End of an era?

Last day
Originally uploaded by ela_jo2005 / Georgina

I'm sure there are lots of people blogging about the credit crunch and all it's various effects and challenges so why not jump on the band wagon?!

This is/was our local woolworths, one of 3 that are within traveling distance of where we live and I can say I have visited all 3 within the last year, though whether I made any purchases other than soft drinks + sweets I can't say.

I'm not going to bemoan the fact that although 2 of my children consider woolies the fountain of all pleasure (while I consider it a den of temptation and source of many hour of moaning from the kids as well as the original inventor of pester power) the third will not know or remember it ever existed. Rather I wonder why or if we will miss it at all. Music + video was over priced compared to supermarkets, household goods no longer had a big enough range to draw my interest and toys ranged from noisy + annoying to shockingly bad quality.

So what will we miss it for? At this time of year, honestly very little but come september I will miss their uniform and in summer I will miss their pick + mix, or I would if my current gluten free diet did not preclude it. But mostly I will miss going somewhere with welcoming staff some of whom have been there many years and some who are young + experiencing work for the first time.

So long woolies.

Tales from the crypt...

These days we are not traveling so light ha.ving three children means we are now using the 7 seat option in our 5-7 seater car, not because of the number of children we have, more because of the size of child car seats. You just can't get 3 that will sit side by side in the back of a 'normal' car.

Demoting the 2 eldest to the boot seemed like a great solution at the time - they're further away so quieter and can't faff on with windows etc as there's nothing adjustable in the back. It worked until today when our middle child decided it would be an excellent idea to quietly take his seat belt off. Of course his older sister tattled on him straight away, just as we were driving down a dual carriage way approaching a police car. Faced with this I resisted the urge to vault across the car and grab his throat Homer Simpson style and instead growled through gritted teeth to sit very very still until we can stop and re-do the strap in the interests of avoiding a hefty fine for transporting an unrestrained child.

Middle child has much to thank his sisters for as his hungry + cranky newborn sister saved him from being made to walk the last mile home which is usual punishment for fiddling with seatbelts while we are driving.

Watch this space to see if we end up walking home tomorrow!

Our first week as a family of 5!

Last friday saw the arrival of our third bundle of joy and she is now over a week old already! Though a week is a very short space of time its been such a journey already and we've had lots of challenges and cherished moments already.

The advantage of having a planned C-section (we thought) was the ability to plan many aspects - childcare, introducing the new baby to siblings, coming home as a family of 5 to a thanksgiving at our church.. Actually none of this happened!

With less than 48hrs to go before being admitted our son develped a vomiting bug and that meant that if we respected visiting + infection control procedure our carefully planned introduction could not take place until 48hrs after his symptoms resolved.

Her delivery was longer + more complicated than imagined but the biggest surprise came when she was weighed, our prediction of 8-9 pounds was smashed + she tipped the scale at a massive 11 pounds! This had staff from all over the department calling in to see "the huge baby". We both slept through most of the afternoon and evening and became nightowls together when the ward was meant to be quiet.

Saturday was very exciting, I had no tubes left in, was fairly mobile + had had a shower and was looking forward to heading straight to church the next morning, however that soon started to unravel too! Bethany failed her hearing test meaning we would have to wait to repeat it the next morning (she did pass the re-test) + we would probably be late leaving. That evening our oldest daughter looked decidedly green while visiting so we removed her downstairs for the risk she might vomit + spread it around the maternity ward, just in time as she was sick in reception. As there are lots of other children at church we cancelled the thanksgiving to keep our germs to ourselves and came home as a fragmented family as biggest sis was forced to hang out with Grandma for infection control.

So it was a busy weekend! Topped off in the middle by me catching the same virus as the kids and having to plod on breast feeding. Fortunately I had a lovely husband to look after me!

So she's a week old already and we're so in love but she has already changed so much! I want to remember everything about her forever. Right now she always sleeps with an arm under her head, after feeding she pulls herself off and lies across my stomach with her hands splayed across my skin, she giggles in her sleep + smiles at her brother, wonder how long that will last!

Have you ever seen....

Such a real candid?! This is my exposure test shot prior to setting the self-timer + running (well waddling) to join my family for our weekly family shot.

The actual shot turn out not so different in the end! Like father like son!

Waste of energy?

Everyone seems to be on an economy drive these days, whether it be for environmental or economical reasons. In keeping with that after Christmas we'll be switching to washable nappies with our new addition (I apologise to all hard-core green mums I cannot cope with recovering from a C-section, 2 other children and washing a zillion newborn nappies a day) and today tried some alternative to soap powder - soapnuts and essential oils- in our environmentally evil washer/dryer. I set our central heating timed programs to be cooler yesterday and we've switched to energy saving lightbulbs all over the house in the last few months. Our sky box, which we previous left on all night (*holds out hands for smacking*) has started to help us out by deciding to turn it's self off if we leave it without changing channel for too long.
That said the type of energy I would REALLY like to conserve today is mental energy! Having a C-section scheduled in less than 2 weeks and more than 2 weeks of 2 ill children behind us a good old rest would be lovely, is that likely? No of course not.

