6 x 6

This is a set of questions posed and answered on Glow in the Woods that I found interesting so I thought I'd join in even though I'm a bit late.

1 | Do you feel as though a higher entity/supreme being/energy force has a presence in your life? What do you call it, and what makes you feel it exists?
No I don't. My dad is an atheist so I guess I've grown up this way but my scientific training has reinforced this.

2 | Describe, in a word or two, the nature of your spiritual self before and then after the loss of your baby/babies.
No real change it just reinforced the randomness and unfairness of life.

3 | Do you pray, even if you wouldn’t call it praying? To whom? What for?
No but I do find myself "talking" to my grandparents and my babies occasionally even though I know they can't hear me.

4 | Is there a particular line of scripture/teaching/sentiment that you find particularly helpful? Or is there one that’s commonly referred to but is unhelpful?

No

5 | Did your faith offer rites, rituals or teachings that acknowledged your baby and your healing? If not (or if you didn't seek it out in an organized fashion), what rites, rituals or mantras have you adopted as your own?
I did find myself in a church lighting a couple of candles after my first loss because it felt right to mark the loss despite my lack of belief.

6 | Some people say that in a foxhole, there are no atheists. You’ve been in a foxhole. Discuss.
I'm not sure it counts as a foxhole, but I'm still an atheist.

Travelling again

We're off travelling again today. This time to a friends wedding in Cumbria and then to visit my cousin and some friends in Edinburgh. I'm looking forward to it but also feeling like it would be nice to have some more chilled at home time.

Apart from anything else baby T has been fussier recently, I'm not sure if it's a growth spurt or all the disturbances to his routine but being at home would be easier. On the other hand we will see several uni friends at the wedding 2 of which have also had babies this year; meeting some internet friends in real life for the first time; catching up with my cousin who is finally pregnant after struggling for a while and seeing good friends in Edinburgh. On the whole I think I'll need several days to recover when I come back but it will be lovely really. I'm really looking forward to seeing the mountains even if there won't be any time to climb them this trip. The hills in Edinburgh will probably kill me though as I'm so unfit at the moment it's untrue. I might do a little shopping while I'm there too as I think it's time to admit that my trousers don't fit my thickened waist and it's silly to think I'm going to shrink back down any time soon.

An English Girl in Copenhagen part 6 - deja vu

If you're looking for the rest of the story it starts here and continues here, here, here and here.

Things began to settle into some sort of normality as I got used to my new position and we packed up and moved into our friends place. The people in my new department were very nice and I soon began to feel settled.

Over the 2006 Easter weekend we returned to Glasgow to pack up our remaining belongings that had been kept there and ship some and give some to charity in preparation for renting the flat through an agent. The hardest part of this was having top get rid of a lot of my books as it just wasn't sensible to ship them all. I made decisions by looking at each book once then allocating it to shipping or charity shop. If I'd looked again I'm sure I'd have retrieved loads of them. I do miss them still and every so often go looking for a book before realising that it's one of the books I got rid of.

As the end of my contract approached it became clear that it wouldn't be renewed so I started looking for jobs again. In June 2006 we had a BFP again but this time I was terrified that something would go wrong. So my doctor referred me to an OB so I could get an early scan, I also interviewed for and got my current job with a start date of August 15th.

Once again things seemed to be falling into place - should have seen the warning signs really shouldn't I?

Unfortunately unlike Aurelia Ann's OB, mine was far from compassionate. Within a couple of minutes of inserting the dildo-cam he announced that there was nothing there said he would ring the hospital and left the room. Once dressed I was left in his office crying and holding S's hand while he sorted things out. I found it hard to believe how unhelpful this man was even down to the small detail of not having any tissues on his desk (I can't of been the first woman crying in his office). He also never once said sorry.

Once I arrived at the hospital they were much more sympathetic. Since I was so early on they inserted a pessary to encourage my cervix to open and bring on the miscarriage. I lay in bed for obsevation and went home afeter several hours with an appointment for a scan the following week to ensure all was as it should be. During that week I bled a little but my boobs still felt sore so I was reasonably sure that there was still something left producing hormones. This was confirmed when I was scanned the following week and they could see a sack.

