…is totally unco-operative, especially when you suddenly realise that the daylight is about to run out and interrupt him mid-feed to snap a photo of your WIP.

But when he’s really good…

(you might need to prepare yourself for this one, there is some serious squee action ahead)

…he is REALLY good.

Please enjoy this thinly veiled attempt to show you how perfect my life is an how beautiful my children are under the guise of sending you my best wishes.

(but seriously, have an awesome day)

(and dude, you have to admit it, my boys (and bauble daughter) are seriously gorgeous)

Tonight we’re going to Declan’s graduation ceremony, held in their church, he is graduating from pre-kindy (aka the diet coke of kindergarten) to real, proper, ridgy-didge kindergarten. The one where, in his words, you “learn properly and get to wear a BLUE uniform!”.

Have you seen The Incredibles? There’s a scene where Helen berates Bob for not attending his sons “graduation”… let me briefly imdb (is that a verb? It should be. I am making it a verb now.)

Helen: I can’t believe you don’t want to go to your own son’s graduation.
Bob: It’s not a graduation. He is moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade.
Helen: It’s a ceremony!
Bob: It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity.

Mr Incredible, can I call you Bob? I am totally with you on this one. I had no intentions of attending, I have a newborn, I haven’t had time to fix my roots, and really, why celebrate something so inevitable? Does that add yet another thing onto my “Bad Mum” column? Probably. Do I care? Nope. Does my son? Hell yes.

I’d missed a lot of Declan’s life for three weeks whilst I was in hospital looking after Ronan, and had no idea just how excited my biggest boy was about the concept of graduating, and the moment I got home started telling me how wonderful it was all going to be, he was going to get a certificate, and get up ON THE STAGE and Mummy, Daddy and Connor were going to sit in the church and watch him sing a song ON THE STAGE! OMGZ THE STAGE!”

I asked him if Ronan was allowed to come to. He literally facepalmed himself for forgetting his newest brother, and said of course he could come, “but if Ronan comes to the church with you… you need to make sure you have your boobies out”

o.O

Because if I didn’t burst into flames upon entering the church, Declan was going to make sure as hell that by the end of the night I would end up a charred pile of bones, and what better way to do that than pulling out my norks in a holy place?

He quickly picked up on my confusion and explained it all to me…

“When you’re in the church Mrs G. says we have to be VERY quiet and respectful, especially when I’m ON THE STAGE!!! singing my song. If you have your boobies out then Ronan will be quiet and everyone in the audience will be able to hear me properly.”

Of course, my son doesn’t want to buy me a one way ticket to hell, he just wants to make sure everyone’s attention is completely on him (and the seventeen other students that he seems to forget will be up there singing with him), that makes far more sense!

I know I’m not totally educated on the whole religious stuff, my knowledge of the seven sins comes soley from a certain Brad Pitt movie, but Vanity was one of them, right?

We are settled.

Ronan is such a chilled out little dude, he boobs, he sleeps, he fills his pants a lot.

Declan obviously loves him, he’s just far too cool to show it, but he’s the first to call me when his baby brother cries and won’t go to sleep without giving him kisses.

Connor LOVES Ronan. He wants to hold him 24/7, he’s aghast when I put him down to rest in our bedroom instead of in the lounge room where Conman can set himself up next to the bouncer, place his face five inches away from Ronans and stare creepily at the little dude while he sleeps.

But I have no time to write long missives that I want to. Ones about how much I love my evolving family, how boys continue to be strange little creatures that I don’t think I will ever fully understand and how brutal the realisation that taking home a living baby doesn’t fix even half the dead baby issues that I thought it would.

Because the moment I look away, in this instance to make a cup of tea, I hear shuffles, shortly followed by giggles, and then eventually a call from my eldest…

“MUMMY! Look, we made Ronan into a helicopter!”

And they had.

Like I said. Boys are strange little creatures, fortunately they’re also mildly amusing as well.

Today we go home.

I know this because the midwife on duty poked me until I woke up, at six am this morning and asked what time my husband will be in to pick me up as they need the bed.

(when the battle of Dan vs Three Car Seats In A Holden Commodore is concluded, with Dan, hopefully, being the victor)

I am now overwhelmingly nervous about leaving, about going out into a world where there isn’t pink hand sanitiser on every corner, where monitors don’t beep with each breath and where two members of our little (big?) family bring back every kind of germ you could imagine from their petridish of a preschool.

It has been three years and three months since I brought home a newborn.

Yesterday I was so excited about the prospect of bringing Ronan home and settling into our new life, and now it all feels so dangerous.

I feel like a first time Mum again.Like everything is new, and unsafe, and more than likely out to get my baby, and probably me as well.

