By far the worst in my short medium-length life. But it was also probably a once in a lifetime thing, so perhaps your experience with Norm won’t be the same as mine was.

More dream snippets from last night:

• Flossing my teeth
• Putting my foot in my shoe to find a huge orange spider in there. It was made of felt cloth, but was non-the-less alive. It crawled out the shoe (once I had stopped screaming and removed my foot) and climbed up the wall.

* for the non South Africans: ‘kak’ is Afrikaans, and translates directly to ‘crap’, but really it’s just so much more than that…

It’s been an eventful week. Hunny discovered a small red bump on his upper arm on Sunday. He thought it was just a zit or something. By Wednesday it had taken over a sizeable section of his upper arm. After some convincing he went to the doc to get it checked out. Well, my friendly doc wanted him to go directly to Sunninghill clinic and get it removed. By then it had killed off the skin covering its peak, which peeled of with the plaster and left a nice big suppurating wound.

Determined to be a man about this Hunny didn’t go directly to the hospital, but agreed to go to the hospital if it wasn’t looking any better by Thursday morning. Well it wasn’t, and he did. He sms’d me around 10:30 AM to ask me to bring him some nightclothes and a book because he might be staying the night. They were going to operate that afternoon, under general anesthetic!

I don’t think I have been as at a loss of what to do in my life, so I went shoe shopping. Well actually, I had planned to go and look for some new shoes at lunchtime, and being as Hunny didn’t need the clothes and things immediately, I full-filled that plan and bought two cue new pairs of shoes. I realize that makes me sound like a totally heartless wife, but really I think it was a coping mechanism. I wasn’t needed at the hospital yet, and I couldn’t concentrate on work, so I had to do something else …

I got to the hospital about half an hour before Hunny went into theatre. He was getting changed into one of those sexy gowns and paper underpants when I arrived

The really great anesthetist, Lance, sent me an sms when we went under, and another just before he finished up in theatre, so I was ready and waiting, pacing the halls when the very serious surgeon came looking for me. Everything went well he said, but Hunny would have to stay the night. He also told me that they removed a lot of necrotic tissue, Hunny should have come in the day before, and he’s lucky that it hadn’t spread too much between Wednesday and Thursday. I went home and looked up necrotic tissue: it means dead tissue. I also did some research on why an abscess could be such a critical thing. Well, gangrene would be the reason! Shew! Things we didn’t know. Hunny thought it would burst and sort itself out on its own.

It’s Friday, and Hunny is still in the hospital, but the wound is looking better. Less swollen and infected. He’ll still need to stay in another night though, mostly just so they can clean out and dress the gaping hole in his arm at their own convenience. He’s off the antibiotic and pain medication drip, so at least he can wonder around the hospital.

Anyways, looks like this was the culprit: the Brown recluse spider. When Hunny told me the name and I looked it up on wikipedia I was shocked and horrified. That image on the top right of the page is far too familiar! We have sightings of these little guys in our house at a rate of probably a couple a week. We usually just leave them be. They kill some mosquitoes and they stay out of your way. I expect we’ll be fumigating the house in the near future.

To show people why you would need to be admitted to hospital for a simple spider bite we took some picture evidence of the very grim looking suppurating abscess that laid claim to a vast potion of Hunnys left arm. The swelling that extended down to his elbow. I think I’ll leave them for him to post though, it’s his story after all. I’ll link when he posts, if you are into looking at really gross images.

On a different note, what is it about some people that make them so determined to bring you around to their way of thinking about childbirth? I just had my company’s CEO telling me to “think about”:
1. Not finding out the baby’s sex before it’s born
2. Having natural childbirth
3. Forgoing pain medication when I do so.

Something about true surprises, challenges, being designed for this kind of thing, and showing how we are different as women. Not sure he knows that much about being a woman.

But surely I get to make this decision on my own? Of course by ‘own my own’ I mean with my husband and my medical practitioners advice only.

And what’s with peoples need to ask “Was it planned”? This pregnancy was planned, but why do I need to tell that you? What if it weren’t? Then you have just put me in a position where I must either lie, or confess that I had an oopsy, where I’ll then need to qualify that we are excited about the baby anyway and you’ll still wonder if I might resent the pregnancy and child.

Or maybe I’m just touchy because I’m pregnant.

I must say that not everyone is that so pushy about it. One male colleague (he has 4 kids)  who overheard the CEO’s closing arguments said to me that for what it’s worth, he thinks there is nothing wrong with taking ‘the easy way out’ as my CEO put it. Thanks for the support Johan; it means a lot to me.

I’m off to visit my love in the hospital now. Have a great weekend all.