If I’ve been a bit quiet of late (though really, with Amy solely holding the fort with some cracker posts – you’ve got a pretty good reason not to have noticed), it’s not because I haven’t been carrying my weight (all 42 weeks of it) – it’s because that weight was finally converted to baby on the Nineteenth of March, 2014.

Introducing, August Gray Kennon. We think he’s a bit scrummy.

In addition to a long labour, birth plan that went out the window and a longer stay in hospital than anticipated, well, you know, I have a newborn. It’s pretty much all consuming, and he has taken my time and breath away faster than you can say grazed nipple.

So I’ll be back in the swing of things with a post tomorrow, and since Amy has her own impending baby to birth, you might see a bit more of me when she disappears into the newborn haze.

I’ll leave you with the moment Hazel met August (this was taken just before August started crying and Hazel took the hands-off “I didn’t do it!” approach to baby-holding)

So here’s a thing that’s become a total THING. Hating on friends with kids. Especially friends who post things about their kids on Facebook. And I’m here today to tell you it’s weird, guys. Hating on people who have kids is weird.

Look, I remember 2007 like it was yesterday. I remember when Facebook was all travel photos and hilarious status updates that had to start with ‘is’. I remember being nervous about being tagged in photos from Friday night because I could barely remember Friday night. I remember being relieved to discover that although I didn’t remember it, I still looked (mostly) pretty hot. I remember giving myself the goal of posting one funny thing about cats every day. I remember. Oh yeah, I remember.

Then 7 years passed by, and a bunch of us did a few big ‘life’ things. Like getting married and having babies. And because those things were suddenly a lot bigger parts of our lives than Friday nights on the piss and LOLCATS (though for me personally, nothing will ever be bigger than LOLCATS. Nothing, you hear?) our posts started to evolve as well. We started posting about the things that were going on in our actual lives rather than, oh I don’t know, lying about going out on a Friday night when we weren’t. Or posting travel photos of places where we weren’t. Or disappearing off Facebook altogether in shame.

And the response to our change of social media direction? Haters. You may be shocked to hear that there are entire blogs dedicated to complaining about parents talking about their kids on Facebook. Entire blogs!

Haters, I’m not going to psychoanalyse what your problem is (well, I already have but I won’t present my findings in a public space), but if you’re offended/annoyed/disinterested by stuff that your “friends with kids” post on social media, I am going to give you just a dash of parental advice: you don’t have to look at it. Just like we don’t have to look at your lame selfies.

How you go about it is this: in your Newsfeed, identify a post containing a simply disgusting child who has the audacity to be starting kinder today. Hover over it and you should see a little downwards arrow on the right. Click on it and you’ll see the “I don’t want to see this” option. You can then opt to completely unfollow (without unfriending) a person who notoriously posts stuff about their abhorrent child.

How you don’t go about it is this: dedicate an entire blog to complaining about the thing you’re so offended by. It seems to me that it will actually make you far more involved in the topic that you apparently don’t like. As in, it would become your JOB to write about the thing you HATE. Where’s the logic? I ask you, where’s the logic?

These ‘friends with kids’ were presumably your ‘friends’ first and foremost. It’s not like total strangers are knocking on your door and parading their children in front of you and demanding you ‘like’ them. Why be so offended by a cute/funny/gross/uninteresting photo of a kid you know? Why be annoyed to hear that they just took their first steps? If you feel that there’s too much talk about them going on, seriously, just unfollow and stop being a jerk.

Haters, I’m sure you’d rather peruse your own profile pictures than look at photos of someone’s kid. And that’s cool. But the bottom line is this: Facebook was invented for people to connect with each other in their own unique way and talk about the things going on their actual lives. It wasn’t invented for YOU and only YOU to talk about and connect with YOURSELF and the people who think exactly the same way as YOU, are doing the same activities as YOU and are at exactly the same life-stage as YOU.

If we were friends on Facebook, I would unfollow you without ceremony. I wouldn’t start a blog about self-righteous and immature jerks, though. I’ll take this opportunity to rant about it, but an entire blog seems a little overboard. And lame. And frankly, I’m a parent now so I don’t have the time.

1. This is just one of series of images that my husband took of my foot in which he had made an indentation with an inanimate object. In this instance, his thumb. Oh, the humanity!

Now, it wouldn’t be right to say that I’m renowned for having a well-turned ankle and a good set of calves – but I will say that I have always been happy with the shape, size and general look of anything below the knees. And for most of my pregnancy, indeed really all the way up to about 38 weeks, I thought I’d escaped the curse of the fluid retention.

Clearly, I was wrong.

So here we are, at 41 weeks with the legs resembling the trunk of a native tree and fingers the size of soy-sages.

And before anyone has a heart-attack about potential pre-eclampsia – I don’t have it. Blood pressure etc all normal – just storing up fluid like the Hoover Dam.

FFS

2. How many towels does it take to soak up the overflow from a bath you left running after dozing off because that new book you purchased was SO BORING …. oh, about this many.

FFS!