Five years ago when Declan was first released from the hospital, we still needed to pick up a few bits and pieces, so on the way home stopped off at Westfields Parramatta. I remember pushing him in his pram with swarms of people around us, wanting desperately to pick him up and hold him close and keep him safe from the world we’d just brought him into. We walked past a music store on the top floor and music blared out of the door in the few moments it took us to pass.

I burst into tears, aghast that my tiny little bub had just been exposed, at just three days old, to such a jarring noise. We continued walking and Dan noticed the tears streaming down my face and asked what was up, I explained and he told me to look into the pram… and there was our babe, swaddled in a lime green blanket, fast asleep, completely ignorant of the world going on around him, and the dangers I perceived to be hiding around every corner, he was warm, full and content, and some crappy music coming out of HMV wasn’t going to change that. It took me until he was about six months old for that logic to finally sink in.

And now I’m back there, with my eyes wide and my back arched. I don’t know whether it’s because of the age gap, or because of the brutal reality check of Robyn’s death, but my mama brain is interpreting everything as a threat right now, I want to swaddle Ronan in more blankets than I own and strap him to my chest, and then possibly wrap the two of us in cotton wool and then move into a house inside a bubble, ideally situated in Outer Mongolia.

My primative brain is telling me that this is the most logical thing I could ever do.

Unfortunately, SIDS and Kids aren’t too keen on all those blankets, I don’t think I could purchase enough cotton wool to wrap myself in, and I hear Outer Mongolia is just awful this time of year… so instead I’m just going to panic a lot, check his car seat twenty times before placing him in it, and become obsessive with the big boys washing their hands.

The term “headless chicken” springs to mind, and yes, I plan to run around like one.

I have been incredibly lucky with my little ones.

Declan was an easy nurser, took to it straight away and would have a full feed in a couple of minutes, we fed until he wasn’t interested in it any more and basically self weaned over a couple of weeks.

Connor was my lazy babe, spending 45 minutes to feed, simply because he was such a limpet and loved being cuddled for that long. I weaned him when I was about five months pregnant with Robyn, because when you’re that pregnant, having a little being suck and chew on your nipple for almost an hour really doesn’t help your already super sensitive boobs. So I weaned him, and he wasn’t happy about it. I think if he’d had his way he would still be nursing now.

Ronan is doing amazingly on the breast, his gestational age today is 34w5d and we’ve just moved to four breast feeds a day, alternating with tube feeds, and he seems to be a mini Declan, taking everything he needs in a matter of minutes, his latch and suck is wonderful for such a little bub, particularly one with tongue tie.

Like I said, very lucky.

Over the last week I’ve watched a young first time mum struggle with feeding her baby. I’ve watched her in tears as she struggles to pump more than a couple of mls, I’ve seen her look away as they tubed her baby as she didn’t thrive, I’ve watched her spend hours simply trying to get her little one to latch and cry when the scales show that she’s lost more weight.

When I walk in to the nursery I’ve taken to hiding my pumped bottles of milk as I make my way to the fridge. I heard her tell her Mum that she feels like a failure, and I don’t want to seem like I’m “flaunting” my supply, which, if anything, is excessive for a babe so small.

Surrounding us, in the antenatal clinic, the maternity ward and the special care nursery are posters, educational posters purporting that breast is best. They are everywhere you turn, the midwives and lactation consultants come and visit her, and make everything seem so easy, all you need is some patience, and maybe a nipple shield… and a supply. She had the support, she had the education, but her body was refusing to do what it was meant to, and she was loathing herself because of it.

Yesterday a new woman walked into the nursery. She looked rested, less stressed and the bags were starting to ease from underneath her eyes. Yesterday she had decided to start feeding her little girl formula, for the first time I saw her pick up her baby without dread in her eyes.

Breastfeeding is awesome, mamas milk is absolutely magical, but we’ve attached such a stigma to formula feeding that mothers like this one are beating themselves up because of something their body is refusing to do. How does that help anyone? It leads to a stressed mother, an undernourished baby and an overwhelming sense of failure, regarding something that, based on the posters that cover every inch of the walls in the hospital, should come as naturally as breathing.

When the oxygen falls down in a plane, you’re always reminded to place the mask over your own face before your childs, because if you pass out then you’re no good to anyone, looking after yourself first allows you to look after your children, and I really believe that lesson carries through to everything in parenting. You can not be a good parent if you don’t take the time out to look after yourself, and despite the best intentions, some times we have to change our parenting ideals because things don’t fall into place. This doesn’t make a mother a failure, it makes her adaptable, which we all know, as mothers, is pretty much the number one required skill, because I’m lucky if I day goes by where everything goes to plan.

