Algarve

aaarghhh

The other day I came home and panicked: ‘oh my god! We’ve been broken into!’ but no that was just how messy I had left the house. This photo pretty much sums up life at the moment as we inch towards our departure from London.

Dah-dah dah-dah Lim-BO!

Limbo:
a) to manoeuvre under a pole, most usually done by zany party people;
b) that dodgy place you learn about in Catholic school where God leaves you while he decides if you deserve to join him for all eternity in the paradise of heaven or burn and wail in hell’s raging fires and brimstone;
c) the state we currently find ourselves in living in London but thinking of home.

When we came here we bought one-way tickets as an incentive to stay at least a year. Now over four years later we’re looking to head back but that seems easier said than done. London is great but unfortunately not an option for us long-term. We want Romily to grow up knowing her extended family and I want a backyard, a dishwasher, and hey, call me spoiled, not to be sleeping on a futon in the lounge room.

Brendan feels the responsibility of having to bring home the bacon and in these uncertain financial times rightly believes that a piglet in the hand is worth two at the trough… or something like that. I’m a definite believer in quitting while you’re ahead and it’s frustrating when you’ve mentally moved on from a situation that you remain physically stuck in. In the meantime we are reminding ourselves that Melbourne in August is gloomy and are planning a Summer holiday, so should soon have some sunny snaps to post here. But to tell you the truth, as much as I’ll miss it, the blog post I’m looking forward to is the one that will be entitled ‘Farewell London’.

*

Now here’s someone who is certainly not in limbo but moving ahead in leaps and bounds:

Fun and games

Mid-April already… how did that happen?

Now, here’s an idea for the world’s most difficult computer game: a true-to-life simulation of looking after a baby. The game must be played 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It comes with one hundred instruction manuals, all with slightly different rules. Just when you think you have a handle on things you are whisked to a new level and the state of play is nothing like you’ve ever experienced before. What you consider a brilliant move one day turns out to be a complete failure the next. You are permitted to hand the joystick over to someone else, however the effect of this on your score is hard to determine. The game is not ‘fun’ as such but the interface is so damn cute that the moment you start playing you are addicted. With over six billion people/ex-babies in the world surely I’m onto something here.

I now realise that women with young children talk about these children so much not because they want to be baby-obsessed bores, but because there is so little time left for anything else. For example since we’ve been back from Melbourne Romily’s sleep hasn’t been the best (let’s put it this way, I knew we were in trouble when I found myself thinking ‘last night wasn’t so bad, she only woke up three times…’) and so the majority of my day is spent planning and plotting and implementing methods that may help her get through the night and have good naps. The happenings of the wider world seem trivial by comparison.

What started as a ‘tales of our travels’ blog now looks like turning into a ‘lets look at the baby’ blog which was obviously not the intention at the outset. And while I find it fascinating that Romily can now roll over and seems to be displaying a preference for sweet potato over pear, I wonder if anyone else (well, aside from the other gals in my mothers’ group… and my mum) thinks this is an interesting topic of discussion. But it’s all I got, so here you go…

The Romily Tour: Melbourne February 2009

Standard question number one: so, how was she on the flight?

Standard answer: she was great… we were wrecks… but she was great!


I think my favourite moment was at the end of the ‘oh my god when will it ever end… I think time is moving backwards… dear god are we still just over the Indian ocean’ leg, otherwise known as the dubai to melbourne leg or what I prefer to call 16-hours in hell, when I turned to see all the other passengers waiting to disembark, each looking more tired, dishevelled and refugee-like than the next and there was little R bright eyed and bushy tailed, smiling and bouncing and looking like it was just the best day ever…ahh youth. I guess for a baby getting to sleep on one of their parents is the equivalent to a first class cabin.




Romily, like all babies, was born believing she is the centre of the universe. Being ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ over every day by scores of new people only consolidated this view. I don’t think she could have asked for more from a holiday. The sun was shining, B had a month off work and I got to sleep-in on occasion, so I don’t think we could have asked for more either.

Meet the Grandparents




and the GREAT-grandma



I've not come across warm weather before... but I think I like it!

Taking to Melbourne cafe culture like a native

The maternal line

Just chillin' with some family ...

...and friends

with baby in brussels

And now we enter the age of Travel A.C. (after child). We had been warned, ‘It’s not that you can’t holiday with children, it’s just that you won’t enjoy it’. So we thought we’d try a trip while Romily is still in her easy portability stage (that is, before her idea of a good time becomes crawling along a filthy carriage floor or toddling through a crowded airport terminal). Although our luggage may have suggested otherwise, our trip of choice wasn’t a six week hiking expedition through the wilds of the Himalayas but one night in a swish hotel in Brussels via Eurostar.

We found the city charming and the people friendly and laidback. I was able to meet up with my cousin and her husband, and as fellow parents we were able to indulge in baby-related chat as well as receiving an insider’s view of the city.

