Hello

Hi, hello, hey. I realised I started posting on here without actually pausing to introduce myself, or to reintroduce myself if you've been following me under a different guise in the past. I used to blog under the handle @btwncandc, and at www.betweencloudandconrete.co.uk. It's a blog that I'd had since around 2008, but for one reason or another, I never got into regularly updating.

The big difference now, I guess, it that I'm a mum. And the transformation to becoming a parent has been the biggest change I've been through, one side effect of which is a newfound sense of contentment and confidence. I literally live my life now with zero f*cks given. It's a bit of a cliche, but when the most important thing in your life is a seventeen pound bundle of joy, everything else falls into perspective. What I wear doesn't matter. What I look like doesn't matter. Having the most groundbreaking, covetable blogger layout doesn't matter.

The last couple of times I've restarted blogging, I spent hours and hours worrying about getting everything looking perfect before I even started writing. I'd pay for a new theme, then spend way too much time tweaking and tinkering with the code, worrying about how it looked and how I was inadvertently coming across. Did this theme represent me? Did this theme mean I was more likely to get followers? Did this theme look like the blogs all the cool girls I was following were using? This time, I really don't care about any of those things. I only want a space that I can document my life now.

I know no-one is reading blogs anymore. I'm not even reading blogs. But I want to do this for me. All of the advice articles on how to start blogs talk about writing what you know, and writing for yourself. I guess I never really had much to say before that I thought was worth remembering. Being  a mum, however, you want so much to be able to remember every little detail. Every moment. Every smile that your little one gives you. I'm only four months into motherhood, and it saddens me to admit that the memories of what my newborn son felt like in my arms are already starting to fade. So I want to write things down.

Not just about Charlie, but about my life beforehand. Life B.C (before Charlie). I'd like to be able to look back at all the big milestones of my life in a place that gives the memories room to breathe, rather than stuffing them away in my camera roll or cramming them onto a dodgy disk drive.

I accidentally bought a gay poetry book once (...random I know). Unsurprisingly I couldn't relate to a lot of it, but one of the lines that stood out to me was "Writing something down keeps it alive". This will be a space to keep this version of me now, a thirty one year old mum, alive for my future self to look back on.

If you've read this far and just wanted the basics, here you go: my name is Kirstie, I live in the Midlands, I'm mum to Charlie who was born in November 2019. I work in Social Media Management. I'm into interiors, Netflix, coffee shops and candles, hence the name of the blog. I used to hoard them in their boxes, but now I'm planning to burn every single one. Like I said, zero f*cks.

Pregnancy Diaries: How We Found Out (And How Fajita Was Born)

We found out we were pregnant in February 2019. I already had a feeling I might be pregnant as my cycle was longer than normal, so on the Friday evening of 22^nd February, after he got home from work, I convinced Carl that we should take the test. While he pottered in the kitchen, I went upstairs to the bathroom to do the deed.

As soon as the moisture on the stick crept across the little window, I thought I’d seen the faintest of lines start to appear, but I didn’t want to jinx it, so replaced the cap and set the stick aside and sat and waited. And waited. Then before I took a proper look I just knew. Lo and behold, there it was; a definite solid line which meant it was positive. I was pregnant. I called downstairs to Carl, then he came to meet me at the foot of the stairs, where I stood holding the test behind my back. “I’m pregnant!” I told him, although I think he already knew as soon as he’d seen the beaming smile on my face. After lots of disbelieving hugs and kisses, I decided I wanted to take a proper test to tell me how far along I was, so we went off to Tesco to buy another one.

While we were walking around with the pregnancy test in our basket, still in the cumbersome security packaging and not very well hidden by the ingredients for dinner, we joked about people recognizing us, so it was just typical that we were collared by someone Carl knew from his rugby club who stood and chatted to us for what felt like a lifetime! I can remember Carl subtly trying to hide the basket out of view, but his friend even took a good look in the basket and commented on what “healthy ingredients” we were buying, so he definitely spotted the test! Talk about awkward.

The second test I took that evening confirmed I was 2-3 weeks pregnant, which was reassuring, but we still didn’t want to get too excited. It was the first time I had ever been pregnant and after hearing so many stories of people losing their babies, we both didn’t want to get our hopes up that this would really be it, only for it to go away again. Although thinking back, I’m sure it would have been utterly devastating no matter how much I’d managed to suppress my nervous excitement.

I can remember sitting eating our dinner feeling completely amazed that it had worked; we had conceived. Our parts worked. With a mixture of relief and incredulity, we sat speculating about the sex of the baby and as we were eating Fajitas, decided that would be the nickname for the little bean growing inside of me. The little bean that would one day become Charlie.