She has seen us brush our teeth with an electric toothbrush so when we brush hers or I pretend to brush mine I make the sound of one. I think she finds me going ‘blergh’ more funny though. The other night she would not stop laughing.
Yesterday Tiago was looking forward to her naps; she slept for half an hour both times. She has been sleeping okay through the night, though last night she did wake up at 11 briefly.
We’ve been watching Through Her Eyes. We watched 2 episodes last weekend, then hadn’t watched it again until last night. Tiago has given me the go ahead to watch it by myself though, as I think he is a little freaked out/can’t be bothered to watch it. I have started to watch a lot of TV on 1.5x while doing work…
I get confused by it all every time though. Thinking about it the old 6am will be 7am, so the first night might not be great (hello super early bedtime) but it could be worse. We’ll see…
I hope more things stay online after the pandemic is over. It was so much more convenient to be at home with a digital portfolio. One reviewer said she wouldn’t have been able to go to the physical reviews as she has kids to look after.
They seemed to go well and were generally positive. It seems worth noting that I only had female reviewers.
It’s 9.15am and this morning he’s been looking after B so I could do dance videos, do a shoot and now my hashtags and blog. B is just going down for a nap, so I hope she sleeps well. I need to do some ‘work work’ after this, but I want to make sure that Tiago has some time for his own stuff today too.
I still feel guilty about T looking after her so much, but B doesn’t see him that much during the week so it’s nice for them to spend some quality time together.
My Mum and Tiago will be looking after her while I’m doing it. I’m looking forward to getting out more, but I worry about fitting everything in. I know it’ll be fine though.
I end up singing that ‘What Does The Fox Say?‘ song from time to time as B has a fox toy and a few books that reference foxes. I just remember hearing them mate in London a lot and that wasn’t very nice…
People like to use animals for things that aren’t really known for their noises. If in doubt a lot of animals roar, and most birds tweet, but what does a moose say? A lot of them become Pokemon in my mind as in a toucan says tou-can, and a moose says moooose.
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I probably should have wrote this a bit closer to the one year anniversary of the UK’s first lockdown (23rd March), but I guess nearly 3 weeks after isn’t so bad.
I had planned for this blog post to reflect on pregnancy and early motherhood during a pandemic, but it took me long enough to just talk about my pregnancy so expect the motherhood bit at a later date.
I’m a bit bored of sounding like a massive whiner, but this year has been tough and I know it’s been tough for everyone in different ways.
Going back to what feels like a lifetime ago – I found out I was pregnant in October 2019 and knew I wanted to document it since I’ve been making self-portraiture projects since 2010. Sometimes titles for projects take a long time to appear, but other times they are easy, and Waiting For Things In A Time When You Rarely Wait For Things arrived with little stress.
I thought it was smart and funny.
‘Well, it’s 2020 and you can order things via the little gadget in your hand and it will arrive the next morning. We can watch a whole series in one go and not have to spend a week wondering what will happen next (okay for some shows you do have to, but I didn’t have a TV so I wasn’t really watching programmes like that). And now I have to wait for 9ish months for this baby to appear.’
I thought that pregnancy was something that happened to other people and not me, so I was really intrigued to see my body changing and experience someone – who would look like me and my husband – growing inside me.
If I talked about the whole of my pregnancy then we would be here for a long time, so let’s skip to not long before the UK had it’s first lockdown.
Earlier in my project (Waiting For Things…) I remember referring to Covid and feeling awkward about it as I thought (like most people) that it would be something that would just pass. Now I wish I had mentioned it more, but I thought people would think I was paranoid. I remember when I first started to sanitise my hands in public that people would think that I was odd for doing it. I initially tried to do it as discreetly as possible.
Pregnancy In The Time Of Corona (25 weeks) (March 2020)
(It’s weird seeing how short my hashtags used to be. I feel like sometimes I don’t know what to write about and before you know it I’ve reached the Instagram maximum of 30 hashtags and 2,200 characters.)
We had planned for a home birth, so my midwife appointments were all at our flat. I had the same midwife the whole time, but she was giving her father a kidney so was due to go on sick leave. However due to Covid the operation got cancelled so she never took her sick leave. I hope her family is okay.
I actually didn’t even reference going into the first lockdown in my project. My first post after lockdown just talks more excitedly about seeing the baby (B) moving for the first time.
