Nine Months!

Nine months! Amy's finally got a tooth. She's had her first taste of daycare and did pretty well. What a big brave girl.

See Amy grow.

I still love 'em

Filling a couple orders for the first time in ages. Even after 2+ years of making these, I still get a thrill when I turn them right-side-out and see how amazing they look.

One's a genuine paying customer, the other is a long-organised swap for Amy's birthday present.

A Nini & Wink family to go with Amy's Lilly dolly. I'm going to make a tram for them all to ride in. Somehow. Perhaps in the style of Jodie's Animal House.

(Blame Blogger for the pixelated photos!)

My crystal ball...

...Shows me this.

I've taken full advantage of Spoonflower's Free Shipping Monday. Now I have to wait a month or so for the future to arrive.

P.S. Thanks everyone who commented on my breastfeeding/weaning post. I've been running around like a headless chook and haven't had the chance yet to reply to each of them individually. But - it does mean a lot to me to have you share your experiences and offer support for whatever (safe & healthy) way I look after my children.

P.P.S. My wish for 2011 was "Babies for those who want them". Today I've had news of yet another pregnancy for a person who's been waiting an incredibly long time. It's got nothing to do with me wishing, of course, but it makes me very happy. Only one left on my "Wants a baby but hasn't got one" list, and she only joined the list this month so she may have to wait a bit! Hooray for babies!

If you look closely...

...You might glimpse the future.

A vague approximation of it, anyway.

(I feel like I should have my blog confiscated for taking photos with a flash.)

Spoonflower has free shipping everywhere in the world if you order on (American) Monday, so time to get those design kinks sorted out and start uploading.

Quick question for cushion fans - big squishy 45cm, or neat cute 40cm (of which I can easily fit six panels into a yard)?

(Thanks to Margaret for workshopping this with me today, and thanks to Cathie and Nikki for a perfect opportunity to do so!)

Secret Mummyhood Confession

Crazy Canadian Tawny Bee joins in with Secret Mommy-hood Confessions on the weekend, and today I've got my own confession to make.

I stopped breastfeeding Amy a week ago and haven't said anything anywhere because I'm afraid of being judged by pro-12m+ breastfeeders.

My first bubba, Jack, was the worst breastfeeder. Right from the start he screamed and fought breastfeeds, and we ended up in a routine of me having to walk around the house jiggling around while breastfeeding him so he'd stay calm. If I so much as spoke while he was feeding he'd have a tantrum. He had his first formula top-up at eight weeks because I was so sick of the Maternal & Child Health Nurse's program of using the breastpump for ten minutes after every feed to increase my supply. At five months I replaced his bedtime feed with a bottle because I simply had no milk at that time of day, and a slow weaning program saw him have his last breastfeed at eight months. I was so glad it was over.

Second bubba Amy has been the opposite. After the first two weeks breastfeeding has been simple and it was wonderful to be able to leave the house knowing I could breastfeed quietly in public - something I could never do with Jack. I tried several times to get her to drink expressed milk from a bottle and she wouldn't have it. At six months I finally convinced her to take a bottle, and as I'm searching for work I replaced one feed a day with a bottle of formula. We casually adopted a slow weaning plan and a couple weeks ago we got down to two breastfeeds a day. As it did with Jack at this point, my body gave up on having milk ready at feed times and the remaining breastfeeds became very difficult. One of the last two remaining feeds was swapped for a bottle, and then last Sunday it took so long to achieve let-down, leading to Amy getting very upset, and I knew it was the last feed. Despite breastfeeding being so simple this time she was weaned at exactly the same week as Jack.

This is a major thing for me, having spent most of the last three and a half years pregnant or breastfeeding. My body is my own again! I went to Myer yesterday and got professionally fitted for three brand-new (25% off) underwire bras. I can have a drink without calculating how long it is until Amy's next feed. I can get a new tattoo (if I save up all my pocket money for a year and convince my hubby it's okay). I am happy.

And yet - I haven't mentioned this major event because I feel guilty about being happy about stopping breastfeeding. Even though this time I managed to get to six months without using formula, which I so badly wanted to be the case with Jack, I still don't want the women I know who happily breastfeed for twelve months or more to think I'm flippant and selfish. This is what the 'Mommy Wars' does to a grown, rational woman even when she's achieved her personal goals. I realised it's important to me that I do say something as a bid against the Mommy Wars, to say I believe we can all be proud of the jobs we do as mothers and none of us are in a place to judge another mother for using formula, or breastfeeding a toddler, or whatever is best for our individual families or personal sanity. And none of us should be afraid of the imaginary judgement of imaginary mothers, the way I have been.

That's my Mummyhood Confession. Find more at All Work & No Play Makes Mommy Go Something Something. (Love the Simpsons reference!)