A significant difference to Travel B.C. (before child) is that strangers regularly spoke to us - or, more accurately, they spoke to our baby… with a few follow-up questions to us… primarily to get information about her.

Our next travel challenge is a 24-hour flight to Melbourne. Previously in a departure lounge we would be amongst the passengers eyeing the family with a small child and silently praying, ‘please god, let them not be sitting next to us’. Now we will be the dreaded passengers… the power! I can’t wait!

the rules are there ain't no rules

We are all born with a reflex to grip onto things. If you put your finger in a baby’s palm it will grasp it and if you put your finger under a baby’s toes, its little toes will curl under and attempt to grab. I read that this is a carry over from the time when we were all covered in fur and little (furry) babies would ride on their mother’s backs clinging on with their fingers and toes.

Aside from the being covered in fur part, this is quite a nice image. I imagine mother and baby in the cave slowly plodding along, sleeping, eating, cooing. Dad would occasionally go out with the other cavemen to hunt a woolly mammoth and for entertainment there were stories around the campfire and drawings on the cave walls. It was a simpler time. Okay, probably everybody died at twenty-five but there didn’t seem to be the multitude of stresses that we now subject ourselves to - the extra complications that we choose to add to our lives. Figuring out how to look after a baby is an area especially prone to this over-complication.

While other mothers-to-be in my antenatal class had pre-baby sleepless nights thinking about childbirth, it was my pre-bedtime reading of The Contented Little Baby, with its quarterly hourly instructions, that left me waking in a cold sweat. I thought it would make more sense once we’d actually had the baby, but a few weeks of trying to follow it (albeit vaguely) did my head in. Here’s a sample, for a one-week-old baby:

7AM
· Baby should be awake, nappy changed and feeding no later than 7am (a bit hard to enforce if you only managed to get the baby back to sleep at 6am after a night feed)
· He needs 25-35 minutes on the full breast, then offer 10-15 minutes on the second breast after you have expressed 60-90mls. (Romily would have 20 minutes max at this age. Expressing is fiddly and time consuming so why bother with expressing if you’re not planning to use the milk?)
· If he fed at 5am or 6am, offer 20-25 minutes from the second breast after expressing approximately 90mls. (These ‘if…’ instructions add to the confusion).
· Do not feed after 8am, as it will put baby off his next feed (the use of bold type is especially terrifying)
· He can stay awake for up to one and a half hours (at one week Romily was doing well if she was staying awake for up to one and a half minutes).

And on it goes, followed by another four and a half pages of detailed instructions to get you through the rest of the day. At two weeks the routine changes, then again at four weeks, with ten routines in the first year. For night feeds there is to be ‘no talking or eye contact’; naps must be ‘fully swaddled and in the dark with the door shut’; baby must be tucked up in bed each night by 7pm (good luck with this one!)

Criticizing this book is like shooting fish is a barrel but for the clueless first time parent its tempting to believe that an established set of guidelines will work and make your life easier. In reality I would like to meet the infant and parents who conform exactly to its rule (although I wonder if they could find the time to fit meeting me into their timetable).

Following my extensive (i.e. nine weeks) experience as a parent I am planning to pen a baby care manual of my own. It’s tentatively titled The Baby Cuddler and here are some of main points:

· As long as the baby feeds every two to fours hours and basically knows the difference between night and day, what she chooses to do with the rest of her time is up to her.

· You can’t spoil a baby. They know how to do a few things but manipulating you isn’t one of them. So go ahead and pick her up when she cries. It reduces her stress levels as well as yours.

· Cuddle your baby to sleep. Okay this may turn into a habit, but what else do you have to do?

· Do not follow this advice! It works for us and our kid, but who’s to say it will work for you? And it’s just working for us now. Things change all the time. Any minute things could all go pear-shaped.

· Slow down. Think ‘caveman’. Hope for the best.

tuning into the baby channel: all baby all of the time

Jerry Seinfeld has said:

The funny thing about being single… see I had married friends and I wouldn’t visit them when I was single because I thought their life was so pathetically depressing.

And then, now that I’m married and I have single friends, I feel I don’t really like to be with them now `cos I find their lives trivial and meaningless.

And I think in both cases I was correct.

Substitute ‘single’ for ‘childless’ and ‘married’ for ‘parent’ and you have an idea of our experience of the chasm between these states of before and after. When we didn’t have a child we really didn’t think about children much, them being small beings belonging to other people … now that we do have our own she is the absolute focus of our attention.

Everyone says your life changes when a baby comes along, but you have to experience it for yourself to understand how totally. It’s not just the different things you have to do (feeding, changing and settling making up a good proportion of the day) but how you feel - we can spend hours just staring at her and cuddling her - marvelling at her wonderfulness. All she has to do is be herself - a lovely little baby who is now more interactive - making eye contact and smiling at us - melting our hearts and adding so much to our lives.

Okay, I guess this is quite a soppy post, different to the ones that have gone before, but like I said, now we’re living on the flipside.