My favourite Photograph.

I'm no photographer. Despite spending a not insubstantial amount on a decent DSLR Camera last year, I'm not especially creative with it. I bought it to catalogue the next few years worth of memories of my child, and hopefully children. I haven't even attempted a sunset yet.

My favourite photograph is not a photograph I have taken myself. It was taken by my Mother in law who does know her way around a Camera. She specialises in Still Life mostly, but this photograph is just lovely and I have featured it in a previous post. I love it for sentimental reasons. It's my soppy Ginger Dog being introduced to my newborn son for the first time when he was a day old. Luckily, she was there to capture it.

This post is for week 31 of The Gallery. The prompt is My Favourite Photograph. I love it, look at his wrinkles.

Here come the Girls.

The theme for last weeks Gallery, yes I did say last weeks, was Here come the Girls. I was going to give it a miss because I have no Daughters and my usual crisis of confidence when it comes to photos that feature little old me. Add to that the fact that most photographs of my friends and I, past and present normally involve copious amounts of alcohol and I'm either gurning or sporting those rather lovely Red Wine Teeth.

Anyhoo. I managed to unearth some half decent photos of my Hen weekend in Edinburgh. Unlike most Hen weekends, it was a fairly civilised affair. Yes, there was drinking and dancing involved, but I refused point blank to wear a veil adorned with rubber penises and L plates. It was just a really lovely weekend away with eight of my favourite friends.

I'd have liked to share a group photo of us all, but sadly I no longer see a couple of them.

See, civilised. Posh hotels and Champagne. Not a stripper dressed as a Policeman in sight. Actually, I wouldn't have objected to that.........................

A celebration.

The theme for week 27 of Tara Cains Gallery is A Celebration. I like this theme. Mostly because I haven't had to think too hard about it. This theme has endless possibilities. We generally photograph anything that involves a celebration, Weddings; a new baby; Birthdays; Graduations.......

Not terribly original, but I've gone for the former.  It's one of the few occasions in my life where there exist some semi-decent photographs of me (as you would hope from a professional photographer) and well, it was the happiest day of my life eclipsed only by the birth of my Little Prince. I aint sharing photos of that.

I love these photos because they are the best photos I have of me with my lovely Mum and Dad. The first one is of My Dad and I just as we're about to go into the Church. I love the proud look on his face. The second is of my Mum giving me a hug just as we emerged from the Church after the ceremony. Aside from a couple of lovely shots of me and Mr Nudie, these are my favourite photos of that day.

One day in August.

This post is for week 25 of The Gallery. This weeks prompt is One Day in August. The prompt is in honour of three parent bloggers, Josie, Sian and Eva who are flying out to Bangladesh to raise awareness of the work Save the Children are doing to improve the lives of millions of children in this poverty-stricken region. They flew to Bangladesh on Sunday 29th August.

For this prompt, we were required to take a photograph on this same day. The photograph can be of anything, it just had to be taken on this day. I imagined photographs of children in the garden, maybe a picnic in the park. Unfortunately, I had to work on Sunday 29th August and I was there from 7.30 in the morning until 20.00 so I had little choice but to take a photograph at work, as it's already dark when I get home.

I don't really discuss what I do for a living on this blog, or on Twitter (no, I'm not an MI5 agent). It's not top-secret, it's just that I don't feel that it's appropriate and I have to be careful what I say so that I don't breach my professional Code of Conduct or confidentiality.

I am a Neonatal Nurse. If you're not familiar with that term, it means that I work on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and I look after very sick and/or premature babies. It's a misconception that we only look after premature babies. Term babies get sick too. I would have loved to have taken a photograph of one of our tiniest patients, maybe even just a tiny foot, but I need permission to do that. 

This is a Resusitaire. This is the first piece of life saving equipment a baby who is unwell at birth or preterm will come into contact with. Those of you who have had a hospital birth may recognise it, as one resides in the corner of every delivery room in this country. It serves as a platform for staff (hopefully a Neonatal team) to place a newborn and assess and administer life support (if necessary). In the unit where I work, we also use it to transfer the baby up to the Neonatal Unit.

