Thursday, 22 November 2012

A bittersweet day

I‘ve finally got my baby back.  For the past two weeks we’ve had illness, passport drama and nursery closures causing the two of us to be thrown off balance.  Alby, bless him, has kept smiling throughout but it has taken effort to get there.  Real effort.  Today however, I was rewarded with laughter, giggles, chatter and cuddles without having to do a thing.  

The saying goes “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone” well for the past two weeks I’d forgotten that my son was a naturally happy boy.  I had forgotten to take the time to step back and look at the big picture having lost myself in hundreds of little bits here, there and everywhere.  Well my house is clean, my baby is smiling and I’ve got a bulldog at my feet.  I know, I’m a show off.

The day hasn’t just been smiles and sunshine.  To accompany the gale force winds and torrential rain we’ve had this evening it appears that I have lost my favourite bit of film footage of Alby as a baby.  The film was taken when Alby was 5 days old, lying on Mark’s legs whilst being subjected to “who’s going to get a kiss?  Alby gets a kiss”.  The footage was taken the day before Mark went to Kenya for a six week training exercise.  It’s not a happy film, in fact I find it very emotional.  But it is intimate and gave a window to those surreal first days with Alby; days as parents. 

I think it was accidentally deleted when I was trying to free some space on the memory stick.  I don’t know. What I do know is that it isn’t on the camera or anywhere on the computer and sadly, unlike computers, camcorders don’t hold a nice little trashcan from which you can rescue your mistakes. 

Can you grieve for a memory?  I don’t know.  I can vividly recollect it, in fact I think it’s imprinted on my brain but I’m still gutted that tonight, as I organise the footage we have so far I’m gutted that it isn’t included in the collection.

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