Egg timers and suchlike

So, it’s been a while, guys, hasn’t it? Sorry.

Babe came down with foot and mouth when we got back from holiday. Well, the nurse at NHS direct said it wasn’t actually, but the spots on his mouth, soles and palms were exactly like the ones I found on the web (so to speak), and he really wasn’t very well. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he had – especially as I know there have been one or two outbreaks at nursery recently. Nice.

I am writing this against the clock, as Other Half has taken Babe off while I cook the tea, to find me a hot water bottle. God knows how I lost the two I had, but I have, and I am freezing. In fact I have been ill and shivery for nearly a fortnight, and going to bed very early every night. Hence the absence of blogging. Now Other Half is feeling ill and acting as though he’s on death’s door, despite absence of temperature and ability to go to gym for ‘medicinal sauna’ and watch TV ‘til the early hours each night.

Why are most men so utterly crap when they’re ill? It’s like they’re goading you into telling them they are annoying, useless idiots so that they can slink off with the hump and end up watching TV in bed. Grrrrrrr, I don’t know. (Any men reading who feel annoyed by this, please search deep into your innermost beings and then tell me, hand on heart, that it’s not true.)

Now Babe is unwell again too. It’s all go. Incidentally, my sister gave me a ‘bloggers egg-timer’ for my birthday, to help encourage me to write more often and limit how long I spend on it.

So, what of import do I have to share with you? Precious little actually. I have, as usual, been questioning my life’s path and the obvious mistakes I have made. I’ve been having quite a lot of anxiety dreams about work, including one particularly nasty one in which I was back at Uni – in Italy, for some reason, thinking I should jack it all in and start afresh, studying law as my mum had wanted me to. I woke with an exhausted groan, wondering where and how I should start, before I realised that I am a wife and mother with Responsibilities, and a career path that has not been without direction if not hugely successful.

A very dear friend and honorary sister (we both consider ourselves honoured) has moved from working as a volunteer supervised by me, to writing GB’s answers for PM’s question time. So, suffice to say that news of this has urged me to once again consider what I am doing with my skills and talents, and wonder in what new and exciting direction I and my appendages could move.

The construction industry has frozen up and Other Half has not worked since we got back from holiday. He can’t find anything at all, and to say we are stressed about money would be an understatement. Given the fact that I feel nothing short of a red hot poker is going to get me making a career move, that some unhappy decisions are making me feel unhappy at work, the fact that Other Half is without work, and the fact that I am so unbelievably bloody cold, I am wondering if we should rent out our house and move to Greece, where it’s easier to live in poverty and one can at least stay warm. Although I fear that if I left the UK job market, I wouldn’t know how to return to it. There are plenty of people half my age at work who could do my job much better than I can. Motherhood has robbed me of so much more grey matter than I care to admit.

I am in the meantime, considering becoming one of those people who lead humanist funerals, on the advice of another dear friend whose opinions I admire and respect. Incidentally, these references to ‘dear’ friends must be quite annoying, but I feel that in these days of meaningless Facebook friendships, I need to draw some distinctions in the terminology I’m using.

So, while you all smile at the thought, or groan, or whatever, I am going to google that very thing, for more info, before the men in my life (god, I wish there were a few more) return.

Mad cows and Albanianmen

Apologies for not sticking to my 'two posts per week' promise lately. As you might have guessed, our holiday got pretty hairy, and Babe has had mad cow disease since we got back.

When I left you last, I was hoping that our car would be fixed when I got home. It nearly was, but we didn't know this, we were just worried sick as Other Half had left the house three hours earlier with a restless Babe and not yet returned. So his mum - who can barely walk and stops every three paces and jolts backwards, arching and pawing at her spine and gasping for breath - grabbed me by the arm, put her best jacket on and grabbed her huge, black, patent (and empty) handbag, and announced that we were going to look for him. She had an idea that if we walked up a particular road far enough, we would find him.

I didn't have the energy to refuse, so off we set. You can imagine what we looked like. I'm sure her grimaces and stretches were particularly exaggerated that day, so that she could explain to the many onlookers that the blonde with her was her English daughter-in-law. And add the entire story of our holiday so far that lead us to be walking up the road we were. And then ask at the end if anyone knew of a mechanic.

It wasn't filling me with confidence, I have to say, but eventually we did arrive at the top, and there was our car. Result! I understood the mechanic to say that Other Half had left half an hour earlier, but that the car was now ready for me to drive home. Bravo! Before I had time to explain that I hadn't actually driven on the right before and wasn't familiar with the one-way system and that I'm not really a confident driver, my mother-in-law had jumped in. Whatever. I joined her and started the car up. Three wrong turns and two jumped sets of red lights and a lot of shouting later, we arrived home, triumphant! And beeped the horn a lot :).

The next day we went off on our own to Other Half's dad's hometown. Not a day too soon. Saturday was spent with more family members who'd arrived to see us. And that evening, Other Half drove off to the border (the nearer crossing, to see where it was) to collect two nephews that wanted to see Babe.

I knew when he drove off, that something would go wrong. He got back close to midnight, the clutch having played up again, and he'd had to drive for two hours in second gear. It was supposedly fixed on the Sunday (by same mechanic - I forgot to mention that his breath stank of alcohol). And went again on the Monday. On the Wednesday, he re-fitted the old cylinder, saying that the new one was too small. For Pete's sake! (I am trying to reduce the number of expletives I use.)

He invited me to wait in his home and see some technical documents of car engines that his grandfather had drawn. (That 'honourary man' thing was kicking in again...) I embarrassed Other Half by saying in very basic Albanian: 'Look. I am not happy. I now have three clutch cylinders and the two new ones it seems I don't need. You told me to buy them. Now I have no money. I have a long journey ahead of me, to endure with a small child and a moron. This has not been a holiday, it has been a trip into hell. I beg you to fix my car now and I will send you a full set of Manchester United T-shirts when I return to my homeland.'
He got the drift and the car has got us home, but I dread to think what the service it is due will reveal.

We left on the Friday. I won't bore you with the intermittent detail. It includes a few happy hours on the beach, too much socialising with family members, and I spent four nights alone in a hotel across the road which was sheer bliss. I think we were all ready to leave, and I think the family were glad to see the back of me. Other Half said I had been a total pain in the arse, as usual. I think I did well to survive.

The journey home was 'seat of your pants' style - as is it tends to be, when Other Half is involved. Driving to the Greek border at dawn was incredibly beautiful though - through tiny villages, the scent of wild tea, thyme and origano in the air, and you even have to use a raft to cross a river at one point. Then we were hurtling along Greek roads - I've always thought of Greece as the back of beyond, but by comparison, it's like entering the gardens at Buckingham Palace. We joined the queue for the ferry to Venice with 20 mins to spare, but were told as we handed our tickets over to board, that we needed to drive back to the terminal building as we hadn't reserved our cabin. More sodding charges later, we ended up with a lovely cabin at the very front of the ship. In fact the captain called me at night-fall, asking me to close the curtains, so it seems we weren't the only ones with a good view.

The drive back was hell - although we did stop at Lake Como for lunch which was nice. And saw our friends in Switzerland which was wonderful but too brief, and before we knew it we were home again. And despite my fears, the trip does come highly recommended. If nothing else, because it felt like we were away for months, and boy, was I glad to get back...

More soon, on Babe. He's fine ;)

"Sh*t happens"

..So a friend of Other Half's said yesterday, as he put a huge fish he'd caught that morning on the grill and opened a bottle of wine. We were sat under the awning outside the bar he's built in their home town.

I suppose he's right. And things could be worse. We could be seriously injured or dead. God, I wish I had a babysitter and little pile of spliffs with me.

I am losing track of the days, but Tuesday I think it was, that we spent in a whirl of maddeningly unclear conversations and confusion. The mechanic (a friend of one of Other Half's brothers) had told us the parts we required. Which I now know are the clutch cyclinder and 'the bit that goes underneath it, which is not broken but might break...' ???. An apparently reliable parts dealer told us this was not available in Albania so I found myself on the phone to a VW dealer in Corfu who told me said parts are not available in Greece either, as diesel golfs are rare there, and that they would have to be imported from Germany. This would take ten days, so we'd be lucky to get the car fixed before we had to leave to go home, and that depends on the borders being open again, as they are still closed to vehicles.

My euphoria at finding a solution, albeit a shitty bloddy solution, was dampened when the guy on Corfu then said he needed a cash deposit to order the parts. Bumpkin! So we then had to make another load of phone calls to find a relative (a nephew of Other Half's) who had to leave work to find the village and the shop and pay said deposit so that parts were safely ordered. Phew!

Older brother then gets back and says he's found the parts in Albania. What the f*ck?!! He had gone to a parts shop three minutes from the family home, and the owner had looked up the part in a catalogue, phoned Tirana, ordered it and it arrived last night. We went to collect it (he said we don't need the other part that was 'nearly broken' so I hope he is right, and wasn't covering up the fact that he'd forgotten to order both) and as I write, Other Half is with the mechanic, getting the car well again, I hope. I'll believe it when I see it and am resigned to the awful journey being the best part of this holiday, as long as we get back on the road somehow or other.

In the meantime, I am trying to get back on track, behaviour-wise, and hiding my irritation and frustration with being stuck in family home with a truculent Babe who has had enough of being poked and prodded and smothered in kisses by people he cannot understand. Two neices are staying with us who speak English and he loves playing with them, but he has definitely had enough of the rest of the crowd. As, frankly, have I. It took Auntie Eleni (who is a bit of a wild cat herself) less than an hour to teach him to pummel her with his fists, bite her (on the bum, so god knows what she was doing with him) and stab her with a fork. He can't stand the food, and ate nothing until yesterday when I took charge of the chaotic kitchen and made him chips. Getting him to bed at night amist the noise and excitment is near impossible, as is keeping him occupied in our room from 6am while the bodies strewn about the place lie in until ten-ish.

Gah! On the sunny side, they say that a change is as good as a break and I'm getting that, in spades.

