Sewing and mulling

My hunch is this baby will come early. Probably "hunch" is the wrong word since there are a lot of very good clues it'll come early, like it being the first, and it being huge for its gestational age and the fact that I will be induced if my blood pressure goes doolally. But as of Monday I've suddenly leapt into the nesting action everybody told me was the feature of the last month of pregnancy, and I've juuuuuust hit month seven. In fact, I think today is the 28 week mark precisely.

I'm still fucking exhausted, mind you. It's a little bit like a slow version of being on meth - my body knows it's very, very tired, but it's about as restful to launder, sew, clean and prepare as it is to have a nap. Some friends here gave us a shitload (hah!) of decent quality diapers - not quite enough so I sat down and made 10 more using Rita's Rump Pocket design. I've made them for friends before, and they got good reviews, so I'll see how they go for myself. Having saved all that money I felt justified in blowing about a hundred bucks on fancy Japanese merino and "waterproof cotton" diaper covers which I will name and shame, or else name and praise, depending on their ultimate performance, and then on getting some cheap eBay Marimekko oil cloth for a portable changing pad, which by "cheap" I only mean cheap for Marimekko, and not cheap for oil cloth.

I guess this means that I've committed to the cloth diaper route. Hubris? Maybe. And I won't beat myself up too much if we can't hold to it. But considering I switched successfully some years ago to cloth menstrual pads without hiccoughs I'm hoping for the best.We have friends here who did elimination communication. The F-word and I had a brief conversation about that, which went like this:

"Do you want to try that?"

"Er, okay."

"Let's not try too hard."

"Fine."

(We'd just been to their house, where their two-year-old girl had solemnly announced "pee", and then peed on the F-word's foot.)

Besides that, making mattress covers, blankets and wipes. All in super-soft flannelette. I happened to have metres and metres and metres of it lying around because of my boss who disappeared in Central America. Just before he disappeared I'd hit a good enough work/life balance in Belgium that I was sewing a lot, especially for friends who had just had babies. Of course when he disappeared everything went apeshit. So here I am now with about 30 metres of different sorts of super-soft flannelette on my hands, from the best fabric stores in Europe and Canada, which is lucky, given the fabric stores are rather crap here. Sometimes I think Australia is the planet's slight-damage seconds outlet mall without the low prices.

Anyways, just one more thing to thank my disappeared boss for, I guess. I still miss him. A lot. It all seems so unreal now that he was ever not missing - he's been missing, I think, for longer than I knew him. I suppose this happens with loss? That eventually the person who has died (for it's quite certain he's dead) isn't just the person that you loved, or the person that you miss, but is actually a hole in your existence - and that hole, that lack, becomes almost as real to you as the real person was. Then once in awhile a circumstance or a memory - less and less frequently as time goes by - calls them back to mind almost as they were. What a life.