A Little Spot of Romance

 
Not yet seven and the baby's screaming -
good morning anyway, my tired Valentine.
Disheveled and sweaty in the least sexy way,
but I'm terribly glad we are yours and mine.

Please shut that superfluous alarm up,
it's trashing our orchestra of screams;
too late, the romance is playing dead, 
gone to dally with quiet morning dreams. 

We're up, she's up, the house is up,
Cupid, why can't we all just be down?
The dog is barking into the cacophony,
we must be waking up the entire town.  

I think there's fresh clothes on the floor, 
definitely dirty dishes looking for a clean;
yes, I know the household is a bit askew,
I'm going for the on-trend ramshackle lean.

Watch yourself, my coffee slurping Valentine,
Mini Cupidess just put weetbix on your shirt;
don't worry, rub it in with the banana gunk
And the miscellaneous congregated baby dirt.

Now I got you a card, all glittering and cheap,
Picked with love and thrift at the grocery store;
goodbye, take the garbage on your way out, 
There's no room in the kitchen bin anymore.

Naps, no naps, and tipped up sippy cups, 
avocado painting on the high chair seat;
high time to inhale a bag of gummy bears,
Mummy's sneaky own Valentine's treat. 

The dog's attacking the kitchen door again,
and balance has left the washing machine;
I'll let the mop make out with the broom
and leave tomorrow to work on being clean.

Hello, can you hear me, are you in the car, 
can you pick up more loo paper on the way?
I'll put the baby down and then we'll have 
our shortened parental style Valentine's Day. 

Carbonara, wine, some parmesan cheese,
And three candles on the television stand;
not the classiest restaurant in the suburb
but ample quality for exhausted demand. 

Documentary down and lounge lamp on low,
there's enough time for a spot of romance yet;
no, you're not imagining it, the baby's awake,
that wine is as lucky as you're going to get. 

Let's go to bed with a synchronized flump,
to pass out cold as we both just need to do;
let all the energetic love birds eat our dinner,
while we sleep and snore and love me and you. 

What is your Valentine's Day story?

M x

Underneath the Fever

When my daughter started child care earlier this month, I knew that we would be up against a steady wave of daycare ailments and illnesses, resplendent and resilient in all their combined snotty, sniffly, snuffly glory. 

While I am not entirely naive, my first-time-mummy-self optimistically believed there would be an adjustment period, a blissful and relatively sustained snot-free time in the sand box before the first illness set in. 

Over my morning cups of sleepy coffee and cogitation, I always imagined my daughter's immune defenses to be nothing short of a solid wall, carefully constructed from nine months of exclusive breastfeeding bricks and iron-fortified cereal mortar. 

Every day, I would wrap my hands around the coffee cup, warming my fingers and the cockles of my naivety with the happy notion that it would take weeks, months, maybe even years, for the nasty viruses of the childcare world to chip away at that impressive wall.

I was delusional. Downright - stark raving, looney-tune, kilo bag of mixed salted nuts, dancing by myself on the side of the road in my worst holey underwear, seeing Bette Midler and Hugh Grant buying crumpets in a Melbourne supermarket, eating chalk seasoned with toothpaste for dinner - DELUSIONAL. 

Perhaps I drank too much coffee, or too few cups of the stuff, but I can openly confess that the great wall of baby immunity that I had built in my head was nothing but a shimmering mirage in a mental desert of exhausted parenting madness.  

It took all of two short days in care for my previously non-snotty daughter to lick the communal toys, lick some stolen sippy cups, and presumably lick the other babies and the educators and the nursery floor as well, and pick up her first unidentified daycare malady. 

The first sign of the unwelcome bug was when the baby's nose started to run away with itself - but much like with a nest of white ants, the framework was damaged beyond repair by the time the work showed itself on the surface. 

The opening days of the illness parade were uneventful: snot, snot and more snot, with a bit of grumbling and a lot of forcefully refuted saline spraying, nasal suctioning and unavoidable nose wiping.

The fanfare kicked up a notch about the time we ran out of tissues, when my daughter's liquid leak took on a distinctive indistinct yellow-greenish hue (the one time you really don't want to be wearing the Australian sporting colours), and the bug also jumped ship and took up residence in my nose and throat. 

