Three Thoughts

Thought the first:

It's amazing how this baby, a person that we haven't even met, has already opened our lives up in ways we never would have expected. Last week a group of UK adopters all met up and had an Ethiopian cooking lesson, which was brilliant. It was shoddily organised by moi, (and I found out that wow, I am unbelieveably bad at organising events - useful lesson) which means that I got to know the lady who did the demonstration- she runs an Ethiopian cafe near where we live, and due to my uselessness at organising, we had to have quite a few confabs. Anyway, I saw her again yesterday and it struck me just how much I like her and that we never, ever would have met her if it hadn't been for HFB. And I certainly would never have learned to cook zelzel tibs. Later yesterday evening, we went around to another Ethiopian friend's for dinner. We met him when we went to Ethiopian church (which I blogged about a while back). He is a truly radiant person - it's such a pleasure to know him, and again, it never would have happened if it weren't for our unknown, unmet HFB.

Thanks, kiddo.


Thought the second:

I've known for a while that the most effective fertility treatment in the universe is either to be my friend, or to be related to me. I thought I would feel okay about this by now (you're expecting, I'm expecting, lets swap stories about prams) but each new announcement reminds me just how long we've been waiting, and how long we will continue to wait, and that nobody is going to keep these babies in an orphanage for two extra months while their parents wait for the courts to open again after the rainy season. I know, I know, it's not all about me, and yes, I am a sucky friend / relation and I should be cast into the depths of the ocean. Please believe that I already know this.

And yet. Rather than thinking 'oh, how lovely, more babies for my baby to play with!' I think: 'July? You mean THIS July? That is so monumentally unfair!'

Actually I think that on one occasion, I may have actually said this. See, depths of the ocean.

But I'm realising that a time is approaching when a twelve week announcement won't have that effect on me. Barring unforeseen changes (did I really even need to spell that out?), someone will stroke their belly and say 'November!' and I'll smile beatifically and say 'oh, how lovely. Our babies can grow up together'. That moment can't come too soon.

Thought the third:

J tells me that I can't get upset if people aren't understanding of what we're going through if I don't actually tell them. So, I've been trying to be more communicative with people about what this wait is really like. But these emotions are difficult to convey. I mention the uncertainty and the waiting and the most common response is : 'Oh, that's just like being pregnant!' Ummmm, no, it's really really not. I know that being pregnant is difficult. (Anybody else tempted to write a book called 'What to expect to hear when friends are expecting?') But those difficulties are not these difficulties. This baby is separated from me not by layers of skin and flesh and 40 weeks of waiting, but by oceans and continents and what feels on some days like the entire space-time continuum. I love and long for this child as much as if he or she was inside me, but I can do nothing concrete to keep this child safe. I can't eat or not-eat, do or not-do. I cannot monitor anything. And I know none of those things are guarantees, but I can't even do what I can, because I can't do anything. I don't think I ever really knew what trust was until I realised this. All I can do is pray: Lord, please look after my baby.

My Hopes Were Up

Just so you know: this post has nothing whatsoever to do with our adoption.

A little while ago, a well-known manufacturer of confectionery (okay, it was M.ars) ran a competition that they were promoting on campus. The task was to make something out of three m.ars bars: first prize, £1000, runner up prizes - m.ars hampers.

Now, if I have one tip for successful living - one thing I have learned in all my years, it is this: enter competitions. I don't mean the 'phone this number and answer a stupidly simple question' competitions, I mean competitions where you actually have to TRY. The reason is: most people can't be bothered trying, and there will be many, many fewer entries than you think, meaning that you can win AMAZING stuff with remarkably low-quality entries. With this approach, I have won, in the last two years, a very nice cameraphone, a Pentax digital SLR and an out-of-this-world African safari.

No, not kidding. If you've ever been on my flickr page, the pictures of lions and so on from August 2007 are from this trip.

