For M

Whatever happened to those earrings?

I found a box of photos the other day and I could not for the life of me remember why this particular selection of snaps was there. They may be duplicates of photos I have put into albums, (which I am in the slow process of rehousing into envelopes so they take up less space) but as a set they seem to have no connection with each other.

Anyway I thought I would share some with you (the most flattering ones at least) as I try to remember the contexts.

Here I am on our fabulous sofa, with my thirdborn, my autumn leaf, (more about that later) when she is six weeks old. I believe we dressed her up specially for this portrait, as she is in my favourite little outfit. She has grown quite a bit since she was born – she was so tiny, that even her crying sounded like the mewling of a hamster – she wasn’t much bigger really: but then she grew. And grew. Not too much though. Just enough to keep the health visitor happy.

It was a lovely time those first few months after she was born. That sofa was my home, day and night. As Marysia was our third child we had a wealth of experience to fall back on. Priority number one was to get enough sleep. I had read somewhere that it was a good idea to nap whenever your baby napped. I hadn’t managed that before, but this time I was determined to try. And I did. I have never had so much sleep in my life. Never more than a couple of hours at a time. But that didn’t matter. I would actually look forward to getting up in the middle of the night because by then we had a video recorder, and during the day I would very carefully record all the programmes I wanted to watch, and then have them on hand whenever I was feeding. Bliss. Sometimes I didn’t want her to go back to sleep so I could continue watching. But I resisted the temptation to to keep her awake.

When she finally slept through the night I felt quite deprived. All those programmes recorded and yet to be watched!