And Saranda is a place of character and a certain beauty. Walking around is like being on some weird kind of demolition site, with huge concrete edifices in varying stages of completion towering above you everywhichway you turn. In between them are decaying old buildings, some with semi-wrecked entrances and street-level rooms full of rubbbish, but with upper-floor flats fitted out with air conditioning and brand new double-glazed windows and doors.

The seafront is a short walk from the family home and it is lovely to be by the water, although the beaches are litter-strewn and stony and I'm not sure how clean the water here is. The first two days were sunny, and I took Babe down and let him paddle. He is not afraid of the water at all and wanted to pull his clothes off and splash around.

Also on the sea front is a very old merry-go-round. It is, I think, from the USA, but instructions on the vehicles are in French - so Canadian maybe? It is an amazing piece of social history - hand painted images of men carrying out agrictultural tasks surround the outside of the top, and the vehicles include a tank (!), Harley Davison-type bikes - complete with leather saddles, an amazing fire engine, an old flying Mickey Mouse, a weird pig and a lion... It has bits that would have lifted and spun in the old days - I suspect it arrived here second-hand, and may try and find out more - and these days would fail to comply with health and safety regulations on many counts. Babe loves it, especially when his dad rolls his sleeves up and manages to push it around.

So we are having some happy moments amidst the chaos, and who knows, when I head back home now, there may be some happy news about the car awaiting me.

More soon! Miropafshim!

Strange but true

In case any of you are doubting the integrity of the last entry, sadly it is all true.

Clutching the cold night air

SO! I was hoping to regale you with happy stories in this blog entry, as intimated by the tone of my last Facebook status update.

Stories about how, despite setting off late after Other Half insisted on giving the car a quite unnecessary clean that took three hours on Friday afternoon, I didn't threaten him with murder over it; about how we argued about taking the buggy and I won and we squeezed it in, again without losing our cool completely; about how he drove like a Trojan from Calais to Venice, stopping briefly just twice, through the night, and caught our ferry with twenty minutes to spare, and then ate our evening meal as we floated past the sun-soaked old city...

Boy oh boy, teamwork of the utmost was required and we made it, with no arguments whatsoever. We nearly lost the plot around Basel, missing Germany by inches and only hitting Switzerland thanks to my linguistic prowess (all signs in German and no English) and a well-timed swerve by Other Half. Switzerland was a dizzy swirl of mountains, waterfalls and tunnels and quite overwhelming. Italy was beautiful - Lake Como, Verona and gorgeous fields of corn but marred by drivers who frankly take possesion of the road they way they do a football and it was a disconcerting experience.

Babe was amazing. Slept through the night, and was as good as gold- given that he woke in his seat at 6am and we didn't arrive at the port until 4.30 pm. I am in awe of his patient and sunny nature. The ferry journey was wonderful - nice cabin, and we slept like logs and ate well, and took turns sunning ourselves on the desk as we wafted past the countries that touch the Adriatic Sea.

All was very well, in fact, until we arrived at the Greek port of Igoumenitsa. The last leg of the journey was the part I had made the mistake of assuming Other Half would look after. But as we drove off (after pissing everyone off for forgetting on which deck our car was left- but then we'd had to grab a couple of bags and scramble when we parked it in the ship in Venice as it was leaving) and Other Half took the first sign for Ioannia and ignored my suggestion that we stop and ask for directions (to a new border crossing that has opened, that would put just 40 mins between the ship and his home town), I had a bad feeling in my bones. Twenty minutes later we were asking an old guy and his donkey for directions, ten minutes later we had phoned one of his brothers (Other Half's, not the old guy with the donkey's), ten more minutes later we were returning to where we started, ten more minutes later we were heading for the new crossing, ten more minutes later we were heading back up the road we had started out on, because brother had called back saying he thought it crossing closed at 8.30pm and it was already a quarter to nine.

Which is why we found outselves at a border crossing called Kakavia at about 11pm, after an extremely stressful and tedious journey through mountainous northern Greece, which consists of long winding and narrow roads, and junctions which say the place you're going to requires both a left and a right turn. All not-at-all fun in conditons of extreme darkness, which is what mountainous and unpopulated areas are like on moonless nights.

We were both dead nervous about crossing the border. The Greeks make your life hell if you're an Albanian, or interested in going to Albania, and I was steeling myself for some kind of horrendous body search, or a prolonged interrogation that would leave Babe in tears. Other Half was dreading the Albanian side, and the random taxes our visit might result in.

But we were in luck - The Greeks simply commented that we were lucky to have arrived that day (yesterday) because they're on strike from today for an in definite period of time during which it will be imposible to return home. So if I'm not back at work on 6 October, that might be why. On the Albanian side we were charged the grand sum of one Euro each and that was it, we were on our way.

Once we'd reached the crossing where signs for Other Half's home town started, I called Other Half's brother, to tell him we were safely homeward bound. As I picked up the phone five minutes later, to tell his parents we were nearly there, a pack of wild dogs crossed the road, and we commented on what a dark and cold night it was. And fairly bleak and deserted; not much in the way of settlements. Then there was a clunk, Other Half said, 'oh my God', and we ground to a halt.
'What is it?' I said.
'Look,' he replied.
The clutch pedal had popped off, and part of it was on the floor by his feet.
'Fuck my old boots,' is what I'm afraid I said.
'Don't start!' he said. And Babe woke up.

Thank God my phone had signal, as these are the kind of roads that have two cars pass along per night. I got his sister.
'Margarita,' I said. 'This is Viola. We have a serious problem! Please get in a taxi and drive to the border road. We're about an hour away, the car is buggered and the baby is hungry. We have money, please come now.'
'Yes,' she said.
I saw a car approaching from behind, and got out fast and made star jumps in front of our headlights. It carried on.
Then we started flinging all the travel debris from our initial journey into bags, as we knew we had to be ready to empty the car completely if we got help, as we couldn't risk leaving it with stuff in it. I could see my breath, it was freezing. We then started to discuss the possibility of Other Half staying in the car, to protect it. Not a nice thought. Babe, meanwhile, sat in the passenger seat, wrapped in a blanket, playing with his bear. What an angel!

Not long after, a jeep drove by and stopped. They were headed for the same destination as us, and took Piers and I without question. They had no English and my Albanian is dire, but their little girl was two and called Stacey, you may be interested to know. And had been throwing up all day, so I hope we haven't caught a nasty bug from her. I feel dodgy but it's probably stress. The driver also gave our car a shove, and Other half managed to coast downhill for about fifteen minutes ahead of us. At which point Margarita appeared, bless her, with a neighbour who towed us home. Blinking heck. We arrived at about 1am, not at all in the style in which Other Half had imagined.

Today was spent looking for a mechanic who is trying to track down the parts we need, which are probably only available in Greece - and the borders are closed! Which leaves us stuck in the family home, and no way of getting around. And pretty much all our spending money already gone. Luckily I have some plastic with me.

Bloody hell. I am taking this amazingly well, I think. Keep me in your thoughts.

Internet cafe playing awful music. I am so outta here.

I had a dream

I must tell you about the dream I had last night.

I was on the road in London where the HQ of the charity I work for is based, with my mum and sister. We needed the loo, and decided to use the extensive public facility attached to a huge Peacocks retail outlet that is not located there. On entry, there was a large room to the right, and one to the left. They were both filthy. Rubbish and loo roll all over the floor, grotty dirty basins and WCs, and very smelly. While I was on the loo, a giggling French girl harangued me through the window in the door (?!) crying because she was desperate to use it. Hum!

After washing my hands, I walked to the centre of each room in turn, and yelled very loudly (I am known among friends and family for making complaints and a fuss about things I’m not happy with. I fear men would describe me as a Ball Breaker),
‘Can everyone in the loos and queue please complain to the management about these toilets. They are a disgrace, and unless we complain, nothing will be done about them.’

I then went off in search of the Management’s office. It was a bit like a ticket booth at the train station. I asked the woman at the window if I could speak to said Management. She looked at me (I think my face spelt Trouble) and said ‘Yes, I’ll just get her for you.’ Another woman appeared at the window and I asked if we could have a meeting. She came outside.

I was expecting a battle. ‘Your toilets are disgusting!’ I said. ‘No-one should have to use them. Will you come with me and see what I mean?’
‘Yes, alright then,’ she smiled, and off we went.

On entering, she looked around. ‘Hum. Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right, they’re awful. I can’t believe no-one has said anything before now.’ Before I could interject and quiz her on how frequently she takes a tour of her empire, she had called over one of the cleaners (who wasn’t there before, may I add, and who was wearing a cook’s hat) and said,
‘Beryl, when will Tom and Jack be finished on the dining room project?’
‘Today, I think.’
‘Great, that leaves tomorrow and Friday to give this place a proper clean and lick of yellow paint. What am I doing for the rest of this week?’ It seems the cleaner was also her PA.
‘Your diary’s clear. In fact you were going to take annual leave tomorrow.’
‘Of course I was, silly me! Well, I’ll come in and give them a hand,’ and she turned to me and smiled again. ‘Is that alright?’
‘Well, yes, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘Thank you for listening and acting so fast. That’s wonderful, I’m really grateful.’ I left the toilets and caught up with my mum and sister in the street.

I don’t know what to make of a dream like that. Could changing the world be this easy?

PS Holiday packing going well at home, although we have reached deadlock on whether we’ll need to take the buggy or not. Other Half thinks not, as he wants space in the car for his diving gear. I think so, as I’m worried about my knee complaint and Babe’s need for peace and somewhere to crash during the day. And what we’ll do with him if we end up spending hours at an Italian port.

Otherwise, excitement is veritably mounting.
‘Are we going on holiday, Babe?’ I ask him.
‘Yes! Hooooooooray!’ he cries. ‘Butterfly!’.

I have been humming as I blitzed the house this weekend. Areas of my brain that were previously filled with Led Zeppelin and early pink Floyd are now awash with the theme tune to CBeebies Lazytown. (The hero of which, it happens, wears a blue leotard thing and is HOT.) How times have changed.

Road trip of the decade

Apologies for the lack of updates following last week’s beautiful moment.