Things became unpleasant. I was hot and sweaty and grumpy, and so was the baby. Our heads were abuzz with aches and thumps and the house was floating in an unpleasant haze of toxic little tissue parcels and lethargy. We couched, with Peppa Pig and Hootabelle and Elmo and all his friends filling the inevitable void.

Proving faithful old Murphy was still hard at work down at the law firm even while we were lazing about on our sick beds, my darling little liquid-leaker chose the height of our fuzzy head-cold woozies to become completely and hysterically terrified of all things sneezing, and all things nose blowing.

Every sneeze elicited an intense bout of screaming, accompanied by the angry kicking of little feet against the carpet. Every nose blown into a tissue, whether it was a petite little exhale of negligible proportions or a thunderously productive and powerful achoo, resulted in the baby turning red, scrunching up her face in the most unpleasant manner and squealing at the highest possible volume on her inbuilt speaker.

Just as the malady parade reached fever pitch, and the balloons started to drift off into the sky to make an environmentally unfriendly mess somewhere else, the whole icky parade switched direction.

Out of the snot and the fever and the aching legs, out of the tissue wasteland and the leaking bottles of baby paracetamol with adult-proof-child-safe caps, came a completely unexpected and virulent bout of mutant daycare bug gastro. 

Without any warning whatsoever, I was plunged into an abyss of throwing up into a bucket while trying to sing nursery rhymes and change the batteries in a malfunctioning, off key musical toy lion covered in cracker crumbs and snot.

Worse than the head-breaking lion was the unavoidable and instantaneous realisation that throwing up is far higher on the baby noise terror scale than the mere trifling sounds of sneezing and nose blowing. For every dalliance with the bucket, my daughter would issue forth a blood-curdling scream that would send me back to the bucket, a circle so unpleasant it can't be painted with words.
 
With my husband interstate and my family very far away, I was left without back-up, looking hopefully at the crack of light coming from the back of the television, and pleading with the universe for a box of electrolyte lollipops and a wet face washer. 

Clutching onto some ice cubes and the dying tendrils of my dignity, I slowly scrounged up the walls of abyss, changing nappies and wiping noses and preparing finger foods and running baths and singing bedtime songs and throwing up (quietly) and reading Where is the Green Sheep, wishing it was anywhere else in the universe but here. 

Where once I would have curled up into a ball and focused on stillness, feeling atrociously sorry for myself, I jumped right into the ugly wave of sea sickness and sploshed around until there was nothing left in my stomach, and my daughter was fed, washed, giggled, crawled, storied and asleep.

It was horrible, and it was painful, and it was brilliantly colourful in the greyest of ways, but I managed to muddle through and come out the other side - and that, right there, is the underlying magic of parenting. 
 
It's the ugliest and strongest kind of magic, the one hidden between the sweaty bed clothes, the one floundering around listlessly at the bottom of the toilet bowl. It's the type of magic that makes you all warm and fuzzy (and potentially feverish, depending on the intensity of the ailment) and sends your ovaries into a little spin and rinse cycle when you least expect it.
 
It's the magic that propels mothers to simultaneously fix mechanical lions and throw up in buckets, and makes fathers stay awake at night when they are interstate, and helps parents find the energy to become parents again and again and again.

It's the magic that gets you up at midnight and three in the morning and again at quarter to five, and it's the non-sparkly fairy dust that falls from the sky and keeps you going, through and beyond the eleventh napless day in a row.

It's the force that sees you change nappies that would be better attacked with a fire hose, and gives you the extra soul points to get you through another rendition of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and the only reason that you agree to spend every happy hour dicing up finger food in the kitchen instead of hightailing it down to the bar for a cold mojito and share plate.

It's the reason people without children think about switching out Sundays down at the pub for Sundays down at the park, and the spare room for a nursery, and sleep-ins for just a few minutes of plain old sleep - it's the reason, even though those people don't actually know that the magic exists just yet.  

David Frost once said: Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or healthy adult." Having just had my heart on my fluffy dressing gown sleeve and my sleep on hold for the better part of a very long and snotty fortnight, I couldn't agree more.

How do you get through the sick days at your house?
Where do you find the magic?

