Barren Mare

Scrum

If there's a credit crunch on, nobody told the shoppers at my local Marks and Spencer. Last week, I had a rare afternoon off (an unusual confluence of my office shutting down to move everyone to new quarters, Botany at nursery and my having the right fare for the bus in my pocket). So I ventured up to town for a bit of unencumbered shopping.

Aside from needing to do a bit of a pre-Christmas reccie, I was in desperate need of a new winter coat. My old one was in the military style that was all the rage a couple years ago, quite neat fitting with many buttons across the front. Unfortunately, despite being well back into my pre-pregnancy shape in most respects, my bust remains slightly larger (and lopsided), resulting in a certain amount of strain across the front of the old coat. All the buttons, which were never attached very well in the first place started popping off at various intervals. It was most disconcerting. I'd be toting Botany, lunch box, work bag and Camel in my arms across the car park and all of a sudden I'd hear this *PINGING* noise, looking down to see a small bronze metal object rolling wildly the gutter. I managed to rescue most of the errant buttons, but one or two eventually got away, and I became tired of sewing the little fuckers back on night after night. In any event, the coat is unquestionably a little worse for wear in other respects, beyond the aid of a good dry cleaning. Time for a new one.

This being a chilly country, I do have several other winter coat type garments, but one is my Very Best Coat reserved for Very Good Occasions Only.  Another is this strange green thing I bought in a vintage clothing sore in Amsterdam; I love it as it's very warm but it's a little on the groovy side for work. I also have this pink tweedy item with excellent warm lining but I feel quite matronly in it, and there is the puffa style bomber jacket with the furry hood, far too big and only to be worn for sporty type outings.

I'd been looking for months, unsuccessfully, for a very plain, warm, single breasted, three-quarters length or long coat in some basic colour like black, navy or gray. No frills, no wacky buttons, no epaulettes or furbelows. It was impossible. Clearly, this is the year where everything must be double-breasted, with lots of odd accoutrements. I hate double breasted things, and I look silly when I attempt that style. Anyway, finally one evening, on a rare occasion of watching a bit of TV, I saw the coat advertised. The model was twirling around in the snow, and there was lots of laughing gaily and champagne flowing and everybody seeming to have a thoroughly enjoyable time.  I sat bolt upright- that was the coat for me!

Except of course it's a limited collection type job and not available to order readily; regardless, I knew it had to be tried on. So I made M&S my first port of call. Except, having taken the bus to the far end of the high street, I discovered that the shop had moved and I had no idea where it had gone to. Cue trudging, disgruntled, past the armies of shoppers, all wielding oversized bags stuffed full of retail therapy. Jeez, I thought as I finally found the store, elbowing my way in the front door. Isn't there meant to be a recession on? Why are folk buying so much crap? 

Inside, it was like a battlefield. I finally located the lovely coat (hurrah!) and then discovered there was none left in my size (boo!). I looked at every other coat in the place, jostling for position to try to secure a spot in front of the mirror so I could just slip it on without having to go all the way to the flipping changing rooms. Too many ghastly furbelows later, I was stumped. I wistfully circled back to the desired coat, and decided to very carefully check all the size labels on the rack. And lo! There was my size, hanging on a size 18 hangar. I tried it on. It's the tiniest bit tight across my lopsided bosom, but otherwise perfect. Perfect for work, or for twirling in the snow, laughing gaily.

Having made my purchase, I ventured down to the food hall to grab something for Botany (also know as She Who Will Eat Nothing). Oooh, look the Christmas shop. Madness. Aside from the scrum of shoppers snapping up armfuls of... I don't know even know what all- tinsel, fairy lights, cards, bottles of bubbly, Santa candles, poinsetta flowers and tiny reindeer statuettes, I got sucked into the dreaded 3-for-2 deal on kids' toys. You know, buy 3 things and get the cheapest one free. I really only wanted the one thing, which was something I had actually been trying to find for awhile, but somehow, the compulsion to have the puzzle and the "free" book as well was overwhelming.  I walked out of the store, laden with crap, joining the bag-wielding hoards and feeling slightly snookered. 

