There are nights - nights after nights after nights - where, frankly, dinnertime is not so much fun.

Not for us, with endless rounds of please use your knife and fork and no singing at the table and please don't interrupt and stop eating like a pig and I'm talking to papa, just wait a minute and stop mucking around and well go get a cloth and wipe it up and inside voices and eat what you want but stop whingeing about what you don't like and hurry up and eat, it's getting late and no there's no dessert if you don't finish and on and on it goes.

Not for you, with all the above and then also that's one... that's two... and on the bad nights that's three, go sit on the stairs and on the worst that's three, dinner's over, straight to bed.

But then there are nights like tonight, where it's just lovely. Where we have a conversation, an interesting one, between all of us - all listening, all contributing, no loud random interjections or demands, no singing on top of someone's talking. And dinner is eaten with cutlery, by everyone, without half of it ending on the floor. Where there are no threats, and every request is polite and thanked.

Nights where I wish you two would always be like this... not just this polite and pleasant, but quite literally this same age, with this same curiosity, same innocence, same generous cuddles, same unquestioned desire to be with us. Forever.

Snapshots, inside & out

So you may have noticed, it's been a bit chilly here lately. As in, below zero chilly, even during the day. Unusually far below zero, with a nice wind chill factor for good measure. (Those horizontal streaks in this photo? They're blowing snow.) I am pretty much cold all the time. And reeeaaallly enjoying having to now go outside in order to get to work.

Luckily, the other household members are tougher than me. 

We have pretty new cushion covers.

And I have a lovely sister-in-law.

An instance of when a Swedish au pair is better than an Aussie mum

The Swedish au pair takes the kids outside to play even when it's -12.

First day of work

Outside temperature: -8 degrees C
My temperature: 38 degrees C

Thank goodness for Panadol, long underwear, and fortifying cups of tea.

Pregnant adj.
1.Carrying developing offspring within the body.
4. Having a profusion of ideas.

For a while I was both.

Fuck I thought, as the first suspicion grew. Fuck fuck fuckety fuck when the pee stick instantly showed two bright pink lines. Seriously, was the universe playing some gigantic joke?

Joke #1: Not long before, in a conversation about third children with friends, I had said I was done, and for the first time ever, I meant it.

Universe: Ho ho, a definitive statement.

Joke #2: I had honestly thought there was no chance of this. No chance, because we weren't methodically trying to conceive, like we had to for Téo, Lukan and the embryo in between that didn't make it. No chance, because of my age.

Universe: Tee hee, by someone who seems to have forgotten her sex education!

Joke #3: In the last six months or so, we've passed on pretty much all our baby stuff.

Universe: Chortle, chortle, it just gets better.

Joke #4: In our end-of-year letter, I made a quip about our new au pair that could have been interpreted to mean we were having a baby.

Universe: Chuckle, chuckle, let's see her field questions about 5th household members while actually pregnant!

Joke #5: In February, I am stepping in as a maternity replacement for 7 months for one of my best clients.

Universe: Ha ha ha, a maternity replacement who, ha ha ha, is pregnant! Won't the client be thrilled!

Yeah.

But then, even knowing the hurdles to cross before a baby was in our arms, as the days and then weeks passed and physical manifestations of pregnancy became apparent, I couldn't help but skip ahead. To practical issues: cars, bedrooms. The speed of the birth. To unimportant, but irresistible, imaginings: hair colour, gender. Names.

All that ended at the first doctor's appointment. No heartbeat. A streak of tissue the size of a 5-week embryo, instead of a 9-week fetus with arms and legs and a head.

It still seems like a cosmic joke, only crueler now.

Cruel joke #1: The embryo died pretty much at the same time I discovered I was pregnant.

Cruel joke #2: I was fine, truly fine, with only having two kids. Now I'm back to wondering.

Cruel joke #3: The extra doctor's appointments and hospital visits, on top of all the other appointments I'd already scheduled to get out of the way before I start my new full-time job, and on top of the several other projects I need to finish for other clients before then.

Cruel joke #4: Even the term for this kind of miscarriage, "missed abortion", which seems to imply that I missed something, that I should have known this past month that the beginnings of our baby had died, instead of seeing every bloodless day as a sign of hope.

So. Here I am now, no longer pregnant in any sense, blindsided by post-D&C hormones, mourning the idea of a new baby, wishing this one was still alive, struggling to accept the end this miscarriage means to my reproductive years, an end that somehow seems more awfully final, more finally final, than simply believing I was too old.

Sad, in other words, and a bit weepy. OK, but sad and a bit weepy.

Smooth landing

At midnight local time, after a 14-hour flight in which you got little sleep, in a foreign city where you now have a 9-hour stopover, after an extremely long queue through passport control, when the taxi driver taking you to your hotel is a recent arrival with no idea of where he is, and your motion-sickness prone son is spewing his poor little guts into the median-strip vegetation after a few too many missed exits on various roundabouts, you begin to think it would have been better to have waited out the stopover at the airport.

But actually, this was not the case.

Despite too long getting to the hotel, despite only getting a couple of hours sleep once we finally arrived, and despite travelling alone with the kids on the second leg home with no further sleep, I have never arrived back from Australia feeling so good. So completely fine. So effortlessly able to jump straight back into life over here.

It's possible there were other contributing factors - the sky was high and blue instead of low and grey, the starting of our new au pair the next day meant there were appearances to keep up, and the absence of a husband meant those appearances were all up to me - but instead of the usual blech of exhaustion and surreality of no longer being in Sydney, in just a few short hours I had unpacked, done a load of washing, and gotten the kids into bed. Without any yelling, even. And then, when jet lag woke me at 5am, I got up and started work. No procrastination, no faffing about, just right back into it.

Methinks a hotel stopover is now mandatory.

First things first

Happy new year!