One of the difficulties of living an off-grid life is relying on solar power...as we creep towards Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year (and how we'll be celebrating when we cross that bridge!), there is less and less power. Today, after having four full fairly sunny days of charge, we were still only able to run a laptop for half an hour. Sooooo, while I've been itching to blog for ages and ages, it just hasn't been possible. In the days before LO came into our lives, I would've just popped into town to a coffee shop and spent an afternoon catching up on emails and blogging etc. there, but these days, well, that just isn't going to happen! So we succumbed to temptation and bought a generator - right now it is chundering away outside the back door and pumping out petrol fumes into the clean night air (guilt guilt) but I feel it is worth it to be in touch with the outside world...
Things have been wonderful: crazy, buckwild and wonderful. There have been moments when I've thought 'stop the world, I want to get off for a minute' and there have been moments when I've thought 'there must be ten million angels sitting up there waving their feathery wings over my life right now'. For years and years I have written about aspects of womanhood, including primarily pregnancy and motherhood. Now I spend a lot of time cringing about what I've written in the past... There is nothing quite like motherhood to lay you bare, to strip you down to your raw, real self, and take you crashing through a whole gamut of emotions in the space of just a few seconds. I have never experienced anything like it: the intensity, the adoration, the frustration, the guilt, the extraordinary love, the worry, the anxiety, the laughter, the wham-bam-knock-you-on-the-head immediacy of the whole shebang. Sometimes I wake with his little head beside me on the pillow and just stare at him, overcome by the incredible realisation that he is there: right there, my little bear, taking me by the hand and saying 'MUMMA, THIS IS LIFE!!!' (he can't speak yet but somehow when he does, I imagine this will be his first sentence ;-) )
Ah yes, the co-sleeping thing that springs up in the last paragraph. I always thought we'd be a co-sleeping family, it is something I'd researched and read about before and felt pretty strongly would be the right thing for us. But I didn't realise it would be a neccessity... When the bitter cold nights started here, the terror something would happen to our darling completely took me by surprise. A few weeks in and I began to get less fretful that some dreadful calamity would befall him at any moment, but there's no hiding from the fact that living in this house is freezing at times. When we came in after dark, I yearned for light switches and central heating, not a range that had gone out and stumbling around for candles. But kids are so adaptable, aren't they? Amazingly so. He is more entranced by the moon and the stars, by the first flickering lights of the candles, by the pure, deep velvet silence of night than he seems to be perturbed by the cold. That's the magic of off-grid living I guess. Nonetheless, as soon as he was settled enough, we moved him from the spare bedroom into a cot in our room, then gradually into our bed, starting with little stints in the morning. It was a reminder of how far we'd come when he slept quite peacefully between us; the first time we'd taken him on the bed for a lie down a few days into his being with us, he had cried furiously and angrily and would only settle when he was alone in the cot in the spare bedroom. Now, he starts the night in his cot in our room and when we go to bed we lift him gently into bed with us, usually without him stirring. He reaches out in the dark and touches our faces if he wakes in the night, and settles again instantly. He is so happy and cuddly when he wakes, and more than content to settle back to sleep for a nice lie-in after he's had some milk. I can't even put into words how special it was that first morning when he woke between us and turned his head from side to side to look at each of us, chuckles of delight and hands waving madly! I know that lots of people would say 'rod for your own backs' and all that, but I say rod-schmod. If you've wanted a baby with your whole heart, every moment is precious. If he shares a bed with us for years, who cares? We both agreed that we'd look back on this time when he's all grown up and flown the nest and only have warm, blissful, cosy memories.(Plus, we have a fold out bed in the living room for time just the two of us, if you get my meaning!)
As the weeks pass, our bond grows. At first he was happy to see us, but he generally likes people. Now, we are his Mumma and Dadda, he reaches for hugs and kisses (he is a blissfully cuddly baby), laughs with us, turns to us in times of need. I am amazed and full of awe at how far he has come. Suddenly, a few weeks into being here he began to bust through the 12 month milestones with a kind of feverish intensity. Every day, he did something new that had us squealing with delight. From being a fairly passive little guy, he was suddenly crawling, pulling himself up, walking with his push-along walker, clapping, making all kinds of different vocal noises...lots of achievements we got to witness. Eight weeks down the line and he's not the little person we could leave playing with his xylophone on the playmat, oh no, he's on the move! We spend a lot of time leaping about after him like mad rabbits trying to coax him away from the magnets such as dog bowls, wires, coal scuttle etc. etc.
It's good to come back and write again on some of the things that have been happening, and also reminds me of just how fast time has gone since he has been with us. All that feet-dragging on that part of Social Services, and the change of social worker, and the other ups and downs, seem like a distant memory. Another lifetime almost. Like I say, when I gaze at his sleeping face in the morning, I can hardly believe our luck.