Sunday 29th August was a busy day. We had two admissions arrive simultaneously. I took this photograph after one of the babies (born at 29 weeks) had been safely settled onto the unit. Believe it or not, the plastic bag is an excellent insulator. These resustitaires cost somewhere in the region of £20,000 pounds each. It's very unlikely that hospitals in Bangladesh have equipment like this, especially not in every delivery room. I very much doubt that babies born at 29 weeks in Bangladesh even survive. 

People complain about the NHS, but we really are very lucky to have access to such a good standard of healthcare in this country.

  

Memories are made of this.......

This post is for week 23 of Tara Cains Gallery. The prompt this week is Memories. So many images I could have chosen that represent an important memory for me; photographs from my childhood; my time at university; my early adulthood spent living in London. All of these periods in my life have shaped the person I am today, but none as much as becoming a Mother. Every moment spent with my wee Prince is a future memory in the making.

The memories started before he was even born. The first glimpse of him on the scan. The first time I felt him move. All precious and stored away in those memory banks.

The images below are of moments etched firmly in my memories. The first time I realised I might be carrying a boy (we chose not to know the sex of the baby) was during my 20 week scan. A huge foot loomed out of the darkness at the bottom of the screen. 'There's no way that foot belongs to a girl', I had said to Mr Nudie. I was right.

When the Little Prince finally emerged, one of the first things I did (after I'd seen his dangly bits) was look at his feet. As I suspected, they were huge. They still are. This photograph has pride of place in our house because it represents one of my first significant memories of Motherhood.

The Talented Mr Nudie.

This time it's all about Mr Nudie, well all about what a bloody brilliant Dad he is to my Little Prince anyway. Not only does he have seemingly endless patience and the enduring ability to get up with the little darling at five-ish most mornings while I pretend to be asleep I mean, snooze. He is the inventor of all manner of cool stuff and games for little boys. I can't even begin to kid myself that I am as much fun to hang out with. Sorry, Little Prince. 

Mr Nudie is a 'Dangerous Book for Boys' kind of Dad. Always making stuff from bits and pieces he has lying around and foraging for beasties in the garden. All that's missing is a mad inventors moustache.......maybe that would be a step too far, despite his dedication to the cause.

Anyway, I want to share with you Mr Nudies piece de resistance. The Little Princes playhouse. It was borne from a small idea one weekend. The next thing, Mr Nudie's drawing proper fancy-pants plans and everything. It took him, with a little help from the boy just one weekend to build this.

It's the perfect spot to hang out, whilst creating a masterpiece.

Or just to chill and enjoy a little snackette.

This is the Little Princes space, and with it Play time has taken on a whole new meaning.

This post is for week 22 of Tara Cains Gallery. The prompt this week is Playtime. Don't forget to go and look at all the other entries.

The Gallery. An Ode to Pip.

The Gallery: Week 17. Emotions

This weeks prompt for the Gallery over at Sticky Fingers is a little different. This week it is a hybrid between Taras Gallery and Josie from Sleep is for the Weak's Writing Workshop. I try and join in on the Gallery every week, but I have to admit I have never been tempted to join the Writing Workshop because I am just not a creative writer. I started this blog a couple of months ago for fun and to catalogue all of the great things my Little Boy does and says. I am also rather prone to forgetting my manners and the odd rude word sneaks into a post (best not look at my most recent one if this is likely to offend).

Anyway, the prompt arrived on Friday as usual and I felt absolutely compelled to join in despite my reticence about 'proper' writing. The date on Friday was June 25th, an important and auspicious date for me. This is why.........

An Ode to Pip.

Friday, June 25th 2010. Today is my wedding anniversary. Five years ago today I married my soulmate. I should be happy. I am happy. There is a cloud. Something else should have been happening today, or near to today. It isn't.