So my motto is: You've got to be in it to win it! Otherwise known as: most people are lazy, so take advantage of that. So anyway, back to the story. I decided that of course this was worth my time! A colleague and I spent two lunchbreaks carefully crafting the following:


which was more difficult than it looks, but surprisingly fun. (That's the other rule, of course - only do competitions that are fun. Otherwise it's really NOT worth it, no matter how great the prizes are). As we suspected, the organisers were not bowled over with thousands of entries and despite the ordinariness of ours we won a runner-up prize. Yay! A hamper! Full of chocolate! Life was (no pun intended) sweet.

Well, anyway, that was more than three weeks ago. Whenever one of us was out of the office for more than about ten minutes, it became a running joke to ask 'has the hamper arrived while I was out?' on returning. The answer was always 'no', of course, and this hamper began to assume gargantuan, mythic proportions in our minds while we waited. Whenever things got a bit difficult (often) one of us would sigh and say 'you know, what I really need to get me through this is a hamper full of chocolate'. In quiet moments, we would discuss what we thought we would find inside on that happy day when it finally arrived. We had already promised bits of it to various people. Basically, we were like children waiting for Christmas. Occasionally, we would say 'ahhh, there is NO WAY this is going to be good enough to live up to our expectations'. But secretly, we thought it would.

Today, it arrived. It was a brown cardboard box, smaller than we had hoped, but with a promising weight of four kilograms! That's quite a lot of chocolate! Anyway, I know the suspense is killing you so here is what was inside:

The stuff in the big orange packets is... rice. I kid you not. RICE. And not just any rice, but... instant rice. And there is some stirfry sauce. Altogether, this is more than half the weight of the package. There's hardly any chocolate. Not a single m.ars bar. Not an M&M to be seen. No snickers (I love snickers).

What kind of company goes to the bother of running a competition, administers it, and then at the point of packing the prizes (at ZERO cost, from their OWN factory) decides: what all the kids want these days is a big box o' rice?

I'm not even really sure what the point of this post is, except to say... some things are so weird you just have to write them down. Today, I think I experienced one of them. Anyone want to come to my house for .... rice?

Good News for Clarins

The good news for manufacturers of expensive skin care products is that I have started to wrinkle. You may ask my age, and then scoff, if you like, but it is true. True. I blame it on my sunlit childhood, mostly spent swimming and absorbing as many UV rays as possible. I wore suncream, obviously, but nobody has mentioned this to the crows who seem to have permanently planted their little feet next to my eyes. Anyway, the time has come for me to stop whining about it and start taking Proper Care of my Ageing Skin. Lucky me. Otherwise I worry that HFB will take one look at me, recoil and think: "what's going on here? I need a mother, not a grandmother! Who is this haggard old crone? Ach, she's too cheap to buy proper skincare! What kind of a future am I going to have with this wrinkly tightwad?"

Yes, at the moment, the voice in my head tends to belong to an angry Ethiopian baby.

Anyway, long story short, I bit the bullet on a 'skincare plan' (snort) and since I was spending such a freakingly stupid amount of money, this seemed like the right time to take a form home and join the store's loyalty card scheme. Name and address aren't too challenging. Then you have to tick all the discount sub-schemes you'd like to be part of. 60+ health scheme? Errrr, not quite yet, thanks! But here's an interesting one....For parents and parents-to-be.... hey! That's us! Finally, that's us! We've got no baby stuff yet, and I really love discounts. So I'm definitely joining up. But then I take up my pen to tick the boxes and it says 'if you are pregnant when is your baby due?' and I'm stumped. Should I guess at when we'll be coming home, baby in hand? Or should I pick some kind of joke date? April Fools Day seems appropriate. Scrawling 'What about ME? I'm adopting and I don't HAVE a due date! Do you have any idea how HARD that is? Just because I'm not pregnant doesn't mean I don't need DISCOUNTS' across the application form seems like a little bit of an over reaction, but I get dangerously close.

