Hi all
Nae - so sorry to hear you're still having problems with your mum. I haven't been over to read the latest. I was really hoping the new baby would make her grow up a little. The SIL stuff sounds like an added pain. Best to just ignore it, let her live her life however she wants, as long as it doesn't impact too much on you.
Emma - welcome back. I hope your dog is ok. Poppy's also started rolling, which is causing her endless frustration cos she doesn't know what to do once she gets onto her front.
Heather - how's your bfing going? What a terrible trade off - a full night's sleep gets you a blocked duct. Where do you lodge a complaint about that?
Tecopa - thanks for your advice on the dog. I love thinking of you doing your cooking shows for Elliot. I don't do much cooking here. (No point when DP loves cooking, I don't really know how to get things done with only two gas rings and bundles of weeds and eating out costs less than $1).


As for me -- yesterday, the whole returning to Vietnam thing got on top of me. DP told me as he was walking out the door that he'd bought a dining table (without consultation) that was being delivered in an hour. Now, Poppy's morning routine and my general exhaustion means we don't really get going til 9.30. So I had to jump up and get dressed and wait for the table. But it didn't arrive at 9. Instead, halfway through Poppy's 9am feed, a guy comes to install the curtains the landlord promised. This creates all kinds of new dramas as he tries to work out how to get up to the curtain rod, which is 3 meters in the air. He finally works out that the only way he can hang the curtains is to drag the small computer table to the window, put the cheap and nasty folding stood on top of it and climb up. So he's wobbling up there in the air, the baby is crying because her feed is being interrupted and I'm nearly in tears because it's the ugliest curtain I've ever seen - a cheap nylon diarrhoea-yellow number that clashes with everything in the room.
Then the table arrives. It has a glass top, attached to a cheap imitation wrought iron bottom with very obvious suction cups. The chairs, also made out the cheap black pipe stuff, have a nasty velveteen cover on the bottom with brown-on-brown squares, which doesn't actually match the velveteen cover on the backs of the chairs, which are yellow-on-beige ovals. The yellow matches the diarrhoea curtains upstairs but clashes with the pink, black and white tiles on the kitchen floor.
All this on top of the five mosquito bites on Poppy's face, the result of DP putting the baby to bed while I went to the farewell dinner for one of my closest friends. And on top of months of living with my parents, three-and-a-half weeks of being crammed into his brother's flat, moving into a filthy mosquito-infested house and feeling stranded, isolated and completely useless. And I was supposed to go across town to pick up some shelves and meet someone for lunch and the deliveries made me so late I couldn't go at all - goodbye lunch with interesting new friend and free shelves.
So I had a big old complain to DP, who came home and cooked lunch and apologized for the whole world being against me. He also agreed that the dining set was too big and so it would have to go.
Today I feel better, Poppy's mosquito bites are less angry-looking and the mosquito problem is just about resolved so I could sit in the kitchen (ignoring the horror of the clashing colours and patterns) and have breakfast.
I didn't get the job in Singapore. They told me they made an internal appointment but that there was another vacancy arising soon that they'd like me to consider. But DP now says he wants to stay in Vietnam for another six months because he's getting a promotion and the new job title will look better on his CV.
Gee, maybe I should take up residence in the boo hoo room!
In the midst of all this Poppy has started rolling over. The half-roll from a few weeks ago was a false alarm. Lying in the baby gym and kicking the ball is sooooo yesterday. Now all she wants to do is do a faceplant and make puddles of drool all over the place. She can't get all the way over, trapped by one arm that gets stuck underneath her. I put her on a cushion on the floor yesterday and while my back was turned for five minutes she wriggled around so her legs were on the floor and the rest of her was about to overbalance and fall off too. It was only a drop of a few centimeters but I'm so glad I caught her in time.

I'm off to mothers group again tomorrow. The first one was quite interesting. There were women from all over the world - Australia, Scotland, England and Denmark. The apartment was quite fancy and a lot of the ladies were talking about going to Phuket or Bali for Tet (Lunar New Year) but it wasn't the snootfest I was dreading. I don't know if I can ever host a group, though, with the current hideous colour scheme in our house. (We also have television sets, rice cookers and air conditioning units stacked up to the ceiling in the living room because BIL is cleaning out his warehouse for Tet.) I am thinking of writing a book about this craziness. But I don't know who'd read it!