Sooooo

Song one

Liv has the most beautiful eyes so this was an easy one for me to start with.

Liv's wide eyed pose.

For more entries, and more info please click below.

The ever fabulous Beth at The Pieces of Me (yes, her again) brought this linky over at Mummy Daddy and Me makes Three to my attention, and I thought it’d be lovely to join in.  As Mummy says “ it is just about the little things that made your week”  Sadly working fulltime means most of my days of the week suck ass!

Monday – Nothing special here

Tuesday – Baby took 2 hours to fall asleep, I was pulling my hair out till my husband called at gone 9, spoke to Liv and watching her press her ear against the phone and slowly closing her eyes melted my heart. Within 15 minutes of her speaking to her Dad, she was fast asleep.  He is normally home and gives her a goodnight kiss and cuddle before bed. I’m pretty sure she was waiting for her goodnight from him before she’d sleep. After over 9 months breastfeeding and being her everything, she’s a blooming daddies girl, and I love it.

Wednesday – I got to play with some pretty macro heavy spreadsheets at work instead of the normal desk monkey work, you can see last weeks rant over this here and I felt like me again. A super nerdy spreadsheet geek, and it made my day. Also, after a normal goodnight from her father, daddies girl was asleep with 7 minutes. Phew.

Thursday – nothing special here

Friday – nor here

Saturday – Spent the day with My mum and brother in the morning and just generally had a lovely day. Liv decided she now needs just one hand holding when she totters around. 

Sunday – We spent the day at my husbands mums and Liv decided it’d be a good time to show off her likes/dislikes and spent half the time trying to kiss everyone. On the way home she started copying our sneezes, and I could not stop laughing. I don’t know how may times I say “she is so funny” but man… she is SO funny!

Pop over to Mummy Daddy and Me to see the other entries in the linky

Age: I’m 25. Officially too old to pull the “I’m still young” card. I’ve noticed I’m refered to as “this lady…” instead of “this girl…”

Book Size: Paperbacks areor ebooks on the nose-phone please. Though the last 10 books I’ve read are all made of cardboard and have furry bits in them. Oh how I love “thats not my” books.

Chore that you hate: Washing up. When I was single I was known to hide dirty bowls in the cupboard when I ahd visitors. I still sulk to this day any time I have to wash up. I HATE it. I blame my mother for using it as a punishment when I was younger.

Dogs: I had one once, but my husband hates all animals. Grumpy bugger.

Essential start to your day: Giving Liv milk in the big bed then a shower. I jsut cannot function without a shower.

Favorite colour: I’ve never had a favourite colour.

Gold or Silver: Silver, or white gold.

Height: Barely more than a midget. Well 2 inches awy from official midgetness. 5ft 1 and a bit.

Instruments you play: Bass guitar, Cello and piano. Barely.

Job Title: DSL Commisioning and second line support

Kids:Liv. She’s likely to be the only one, ever. If you’re reading this then you’ll have seen a few million posts about her before

Live: Just outside of Birmingham

Milk: In tea, yes. On Cereal, just enough to wet it, but I’ll never have milk as a drink. Yuck.

Nicknames: Frank. Lee. Shorty.

Oldest living relative: Aunty Anne. My Nans elder sister, now in her 90′s, she used to be a midwife.

Pet Peeves: Hypocrisy, not being listened to, people that take others for granted

Quote from a movie: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Right or Left handed: Right

Siblings: 1 Sister and 1 brother

Time you wake up: Just before 6, up for 7.15

Underwear: big pants and bigger bra.

Vegetable you hate: lady Fingers. Puke.

What makes you run late: Most things. I don’t have the drive to be early. People should be glad I showed at all

X-Rays you’ve had: As an accident prone cild. Most places. Including lungs.

Yummy food that you make: Spanglish Chicken

Zoo animal: Monkeys!

Fab 1 – SLEEP! MY BABY SLEEPS! after an awful tuesday night, my baby has now slept from 7.30 until 5:45 before waking for milk in my bed, and we crawl out of bed gone 7. LOVING this newly found sleeping through the night thing.

