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!