Sunday, November 07, 2010

So very much to do, so little time

So yesterday was my birthday, and whilst being a grownup and you know that birthdays come and birthdays go, this one was a little more than the ordinary for me.

This is my last year of my thirties. Yesterday I thought back to when I was 29, and it was all so, so very long ago. So much has happened.  Ten years ago I was still a surgical trainee, unmarried (although I was dating MrT)  and had just bought my first house. I was planning to take a year off to study for my surgery exams, and I felt the world was my oyster, and in truth, it pretty much was. I was young, wealthy, and about 30kg lighter.

I would never have imagined my life now, and if I think back another ten years before that, to 1990, I would never have imagined my life as it was in 2000. So now, to try and imagine my life in 10 years time, I know that I will be wayyyy off the mark.

It is also sobering to think that  When I was 19, I wasn't exactly content with my life. I was always looking forward to the next thing, the next chapter, the future. At 29 I couldn't wait 'til the next year, to be taking that break from work, to be moving in to my new house. And now? At 39, I can't wait for the exam to be over, to start my Fellowship (the final year of my specialist training, in which we are treated as independant practitioners but still with the backup of being able to say "this is way past me, I need help"). But now I want life to slow down as well.

It is such a cliche to say that children grow up so fast. I am daily amazed by the things my boys do and say. I want to put them in a bubble and never have them change, but also am so excited by their changing little personas I want to see what will happen next. I know when I stare at Ollie it seems that I will never be able to forget what his chubby little face looks like, but at the same time I can't remember what paddo looked like at that age. There are moments of every day that you want to last forever- smiles, hugs, tickles, sleepy heads nestling into your shoulder- but you know are fleeting.

Patrick's imagination is just bubbling over at the moment. He invents stories, he makes up songs ("Planes and trains and monorails, trains and planes and monorails, they all go froo the gate but not the monorail" *shakes head*) and the cities and scenarios he enacts with his trainset are getting so complex as to be almost incomprehensible ("No! not over there, mummy, that's the hospital! Put it here, that's next to the supermarket"). He reports his dreams to me each morning, and they are just mind-boggling "I was in a frog's tummy, and it was funny. There were bees in there and then I came out and there was a rainbow, a small one"; "There was the moon and it was really big, but there was a puzzle piece missing from the moon and I had to find it".

Ollie is finding a new word every day, it seems. They are sometimes unexpected, but always funny. He has little conversations with me in bed each morning (he still gets a morning feed in bed with me unless I am working) where he sits on my chest or MrT's pillow and says "Awll ee awlll oo blipbillah, awlawlawl borble awlawlawlawl hoowah blobblob spider awlawl hooblob wollwoll mama" complete with gesticulations and seemingly appropriate facial expressions (generally dead serious, but sometimes a nod or shake of his head). I have absolutely no idea what he is saying, but he can keep it up for ten minutes or more, so long as I respond with something ("I see, is that the case? And what happened next?"). It obviously means something to him.

Patrick's drawings have become representational, too. His favourite themes are trains, cars and rainbows. He has also drawn me some recognisable cats, which are the very cuteness- I cut them out and have them stuck in my wallet to look at when I'm feeling low.

Oliver, however, is just scribbling. All over the walls. We have given up trying to stop him and just gone with simple harm minimisation by letting him only use pencils which wash off easily. But still, it's that stage of "I can make a mark. I can do something tangible to my world."

Which makes it all the much more precious.

I don't really know how to segue this; how to appropriately join this to my next statement, but I'm sure you'll get where I am going with it.

Recently there has been an influx of crap things happening at work. I know we daily deal with people's illnesses and lives, but every now and then there are a few things that just bring them home: the unexpected, tragic death of a toddler, the sudden death one of our ICU colleagues who was the partner of one of our anaesthetic colleagues, and finally one of my fellow trainees struck down with a serious illness with, in all reality, a really crap prognosis.

Basically, I have to stop. Waiting for the next. Waiting for it to all come good and realise that this is as good as it gets, this is life. After 39 years, I need to face the fact that whatever comes next may be worse than what happens now, or it might even be better, but that doesn't change the fact that I have to stop worrying about tomorrow and live for the now.

And if you have found a way to do that, please tell me, 'cos after 39 years, I still haven't a clue.
Now here are some pictures of how my life is pretty wonderful just the way it is...

 Harm minimisation
 plum tuckered out
 "It's a city, with a big, tall waterslide"
 One of the kangaroos that occasionally hops down our street*
 and its mum

 The dress I made for my neice who is just a few months older than Patrick. Which is handy because I can put it on him to see if it would fit her...

"I'm a beautiful butterfly!" (referring to the big bow on the back as his "wings")I was worried it wasn't very fashionable until MrT commented that it looked like something Sarah Blasko might wear. Thanks, T!
Taken an hour ago. They were watching a bee together, fascinated. (Note Patrick's purple sparkly sneakers)






*Not. The usual joke we play on foreigners, especiall from Northern America. Ok, yanks. Possums, cockatoos and other parrots, fruit bats would frequent most suburbs, but not roos.

1 Comments:

Blogger E. from Pot o' Gold said...

As I'm getting older I'm noticing all of the things I should be grateful for in my life too.

The cliche of "kids growing so fast" was evident in this post as you haven't shared photos in a while. How on Earth did they get that big? Ahhh....it's sad to see our babies grow, but fun to see what's around the corner in the next stage. I guess that's how it will always be.

10/11/10 22:07  

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