Sunday, July 29, 2007

How to eat a chocolate fish without using your hands.

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the world needs more lerts

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Forget Harry Potter – the major feats of spoiler avoidance in this household currently involve the Tour de France, which finishes in Paris this Sunday (Cat, you lucky bastard). Our boulevardier/ère days being long past, we must content ourselves with ITV's highlights packages of the previous day's stage, which we watch in the evenings while jiggling Maggie. Until then, the Grauniad, the Beeb and all other online news sources are off limits, and even listening to Morning Report has become fraught with peril, as anyone who has ever tried to fling themselves across a room at a radio while keeping their hands clamped over their ears and shouting la la la la la i'm not listening will attest. (Becca: Daddy, what's Mummy doing? Jack: La la la la la I'm not lis- sorry, what was that Becca?)

Further emotionally ambiguous moments in parenting: realising that your wee baby is no longer wee enough to be carried facing inwards in the front pack.

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about time:

Monday, July 23, 2007

never enough of it, and never at the right time of day. When I'm looking after both daughters there is none whatsoever so don't even think of sneaking off to check email;* when it's just me and Maggie things are easier becaue little babies sleep. But they sleep unpredictably, and when she does go down, I find myself in such a quandary as to what to do with the precious interval that I waste half of it faffing and dithering between the two top competing activities on the What I'll Do When I Actually Get A Few Minutes To Myself list. Said faffing and dithering exacerbated by the absolute uncertainty as to how long the interval will be: she's just gone to sleep in her bouncy chair &ndash can I maybe embark on cleaning out the fridge, or should I bet conservatively and just try to get ten minutes yoga in?

On the subject of yoga, am enjoying what the magazines call getting my body back, as though it had been in some sort of reproductive pawnbrokers for all these months, awaiting redemption. Now I've got it back, at least for the periods of the day when it's not plugged into Maggie, and so I am able to stomp and puff up and down the hills and ridges of Newlands, pushing Maggie in the three-wheeler. This makes her go to sleep for hours; on our return I park her in a corner and sneak off, once more confronted with the how much time, and what to do with it? conundrum. Last night she slept from 10 minutes into our 4 pm walk until after 10 when I got back from Rebs practice** (much frantic texting home in between, and sometimes during, numbers: has she fed? is she awake? still? have you checked she's breathing? you did? well ok then...). Despite my dire predictions that, well-fed and rested, she would then party all night, she fed hungrily while we watched the Tour and then slept until 6.30. And her older sister, who usually likes to drop in on us roughly halfway between one feed and the next, presumably in order to optimize Mummy and Daddy sleep deprivation, actually managed to spend the entire night in her own bed. Joy! Maggie hasn't made a habit of sleeping through the night yet, so at the moment even one unbroken night seems like boundless luxury. (That's the blogorrhoea secret to a happy life: low expectations.)

*Note to self: lose habit of leaving the toilet door open when you go so you can hear what they're up to, as you're starting to do it reflexively in other people's houses.

**Next gig on 1 August at the Irish Society: details here.

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(no time to write)

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Big gummy grins!

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nuits blanches

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Now there are some sentimentalists that will tell you that the first transcendent moment, the one when suddenly all the weeks of sleep deprivation and relentless feed-me-change-me-burp-me-feed-me-oops-i-just-sicked-up-all-over-the-duvet-change-me-again-please drudgery melt away in a single instant is when your new baby looks up at you, all wobbly-headed and google-eyed, and essays a first tentative, wide-mouthed smile.

Yeah. Call me a cynical old battle-axe but for me the moment of transcendence occurs the first time you wake up in the morning and realise that they've slept through the night. Which she did last night, for about 12 hours. I woke at 6 am, heard sleepy snuffles from the bassinet and clambered over Jack to see the alarm clock. 6 a.m. 6 A.M.! As Becca was spending the night at her nana's we weren't expecting the usual 6 o'clock invasion, so, pausing only to offer up a silent, grateful prayer, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Then Maggie woke up at 7.30 and guzzled down 12 hours'-worth of engorged boobie at such speed that she promptly puked mightily, soaking the futon and practically washing her mother away in the process. But I don't care because she slept through the night and there is light and hope in the world and looky here, suddenly I can form complete sentences even if they are run-on ones.