As there wasn’t much to do though we got quite into going for walks. We lived in Liverpool city centre and originally we were walking along the riverfront which was really nice, but just a bit too busy for our liking. I was scared. I didn’t know how Covid might affect B (as an unborn baby) and I was anxious enough during my pregnancy before the pandemic.
I Want To Keep Being Able To Go For Walks (27 weeks) (March 2020)
Lol. Did any of us think we would still be dealing with it now?
I felt like people weren’t taking instructions about social distancing seriously enough and I got stressed out. I would wait outside of the supermarket while Tiago went in, and get annoyed by people, especially as I realised how gross and unhygienic people were.
I Feel Like I Have Lost A Sense Of Urgency (27 weeks) (March 2020)
We had been walking after dark to try to avoid the masses of people also taking walks, but soon we just started to walk in the opposite direction during daylight through the industrial area instead.
(I’m just posting pictures where the titles refer to things to do with the pandemic as there would be too many images to talk about otherwise. You can see the whole series on my Instagram.)
Tiago used to work from home a bit before Covid, but then he was always at home. Luckily we get along well (that’s always good if you’re married to someone) and it was nice to see him more. While I grew a baby he grew facial hair, which was weird as he only rocked a beard when we were on holiday.
He appeared in the project more than I had initially planned due to being around more.
Soon my midwife appointments would be changed from every 3 weeks to every 4 weeks. This didn’t really matter but I guess it meant we didn’t have as many as we should have. At one point my midwife sent someone else in case she wasn’t available when I gave birth, but otherwise she was the only person who I saw on a regular-ish basis during lockdown #1 besides Tiago.
It Is Odd That Quite Possibly None Of My Friends Or Family (Besides Tiago) Will See Me Heavily Pregnant In Real Life (29 weeks) (April 2020)
I was looking forward to my friends and family seeing me pregnant, I wanted to know what it was like to float in water while pregnant and … actually my wishlist wasn’t very long at all. I guess the main thing was to just really make the most of our time saying goodbye to our old lives of no responsibility, and hang out with our nearest and dearest.
It’s funny how you can take such simple things for granted.
We (my husband Tiago and I) moved to Liverpool in late 2018 and we had a small group of friends there, but a lot of our friends lived elsewhere. We had both lived in London for a number of years (me for 8ish and Tiago for 10ish), and Tiago was born in Portugal. We still haven’t seen any of Tiago’s family since December 2019 when Tiago’s brother invited everyone (their parents and us) for Christmas, otherwise we wouldn’t have seen them for a much longer time.
We had had all our compulsory scans before the lockdown, but I was meant to have 3 additional scans due to my BMI (if it’s under 20 you need more scans and mine was 19.9). These got cancelled, which was fine as I didn’t think it was necessary and didn’t fancy going into the hospital for them. It also meant that Tiago never missed an appointment due to restrictions, which was lucky.
We had tried to find out at previous scans, but B would not ‘present’ and I was not so secretly glad that this was the case. Due to our other scans being cancelled we did not have an opportunity to find out, so we waited until I gave birth to see that B was a girl. (I thought she was a boy at first as I could only see the umbilical cord.)
I was thinking the other day that I really don’t miss a lot of things. Maybe that’s because I’ve had a baby and things are more difficult. ‘Would it be worth the hassle of getting someone to look after B to go to a music gig?’ Not really.
I do daydream about going out to a private view or something though, but Tiago wouldn’t be bothered about joining me so he could look after B.
Eating Almond Butter Is My Daily Highlight Right Now (29 and a half weeks) (April 2020)
I really did not know what to expect when pregnant, but I knew it wasn’t this. My mental health has always been a bit over the place, and my art is therapeutic for me and the main way that I try to deal with things. I felt lucky to have something to count down to during this time and I was glad that I had already started a project to work on and vent into.
Sad, but small things. My daily highlight at the moment is getting out for a walk, but I do now really like this dark chocolate sea salt almond butter – I was just eating their plain stuff before which is still really good. (Yes that’s a lot of money for nut butter, but a kilo does last a long time. Some people spend money on alcohol – I like to buy nut butter.)
Who Knows How Things Will Be By The Time I Give Birth (30 weeks)
I had imagined that at some point there would be some kind of big goodbye to not being a parent. I didn’t want a baby shower, so I was relieved that I would not get one, but yes I thought I would celebrate with friends and just experience doing things for the last time child-free while realising it was the last time. Bizarre.