In other news, Botany's endless cold is now accompanied by a rather nasty wet cough. I took her to the doctor today, and he pronounced that her chest sounded fine but in view of some pinkness in her ear canals, prescribed some antibiotics for "just in case" and which I am meant to give her if things don't improve. Since I don't have an implement at home for peering in her ears, I am not quite sure how I am meant to gauge improvement. One indicator might be a cessation of the clingy moaniness (with optional whine and wail). She wants to be held and carried around almost all day, with her hand down the front of my shirt twiddling ferociously on my nipple, or indeed actually nursing for extended spells. I am trying to be patient, but the all day nipple twiddling fest, together with the low grade whinge, is just that little bit tiresome and by five pm, I am ready to stick my head in the blender.

Oh, and before I forget- Eve commented on my last post about Baby P. that it would be an idea for anyone moved by the story to make a contribution to charity, for example to Barnados or the NSPCC. That's an excellent thought, and one I intend to follow through on. Normally I put 10% of any ad revenue from this site per month toward charitable causes; this month I'll donate any money earned over and above the site hosting fees. Thanks, as always, for your support.

The fall of the sparrow

It is snot central around here. Botany has had one streaming cold after another, complete with the nastiest goo emitting from her nose. When I first thought about having kids, I admit that one of the things that really, really put me off was the thought of how some children seem to have this permanently snotty beak. Why, I used to muse, catching sight of some crusty urchin on the bus, can't the mother keep the face of their offspring clean? Ah, the irony. I'm forever dabbing at Botany's nose with a wipe or a tissue and five minutes later, she is covered anew in a fresh coating of oobleck. 

On another, much grimmer note- like much of the nation, I am following the story of Baby P with a mixture of horror, disgust and sadness. For those of you not familiar with the case, I warn you- it's disturbing stuff. A 17 month old baby was abused to death by his mother, her boyfriend and a lodger. What makes it all the more horrendous is that despite repeated opportunities for the authorities to intervene (or even to notice that something was seriously wrong), nothing appears to have been done to prevent it from happening. 

I've chosen a link to a news article without the graphic illustrations of Baby P's injuries; the full catalogue of abuse is readily available if you want to see it- but I think it's enough to say- the harm inflicted on this poor wee boy was dreadful. And the particular fact that the baby was seen by a doctor in the hospital two days before his death with eight broken ribs and a broken back, and that the doctor failed to even carry out a proper examination- well, it wrenches my heart and makes me so unspeakably sad.

The killers are in jail, and are likely to be for a long time. Apparently, they are not even particularly sorry about any of it. Meanwhile, the media is carrying out an intensive dissection of what went wrong and when it all happened and who was responsible and what is to be done about it. What I, like many people, are thinking is- will it do any good? For all the handwringing and fingerpointing going on, can things ever really change? People are abusing their children, and often getting away with it. What's the solution? What the fuck is wrong that the systems in place to protect the young and vulnerable are failing so badly that a child ends up dying in such horrific circumstances? Or have things always essentially been like this, and there are always going to be cases where we shake our heads in disgust and mourn more than a little for a baby we never knew? Either way, there is something badly, badly wrong. 

I don't know. I don't have any answers. I'm sure those at the coalface of working with difficult cases would say that it's not that easy. I'm sure it must be hard, in practice, to walk the careful line between assessing someone as a crappy, inadequate parent (but yet determining that nobody is likely to end up dead or maimed for life) to making the actual call that the situation is so bad that the child has to be removed, immediately, into care.  But logic and reason would suggest that if nothing else, repeated incidents of trips to the hospital with an child who was exhibiting increasingly severe injuries and trauma should have made a difference. It didn't- and that's what is so hard to understand, to comprehend.

Poor baby P. It makes me want to hug Botany that little bit tighter, to make sure as best I can that nothing bad ever happens to her, despite knowing we live in a world which often seems full of such cruel madness, such inexplicable tragedy. 

