In the morning

In the morning, I make myself three slices of toast and a cup of coffee. I make Hartley one slice of toast with a very thin spread of margarine, cut into small pieces.

I sit at the computer having my breakfast, and I pass Hartley a little piece of toast, repeating the mantra A slice of toast is a good breakfast for a boo. This is something Bruce said once, to make me feel better about the fact that Hartley will only eat toast or fromage frais in the morning. I say the mantra aloud as I hand him each bit of toast, and he looks up at me from his Bumbo and smiles, making clutchy clutchy motions with his hand.

Sometimes he takes the toast and turns back to watch television, which is on to distract him from the fact that his only task right now is to eat his toast. Toast isn’t much of a challenge for a ten-month-old. Having a conversation with him doesn’t work, because eventually it dawns on him that he’s eating toast and then he gets upset.

Sometimes he makes the clutchy clutchy hand motion but then slaps the toast out of my fingers. If I feel he’s going to do this, I lightly hold his wrist and sometimes he will let me place the toast in his palm. If he’s serious about wanting to slap the toast away, he won’t let me hold his wrist, and will flap his entire arm at my fingers until the toast piece falls to the floor. Then I know that breakfast is over.

When his favourite programme came on this morning, he did what he does every time the programme comes on: he swivels his head to locate me in the room and then gives me a cheeky grin as if to say, Look, it’s our favourite programme! Then he turns to watch the intro, which is the best part of any show in his opinion.

We only let him watch baby telly, and only when we’re trying to eat breakfast or accomplish a task he’s not allowed to take part in, like a shower or cooking. The kitchen is very small, and he always wants to play with the rubbish bin.

Mornings with the baby are some of the loveliest mornings I’ve known.

Must...write...post...

Hoof, why did I sign up for this again? Okay, something else. Tonight it’s the Proust Questionnaire.

1.What is your idea of perfect happiness? 
No pain, no yearning, and to exist without the weight or burden of self.

2.What is your greatest fear? 
Dying, and the eternity of nothingness that follows.

3.What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Weakness.

4.What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Smugness. Or immodesty. I don’t know, some combination of the two. Smudesty.
 
5.Which living person do you most admire?
My son.

6.What is your greatest extravagance?
The time I spend online.
 
7.What is your current state of mind?
It’s standing on the edge of a high diving board that is suspended above an empty pool.

8.What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Beauty, obviously. Nobody has to work at beauty, so why do we reward those who have it? Ptooee.
 
9.On what occasion do you lie?
When I want to spare someone’s feelings. I think that’s important to do. There’s nothing virtuous about crushing someone.
 
10.What do you most dislike about your appearance?
My eyes. They look hound-doggish when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror.
 
11.Which living person do you most despise?
I’d rather not say.
 
12.What is the quality you most like in a man?
Wit.
 
13.What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Kindness.
 
14.Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I quite like [insert likeable thing here].
 
15.What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Bruce. Or Hartley. Brucely. Hartluce.
 
16.When and where were you happiest?
I don’t remember.
 
17.Which talent would you most like to have?
Musicality, or paintingness.

 
18.If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I would feel less awkward about talking to people.
 
19.What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Changing my life from what it used to be.
 
20.If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
I’d want to come back as myself. I can’t imagine being anyone or anything else. That would be frightening.
 
21.Where would you most like to live?
France, or some non-existent place in Italy.
 
22.What is your most treasured possession?
A small box of memorabilia from childhood.
 
23.What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? 
Being in a very bad situation you know you're not going to change. That’s different from the lowest depth of grief, obviously.

24.What is your favorite occupation?
I haven’t found it yet, but I imagine it would be writing. It’s the only thing I actually put effort into without feeling like I’ve lost something.
 
25.What is your most marked characteristic?
I wish I knew.
 
26.What do you most value in your friends?
Mutual respect, and the sense that I can speak to them in confidence and vice versa.
 