Once more I was booked in for a D & E (the week before starting my new job - deja vu), I asked that they do it the next day as we were booked to go to Prague that weekend for a wedding anniversary trip. I could have cancelled the trip but we had cancelled a trip last time and I really didn't want to spend the weekend moping about. I promised the doctor that I would take it easy on my trip and they agreed I could go.

The book meme

Nicked from Rebecca ages ago and finally got around to posting it:

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.

I haven't done these other 2 steps because I'm lazy - sorry.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

1 Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - I plan to read this someday
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [Have read quite a few]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [hate the film why would I bother with the book]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce [I've started this one but it's been put aside for now]
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Teambuilding with a baby

The very small company I work for has grown quite a bit since I went on leave in fact it's grown by 50% (not too difficult when there were only 10 of us before). So when I found out that the annual summer teambuilding trip was taking place I wanted to go along to keep my face in the picture and meet my new colleagues. The potential problem with this is the trip involved 2 overnights 3 hours away and baby T only eats breastmilk and not from a bottle.

I had a chat to S and he agreed I should go if possible and my work were happy for T to come along which is how I ended up here with all my colleagues and a baby. It went pretty well all in all T cried a bit on his longest (so far) car trip but also slept quite a bit of it and I only had to leave the room a couple of times during the talks that afternoon. The houses we were staying in were lovely with big baths for T to just about swim in. The second day we were outside all day and I was able to join in most activities and then take T for a walk in the woods in the sling that afternoon. We returned home on Friday after breakfast and once again the car trip involved a little crying and a lot of sleeping.

My colleagues, luckily didn't mind having T along, in fact it was suggested that he was so good I should just come back to work now and bring him too.

In other news I've just received this book:
It based on research by a couple of Dutch researchers and the women in my mothers group have been raving about it. It explains when and why your baby goes through those clingy, crying stages. It's just been re-published in English although the most up to date info is only in some of the foreign language versions at the moment. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it.

Also I was inspired by a post on All thumbs to buy a new diaper bag since the bag I was using isn't actually a diaper bag and doesn't really have enough compartments to keep everything organised. I didn't buy the one chicklet linked too but it lead me to this one which I love.
They also make sleeping bags for strollers and car seats which I am really tempted by as the weather gets pretty cold here.

I'm so far behind on reading all of you so I'm trying to catch up before we go away (again) for a friends wedding this weekend.

trip report - with pictures

We had a fantastic time in Barcelona, I got back on Wednesday and am trying to catch up with all my feeds on bloglines - I'm down to 165 now but I'm not managing to comment on many.

I love Barcelona there is so much to see, there's definitely enough for a few more trips.

This trip we went to a fair on the top of a mountain,
we visited Park Guell designed by Gaudi
and of course the Sagrada Familia

and we even had time for a visit to the beach and T's first paddle in the sea - he wasn't very impressed.
T was mostly great but disturbing his bedtime routine several days running came back to bite us on the arse in the end as he had overtired-meltdown the last couple of nights we were there. Luckily he was back to normal as soon as we arrived home. He did manage to charm numerous waiters and waitresses around Barcelona though. Also our hotel was right next to a street where women were working in the oldest profession and he managed to get quite a few smiles from them too.

He also discovered both his feet and his penis over the weekend which was fun and hilarious respectively. He now grabs his penis the second you take off his nappy (diaper) which means you have to be fast with the clean up if it's an especially poo-ey one (ahhhh boys)!

The temperature difference when we returned was a bit shocking though, Barcelona was in the high 20's-30 degrees while autumn seems to be approaching in Denmark with the temperature around 15 here. This does mean I had an excuse to buy T a new hat which he looks extremely cute in I think.

Barcelona

I have a bunch of unfinished posts that I keep thinking I'll get around to completing and post but it's not happening - maybe next week.

In the mean time I'm off to Barcelona for a short break with S and T and I'll be back on Wednesday to a huge list of unread posts I expect.

I'm looking forward to showing S the places I discovered last year and discovering some new ones with him.