Christmas

C’s first Christmas was fantastic. She’s sitting by herself quite confidently and loves exploring her world around her.

Lawyer has always been a bit of a Scrooge about Christmas but this year was really getting excited about making the day special for C. We dressed the tree with the good glass baubles for the last year (next year we get out the baby friendly ones), wrapped every gift we could in bright coloured paper and piled them up under the tree, and watching Christmas cartoons from our childhood.

Photos are the best way to show how special the time was

Decorating the Tree

Helping to Wrap Her Own Gifts

Christmas Morning Gifts with Her Mummies.

Enjoying Christmas Lunch

We also got to hang our 3 milestone ornaments I bought a few years ago. A church for when we get married (even though there was no church in sight for our special day), a house for the house that we own, and a rocking horse for the baby that now fills our house with love and laughter.

 

Birth Certificate

We got some very happy and surprising news yesterday. The government has finally enacted a law that was passed exactly 1 month before C’s birthday. This law will allow Lawyer to be on C’s birth certificate along with me, and all we have to do is show the IVF clinic paperwork.

It was meant to be enacted on June 23 2012, but I highly suspect that the birth of a federal senator’s daughter by her female partner may have sped things up a bit so that our state wouldn’t look so backwards.

The only catch on this is that it only for babies born via artificial reproductive technology, which thankfully covers us, but doesn’t cover a lot of couples who used the turkey baster method. And in our state ART is not available to lesbian couples unless medically infertile. So this means that couples would have to prove infertility, tell small lies to be able to use ART or like us, travel interstate. But it has now started the ball rolling to change the ART laws here. Fingers crossed this will snowball into more discriminatory laws being changed.

We got the forms for the new certificate today, we’re filling them out, and Lawyer is going to get the papers witnessed by a co-worker and then I’m walking them down to Births Deaths and Marriages to get submitted.

[promise my birth story is on the way]

 

Devastated

Yesterday morning bought about the most shocking discovery. I went out to feed my 14 beautiful hens to discover that they had been killed overnight by a fox.
Senseless killing for the sake of it.
I am slowly trying to come to terms with what happened, Lawyer is struggling to deal with grief as an adult (her parents always shielded her from death) and C is aware that Chook Chooks are not in their yard. Whenever we go outside I’d take her to see them, either looking over the fence or going into the yard and feeding them, today they weren’t there to greet her and she looked around to find them.
As Lawyer said to me, ‘we lost part of our family.’

 

1 Year

It’s hard to believe that it’s been one year since we were here:

Second cycle egg retrieval, with Blaze the dragon for good luck.

And now we’re here:

Cheeky Monkey

 

No Longer Waiting

I just realised the other day that all my life I’ve been waiting for something. Waiting for school holidays, waiting to graduate primary school, then high school, waiting to get into university, waiting to graduate and get a real job. Waiting to get engaged, get married, buy a house, ask a friend to be our donor, then waiting to start IVF, waiting for the quarentine period on the sperm donations. Of course there’s the horrible two week wait and then 38 weeks while our baby grew & developed, and the agonising last few weeks of pregnancy waiting for labour to commence.
Now she’s here I’m no longer waiting. I’m just enjoying it and soaking it all up. I want each week to last forever. I’ll spend hours just staring at her as she sleeps, or grins and eats her fists. I’ve finally got everything I want.

 

Photo Update

Realised that it’s almost been a month since my last post. Time is just getting away from us and C is growing so quickly. I get snippets of time online while feeding, but otherwise I’m playing with C or running around trying to get some housework done while she’s sleeping. I feel like it’s an achievement if I get 3 things done in a day, and often that includes cooking dinner.

So while C is sitting on my lap and happily playing with her hands I’ll post some pictures, and maybe work a bit more on my birth story.

Geek and C in her sling

My favourite photo of Lawyer with C

Explaining to C how to knit- she was facinated!!!

C giving a big grin to her nanna

 

SAHM

I got a phone call from my work the other day. Seems I’m no longer on maternity leave, I’m now a stay at home mum.

My employer has gone into receivership and I’ll soon be without a job or employer to go back to.

Odd thing is was that I didn’t really feel like going back to work there. I was taking 12 months off work (all unpaid apart from 18 weeks of government parenting payments) and then we’d evaluate the situation- can we live on one wage, do I need to go back part-time or full-time, can I get a job with better conditions elsewhere? Given the issues and the lack of support my manager gave me during the first 4 months of pregnancy, I didn’t feel any loyalty to going back there. This job was kind of my safety net if I needed to go back to work and I couldn’t get a job elsewhere.

Given that I work in IT and mostly do helpdesk/service desk, then I’m sure I’ll pick something up if/when I have to, but this wasn’t the news I wanted during the first few months of my leave.

 

Feeding Issues

Reading blogs and mothering forums, it seems that many mothers have a rocky start to breastfeeding. But not only was there the problems I had in hospital with feeding C enough, at about 3-4 weeks I started getting intense pain in my nipple when C latched on. It slowly got worse, to the point where the pain would make me gasp audibly when C latched on and the pain would continue on for up to a minute on the start of feeding from each side.

The help we’ve been given with this has made me realise why we paid a big lump sum of money to my OB. I’ve been in several times to see the midwives at the clinic and OB at no cost. At first the OB diagnosed me with thrush on my breasts and prescribed me with anti-fungal tablets to take myself and drops to give to C. After 2 weeks the medication wasn’t doing anything and the symptoms were showing now signs of easing up. I called the OB and she told me to take another round of tablets and continue C with the drops. I showed up to the pharmacy with the old bottle of drops to get more and the pharmacist gave me the third degree as to how old C is, why I was giving her so much medication and that I should see my doctor again to confirm that I did actually have thrush.

I went back to the midwives and the OB who suggested that after 3 weeks and no signs of improvement that it could be Raynaud’s (or vasospasms). So now I’m on different medication, as well as putting a hot pack on my breasts before feeds and trying to keep them as warm as possible. It’s been a week now and while it’s still painful, it no longer feels like someone is using a blunt knife to remove my nipples.

Now I just have to work out how to stop C from choking when I feed her from the right side. Seems my flow is just too strong and she can’t drink fast enough.

Claudia feeding and telling everyone to go away with a simple finger gesture

 

1 Month

Hard to believe that C is already a month old.

Sleeping on her play mat

Geek and C

Lawyer, C and Frankie

 

Doing Fine

Today we had visit from the community nurse that all new mums get.
Lawyer was paranoid that we were going to be judged on our fitness as parents because of our relationship. And in a way we were. One of the things they check for is to make sure that I’m not showing signs of post-natal depression, making sure I’ve got enough support and help. The nurse made comment that our relationship was obviously very supportive and strong and that C was being well cared for. I love when perfect strangers say such positive things.
C also had another weight check and is well over 4kg now and back measuring in the 75th percentile, which is where she started. The nurse reassured us that despite her rocky start, C is thriving.