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

First day flying solo with two kids. Not going too badly at all really – it's after four thirty and I have achieved the Nirvana of parenting: both of them are asleep at the same time. Mind you it took a car trip out to the mall to get Maggie to stop grizzling and go down; she now smells strongly of poo (which we're studiously ignoring) and I practically ruptured myself carrying her sister in from the car to the couch. What with the pregnancy and then the c-section it's been literally months since I picked Becca up and I could barely stagger into the house under her weight, which appears to have doubled. Speaking of which, Maggie is seven weeks old today and nearly grazing the 5kg mark. I am going to make the most of this priceless moment by sneaking off to snatch a quickie few pages of my book (Margaret Atwood's latest, Moral Disorder) while I can.

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pyjama game

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Maggie made her social début yesterday at the pyjama party at Becca's crèche. It's taken us a while to bring her there for various tedious logistical reasons, mostly to do with my post-surgical immobility, but last night we finally made it, and when we arrived it soon became clear just how much Becca's been longing to show off her new baby sister to her wee colleagues and teachers. She spent the entire evening doing the rounds of the room, accosting adults and children alike ('Come and see my baby sister!') and hauling them bodily across the room to admire Maggie sleeping in her carseat in the corner ('Crouch down! Crouch down!'). And then running back to her table for another fistful of chips, and a new victim.

Predictably, Maggie's condemned to a lifetime of being compared to and with her big sister and as it's the differences that intrigue me more, these are what I've tended to blog about and will probably keep on blogging about (apparently some babies actually get pissed off with being jiggled about and sung to in order to make them go to sleep, and would far rather be placed in their cradle in a darkened room: who knew?) However in spite of her many differences from her big sister, Maggie's reaction to her first batch of vaccinations, to my relief, was exactly the same: passed out for twelve hours with a quick mid-sleep break for feeding, then woke up a bright-eyed box of fluffies at two AM with no sign of ill effects of any kind, and no inclination to go back to sleep either.

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first footing

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Today we hit the much-anticipated six-week mark, which means that I am allowed to drive again. Woo, and indeed, hoo. Marked the occasion by luring/bundling, as applicable, the kids (plural! good grief, how did this happen?) into the car and setting off on my first solo outing to a mate-with-kids place. OK, quasi-solo, since my mother assisted with the luring/bundling process and then came along with me so that she could mind them while I stopped at the local dairy for fancy biscuits, an essential item when mums get together. But next week I will do it all by myself, as my mother will have returned to Auckland, where she has a life that she has selflessly put on hold for the past few weeks in order to keep things running down here, ensuring Becca is clothed, fed, entertained, bathed, and transported to crèche, that everyone has clean clothes, the fridge is full of food and the floor free from it, and that the baby is rocked and soothed after feeds, allowing me to sneak off and post every once in a while. I honestly don't know how I could have managed without her. However my incision's healed, I'm mobile once more, and on Monday I embark on the next phase: home with two kids. I'd be more terrified if Becca weren't in daycare three days a week meaning that, barring illnesses (inviting calamity just by mentioning it, I know) I'll only be wrangling both of them at the same time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And Mam's back down for three weeks in September so I can do a short teaching stint. Which gives me two months to convince Maggie that bottled boobie is an acceptable alternative to the boobie itself.

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forty days on

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Maggie's now outgrown her newborn-sized stuff, so in the interests of freeing up some space I'm packing it away. And as I do so, re-experiencing the pangs of whatever emotion it is you experience as you bag up the first tiny clothes your child ever wore,and realise that they'll never be that tiny again. The pangs may be a bit sharper this time around, as I know this is the last time I'll be doing this. And in a few weeks' time I'll be doing it again with the zero to three stuff, hauling out the three to six stuff, and in the process I'll come across the newborn stuff and marvel that Maggie was ever that small. The early months and years bristle with markers and milestones, which obscure the view back to the beginning. Even re-experiencing the strangeness of the first days doesn't bring back the earlier experience of them: as I witness the small beginnings of Maggie's autonomy from me, I find myself continually asking: 'was it this way with Rebecca?'

An unexpected recommendation: Flushed Away – the CGI feature from Aardman. How can you go past a movie with singing slugs?

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