In the end I tick 'not applicable' and shove the form in the mail with quite a lot of force. It was probably just going to be discounts on folic acid supplements anyway. Who needs that, huh?

amazing amazing

For the last few days, rumours have been spreading about what's happening in the courts in Ethiopia. I've been trying not to think too much about it - just last week, we found out that a friend (from the UK) had her court date set and it was going to be a three month wait. This felt like crushing news - for her, that it was such a long wait, and for us too. I've always been hoping that one of the perks (okay, the ONLY perk) of having to adopt independently would be that when we went out to apply for a court hearing for our baby, I could stay and start making friends with him or her while we waited for court. But the longer the waits for court become, the more impossible this looks.

Two months out there - I can probably do that, financially, and in terms of neglecting my husband. I want to do it, by the way. But three months starts to look a lot dicier, and the worst part is that the waits went so rapidly from two to three months, they could easily become four by the time it is our turn. I haven't really blogged about all this because it very quickly makes me feel unbearably sad, and also because I know that I don't know the first thing about how hard that post-referral wait must be. I know that lots of people have to go out, meet their new baby, and then come home. And I know that if I really had to do that, I would probably survive it. But I feel like it's killing me now not to be able to see my baby, when he / she is still only the hypothetical future baby in my mind. I've witnessed enough of other people's experience to know that being separated from a baby you know through a photo, video and descriptions can be indescribably painful. But a baby I have actually held? And then had to put back down again? And had to get back on a plane and come back here? For three MONTHS? I have to keep telling myself : like every other part of this process, I would survive, because there's no other option. I can rage and cry about this but it doesn't do any good.

But today. We got an email from this friend, and she told us that her court date has been moved forward by FIVE WEEKS. This is so amazing - I can't take it in. In the nearly eight months we've officially been in this process, we've seen a lot of changes and they've all been bad. Two compulsory trips. No singles. No official referrals. Independent adoptions only. Telescoping timescales. I have felt like we are trapped in a system with an unusually high level of entropy - things are falling apart at speed and we just have to hope that we manage this before they fall apart completely. But now, but now... is it possible that things might be getting - not worse - but better?

I should have said

...that I was going to be away for a week. But I forgot, and then I *was* away, somewhere blissfully so remote that i had no computer, no phone, no nothing, and no ability to say hey, I'm away for a week. And things have happened! People have passed court! And I haven't had a chance to congratulate them yet!

But now I'm back. And I have BEADS!! And not just beads I bought off the internet either - beads from people! Real, live people! On MY doormat! I. Am. So. Excited.

Other exciting holiday news - I convinced J to read a book that hadn't been previously read and approved by me (this is a big, big milestone in our relationship - he really likes to read, but he likes me to guarantee that the book is going to be good beforehand) and he's finishing it off now. That doesnt' look so exciting when I write it down, but while he's distracted I've had a chance to start catching up on things... better make the most of it!

Fabulousity

I got tagged! Thanks so much for tagging me for this, filoli - and sorry it's taken me so long - it pulled me out of my blogging funk. I'm a little dubious about whether any of these addictions are actually fabulous, (TV! Food! The Internet! Craft! More food! That woman really DOES lead a fascinating life!) but hey, I'm going with what I've got.

My current top 5 addictions are:

1) The West Wing
I know, I know, everyone else discovered this in about 2002. I thought I was immune - in fact, I thought it looked pretty stupid - but a critical mass of my friends told me 'wow, you should really see the west wing, it's amazingly great, although it's not as good after Aaron Sorkin leaves' and suddenly, a moment of madness during my Christmas shopping saw me adding the complete seven season box set to my trolley. (It was very, VERY heavily discounted, she said hastily). I was with a friend at the time and he said 'hey! The west wing! That's so great! You're going to love it! But it's not as good after Aaron Sorkin leaves.'

I went home, time passed. I watched a few episodes. I liked it quite a lot but wasn't raving, until suddenly a few discs in I was hooked. As in, H.O.O.K.E.D. So much so that i had to call the original friend who recommended it, just to tell her how right she had been.
'I know!' she said. 'It's so great! But enjoy these first seasons, because it's really not as good after Aaron Sorkin leaves'.