Wasting my time

What's the latest way to waste time on the internet (which has been around I don't know how long)? Pinterest, of course!

In a way it makes me cringe - the number of dream wedding boards and dream nursery boards by people with no engagement ring or BFP*. If it weren't for the "Please be nice" commenting rule I would be snarking all over the fantasies of dreamy gals saying "Ooh, I'm going to do this when I've got a baby!" having repinned someone's highly personalised, meaningful and one-in-a-million-chance-of-baby-smiling baby portrait.

But on the other hand, I know if Pinterest had been around when I was planning my wedding (or nursery) I would have been fired for spending all my time repinning images of starry garden wedding receptions. Pinterest is completely compelling and I can't deny I get a little thrill when something I've freshly pinned gets repinned. Ooh, I'm popular with the Sofia Coppola-loving hip chicks who think their future husbands will go along with sleeping in a hand-crafted nook with 'Dream sweetly and go to hell' engraved above the pillows.

Sorry, don't know where I went just then.

Anyway, my Pinterest bits are at pinterest.com/mrsbeckinsale. My boards are full of house deco ideas my husband would hate, Australian indie craft and design stuff I own (or wish I owned), tattoos I'll get when body modification is a higher financial priority than buying a house, and some stuff that makes me laugh.

If you want to play with Pinterest let me know and I'll send you an 'invite'. The invitation system beings to mind Groucho Marx - I don't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member!**

If you're not (P)interested perhaps I can entertain you with some of my scrapbooks from circa 2001***. Enjoy:

Click to embiggen (and fully appreciate that fake-fur-trimmed Kinki Gerlinki vest!)

* Big Fat Positive - a positive pregnancy test.
** I'm going to paraphrase as this is quoted differently around the internet.
*** I was trying to find my teen years scrapbook filled with dreams of my future wedding. I'm sure I haven't chucked it - hopefully it'll turn up when we eventually move house.

Maternity Dress Refashion

After several nights of good sleeps (I think Amy understood when the Maternal & Child Health Nurse threatened her with CIO) I am utterly exhausted again - because I was at an awesome wedding last night! Getting to bed at 1am is not a good idea when the kids start waking at 6:20am.

This was an evening wedding at NGV International - that's the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road. I tried every dress I owned and nothing fit, thanks to several years of pregnancy and breastfeeding. I flirted with the idea of buying some fabric and designing a new dress, or even buying a pattern, but nothing in the fabric shops or pattern books inspired me. I looked back to my wardrobe and noticed the maternity dress I made for my brother's wedding last April, which I don't plan to ever need again... Why not give it a new life?

Before and After!

I didn't get a wonderful photo of me wearing it as the Great Hall at NGV is dimly lit on a winter evening, but you get the idea - a new contrasting boned bodice (what I need most from a dress is a waistline!) and a short, straight skirt with a... whatchercallit? Thingo pleat in the back so I can move my knees.

In progress, and fabric detail

My 'new' dress cost:

$8 approx for boning, Shapewell interfacing and new zip

$5 for black brocade fabric, found in Spotlight's upholstery section

Free black delustred satin and anti-static lining left over from a dressmaking client years ago

That's it!

I used the upper bodice from the original dress. I drafted a new skirt pattern, cut the front skirt piece from the original skirt and the back skirt pieces from leftover scraps which I found after twenty minutes of increasingly panicked searching. I drafted the central bodice to my measurements with mega-support undies and no ease, which meant I had to gather the upper bodice to make the sections fit together. As the hours ticked away on the day of the wedding it was chancey how 'finished' the dress was going to be on the inside, but in the end I managed to fully line it. The lining isn't stitched to the zip and and fusible hemming tape on the skirt didn't last the whole night so there's a bit more to be done before I can wear it again!

I could write a mistakes and mishaps section, but perhaps I'll keep those to myself for once. I will say that if I'd realised the existing zip in the dress wasn't going to be long enough for the black bodice section and I'd have to unpick and replace the whole thing and make a mess of the back neckline, I probably would have chucked the refashioning concept in the bin and made a new dress from scratch.

Good points said and bad points forgotten, I think my 'new' dress is ace. The corsetry and short skirt give it a bit of an eighties rocker glam feel and I was worried I might win second prize in a Stevie Nicks contest. But I think I pulled it off, and it made me look like the woman I feel like (on a very good day).

For your patience, here's a peek of what a wedding at NGV International looks like:

Bride's dress by Mariana Hardwick, lucky duck!

Eight months!

Baby Amy is eight months old! Still no teeth. In this photo she's getting over a virus and her eyes are still a bit red. After three and a half months of waking multiple times a night, she's just done eight hours straight two nights in a row. Three times is a routine, so fingers crossed for tonight.

I'm going to have to go back to the original photo files next month and construct Amy's montage from scratch - these images are getting blurry from being resized so many times!