In February 2020 I had gone to Norway for my first solo show at Vasli Souza in Oslo, and Tiago had joined for a few days. I had imagined that we would go on another small trip before B was born, but nope. Norway is expensive and I felt bad for spending money on things, but if we had known what was to come then maybe we would have just stayed longer and done more.
At this point we are not sure when we will risk going to see Tiago’s family (it’s two flights, and it was already a lot of faff before we had a baby and Covid to think about).
I Have Told Him Before That If He Wants To Touch The Bump Then He Has To Make Sure His Hands Are Warm (22 and a half weeks) (February 2020)
And then as my due date got nearer I seemed to not worry so much about the world’s situation, as my main thoughts were about giving birth and becoming a mother. Covid was just something we learned to deal with. We went for our walks and Tiago did the food shopping. We both worked, and I spent my days off doing my own work.
(I now realise how much time I wasted and faffed. I wish I had been quicker and spent more time relaxing, but oh well.)
We figured we wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon, so we just tried to make our flat nicer as we planned to stay there for a while. (Spoiler alert: We moved to Birmingham at the end of October.)
#IHopeMineComesAfterTheDueDate
Just laughing at this as I really thought I’d be a 42 weeker giving birth at home, but B came before 38 weeks and there was no home birth.
Time Is Running Out (37 and a half weeks) (June 2020)
Our new normal just became staying at home with a daily walk. I felt lucky to still be working, and that Tiago was still working, and that we hadn’t really been affected too much by Covid. I was just really unsure of how giving birth would be, but I just kept practicing my breathing that I’d learned through hypnobirthing (it was super useful in the end).
We Ended Up Waiting For Something To Happen In A Time When Everyone Was Waiting For Something (0 weeks) (June 2020)
I miss those early days of feeling high on life and feeling okay about everything. In the early days she could not do much and it was nice to just learn about parenting without the pressures of having to see people and feel judged. I’m glad that I did not know how long this would go on for though.
But overall with my pregnancy – Yes I wish I had seen more friends, yes I still haven’t seen most of those friends, but I do not really think I missed out that much. The main thing that upset me was being in hospital for 4 nights without Tiago being able to visit us. It was bizarre. I was in a parallel universe in a hospital (after not being in another building besides our flat for months), with a baby and without a husband (who I had not been away from for a night since February).
The big missing out for me though has been since B has been born and it has been super frustrating. Moving to Birmingham has meant that we’ve got to be closer to some of my family, but I just feel like we’ve been locked at home for months unable to do the things that people with babies are usually able to do. I’ve felt worse lately after some good weather – which meant some nice time sat outside and a change of scenery – soon went away, but hopefully with summer on its way and more things starting to reopen soon it can only get better. She’s still yet to meet a lot of people, we haven’t been to a baby class in real life since before Christmas (we have one this week, phew!) and I get super obsessed about her routine because I haven’t had much to mess it up for a long time.
I guess I should save this for the next post though, which I will try to do soon but this has taken me way longer than I expected.
One last note though: I’m really glad that I made this project as I remember being pregnant, but it doesn’t really feel like it happened to me and that I dreamed it or something? I find it weird looking at the photos that THAT happened to my body. It’s bizarre. I definitely never imagined that I’d be pregnant during a pandemic, but I was, and thanks to Tiago for helping me get through it.
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It seems weird that it may have actually been an exact year. 16th March 2020 was a Monday and I’m pretty sure I was not feeling too great that day, so I said I’d next go into the office (where I did some part-time work) maybe a few days later but by the time I got home I found out that pregnant women were classed as high risk.
I’ve walked past it with B before on the way to baby classes in December. With B I’m usually a bit slower as I have to push her, and sometimes it is more of a leisurely pace.
#HoweverTodayIWasByMyselfAndItWasOdd
I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a while let’s face it, but it felt so odd to be by myself.
Yeah those photos were fairly bad. This project has evolved a bit, but as I have been making work throughout the pandemic I thought I should still talk about some of this stuff.
I thought about a time when I spent ages choosing somewhere to eat a sandwich before an improv class when I lived in London. In the end I chose an area that seemed quite quiet, and as I went to take a big bite I looked up and saw a male photographer taking a photo of me.