I cannot tell you how much of my time over the last few weeks and months has been spent on my sofa, knitting and watching this programme. Life has been not the funnest, lately, and it's really good to know that whatever happens, Josh, Toby, Leo and CJ will be there for me. (If one of them dies / leaves, I am going to be SO MAD. I wasn't sad when Sam left - his pretty-boy hair was annoying me).

I'm on series five now, and I'm still really enjoying it. I think you should all watch it too. But you know what? I feel I need to warn you about one thing - it's really not the same after Aaron Sorkin leaves.

2) Oreos.
As the future white mother of a black child*, I have major guilt feelings about loving oreos so much. I worry - does this love affair reveal some kind of subconscious unresolved issues about race? And then I eat one and think - gosh, no. I love these because they taste so darn YUMMY! And because they come in handy snack packs.

Ironically, (and yes I believe I am using that word correctly) I got hooked on oreos because of WeightWatchers. Two cookies is only 1 1/2 points. Considering a slice of bread is 1 point, and so is an apple - that's pretty fan-spanking-tastic. Bring it on. I might have another one right now.

*I'm already white. It's motherhood that's in the future. Just in case you thought I was going all Michael Jackson on you. And also - 'black' is the correct, PC term here. AA is all wrong (for very obvious reasons). I hope it doesn't offend anyone. If so, please suggest another word that isn't US-centric!

3) Reading all your blogs
Do I have to explain this? No, I thought not. Suffice to say that my husband REALLY rues the day he encouraged me to buy an internet phone, because now I can do it anywhere, anytime.

4) Buying beads on the internet.
Oh, wow. This one sure snuck up on me. It all started so innocently. I thought beads were for, you know... other people. But then I discovered the world of semi-precious gem beads and I'm just... a goner. I've become like some kind of cartoon character with a chest full of treasure - I keep opening up my packets of beads so I can just... hold them. This is especially the case with a set of 14mm amethysts I ordered- I keep on stroking them in a way that is probably not entirely healthy. I'm not even sure I want to make a necklace out of them because then I won't be able to trickle them through my fingers anymore. And, of course, one thing leads to another. What these amethysts need is some smaller amethysts to put between them, and some black onyx to set them off. So I bought them too. And isn't that a gorgeous string of faceted purple jade? Oh, here I am again on the website of my favourite supplier again. How did that happen? That rock crystal sure is pretty! And will go with everything! Oh hey, these guys don't sell silver beads. But hey - here's someone who does! And look what else they have!

I ordered some more beads yesterday (rose quartz, since you ask) and already, I'm smacking myself on the forehead and saying to myself: 'Iolite! I didn't buy any iolite! Well, one strand can't hurt. Better go back and get some, because a nice blue really is incredibly useful. And while I'm here, let's see what else they've got....' AS IF IT HAS CHANGED SINCE YESTERDAY.

Of all my addictions, this is the only one that is likely to see me default on my mortgage payments.

But really, it's fine. I can stop anytime. Anytime.

In fact, I have bought so many beads recently, and made so many necklaces, that I'm never going to get a chance to wear them all unless I sprout another neck. Or three. Turns out it's the making I really like, rather than the wearing. It's therapeutic, and I'm too repressed to get actual therapy so that's very handy. It's definitely time to set up an etsy shop. Actually, I've already done that. I guess it's time to actually take the photographs and write the descriptions, rather than rely on buyers' psychic powers to sell these objects. And then I HAVE to buy more beads, because it's actually a business expense. Right? You don't have to sell anything to actually be a business, do you? Right? Right???

But really. I can stop anytime.

5) Two food addictions is a little embarrassing. But if you asked me what I wanted, right NOW, what would add most to my happiness, I'd have to say:


A handful of these guys. I'm a fickle person, and my addictions and obsessions wax and wane over time. But M&Ms have been a staple craving for about the last ten years, and I don't see them being bumped off this list anytime soon. I have to tightly ration myself (if I told you how tightly, you'd mock me, so I won't) but it's good to know that whenever the going gets REALLY tough, they'll be waiting for me.