M x

Game, Set, Couch

With the recent heatwave done and dusted, it's finally cool enough to settle back down onto the couch and into my favourite summer sport: watching the Australian Open on telly.

To some, the Open is just another tennis tournament, a televised parade of extremely fit people hitting a small fuzzy ball from one end of a court to another, mixed up with a pastiche of grunting, drink sipping and towel wiping.

To others, like myself, the Open is the holy grail of the summer experience. It is better than lazy days at the swimming pool or keeping cool in the frozen section of the supermarket, and right up there with having your significant other scrub the shower and toilet while you take a sneaky afternoon nap.

There is something quintessentially Australian about lying spreadeagled on the couch under a pedestal fan, with remote and beverage in hand, yelling swathes of ocker encouragement and dismay at the players, and grunting in perpetual disagreement with the umpire.

There is something even more iconically Australian about catching an overloaded tram to Melbourne Park and sweating through a five-setter on an unshaded outside court for four hours, with only an expensive hot dog and your ground pass for sustenance.

It's oddly addictive, this Open watching business, a sweaty fortnight of chance and upsets and possibilities. Can Lleyton do it again? Can the Feds hold off the young charge? Can the new kid knock the socks off the number three seed and blow the tournament wide open? Will the compere say something completely inappropriate during his off-the-cuff interview and throw the whole affair into scandal? Will the roof stay open?

If you had a spare afternoon in the beer garden, I could buy a jug and bore you into a siesta with the minute details about the most memorable matches of the past decade, or the picky reasons I prefer one commentator over another, or the sixty-seven plus reasons why I will always barrack for Federer.

But for the life of me, I could not get out on the court and show you how it's done. As so often occurs in the world of passionate sport enthusiasm, my love for the game belies my complete inability to actually play the dratted sport in any way, shape or form.

My lack of skill was not borne from a lack of effort. As a child, I spent countless summer days standing on the tennis court in direct midday sun, smothered in an unfortunate mix of sunscreen and shambling embarrassment, trying my uncoordinated little heart out.

My repeated attempts to hit the ball resulted in little more than wild air swings, dull thuds, tangles with the net, endless double faults and exasperated friends and coaches. My mind had trouble focusing on the ball, wandering off to the choose-your-own-adventure book I was reading or through the latest piece of choreography from jazz ballet class.

I put it in extra effort. I tried hitting the ball against the wall like the famous Australian tennis star Evonne Goolagong Cawley did as a kid, I tried marathon totem tennis sessions in the backyard, I tried sticking my tongue out at all sorts of various acute angles on the hope a bit of concentration face might help - but it didn't.

Eventually, I had to put tennis away in the 'not for me' basket - along with Nippers, basketball, netball, athletics, squash, trampolining, kanga cricket, volleyball, body boarding, BMX riding, mini-golf, roller blading, ice skating, table tennis, frisbee, rope climbing and competitive swimming.

It took the majority of my childhood and teenage years to work out I could dance, and I could run long distances reasonably well, but that I couldn't (and shouldn't try) participate in team sports or go anywhere near a ball or bat of any sort, without at least wearing protective headgear and an inflatable suit of armour.

While I love teaching my daughter new things, sport is the one aspect of life where I will happily step aside and leave all the lessons to her infinitely more physically coordinated father.

I will sit on the sidelines with my fingers and toes firmly crossed that she can throw and catch, hit and bat, putt and bowl, and jump and sprint with even a modicum of the sporting grace and coordination I dreamed about from the chilly icepack embrace of the first aid office.

If sporting prowess was measured in effort, I would be a World Champion with an impressive trophy cabinet and several lucrative sponsorship deals - but as it's not, and I'm not, I will stick with cheering the tennis gods and goddesses on from the physical safety of my couch. 

Thirty, love. Hit on!

Do you follow the tennis? Do you enjoy watching or playing sport?

M x

The Hardest Decision, The Easiest Day

Sometimes, the hardest things you can imagine actually turn out to be the easiest - as was the (unexpected) case when my baby started childcare this week.

After winning the childcare place lottery in October, I spent two and a half long months dreading the inevitable moment of separation, and second-guessing my hard fought decision.