Fab 2 – I seem to have found my blogging head again. Sorry!

Fab 3 – twitter folk (you can follow me @f_a_b_ )so many lovely twitter folk have just made me smile so much this week. Daft really, but I loves ‘um.

When my friends discussed planning their children’s 1st Birthday parties I smiled, when they asked me about Livs I smiled and said “naw, save it for when she’s 3, might get her a little cake, but nothing special”

It turns out I’m the only person in the entire world who doesn’t feel the need to do a party for a 1 year old. My Husband has been designing the cake in his head for weeks now and has asked me to ask my sister to make it. My Sister has already bought princess/castle themed cupcake stands. Funnily enough my husbands cake design is a castle.

So there it is, my daughter is having a Princess themed 1st Birthday speaking as a serious tomboy myself, I can’t see the appeal. I had toy garages instead of dolls. I started my career as a telephone engineer straight from school, climbing poles and going down holes. Fair enough I’m in the office now and wear makeup… but a girly girl I am not.

I’ve taken the stance that Liv will be whatever she wants to be. When I found out I was having a girl I asked people not to buy pink. Of course most did, and now so do I. Most days she LIVES in pink. I naturally gravitate towards jogging bottoms, jeans and leggings for her, but yes, a lot are pink. Partly because that’s what ASDA and Matalan sell most for the girls. Partly because damnit, its cute.

Other than the pink playmat I bought when she was born, from ASDA and a pink phone. Every toy I’ve bought has been gender neutral. I say it’s for practical reasons. Future babies etc (of which I’m pretty sure their won’t be any) but it’s because I prefer non pink stuff. She has so brightly colour Lamaze toys from birth, I love them all. Now at 9 months she is pretty clear on her favourite. A Pink Princess Sophie Lamaze doll. I’d like to say it’s because her little legs are easy to carry and Liv loves chewing its purple ballet pumped feet, but why not Sir Prance-a-lot. His horse has little skinny legs.

Princess Sophie gets dragged around the apartment. If you hear Liv crawling accompanied by a scraping sound, its Princess Sophie… (or the computer mouse but that’s another post all together).

Liv in and her Princess doll in all their pink glory

I’m pretty easy-going really, I just like to rant about things here and to my lovely long-suffering girls on whatsapp. If a Princess doll is Liv’s favourite toy this week then so be it. She has plenty of time to change her mind and choose then toy cars next week. I love going to nursery and seeing the boys playing with handbags and dolls, and the girls with their cars and footballs. They don’t think twice about these things. They look fun so get played with. Simple.

So it seems I have a Princess party to organise in a couple of months. Wish me luck guys!

I posted late last year about my “need” to get promoted, and be the best I can at work, at all times.  I told you how I’d applied for a job and the recruiter has taken over a month to offer interviews or not.  The job application closed at the start of October. It’s now January and it’s still not gone to interview. I gave up on that job early December. This post isn’t about that job as such. More any job.

Before maternity leave I was in a few talent programmes at work. My managers had always supported and challenged me with projects and tasks. For the past 7 years, since moving on from my first post in the company I have never done my job, I’ve always acted in the position above or been on projects for senior management. I thrived on the challenge and being the best I could be.  My last post before maternity leave was working with level 2, 3 and 4 managers and treated as an equal. I was influential in resourcing decisions and was the subject matter expect on our forecasted demand. This was my favourite job to date. I worked from home and was basically left to it. So long as the work got done, so long as I attended and chaired the conference calls as needed, I worked whatever hours I liked. Granted I was contracted to do 36 hours a week not including lunch, and sometimes I’d do 50 hours, others 30. It worked for me, it worked for my boss, it worked for our customers.