Now - some fabulous blogs. You're ALL fabulous! But today I tag:

CINDY - partly because I want to know how many times 'cheese' can appear in a five-part list

AMY - because her blog is a hilarious, marvellous public service and I think the whole world should read it - it would definitely become a much chic-er place,

ANNA - because she always lifts my spirits

COLLEEN - because I think you should all visit her blog and check out her cute new haircut

MISTY - because it might give her something to post about while she waits six more days for court!

The rules are pretty straightforward - list five of your fabulous addictions, and tag five blogs that you think are ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS.


**Updated a day later to say** - I bought the iolite. So sue me.

Sunday/Monday

I'm sad (very sad) to tell you that my grandmother passed away last night - or this morning, depending on what timezone you're in. When you're not even on the right day of the week when someone passes away, maybe that's nature's way of telling you you're too far away from your family.

I spoke to my mother and my grandfather this morning (my time) and that really did help. My mother assured me that it was the right time - she had been in a lot of pain, and it wasn't possible for her to keep on as she was. The family had been taking it in turns to be on 24 hour bedside vigil for the last few days, and my aunt (who was at her side in the hospital) called my grandfather about 4am and asked him to come - he came - they were both there at the end. I'm glad of this. I'm glad she was surrounded by those she loved in death, as she was in life. She was a wonderful grandmother. I will miss her terribly. If I have grandchildren, I hope they have a tenth of the happy memories of me that I have of her.


My grandfather told me that she has asked to have her ashes scattered here (not a very good photo): which is the town where she grew up.

I so much wanted her to meet our baby. I'm so sad that she will not.

I've been so disappointed that it's going to take longer to bring our baby home than I had thought. But today I've been thinking. Maybe it's right. You only have to read my last few posts to see that this is a pretty sad house at the moment. This probably isn't the best place for a hurting baby to come home to, right now, needing super-parenting. I'm not saying I want to wait until the end of the year (which is looking more and more likely) but... I think it's going to take a while for things to feel okay again here. In a week I might be cursing myself for writing that. But. I don't think even 'the call' would make me feel happy at the moment. So it's just as well it's not going to come.

In No Particular Order

• This is going to be one of those bullet point posts.

• I hardly know where to start on this last week. Forgive me if I sound disengaged from all this - I'm not - but I'm writing this on my work computer (see below) and now is not the time for me to start crying.

• So first the easy stuff. Our internet at home is on the fritz (<--------- joke for the benefit of my sister) and it's making me crazy. I was ordering beads(!) on Saturday and I had to keep restarting the computer so often (to kick the modem into life) that I nearly threw it against the wall. Only the thought of finally being able to send off some beads out kept me going. Now those days of restarting to make it work seem joyous because now all it will say is 'remote computer is not responding' or 'modem is not responding to poll commands'. We've got to get a proper internet connection. But (as I'm sure everyone else has noticed) the most efficient way to arrange an internet connection is ... over the internet. Which we don't have. We'll have to sort it out from work, but in the meantime I'm reading blogs on my phone but that won't let me comment. Which is making me crazy.

• Trivial but annoying. On monday I broke a tooth on a stone in my breakfast cereal. It's only chipped, really, but I wish it hadn't happened. I keep trying to make a dental appointment with my local NHS practice, but I feel like I'm trapped in a Kafka novel again. I do not want to be That Person - the person who demands payment from a breakfast cereal company for a dental repair - but if I have to get this done privately that may happen. On the realities of the NHS - all I can say is, if you saw 'Sicko', don't believe everything Michael Moore tells you about healthcare in the UK. But hopefully you would already know that.

• Harder. J's father got the results of his tests back, and much to our relief his c.ancer seems to be operable. Three weeks ago, I would never have believed that we would be so pleased that J's father would be going into hospital for such a serious operation. We know this is the best outcome we could have hoped for but it's really tough for him, for the family, and especially J's mother. He's going in on the 24th.