Wednesday, December 9th 2009. I didn't sleep a wink last night. I have no reason to be worried. Yet I feel a strange sense of foreboding I cannot explain. It's just a routine scan. In half an hour it will all be over. We will laugh at my over anxious mind. We will finally be able to share our news. It will be fine.
We have the first appointment of the day. We go straight in to a little room and I lie down on the couch. The sonographer puts warm jelly onto my tummy and looks at the screen. We all look at the screen. There is a tiny head and a little body. Yes, I see arms and legs. I see Pip. Mr gave her that name 'Princess and the pea' - Pip. I smile, it is going to be fine. The sonographer doesn't say anything, her brow is furrowed, concentrating. 'It's sleeping' she says, tentatively. The anxious feeling returns. She presses harder. Pip doesn't move. 'I'm just going to get my colleague to have a look' she says. She leaves the room.

I turn to Mr. He doesn't say anything. He squeezes my hand. 'Pip's not sleeping', I say. 'She's dead'. Even as I say the words. I cannot cry. I feel numb. The two sonographers return. The second one runs the probe over my lower abdomen. 'There's no easy way to say this...........' he begins.

We leave the hospital. I knew it was too good to be true. The due date on our wedding anniversary. What are the odds of that? 'By my calculations, you're due on June 25th' My Doctor had said. I couldn't have been happier. Now it wasn't going to happen at all. Forevermore, this date will mean mixed emotions for me. 

 In years to come, I will not associate this date with any negative emotions. This year it is a little raw for obvious reasons. It is best to remember the reason why this date is usually a happy one for me.

 25th June 2005

The Gallery. Creatures

The Gallery: Week 16.

Rude Monkeys.

The theme for The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers this week is Creatures. I was going to dedicate this post to my two idiot Dogs, but they are such immense characters I think they deserve a post all to themselves at a later date. I was watching a David Attenborough DVD with the Little Prince earlier and he was completely mesmerised by the Monkeys. A light bulb flashed over my little head.

 As a child, I lived for a while in Gibraltar and one of my earliest memories is of the Monkeys that live on the Rock brazenly walking up to people and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. I learned pretty soon how erm, Monkey babies are made too. Anyway, watching the film reminded me of how brilliant and funny they are. A few years ago, Mr Nudie and I went to Indonesia. We visited the 'Monkey Forest' in Bali and like a pair of kids we went round giggling at our Primate cousins performing every act in the Monkey Kama Sutra and taking pictures  of it all for prosperity.
 Seriously though, I do love Monkeys. They are fascinating creatures.

Snigger

Chortle....

Bit blurry, there was a lot of motion, ahem......

The Gallery. Motherhood.

The Gallery. Week 15: Motherhood.

The theme for The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers this week is Motherhood. Not as easy as it sounds. Trying to define what Motherhood means to me in just one image is difficult as I have so many images of my little boy that make me proud, bring tears to my eyes and all of the other emotions that you can feel in just one day as a Mother.
I chose this one eventually. It's special because there aren't many photographs of us together and because he's still very newborn in it. This means that I was still caught up in the haze of new Motherhood. Remember that? I would spend hours marvelling at the wonder of my own creation and not quite believing it was really happening at all.

I want to share a little story that sums up Motherhood for me right now. My Little Prince is completely obsessed with the film UP at the moment. This evening, I was on my way home from work still pondering what I was going to write for this post. I opened a message from Mr Nudie that made me well up in the same way this photograph does. He was watching UP with the boy after collecting him from nursery and had been trying to explain the bits in the film where the old man looks really happy with his wife in photographs.

Boy: 'I don won wife'

Mr Nudie: 'That's Ok, you don't have to have one'

Boy: 'I just won duddle my Mummy'.

That, my friends, is what Motherhood is all about.

The Gallery. Week 13: Friendship

Two Little Boys.

The theme for The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers this week is Friendship.

Mr Nudie is a solitary creature. Like a lot of blokes I know, he believes that the quality of friends is more important than the quantity. He has one really good friend who has been his best buddy for years now. They met through their mutual love of sailing and spent many weekends away sailing for years until I came along and ruined it all.