Marathon

I've been following a couple of blogs doing NaBloPoMo, with a certain wistful longing. There's something quite appealing to me about taking on the endevour of writing even a little something every day. Unfortunately for me at the moment, (if I want to get to bed before midnight), it sometimes comes down to a choice of: do I take a shower and actually make something for my dinner other than cornflakes, or do I blog?  Not exactly conducive to daily posting. Let's face it, I'm barely making once a week.

With Botany on the move, the flat is...well...perma-chaos. There are toys, clothes and random items, like a compass and a calculator strewn from stem to stern. At present, she likes to limber up in the morning by toddling into the living room and removing all the books and DVDs from the lower shelves. As I chase her around trying to get her to stand still for a second while I wrestle her into a nappy, she embarks on opening up the wardrobe and flinging her clothes everywhere. Later, for kicks, we will mutually disembowel the toy chest or "her" cupboard in the kitchen.

 I seem to spend the whole day returning items to their proper place. I know it's probably only going to get worse and I should probably resign myself to living in a heap. But the disorder is stressful for me, not to mention it actually seems slightly hazardous to have stuff lying everywhere, since Botany has not quite grasped the notion of walking around items in her path but persists in trying to plow through (and trip over) the aforesaid random stuff. 

I knew also that things would be much harder once my parents left; when first they departed, I seemed to be carried on a wave of insane adrenelin, so determined was I not to let the standards slip. There must be porridge in the pantry at all times! We must never run out of loo roll! Let us not be without fresh milk and copious quantities of extra butter. And there must be enough of a nappy stockpile to survive the longest of sieges!  Of course, the reality is that my folks had nothing better to do with their time besides do odd jobs around my flat (my dad) and make daily runs to the supermarket for whatever item was in demand (my mother). With me on my own, I can't keep up and have had to accept that in the event of needing a barricade against the zombie invasion, there will be less than optimal stashes of tinned tomato.   

There are days just now where I stagger out of bed in the morning to start the daily treadmill- the breakfast ballet, the nappy wars, the naptime vigil, the endless repetition of certain games and stories, coaxing lunch down her gob, battling over coat on/shoes on/hat on, the dinner time scramble- and I think to myself, in a small self-pitying whimpering tone: I can't. I just can't do it. I'm so tired and I haven't had a break in weeks from the childcare/work routine grind. I can't face the high pitched squealing when I strap my daughter's wriggling, resistant body into her car seat. I can't deal with trying to put on my underwear and a pair of clean trousers suitable for work with Botany clinging on to my leg. I now hate some of the programmes on the children's TV channel with a vehement loathing, forced as I am to put on the box for 30 seconds of distraction long enough to sprint to the bathroom. And I can't stand the horrid monotonous whine that Botany's been emitting lately, rising and falling like a deranged, moaning siren until I want to scream and pound my overheated head against a wall. 

When the day finally ends, and I finally sit, nursing her to sleep in darkness, I feel sometimes guilty for any bouts of impatience or resentment during the day. My sweet baby, my much longed for daughter- how could I not love every moment? It's a lesson I'm learning over and over- that the joy of parenthood is necessarily tempered with a certain amount of mourning of the loss of the self, of time to do as I please, of the right to think of only of me. And I remember, as I must, that I really never intended doing it all on my own. There were meant to be two of us picking up the slack, keeping the homefires burning, maintaining some semblence of order. Of course it's that much harder that it's just me.

On a closing positive note, we do seem to be working to a 5.30 am wake up call now. It's not perfect, but I'll take it. As a commenter helpfully pointed out, I do know of the Weissbluth mantra; namely sleep begets sleep. However, the trick of an early bedtime doesn't seem to work in Botany's case. I've tried it. I tried it for months- she used to routinely go down at 6.30 pm. All it seemed to do was result in a wake up approximately ten hours later from whenever it was that she went to sleep. So in that respect, I think I'm an advocate of the Ferber approach- that is, that the kid can realistically only sleep so much at a stretch and the average is actually in the region of ten hours. A 7.30 pm bedtime appears to be giving Botany just that wee bit longer in bed in the morning and for me, it's a crucial extra half hour I really need to feel less than insane when I start the day. 

There are still moments where I lie there in the dark dawn thinking: I can't. I just can't. But of course, I must and I do and I will. Onwards.