• Harder still. The funeral of J's uncle Peter (known in the family as U.P.) was on Tuesday, in Yorkshire, which is about 3 hours from where we live. It was a really difficult, long day - in some ways much harder than I expected. By the time I met U.P, about five years ago, he was beginning to be very infirm in body and mind, and I never really knew him properly because of that. This makes me sad - and I feel sadder about it after his death than I did during his life. In stark contrast to my family, whose motto seems to be 'breed early and breed often', J's family is very very small. UP was J's father's only sibling, and he never married, so J's parents, together with J, me, his two brothers and their wives, were 'The Family' at the services. And I hardly knew him, really. It was a hard day.

• Hardest. I spoke to my mother yesterday and it seems that my beloved Grandmother is rapidly approaching death. I feel like I cannot bear the thought that she will go. I keep feeling - 'It's too early! You can't take her yet! She's only 82!' and I know how stupid that sounds, but it's never, never going to feel like I'm ready to lose her. And not only that I'm not ready, (although I'm not) as that I know she is not. I could face losing her, despite the pain it would cause me, if I could look forward with joyful hope to knowing she was passing from death into life, and going to meet her saviour (I know that sounds hokey to some of you. I don't care). But her mix of atheism / agnosticism doesn't allow me that hope. It would be disrespectful if I were to talk as if she was looking forward to going to a heaven she doesn't believe in, to meet a God she has rejected. Disrespectful both of her and of God, both of whom I love. So I cannot. But I wish I could.

• On Sunday, before I found out about my grandmother, I was telling a friend that it feels like every time we get a phone call it is unwelcome news. She said - at the moment, it probably feels like you can't take any more. But other things will happen, and you will bear them too. Wise words, as it turns out.

• Emotionally, I'm still having a really hard time with the 'hey I'm an expectant parent too' feelings. Not all the spare baby equipment needs to go to someone who is physically pregnant, surely? I'm sitting right here, right next to the pregnant lady who you just gave that stuff to 'because she might need it'. Do I need to carry a placard?

• I'm going to see this tonight. Really looking forward to it. How can I not want to see a person who describes himself as the child of an unlikely liaison between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Wigan Social Services?

• One bright spot - my bead order has arrived. I'm hoping to send out some today. Incidentally, people, I can't send you a bead unless I have your address. Just sayin'.

• I'm exhausted now. Thanks for sticking with it.

Do I hear a wagon?

If you listen very carefully, you might hear the sound of a wagon rolling through the land of blog. Not just any wagon - a BANDwagon (which is by far the best kind of wagon) - and once you've heard it, you will also hear me running after it and hollering and demanding to be let on board.

I'm not quite sure what to hand over for my ticket. One of these?


Or maybe one of these?


This, perhaps?


Nah. Maybe one of these:

I'm guessing at least 90% of you know what I'm talking about by this point. The driver of this bandwagon is the inestimable, inimitable Courtney, who is approximately a hair's breadth away from her referral. Last week she asked her blog friends to send her a bead. If you haven't read this post yet - read it. Read it now.

I think this is a wonderful idea, and I really want to join in. So much of this post touched me that I'm at risk of typing it all out again so I can say how meaningful I thought it was - I won't. But for me it really tapped into a need to feel - togetherness - on this crazy journey. I feel so alone sometimes, doing this. Nobody in my real life is doing this. If I needed breastfeeding advice, I would have people to ask. If I needed maternity clothes, I would have people to borrow from. If I had an ultrasound photo, I would have people to show it off to. If I needed morning sickness remedies, I would have people to call. But on this journey, in my life, where I live, I... don't.

On this path, I've been surprised by how much it has hurt not to be part of the collective female experience of giving birth to the next generation. I would like to have taken that baton from my mother and passed it on to my daughter. I would like to have taken it for granted. And I would like to have taken for granted a sisterhood that has been through what I am going through. And I don't use words like 'sisterhood' easily, so that's an indication of how much pain it has caused.

