Silent Sunday - Merry Christmas everybody!

Love for The Gallery

Love is:

Studying the menu together...

Keeping a two-year old entertained on a seven hour flight...

Sticky chocolate ice cream kisses :)

This is my end of year Gallery post. Thank you Tara for helping me meet so many fantastic people!

My baby turned 2 today - Silent Sunday

:)

Birthday season - Silent Sunday 12/12/10

White...

We went to Maryland for Thanksgiving.

Goodbye Glasgow, goodbye white wind turbines (see here for the return!)

Thomas was an angel on the aeroplanes.

We visited the air & space museum in Washington DC.

We visited Frederick, with it's canal and many many churches.

And we came home to a blanket of snow and have been stuck at home ever since!

We went to many places and saw many things and I took many many photos! All on manual! These photos represent the colour white to me for the last couple of weeks. Go over to The Gallery at Sticky Fingers for more brilliant photos...

Silent Sunday 05/12/10

Hello Glasgow.

Silent Sunday 28/11/10

King size bed.

Black and white

My contribution to Tara’s Gallery this week. It's late as I spent the day travelling to Maryland!

I am ready to write this post. I don’t want to cause a debate so I will tell you now, it’s about breastfeeding. Or not breastfeeding, more to the point.

This photo was taken during a ‘good’ feed. One of the feeds which made me think “oh, THIS is how it should be, this is what it means to truly feed my baby”… rest assured, the rest of the feeds that day would have been hell and stopping breastfeeding was one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever done.

Let me rewind :)

I was definitely going to breastfeed, in the same way that I was definitely going to have a home birth and I was definitely going to use reusable nappies and I was definitely NEVER going to let my child eat their dinner and watch TV… I DO still use reusable nappies!

A combination of a 10lb 8oz baby, big boobs, flat nipples, poor latch, lack of support (I live in Scotland and my family are in England plus T was born 6 days before Christmas and the midwives were short-staffed due to a sickness bug), mastitis and constant feeding, meant that my breastfeeding days were over when T was only 12 days old. I was sensible enough to realise that feeling resentful every time this tiny creature with gnashing jaws came anywhere near me was probably not healthy and with much soul searching and self-flagellation, I stopped.

You would think that was the end of it but I felt guilty for months. All around me people were breastfeeding their babies, people were struggling and getting through it, others had babies with perfect latches who couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t do it. Labour? I would do labour again in a second, but breastfeeding? Not a chance! I questioned myself. Had I done the right thing? Maybe if I had just tried a bit harder…

As part of my doula training I had to look back on my own birth and breastfeeding experiences. I had a great birth experience, not a textbook ‘perfect’ birth, but a positive empowering experience. If only I could get over this breastfeeding thing. When T was almost a year old I went on a breastfeeding course and spent a day surrounded by women who could breastfeed, had breastfed and who felt that everyone should be able to breastfeed. We spent time talking through how you do it, what difficulties you may come across and how you can support women who are having issues. I came home from that day and cried. Not because I had done any wrong, because I finally realised that I’d done nothing wrong. I had looked for help, I tried different things, I tried to express milk, I tried supplementing and in the end, it didn’t work for me. My baby was happy and healthy and, most importantly, we did and still do share a bond.

Looking back, I understand that I was never judged by anyone except myself, and I have learnt to realise that the best-laid plans all go to pot in this world of parenting :) I also realised that the world of breast versus fomula is not always black and white!

Silent Sunday

An apology for David...

I've got a confession to make... I like Take That. No, scrub that, I LOVE Take That! I decided to turn my random musings into a blog post because I'm boring my husband. I think my love of TT is under control, not an obsession, just a rumbling undercurrent. David thinks otherwise. He thinks I'm insane.

OK, I admit, the current album release and the recent onstage performances may have made me slightly more vocal than normal, but obsessed?

Really?

I think its incredibly important for David to know the intricacies of the Never Forget performance on Children in Need. After all, he is the one always reminding me of how he missed out on the UK '80s and '90s due to living in the US. It is surely my DUTY to keep him fully informed of happenings in my 17 year 'career' as a TT fan.

Well, that's what I believe anyway.

So, David, I'm sorry. You know I love you, that I'm proud of you and I want you to be mine forever... You just might (will probably) end up with a wife who goes to concerts and screams like a 17 year old when she's 50, maybe even 60, let's hope I'm over it by 70!

Oh, and I like the new album... but I'm not feeling the Robbie love in the live performances... :)

This is my lovely husband and baby watching Fireman Sam, not Take That. One day I hope they watch Take That performances with such solemnity...