When Mr Nudie and I got married , I moved from London to where he lives on the South Coast. I didn't know a soul, so his best friends lovely wife took me under her wing. She is now one of my closest friends. A year later I fell pregnant with the Little Prince. Shortly after that our friends announced that they were expecting too. This meant that my friend and I shared our pregnancies and even better, we were on Maternity leave at the same time. The babies were born just five weeks apart, both little boys.

The boys will be three at the end of the summer. Already their friendship shows great promise. I wonder if they'll meet for Sunday night beers to put the world to rights in years to come, just like their daddies.............

The Gallery. Week 11: Men

It is week 11 of The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers. The prompt this week is Men. I could have come up with something highly original to do with Men, but no. Like almost everybody else, I want to post photographs of the most important Men in my life.

I am the lone female in a house full of boys. There's Mr Nudie of course, and our Little Prince. Ginger Dog is also a boy, as is the latest addition to our family- Stitch. I don't have any photos of him yet. I always used to think I would have liked to have daughters, but I'm really happy with my boys. As the lovely Mr Nudie put it recently 'You are the most important lady in three boys lives'. I love that I am. Here they are. My boys.

.

This is Mr Nudie. The love of my life. My best friend. The first photograph is of him on our wedding day. The one below is of him on our honeymoon in Indonesia. I still get goosebumps when I look at that one.

I love this photograph. This is Mr Nudie and the two day old Little Prince being introduced to Ginger Dog. All of my boys, together. They are more than just the Men in my life. They are my life.

The Gallery. Weeks 9 and 10.

This is my first ever entry to The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers on my shiny new Blog- eeek! This post is inspired by weeks of Twitter-induced Blog envy. I have been snooping on other peoples blogs, gazing longingly at the photographs and wondering which of my own photographs I would have applied to each theme. I have been harbouring this blog envy for a while ( a post in itself I think) so why it has taken me so long to do anything about it is anyones guess. I have finally done something about it though, so enjoy the photographs. There will be many more.

Week 9. Portrait
I really wanted to post an entry last week for the 'Portraits' theme, but I don't have a scanner and I didn't quite get my arse in gear to take my old photo somewhere to be scanned in time for the Gallery link up last wednesday. Anyway, I still wanted to post my pictures for that theme so here are a couple.....

We don't have much in the way of portraits hanging on the walls in our home. I prefer the more contemporary 'reportage' style of photography, whereby the shots are more candid and therefore the results are more natural. However, I do love old photographs, especially of my family and particularly of my parents as children. When they were young, portrait photography was far more popular and the norm. I have chosen a photograph of my lovely mum, taken when she was about two and a half- the age my Little Prince is now. The similarity between them is quite striking I think. The photograph of my boy is by no means the best I have of him, but it is the photograph that best demonstrates the smile that they share.

Week 10. The World around us.

This weeks theme is 'The World around us'. Some people have taken this theme literally and have posted photographs of a secret place that is special to them in one way or another. Some have shared photographs of a favourite place in the world that they have visited. I couldn't honestly choose which of the wonderful places I have visited over the years is my favourite, there are just too many and each hold special memories for different reasons. One place that does stand out, simply because I had never been anywhere quite like it before or since, is China. It is such a unique and amazing place with a unique and amazing culture to boot. Also, it is home to one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Which is why for me, it was the obvious choice for the Gallery.

View from a watch tower on the Great Wall

This really is a typical view from a watch tower. All you can see for miles is the seemingly endless
'wall' snaking into the distance. Well, it does go on for some four and a half thousand miles! I trekked the wall for eight hours a day for six days in a row and sometimes this view was all you could see. I never tired of it.

Typical view from the Great Wall

A visit to a local school

We were priveliged enough to camp in the grounds of a remote local school for a night. The local people were so hospitible and the children were absolutely fascinated by us, as we were with them. Aswell as being quite honestly the most beautiful children I have ever seen, they were the most polite and endearing. We stayed for the 'raising of the flag' ceremony, which is performed by the children each morning. There was not a dry eye. Beautiful.