Oh, it’s a jolly holiday!

Well, it’s not really a holiday, but maternity leave does give you a few more hours in the day to pursue your own ends than traversing from home to office and back between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm..!

My first ‘official’ day of leave was yesterday, and it was a very strange feeling. I talked briefly to Peter about it, and likened it to exams – you know, you’ve done the course, attended the lectures, had a structure to your day for as long as you can remember, and all of a sudden it stops. Dead. The time is your time. As with exams, there’s that anticipation of something big and significant about to happen. The only difference between birth and exams is you don’t know when it’s going to happen..

There is another story to this picture of Mary. We had our first antenatal class last week (our second tomorrow, though it’s only for the mums-to-be..) and the lady running our class apparently thinks of this sequence from the Mary Poppins movie when she thinks about the ‘show’ that appears prior to or just at the start of labour. We all laughed, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ll be singing, ‘It’s a jolly holiday!’ when in the throes of active labour..! ;o)

But if I’m not singing, it doesn’t mean you can’t…