11 Apr 2022
The Weekend | Sunshine, Flowers & Mother’s Day
Back in 2018, I went through a phase of documenting the good weekends. Not necessarily the ones where something really exciting happened, just the ones I knew I wanted to remember – the extraordinary every day.
I’ve long fancied starting to do this again, particularly whilst on maternity leave and in the first year of Baby Boy’s life. So I’m starting with this weekend from a couple of weeks ago because it’s the first weekend I’ve actually wanted to make a record of for a while. I said the words ‘it feels like we’ve turned a corner’ this weekend and so I’m documenting that moment. The fourth trimester was hard and the complications we had around feeding completely shattered any cute-new-family visions we’d anticipated for that time. But this weekend felt like we finally had some of the moments we’d imagined with a new baby. It started with the postman delivering flowers whilst we were all still in bed on Saturday morning – an early Mother’s Day present. My three-month-old has already mastered online shopping, what a lil genius eh?
The weather was beautiful so we donned our sunglasses, plonked A in the pram in his new too-big sunhat and headed out in search of lunch. Spoiler: we were not the only people to realise the weather was excellent. Town was heaving but we found an outside table in a café by the river and decided we were chipper enough to wait for the delayed food. A was mesmerised by the willow tree swaying in the breeze which meant we had a rare moment when he was still (not a word we usually use to describe him) and could enjoy our ACTUAL ALCOHOLIC DRINKS. Naturally, he soon wanted out of the pram and to be standing on the table because any moment not spent standing is a moment wasted according to this kid. He loved looking around at all that was going on so lunch (veggie burger for Gary, pizza for me) was spent passing him back and forth across the table and I’m so used to eating like this now, that I didn’t feel particularly phased by it anymore. It was pretty damn lovely to be sat there in the sun with my boys, having a cheeky drink by the water. I’d quite happily spend the whole summer like that. It did make me realise though, that we are going to spend most of the summer repeatedly saying ‘his hat is over his eyes again’ which I’m sure isn’t going to get annoying at all…
New lesson to add to our ‘things we have learned since having a baby’ list: always take the damn carrier out with you. A categorically did not want to go back into the pram and shrieked until we gave up and Gary carried him up the hill. We got ice creams and were going to sit on the grass but the shrieking started up again and was reverberating around the cathedral which was, ahem, loud so we gave up on that idea and Gary took him home whilst I went to buy my mum some flowers. You win some, you lose some.
I tried out Nigella’s leek pasta bake for dinner which involved wine, so I had my first glass of vino in nearly a year and had a moment where I was cooking dinner, expressing milk and drinking wine all at the same time and really feeling like I was nailing this multitasking malarkey.
My first ever Mother’s Day involved a card and gift in bed, beautifully fluffy pancakes for breakfast, stopping in to see my own mum and then - GLORIOUS - baby boy taking an afternoon nap for the first time in an age. It’s like he knew! We ended up going to the street food market that’s on in Ely every Sunday and getting halloumi wraps and baklava from the Greek truck, which we ate in two parts - by the river and on the grass by the cathedral - before heading home and hoping the nap would continue (spoiler: it did not).
10 Apr 2022
Little Joys From March
Coconut hot chocolates. Baby boy meeting cats for the first time. A pub lunch under blue skies. Cherry blossom. Optimistic ice creams. Magnolia trees in bloom. Crinkle brownie cookies. Sunshine walks. Bedtime stories. Rare baby cuddles. Baby boy learning to blow raspberries. Peekaboo. Afternoons in my parents’ sunny garden. Banana biscoff milkshakes. Our first trip into London. Baby boy having a ball on the train. Lunching in Granary Square. Meeting new babies. My first Mother’s Day. Greek street food. Baby dressing gowns. Sitting outside. New shoes. Baked goods. Smooth baby feet. That Spring feeling.