On the days I was scrambling to keep the contents of the house off the floor while simultaneously pureeing pork and mash and paying the car rego at the Post Office, I could see the wisdom of my decision shining through the cloudy oven door.

On the days when I was writing articles to deadline and submitting job applications amid chaos, I would flop open my mind and mentally skip down the childcare driveway with bottles of expressed milk and bouquets of roses in hand.  

On the days when I watched my daughter playing with other babies at Parents Group catch ups and annual family gatherings, pushing toys back and forward and freaking out when they touched her hair, I would relax into my decision and start prattling about the many virtues and benefits of social interaction from a young age.

On the days when my daughter would light up the room, or unexpectedly manage to stand on her onesie clad foot, or suddenly find a decisive 'bird' or 'ball' from within the constant stream of babble, I would emotionally bail on the whole childcare caper.

I would resolve to become unresolved, and start preparing my fiery argument against childcare, for consideration and endless discussion in the marital decision court over turkey burgers and salad come dinner time.

As we descended into the final fortnight of unadulterated stay-at-home-mummydom, my clingy mother status skyrocketed from lousy home brand cling wrap to the top shelf, brand name stuff.

I spent countless hours holding onto my baby for dear life, even when she clearly wanted to be out of my arms and exploring the ceaselessly amazing fluff content of the lounge room carpet.

My hug and kiss rations multiplied, and where I would normally give one kiss, I started to dole out ten, with an extra butterfly kiss and a special peck on the cheek for added good measure.

I unintentionally dug deeper all round, ensuring that every block tower was knocked down with unusual oomph, every outfit change was selected with unexpected fastidiousness, every Incy Wincy rendition delivered with extra special hand movements and embarrassing facial expressions. 

Unfortunately, cling wrap is not thick enough to keep out the world, and my excessive hug-a-thon eventually dribbled away into the inevitable orientation day that had been marked on the kitchen calendar for so long.

Orientation was far cooler than I had been prepared to give it credit for. It was a bit like my own personal halfway house, all the freedom and responsibility of entering the real childcare world with the safety net of being able to run back up the corridor and into the nursery room whenever my panic got the better of me.

As I tiptoed out of the room for my trial separation, heart somewhere between my esophagus and my churning stomach, my daughter pounced on a pile of triangular shape sorting blocks and stuck a plastic stegosaurus in her mouth - go away, mum, you're cramping my prehistoric dining adventure.

With my heart still somehow inside my body and the trial separation inked in the childcare day book as a theoretical success, we progressed with lightning speed to the real deal - the first day of childcare, no safety net attached.

My husband and I decided to climb the mountain together - or rather, I dragged him up the mountain against his will to help push me along when I tried to turn around and roll back down to the safety of another day at home with a morning nap and afternoon pram walk. 

After so much anticipation and dread, though, the mountain seemed radically smaller in real life. Despite months of technicolour nightmares, I did not self combust or hyperventilate or have to dodge cesspits of fire and brimstone. 

Perhaps it was the afterglow of the orientation trial separation, or the promise of uninterrupted french toast and coffee for breakfast, or the wonderful teachers in the centre, but I felt strangely calm as I dropped my daughter off and effectively tipped our lives upside down forever.

I kissed my daughter goodbye and simply stepped out the front door and into the new world order, leaving her to crawl off into a wooden mirror maze with a look of baby awe plastered all over her face.

My daughter didn't notice I was gone, I didn't cry like a baby or wail like a banshee, my toast and coffee did not get tipped on the floor or covered in steamed apple and pear once - and I even managed to vacuum the skirting boards properly for the first time in nine months.

Six hours later, my daughter greeted me at the nursery door with a shoe full of sand and a face full of sheer excitement - and in that moment the hardest decision I ever made suddenly became the easiest.

Have you had to make tough family decisions? Have you left your child in care? I would love to hear your stories.

M x

Sharing for #FYBF at www.withsomegrace.com

Constructing Christmas

My name is Meg, and I'm a Christmasoholic. 

When the supermarket fills with tinny Christmas carols each November, I switch from being a (relatively) reasonable person to a tinsel waving loon, with one hand in the decoration box and the other firmly planted in the shortbread cookie tin. 

