What is this nap time of which you speak?

I haven't written on here recently as I have been spending most of my life wandering around Wembley in a dead-eyed haze, pushing a pram containing a wide-eyed and alert Piglet, who sits staring at me blankly as I plead with him to take a nap.

He does actually need a nap.  He has all the signs.  All the signs that every baby book and website says are there to tell you that the baby has gone past his window of normal drowsiness, and has passed into the realm of the wired clubber at 6am getting second wind after fifteen vodka Red Bulls.  The yawning, the eye-rubbing, the screeching; even the frantic crying when put into the pram and forced to wait for an inordinately long period of time for Mummy to rush around the flat taking such obscene liberties as grabbing the keys and putting shoes on before we can actually leave.

And every time I tell myself, through the persistent and ear-splitting screams, he will be asleep as soon as we leave this flat and start moving.  Please God, don't let the neighbours think I'm some sort of heinous child abuser.

The thing is, back in Ye Olden Days (a few weeks ago), Piglet did fall asleep as soon as we started moving, but now he is far too excited at the prospect of having a little wander round Baby Gap, or  watching Mummy drink a latte in Cafe Nero, that he simply Will.  Not.  Sleep.

Today we walked the entire perimeter of Wembley Stadium (which is a surprisingly long walk, let me tell you), being buffeted by gales (it's randomly very windy up there.  Sort of like being in the middle of the sea), with Piglet wide awake and wired, eyeing me from his car seat with the slightly insane look of the sleep-deprived.  We walked so far that we encountered a whole new Sainsbury's which I didn't know existed (forgive me my excitement.  I live a simple life).  We saw people dressed as actual real monks and nuns.  One was in a full-on authentic Mother Teresa outfit.  I thought it was her until I remembered that she was dead.  I thought I might be hallucinating through lack of sleep but it turns out that there was a Catholic event at Wembley Arena.  Actual monks and nuns in the genuine uniforms people!  Who knew?  It was a bit like that moment in my first term of university when two people in the E block kitchen started talking about their boarding schools and I started guffawing with laughter as those things died out in the 1950s and only lived on in the Mallory Towers books, right?

And through all this, Piglet continued to sit in his pram, wide awake, taking it all in.  We went into Cafe Nero and he behaved impeccably, sitting bolt upright in his car seat like one of those black and white pictures of bonnet-clad 1930s babies in their humungous prams, fixing their gaze on the camera in a steely stare while children in rags play hopscotch around them.  We then went home and all hell broke loose, with persistent shouting interspersed with a few brief periods of quiet where Piglet was pulling his Bumbo seat apart while I tried to get him to eat his dinner, followed by an hour and a half of constant breastfeeding.

He is now asleep, but for how long?

Piglet Goes to Church

Argh.  The trouble with Christmas is that every Tom, Dick and Harry that you may or may not be related to wants to spread the festive cheer by having their say about your parenting skills.  

Take yesterday, for example.  Mother and I had been out with Piglet, running errands, and on the way home passed the house of a friend of hers.  We went in, to find that my mother's friends were entertaining a friend of their own, one of the Older Generation.

My mother's friend kindly offered us a lift home and I wanted to walk home with Piglet in the sling, so declined the offer, citing the fact that we didn't have our car seat as a reason.  I could have told the truth, but saying, "actually as nice at it is for you to offer, I hate accepting lifts from people who are not members of my immediate family, as it makes me feel like a carless pleb reliant on the charity of others," but that might have been considered a weird answer, so the car seat was a handy excuse, and also factually correct so unlikely to offend.

Then Older Generation chipped in with the obviously well-thought out point, "well, what do you think people did in the days before car seats then?"

I don't know.  Die horribly in car crashes?

Sorry Fire Brigade, it was nice of you to offer to install one of those new-fangled smoke alarms, but I'm going to pass, thanks.  If there's a fire, it'll be OK.  I'll just burn to death, like in the olden days!

No Doctor, no need to use any of that modern medicine on me.  Just leave me to die in wretched agony.  It's what people did in the olden days!

And while you're at it, you can forget that anaesthetic too.  I love the pain, me!  Everyone knows things were better in the olden days!

I might add that Older Generation had already at this point come out with a few non-child-rearing related gems, including a denial of climate change ("I'm sure it's getting colder.  They just don't want to admit they were wrong!") and the astonishing possibility that the hole in the ozone layer may have been caused by spacecraft flying through it ("funny how there was never a hole until after they started going into space, isn't it?").

