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 :).