Right, now for a me, me, me post!
We are getting settled in to our new house and it is brilliant. Huge, very light, with high ceilings, a fantastic old couple next door, a big garden (albeit devoid of any plant life at all, as the old lady who lived here hated gardening), where I am planning a vegetable patch and have already planted a load of irises, and a barbecue. Furniture for my study to be delivered today and I will have a whole new, productive working environment instead of trying to do research sitting at my kitchen table!
Slight negatives:
(1) Out of the long-awaited 3 baths, one is utterly unusable due to limescale desposits the like of which I had never seen before; one has a huge paint splodge all along the bottom where a painter dumped his paint and then forgot to rinse it away. It's clean, but not v appealing. The only usable one is tucked up at the very top of the house in the guest room (get me, eh, I have a guest room!), and not practical for bathing kids.
(2) our electricity is wonky (v French, I might add: much though I love the country they are not great at electrics) and keeps cutting out, often at night. This would not be a major problem if the fuse box was accessible. But it is downstairs in what used to be the garage but has now been converted into a separate premises, used by a lady who does hearing tests and sells hearing aids (sure there's a name for this job in English, but have baby brain). It's open from 9:30am-12 and 2pm-6pm. Outwith those hours I have no access to my fuse box or meter. Have already binned one freezer load of ruined food, and am worried about the EBM stock I was intending to lay in. I won't bore you with the details of how shite EDF, the electricity board, have been. The problem may not be solved until October!!!
All in all, though, life is far, far nicer here than where we lived before.
Back to baby matters: A starts at his childminders at the end of this month, and I am starting to feel apprehensive and sad about it. Anyone else going back to work in Sept?
I began expressing milk today, despite the possibility of another power failure forcing me to ditch any frozen EBM. I have a few queries, as I only gave DS1 bottles after he was about 7 or 8 mths old.
-how much (roughly) per feed? I've just expressed 6fl oz. Is that about one feed? Half a feed? This obv will vary from baby to baby, but a rough idea?
-can I keep a bottle in the fridge for about 24 hrs, top it up as I express and then freeze it?
-what about sterilising? I didn't do it for DS1, as he was fairly old. I boiled up my pump and bottles today, and they are covered in chalky deposits because the water here is so hard. Do I need to sterilise? What method is best?
God, what a marathon post.
Enjoy your day!
OutOfMetaphoricalBreathAuld