Like a broken carols record, I insist on mapping out all the Christmas light displays within a twenty kilometre radius and visiting them one by one in all to revel in their multi-coloured high wattage goodness.  

I love to send and receive Christmas cards the old fashioned way, with a pen and an envelope and a stamp and a little love, and have been known to lose afternoons days admiring the glittery holiday trim displays lined up in department stores. 

The Christmas tree is the pinnacle of my home-spun Christmas wonderland, holding court in the lounge room from the first day of December until the first day of the New Year (or perhaps the second, or even the third, depending on the severity of the Auld Lang Syne hangover). 

Sure, my tree is just a spiky plastic shrub wrapped in artificial materials and cheap lights, and it attracts debris and dust and will probably be bowled over by the dog at least twice before the season is out - but it's a special spiky shrub, and it makes me feel like a little magic might just happen. 

My husband does not share my level of enthusiasm for the silly season - while he is more than happy to down a Christmas beer and throw some king prawns on the barbecue, he is a strictly non-tinsel type of guy - the perfect naysaying yin to my obsessive decorative curling ribbon yang. 

He dislikes the triteness of the whole occasion, and the entrenched culture of commercial madness and giving gifts just for the sake of having something to wrap and unwrap on the big day - and really, if we're being honest here, who can blame him? 

The sight of a mile long queue at the end of a gift grabbing bonanza, and the effort of having to conjure up a fake smile of appreciation for your seventh box of chocolate covered macadamia koalas, well, it can deflate even the most buoyant seasonal balloon of happiness. 

It's not just the consumerist aspect that gets under my husbands humbug skin. He hates being dragged along to check out the Christmas window displays, and we have long since ascertained he has zero interest in trimming the tree or trying to form any sort of sentimental attachment to a bauble.
In fact, he is so uninterested in the whole tree trimming business that he usually just settles back on the couch with a beer and shrugs intermittently when I ask if the tree looks wonky or the decorations seem unbalanced.

Tree of disinterest

Last year, when I was heavily pregnant and trying to wrap a tangle of lights around the tree without bursting my waters or my leggings, he took his life in his hands by asking if we were really, actually, seriously, like REALLY, going to do the 'whole Christmassy Santa type thing' with our daughter.
Luckily for him, the lights were too tangled to use as a weapon and the baubles were unbreakable plastic so my only retort was to scowl and mutter angry insults. Sigh-bah-grinchy-humbug-sigh. 

With his aura of Noel nonchalance, it comes as no surprise that he is less than enthusiastic about entering the prime parental decade of nibbling carrots and making up stories about a jolly dude sweating around Australia in a climatically inappropriate red suit. 

To a point, I can understand his reluctance. It takes a lot of parental effort to perpetuate a myth the size of Santa, and even more energy and dedication to allen key a fifty-seven piece swing set together at midnight without making a sound. 

It can also be sheer hard work to deliver a sleigh load of cheer and sliced ham on a non-negotiable date year in year out, no matter the state of your personal credit card economy or how many end of year bevvies you've consumed. 

In the dim light of his unenthusiastic Christmas light bulb, though, I can see that he is conflicted - while he would like to wrap the whole season up and store it at the back of the wardrobe, he also wants to deliver a little bit of Christmas magic to our daughter.

Santa is a top bloke with an excellent team of elves and PR advisers, but he's still just a man with a sleigh and he needs a little parental help to spread the magic right across the world in 24 short hours. 

He needs our assistance to usher kids into shopping centre photography lines, oversee the writing of wish lists and to carry out the all-important tasks of gift wrapping and Christmas morning present placement.

I've been waiting impatiently to help Santa deliver the magic to my own family since I was initiated into the land of the knowing aged nine and a quarter, when a series of forgotten price tags and a suspicious run in with the Easter Bunny in the laundry at midnight lit up the truth brighter than Rudolph's glowing nose.

I'm sure that when the pudding boils down to it my husband will be willing and waiting too, and when he's actually chewing on those carrots and making up those stories (and feigning excitement about them while stumbling about the lounge room at 5:20am trying to find AAA batteries and a pair of box cutters), he will find himself having the time of his life. 

Goodness only knows I will, complete with jingle bell earrings and a string of tinsel wrapped around my head like a sparkly turkey on a festive mission. 

