Even better than the real thing? Well... No.

This "yoghourt" (which seems a bit like spelling Belinda "Biilynda") is not like a cafe latte. Nor is it a promising alternative to my Bulla Creamy Classics Iced Coffee Ice Cream. After Mum saw me on the weekend for the first time in a few weeks and said "Oh my! You're enormous! Are you sure there's only one in there!?" I thought maybe I should attempt a less fattening dessert option. However, a visit to my fabulous midwife yesterday assured me that I'm exactly the amount of enormous she would expect and that it is the baby that is growing (appropriately) and me only incidentally.

A gifted child!

In other news from the midwife, our baby is head-down, bum up, legs to the left - which explains the "scuffling" I've been describing to people - "as if the baby is trying to tunnel its way out" - that's just its head and hands moving about as it performs a rather athletic and complicated handstand. It also explains the Jurassic Park like foundation-moving activity that takes place just under my left rib - hello dancing feet! I'm going to just organise an artist's impression...

See? This baby knows all about being born. It must be absorbing all of that good birth literature that I'm reading and getting itself prepared. Granted, next week all kinds of scary medical adjectives like "breech", "transverse" (which I momentarily confused with "trapeze" the other week) or "posterior" may apply, but today I declare the inhabitant of my womb a gifted child!

In literary news...

I am reading a book recommended to me by the fabulous Nic, who in my almost-year of absence from the world of blogging, seems to have given it up entirely - good for her, I say!
Anyway, this book is rather hokily titled Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life by Margaret Kim Peterson but I thought I should read it because I am not particularly domestically inclined and am about to spend six-ish months as a full-time-carer engaged in domestic duties. I wonder how P.C. you could get with that? Domestic Engineer? Manager of Domicile Enterprises? Nurture Giver? aaanyway... I thought I'd better get myself a bit inspired - and I am inspired! This is a pretty good book! I'm only half-way through (having started reading at about 5:30am until Jon left for work at 7:30ish) but I have already been challenged to see the way that providing shelter, food, clothing, comfort and beauty for people are very much activities in keeping with the activities of God! I had never really thought about that before. Let me just heave my way out of my chair and I'll fetch the book to provide you with some quotes:

"...Jesus has very strong things to say at various points in the Gospels about the Christian duty to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless. He even goes so far, in his parable of the Last Judgement, as to paint this as the criterion by which the sheep are separated from the goats: Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me... Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. (Matthew 25:34-40)
There is a tendency, I think, on the part of those of us who are well fed, clothed and housed to imagine that the needy people to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25 are people we don't know - the sort of people who are served at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, at which we ought therefore to volunteer at least occasionally. But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed."

and I liked this quote too:

"...God does not appear to think as lowly of housework and housekeepers as members of our culture are apt to. On the contrary, scripture abounds with images of God himself as homemaker and housedweller, as one who clothes and is clothed, who feeds people and animals and the earth itself and receives gifts of food and drink in return.
Consider Psalm 104:
Thou... coverest thyself with light as with a garment, who hast stretched out the heavens like a tent, who hast laid the beams of thy chambers on the waters... Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken. Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a garment... Thou makest springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills, they give drink to every beast of the field... [All creatures] look to thee, to give them their food in due season. When thou givest to them, they gather it up; when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things. (vv. 1-2, 5-6, 10-11, 27-28)

Anyway, I'm enjoying it so far but will let you know if it all comes crashing down... I am very blessed in that my magnificent husband does all of our washing (not even sure I would know how to operate the washing machine - though I'm confident I could figure it out) and always stacks (and very often unstacks) the dishwasher and does all the vacuuming along with cooking the more-than-occasional meal. Our household duties have been divided in such a way that I have never had to contemplate any of them as being technically my jobs, as I know a lot of women still do. But I hope that when the time comes that I have a break from my full-time paid employment, I'll pick up some of Jon's domestic duties? Or will my new domestic duties, like the one that really I'm the only one equipped to do - feeding a newborn baby - take up all of the newly released time and energy? Well, we'll just have to work that one out as it happens.

You may be interested to know that Jon is in the process of sorting out his paid employment so that next year he can be at home with our baby two days a week and work the other three days. As a consequence, I will hopefully be back at work for the two days that he's at home and together we'll be earning one salary, rather than one of us always being at work and away from our baby and the other one always being at home and away from the world of paid-work, and more specifically, the teaching that we both love. It is an exciting thing to embark on this adventure of family in such a mutual way! I'll let you know how it pans out...

But now I must get to work. I may not have physically transported myself in to work today (hence the early morning mid-week blogging) but that's ok because I physically transported all of the work I need to do home (apart from my Year 8 class, who are in good hands and who I frankly wouldn't want here at home with me, delightful as they are) and am about to start marking and report writing like a mad thing. A mad thing in pyjamas.