Getting my Groove Back

The following equation just about sums up what life’s been like for the last five months:

Living in England + two small children + no support (i.e. nanny, house help, au pair, relative) + being a wife and mummy = no time left over for self

In a nutshell that’s life as it is for me at the moment and the reason I haven’t blogged in such a long time.

But never one to remain in a downward spiral for long, I have set about improving my lot.

So after almost five months of slobbing about I am finally coming round to the realization that my excuse of ‘ but I just had a baby’ isn’t going to hold water for much longer and have embarked on a programme of turning PTS from a Slummy Mummy to a Yummy Mummy.

My first stop was to get me back in shape so I signed up for not one but two! , exercise classes. On a Monday I go for Pilates and on a Wednesday I go for Yoga. Best decision I ever made. Not only does it give me three hours clear a week to myself, I feel so much better. I LOVE yoga. I could kick myself for not doing it years earlier. To be honest, I had the ignorant misguided idea in my head that to do Yoga you had to become a mantra chanting, incense burning, vegetable eating, tree hugging hippie type person. Don’t blame me!! Blame the stereotyping I am bombarded with on TV and in the magazines.

Yoga is relaxing, challenging and it teaches you to really focus and BREATHE. Oh, and being flexible is a plus. After just four weeks ( of both classes) I can feel the benefits already. My body feels much stronger – not in terms of muscle but in terms of strength – I feel toned and strangely enough I feel more confident as well.

Second stop in my Yummy Mummy quest is to tackle my diet. I don’t eat bad, bad but I don’t eat so great either. I love my butter and my fat and my fry, fry, fry. I love bread (brown) and cream and milky drinks. I buy fruit but don’t eat much of what I buy. Thankfully my daughter is a fruit freak so nothing goes to waste. I do like vegetables though but half the time I can’t be arsed to make a bowl of salad. It’s such a chore chopping all those vegetables up I find. And I eat way tooooooooooo much meat (ah, the Naija in me!). Hubby has embarked on an Alkaline Diet (see the PH Miracle for further info) and the weight is absolutely dropping off. It’s a bit too drastic for me (I can’t do without meat for too long) but it works so perhaps I will dip in and out of it and tailor it a bit to suit my lifestyle. I am more inclined towards the French Women Don’t Get Fat type diet so we’ll just have to see. Check in for progress reports…

Third stop is my wardrobe – I mean there must be more to life than denim and Gaps’ Favourite T. But where to start?? In being a mum and wife I seem to have lost my sense of style and adventure when it comes to clothes. I always stick with safe choices – blacks, browns, creams and beige. BORING!! So budding fashionistas, any suggestions? But remember, I am a woman on a budget so forget the Prada’s and Jimmy Choo’s for now.

Finally, there is the more, erm, personal side of my personal improvement plan. Let’s just say that after running after two kids, looking after the home and doing the laundry the whole day your hormones aren’t exactly raring to go come bedtime. But that’s a topic for another day. Ha, ha.

And how have the last five months been for you? Oh, silly me, I have to read your blogs to find out!

Shopping and the Breastfeeding Mum

As any breastfeeding mum will tell you, one thing that changes radically is your shopping habit. At least for me it has.

The first thing I do now when I arrive at a shopping mall is to scope the joint for the nearest mother and baby ( M & B) changing room – these days many forward looking malls also have a little area included in which a mother can sit and breastfeed her baby away from the prying eyes of strangers. In this country, if you breast feed in public you either

a) get told off by a member of the passing public claiming that the sight is offensive to them (this happened to a mum recently)

b) get gawked at by acne ridden teenagers eager to cop a look at a bared breast

c) get gawked at by lecherous old men also eager to cop a look at a bared breast.

So to avoid any of the above the best option is to make a bee line for an M & B room.

I am toying with the idea of drawing up a list of the best and worst M & B rooms across the country – I have been doing quite a lot of travelling lately and so I am familiar with more than a few of them. The best feeding room by far that I have found myself in is the John Lewis one in the Touchwood Shopping Centre, Solihull. Fantastic! The worst are the ones in the Bullring, Birmingham. Tight and pokey with a very hard flip down seat. Horrible.

But I digress.

The reason why I look for the M & B room first is because I know that I will be spending at least an hour or more in one during the course of my shopping trip so it’s a good thing to be prepared, as the scouts would say.

Another thing that has changed for me as a breastfeeding mum is the type of clothes I shop for – the bottom half doesn’t matter but the top half is all important. Gone are the days of wearing tops with zips down the sides or back. Now anything I buy has to either button down the front, be stretchy enough to be slipped over my shoulder or should criss-cross in front (Principles do a nice range of stretchy/criss-cross dresses) which is a lot more difficult to achieve that one might think. Most of the fashion these days are geared towards slinky, small chested women and shops catering to mums with little babies are either ridiculously overpriced or have a collection of clothes so dull and dismal all you want to do is just sit down and weep.

The fabric of the clothes should also preferably be patterned, fairly dark or thick enough to disguise the tell tale outline of your breast pads. Oh, breast pads are soooooooo important to have on/in when you go shopping. Without going into too much detail the last thing you want to have are two round wet patches on either side of your chest as your boobees begin to lactate at the sound of your baby’s cry. Not a good look, trust me.

Last but not the least – I never, ever leave home without the all important feeding cloth, as I call it. This is simply a square muslin cloth which is almost always to be seen draped over my shoulder. No it is not a new fashion accessory but an all important clothes protector. After all the last thing you want is regurgitated milk resembling cheese in the first stages of processing, oozing down your shoulder when you hold baby up to burp.

And my favourite joke of the minute is..

What sort of bees make milk?

Boobees!!

Hehehehe.

Picture courtesy of daily candy

Blogging Again

As you may already have guessed life has been incredibly busy hence the long silence from me on my blog. There just are not enough hours in the day any more.

Where to begin?

Well, baby (I’ll refer to her as G from henceforth) is now nine weeks old – yeah I know I can barely believe it myself! – and she is just the cutest thing on this planet. However, she has recently developed a Jekyll and Hyde personality - switching between being a coo-ing angelic cherub one minute and a screaming banshee the next. To deal with this screaming persona I enlisted the help of a simple devise known as a dummy. My goodness, does it work like magic or what! I swore over my dead body that I would not give a dummy to my first daughter and I never did (fool that I was I now realise) and after initially taking the same stance with G I had to admit defeat after a particularly nasty screaming bout (there is nothing like a screaming baby to get your temperature rising and your teeth gnashing!) and rushed out to Boots to buy one and am I glad I did. Used sensibly and with discretion a dummy can be a life saver. It calms G instantly and the sucking seems to soothe her. I wish I had known this the first time around I would have saved myself a lot of stress and tears.

But there is no doubt about it; I am enjoying being a mother more this time around than I did with my first. With my first child, it was a journey into the unknown and it felt, at the time, like I was travelling down a long dark tunnel with no light at the end of it. I felt trapped - like my life had come to an end. But as I look back nowI realise I suffered from baby blues.

This time around, experience has kicked in. I know what to expect and I am more relaxed about the little things I used to get so worked up over the first time around. I am much more in control and feel a lot more confident about my mothering skills. I have accepted the fact that a task that would normally take me half an hour to complete (like blogging) now takes me the whole day because I have to keep stopping midway to attend to G. Most importantly, I know whatever phase G is going through will pass so I try as much as possible to enjoy the moment. Of course from time to time I blow a gasket (I am only human afterall) but it's short lived and I take a deep breath and life goes on.

Hopefully, I am now sufficiently back on track to begin blogging more regularly again – I’ve missed it and boy do I have loads to blog about.