Other Half and I have been busy arguing furiously about our impending holiday. I have agreed – how could I refuse? – to holiday with his family, as he hasn’t seen them for nearly two years, and they have only met Babe once since he was born. But these holidays are, frankly, hell on earth from my perspective, and over the years I have found excuses to miss out on them occasionally. Now that we’ve got a child, instead of wanting us to have lovely family holidays together, Other Half is keener than ever to visit his. Bugger! What did I expect? Perhaps once we are off the bread line we’ll be able to have more than one holiday a year and it will be less of an issue. We can’t wait to get Babe on skis!

Now, there is a lot I could tell you about visiting Other Half’s family, but there are two salient points to note:

1 There is a f**k of a lot of them – he is the penultimate of 13 kids. All married, nearly all with kids. And extended families...

2 On these visits, I am proffered the metaphorical role of Honorary Man. This means I am plied with alcohol and sweetmeats, and generally treated like royalty, which is very nice. But in return I am expected to regale the assembled company with stories and evening-upon-evening of entertainment. When I’m in the mood, I achieve this to outstanding ovation (not a small feat, as they don’t speak any English at all, apart from some random phrases: ‘Hello, baby!’; ‘I like to move it, move it’ and ‘How you like you eggs?’). But when I’m not in the mood, it pisses me off that I can’t easily get out of these numerous visits to the homes of all and sundry. And now that I am a mother and have less patience and energy than before, I am dreading spending my holiday hanging around with hundreds of people I actually have precious little in common with.

The other issue is that of transport, which gets me back to the subject of this post.

We have had some utterly shitty times in Other Half’s home town. The part of the world he comes from is beautiful. Paradise beaches; goats, grapes and polyphonic singing; healthy fresh food, and lots of sunshine. But the roads are shit, and there are no car rentals because the rental companies wouldn’t see the vehicles they hire out for dust, once they’d driven off the forecourt. For the last few years, we have stayed in a beautiful four-star hotel on a mountain top, courtesy of one of Other Half’s brother’s girlfriend’s brothers (see what I mean?). But not even taxis will drive you up there because of the incline, so we usually have to walk. Not amusing, in 40 degree heat and six months pregnant, I can tell you.

So, this year, having both sworn we would never go back without transport of our own, Other Half is determined to drive. This involves driving to a certain Italian port that shall remain nameless, and then taking a 26-hour ferry to a destination that is about an hour from his home-town. My cunning plan was to fly out there with Babe. But when Other Half got lost again driving to Dorset last weekend, I realize that despite his protestations, I probably need to go with him, to read the map. He wants to drive through the night while Babe sleeps, resting for an hour here or there in lay-bys, as we haven’t got any free cash for hotels.

I am a nervous wreck! And the thought of a night without sleep – or worse still, a journey that Babe rejects wholly and completely as I suspect he will – is making me tremble, and it's still ten days until we leave. I will attempt to update you on our packing progress before we leave, and hope there will be Internet access on the ferry. I am taking my laptop, and have just bought two CBeebies DVDs for Babe, as I don’t think he can live without a daily TV fix in a language he understands.

In the meantime, I have a lot of lists to write. How many torches and blankets will I need in the car? Should I take a tent and plastic sheet for emergency situations? Will I need a whistle? Arm bands in case the ferry sinks? Biros and chocolates for bribing the police on the border, so that they let us through without insisting on playing 20 questions first? Can I manage without a buggy? Our hatchback is quite small.

So many questions and so many arseholes in the world. Oops, sorry, distracted by the news. Excuse my French. Bonsoir!

A beautiful moment

Gosh! I’m in danger of exceeding my two blogs per week quota. But I had to share with you all something beautiful that happened to me yesterday.

Note to those of you I work with: I’m writing this in my lunch hour – I have a new ‘two full days per week’ regime, as well as the two halves. It’s kind of weird being here all day. Nice :).

I took the train up to Paddington yesterday – as I’m obliged to for work, a couple of times each month. I love these days in the Big Smoke, but since having Babe, the earliest train I can get is at 9am, after dropping him at nursery (Other Half having left the house hours before me) and I feel my late arrival is an encumbrance. I feel a bit lopsided when I get in, and out of psynch. And where it used to be a fairly tiring day in itself, these days the 50-minute walk to the station aggravates a knee problem I have developed since giving birth (diddums! and how is it that I haven't yet been to have it X-rayed, as suggested by my doctor?), and my general state of tiredness makes these day trips harder to get through than previously. (Good grief - was that another moan? I must stop referring to being tired in this blog or I will send you all off to sleep.)

Anyway, on arrival I walked briskly from the train to the underground, and had reached the bottom of the first flight of stairs when a man rushed up to me from behind, and caught my arm.
‘Excuse me!’ he called. He was about 50, I’d say. Nice face, nice suit, nicely-groomed. A confident and up-together air about him, and altogether quite a dish.

‘Yes?’ I replied, noticing that he was holding a bunch of flowers. Anemones. Pretty; unusual.
‘I just wanted to tell you I think you’re gorgeous!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was listening to you on the train and you sounded so warm and intelligent. Funny. Engaging.’

I’m not sure what my face was doing. Usually I struggle to hide what I’m feeling but for once I was quite taken aback and it took a while to register what he was saying. In fact it was quite surreal, us talking almost as though we knew one another. A lump formed in my throat and my annoying habit of crying when I'd rather not was threatening to kick in.

‘I’m not making a pass!’ he went on. ‘I’m married. But I wish I’d sat down next to you on a train twenty years ago. These are for you.’ And he handed me the flowers, which I suppose he’d rushed to buy on the platform above. My God, I hadn’t even noticed him in the carriage.

‘Gosh,’ I replied. Thinking fast on my feet is generally one of my strengths and I came back to earth with a bump.
‘That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me for a long time,’ I laughed through the water that was starting to creep down my cheeks. ‘My husband would tell you I'm a pain in the backside!’
‘Aren’t we all, sometimes?’ he answered, and leant forward and kissed me on the cheek, before it occured to me to try and stop him (I'm the kind of girl who waves to lorry drivers in a friendly manner when they toot, thinking a friend of mine must be up in the cab) and then walked off into the underground, even turning to wave before he went through the barriers.

I stood where I was for a few seconds. My legs wouldn’t move and besides, I thought I’d give him time to get away. I didn’t want to spoil our beautiful moment by finding myself cheek to jowl with him on the Bakerloo line.

Then I looked at the flowers. Georgeous. But not really mine to keep, I didn’t feel. And I didn’t want to have to explain where I’d got them when I arrived at work. Ahead of me was a tired-looking mum, trying to cajole her toddler into the pushchair. As she turned to pick up her bags, I popped the bunch onto the folded-back hood, and quickly carried on. I hope that gave her a nice surprise and didn’t freak her out!

For the record, the last person who paid me almost the exact-same compliments (excluding the bit about wishing he’d met me twenty years earlier of course) was my dad, several years ago. We were with a group of people around the dinner table at his house, a place I don’t go very often. He sounded kind of surprised when he said it.

Silly Sunday

So, we didn’t have a Special Sunday. It was more of a managed-to-survive, sicky, Silly Sunday. I think there may be some humour in the inane mundanaity (spelling?) of it – but there again there may not, so only read on if you really have nothing better to do…

Babe woke at six. Waking at six on a Sunday would be shitty if you hadn’t been doing it every bloody day of the week for the last two years, and given that we have, it was super-shitty.
‘Mummy, milk!’ he yelled from his room and I groaned, and the brain-ache I have spent so many consecutive days coping with, kicked in. I walked along the corridor, opened the door and waved vigorously. Which meant I could keep my mouth sleep-shut for a bit longer.

I put him down next to me in bed and gave him his beaker of milk. He took it and started drinking. This was a defining moment and I guess I now know for sure that he is no longer a baby – we have finally cut the bottles! Yesterday I bought him a purple sporty-drink bottle thing with a soft straw top that I thought might aid the transition from the bottle he has first and last thing, to cup of milk. I offered it to him last night and he hated it and tried to pull the top off, so I thought I’d try him with a beaker again instead, and he didn’t bat an eyelid – was just relieved to start downing the contents. Gosh, I had no idea it would be that easy. It helped, of course, that he was distracted by Charlie and Lola – he tends to have his milk in front of the TV these days.

So, there he sat in my bed, drinking his milk and scratching at the eczema patches on his legs while I tried to hold down the bottoms of pajama legs to stop him, and show him a picture of a bus which saved turning the telly on. I felt unable to tolerate even the tellytubbies. Babe is obsessed with vehicles, by the way. When he sees one, he repeats the word incessantly, and it becomes really bothersome. ‘Bus! Bus, bus, bus, bus………’ you get the drift. I wish I could find a route to nursery that didn’t involve walking past 500 or so parked cars, I can tell you.

Anyway, the door opened and who should walk in but… Other Half. A rare treat. He has been back in the spare room for a couple of nights as he hasn’t been feeling well, but having got away with spending most of yesterday in bed, ‘sick’, I think he’d had an attack of the guilts and wanted to do his bit. He picked Babe up and took him downstairs.

I rolled over and turned the light off. And then pulled the book and beaker out from underneath me. I should have felt delighted and able to stretch luxuriously under the covers and drop back off to sleep, but my brain kicked into overdrive. Within seconds I was stressing about work, money, impending Holiday of Doom XVII (much more to come on the that), the state of the economy, and whether the TV downstairs would be damaging Babe’s hearing and whether Other Half had thought to change his nappy.

After fifty minutes of tossing and turning, I went downstairs. 7.20.
‘You might as well go and lie down upstairs,’ I said to Other Half, who was lying on the sofa. ‘I can’t sleep.’
He went upstairs and fell asleep until 10.30.

I got Babe dressed, made us breakfast, hovered and cleaned the sitting room, emptied the dishwasher, put two lots of washing through, checked the tomato plants for slugs and watered them, tidied the toy box, and drew a large picture of cars, spiders and butterflies. All at an agonizingly dithery slow pace. It was a muggy day and I felt as though my head was blocked up. I needed to wash and dress myself – but I wanted to wash my hair – and try and get my brain into gear, but I just couldn’t shake the dreadful pain of wanting to be back in bed. Note to self: do not wake with greasy hair at the weekend! (Readers: I told you this would be boring…)

So, at half ten, we went upstairs to wake Other Half, who said he was still feeling ill, but gave me a shoulder massage and got dressed. By this time it was raining, but Babe was champing at the bit to be out of the house, so I suggested Other Half took him to soft play. In fact, I fancied going – I love the ball pit and the covered slide - but I needed to shower and get lunch. Like most parents, I do stress about getting enough of the right kind of food into my son. He has a penchant for the sweet things in life, and embarrasses me by waking from a nap in the buggy in the following way: stir, rub eyes, look around, and yell ‘cake! Biscuit! MUMMY!’ He is his mother’s son, for sure.