When I went on maternity leave, I dispersed my tasks across the management team. Each one, taking on a small part of it. This of course, in a company and industry driven by cost, meant I was a headcount reduction. My role no longer existed.  When I came back after less than 6 months leave, I was placed, without choice, in a new role. A technical level job, Configuring and deconfiguring circuits on systems.  I’m now a “desk monkey” clicking, copying, pasting all day. Following set processes. Working through queues of jobs.

This is a desk monkey job. This is not me.  It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to do, I can do it. Easily. I excel at it. This job sits better on my CV 5 years ago. I’ve taken huge steps backwards in my career because I took 5.5 months out to start a family.

I had a good bitch to a couple of senior managers about it. There’s nothing they can do.  I’m needed where I am, and without a job coming up, me getting and passing an interview, being offered and accepting a job… there’s no way out.  This is in a company that’s constantly challenging its headcount, and where managers cost way more than team members, so they’re reducing the number of managers.

Here I am, a no-body for the first time in years, a desk monkey, working 8.30-5 every day, on queues, hoping for a promotion. Who am I kidding? Well, not me, not anymore.  I’ve given up. I’ve applied for four promotions since October. I’ve had two  No’s before interview “more experienced candidates were interviewed” and I’m still waiting to hear if I have an interview for the other two.

Maybe I should concentrate on being a mother outside of work. Maybe I should appreciate the fact that for the first time in years, when it hits 5pm I can walk out of the office and go and get my girl. Appreciate the fact no one expects me to go above and beyond. Accept the Generally Satisfactory scoring on my quarterly reviews instead of outstanding or excellent. After all, this is what they expect of me. My “priorities should have changed” they said, and they have, I put my daughter in fulltime nursery at 4 months old and my GOD I wanted to make that worthwhile. Do her proud.  It seems now isn’t the time though. I should do my 8.30-5 job, plodding along, accepting the vanilla blandness that is my working life.

Nothing special here. No ambition. No drive. Just a desk monkey.

When Liv was 9 weeks old, she started sleeping through. of sorts. She would sleep 10.30 ’till 5 or 6, it was amazing. Then at 4 months old she started nursery and within a couple of weeks it stopped. She needed night feeds. After speaking to the Health visitor we weaned at 5 months hoping it’d help. Of course it didn’t.

Up until New Years eve the routine was as follows. 7pm bath, cuddle with Daddy, feed to sleep, put her down in the cot in our room, by 2 she’d have been up who knows how many times and would be in our bed for the rest of the night. Feeding on and off, of her own accord.

December finally saw me giving away the spare bed, and decorating Livs bedroom. Its been a long time coming, she is now 9 months old. December 31st the cot moved next door into her bedroom. I decided to try Controlled crying of sorts, but got to the 3 minute gap and my husband couldn’t take the crying and went in and got her. Last week however, I decided to stop feeding her to sleep, just until she was content and put her down, I patted her bum and sang to her, lying her back down a few times when she got up to escape, and within 10 or 15 minutes she was asleep. Shocking! she slept until 3 am, had a feed then slept until 6 for her morning milk. I could not believe the difference putting her down awake and happy has made. I’ve also bought Ewan the dream sheep to try, and for the first night I continued to sing, pat and rub her to sleep. Last night however, with the sheep playing its lullaby, and its light turned off as lights are play things for Liv, I simply stood over her for 10 minutes and she dozed off for the night. I didn’t hear a sound until midnight, but I closed my eyes and next thing I heard her again at 2am. After trying the sheep again for 10 minutes she made it pretty clear she wanted a feed, but then went down until 6am.

I am more than happy with 1 wake up and morning starting at 6 as she’s out of the door for nursery by 7.50 anyway. The progress we’ve seen in the last week has been a pleasant surprise. If we carry on like this she’ll be settling quicker and easier each night, and hopefully dropping the middle of the night feed (we got to 5am one night this week!)

Bring on 12 hours sleep! whooooooooooop. The implications of this would be MASSIVE. My husband and I could go out for date night without a babysitting sister-in-law having a nervous breakdown due to a screaming baby waking up and only wanting me, 15 minutes after we leave. Heck, I might even find time to do some exercise.