Women are terrible at casting judgement, mothers are even worse, but I think the worse culprit in all of this is ourselves, our children need to be fed, kept warm and dry and loved, it doesn’t matter how you get to that final conclusion so long as the end result is happy, healthy children, but as mothers we need to stop self flagellating and beating ourselves up when something doesn’t go exactly to our parenting plan, because if you’re stressed and minutes away from a mental breakdown, you’re not going to be the parent that your child deserves. As a society we need to let mothers do that, to step back and say that maybe this isn’t the best for your baby, but it’s best for you, and I’m not going to judge you for making a decision that allows you to be a happier and better mother, whether your babe is on the breast, drinking EBM or having formula.

(The posters shown above are the same ones shown in our hospital from the Manning-Great Lakes ABA)

(I know the images have messed up the formatting on this post, I promise I will fix it once I get home and fix my CSS, just suck it up for now!)

On the 22nd of November we welcomed Ronan Clay Treacy into the world after 3 days in hospital, an ambulance plane flight and an exhausting 21 hours of labour with a lot of threats of caesareans. He was born at 2:20pm, weighing 2.36kg (a little over 5lbs) and 45cm long. He looks like Connor and Robyn, meaning this kid got none of my genes and all of Dans. Conman is absolutely in love with him, Declan took one glance at him laying in the humidicrib and was very concerned about why we were “keeping him in a fish tank”.

He is healthy, and perfect, but at 33 weeks gestation just a little bit undercooked. So he’s in the local special care nursery whilst he learns to eat from something other than a tube, grows bigger and gets enough fat to maintain his temperature. I’m living on site at the hospital and going through a rather sharp learning curve as I learn all the ins and outs of looking after a premature baby. Ronan is doing fabulously, and we’re learning every day just how appropriate the name “Hercules” was for him.

Thank you to everyone who partook in the live tweeting of my labour and birth, and for all of the messages of support and love, Dan and I have been completely overwhelmed with how lovely everyone has been and how much Ronan’s birth has been celebrated by people from all around the world. It’s just completely crazy I’m still wrapping my head around it.

For years Dan and I have fed the ferals kids, put them to bed and the sat down on the sofa and watched a show together whilst eating off our laps. Yes, it involved making two meals, but damn, it was nice to just sit and chillax after the craziness that is bedtime.

We got into this habit very early on, probably when Declan was a year or so old. Dan wouldn’t get home from work until 7-8, so I would feed Declan separately, and then Dan and I would have “grown up time” to eat after he got home.

Except Dan has been self employed and working from home for three years now, and we really had no excuse anymore for not sitting down and eating as a family.

And I know I read somewhere that children who eat family meals are less likely to kill puppies, which in turn makes them less likely to my psychopaths.

So, in an attempt to stop my children becoming serial killers, I now slave over a hot stove, create something fabulous for my family, and sit down with the intention of us having stimulating conversation about our day and bonding over our delicious meal.

Except by the time I sit down after ferrying around after everyone, my dinner is usually cold.

Without fail, one of the boys will take a glance at what I’ve served them, which they usually ate a fortnight ago without any dramas whatsoever and announce that I’m severely mistaken if I ever thought that they liked that meal, and would I please just TRY and only cook things that they like in the future.

That is generally the stage where I cover their meal in ketchup and tell them to suck it up.

And then the whinging will start.

Like OMG, I put onions in the pasta sauce, and “they feel like eating someones skin” according to Declan.

(See why I’m so concerned about the whole serial killer thing now? My eldest aspires to be the next Buffalo Bill)

Or, in yet another desperate attempt to get Connor to eat something green, I placed THREE WHOLE PEAS on his plate and contaminated the whole meal.

And really mummy, can’t we just have chicken nuggets and chips?

Then the hunger strike will generally begin.

Hunger strikes look like this…

Conman here is grumpy because there are tiny little diced carrots in his cottage pie, and he just can’t comprehend how I forgot that he was deathly allergic to all forms of vegetables.

It must be genetic because apparently both my kids are.

I’m an evil Mummy and if they turn their noses up at what’s on their plate, I refuse to make them anything else for dinner.

Not completely evil – if it’s something completely new or something spicy, then I will usually have a back up plan of ham sandwiches or cereal, but if it’s a meal they’ve eaten before then they know they’re going to bed hungry if they don’t eat it.

And we make them sit at the table until everyone else finishes, normally they end up so bored out of their skull that they start to tuck in.

Except Declan has worked out how to get around this, and if he doesn’t like something will magically develop some life threatening illness that will mean he has to go and lie down immediately.

This is what that looks like…

This is apparently the face of a child suffering a very fast onset of polio, which was magically cured when it was time to read a bedtime story.

By now Dan and I have spent 45 minutes getting progressively angrier with the kids, our meals are cold, we’re taking away after dinner treats and bedtime stories, and all we can think of is how nice it was when I just fed them dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets and chips, put them to bed and we sat down and watched How I Met Your Mother, with our hot meals and peace and quiet.

I hate sitting down to eat with my children. There I said it. It’s not happy families, it’s stressful and makes my blood boil watching them completely refuse to even lick something that I just spent an hour cooking.