‘Wear him out for a while in the ball pit,’ I suggest, ‘and then bring him back at about 12. We can lunch together and then I’ll put him down for a sleep. He’ll sleep better and for longer if he’s not hungry, and then we’ll have got one good meal into him today. IF we don’t, he won’t eat properly after he’s slept, and will want to snack all afternoon…’

‘Ok,’ says Other Half. And I think we both know that the chances of getting Babe home, tired and awake, are slim. But because I’ve got brain ache and the air is muggy I put salmon in the oven, wash my hair, lay the table, and have a lovely meal ready for the ridiculously early time of 12 midday. Other Half turns up at half past, after several nagging phone calls – ‘we’re busy in the pet shop’ – and Babe is asleep.

So I get him into his cot, and we sit down, bickering and not really hungry, to eat Sunday lunch. See what I mean about ‘silly’? Just, I don’t know, ridiculous, daft, dumbass.

I can’t face more chores, and so I decide to go with my brain ache, and tell Other Half that I’m going back to bed. He isn’t tired – of course he isn’t bloody tired after a three-hour lie-in - but decides to come with me, so I make it really clear that my sole purpose of returning to the sack is to sleep. He looks at me and comes anyway.

We chat for a while, and he gives me another back rub, and then just as I am dropping off, Babe wakes. Other Half takes him downstairs and I hear him trying to administer cold salmon and broccoli. After half an hour I give up trying to sleep and go back downstairs.By three o’clock we have fussed and farted, changed babe a couple of times, packed and repacked a day bag and decided to go out. We walk by the river – for all of ten minutes as we forgot the buggy and babe refused to walk and is too heavy to carry far - take a little ferry to a teahouse where we buy huge slabs of not-half-as-nice-as it-looks cake that makes us all feel sick, and then drive back home, via the park, where I rest on the see-saw, wondering who Marjorie Daw was.

By the time we get home (half five-ish) Other Half is needing to rest again, so he sleeps on the sofa while I play trains, give Babe tea, and read books with him. We then play with a sticker book of fish, that provides us both with great fun. I love that babe seems to get what the pictures are of, but sticks them in really random places: stranded dolphin on the sand, treasure chest on the harbour wall, deep sea diver lying on the rocks etc etc, and then he decides he wants to stick the stickers on his pajama top instead of the pages – I can’t see why not and let him have a couple, and then he wants to stick a couple on me. For some reason he sticks them on my boobs.

After milk (yes, in beaker ;)), a bit more TV, another few books and cuddles and I get him into bed.

Then I do more chores, get things ready for a long day of meetings in London tomorrow, sniff the few presentable items of clothing I possess to make sure they didn’t need washing before I put them on tomorrow, and sit down to have a snack. The phone rings, I keep the call short, and then flop. I would like to spend some time on my Domestic Budget and my Life Plan but I haven’t got the energy. There is nothing on TV and these days I don’t read much. I look at the Michelin website, in a bid to persuade Other Half that we don’t have the time or money to drive to his home town when we have our holiday this September, but he gets excited and starts analysing the map.

So I push him away and start writing this blog as I just don’t know what else to do with myself. At least now it’s 11pm and hopefully I’ll fall asleep when I go to bed.

Goodnight!

Didn't touch wood

The little so-and-so has woken three times while I tried to publish the last entry and is crying for me now. I sense a desperate night ahead. Arggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!! I should have kept my stupid bloggy mouth shut :(

Contented weekends and Special Stuff

Ooh, such a lot has happened lately. Not! Such are the joys of wet weekends with Babe. And it doesn’t leave me with a lot to write about.

But actually, I can’t complain. Life is so much easier now than it was a year ago, when my weekends – wet or dry – were spent keeping Babe out of the house so that Other Half could continue digging to Australia underneath the kitchen floor.

If I listed here the work that properly commenced when I went into labour and continued for the first year and one month (yes, I was counting) of Babe’s life, you would be shocked. The sight of me turning into a human pumpkin over a period of nine months was not enough to make Other Half get his skates on, but seeing me writhing all over the floor once Babe was actually entering the world was what put his metaphorical foot on the gas. It’s just as well my labour lasted four days.

Yes, FOUR DAYS – from a few hours after I went to bed on a Sunday night to 10pm on the Thursday. And without pain relief. And after two sleepless nights in hospital with complications before labour started! I have to mention this, because surviving the experience has made me the woman I am today – frankly, a goddess of quite outstanding fortitude. I fully expected Other Half to spend the rest of his life kissing my feet and bowing most worshipfully before me for the rest of mine, having witnessed what I went through.

But in fact he spent the part at home digging like a maniac and the part in hospital in some kind of freaked zombie state. He spent eight hours massaging my back in the wrong place and irritating me to distraction (but I was concentrating too hard to communicate this to him), and then pulled the wrong lever on the bed in the moments before Babe arrived, forcing me into an upright position that my bump could barely accommodate, and was probably therefore responsible for his final arrival, seconds before the forceps made it into a part of me not designed to accommodate them.

So, back to our contented weekends. We have got into a comfortable routine in which I get up early with Babe, and do cleaning and housework around him while Other Half lies in. Then they trot off to the supermarket and the city farm for a few hours, while I do more cleaning and housework. We all have a sleep after lunch, and Bob’s your uncle, it’s nearly evening. Most satisfying! I should also point how here how very lucky I am to have an Other Half who comes homes from work every day overjoyed to see his son, and keen to take him out for a walk, or to the park for an hour or so, so that I can scrape baby mush off the carpet, shave my armpits and open the post etc.

The way I see it, you have two choices: live like relative slobs through necessity during the week, but make it into bed at a reasonable hour each night, and blitz the place at the weekend, or spend the week in overdrive keeping more than on top domestically so that your weekends can be spent in a sleep-deprived trance of Having Fun. The former works best for us.

We do aspire to having Special Sundays (as detailed in my highly-organised Domestic Year Plan) but they tend not to come to fruition. We fit in special stuff though, like dancing in fountains, singing in the rain, and sitting in the car outside the house listening to music while Babe turns the hazard warning lights and indicators on and off. Which is where we were, as it happens, when we took the photos I recently updated to my Facebook profile, and which some readers have said took them by surprise. ‘You both look happy and attractive, WTF is that about?’ asked one cheeky devil. I assured him that we had spent half an hour arguing about what my best angle was before said pics were taken. By me.

I think it’s time I went to bed. I’m aware that this is not the most exciting entry ever written. Despite the fact that for the first time tonight, I removed the internet cable from my laptop, so that I could sit in the window and see lampposts and stars, a la Carrie Bradshaw. (The resemblance ends there.)

You may, by the way, we wondering how the Sleep is going. It is much improved, thank you. Babe is now going down without a problem, during the day and at bedtime. So no more pushing him around to get him to sleep after nursery. And he now wakes for milk once per night, often at around half past five, and then sometimes sleeps for a further hour, which is quite joyous. I am feeling gradually recovered and definitely On The Up. So much so, that this week I have had to drop my own daytime nap, as it was giving me insomnia problems at bed time. Which means that I am finally finding time to cook and clean while Babe has his. So we may yet have a Special Sunday - perhaps even this weekend. Will report back next week :).

Fun and games

Babe head-butted me this morning and gave me a nosebleed. It was extremely painful and not, I think, an accident. One minute we were singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, laughing and jumping, (on the bed, 6am, Other Half pretending to be asleep so that he wouldn’t have to join in) and the next he had lurched towards me and biffed me on the nozzer.

Shocked and in pain, I grabbled a tissue from beside the bed and wondered how to respond. I decided to do what Babe would, and curled up in a ball, stage-crying. Peeking out from between my fingers, I saw him watching me and smiling, with his finger up his nose. So I decided to up the ante and yelled a few times in what I thought could be described as pain. At this, Other Half shoved me onto the floor and I landed uncomfortably, on a small wooden engine. This really did bring tears to my eyes.
‘That hurt!’ I yelled. ‘Say sorry!’.
‘Sorry,’ said Babe, and leant over and rubbed my arm.
Other Half gave me a look that had not a whiff of apology, and I felt angry and confused. Which pretty much set the tone for the next couple of hours, for all of us.

Thank god Babe goes to nursery. He knows how to mind his ps and qs I can tell you. What's more, he can count to ten, tell us to ‘Stop, please’ with appropriate hand gesture to accompany, knows the difference between shreddies and weetabix and can describe this in words and shapes, and has recently started asking to sit on the potty, as long as I sit on the toilet at the same time. He even comes home with his hair brushed, where I had just started calling him ‘Sonic’ and resigned myself to him having dreadlocks before long. I think my work with him is done.

He is also taught the concept of ‘time out’, which he had to have today, because he was throwing the toys around and not helping to pick them up. I could tell they’d had enough of him when I went to pick him up, but for my part I was just glad he was doing something normal for once.

Seriously, though, he does seem to benefit hugely from going to nursery. He was a very quiet, reticent little thing before he started (at six months’ old, when I returned to work) and now he rules the roost. This makes me glad, because I do want him to be able to stand up for himself, as he’s got a tough time ahead with us for parents. (I use ‘us’ in the loosest sense of the word.) I am also hoping that he will have a Mind of his Own and be prepared to stand up and be counted, and do something about the State of the World, but we shall have to see.