27.Who are your favorite writers?
This changes with the books I’m reading because I admire a lot of writers. Right now it’s Wells Tower. I used to really like Murakami, but then I realised everyone else in the world does too, which makes me question his value. I know that’s silly, but the best writers make you feel as though they are writing only for you.
 
28.Who is your hero of fiction?
Fictional hero? Or writer of fiction? If it’s the former, then I’m not sure. I don’t think writers are heroic. It’s easy to sit alone in a room and make things up. It’s much more courageous to try and see things the way they really are, and feel helpless in the face of that.
 
29.Which historical figure do you most identify with?
I’m ignorant of most historical figures. I’ve been told that I resemble a Joan of Arc figure, and I remember feeling like a persecuted crusader when I was in a mental institute, so maybe her.
 
30.Who are your heroes in real life?
The professors at the university where I did my film degree. They are some of the most dedicated and interesting people I’ve ever met.
 
31.What are your favorite names?
I admire simple names, like Sam, but I’m always choosing silly names like Jupiter. If I have another son, I think I’d like to name him Casper.
 
32.What is it that you most dislike?
The feeling of impermanence, or that life could end at any moment so you can never really relax.

33.What is your greatest regret?
That I fell out of touch with a wonderful friend who died in an accident a few years later. I wish I’d told her how much she meant to me, but I was young.
 
34.How would you like to die?
I’ve thought about this, and I still don’t know. I think it would be horrific to die before you have the chance to say goodbye to your people and to yourself. But I think it would be horrific to contemplate eternity as imminent also. I think I would like to know that it was going to happen and then drift away surrounded by people I felt good being around.
 
35.What is your motto?
I don’t have a motto. Mottos are for people who think in absolutes. Maybe that’s my motto.

What is more interesting than child abuse? Herein lies the answer, maybe.

Ha ha. It only occurred to me today that I can’t even rest on my laurels of yesterday’s post, as I’m meant to be doing this every day. When did I last have enough time or gumption to write a post about myself every single day? Somewhere in the vicinity of 2004, I suspect. My navel seams to have closed up over the past few years, and I find myself - or even the way my brain works – less and less interesting as time goes on. I don’t even look at daily events as potential story fodder anymore, as I find most things can be adequately summarised in a 140 character tweet, or my Facebook status.

I thought I was going to have to elaborate on how my good feeling about this little play group I attend nearby went rapidly downhill after I watched the leader snatch a toy piano away from a baby not much older than Hartley while she was trying to make an announcement, even though she’d just finished handing out instruments to the children in preparation for our sing-along, and then didn’t even give it back to him once the music had begun (though some kindhearted mother pointed out to her that the reason he was screaming through snot and tears was probably due to this fact). The good feelings dissipated further after I watched her absentmindedly push what I am hoping was her own child into a pretend sleeping position for "Hop Little Bunnies," which resulted in said child hitting her head on the hard vinyl floor.

But then something much more interesting took place after class, on our walk home. It was Morag who noticed that someone had left their laptop case leaning against a tree. I’d registered the laptop but immediately dismissed it as unimportant, I guess because I envisioned someone emerging from one of the nearby houses to collect it. But then I remembered that we live in London, and you can’t drop a wallet with any hope of ever seeing it again if you don’t notice straight away. We deliberated about what to do, and had to concede that its owner wasn’t coming back and so began searching it for contact details.

I found a plastic folder of personal effects, which I felt uncomfortable about going through because at that point I thought there was still a chance the owner would return and find me snooping through their official documents. The documents contained an address, but it wasn’t a UK address. I opened a note that had been handwritten in blue ink on a piece of graph paper, which was tucked away in a pocket. The letter was folded in three, its face addressed to “Mum and Dad” in a childlike script. Inside was an apologetic, self-deprecating missive with a tone of finality so pointed it became immediately apparent that it was a suicide note.

“Um, this is a suicide note!” I said to Morag, who was in the midst of outlining a plan of attack. Her eyes widened as I handed her the piece of paper, and she scanned the letter quickly before noting, with some relief, that it was dated from two years ago. We finally decided to take the laptop to the police station, because whether or not there was any significance in it being left behind, we couldn’t just let some random kid come along and pinch it. We scrawled a quick note to this effect on the blank inside of a prescription packet and tacked it to the tree where we’d found the laptop, reasoning that if they returned to that spot, they’d probably see the note.

