v2.0

I did wonder if I was done here.  The not-ginger turns one in a few weeks, and I've had nothing to say for nearly a year.  It's been so long in fact, that I'm not entirely sure how to work blogger any more.  They've changed stuff, and I could barely use the last set-up. Anything could happen. Anything at all. I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

I started this blog as I journeyed through infertility, and it was awesome.  The blogging, not the infertility so much.  It did have it's moments, but generally ... you know?  Then, when Antonia was born, I realised that infertility was over for us.  It was done.  We'd done it.  We had two crazy little munchkins, and we were sorted.  The fight to have them was over, and the fight for them was underway.  The next bit was to get them through life (and survive sleep deprivation a second time).  It did seem so ... annoying ... to pull the plug, and that's because I knew what it was like to follow a journey and to want to know what's happening forever (I'm looking at you getupgrrl - I think of you often), but I had nothing to say.

And a few really crap, really sad, really crazy other things happened along the way.

Just as I was due to have Antonia, we discovered a lump on our beautiful Jack-dog's shoulder.  It was a tumour.  We fought hard and spent a fortune, and enlisted the best team this side of the world to try and save him, but we lost him fast when Antonia was about 3 weeks old.  That was crap beyond belief.

Just two months later, our Jess-girl, who'd only known life with Jack, died suddenly.  Also crap beyond belief. 

I miss them every day, and I still haven't stopped looking out for them.  Ridiculous, noisy animals.

I didn't do well without a dog.  I said I'd never have another one after my heart broke twice in such quick succession, but Kep the Blue Merle Border Collie is 9 months old and just farted under my desk.  It's the companionship, as well as the stupidity. Kep is supposed to have a white tip on his tail, except he keeps chewing it off.  He sees it out of the corner of his eye, chases his tail till he catches it and falls over, then eats it.  It never grows back. First glint of white and the whole thing starts over.  He has a permanently stubby tail-end.  But he's there, all the time, adding his own something special to life.

We moved.  Again.  I know!

We decided we weren't happy.  It wasn't right.  For a lot of very uninteresting reasons, and one which turned out to be very interesting, but which we will get to later.  That one is our new journey, and the one that really leaves IVF behind.

Anyway.  We tried to convince ourselves that it was good, we were happy, we were making the most of it, this was good, that was good, but sometimes you just have to step back and say, crap. We made a mistake. We made a mistake, and if we kept going with the mistake because we were trying to do the right thing (ergo, we'd sunk a lot of money into the house and we knew we wouldn't recover it at this point) when actually we just need to throw our hands in the air and do-over.  So we did. Over.  The Taita house was a whole lot of do-up still to be done, so we gave ourselves a year to do it. In the meantime we did some market research.  What was out there? What did we want and need? How much would it cost us to get it? And I think it was our second lot of open homes we found the home we'd been wanting for the last year and a half, and within 2 weeks we'd tendered for it and bought it. Quite the heart-attack inducing situation really on the stress-front. 

But, we made it.  We did the do-up, put it on the market, sold it, lost somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand dollars, and now we're living on a Kapiti Beach, happy, settled, in our forever-home and thinking that life is pretty bloody good all things considered.  It's where we first wanted to be, but couldn't find a house (seriously - the first house we looked at when we first started our move down the Island was number 50, just up the road. No kidding).  I'd like to think that the inbetween served a purpose, whatever that was - I have some ideas, but it doesn't really matter.  It got us to here, and here is awesome, so here we'll stay.  Plus, the buy/sell/do-up with two little kids was horrendous and I'd rather shoot myself in the head than even think of ever doing that again. 

And almost looping back to the beginining, in that it's a little ginger journey again, we start a new chapter. When Cuinn started kindy, it was picked up by the incredible team there that he displays a wide range of markers for the autistic spectrum.  We took him to his Dr, and he confirmed that for us, though we're dealing with the very high functioning/mild end of the spectrum if that's in fact where we are at when a full assessment is completed. We took him to Wellington Early Intervention, an amazing team of therapists that we will start working with in a couple of weeks, and they feel confident that they can help us and help him navigate his way of viewing the world, and we're on the waiting list for full assessment by the Child Development team of our DHB.  It makes sense, even though it took us by surprise - he's our first child and we had no comparitive scale ... who knew? We started employing a few basic strategies for our own understanding, and it made a difference.  I think they're right and we're onto something. I think we'll find he has Asperger's, but we'll just wait for that.  I'm focussing on learning and understanding - about him, and about myself because there's a big personal journey here too that's just starting and which will run beside his journey.  Crazy little ginger - he's an awesome kid.

So, I found myself looking at Needle Mountain the other day, thinking that it felt like time to say goodbye (incidentally, how does one dispose of a large number of hypodermic needles?).  There's a new journey starting here, a new life underway, and it's time to do more too.  Part of that is trying to make more time, more peace in the day, and I miss writing so much, so I really, really hope there's more of that too.  I'll see you soon.  I hope.