I did say to Other Half, in an offhand manner, some months ago, ‘I do hope Babe won’t be one of those children who is bullied at school.’
‘No son of mine will be bullied,’ he said.
‘And how do you know that?’ I retorted.
‘Because he will be big and very strong. I will teach him to defend himself.’
Right. So the onus will be on me to build his self-confidence. And make sure he understands, despite the best attempts of his father, that he is not living in a communist state, does not need to fight for survival, keep supplies of diesel in the shed with the tomato plants or tins of lentils and bottled water in the roof. It’s a blessing they check the contents of your baggage at airports, or we’d probably have Grandad Filipe’s Kalashnikov hidden under our bed instead of his, and little cousin Armando’s hand grenades (which he tried to give me once as a leaving gift) in the toybox. Some cultural differences take a while to dissipate.

Anyway, back to the theme of fun and games. We have had a brilliant evening together. I have always been a lover of games, coming, as I do, from a family who likes to play games together at every opportunity. Christmas at home is a whirlwind of pic-up-sticks, connect4 knock-out, and quizzes and IQ tests. All of which my eldest brother has to win. But his competitive spirit has made him a millionaire, which isn’t something we complain about during the season of goodwill…

Other Half approaches games with reticence and healthy cynicism. But then he grew up having to fish and catapult pigeons to help his mum put a meal on the table, and at military school was forced to ski naked and sit in snow until he froze, within eyeshot of a huge burning bonfire.

My idea of a perfect evening would be a few rounds of Ludo, and I can’t wait until Babe is old enough for one of those ‘Simon Says’ games, as I’m in my element on that. But tonight we discovered a whole new plethora of family evening entertainment. I’ll list the ideas here, in case any readers who are parents who may like to try them out at home:

1 Fit the shapes into the spaces (you know, the sets of cut-out wooden shapes that you have to slot into the right place on the board) – who can place them all correctly in the shortest time?

2 Fit the shapes into the space with your eyes shut (as above, but in the dark)

3 Guess the nursery rhyme (which is coming next, by putting the CD player onto ‘random’)

4 Hunt the bear (i) (ie favourite bedtime toy, one of you hides it five minutes before bed time, the other has to find it)

5 Hunt the bear (ii) (hide it and then go out on the razzle)

You know what – I’m going to stop here, as I can see more publication potential appearing before my very eyes. Oh, so much talent and so little time. Talking of which, I better dash, as have got to get bags ready for outing to buy new sunglasses in sales after work tomorrow, while Babe has sleep and then eats the many canapés I am about to prepare for him to keep him occupied. Will report back on success or lack of, and may even offer those of you who have my Facebook details a pic of the purchase.

So, as Babe would say (accompanied by wave and firm look in my direction, in the style of Queen Elizabeth from Blackadder, and usually whenever Other Half picks him up): Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Highlights

By the way - I had my hair done too. The icing on the cake :)

Sons, friends and lovers

There is nothing like spending time with an old friend to make you feel reassured and warm inside.

We have had a lovely weekend, with my dear pal from student days and her three gorgeous boys. Babe didn’t know himself and had the time of his life, running around after them. ‘Guys!’ he kept calling, and paddle-paddle-run-trip-splat went his little feet, in hot pursuit. Never before has he had three chums to play with from the crack of dawn. He was overwhelmed, loved every minute and cried his heart out when they left.

Apart from making life feel Great Fun and most holiday-ish for a few days, which is just what we needed, it also gave Other Half and I a useful insight into life with More Than One. Golly! I thought we were running a tight ship, or whatever the expression is, but she is running something of much greater depth and magnitude. Respect! (Generally-speaking, by the way, my use of expressions, similes and the like is down the pan, thanks to Other Half. In his country, you run like a horse where we run like the wind, swim like an otter, and a car in the hand is worth three on the road, or something like that. These days I talk of feathers in my bonnet, bees in my cap and top potatoes instead of top bananas…)

When they arrived and jumped out of the bus outside our house, my first thought was, ‘Three tiggers!’. Gosh, such a lot of bounce. You have to have eyes all the way round your head, not just at the front and back. I found myself wanting to nod in time with some kind of invisible human biorhythm, just to keep up with the life force and energy they exude. And do the hippy hippy shake on the spot, to keep up with their literal, physical, wonderful, being aliveness.

There was a time when I had bounce. Would be the first onto the dance floor and the last off; run home instead of catching the bus, impatient to be doing something else to fill the time between after work and bed, and spend weekends walking up hill and down dale, come wind or shine. These days, I guess it inhabits a different dimension. I bounce back more easily. Smile and laugh and lot and navel gaze a lot less. (Trust me, this blog is nothing by comparison.) But I would like to re-capture some physical sparkle. I am in fact saving up for some swimming lessons that will help motivate me to up the ante in my fitness stakes.

But back to the boys, and their joie de vivre. Such wit! Laughter and intelligence in buckets. (Is that expression right as well? I have a feeling it should be spades, or droves.) And so street-wise. I must do more to keep abreast of trends that will make Babe feel assured of his own street-cred as he gets older. I lost mine some time ago, I fear. If I ever had any - and I don’t want to be a mum he’s embarrassed to be seen with, as his dad is sure to humiliate him publicly all the time. If that sounds a bit mean, just go with me on this one. If he’s jumping over park fences instead of using the gates now, taking potatoes from home for the pigs at the city farm in spite of the notices forbidding this behaviour, and singing ‘I’m a Barbie girl’ as he walks round Tescos, just imagine what babe has lying in store for him, poor thing.

We were entranced and I could see Other Half thinking, ‘This is what I want. A houseful. To feel completely, all-consumingly alive.’ He is one of thirteen siblings and says he’d like us to have a similarly large brood. ‘In your dreams,’ I have replied tartly on the many occasions that he brings this up. But, as one of four, I know what he means. What is life about, if it’s not about family, love and laughter? (Ok, and kicking the living daylights out of one another at times as well.) Living well into the moment, instead of the past or the future.

I was thinking, ‘This could be what I want. But if I never get it, or decide not to go for it, I could be very happy sharing other people’s from time to time.’ This realisation has left me in a very calm and happy place. Taken the pressure off. Left me caring less that all my friends seem to be pregnant again now, just as I’m starting to enjoy life again, and get a little more sleep, and feel in no hurry to further procreate. Que sera, sera, and all that.

Really, it was quite the nicest weekend I’ve had in years.

Spoons

I’m a happy bunny today! Babe slept all night, like a rock, and so did I. Too tired and rock-like to argue with Other Half about who was crossing the imaginary line down the middle of the bed, or whether or not it was fair of me to need to sleep in a star-shape or the recovery position (my two favourites). Grandad has been to stay for two nights, which means that Other Half and I have been sleeping in the same bed for three (clean bed made up in spare room night before of course :)).

Do real couples actually spoon, I wonder? Don’t they get as hot as hell? The most I can tolerate is other half resting his foot on mine – and that only works when I’m making like a star. If anyone so much as lays a finger on me when I’m in the recovery position I growl like a bear.

Anyway… it has been a joy to see Babe playing with my dad. He is the ultimate eccentric, beyond unorthodox and as funny and as annoying as you’d wish any person to be. I wasn’t sure how either would find the encounter. But seeing them together (dad lying on the cold kitchen tiles because that’s where Babe was sitting and shouting ‘book!’) has reminded me of many good childhood memories of my dad. Fun and laughter in abundance. Never, ever, dull:

Party games which stretched kids to their physical and mental limits; Christmas encounters with Santa’s dwarves on the top of multi-storey car parks; long car drives wiggling Vik inhalers stuck up his nose and waving at other drivers; ghost stories on holiday that had all us bundling in with him for the night (because he had scared himself witless) – and I’ve never heard another dad scream, ‘Run for your lives!’, drop his kids’ hands and hurtle himself into a parade of Rhododendrons at the approach of a flock of Canadian geese in the park. One day I will write a series of children’s books, full of these stories. They will be called ‘Adventures with Mr D’, and will make us both rich and famous.

It’s a shame that Babe doesn’t see more of his extended family. What child doesn’t revel in the attention? There’s no such thing as too much love. I realise how different things would be if we lived near Other Half’s family. Aunts, uncles, cousins in abundance. It would give me a nervous breakdown, as I’m typically English and like my own space, but there’d be no such thing as childcare worries, or lack of sleep. My sister-in-law gave birth a few weeks after I did, and the females of the family (females, yes, and they all work) took it in turns to sleep in a chair by her bed in hospital for the days she was in; her mum slept on the sofa for the next two weeks to make sure she got enough sleep and her sister now looks after the little boy every afternoon so that she could return to work. I don’t think she’s had to cook a meal since little Alexandro was born. As I say, it’s all swings and roundabouts, and there’s a lot more I could discuss on the subject, but it’s interesting that in this country you’re not allowed to have anyone stay the night with you in hospital. Great start.

Back to Babe and our sleep. Not only did he sleep through ‘til six, he then slept in bed with us for an hour until seven! Unheard of! Rejoice! This means he’ll be due his nap when I pick him up from nursery at lunch-time. Hoorah! Of course it also means that between six at seven I didn’t dare move, and at half past six had to wake Other Half without stirring Babe. Ten prods with my big toe did it. He slithered out and landed gently on the floor. Picked up his clothes and crawled around the bed, so that if Babe opened his eyes, he wouldn’t see him there and howl. We held hands briefly, and he was off.

So, you may have inferred that the deadlock at home is broken. I’m not sure if either of us gave in first - I think we just decided to have a good shag and then everything was ok again. Other Half immediately perked up (so to speak), and cleaned the house for me, as I was “feeling extremely poorly and unloved”, and then gave me a lovely massage, as I was “still fit to drop” and then Babe and I watched through the window as he hoovered the car.

We have yet to fully the resolve the issue of whether I am his ‘number one’ or not – aha! Now I remember, that’s how the argument started: when he said Babe was his priority, at which I hit the roof and bought a massive t-shirt with ‘Number 2’ emblazoned on the front – but I might let it go for a while as, at the end of the day, actions speak louder than words, and he’s being extremely nice at the moment.

Roll on, weekend! Aubergines ahoy!

Sex in the city

I saw the Red Arrows today. My God, they're good. I swear there wasn't a woman in the crowd who wasn't thinking, consciously or otherwise, 'Get me a pilot for a right old rogering, now!'. Well, that's what I was thinking anyway.

