Today I have another guest blogger for you.
Ruth gave birth to her son Andrew just as I was finding out we were going to have a baby of our own, and has been a great support for me during some of the harder times in m pregnancy and during our breastfeeding journey.
She recently started blogging and you can find her over at Mixed Bag of All Sorts
Before I begin, I’d like to thank Amanda for suggesting that I could do a guest post, and for inspiring me to start my own blog. When we first emailed about me doing a guest post, it was just before she changed the name and layout of her blog to reflect her growing family. So I thought it would be appropriate to share on this Family Patch my experience of family life. I hope to show (and remind myself whilst writing!) that all the busyness that family life brings can be a good thing, even though it can seem overwhelming at times (especially when little sleep is involved).
Since about this time last year, my boys – husband Tom and 11-½ -month old son Andrew – and I have been a three-person family. For me, the step to becoming a two-person family back in 2008 when Tom and I got married was amazing enough, but I have been even more amazed at just how much I’m enjoying life with another little person. For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that I wanted children, but until I actually had my very own child, I didn’t quite realised just how much I would love being a mum. Likewise Tom didn’t realise just how much he would love being a dad. Before Andrew came along, we weren’t even sure whether conceiving our own child would be easy, because I had suffered with anorexia in the past and had a very low body weight for several years, which could well have interfered with my fertility. So we feel incredibly blessed to have Andrew here with us today, so healthy and happy.
Adding another person to our family has meant that there is more going on now from day to day than before. Don’t get me wrong – I was busy before we had a baby, and I actually like being busy to a certain extent, and get bored quite easily if there’s not much going on, but the busyness isn’t quite the same as it was in pre-baby times. Before I could focus on what I personally wanted to be busy with, and of course we did things together as a couple. Now I feel like there are so many different things in my weekly routine that need to fit together in the best possible way for all three of us – it’s like one of those puzzles with little tiles that all move around within a bigger square, and there’s always one hole that you can move a tile into, to eventually make a picture that makes sense. I try my best; most weeks I feel like I succeed in sliding things into place so that we get a good picture, though some weeks it’s not perfect.
Two and a half days a week, my job is to look after Andrew. As he’s so active, we go out for much of the day to various play groups, so he has lots of space to explore the world around him and interact with other children. For example, there’s ‘Rhymetime’ in the library, where we say rhymes and read books, and ‘Little Music Makers’, where we sing songs, play parachute games, and have fun with musical instruments. We also go swimming together, which Andrew loves (so I’m very happy, having been a keen swimmer all my life). It’s also great to spend time at home together, where we tip all the toys out, stick a cool kids CD on, grab some refreshments, and even have a chat in French or German (since I studied these languages at university and researched them for my post-grad studies, I’d like to introduce Andrew to them as early as possible) – he of course still only babbles back to me whatever language I speak in, but it’s amazing what must be going on in his brain with language acquisition.
Two and a half days a week, my job is to be a post-doc research associate (fancy name for the fact that I do research and have a PhD) at the University of Cambridge. The project I’m working on is looking at how children with a language impairment hear rhythm in music and speech, and how we might ultimately be able to improve their language development with music-based interventions. I find it a really interesting area of research, particularly now having a baby myself. Currently I’m sifting through all the data we’ve so far collected, which mainly involves staring at spreadsheets of numbers all day, which drive’s me crazy; but this term I also get to do one school visit a week, which means playing some specially designed games on a laptop with kids, and getting them to do some karaoke – lots of fun!
So that’s the five weekdays covered, and we’re left with the weekends. Saturday mornings are more Daddy and Andrew time – they toddle off to ‘Daddy and Me Club’ once a month and ‘Rhymetime’ the other weeks, leaving me home alone. Give me a few hours these days, and it’s amazing what I manage to get done around the flat: having a baby has made me much more productive at things like cleaning and sorting stuff out. Before I know it, I’ve caught up on the washing, the floors are vacuumed and mopped, the bathroom is clean, I’ve baked something tasty, I’ve been for a swim, and I’ve even sat down with a cuppa in hand and written something to go on my blog. Saturday afternoons I usually let Tom have a go at catching up on things he needs to, by taking Andrew to the park or some other out-of-the-flat activity. By the evening we’re all ready to have some family time over a meal of comfort food. Then comes Sunday (read family-day). We go to church in the morning, and then a trip out somewhere for an afternoon walk. It’s time for us all to catch up with each other, after a week of spending most daylight hours as, at most, a pair and a singleton.
