Hartley: Ten Months

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Hartley Bear

Right this minute you are sitting up on the bed, fingering and biting your jumper instead of sleeping. I think you must know that you are toeing the line because at least you're not trying to leap off the bed, and actually, you are falling asleep in an upright position, so I guess your batteries have a small amount of juice in them yet.

Which is more than I can say for this phone, which is the only thing I have with me for posting online. We're in Paris on a much needed holiday from England, and somehow we took for granted that they'd have everything we needed for you already at the flat. I mean, it's Paris. It's just a French-speaking London, right? Except no. This apartment, this entire city, couldn't be any less accommodating to babies if tried, and sometimes it seems to give that a go too. If we have to carry you down the several steps leading to the metro and we leave plenty of room for someone else to get past us, that someone else will find a way to get stuck behind us so that they can tutt and sigh and make rude remarks about us under their breath. But they live in the country of good cheese so you have to be lenient.

This hasn't been the easiest month of your life, I have to say. It seems like your cold heads off to the cold library every week where it renews that same book about a runny nose and high temperature, which this last time around you had for four days. FOUR DAYS. That's like six months in baby years! And we took you to the emergency clinic for your tracheotemy or vasectamy or whatever would make that permanent bogey on your top lip disappear long enough for you to eat and breathe properly in your sleep. It seemed you woke with every stiffled breath, which meant bad sleeps for mummy, and also daddy while we've been sharing a bed here.

The only way we could convince you to drink your horrible banana-tasting antibiotics (which I think were given to us to make us go away, though we've started you on them now and have to finish the course) was to pour it into a shot glass and pretend like it was liquid gold. Then, even this stopped working, and currently you're taking it in the lid of a cola bottle. If you insist on a thimble by tomorrow, I'll thank my lucky stars there's only four more days of this.

I don't have much time, as we plan to watch a French film we bought earlier, as well as scarf down a wheel of Brie with the rest of those madeleines, so let me just say that in spite of how hard being sick was for you, you have been lovely and brave, and are growing in ways that take my breath away. You participate in our jokes now, and have begun to imitate small gestures, such as the one we call 'fish' and the one where you tickle your bottom lip and make a burbling sound. Your mamama and dadadas have become more pointed, and it's becoming increasingly evident that you are your own person now - one who likes to stand on the back bumper of your walker or shout at us when we do the hoovering or sit up on your own gumming baguette in a restaurant.

We love you madly, mon cherie. Don't ever change.

Not every fountain is a wishing well

We went to the Louvre and it was . . . closed.

We walked to the Eiffel Tower and it was . . . far.

Hartley will only take his antibiotics in a shot glass. No comment.

I am trying to add an image to this post, though I'm not sure if I'll succeed. It was taken at the Muse de Louvre during those blissful minutes before we discovered our mistake.

It's been a long day, and I just want to drink a glass of wine and think about nothing, so you'll have to imagine a grand day with us in it.

Present and accounted for

In spite of engine failure and a sick infant, the three of us made it to Paris, and as I write this on a notepad with a failing felt-tip pen in the near dark of the television, Bruce is trying to tire out Hartley, who for the last two hours has been proclaiming his enthusiasm for the new surroundings, and for the recent absence of a crippling fever which has plagued him for more than three days. It doesn't help that we're an hour ahead here, but it's approaching ten o'clock at night and he's still sitting up in bed like a cheeky sentinal, blowing raspberries and shouting at me from across the room (it's an open-concept apartment superficially divided by a skeletal wood shelving unit.)

I'm drinking Cotes de Bourg (or perhaps that's just the region - whatever, the stuff is red and dry and lovely) and eating emmental croustilles (they really like their emmental in this country), pre-writing this post so as not to waste a precious drop of my iPhone's dwindling power, as we don't yet have a converter. But we are having a marvelous time. Or at least I think we are. It is the British way to leave on holiday and then spend the entire time pointing out how much better England is and wanting the holiday to be over so that one can return home.

Earlier, Bruce applauded my stellar bilingualism at a cafe in the train station shortly after we disembarked, and seemed really impressed, until I reminded him that the croque Monsieur and pain au chocolat are already in French.

Anyway, I'm still here. Proving I can kick it old skool. I mean, pen and paper - what's that all about, hey? Wish you were here, etc.

C'est la vie en rose

Hartley’s fever broke at around two this morning and Bruce and I did a sleepy high-five in the dark before settling back into a fitful sleep. At about four, Hartley woke again, this time in tears. His little head began another slow burn, and by eight o’clock, his fever was back in full force. We called the NHS help line, and the person on the other end of the phone said some vague things about Swine Flu before referring us to an emergency clinic in Crouch End.

We bundled up our little boo and rushed him down there, only to find that the doctor seemed relatively unconcerned, even after he misunderstood that his fever had only come on in the last few days and not weeks as he’d imagined. We’ve had a trip to Paris planned for ages, and as it’s coming up tomorrow, we were certain we’d have to cancel. But the doctor wrote us up a prescription for antibiotics just in case we needed a Plan B, and told us to have a nice time.

So the rest of the day has passed in a flurry of activity - not only in preparing to leave for Paris, but in getting my application together for my leave to remain, as my visa runs out soon and we have to pop it in the mail the day after we get back. In addition to proof of having passed my Life in the UK test* and upward of eight hundred pounds, we also need to provide several documents demonstrating that we’ve been cohabitating for the last two years. One would think a marriage certificate would suffice, but one would be sorely misguided in that thinking.

If you’re well acquainted with the pair of us in real life, you will know what our organisational skills are like. They are like someone carefully filed every single letter, bill, receipt or notification in a well-ordered cabinet, in a well-ordered study, and then lobbed a Moltov cockatil into the midst of all that order. And then rubbed their hands together and said, Okay, now where did I put that Council Tax bill from 2006? I tell you, trying to gather the supporting documentation whilst force-feeding our screaming, choking infant his thrice-daily antibiotics has been fun. Great fun.

But although we are closer to fleeing the country in distress than setting out on a great adventure at this point, I have high hopes that tomorrow Hartley’s fever will have disappeared, and that we’ll be able to pull off this packing/leaving the house stint within the first few hours of waking. Or at least I’m folding dresses, t-shirts and baby blankets like that’s what I think. Going through the motions of belief is half the battle.

If anyone reading has ever done Paris on a budget and with an infant, your ideas on some baby-friendly sights and activities would be greatly appreciated. We haven’t exactly had time to do our research.

A tout a l’heur!


*I think I could probably wring a whole new post out of that experience, and will probably try at some point this month.