Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence

I might be blogging again but I haven’t decided yet. I appear to be blogging today, so that’s a start. I haven’t even looked at the blog for many months, for fear I would find it full of crap I can’t bear to read. Taking a glance around this morning, I was surprised to find it interesting to read about my year-ago world. How things change.

Things have changed immensely in the past year and the changes have increased rapidly in the past few months. In years to come I think it will be interesting (for only me, perhaps!) to read about my changing world. It might be unrecognisable in another year. In many ways it already is.

Some changes.

We sold a house and bought a house. You think it’s going to take months – and the preparation process really does – but the actual selling, then buying, happens in a day. A morning, actually. A series of phone calls on a snowy morning and you no longer own the house you stand in. Instead, a bigger, emptier and, it transpired, dirtier house belongs to you.

Moving day itself was beset with problems and drama – three moving lorries full of our stuff became one moving lorry skidding in the snow – but I didn’t hate it like I thought I would. At the end of the day, the body-building moving men rebuilt our furniture while singing Lady Gaga songs and chatting about going home to their wives, rather than the visiting the pub. I sat among the boxes in our new kitchen and fell in love with our new home.

The next day we set about the endless process of unpacking, which somehow seemed more annoying than the packing had been, (and, incidentally, still isn’t finished…) We discovered that our efforts to leave behind a clean and spotless old-home had not been mirrored by the departing owners of our new home. It was a sty. A sty that hadn’t been cleaned for some time, possibly ever. Two bottles of bleach and an entire cannister of Oven Pride later, we called in an industrial cleaner for the cooker and a demolition team for the bathroom. I’m not even kidding.

We would have done neither if we’d known that two months later a burst pipe would flood the entire lower floor of the house, rendering our new furniture scrap and turning every room into a building site.

One mammoth insurance claim, lots of insurance company-induced faffing, and one lost summer later, and we’re finally back to the point we’d got to in April. The ground floor is mostly fabulous; upstairs is not. Our bedroom is still hot pink and has half a sheet of wallpaper Sellotaped to the wall. But, you’ll be surprised to know, this is not our decorating priority. I went back to work in September, after the long, frustrating summer, and in October I discovered that Husband and I would soon be expanding our little family by one – in about eight months time.

It’s hard to describe the way you feel when you see the second line appear on a pregnancy test – lots of you have been there, you already know. Even if you’ve been planning and wanting it for a long time, that elusive little line is monumentally overwhelming. I thought I was going to throw up.

Then two weeks later the morning sickness arrived and I really did feel like I was going to throw up. We happened to be on holiday at the time. In Monte Carlo. Walking the entire length of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit while six weeks pregnant. I’m not going to go on and on about it here, just this: travel sickness bands – like actual magic.

We’re now seventeen weeks along this slightly terrifying and yet magical road, and everything has changed. I’ve never cared a jot about travel systems and cotbeds before. I didn’t even know how much maternity leave teachers were entitled to, (not very much, it turns out.) And I certainly didn’t know that a woman’s body could perform feats of complex bio-engineering without any input whatsoever from the driver. This is fascinating and frightening every day.

So that’s where we are about now. You’re all up to date. The photos will come back again, I’m sure, even if the blogging doesn’t fully recover. I can’t promise not to become a baby-bore, but my wonderful amigo friends haven’t rolled their eyes once, not yet anyway.

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