how time flies

so the bean is now sharing her pod with littlebean. the past 6 months have been, in a nutshell: challenging, life-altering, joyous, heart-breaking & taxing. i think that about covers it.

littlebean is a delight - so lovely, sweet-tempered, mesmerizingly beautiful. i would say "easy" except that she's not always. she HATED her infant car seat/bucket thus also the car and doesn't relish being in her own space (i.e., insists on being held 87.5% of the time). she has turned us (somewhat reluctantly) into co-sleeping parents, although now that it's happening i must admit that i do treasure the closeness. she is likely our last baby and i am drinking her in as much as i can and bemoaning her rapid, rapid growth.

bean amazes me with her readiness to love, love, love her sister even though she's a long way off from being a proper playmate. she offers her own baby toys (though not the Melissa & Doug soft tool box from Auntie Jayne - "I'm not done with that yet! I still play with it!"; gives the gentlest of kisses; patiently tolerates (soooo much) crying in the car, even empathizing with littlebean: "I feel sad for" her.

the cliche about life being a balancing act becomes a glaring truth when you have your second child. how do you balance the needs of one with the demands of the other? i've learned that it can only be done with a LOT of patience (often more than one can muster) and forgiving yourself for not being perfect and just allowing yourself to do the best you can in the moment that you have. i thought i had shaken loose of the grip of that evil perfectionism - littlebean has taught me that that is not yet true...

photo credit: photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-NonCommercial

second time around

this is my inaugural post! i should be writing christmas cards (less than a week to go!) but i really wanted to get this started...

we're expecting our second child - a sister for our first daughter, the bean. when i stop to think about it, it is very exciting, but mostly i'm just feeling tired. and i'm tired of saying that i'm tired. i remember feeling awesome when i was at this point in my pregnancy with the bean (2nd trimester), but that surge of energy and feeling normal again has eluded me to this point. still, feeling very grateful not to have had morning-sickness with either pregnancy.

what's a bit troublesome with this one, though, is that my voice has been affected. i'm a singer and the last time, i could sing just fine throughout the whole pregnancy. my singing is okay, but i've had quite a bit of pain in my vocal cords when speaking and sometime when singing if i don't concentrate on my technique. HUGE relief, though, the other day when an ENT checked & said that my cords were "pristine" - the pain is from a lack of support when speaking/incomplete vocal fold closure and apparently there's nothing to be done, except to birth the child. 2 1/2 months to go...

so now that i've started my blog, it's time to stop for now. do wish to scribble a few notes before heading out to a christmas party with the family. really looking forward to the party - friends have arranged a horse-drawn wagon to take a big group of us around the neighbourhood while singing carols. how christmasy & awesome is that?

much more - and baby - to come...