Dancing Boy

A quickie tonight as I’ve been working on assignments most of this evening.

Last weekend I was asked to photograph one of Monsieur’s kinder friends’ birthdays. It has been a while since I’ve done any event photography and the combination of low, multi-coloured lighting with very active 4 year olds made for an interesting challenge! Here are some of the shots of Monsieur that I can share…(because I don’t share photos of other children without their parents permission).

 

So busy dancing, he couldn’t stay still when the music ended. He was “out” of the dancing statues game early on, but happy to keep on dancing in the side dance party.

 

Sharing a cushion with his best kinder friend. Every day he checks that her stone is in the bowl (the children all have to put the stone with their name on it in the bowl when they arrive at kinder). He is always worried if her stone isn’t in the bowl and will immediately check to see if her coat and bag are in her locker. If they’re not there, he’ll turn to me and say “S isn’t here. I hope she’s okay. Why isn’t she here?”

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More dancing! He was stoked to receive a slinky for awesome dancing 🙂

Secondary infertility

I remember when I was pregnant with Monsieur reading an article about secondary infertility. Secondary infertility is where a couple have no trouble conceiving first time round but are unable to conceive second time round, or experience recurrent miscarriages.  I was appalled that, even though we’d managed to conceive easily the first time, it was no guarantee of future fertility. It seemed like a cruel joke.

I sometimes wonder if it hit too strong a nerve with me. Did I somehow will it upon us. Ridiculous I know, but the mind can lead you along some twisted pathways sometimes.

Not only is secondary fertility an issue, it is actually more common than not being able to conceive in the first place (a fact which I just read tonight as I searched for the correct term and definition). Kinda makes you wonder how many one child families are a deliberate choice and how many are a result of undesired circumstance.

Secondary infertility is painful – it is hard to adjust your vision of your family – but at least there is the considerable silver lining, perhaps it is a silver fill-in really, of already having a child. A sense of “Well, thank heaven we were able to have this one”. In some ways, I feel selfish to get sad and upset at our situation when we do have a child, and such a beautiful child at that. I feel like I should just be grateful for what we have; that I should gracefully and quietly let go of our dreams of another child. I’m grateful, extremely grateful for Monsieur, and I will always feel so blessed to have him in our lives, but that does not ease the ache of missing the other child we wanted.

We always imagined having two children, reasonably close in age. The age gap was ultimately going to be determined by when we felt ready for a second child and I felt ready to be pregnant again. Ideally it was going to be about an 18-24 month gap. We didn’t realise that the gap was not up to us, nor was the number of children. Huh.

Two pregnancies in 3 years, both miscarried early on. The second one was an ectopic so a natural miscarriage was the best case scenario. After the ectopic, I had to have a tubal patency test to check for any obvious issues in my fallopian tubes. I was told that it was also useful as it would “flush out” anything remaining, leaving a fresh slate, so to speak. The ultrasound technician told me that many women conceive after having the procedure done, possibly because of the “flushing out” aspect. I also heard a similar thing after my first miscarriage; friends telling me how they, or someone they knew, conceived within 2-3 months of having a miscarriage. Honestly, after each miscarriage, early as they were, it took my body three months, at least, to physically recover.  There was no way I was up for anything to do with conception while I was healing.

That really threw me for a six too. I couldn’t understand how I could still be having painful periods, and pelvic girdle pain three months after being pregnant, when I had been just barely pregnant. I mentioned to this to a nurse when she asked how I was doing after the first miscarriage and she said to me that pregnancy is a binary thing. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not. There’s no being “a little bit pregnant”. Once that pregnancy happens, all the hormones start flowing and the body starts it’s preparation, probably before you’ve even peed on a stick. I should have known that, but it hadn’t really occurred to me. Like so many people, I think that I judged the worth and impact of a pregnancy on how far along it was. A four week pregnancy isn’t anything really, but a 10 week pregnancy, obviously that would be really tough on you physically and emotionally to lose.  I still believe that the impact is much greater, the further along you are in a pregnancy, however I no longer underestimate the impact of an early miscarriage.

I have been seeing a fertility specialist since March, starting the long process of signing up for IVF. R and I have had many tests and there is no discernible reason for our difficulties in conceiving and keeping a pregnancy. Age is a strong possibility. Perhaps there’s some tiny damage in my tubes, too small to be seen in the scan. But for whatever reason, we are classified as being medically infertile for reasons unknown. IVF is the recommended course of action. And now that we are staring down this road, suddenly we are hearing about other couples who have gone down or are going down this same road. Just like miscarriage, it seems no one mentions it until you are experiencing it too. Then suddenly you discover just how common it is, and can’t quite comprehend how something so prevalent can be kept so secret. But really that is an issue deserves its own post.

Right now we at a fork in our lives and it is not 100% up to us which fork will be taken. Will it be the fork with a sibling for Monsieur, or will it be the fork where where we remain a family of three (with an awesome TV/entertainment room – because we will need to do something awesome with Sibling’s room, if Sibling doesn’t come to claim it).

 

Further information can be found online, of course, by googling. I referred to the following websites for information:

Resolve – The national infertility association

Babycentre UK

Women’s Ultrasound Melbourne

Advanced Women’s Imaging

 

In her recent post on Medium, Lorelei Vashti writes about miscarriage far more eloquently than I ever did.