My name is Meg, and I'm a Christmasoholic - are you? 

M x

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A Parent in Six Letters

PARENT.
One simple word.
Six homogenous letters.
Infinite possible individual meanings. 

After seven months in the job, this is how I spell PARENT.

P is for Pooplosion
Welcome to parenthood, the world of the brilliantly brave and the domain of the mighty pooplosion.

Pooplosions are the regrettable centerpiece of every parenting table, and are motivation enough to have you skulling Pinot from a plastic tumbler well before morning tea time.

As with most grand scale disasters, pooplosions have a tendency to be delivered at exactly the wrong time - when you are running late for dinner, when you forgot to pack a spare change of clothes in the nappy bag, when you've just buckled into the car for a long trip and as soon as you've finished dressing the baby after the bath.

There is no point sugar coating the most sour truth in the room, and certainly no way to avoid the clean up. Best just list your rose coloured glasses on eBay, roll up your sleeves and create a toilet training advent calendar for the fridge.

A is for anxiety
Parenting can be one of the most terrifying rides of your life, particularly if you are the kind of person who likes to travel through life with a mapped out travel itinerary and a well-stocked lunch bag.
 
If you listen closely enough, you can almost hear your helicopter parenting blades warming up from the moment you step foot in the delivery suite and taking off as you walk out through the protective hospital doors.

The fear of something, anything, happening to your adorable little munchkin gets right into your worrying parent veins and runs through your jumpy nervous system like some kind of offspring-induced crack.

The faint splotch of a perfectly normal rash is enough to have you scheduling urgent consultations with Doctor Google and plotting out the fastest route to the local children's hospital, while the slightest coughing sound will have you on high alert and fastidiously checking airways as though you are a plumber checking for bits of wayward plastic in a drain pipe.

You can strap the television to the cabinet and you can follow the vaccination schedule to the day, but you just can't stop the big, bad world from revolving or sneaking through the (childproofed) venetians. 

R is for Rocking
The show is done, the band has hit the bar and the era for rocking out is over. The long nights are now reserved for monotonously rocking your baby up and down the hallway, like a malfunctioning Ugg-boot clad robot stuck on a short wire between the bedroom and the nursery.

To break up the relentless routine there are other soothing motions to choose from - walking, swaying, carrying, pacing, whispering, singing, shh patting, and even downright pleading - but when you boil it down, they are all just rocking by another name, and none of them smell sweet.

Rocking is not confined to the baby kingdom.  Even if you do manage to jump the dirty-nappy moat and hitch a ride to town on a passing pumpkin carriage, you will still be owned by the power of the rock.

Without even realising it, you will lilt from side to side on the park bench, you will sway when you stand in line at the ATM, and you will take the concept of nursing a beer to whole new heights. Rock on.

E is for Exhaustion
Remember that time you snaffled Foo Fighters concert tickets and stayed awake until dawn listening to their entire back catalogue on repeat even though you had to work the next day? And that crazy week at college when you pulled three all-night essay sessions in a row just to scrape through the semester?

Despite what you thought at the time, you now know that you weren't even the slightest bit tired; you were as fresh as an infuriatingly pert daisy, and gaily skipping through the great park of life with some nice vino and a basket of high quality cheeses.

Tired didn't actually exist until you were hit by parental exhaustion - the kind of all encompassing, all terrifying lassitude that eats your brain and etches dark circles under your eyes.

It makes you put the butter away in the garbage bin and salt in your coffee, and leaves you zoning out in the cold section of the supermarket with a superfluous packet of smoked salmon in your hand, wondering if you were actually meant to be getting nappies from the discount chemist down the road.

I confess: somewhere around week five, I became so consumed by parental exhaustion that I actually forgot my own daughter's name. Seriously. Luckily, most of the important things come back to you after some uninterrupted sleep and coffee (and a quick check through your Facebook history).

N is for never again
Somewhere toward the pointy end of squeezing a seemingly over-sized baby out of a seemingly under-sized exit hatch, women across the ages have found themselves making desperate plea bargains and promises with the universe: mine was never again, never again, I promise, if you just get me through this, dear poor body, I will never, ever do this to you again.