I shot back that it was the law to put your child in a car seat, thank you very much, which led to a few discussions about whether it actually is the law.  I can only assume that if seatbelts are mandatory then surely so are car seats.  Anyway not only am I not planning on testing it out, but surely they wouldn't pass a law against smoking in cars with children if it was still OK to be driving about with a baby sitting on your lap, even though I'm pretty sure that Britney Spears managed to do just that a few years back without being arrested.  Only in America.  Thinking about it, it's remarkable that the police over there didn't shoot her.

Anyway, if I had thought that being criticised for wanting to make sure my baby travelled in relative safety rather than on my lap, Spears-style, just like it was in those halcyon days of the 1970s when Britain's roads were so much safer, everybody left their doors unlocked and beer was 10p a pint, was the only critique of my parenting skills that I would have to put up with over the holiday, I was sadly mistaken.  On Christmas Eve, despite being a godless heathen, I suddenly developed a nostalgic urge to go to church.  Probably something to do with the pretty candles and nice, cosy Christmas carols, rather than any of the Word made flesh, Jesus came to earth to deliver us from our trespasses, God stuff.  And also I do have a bit of an affinity with the Virgin Mary, especially at Christmas with all that virgin birth stuff, what with Piglet being an immaculate conception, and all that.  And also I once saw her, in a Renaissance painting, spraying milk out of her breast literally across the room into the mouth of a kneeling saint, who looked absolutely ecstatic with joy at the privilege.  And I can now do that.  I sprayed Piglet right in the eye the other day.  He wasn't quite as happy about it as St Bernard of Clairvaux seemed to be, in fact he screamed, but the point is I have magical Virgin Mary-style breastfeeding SKILLS.

What was I saying?  Oh yes, so I decided we were going to church.  Me, Piglet and my mother, off to the church where my mother got married thousands of years ago, to sing Away in a Manger with the lights off whilst holding symbolic oranges.

I thought my mother would approve of my sudden religiosity.  She did not.

"IT'S TOO COLD OUTSIDE!" she thundered, as if I had just suggested taking Piglet to the South Pole in a re-enactment of Captain Scott's ill-fated voyage, complete with authentic equipment from 1912.  "HE'LL CATCH A COLD!"  

I pointed out-wisely, I thought-that one did not catch a cold as a result of being somewhere cold.  One caught chilblains and frostbite, yes, but not the common cold.  In fact, a cold is a virus that one catches from another infected person.  Reluctantly, Mother agreed to join me at church, but not before berating me throughout the entire journey for my fecklessness in taking Piglet in the sling instead of the ("much warmer") pram.  Once we got there, we took a seat right at the back, Mother reasoning that it would be easier to make a quick exit in the event of the relentless screaming that she obviously thought was going to be the outcome of forcing a five month old baby to sit through a church service.  Piglet, clearly his mother's son, did not seem to enjoy all the sermons and Jesus stuff, causing a small child who was sat in front of us to turn around and say to me knowledgeably, "I think he's tired."

Yes I know, I'm a terrible mother who has dragged my poor long-suffering baby to church against his will, when he's tired.  Which he always is, BECAUSE HE CAN'T SETTLE HIMSELF TO SLEEP GODDAMIT!  ARGH!

There was one moment when I thought I was going to be launched into the role of Pushy Stage Mother when one of the vicars (there were, like, three.  Times have changed since I was last in church) asked if there were any babies in the church and I waved Piglet enthusiastically above my head, thinking he was going to get to play the coveted role of the Baby Jesus in some sort of Christmas nativity play, but sadly all I got was to say his name and age into the microphone, while the vicar looked at me slightly puzzled, clearly thinking she had never heard of a baby called that before and why wasn't his name Alfie or Harry or some other sort of popular baby name, and was it a boy or a girl, one can never tell these days.

Anyway, despite my mother's best attempts to save the day by grabbing Piglet off me every time he whimpered and trying to exit the church in a dramatic fashion and prove that her silly daughter was a far inferior specimen of mother as she couldn't even keep the baby quiet in God's Holy House, we managed to last until the end of the service.  Long enough, in fact, for me to get to go to the front and collect a special candle stuck into an orange for Piglet, leading one of the vicars to remark sniffily, "He's a bit young!" as I did so, clearly thinking he hadn't spent the best part of Christmas Eve sticking jelly babies on the end of cocktail sticks so that inadequate specimens of motherhood such as myself could pretend to take them for their babies and then eat all the sweets themselves, and then never darken the door of the church again until next Christmas Eve, for the free sweets and nostalgic Away in a Manger singing.