The police station isn’t far from where I live, though it’s small and keeps to erratic hours, so it was closed by the time we got there. We stood outside in the dark debating on whether or not one of us should take it home and bring it back in the morning. There really didn’t seem to be any other option, so I hooked the laptop case around the handle of Hartley’s pushchair and we headed off back in the direction of home, and the shops.

Along the way, we ran into two female police officers, who agreed to take the laptop from us with our details. They asked us what was in the bag and we itemised everything whilst they went through it all. Morag mentioned the suicide note, which seemed to baffle them, though they glossed over this bit of information in their report. The officer I spoke to said they would contact me if the bag was retrieved by its owner. Bruce says this is because the owner might want to give me a small reward. I think that’s an odd thing to volunteer, but we’ll see I guess.

Mostly I wonder about the note, and about the person who wrote it. Our search revealed that the owner of the laptop is in his or her seventies, which would put the writer of the note in his or her thirties, at best. If a child writes a suicide note to their parents and that child is very young, there is a chance the note is a cry for help. If the child is more of an adult, on the other hand, there is a very good chance that such a note indicates intent.

It’s difficult to know for certain, and so the question I’m left with is this: would a parent keep their child’s suicide note from two years ago if the note writer hadn't succeeded? Would they keep the note if the note writer had succeeded? I don’t want to put myself in the shoes of whoever lost that laptop, even if it means clearing up a mystery. And who am I to reduce the tragedy - large or small - of a complete stranger to a mere curiosity?

It is rather curious, though.

Much ado about blogging, and pasta

Let me sully this post by first speaking about my writing here, and elsewhere. I think reflexivity is pretty pertinent to a month-long yard sale of musty, randomly priced ideas I’ve had to drag out from storage because I have nothing of real value to say. Everything I write is off-the-cuff, from conception to execution, and I only sit down to write when I feel confident that my mojo (or in this case blomo) is in good working order.

This is why I have a partially written piece that gives me the evils every time I maximize its worthless bulk to see if I can perform some kind of emergency surgery to get it at least looking like something I could post on a collaborative site made up of fearless, prolific bloggers. But that’s the irony of my situation: the words I conjure are either living or dead, and the dead ones are usually too far gone for the defibrillators.

So you may be in for a fairly ghastly house of spooks, gimps and amputees this month, and I can’t even pretend it’s a lead-up to Halloween. What I can do is try to keep this as close to its original intent as possible: an online log of day-to-day events as they occur, at least for the month of November. I might even be able to convince you that I do more here than shovel gruel into the mouth of a nine-month-old boy and then scoop out the results hours later. Slightly more, then.

Today, for instance, I tried to do what I do every day, which is to make a sort of minor celebration of life using whatever positive feelings and tangible materials I have at my disposal and fashioning them into some kind of ticker-tape, bunting-choked fanfare that will propel me out the door and into the world, where we all live and pretend that nobody else lives as well or as colourfully as we do. That last part is something I don’t do anymore, actually. I’ve let too many minor characters act out their stories on my stage over the years, and wouldn’t know how to play the leading lady to a flea at this point.

Regardless, I know that I have to raise a wee one, and wee ones naturally feel they are at the centre of everything, with passersby cheering them on from open windows and city sidewalks. This is why they smile so damn much, and why they have no qualms about screaming at you in public if you’ve deprived them of a teething biscuit for longer than five minutes on a bus journey to the nearest play group. This is a delusion you want to nurture, because it takes a buttload of confidence to make your way in this world without letting some bullish, snub-nosed kid grind your feelings beneath his heel because you wouldn’t let him push you off a swing.