Somewhere in the early morning hours of new parenthood, you will more than likely find yourself slumped against a wall, clutching a strange assortment of items (maybe a pillow, a single sandal, a bottle of tea tree oil, a microwave steriliser lid) and swearing under your breath: baby, if you will just go to sleep, go to sleep, I will never, ever, EVER, do this again.

Somewhere during the opening set of the childhood teething match, you will probably find yourself trying to pour sticky baby paracetemol between fiercely clenched gums, while prising a warmed teething ring back from the milk spot abyss: never again, just let the teeth come through, then I will never, ever, EVER, EVER do this again.

Then somewhere down the parenthood track, you will likely find yourself staring at a squidgy newborn sprawled on a blanket in the park, feeling strange thoughts stir beneath the surface: maybe just one more ... then never, ever, EVER, EVER again ...

T is for Time
Parenting is a fiercely hungry time vortex, stealing hours and giving minutes while busily spitting out spatially skewed memories to stick on the collective family fridge door.

Time is always hiding out in the bathroom when there are cloth nappies to fold, or sightseeing in Holland or Switzerland (or any other land far from here) when there are toast soldiers to cut and ear drops to administer and cups to stack and unstack and then stack all again.

The days crawl slower than your baby ever will. They creep from dawn to bedtime like individual time thieves, heavy with homemade apple puree and the dark space between routine and familiarity.

In argumentative opposition, the months rocket by, jettisoned by the endless parade of incredible baby milestones and spurred on by the parental desire to grab hold of pudgy little fingers and never let go.

Time is both the bane of my parenting existence and the bees knees of my motherhood journey - never enough, always too much, housing a growing child and her unwritten story.

How do you spell PARENT?

M x 

Linking with Grace for FYBF

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Image courtesy of Miriam Wickett via rgbstock.com

The Magic Blue Cup: bottling the baby

The little bottles that couldn't

Yesterday, I escaped. 

I ditched the pajama pants, handed the baby to my husband, and ran away to the hairdressing salon for the first time in nearly seven months for a rescue haircut with the works.

An entree of chit chat and gossip mags and coffee. A generous main course  cut and colour, moisture treatment, and a divine curly blow wave. A dessert plate of eyebrow wax and shaping in the beauty room, and a handful of lollipops to go. Delish.

The adventure was as restorative for the soul as it was for the split ends, and washed away the lingering remnants of banana smoosh and several months of frump and frizz and fuzz. 

I've been hanging out to go the hairdressers since Buggy was born. Despite having missed the fashion gene (and the makeup gene, and the cooking gene, and the ironing gene ...) I fell hard for the girly universe of the hairdressing salon long ago. There's something about the combination of spritzed hairspray, trash mags and the roar of the hairdryer that works for my particular soul.

Over the past five and a half months I have spent several of my nine spare minutes staring despondently at my decaying and fraying mane in the mirror, dreaming of breaking out of the laundry and eloping to the salon. 

But for almost all of those five and a half months, there has been a significant road block firmly planted (and growing roots) between my house and the hairdressers: the baby's obstinate refusal to take a bottle.

This roadblock has been intensely frustrating, for all the usual reasons, and because it came on the back of Buggy's initial obstinate refusal to breastfeed. 

After finally conquering her newborn breastfeeding demons, Bug became an impressive and thirsty little breastfeeder who would feed anywhere, anyhow, anytime. I even fed her with great success standing up in a packed family pub during the Sunday afternoon band session.

Thinking we had finally cracked the elusive code and worked out the feeding caper, I allowed myself to relax into breastfeeding. I stopped timing feeds like an Olympic hopeful during a morning train session, and started to tune in more to the baby herself. 

It was going swimmingly, until - and isn't there always an until moment floating around in the mummy universe - I decided to express some milk and give her a bottle so I could go out for an hour or two. Nope, no, totally not happening. There was writhing and squirming and spitting, but not even the remotest flicker of a suck. 

Holding the full bottle in bewilderment, the truth dawned hard and fast on this weary mummy: as Buggy's familiarity with breastfeeding had grown, her interest in drinking from the bottle had completely diminished.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think breastfeeding is great. My daughter and I worked damn hard to make breastfeeding work, and getting to a stage where we could feed comfortably was one of the biggest and boldest achievements of my personal life to date. Breastfeeding is healthy and cost effective and comforting, and delivers a mother-daughter bond I never even imagined possible.

