Baby brain

I’ve been blogging over at The Engineer’s Wife for a couple of years now.  You wouldn’t guess it had been that long, based on the number of posts.  But I can promise you that it has.  Although the posting has been sporadic, I have really enjoyed having somewhere to document my experience as an expat in Brunei.  I have also met some wonderful people as a direct result of the blog.

Part of the reason that the blog has been so slow is that for the last year I have been really caught up in pregnancy and baby raising.  And for six months before that, I was pretty baby focussed as we went through the physically and emotionally draining process of fertility treatment.  In fact, not having and then having a baby have pretty much dominated my Brunei experience.  But I was adamant that The Engineer’s Wife was not going to become a baby/mum blog.  So rather than find other things to talk about, I just didn’t write.

Now I am coming out of the fog of newborn babyness and coming into a rhythm with this at home parenting thing.  And I have recently found myself getting a bit down in the dumps.  After a bit of soul searching, and conversations with some very wise women, I have realised that I am bored.  Our baby is wonderful and fascinating, but that doesn’t change the fact that parenting a small child is a fairly relentless process.  I would love to say that I can watch her all day and just be amazed at how she is learning and growing.  But the fact is, I can’t.  I am absolutely amazed at how she is learning and growing.  But I also need to focus on my own  learning and growing.

So I am now resolving to make better use of nap times.  I have to keep in mind that nap times still often look like this:

But even with a baby strapped to my chest, there are so many better things I can do than skulk around Facebook and Tumblr.  I need some creativity and somewhere to calm and process my overactive brain.  Writing has always been something that has helped me, so as part of this nap time overhaul I am going to get back into writing my novel, and I am also creating a space where I can talk about motherhood without taking over my existing blog.  I also hope (quite possibly in vain) that by getting the motherhood stuff out, I might find a little bit more to say about expat life.

And thus The Engineer’s Baby is born… I have no idea how this nap time experiment will go, but I’m excited to find out. I think this blog will be a useful part of it, and I hope that maybe it will even be a bit interesting for others to read.  Let’s see how it goes!