Nibble nibble (and bite nails)

Here follows a bunch of nibbly bits and pieces, a grab bag of bloggage- stuff I've been meaning to mention but haven't gotten around to (or which doesn't necessarily merit its own bespoke post just now).

O fair Sleep, why do you spurn me?

We changed our clocks back last week. At the same time, Botany picked that particular weekend to make a giant developmental leap in walking. From tottering precariously to zooming up and down the hallway literally in the space of about two days. It sort of blew my mind. I looked up from the stack of alphabet blocks I was happily arranging into swear words (kidding-of course it's always all purity and light around here) and saw Botany up on her hind legs, as my dad would put it- disappearing into her room. Holy fucking crap, I spelt, my kid just walked the length of the flat on her own.

And she's not stopped since. 

Of course, the result of all this time change/great leap forward has been sleep mayhem. She went from regularly waking up at 5am to 3am. To be expected, I thought and decided to go with the flow for a few days until she got turned around. Eventually we clawed our way back to 4am and then got stuck.

I then had the completely insane notion that this might be the time to try to break her of the old "wake up so I can get boob and sleep with mummy in bed" habit. I won't even go into it, it was so pointless and dumb. Essentially, instead of sleeping in the bed with me, nursing, we ended up sleeping in a chair, nursing or having naps all over the map in terms of schedule. Plus it made me so tired I wanted to die. I surrendered after three days and normal sleep service (such as it is) has been resumed. Since an early bedtime almost virtually guarantees a very early wake up, I have made the move of pushing bed time back to 7.30pm to see if it makes any difference. Thus far, not really.

Communal Spoons

I'm too lazy to trawl back to doublecheck but I think it was Laura asking me how I managed to get Botany to eat with a spoon (by the way, if you've never checked out Laura's blog, I urge you to do so- some damn fine writing.) Thing is, I didn't do anything apart from hand the spoon to Botany to her when she tried to grab it and let her mush into whatever it was in front of her. I guess you could say I've taken a relatively relaxed attitude to table manners and food thus far. I didn't really do the whole puree route but instead opted for what I would call "BabyLed Weaning Lite". Meaning that I sometimes did a lot more helping than the approach traditionally allows but I also let Botany have a go at stuffing food in her mouth in whatever way she could devise to cram it in. It seems she just sort of figured out the spoon thing on her own. Clever monkey. That's not to say she doesn't still go for the finger food approach when she's so minded. And the area around the highchair is perpetually classified as a biohazard area. 

Oh, and when she's done shoveling it in, she also likes to feed me. Which would be fun if we did have more of our meals together. We manage to sit down together for the better part of breakfast and the odd bit of lunch, but not dinner. It's just a lot less frantic for me if I can make her something which I know she will eat (even if it's just warm cereal) than if I try to prepare a proper supper for us both which we can then eat together. Some mealtimes I seem to spend the whole thing scurrying around shoving various portions in front of her so she has something to munch on while I get the rest ready. I'm still in the process of working out the whole cooking thing and it stresses me out less if I can take the time to read the instruction. For example, two cloves of garlic, not seven. Yum. 

Election suspense

My duly completed absentee ballot went home with my parents in the sealed envelope in early October and was posted off when they landed. I've never quite gotten over the horror I experienced in 2000 when I realised that, like an eejit, I hadn't sent off the form in time and just how close the count was in Florida (where I am registered to vote). If ever there was a lesson, like a steel spike through the head, in teaching that your voice can matter, that was it for me. Never again will I be so lax in exercising my right to vote in a presidential election, a privilege I hold dear despite living abroad all these years. The big question is now do I stay up late to watch the results or do I get up in the early hours to check? Bearing in mind I am up early anyway (see above).  Either way, the suspense is killing me.  

Good news

Speaking of suspense, I am going to leave you in it. Tempting as it is to spill the beans now, I think I'm going to wait just awhile longer to share. Hell, if it keeps Ms Prufrock from jumping the reader ship, I might just hold off indefinitely. But trust me, I'm pretty sure you'll like it. It's really very good indeed.