He obviously didn't know about my immaculately conceived child and special Virgin Mary breast milk-squirting skills.  We would have been PERFECT for the nativity play.

Subsistence Parenting

Yes I admit it.  Guilty as charged.

Yes I did put the baby in the car seat to sleep while I had my lunch.  And we weren't in a car.  And (voice drops to a barely audible whisper) I didn't even fasten the straps.

Surely God will strike me down with a lightning bolt.  Or at the very least a crack team of virtuous mothers will be sent from Mumsnet to chase me with torches and drum me out of town.

In other news, hot on the heels of the two hours sleep I had last night, Mother (my own mother, that is) is constantly hassling me to call the doctor/health visitor/anyone else who might be susceptible to a bout of new-parent hysteria to report all crying episodes.  Anyone would think it wasn't normal for babies to cry and prevent their parents from getting any sleep.

She is also trying to get me to go to a breastfeeding support group in the local area.  Not a bad idea, you might say, except that I am basically Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances and refuse to associate with anyone from the immediate surrounding area as all are plebeians who fail to understand the difference between "your" and "you're."

Anyway, Piglet is waking up now and about to start screaming for food...

Baby Still Not Here. I Feel Sick. Probably Because it's my Birthday

Summary of my day so far:  Got up, realised it was my birthday, threw up, returned to bed.

That pretty much says it all.  Thirty-four just has such a great ring to it.

Just exactly what last night's mushroom omelette and chips were still doing in my system ten hours after they were eaten is anyone's guess.  Does food just never get digested anymore?  Does being pregnant mean that one no longer has intestines and food just sits there in the stomach, gradually congealing forever?  The levels of acid reflux I am experiencing would suggest that it is so.

See, I told you this blog would be a veritable goldmine of Too Much Information.

In other news, the baby shows precisely no signs of wanting to come out yet, but then this is probably a good thing, since one would hardly want the prediction of one of my Year 11s "but miss, what if the baby comes on your birthday?" to come true, since that would mean never having a birthday ever again, but being condemned to spend own birthday in perpetuity stone-cold sober, trying to direct children's birthday party complete with overpriced party bags and screaming hordes of other people's children baying for cake.  Even at 34, I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of self-sacrifice.

Also, mercifully the fact that the baby has not come yet has allowed me some time to prepare.  Preparing in this case means trekking to London and picking up piles of baby clothes, along with the few remaining threads that I can fit into, and organising an appointment with the midwife here in order to change hospitals, which I am feeling much better about now, as nobody within the NHS has sent out a lynch mob just yet.  My brother has amusingly referred to the whole process as me being like a salmon, returning to the land of its birth in order to breed.  Hopefully this doesn't mean I will not at some point in the future get away again, rather than be trapped forever as a house guest in single bed in my teenage bedroom which still has pink shelves on the wall which I adorned with glitter, and a door which, in a moment of arbitrary teenage madness and overexcitement at opening of local Ikea store, I painted purple, and which most tellingly of all still bears the blu-tac scars from the eighty-three pictures of Alessandro Del Piero I once festooned upon it.  At least the pictures themselves-lovingly cut out of the pages of the Gazetta Dello Sport no less-are not still there.

Where exactly the baby is going to sleep at this point remains something of a mystery.  My mother has kindly purchased a Moses basket, so he may well have to sit in it in the middle of the room like a bit of furniture or a suitcase no one quite knows where to put.  Alternatively there's his car seat, which I have to admit looks very comfortable from where I'm sitting.  Many's the time I've been tempted to park my expanding posterior in there, but I doubt I'd ever get out again and I'm not sure the safety tests are quite rigorous enough to see if the contraption will withstand overexcited parents trying to climb in with the-probably erroneous-belief that it might be more comfortable than a trip in the front seat with a neck pillow.  Come to think of it, babies do have pretty nice lives.  My brother has even expressed an interest in borrowing some of the Little One's clothes, although quite how he will look in a woollen sailor onesie from Le Petit Bateau is a matter of some debate.