After hiding under a quilt with my 3 yr old poorly boy for the morning I managed to coax him out from under it and after a dinner of a piece of cheese and some crisps which it took me an hour to persuade him to eat, we went to get his hair cut in preparation for the seemingly far-off day that he is well enough to go back to nursery. Armed with hat, scarf, jumper and thick coat he unwilling trudged there and back and sat in stoic silence while his unruly mop was tamed.

On our return home the phone was ringing, of course, force me to walk across our newly laid and lovely floor with my outdoor shoes on to answer it. Of course I now wish I hadn't bothered. On the other end was an education welfare officer calling to ask about our son's poor attendance at his (non-compulsory) pre-school nursery place. I admit to being a bit irritated and curtly explained that due to our local school's inability to provide proper support for our autistic daughter she has to go to a school that takes me over an hour to get to on public transport and does not have a nursery while our son goes to the local school. This means we have to rely on the kindness of friends, family and occasionally strangers to pick up our daughter so that I can get to nursery to pick up our son who finishes just 10 minutes later and (before you ask) does not have an after-school club to go to. I then catalogued the hospital appointments that both children have had over the last term, my own hospitalisation with a heart problem, failure of friend's arrangements meaning we had to keep one of them at home, then passingly mention the string of illnesses he has been sick with since starting at the local germ factory; 2 viruses each taking over 2 weeks to leave him, a chest infection and currently an ear infection requiring a week of anti-biotics.

SO no I am not irritated by the referral leaving us more to deal with, and do not think that the actual referral was motivated by the fact we have previously made a complaint (which was upheld) about the school, no not at all.

In the interests of saving energy we should probably withdraw him from the pre-school place he has, as its not compulsory, and allow him to have fun at playgroups and trips out without causing us stress and continually draining his immune system. Not to mention all the electricity used up in writing such a long blog post!

Photo printing review: snap fish

After seeing a fantastic thread on babyworld linking to a website that hosts links to all the websites offering free prints I decided to try a few out for review purposes.

One of the saddest things, personally, about having 'gone digital' in the time that's elapsed since the birth of our first daughter is that we rarely print photographs these days, and what are photos for if not printing?

First up this week was snapfish and kodak. On the surface Kodak seems slightly more generous offering 30 free prints to snapfish's 20, however their upload interface is clunky and slow (arduously so, I nearly didn't bother uploading all 30 in the end) and their processing and postage times are longer. Hence the reason I can only comment on snapfish's prints today.

The prints arrived promptly and within the stated delivery time, communication was good and I received system generated e-mail every step along the way. They arrived well packaged and protected by masses of promotional information for their gift ranges etc.

On the whole the prints themselves were good quality. I uploaded a variety of colour processing methods and resolutions to see how they dealt with them. All were already in 6x4 proportions. Interestingly snapfish did not agree with lightroom as many of the images which I watermarked show that some cropping and resizing has taken place -the edges of the watermark are missed off. There was some colour distortion where more artistic processing methods had been used also, and I was disappointed in that those files that were very high resolution actually did not look 'that' much better than those that were essentially uploaded at web standard. Perhaps this would have shown up on a larger print.

The one huge unexpected jewel in the crown amongst the prints was a black & white conversion, it was printed exquitly which I certainly did not expect. That particular print has now become our photo album cover.

So overal snapfish provided a good level of service and adequate level of quality in prints, cropping and sizing issues would prevent me using a lab like this for client proofing but would be perfectly good for printing all our post-Christmas snaps.

Let the Christmas madness begin...

Why oh why have we never asked our kids to make Christmas lists for santa? Generally the logic has been that firstly until this year neither of them has been particularly capable of it and secondly in theory we shop during the year to avoid the financial embarrassment December generally brings.

What that actually means is, we put things away during the year, forget what we have and get caught up with advertising more than the kids and buy fashionable toys in the dying weeks of November like everyone else. The we inevitably find things the kids actually like in the cupboard along with a selection of beautiful clothes that no longer fit because we've forgotten they were there.

This years 'fashionable purchase'? Actually is something we wanted to play with, Elmo live, and the subsequent discovery that Elmo has 2 TMX friends of course led to a further purcahse. What?! By Christmas day we'll have 3 children, that's one sesame street character each.... of course if they touch them without asking there WILL be trouble.