There is something terrifically sexy about the control, tension and speed; those perfect formations - and the tinge of fear where they shoot close and noisily overhead. The atmosphere was subtly heightened by the general 'Ooohing and ahhhing' that was going on and I joined in with gusto, noticing from the corner of my eye that Other Half glanced at me suspiciously more than once. I must visit their website later.

I guess failing a pilot, someone dressed up as a pilot would do. Strong and silent and, I don’t know, powerful. (And wearing a helmet, or goggles and hat or thick scarf at least – this would have to be an anonymous encounter of course.) Other Half is strong (and particularly silent of late – more on that later). He’d be a liability to the red arrows, though, as is in no way a team player. He’d be the joker who gets expelled from the troupe for letting off orange smoke in the middle of their red, white and blue, and impersonating a solo flight of the bumble bee while they execute a perfectly-formed cupid’s heart. He’d hang back as they zoom forwards, then start to speed up as they slow down. I can see it now – an aerial version of the way we progress down the street.

I am generally several steps ahead of him (literally and metaphorically, and it’s not out of choice, you understand), and I just can’t bear to dawdle. He, on the other hand, walks at a snail’s pace unless I want to take in the scenery, in which case he will declare himself hungry or in need of a toilet and force us to move on quickly. I realise, writing this, that there was in fact a time when, despite our differences in tempo, we would walk around hand in hand. The closest we get to that these days is swinging Babe between us in an attempt to get him to speed up. Blinking heck, too much of life is spent hanging around waiting, or trying to catch up, but to escape it - how? Live in south-east Asia?

Hum. Back to the pilots. Much more fun and I’m not in the mood for nostalgia – I’m in a bad mood on purpose, original reason now forgotten, but cannot back down first as am on strike from being the first one to say sorry. Yes, that’s how grown up things are chez moi at the moment. And now, darn it, I just can’t get back into the swing of my earlier sense of frissance, as I’ve noticed my initial assumption that all pilots are male, and am also starting to feel worried by my use of the word ‘powerful’. I think I had better take some feminist theory to bed with me tonight.

So, any readers out there wondering whether I might be prepared to take it all the way with a red arrow can be reassured that no, of course I wouldn’t. Because it’s rare for me to go with flow and stop analysing what I’m doing and why. Plus it would, of course, be highly immoral.
You lot go to bed, and I’ll surf awhile…

Apologies...

...for not updating this blog for the last couple of weeks. We are seeing a Sleep Specialist and I am focussing my every waking effort on getting through the day and hitting the sack as soon after Babe as I can.

I am also in a very dark and fed up mood, wondering where my life is going, how many years of my career (if you can call it that) are going to be interrupted by motherhood, how I can be more positive and put myself forward at work when the possibilities are few and far between, how will I ever be able to change jobs when I'm stuck in the trap of working part-time in an office down the road from nursery and where I live for quite a good salary, and when will I be able to afford to get my hair done. Etc.

In fact, now that I have just read that through I am feeling even more fed up. I fancy packing up the contents of our house and moving to live on the other side of the world. But as we generally rely on my salary that would hardly be a holiday for me. I need a new life, new aspirations, a change in focus, a new body, a new Cunning Plan.

I think it is time to start buying lottery tickets. And in the meantime perhaps I can flog Other Half's tap shoes on ebay to pay for my highlights.

I will endeavour to share the delights of sticker charts and power struggles with you all, dear readers, by this weekend. xxxxxxxxxxxx

Belly buttons and shirt-lifting

The other thing Babe has noticed is belly-buttons. And he can more or less say that, too. Although it sounds a bit like ‘bliggy buttoms’. But he doesn’t seem to get that they are generally located on - aha! - your belly. Instead, he has become obsessed with trying to gain access to your back, so that he can lift your top and see if he can spot a belly button there.

At home, this seemed like harmless enough fun. But at nursery it is another matter entirely. He has made himself unpopular with all his little friends, by chasing them around, trying to lift their shirts. And was socked on the jaw by one little girl when he tried lifting her skirt. Clearly the carers have had enough of it too, as they’re constantly having to pull him off the other kids, and the implication is that this behaviour is both uncommon and odd. I feel obliged to reassure them that at home he has not witnessed Other half and I crawling around the floor, lifting one another’s shirts, and looking for new crevices we can stick our little fingers into, but you can feel their scepticism as you blather on, and the brains behind the raised eyebrows wondering where he’s learnt to behave like this if we haven’t taught him.

Yesterday, he upped the ante and played in a whole new way that has been recorded (so I was told in a private meeting) in the ‘abnormal behaviour book’. It seems he was simulating sex with a small plastic doll, rubbing his face into hers, and lifting his shirt and rubbing his tummy against her plastic one. Poor little mite – I must introduce more sensory pleasure into his routine. And double check that he hasn’t tuned into a pornographic channel that we’ve yet to discover, with the remote.

It would be nice if he could do something a little more normal. The folk at nursery already know we listen to Greek music at home, smash plates, roast lambs in the back garden and worship the television, decorating it with doilies and ornaments on top. I’m worried that we’ll get social workers on our case if we’re not careful.

If anyone has read a book on how to make your child kick and bite, please let me know.

Apologies

I'm sorry I didn't update my blog last week. I was at a wonderful festival, feeling utterly miserable as it dawned on me that looking after a toddler on a camp-site would be no less labour intensive than it is at home. Instead of meditating, ecstatic dancing and sitting in a late-night hot tob under the stars, I was tiptoeing around sleeping campers with a muddy, dew-damp Babe and his football at dawn; developing a terrible knee injury thanks to the wet conditions and the fact that I was carrying him everywhere instead of pushing him in the buggy; struggling to find vegan food that he didn't spit out in embarrassing disgust, and by the end of day one feeling generally pissed off with the World At Large.

Other Half came to relieve me on the last day, but the Thai massage I'd booked for myself was nothing short of agony, as my exhausted body told me in no uncertain terms that I am in need of complete and utter re-conditioning. Plus it seems that these days you're expected to undress completely without so much as a blanket to conceal your privates, ahead of your massage, and thanks to the fact that the masseur in question had a faulty zip on his tent door, quite a few people wandering by got a view of said privates when leg was raised in said agonising postures that not even Other Half has had for some years now. I thought it was ok to be modest, and not to want to reveal yourself to anyone you happen to be paying to lay hands on you? Is nothing sacred any more?

I feel ancient, out of touch and in need of six months at an expensive spa. Instead, I have emailed a local Buddhist group, asking if they will waive the fee they usually charge for drop-in meditation so that I can get a weekly fix of feeling calm and as though I'm coping. (Since when did it cost to pray? Am suprised and saddened by state of world.)

In order to bring love and good energy back into my home, I am going to build a healing pyramid on the decking in the back garden. (As it happens, the decking is our back garden and I think aformetioned healing vortex may enrage Other Half and result in temporary karmic deficit but hey, needs must...) You probably think this is a joke but it is not. I will keep you posted on my progress. Am off to find tape measure and string before practising yogic poses that will apparently get energy flowing through my body - whahay! - and then breathing pranic life force into my knee joints. The mind boggles.

Spots and titties

Babe is learning tens of new words each week. It is a joy to witness. He’s such a clever little chicken.

But it raises questions about what to tell him to call some of the things he points at. Chicken or hen? Leopard, cheetah or jaguar? See what I mean? I need to go back to school myself to work out some of the differences. And Other half is already having to avoid some early-learner books as he knows his vocab range doesn't cut the mustard. Even the alpahabet flashcards have him on his knees begging for mercy: 'net', 'igloo', 'xylophone' (hardly everyday words, and if I can't spell them, how can he be expected to?)... God only knows what we’ll do when Babe is revising for his GCSEs. Run for cover, I imagine.

I have a small mark on my leg that he pointed at yesterday. I didn’t see the point of introducing ‘bruise’ or ‘cut’ so I said ‘spot’. Now he is calling every small blemish on my being, ‘spot’. But yelling it while pointing at my neck/arm/cleavage as we walk down the road does not float my boat.

Talking of cleavage, he has noticed and starting pointing at my breasts. For some reason, the word that sprang from my lips when he first noticed them (and which I have never used before in my life!!) was ‘titties!’. Gordon bennett! I’m living to regret that, too, as you might imagine.

Why is it that sometimes random and previously-unused words pop out when you least expect them to? I was walking along the street on holiday abroad once, looking at my reflection in a shop window, when I walked straight into someone approaching me from the opposite direction who’d been doing the same thing. Strangely, the only part of us that made contact was the top of our heads, and the impact caused us both to fall over backwards. (I know you think I’m making this up, but I swear it’s true.) Thanks to my linguistic skills, I could have produced expletives in a number of world languages, including that of the place in which I was staying. Which was not Italy. But what did I shriek? ‘Mama mia! The mind boggles.

Anyway, going back to words for the more private parts of our anatomy, Babe has also discovered his ‘privates’. And I didn’t hesitate in using the word ‘willy’ to describe them for the time being. But what do you call a girl’s private parts? What word doesn’t sound faintly embarrassing, or imply that they’re something to cover up, or sound somewhat insulting? Suggestions, please! I won’t bore you here with a diatribe on the sexism that is so inherently embedded within our society and perpetuated by language. Thank God it’s Friday tomorrow.

Coming soon: belly buttons and shirt-lifting

Points of clarification

Further to my previous post, I feel I should elaborate on one or two things. Firstly, I AM crazily in love. Oftentimes it feels like more of the crazy and less of the love (hence this blog) and I can’t deny that to describe our relationship as turbulent would be the understatement of the millennium. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Probably.

Also, you may have wondered whether Other Half knows he is being committed to online pagination in this way. Well, yes, he knows. He sits on the sofa watching me giggle and squawk delightedly as I write, and then throw myself onto the floor gasping when the pins and needles kick in (internet cable only a short distance from the TV set so I have to perch on a stool at the coffee table to write). I even read bits to him sometimes. He says he wants me to pursue my creative endeavours at any cost if that's what makes me bearable to live with, and just isn’t bothered about what I share with you all.

'It's me, I loves you'

You have possibly been wondering why this blog is called ‘Crazy in Loves’ and not ‘Crazy in love’, after the popular Beyonce hit.