Lastly, the only other noteworthy thing that has happened (it's been a slow day) is that according to the ancient scales in my mother's bedroom, I have lost three pounds.  Either that is an error on the part of the scales or I have stopped expanding and this must mean that the baby is ready to be born, right?

Watch this space.

Missing Work Already....

I'm writing this on my mother's home computer.

This means two things:
1.) I may be discovered and
2.) I'm not sure if that is good or bad.

I mean, it's not like anyone reads this blog due to the extreme veil of secrecy surrounding it.

Oh well.  Today is my first official day of maternity leave, and with the emails coming thick and fast from work, with content such as "Milly burst into my classroom as I was speaking to another student, shouting "English is rubbish at Key Stage Three anyway!"" and "Lionel kept saying repeatedly "I ain't doin' no detention for this," as I wrote the detention in his diary"* I have to say I'm missing it terribly.  About as much as one misses the proverbial hole in the head.

Meanwhile, I have been concerning myself with annoying beaurocracy that would put the European Union to shame, courtesy of the NHS (apparently it's not the done thing to be changing hospitals at 38 weeks, and everyone from hospital porters to the Health Minister is up in arms).  It's enough to make one want to dispense with hospitals entirely and give birth on their own, on a barge (I once read an article in the Guardian about a woman who had done exactly this.  I think she lived on the barge though.  In my case it might be a nightmare scrabbbling around at the last minute trying to find a canal and then an unlocked, unattended barge to sneak onto.  To be honest it might actually be easier to stick with the original plan, i.e., hospital.  Plus now I have a car seat they might let me out again).  Yes, I have an actual car seat and, despite my pronouncements of frugality and enhortation to my family to purchase-and I quote-"the cheapest one that is actually safe"-as though car seats in baby shops might be divided into two sections marked "safe" and "unsafe" and then priced accordingly so that you would pay considerably less for the ones that would be completely ineffective in an accident scenario, my mother bought the most expensive one, i.e. the one I actually like.  My brother has since been engaged in merry japes such as attaching it to the car, admiring it, taking it out of the car (my mother and I thought it might get stolen.  My brother seemed to think that such things only happen "up North" for some reason, as though "Up North" was some sort of lawless rogue state, while Down South exists in a constant state of utopia) and attaching it to the pushchair, the latter of which took about two hours.  I can now pretty much categorically guarantee that unlike my own mother in the eighties, I will not be a dab hand at running for the bus, tucking a toddler under one arm and folding a double buggy simultaneously.  To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I'll even be able to remove the rain cover without assistance.  Still, I have been told that these things are instinctive, right?

*Names have been changed to protect the guilty

The Perils of Buying Baby Stuff

The shopping is getting serious.

AARRGH.

I never thought there would be a type of shopping I failed to enjoy on any level.  And then I came across Baby Shopping.

To be honest, the pram and pushchair aspect of it is quite enjoyable (as long as you don't look too closely at the prices) and I have spent many happy minutes posing in front of the mirror whilst accessorising with a Bugaboo (cue Destiny's Child circa 1999 appear, tossing a now-obsolete item once known as a "pager" out of the window) and wondering how I might look as a mother (most mothers with pushchairs look at best what can only be described as "harassed," but I will obviously be different).  However, the car seat aspect is awful.  First of all, I feel personally bullied by the NHS into buying one, as apparently I will not be allowed to leave hospital without it, and will presumably have to stay there forever like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, but in a hospital so therefore worse as no duty free and full of sick people in unattractive backless gowns hanging around outside with their drips smoking fags (truly the sight that sums up all the worst things about hospitals).  Also secondly, they are extremely heavy.  Now I can sort of understand why, as no one wants their baby flying around the car in the event of an accident, which I imagine is what might happen to something very light, but is quite disconcerting when you pick one up expecting it to be roughly the weight of a baby.

Then, if the car seat dilemma (they don't all fit your pram, they don't all fit your-or in my case, my brother's-car.  Unless they happen to be the most expensive one in the shop, that is) isn't enough, most baby shops seem to be crammed full of pink plastic tat (hello, Babies R Us) that you will never, ever use and which will end up living on your balcony for four hundred years as you slowly morph into one of those people who still keeps a ten year old pushchair and a rancid potty on the balcony.  Also known as a parent.  Not a look I was going for as I sit serenely on my sun lounger in a wide-brimmed hat, cradling the baby in my arms and rocking him to sleep as I sip a cold glass of pinot grigio.

Because that's so going to be my life.  Right?