It then reminded me of a time in France when a guy was trying to get a picture of me applying suncream, and he was so close up that it was probably a bust shot. I kept turning around whenever he picked his camera up and I said no. He was getting annoyed with me, but I said no. Then he walked off and tried to take a picture of me from further away. Some things I missed from my memories post.
(11th April: I’ve also been thinking lately about the horrible male orthodontist that I had when I was a teenager. He used to accuse me of not wearing my retainer and would tighten it SUPER tight. For the record I always wore the darn thing (especially as I did not want him to tighten it so much), and now I’m older I think that he might have just been abusing his position of power to cause unnecessary pain. Maybe he didn’t and my teeth were (and still are) genuinely rubbish, but I do wonder about it.)
I didn’t realise they were only going to be online for another 14 hours, so I just had to skim through them for the good bits. The channel 4 app needs to have 1.5x button like Netflix.
It really didn’t feel nice. Will we have a tooth tomorrow? Will B sleep well? I hope it’s a yes to both, though I’m not looking forward to brushing her tooth.
I was planning for this ‘entry’ to be Portrait Of A Mother Of A 9 Month Old, but then I realised Mother’s Day was coming up so I thought I would leave it until today. I haven’t done a shoot yet, but I fancy doing one with B so hopefully we’ll do one when she wakes up from her nap.
(6th April: Well I did the shoot and it involves one of my favourite themes of making myself not look very nice. I say that I’m not going to show B’s face, but this one shows her mouth and a bit of her nose. I was going to edit it, but it seemed a bit unnecessary.
I guess I do not want to show her whole face (well I posted a photo of B wearing her jaundice machine mask when I announced her birth anyways), and I particularly don’t want to show her eyes (which were covered in that photo). I feel like I should write more about this but I’m too tired. A topic for the future?)
It looks like Mother’s Day in Portugal is the first Sunday in May. Weird that Mother’s Day moves around but Father’s Day is the same date every year? I guess Portuguese Father’s Day might mean more to Tiago?
Bless him. He gets super stressed then keeps talking about it as the day approaches. It’s a commercial holiday that I am not really that bothered about, but I guess it just feels somewhat momentous as it is my first. I much prefer a hand-drawn card with a nice personal message to anything else, plus as it’s the weekend he has given me plenty of time to do my work which means more to me.
When we lived in Liverpool people on skateboards and roller blades/skates would constantly go past us. I used to love roller blading – I remember going round my neighbour’s garage to Gina G a lot – and going to roller discos. I was never good on hills though. Just nice flat terrain for me please. I’d be too embarrassed to go out on them by myself…
It’s a rollercoaster. Basically we can’t be lazy. We have some hydrocortisone cream that we apply twice a day when it’s bad, but her skin go to the point where we couldn’t even see where it needed to be applied. Now it is creeping back, so we need to keep an eye on it. We also use Dermol 500 which is super easy to apply and her skin seemed to get much better when we started to apply that every hour or two the other day. Then we have Zerobase which is a heavier ointment that we use before she goes to bed, and once or twice during the day.
(I hope this may be of use for someone, but I know different things work for different people. These are all things that B has been prescribed.)
I have a temporary part time job coming up and I’m excited to get out of the house more. Yesterday we bumped into a woman and her baby who we met the other week, so I am hoping soon we will know more people.
I worry that B will see this work when she is older and think I hated raising her. I don’t.
#SeeingBGrowingAndChangingWeekToWeekIsSoRewarding
She changes so fast. I guess I did not really know how she would be at 9 months, but she seems to be doing more than I thought she would?
#ButNothingCanPrepareYouForThisMassiveLifeShift
I never really stayed in bed until late, but I definitely wasn’t waking up between 6 and 7 every day. You just get used to it and adjust your bedtime I guess, but that is the biggest shock I think really. We could let her lie in, but then she’ll probably go to bed later and I like having free time in the evening. Plus now she is often awake before 7 (when we’d like to get up) so that wouldn’t work.
I thought I had mentioned this in previous hashtags, but maybe I didn’t? Well at meals now I give her 30 minutes to eat as otherwise we can sit there for an hour with me getting stressed.
Yesterday she wasn’t eating dinner, but then I started to give her a bit of yoghurt with mango and she got eating so then I mixed it all together and she ate 90% of it. Great.