I love Lego...

I wasn't going to post this week but having seen all the other brilliant posts for Tara's Gallery, I just wanted to contribute. I posted one of these photos before but here is the series. Thomas got a bit carried away by the Lego bowl at the Science Museum - David laughing makes me laugh the most :)

I love the bewildered look he gives the Lego afterwards...

I'll be back soon!

Life is too busy but I hope to be back on here soon. Maybe after tomorrow. It's my birthday! :) Here are some recent photos...

My mummy

This is my mummy with Thomas when he was a month old. She was there for his birth and they've had a special bond ever since :) She doesn't like photos being taken, but I think this one is beautiful.


I think my mum is fabulous. I always said if I could be half the mother she has been, I would be doing OK. I love you mummy!

This is my post for Tara's Gallery this week. The prompt was "Here come the girls" :)

Here is a photo of Thomas. He isn't a girl, but he was spending the day at Blair Drummond with a group of girls, so it sort of counts, and I just really like the photo...

Interestingly, I came across a superb photographer Joe Wigfall, who takes street photos in a similar way to how I took this (although, obviously, much much better!). I feel inspired!

A smile

I know that if we couldn't have children then I would have been enough for my husband. I know he loves me more than anything else in the whole wide world... nearly... except for Thomas (who he loves in a *different* way he tells me). No-one makes him smile like Thomas does, it makes my heart smile :)

Back then it was just pure love, nearly two years later they are proper pals...

This is my post for The Gallery this week - topic "A Smile". Head over to Tara at Sticky Fingers to see all of the other fabulous photos. Guaranteed to make you smile!!

Manual take two!

I didn't take part in The Gallery this week. I just didn't have time. Today Thomas is sleeping for a loooong time so I thought I'd update on my 'switch to manual' leap, which was dramatically helped by Jay. Thanks Jay :)

It's kind of good and bad. The worst photos are the ones which I know would have been brilliant if I'd got the focus right / ISO right / aperture right (delete as appropriate):

Ones which I'm mainly happy with, but still don't *quite* get what I did to get the photo:

Then the ones which really make me happy :)

I think it's a coincidence they're both black & white! I love the last one - my boys were drumming, singing songs... at this point, Thomas was screaming at the crocodile in Row Row Row Your Boat. It may not be technically brilliant, but it captured the moment perfectly.

Schooldays!

I wasn’t going to take part in The Gallery this week… Thomas is almost two so I don’t even want to think about his first day at school. I know it will be here in a second and I want to savour the next couple of years before he completely leaves me!

Then I remembered that on a recent visit home I had found this:

It’s a collage of photos from my last days at secondary school; we all said our goodbyes and went on to whatever came next. We all grew up and we all moved on. I stayed friends with a couple of people and found out about other people through them, so we all stayed interconnected but far apart until a couple of years ago...

Suddenly, Facebook made the whole school year accessible again! I wasn’t sure whether this would be a good thing but it’s turned out OK.

There are people I don’t want to be friends with, so I’m not. There are people who I’m not friends with, but who I can now look at as an adult and feel happy that they’re doing well. Then there are my friends, who will always be my friends, who I would keep in touch with anyway, but who I keep in touch with more because of Facebook. Some got married, some went travelling, some had babies, some have brilliant careers, some people really changed, and others have stayed the same. So much has happened to us all since these photos were taken, yet school will always tie me to these people, and I feel glad that Facebook has reunited me with most of them :)

(not the bare-chested boy who was my boyfriend at the time!)

One Day in August

This week's Gallery theme is One Day in August - inspired by Blipfoto, we all got to document a day (Sunday August 29th) in the life of an aspiring* photographer!

*insert amateur / brilliant/ crap / eager as appropriate…

Sunday was also the day three UK parenting bloggers flew to Bangladesh for a week to help raise awareness of the work Save the Children is doing with mothers and children in one of the most poverty-stricken places on the planet. In the words of @tara_cain "Let's mark this inspiring day for Josie, Sian and Eva.".

Armed with my camera, and my new obsession with manual settings (thank you Jay), I set out to take a photo which would depict a typical Sunday in the Welch household…

Thomas played with some stones, Makka Pakka stylee:

I took a photo of some flowers, Lindsey-stylee:

Thomas got daddy to run round the garden, Thomas-and-daddy-stylee:

And then we all stopped…

…

…

…

And the boys fell asleep, Sunday-stylee... Taken on my mobile, not an aperture or ISO in sight yet still my favourite photo of the day :)