Of course we are together as a three for quite a lot of each 24-hour day, but then I’m talking about evenings and overnight. That’s when being a mum really feels like a vocation, not a job. I mean I can leave my research job behind at 5pm(-ish), knowing that I’m not contracted to be there indefinitely on a daily basis. But when I drop Andrew off at the childminder’s in the morning, that doesn’t stop me being mum. If he’s ill, he comes first – so far I’ve only needed to have half a day off due to him having a cold (he’s generally very healthy), and even then my work is flexible so I could make up the hours in the evening when Tom got home. Likewise when I come home, I continue being mum, spending time together after our separate days, as well as getting things like dinner and washing sorted, and even fitting in a quick swim for some me-time to unwind. During the night I’m also on call; although we’re very grateful that he’s a pretty good sleeper at night for his age, he can still wake up at any moment, especially if he’s teething or a bit under the weather. I can’t exactly say to him ‘Sorry Andrew, Mummy can’t come and cuddle you when you wake, I’ve got work in the morning and must get back to sleep’. Mum-hood is a 24/7 role, and the rewards I get are well worth the long hours!
Before Andrew came along, I thought that being a part-time working mum would give me a good mixture of activities that being a full-time stay-at-home mum wouldn’t; for example, I thought I would miss the ‘mental stimulation’ (as lots of people seem to refer to in this context of working mums) if I didn’t go back to work, but I also didn’t see the point of going back full-time, as I would want to play a large part in my baby’s environment in the pre-school years. However, throughout my 9 months of maternity leave, and also since I’ve been back at work, I’ve come to realise that I’d like to look after Andrew full-time. I do enjoy my work, and I see definite advantages of working whilst having a toddler, but to me it will never be as amazing as looking after Andrew full-time, at least until he goes to school. I like the challenges that being mum presents (most of the time), and the end result of seeing my boy grow and develop makes it all worth it. I get plenty of interaction with other adults at the groups we go to and at the committees I’ve joined (La Leche League breast-feeding support group committee, Chesterton Parents’ Group committee, editor of The Voice – NCT Cambridge branch magazine… all of which are completely compatible with looking after kids as they’re run by parents for parents). I enjoy the mental stimulation of writing my blog and articles for The Voice and other parenting magazines (at evenings/weekends and during Andrew’s nap times).
The feeling (growing within me over the past year) that being a full-time mum is my ‘calling’ is something very much linked to my faith as a Christian. I believe that God has a plan for my life, and I want to follow His will, which I try to discern through prayer. It can be easy to see prayer as something that I ‘have to fit in’ along with everything else in the busyness, but I do find that when I actually prioritise prayer, the other things fit together more easily as I feel more able to tackle the challenges. Of course being a stay-at-home mum is not the plan for every mum, and I don’t want to give the impression that I think no mum should work. We all have different gifts and talents, and all families are different, so there can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to working and having kids.
I can certainly waffle on about this family busyness, but I think drawing to a close would be good, for my and your sanity! I guess the purpose of writing this was to share my experience of our family life, and to make the point that it’s important for me not to lose sight of the bigger picture, the good things about the busyness, even when the multitude of small day to day activities and tasks cloud this. By this I mean I try to reflect as often as possible on questions like why I’m doing what I’m doing, what are the most important things to me in our life together, what are my longer term plans/aims. The answers are along the lines of giving Andrew the best quality of life that I possibly can, with as much help and encouragement for his development, and also growing together as a family unit, in which we are all happy with ourselves and each other.
Thank you Ruth for taking the time to write this post.
Please do leave Ruth a comment to let her know what you think or pop over to her own blog to read more about her life as a mum.
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