I love Courtney's idea because it is a reminder that there are other ways to create collective experience and lift each other up. You don't have to live close to someone for them to encourage you. You don't have to have met someone to send each other a bead.

I would so much love it if any of you wanted to send a bead to me. You don't have to be a mother, and you don't have to be adopting, and I don't have to know who you are - if you're reading this, and you'd like to send a bead, then I would absolutely love to receive one. And of course, anyone who wants one - wherever and whoever you are - I'll send you one back. I'll put my address in the top corner of my blog.

It. Would. Mean. So. Much.

The Menagerie

I'll be honest and say that this new phase of waiting is getting me down a lot more than I expected. You know, at this point, I really thought it would start to get easier to buy baby presents for other people. I thought I would hear the big announcement ('it's a boy! We've decided to name him Krazy Klingon Kupcake the Third!) and, rather than feeling nauseous with jealousy, and also angry because Kupcake was MY choice of name, I would just swing by the baby store on the way home, buy the obligatory tiny jumper with a frog (or a weasel, or a cat, or whatever) on it, maybe check out the nursery furniture while I'm there and then just happily trot home.

Yeah, not so much, as it turns out. I'm left wondering: when does this start to get easier? When does the fact that we will have a child in the future start to feel more real than the fact that we don't have one today? I thought it would be now. I was wrong.

Maybe it's not just the waiting, though. I just feel like a fool because I assumed January was going to be a great month. Finally, our time to start with all the preparations that normal parents make! It will be a halcyon time of love and laughter! Instead, it's brought wave after wave of unwelcome news: telescoping timescales, family illness, uncertain immigration requirements and a bereavement. All the adoption bad news feels really messed up with other difficulties until I hardly know what it is that I feel sad about.

So: when your head's in a mess, engage in unnecessary craft activities. That's what I'm telling myself. I haven't been a crafter at all for about twenty years until I picked up the kneedles a few months ago. In fact, I had some very unkind things to say about people who crafted. Mostly including the words 'if you wouldn't buy it, why would you make it?' and 'honestly, who needs a macrame duck?' and 'does she really have that much spare time on her hands?' And then one thing led to another and now I've been crocheting too, and sewing - an activity I swore I'd never engage in. And I'm forced to eat my words.

I love the William Morris quote ' Have nothing about you that is neither beautiful nor useful'. I think beautiful is out of the question, at my level of skill, so I probably should ry making something useful, but so far, no. Instead, I've been going crazy making baby toys. I think my subconscious believes that, if I can just make enough toys, a baby will be irresistibly drawn to our house because of the sheer density of playthings.

So. Meet monster.



He was the first thing I sewed (and I had a bit of trouble with the tension on his mouth, as you can see). J finds him a bit mystifying. He hasn't quite said 'face it, Claudia, no child is so deprived that they are going to want to play with THAT' but I know he's thinking it. At least he was made from an actual pattern, which is more than can be said for sketchy lion:


who was loosely based on the monster pattern, but, errr, obviously completely different. Sketchy lion is not just any lion - he's culturally appropriate (check out the dark brown in his mane, like an Ethiopian Lion) and mildly educational (his mane is made of ribbon tags, for little fingers to play with, and the ribbons are varying textures: grosgrain and satin). Also he has a very fetching tail (although due to practical difficulties it appears to be located halfway up his imaginary spine).


And in the interests of finishing before everybody reading this slips into a coma, here is the rest of the family portrait (so far):

Including blue bear & brown bear (brown bear taught me an important lesson - STAY AWAY from fuzzy angora yarn. It's pleasantly soft, but the heartache of trying to find your next stich just isn't worth it) and mini-kevin (who you have already met).

I think that's probably enough, but I've begun to think about finding a good pattern for a penguin. It seems that the aim is, by the time the baby arrives, to have filled the cot with so many random animals that there will be no room for an actual baby. At the rate I'm going, and the rate that the DC.SF is processing paperwork, I don't think that's unrealistic.