A lull

The word 'lull' usually conveys a negative sense of not much happening. As if a bad thing. In this case the lull is exactly what I was after. I remember writing shortly after Jake's palate operation that I wanted the next year to zip past. Not that I was wishing away my time, but that years only tend to go by in the blink of an eye when nothing much happens. To clarify, again, I'm not saying I don't want anything to happen, but I don't want to change jobs, move house, get married, have a baby or take a baby to hospital again for a long time. Just some normality.

I'm even done with holidays; Clare and I always live for our trips to Spain but, having been away with Jake 3 times this year and separately once each on our own, it's nice to be able to enjoy now without having to plan.

So the lull is welcome but the lull is also a lull in Jake's development; again this is not negative. I'm not saying Jake isn't developing but he's just being Jake right now. He's walking so we're not waiting for him to walk, he's eating everything he can so we're not waiting for that and he's sleeping through 9 nights out of 10 so we're not waiting for that either. It's just Clare, Jake and I and we're just living our family life.

There's some stuff at work which has stopped me making more blog posts and added some stress but other than that it's pretty much normal. We're looking forward to Christmas but only in the regular sense of needing a break and wondering how Jake will find his second festive season.

At some stage next year Jake will either start talking coherent words, or, of course he won't, but it's not until then that the cleft thing will be raised. I am what some would call pessimistic but what I would call a realist, so knowing that 50% of cleft affected kids require speech therapy I'd bet on Jake being in the needing-it group. But that's cool, he'll get the therapy and will be able to speak fine soon enough, there's no hurry.

So there you have it, a blog post about having nothing to blog about. Which is exactly what I wanted!