That said, though, breastfeeding does not allow you to pop out for a counter lunch or go to town for a romantic anniversary dinner with heels and a few sauvignon blancs. It does not allow you to get shitfaced at a rock concert, or drink copious mugs of coffee, or take a necessary course of antibiotics without instigating a serious university level research project and smothering yourself in yoghurt. Or go the hairdressers sans baby. 

I know there are millions of women across the world and across the ages who have, and do, and will, exclusively breastfeed. Some through necessity, some through want, and many through a combination of both. These women are strong and incredible and awesomely awe-inspiring, and they possess more superpowers than Spiderman, Catwoman, Inspector Gadget, Dr Who and Astroboy combined (and for this child of the 80's, that is the ultimate accolade!)

I wish I had those superpowers, I really do. But I just don't. In order to preserve my sanity, I need to be able to take a break from breastfeeding every so often. I need to be able to sleep in once every now and then, be able to go out to grown-up places with grown-up people and have grown-up conversations, and be able to take a few hours here and there to just be myself and do some 'me' things while Buggy hangs out with her Dad.

There is also this mummy sense buried inside me that needs to know that there is backup, so that if worst comes to worst and I get tangled up with disaster or illness or serious misfortune, my baby will be able to pick up a bottle or a sippy cup and keep on going and growing without me.

So, you can see, Buggy's cool disengagement with the bottle had quite an abrupt impact on my mumdays. In the space of just that one failed bottle, I realised that my backup had fallen out the window and 'me' time had retreated to the corner to lick its wounds and feel sorry for itself.

And so began Operation Bottle the Baby, an intensive and mummy-draining fight against bottle apathy. We have purchased enough bottles to build and float our own family-sized raft, but we still ain't floating anywhere on the bottle sea.

The array is quite mind boggling: large and petite, short and tall, angled and curved, latex and silicone, slow and fast, expensive and economical, long teat and wide teat, clear and frosted, coloured and plain, anti-colic and standard.

Then there are the sippy cups: handles and sans handles, soft spout and hard spout, spill and non-spill, valve and free-flow, small and super-sized, single spout and three-sixty degree valves, round mouthpiece and rectangular mouthpiece, upright and angled hold, generic and branded.

We've also tangoed with open cups, big and small and a Babushka style line up in-between. We have had a smidgen of cup success, but it's slow going and there are only so many times a day you can wipe down the baby and change her outfit before you realise you're on a road to nowhere. 

We've tried using a spoon/food device traditionally used for baby mush to pour milk into her mouth (which was funny but not necessarily fun) and we've tried using a straw cup designed for toddlers.  We've tried plastic food pouches with hard plastic spouts, and even bowls in place of cups. 

After nearly four months of banging our heads against the proverbial wall, my husband and I reached a point last week where we were very close to giving up on the baby ever taking anything but the boob. Then, while we were teetering on the cusp of giving up and reappropriating the bottle collection into a fort on the lounge room floor, we chanced upon the magic blue cup. 

This magical drinking device looks like most other plastic sippy cups in my kitchen draw and available on the contemporary market (and trust me, I should know!) Cylindrical body, chunky handles, screw top lid, hard plastic spout. Your usual, run of the mill, milk-carting-and-hopefully-sipping container. 

But for some inexplicable reason, this little cup works for our exasperated little family. The baby not only likes to pick it up and play with it, but she also likes to drink from it - in that regard, it's miraculous! Buggy obviously sees something that we mere adults don't, but she's not giving away the secret just yet. And while I would dearly love to know what she sees, I'm just happy that she does. 

Of course, magic doesn't necessarily equal instantaneous perfection. We have some fine-tuning to do, and there is still a great deal of stylistic drinking flair and hand-to-mouth aiming to be acquired. Plus there are still moments when Buggy mistakes the spout for a teething toy and chews, chews, chews like her life depends on it. 

Perfection can come later. I'm just happy that the baby can drink from a cup some of the time, my husband can feed his daughter, and I can get a blow wave and some lollipops every six to eight weeks again. That's magic. 

M x

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