Given the option I would probably quite happily take my plate and scurry away to the en suite to perch on the toilet seat, eat in peace and dream about one day having a family meal that looks something like this…

Rather than this…

There’s been a swag of posts over the weekend based around the “I Heart My Body” theme on We Heart Life and it’s one that I just can’t join in with.

I have never loved my body, but I haven’t always hated it either.

I was a size ten seventeen year old with perky tits (have fun with that Google!) and I was never too keen on my body,but I had my good days.

I fell in love, got married and whacked on the extra kilos, I still wasn’t keen on it, but Dan loved my body enough for both of us.

Then I got pregnant with Declan, and the stretch marks along my hips started to form. My pregnancy with him was probably the closest I have ever been to loving myself, I wore that belly and those stretch marks with delight, I felt pretty hot – I was even asked out on a date during my third trimester – score!

In my 20 year old naievity  I thought my body would snap right back after birthing amost 4 kilos of boy. Hah. No. Back to general dislike of the body.

Then I fell pregnant with Connor. My sweet blonde boy who was fully engaged for five weeks. Creating a whole new map of stretch marks on my lower belly. But I didn’t mind so much, despite the fact that when I shave my pubes I now look like a silver and white zebra.

I wish I was kidding, Internet. I’m not.

My pregnancy with Robyn didn’t bring any fresh stretchmarks – the boys had already made sure that there was nothing left to stretch out, they’re nice like that.

Then my body let me down in the most obnoxious way it possibly could. It had one job, to keep her alive, and it failed miserably at that. Within a matter of hours my body went from incubator and creator of life, to tomb, carrying a 7lb corpse who was perfect in every way.

Apart from the whole dead thing.

And that is why I don’t heart my body. Because when something or someone lets you down to that extent, love is so far away from the emotions you feel that it might as well be on a different planet, a different universe.

Instead there’s just a whole heap of loathing.

And now, 30 weeks into my pregnancy with Hercules, my every waking moment consists of wondering if my body is going to fail me again, and it only gets worse as each gestational week passes. Statistically, it would be more likely to be struck by lightening after winning the Euromillions whilst eating a lamb kebab that won’t make me fat. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sit and wonder, and count kicks, and panic every time I go to sleep that my amniotic sack might have a leak and be allowing the dreaded bacteria into my fluid whilst I sleep, once again oblivious to what’s going on in my uterus.

I don’t heart my body. It failed me and my family. One day we might make up and at least be cordial to each other, but for now, there’s a lot of bad blood between us, I hope a lot of that can be healed by birthing a pink screechy newborn, but only time will tell.

A relative brought a gift for me. A lovely, well-meaning, slightly misguided gift. Iris scented soap-on-a-rope. Because who wouldn’t wash their armpits with sweet babylost memories?

We laughed. Because what the fuck else would we do?

We started laughing the moment we were left alone, sitting in an empty room, just us and the silence of the lifeless baby inside me. We started talking and the jokes just fell out of our mouths, terrible black jokes that I could never mention to anyone, it was our way of dealing with it, and still is.

At the meeting with the funeral director he asked us if we would like Robyn buried in the clothes she left the hospital in or whether we’d like to provide any, my mother in law straight away offered to go and buy a burial gown for her, I said no, this was my one and only chance to buy clothes for my daughter, that I was going out, braving the hordes of pregnant women and newborns that seemed to line every street and buying some damn clothes for my kid.

And they were going to be pink.

Obnoxiously pink.

Our town is split up into two small shopping areas. I figured I could handle just one of them, and got my shit together for a trip into town.

I clung to Dan like a mad woman, like if I let go of him his entire body would just evaporate before my eyes. I kept my head bowed and refused to look up, lest I saw any hint of a newborn, I wanted to run up to every pregnant woman around me and tell her to stop whining about STILL being pregnant, because her baby just might die.

Unhinged probably doesn’t even touch the sides of what I was feeling at that time.

We walked into Cotton On Kids, and with a deep breath I looked up from my feet and decided to just get the job done.

Dan stood in front of me, right next to a little romper that I’d been looking at the week before, I’d commented on how if I ended up having a girl I would be back in to buy it – it was black with little pink skulls. Totally me and now totally inappropriate to bury my child in.

And we chuckled.

I pointed out another little top. This one with “Game Over” written on it, and suggested we take it home to Dan’s parents and tell them that we intended to bury her in that, simply to see their faces.

And we laughed.

We continued looking around the store, when I heard Dan call me “I’ve found the perfect one, come look at this!”, I darted over, happy that we’d finally found the outfit that our daughter would be laid to rest in.

Dan held it up proudly, another slogan romper.

“Do not wake. Baby Asleep.”

And we laughed so hard that tears rolled down our faces.

Because really. Jess is totally right. What the fuck else were we meant to do?