A week or so into our relationship, Other Half took my hand, looked sincerely and lovingly into my eyes, and announced ‘It's me, I loves you.’ Wow! I had never experienced such a bold declaration of love. What’s more, it was followed by the question, ‘Why not you me gettin’ marry?'

Obviously, I was swept off my feet. Unlike any other man, he had immediately realised what an amazing catch I was, and wanted to land me fast. His confidence and assurance were a key factor in me persuading myself that he was the one. And to this day, grammatical errors involving the letter ‘s’ take me back to the romantic moment that changed the course of my life so bloody dramatically :). And as it happens, 'Crazy in love' was already taken.

Incidentally, eleven years down the line, Other Half completely denies the aforementioned declaration of love. He says his English was not good enough to have made such a proposal. And that he would not have fallen in love so quickly. And that I must have misunderstood. Hum! To wit: how many other decisions of unspeakable magnitude might have been rushed or taken as a result of misunderstandings? George Bush take note!

Techno-whizz and not yet two

Yesterday evening, I made the mistake of leaving my mobile on the floor for a fraction of a second. At least that’s what I assume I did. When I went to check it before turning in for the night, I found it on the sofa with the Bluetooth light flashing. My first thought was, 'Excellent! So finally the Bluetooth is working! I can copy my pics of Babe to my laptop.' (I had spent hours recently, trying to turn the Bluetooth facility on, and failing.) This thought was closely followed by another: 'Hang on, who exactly has got it working?' (Other Half is not a techno-whizz - well, actually that's the understatement of the decade, but suffice to say, I knew he wasn't involved.) Closer inspection of the screen also revealed a 'signal disabled' message. My powers of deduction led me to Babe... But how on earth had he succeeded where I had failed, and how the hell had he stopped the phone working in the meantime?

I spent a good fifteen minutes scrolling through the Bluetooth facility, trying to turn it off, and getting increasingly incensed. Meanwhile, I realised that the phone must have stopped receiving calls and messages at least three hours earlier, and I’d been expecting a couple of friends to be in contact that evening. Bloody hell! Grrrrrrrrrrr!

I decided to try turning the phone off and on again. Twice. On the second attempt, the Bluetooth stopped flashing. I considered tinkering with it, to see if I could now get it working again, but my priority was to have my phone working before I left for work at ten to eight the next morning. I know from bitter experience that on the one occasion I haven't got my phone with me, something bad will happen. (Last October; morning off work; Babe at nursery; me lolling in bath for first time since he was born; Other Half calls, screaming hysterically down the phone; Babe bitten by spider at nursery; ambulance has been called; I run down road in trousers-no-pants, shoes-no-socks, dressing-gown-no-bra and wet hair flapping in the wind.) (You're thinking this is made up, too, but I swear it's not. Babe was fine - when I arrived, the spider in question was in a plastic cup with cling film on top and the two ambulance men were looking at spiders on the Internet. I was about to expire...)

So, eventually, after a whole lot more fiddling, swearing, throwing the phone at the sofa (I held it together sufficiently to restrain myself from chucking it at the wall, but it was a close call) and raised eyebrows from Other Half (I don't often hold it together), it occurred to me that trying to call someone might re-activate the signal. It did. ‘Re-activate signal?’ the screen display asked. Unfortunately, ‘Yes, effing please’ was not an option available to select.

At least I have now learnt the hard way not to let Babe anywhere near my phone. It is small and not hard to put on a shelf he can't reach. The same can not be said for the oven. Which is why the timer has been set for a casserole that will be done to perfection some time in the year 2015.

Monday tomorrow... hooray!

Two more choking espisodes

I’m not sure about including both these anecdotes today. The second is not really about motherhood or being married to an East European. It is simply horrifically revealing about me, personally, and the sad thoughts I have and the pathetic ways in which I entertain myself. I fear some readers will be embarrassed for me as they digest it. But there does seem to be something in the air – all these near-choking episodes are quite a coincidence. So – gulp – here goes.

***

A dear friend nearly lost her life on a fishbone a few days ago. Not a very original way to choke, but that is exactly what happened. Sadly, her son (Babe's Best Friend) had to watch her other half pounding her on the back to dislodge said fish bone, and became distraught, convinced that his dad was assaulting her, and hasn’t yet fully recovered . So I should at least be grateful that my ear-plug choking episode took place when Babe was safely out of sight.

The other choking episode this entry relates to unfortunately once again involves me:

Other Half and I pay an extortionate monthly fee to belong to a gym. And our sole reason for belonging is that the only exercise I can tolerate is swimming, but where some people are afraid of snakes or spiders, one of my day-mares is the thought of slithering around on a dirty changing room floor. Ugh! I’m getting shivers down my spine just thinking about it. All those bits of soggy loo roll and matted hair, and I slip and fall and get all mushed up in it… AGH! AGH! AGH! Hold that thought!

So, we belong to this very expensive gym because the swimming pool changing rooms are clean. And I love it. I’m a different person around water. Calmer, more relaxed, full of joie de vivre etc. And at our gym, they turn the lights down at 9pm, so people going for a late night swim benefit from underwater lighting, which is perfect for floating, or pretending to be a gentle but sylph-like dolphin. Or whatever.

Now, I am not what you’d call a flirt, and I’m obviously not on the pull, but neither am I an idiot and I can see that some gym members use the pool to eye up potential life partners (or shags, or animal counterparts, or whatever), and sometimes it’s hard not to get inadvertently drawn into this. No matter how hard you try not to make eye contact – easier to avoid when you’re wearing goggles but mine are a bit tight so I only put them on for underwater stunts – you find that you do occasionally. And once you’ve accidentally caught the eye of someone a couple of times, before you know it, you both think there’s a bit of a potential thing going on, even when there quite definitely isn’t… This can be really annoying if the person in question is the wrong gender/type/swimming too close up behind you with goggles on, etc, but can be flattering if not.

Last week, I accidentally caught the eye of someone. He’s a bit of a hunk (although much too hairy and tall. I like my men about my height and quite compact. When I say compact, of course I don’t mean, OK, WHATEVER – the Ed) and I wasn’t too annoyed about it. And when I went back last night he was there again.

Apart from the fact that I still look five months pregnant in my swimsuit, my hair was down and though I say so myself I was looking kind of cute. I definitely caught him checking me out as I slid into the pool as elegantly as I could. And I continued to bask in the attention as I executed a few dolphin lengths, did a few more sitting on a float and moving in a backwards direction (which is great for the arm muscles but probably looks a bit weird and definitely annoys other swimmers) and I stared pointedly at the ceiling whenever we passed, so that I was in no danger of giving him the come-on.

Gradually the pool emptied itself of swimmers and it was just him and me left. I felt it was time to leave, as I didn’t want to get myself into a situation, but I didn’t want him to see how big my bottom is as I pulled myself out of the water. Plus I really wanted to have the place to myself. It’s like a blue, if oblong, lagoon. And fun :). So I hung in there, did a few more kicking lengths with the float, and he bailed first. Hooray! But joined two other men in the poolside jacuzzi. Not so hooray – as I still had to work out how to leave elegantly. Still, I was pretty sure he was still looking at me, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to show off a bit. I had a captive audience, as there isn’t really anywhere to look, other than into the pool, when you’re sat there in the bubbles.

After a few lengths of different strokes with the float, I decided it was time to impress with what I like to refer to as my ‘shark-slice one-breath’. I went to a very good (utterly dull, but good) girls’ school, which means there is nothing I can’t do reasonably well, and this includes swimming. Well, it used to include swimming. These days, I’ve still got the strokes but somewhere along the way I forgot the breathing techniques, which is how and why my shark-stroke developed. It involves stunningly good, fast front-crawl, in which I slice through the water in a very straight line, but also necessitates doing the entire length on one breath, because I can’t for the life of me re-capture that ‘turning your head to the side’ breathing thing. So my fitness level (poor) means that I can only do a few of these each session.

I did a few casual stretches, put on my goggles, and off I went. Slice! Slice! Slice! (Thirty-nine slices is what it takes) and then I was there. Yes! I knew that had looked bloody good. The trick at this point is not to reveal that your lungs are about to burst. I flicked off my goggles, did a few quick pretend-stretches, grabbed a float and then headed back up the pool, kicking like mad to disguise the heavy breathing. I could feel this guy’s eyes upon me, and imagined him saying to me at the bar later on (although of course we never would meet at the bar later on) something like, ‘Viola, you were mesmerising in the pool tonight. Truly captivating.’

At this point I should have left the pool. Cut my losses while the odds were high, or whatever the expression is. But my shark-side needed nurturing, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to unleash it a second time. Even as I pulled my goggles over my eyes I knew it was a mistake, but before I knew it I was taking a deep breath and had lurched into the water. Slice! Slice! Slice! Uh-oh! I was losing speed – too many strokes in, and I’d only got as far as the club logo, located on the floor of the pool at the half-way mark. Several more strokes, and I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the end. Several more, and my shark was lost to a jellyfish. I slooped towards the surface, desperate for breath, and took a deep intake of air…just before I reached it.

Bugger! The coughing fit that followed had all three men staring at me in concern. And through streaming eyes I observed that Hairy Man had been joined by a gorgeous, slim blonde. One of the other two (skinny, ugly, prawn-to-my-dolphin) left the jacuzzi and ran around the pool towards me.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked.
I nodded, choking and spluttering.
‘Are you sure?’ he said, jumping in beside me.
I nodded, still coughing. He passed me a float and stood there until I’d caught my breath. About seven minutes.‘You had us worried,’ he added.
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. And swam carefully to the corner of the pool furthest from the changing rooms, and climbed the stairs slowly on purpose, as penance, and to remind myself not to play silly games.

Does everyone, I wonder, have an over-active imagination, like me? Should I be analysing the shark/dolphin imagery? Be deleting all this and researching world development issues? I wish it was Friday tomorrow and that it could be the weekend for ever. I need time for relaxation and recuperation.

Two more eventful things

As this blog entry suggests, two more things of note have happened. Gosh. It all makes my life appear rather exciting.