House Renovation…the final photographs, finally

Whilst our house was being renovated, I was posting photos and comments on the progress. I only got halfway through the progress blog posts before we got to move back home and, well, I’ve been a bit busy since then!

I do hope to finish the more involved step-by-step posts, as I find them really interesting to look back on. It’s quite amazing the level of detail that my memory just does not retain. I enjoy being able to look back and be reminded of how a particular period of my life was, or, in regards to the renovation, all the thought and effort that went into our house. However, this post is just the finished product. I’m really embracing the motto “Better done than perfect”. It would be more perfect if I finished the detailed posts about each room, and then had the big reveal post – which is not so much of a big reveal as it is nearly two years since it was completed – however it will get done if I just do the final the post now. Better done than perfect!

The cost and time blew out on our renovation with discoveries that could not be predicted. These are the joys of renovating very old properties. We needed part of the house re-stumped, and that in itself was an unknown as the builder could not know exactly what the land underneath the house was like, and therefore how deep the stumps would have to go; as it turned out, we need five, very deep stumps in our room to stop the lean-to happening. So there were those sorts of unknowns which we knew to expect going into the project. Then there were the things like the bathroom framework being completed ruined from water damage, and the concrete lintel above our window which WAS NOT anchored into the wall. That particular discovery cost us extra money to fix and extra time as the safety requirements of the job then changed and amendments had to be made to the building permit – I think that was how it went at least…it has been a long time.

Anyway, everyone told us that it would take twice as long as quoted and cost twice as much. We laughed and secretly thought, “Not for us”. Well, it didn’t take twice as long as quoted but I did wish that I hadn’t packed all my winter clothes in storage! It did cost more, due to unexpected discoveries such as the above-mentioned (they were just the two things that sprang to mind), but also because we would go and pick beautiful lush carpet and underlay that was twice the allowance in the quote. As the original quote had come in under our budget, we felt okay with making these choices which ultimately led to a renovation without compromises which we would’ve regretted later. Also, it was hard not to get excited as we saw things coming together and then wanting to add just a little thing here or a little thing there!

The builder that we went with was Ange who runs Estate Building and Renovations. We chose him because we liked his manner, he seemed like a person who took great pride in his work and wouldn’t cut corners and he really listened to us and worked with us to achieve what we wanted. We worked a lot with Joel as well as Ange – most days one or the other was at our house looking after everything. Joel came up with the idea of installing a pool latch on our front gate when I was asking for help to make it child-proof. Both Ange and Joel were great at coming up with practical solutions for issues around the house and we definitely gave them some challenges. Double glazing for our windows was one of the biggest challenges; there was a lot of discussion as to the best way to do it considering that we have leadlight windows which have to stay (council heritage overlay) and do not react well to being double-glazed, and sash windows which leak a lot of air. Ange’s solution of installing a separate, double-glazed internal window was brilliant.

We have more things we want to do further down the track. As Ange said, when renovating, you just have to draw a line somewhere otherwise you can just keep on going. So we still have things to do, and I look forward to getting Ange and his team in again.

Patrica La Torre, of Outside Inside Building Elements designed our bathroom and laundry. Ange works with her regularly and directed us to her services. She was fantastic. When we said that storage was a priority, she delivered SO MUCH storage in the design and still managed to make the bathroom feel larger than it did before. She was excited when I picked the bright striped laminate for the laundry as it is the sort of bold colour that most people will steer away from. Shamefully I still haven’t had her around to see the finished house, because I want it to be all perfect and tidy and looking its best, which it does for a couple of hours every fortnight or so! The rest of the time it looks, well it looks like a family lives here; a family who have work, kinder, playdates, like to cook together and will follow their whims on weekends rather than their “shoulds”. I guess I need to apply that “Better done than perfect” motto here too.

The more time has passed, the happier I’ve been with the renovation and the job done by Estate Building. When we first moved back in, we felt like the house was too good for us! We have grown accustomed to our cosy, comfy, luxurious house now (oh the carpet, the bath, the insulation!!!) and I feel so incredibly lucky that we got to do it when we did, rather than having to wait for 20 years as we thought we would. It is beyond divine to have a proper laundry and no longer have all our piles of washing lining the hallway to greet friends. It is so wonderful to have a house that does not maintain the same temperature as outside, in all seasons. Insulation is a glorious thing, truly glorious.

I also love that instead of putting all the money into building up (which was our original idea), we put it into a reasonably small back extension and renovating the existing house (except the kitchen – that one is waiting a while). By choosing a smaller extension, we got to do things like renovate the bathroom completely, have built-in robes installed in our bedrooms, re-carpet and paint the whole house, get double-glazing put in. These are all things that have a far more positive impact on our daily life than a parent retreat and balcony upstairs would do. The way our house is, it is a lovely size now; it will expand to capacity with the planned Sibling, and then it will still be a very comfortable size once it is back to just us two again. I really like being in a house where I feel like I won’t need to upsize or downsize somewhere down the line.

The before photos are in this post. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at them and I had forgotten how bad some of the internal cracks were!

 

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