WrenMuffin

Cooking has this effect on us in this house.

It makes us smile ecstatically and then our teeth fall out.

Actually, I hate cooking, so it’s just as well that WonderHubby is so good at making omelettes, pumpkin soup and scrummy roast dinners isn’t it?

Plus he’s generous and good looking to boot.
Love you, hon!

Anyhoo, Wren loves making muffins, but the cleanup?

Not so much.

That’s where I come in.

My babies are growing up

Cheeky little Mr Bump starts school in 3 weeks,
and my beautiful Wren moves on up into year 3,
which brings with it a new uniform for each of my babies.

Mwwwaaaaaah!

My Camera, by Wren’s Camera

The super-flashy Camera I’ll be using for Project 365.

- Aldi’s Traveller brand…   Woohoo!

Is every woman in labour this dopey?

With Wren’s birthday coming up next week, I’ve been reminiscing about her formal entrance into this world.
As you do.

And while the memory of the pain involved does indeed fade with time, the embarrassment remains.

My main memory is of suddenly becoming scared and refusing to open my legs to push.

That’s right, when the midwife judged the time was nearing, I clenched my knees and refused to co-operate. I don’t know how I thought that baby was coming out, but it wasn’t through down there.

Luckily, my mother was also present and knew how to deal with the situation. Seeing that I was beyond persuasion she turned to persuading the midwife, and the pair of them ganged up on me. Bullies.

They each grabbed a knee and, well, let’s just say that I was not the winner in the very short wrestle that ensued.

Once Wren finally emerged and was laid, naked and pink, on my deflated belly I blurted “It’s a real baby”. Real perceptive.

The attending medical circus must have thought I’d slipped a cog. Pethidine has a lot to answer for.

Then again, maybe dopeyness is more common in this situation. In the interests of objective scientific research, I’d love to hear your dopiest birth stories.

What were your first words upon sighting your newborn? Did you brawl with your obstetrician?

Feel free to bare all here, or if you write a post about it on your own blog, I’ll include a link to it.

Daddy took us to the zoo today…

And here are the first photos, more coming tomorrow.

Hope you had a great weekend!

We have Cooled Off

I tweeted a couple of weeks ago that we’d made a successful offer on a house and signed contracts.

We’ve now gone through the cooling off period and taken the kids to have a look at it.

Well, here are the pictures.

We actually had an appointment on Saturday afternoon, but the agent didn’t turn up and when we called to check she was apologetic but unable to give another time.

People who disappoint excited children deserve a special place in hell.

It was the first time the kids were to see the place, and they had to make do with running around in the front yard for half an hour.

But luckily I maintained my sunny disposition and suggested a walk around to the reserve behind the property, where WonderHubby lifted them each up so that they could see the backyard over the rear fence.

So the kids had a ball anyway.

Anyhoo, we finally went through on Wednesday and the official verdict from Wren & Mr Bump is that they don’t like it.

They love it!

No joking, that’s what Wren said when we asked her. And of course Mr Bump had to echo her response.

I am sooo hanging out to be there now.

Settlement is on the 27th of October, although it all depends upon the vendor moving out. If he moves sooner, we may too.

He’s looking for a place to rent, so cross your fingers that he finds a good one this weekend.

Surgery Date Set

Our ISP has decided to allow me to access my blog domain once again, after almost two weeks of inaction.
Not surprisingly, a new ISP is just a matter of time now.

So we now have a date for Mr Bump’s open heart surgery for ASD; the 2nd December at Westmead Children’s Hospital. He’ll be in for a week, and need to be kept fairly quiet for about a month afterwards.

No heavy New Years partying for you, this year, little man. 

In January, we’ll be hosting a “school holiday party”. It’ll allow Wren & Mr Bumps to catch up with their friends and the Boyo can show off his scar.

On the surgeon’s advice, we’ll be missing the last 3 weeks of preschool, mainly to avoid bumps and pokes to his chest.

The surgeon has plenty of experience with this particular operation, apparently. He’s made a number of trips to Rwanda with other surgeons & a team of nurses to perform surgery on children there.

In a tent.

In fact, he’ll be returning from doing another stint there, the week before Mr Bump’s op. So our little angel will be in very good hands.

The surgery will consist of a incision of about 2in length down the centre of Mr Bump’s chest, through the breastbone.

His heart will be stopped and his blood pumped by machine.

They’ll go into the right atrium (top right heart chamber) and either sew the hole shut, or patch it with tissue taken from around his heart.

It should take about an hour and a half for the surgeon to do his bit, which is a relatively short length of time for this particular operation. Some surgeries take over four hours.

I’m going to take my cross-stitch, a book and WonderHubby. I doubt I’ll manage to make any use of the first two items during the day, but WH will definitely come in handy for hugs.

Actually, I made it sound like I’m dragging him along, but of course I couldn’t keep him away if I tried. We’ll hold hands and spend the time watching the clock together.

I think I’m going to let Wren have the day off school, too. She’ll be totally unable to concentrate, anyway.

What do you think?

Would she be better off with her Grandma or trying to do her work at school?

Eating My Own Words

When Wren was about 4½, her preschool teachers noticed that she seemed to be having problems coping emotionally.

While her friends had begun to shrug off knock~backs and disappointments, she continued to be overly upset and throw tantrums. She didn’t seem to be developing emotionally, somehow.

I wasn’t too concerned at first, as each child develops at their own rate, but when she continued having problems after her 5th birthday, I began to look for a reason.

Grandma had been watching one of those current affairs shows and suggested that it might be worth a try.

Now, before this, I’d often watched current affairs shows tout the terrible effects of food colourings and scoffed. Look at those parents blaming something else for their rotten parenting, I’d think.

But, as a last resort, I did some research into reducing the number of artificial food colourings in our foods. I started with Wren’s favourite foods and drinks and the colourings in those.

Because the problem had become worse since switching Wren’s favourite drink, I was able to narrow the problem to two colourings in particular. These were Tartrazine (102) and the appealingly~named Sunset Yellow FCF (110).

I was surprised at the number and types of foods that contained them. Some I’d thought were actually healthy.

I still didn’t expect to see much difference in Wren’s behaviour, and it certainly wouldn’t show for a couple of weeks.

The next day at around lunch time, I noticed that Wren had only had one small tantrum that day. It had been about 18 hours since she’d last had either of those food colourings.

Within 3 days, it was as though I was dealing with a different child. I had my sweetheart, my angel, my beautiful kind daughter, back again.

The reason I’m bringing this up now is that Mr Bump’s behaviour has deteriorated since about Easter and I’m again reviewing our foods.

I wanted to share the most valuable online resource that I have been able to find, and hopefully help someone else’s little angel to return to normal.

Edited to add:

As I’m still researching, I’ll be adding any helpful new links here over the next few days.

If you have one to share, email me and I’ll pop it in here and credit the find to you.

1. Top 20 Food Additives to Avoid

Puff Paint Recipe

I’ve had this recipe for a few years and haven’t actually tried it until now because Wren & Mr Bump have such sensitive skin.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that they don’t have to lather their hands with it.
We actually have some paintbushes in the house!

What a great idea: Painting with paintbrushes. D’oh.

Okay, so I’m not exactly painting with a full palette at the moment…

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