The first was yesterday, and involved Babe’s first real bolt for freedom. It was my turn to cook – hang on a minute, who am I trying to kid that we take turns? – and, would you believe, I was doing aubergine again. Honestly, I was. But I’d forgotten to remove the grill pan from the oven and it didn’t take long for the burning remnants of fish-finger coating to fill our kitchen and small house with a burning smell.

Other Half was in the sitting room with Babe, watching more Euro 2008 football. SIGH.
‘I’m opening the front door for five minutes,’ I said. ‘Because I’ve burnt something and the house smells.’ You may remember from a previous blog entry that Other Half has almost no sense of smell. Which is his excuse, by the way, for rarely realising that Babe’s nappy is pooey.

Other Half looked at me and then carried on watching TV. Babe looked up from his train set and then carried on playing. I went back into the kitchen and carried on reading my book and sipping wine. Oops! Slaving over a hot stove, I mean.

Ten minutes later, Other Half storms in, shouting.
‘Why have you left the front door open? Look where he is! Are you mad?’
I look past him, down the corridor, towards the front door. Babe is on the second step, a mere toddle or two from the pavement and the World At Large. He looks at me in the same knowing way he had when he looked up from his trainset, and I realise that he had listened and understood where his father had not.

I feel shocked but decide not to over-react.
‘You'd better fetch him in then,’ I say mildly.
‘What were you thinking, you *** *****?’ he responds angrily.

‘Look!’ I reply. ‘I told you I was opening the door. All you had to do was watch him and keep him safe for five minutes.’

‘I didn’t know you were leaving it open!’ he replies. ‘You should never leave the doors open when Babe is in the house!’

‘But, you ***** ********,’ I say, losing my rag, ‘I told you I was opening it.’
‘But I didn’t know what you meant. And I didn’t hear you,’ he shouts.

‘That is total crap!’ I retort. ‘This is yet another instance of you ignoring what I say, so that I feel forced to repeat myself incessantly, so that you can then accuse me of nagging and blathering on, so that you can then justify only listening when you want to. It’s sexist effing crap and I’ve had enough of it.’

I slam the kitchen door and gather the aubergine into a bowl. For thirty seconds I intend to slop it down the toilet.

‘And your bloody aubergine is going down the toilet,’ I yell through the kitchen window into the garden, where he and Babe are now playing football.

‘You should not leave doors open,’ he yells back.

‘Communist demon-blockhead!’ I scream.

I return to the bowl and consider launching it into the garden and onto his head. But instead I spoon it back into the pan and then add some extra coriander on top. I feel sorry that all he’s had to eat for the last two days has been ‘rabbit food’ and fish fingers and wish that, despite my desire to be a career woman, I could feed my family well. I feel that perhaps I don’t do anything very well. But more of that another time.

***

The other thing that happened was actually probably not exciting enough to detail here. It involved Other Half leaving a sleeping Babe in the car in Tesco’s car park while he came to help me carry back the shopping. I thought this rash and a bit rich after the door episode. But have expressed my feelings on the matter several times now and am pretty sure Other Half has heard and realises it was a mistake.
‘You should not leave doors open,’ he repeats in a muted monotone response. Which I think is man-talk for, ‘You’re right.’

Two significant things happen

Two things of particular significance happened last week. So I'm combining them into one big entry in place of the two I should have added then. Hope that's ok?

One was Babe’s first assassination attempt. And I was the assassinee. Does that word exist, I wonder? There is nothing like speaking baby talk and pigeon English at home to make one’s linguistic abilities disintegrate.

Anyway, it followed Other Half cooking our evening meal for the first time this year. It wasn’t fish, or ‘lamb in the oven’ (as opposed to on a piece of fence railing in the back garden - more of that another time), it was what I like to call his ‘omelette surprise’. And yes, not a very witty joke to crack, but the surprise is just how disgusting it is, even with practice.

Other Half’s favourite food, by the way, after fish and lamb, is aubergine cooked by his mother. Which is frankly a pain in the arse. In part, because clearly I am not his mother and therefore severely disadvantaged before I even step into the kitchen, but also because there is only so much you can do with an aubergine, and I know, because I’ve tried. But I digress.

So, on Wednesday last week, it was omelette surprise, cooked by Other Half while he watched the Croatia V Austria match. And given that the TV is not in the kitchen you can imagine what a catastrophe it was. To save himself time, he chopped the veg in front of the TV, then filled a pan with oil on the hob, and forgot to wait for it to heat before dropping in the mushrooms etc. It was a dripping oily sludge and didn’t go down well.

In an attempt to veil its revolting taste, he added extra salt. And trust me, you don’t want someone from where he is from ever adding ‘extra’ salt to your meal. Which is why I woke in the early hours, for once not because Babe was wailing, with a terrible thirst.

I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table and gulped thirstily before something caught in my throat, causing my eyeballs to nearly burst from my head and a jet-stream of water to crash up my nasal cavities. Other Half was, of course sleeping in the spare room and not there to assist me in my hour of need.

Winded and terrified, I threw open the bedroom door, staggered across the landing and into his room. By now I was about to expire. I threw myself onto him, fists pummelling his prostrate body, and he sat up in bed, reaching for the large kitchen knife he insists on keeping on the bedside table during the night in case we are attacked by vagabonds. Luckily, he sleeps with the blinds open, to make the most of daylight hours (it’s hot and sunny where he’s from) and quickly realised it was me. I saw a flicker of ‘What the f*ck does she want now?’ cross his face before it dawned on him that I was in serious trouble. Whining like a horse caught in a trap – I assume that someone, somewhere does trap horses – I tried, frantically, to slap myself on the back, indicating what I needed him to do.

Thank God he had been forced through years of military school under a communist regime. Grabbing me from behind, round the waist, he began to crush my ribs. On the third attempt, something small and soft that I spat straight onto the floor dislodged from my throat. What blissful relief! Fresh clean air coursed through my being and we collapsed, gasping, onto the bed. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, it has been a while since we did that.)

Some time later, I started whimpering helplessly and Other Half held me in his arms. (This happens quite a lot, usually around the middle of each month.) Later still, I decided to look and see what had nearly taken my life prematurely. It was foam, conical in shape, and orange. An earplug. And must have been left, discarded, under my bed many months ago until Babe found it earlier today, while I was scrabbling around looking for his ball. And dropped neatly into the glass by my bed, for once without knocking its contents onto the floor. Little bugger. Just wait until I put woodlice in his bottle…

***

The other thing of significance that happened, was us realising that Babe has started producing words in Other Half's second language, that he and I often communicate in. Other Half speaks to Babe in his mother tongue – which I can only produce the most basic of sentences in – as often as he can remember to, which isn’t that often. And he gabbles it really fast, giving him b-all chance, in my humble opinion, of picking up so much as a word. But Babe has, as I’ve said, started producing some words of our other shared language, in a whiny and irritated voice:

‘Come on, X’ (‘X’ represents Other Half’s name), and ‘Don’t!’.

Obviously, it is not me he has learnt these utterances from me; they reveal nothing of the dynamic of my realtionship with Other Half and I do not need to reflect on them or consider possible learning outcomes. Good night and sleep well.

Highs and Lows, and ferries

I don't know what to write about today. I'm very tired and not feeling very funny but am committed to updating this blog twice-weekly. Perhaps I'll share the highest and lowest points of the last 24 hours.

As predicted, Babe did not sleep well last night. In fact, he woke every twenty minutes or so between midnight and 3.30am, which was much worse than usual, and he was up by half past six this morning, despite our disrupted night. Other Half and I had agreed to be firm with him, and make him go back to sleep in his own bed, but this weighty resolve had not been tested by the three previous nights of sleeping through, so it was last night that I had to be tough. And Babe didn't like it at all, yelling angrily when I insisted repeatedly on putting him back into his cot.

At 2am, Other Half threw back the duvet and stormed around the bed, shouting that Babe was 'traumatic'. For a minute I wondered if he was being sympathetic, and taking his turn at the being tough. Unfortunately it was simply a linguistic error and what he actually meant was that he thought Babe was 'traumatised', and wanted to bring him into bed with us to calm him down. (Yes, 'us' - we are trying to return to sharing a bed but this will not be a go-er if Babe is hell-bent on sharing it with us.) The ensuing argument, in the corridor outside Babe's bedroom, resulted in Other Half storming into the spare room, as I didn't want to undo the hard work of the last couple of hours.

But by 3am my resolve collapsed and Babe was in with me, snuggling against my back and tucking his feet into my pajama bottoms. It took me another half an hour to drop off myself, and I laid in bed, tears welling up behind my eyelids. Angry with Babe, angry with Other Half, angry with myself for not knowing what to do and for being fat. I woke up thinking I would just have to take the day off work, and then realised I couldn't as I had a meeting to attend. That was a low, low point, what with Babe being tired and grumpy still, and an hour and a half left to kill before dropping him at nursery. I don't know how I survived the morning at work, trying but failing to complete simple tasks in logical order.

I am struck by what a creature of habit Babe is. With some obvious exceptions in the sleep department of course. He loves to have his feet massaged while having his morning and evening milk. He starts to take his shoes off while we're waiting for my friends to open their front doors. He likes to wear a hat.

We have come into the habit of snuggling up on the sofa at lunch-time, when I've picked him up after work. I put CBeebies on and close my eyes, while he watches for twenty minutes or so. If I forget to wrap a blanket around us he goes off to get it and pulls it over both of us.

Today, after the traumas of last night, he wanted to be especially close to me. (Other Half helpfully pointed out that this probably means I did traumatise him.) We were leaning against one another, my arm overlapping one of his, and he was sharing my crisps and sandwich. I sat up to reach my drink and he sat up a bit too, and then waited for me before snuggling back down and shuffling so that I rested my arm back in the position it had been in. This isn't an obvious high point of the day, is it? But it made me feel so tickley-fluttery tickety-boo happy. Just being quietly, acceptingly, comfortingly beautifully in-company with my son. Similar in feeling, for me, to lying with the sun on your face on a ferry crossing the oiled-calm surface of the Aegean. Spray in the breeze and a beer on the bench. Rare moments when, for a second or two, your brain stops whirring and the intrinsic beauty of life takes hold of you. Long may such precious moments last.