Maybe I talked about this before, I’m not sure. Before she was just having milk when she woke up and before she went to bed, but on my sister’s suggestion we now give her milk then. It makes me feel not so stressed about her maybe not eating so much lunch.
This song. I’ve sung it so many times that I’m getting better at hitting a lower note at the end of the chorus. I’m not sure why she likes it, but she claps. I kept making videos of her doing stuff, then I’d start to sing it and she’d look at me.
When we (Tiago and me, as B was not born yet) lived in London I used to do a lot of improv classes and courses, and I did a couple of clowning courses too. I started a stand-up comedy course but we moved to Liverpool before I finished it. It is something that I would like to revisit at some point.
#IDoLoveToMakeHerLaugh
I love to make anyone laugh, but the sound of babies laughing is one of the best in the world.
I love digging out a toy that she did not look at twice when she last saw it, but now she can really interact with it. I think I feel happier too as she can entertain herself a bit better now and is happy as long as you’re sat next to her. Tiago likes to lie on the floor while B crawls over him and chills next to him playing with her toys.
Anything that she shouldn’t play with she obviously loves. My Nan has a trolley that looks a bit like a tea cart. She loves to stick her fingers in the wheels…
She’s young. She’s got time. One moment she will really get it and switch between clapping and waving, and then she’ll just clap. The YouTube baby classes that we do talk about clapping more than they do waving, so it’s fair enough.
I’ve said a lot in the past that I do not know what to say to B all day. I guess I have been overthinking it a lot. I can just keep it simple. ‘Say hi’ say hello etc.’ and then just talking about the colours of things and pointing things out to her etc.
This feels quite randomly slot into the bottom. I originally wanted to say more about it, but yesterday I ended up writing a blog post about it all instead. I feel a bit awkward about it, but I ended up spending a lot of my free time in the morning on it so I thought I should share it.
Fingers crossed. I want her to grow up feeling more confident than I ever did, and her to feel able to call out/tell someone/report when something is not right, or something bad has happened.
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Well it was much better and then it suddenly got worse. I wanted some reassurance that it was okay to still use it and to maybe use it twice a day again.
We have ‘Dermol 500’ which the other doctors prescribed. We were using that and that hydromol, but yesterday we just kept applying Dermol and it seemed to make things better.
Her skin is the worst under her vest, and she has a sleepsuit on top of it most of the time. Last night we thought we would try her without the vest but she was crying her eyes out at 11.30 and we put it back on. Her skin seems better. We had also put her in a new brand of nappies, so we’ve gone back to her old ones. The problem with changing a few things is that you’re not sure what is really helping, but I think it is a mix of things really.
We talk to a woman who walks a dog when we see her, which is usually about once a week. She commented yesterday about how much B has changed since she last saw her – which was probably 5 days ago.
My Nan will say ‘put B’s shows on’. I say ‘B has watched enough TV today’ and my Nan will disagree. I know my Nan means well, but surely me playing with B is much better for her than TV? We didn’t have a TV in Liverpool and we do not plan to have one when we eventually move out. We watch stuff on our computers from time to time, but I don’t like how we can just get stuck in front of the TV. Hopefully the weather will be good soon and we can go out more, and go to classes and do anything else that isn’t sitting in front of the box.
She loves breakfast and it seems okay for me to feed her, but lunch and dinner are a bit more tricky. I’ve made her broccoli scones and raspberry oat bites that she seems more into, but I need to work on giving her more finger foods as we didn’t do the baby led weaning approach.
We’re on a WhatsApp group and there are usually a lot of ‘sorry I can’t make it messages’. I get it as babies are unpredictable, but we need to book onto it etc.
It starts in 15 minutes. B is due to get up in 30 minutes.
I need to do the shoot for this so I’d rather get it done now and then relax during B’s nap later. Or I can just try to quickly do the shoot and attend, and leave early if I do not like it. Hmm. I think I’ll just do the shoot now as we have an online baby class in an hour or so.
I know that some people are still dying from Covid after having the vaccine, but at least we know she will have some protection and then we need to encourage her to still keep her distance from people etc.
I feel bad for her. I complain about things, but this whole situation is also rubbish for everyone else in different ways. She misses going out to the shops, which was her main source of joy before. Hopefully things will be better for us all soon.
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