The Wolfenden Report: 2015: Reflections and the year ahead

Well, what a difference a year makes. Looking back at my 2014 blogpost, I find it hard to believe I packed so much in while spending most of the year pregnant.

2015 was very different. It started off with me being almost two weeks overdue, followed by an emergency caesarean, my baby being treated for neonatal meningitis and me struggling to walk - in a hospital miles away from home for twelve days. It was a frightening, stressful and lonely experience.

F had dreadful reflux for seven months which meant no naps in the day at all and barely anything at night for either of us. We now generally average about three hours a night sleep, sometimes four, which is a vast improvement on how it used to be. There was a whole week in July where I got six hours every night - bliss!

I returned to work full time when he was almost seven months old and my husband now looks after him during the day, alongside his own evening & weekend job. Returning to work has been like starting a brand new job again, but with the expectation that you can easily pick up where you left off - alongside trying to find rooms suitable to express in and meeting tight deadlines fuelled only by willpower and chocolate.

In addition, I was trying to remember how to drive again (I'd barely had chance to practise since passing), as well as trying to remember everyone's names which suddenly seemed to have escaped me.

Needless to say, something had to give and I crashed my car, although luckily the only real injury was to my bank balance.

I had very few goals last year and they mainly consisted of submitting my Chartership Revalidation for 2014-15 and continuing with yoga. I completed the first and doing the latter really helped save my sanity. I intend to continue as much as I can with this, even if it's just once a week.

There will be no more volunteering to be on committees for a while - I've spent the last five years on them for various professional organisations and I no longer have that much time to give. The same applies to long conferences - it will be day length and commutable for a little while longer. Professional development and involvement will increasingly have to take place from a PC, a couch or both!

This year, I've applied to start the process to gain FHEA accreditation and I'm looking forward to speaking to new Library and Information Studies students at UCL in March as part of their Management module. I'm still interested in the coaching and mentoring I've mentioned in previous posts but this will have to wait a little longer until I have more capacity. In the meantime, I'm anticipating introducing my little one to lots more stories - he's already an avid user of our local library and received LOTS of books for Christmas.