We do not push people off swings, we two, no. We stand idly by and grin madly at the fun those kids are having until someone’s father notices us and sheepishly pries his sprog from the chain-linked ropes so that we can have a turn ourselves. It’s chilly, and his breath is hitching with laughter as I push him gently away from me and he comes drifting back into my hands, and I remember that although this doesn’t come naturally to me, the stuff of memory is born from playground antics with your mother or your sister or whoever is in charge of your experiences, and I want him to have as many happy memories of his childhood as I can reasonably provide.


I remember how some baby book or website or newsletter told me that it was my job to make sure that Hartley transitioned from helpless infant to confident baby - to “turn him on to life,” they said. And I wondered how I could do this after allowing him to lie naked under a florescent lamp for three days, screaming for hours on end, because he had a touch of jaundice and that’s what the hospital wanted. He went from being the only baby on the ward who never cried or complained, to an inconsolable, blubbering mess who hated everything to do with being alive. I really felt like that was my fault.

But I needn’t have worried, as this kid is turned on full bright. I don’t think a day goes by that he doesn’t screech with delight over his evening bath, or his lunch, or some silly expression on my face.

So anyway, we had a bit of a swing, and then I took him down the slide a few times, and we headed back home, where he played happily alone in the living room while I made dinner for myself. Whenever Bruce is out for the evening, I try to take the opportunity to eat something he would never in a million years concede to trying. That’s anything that includes vegetable pieces, by the way. Earlier today I’d picked up fresh ingredients for a vegetarian bolognaise (I use Quorn mince, because it makes an awful lot, and because I’m the only one eating it so I have to consider its longevity in the fridge), and I chopped and seasoned and threw it all together in a pot to simmer for an hour.

My pasta sauce is pretty much like my writing – I mainly rely on common sense to roll it out, and if I throw in a little more cooking wine and a little less oregano than last time, it usually still turns out okay.


I had to let Hartley play with a plate of cold noodles, since he’d already had his dinner and wasn’t in any mood to let me eat mine without his participation. Then I gave him a lovely warm bath and a good feed before putting him down, and now he’s sleeping soundly in the next room, which is how I managed to find the time to bash this out. Usually, I lie with him until he’s fully asleep and then transfer him to the cot before tiptoeing out again. While he drifts, I surf the internet on my iPhone, which is mainly how I get around online these days. I steal a moment here and there when I’m out with the baby, or while he’s napping, or sitting in his Bumbo eating toast.

As the cold weather sets in, I become more interested in stories about recipes and cooking, and Erqsome never lets me down on this front. She remains the biggest culinary/crafting genius I’ve ever met, and she can turn a pretty mean phrase as well, which consequently leaves me feeling hungry and full, all at the same time. I know I don’t usually praise other bloggers here (most of them are pretty good at bigging themselves up on their own blogs), but you’d be surprised by what this girl can do with cabbage. She’s my inspiration in most things, and I still refuse to molest that lovely hank of wool she gave me for my birthday this past year. At least until I can work out what I’m doing.

NaBloBlahBlah

I signed up to write a blog post every day for the whole of November, I guess because I don't have enough on my plate.

Actually, I have about a million things to do, most of which need doing in the next ten minutes. But the online writing thing has fallen to the wayside since motherhood, and this makes me sad in moments when I can actually get a handle on how I'm feeling and why, so I thought: why not? I'll leave National Beat Yourself Up for Not Knowing the First Thing About Writing a Novel Month for those with more ambition and less infant in their lives.

So here's my first post. You can find quality posts such as this one right here, every day for the next thirty days. Or is it thirty-one?

Hartley: Nine Months

Chicken,

Today you turned nine months old, which means you’ve officially spent as long on the outside as you have on the inside. I’m not sure if there’s any significance in that as such, but it’s sort of interesting, no?

I think the last time I wrote you, I said something silly about the fact that babies stop smiling at strangers once they realise the world is Satan’s playground and everyone in it self-serving demons who are only interested in their own survival and would use your head as their personal stepping stone if it meant they could leave their stamp on this whirling, meaningless mass of tarted-up dirt. Those might not have been my exact words, but the sentiment remains.

Your mummy has been going through a bit of a rough patch this past while, as our little family unit was playing tradsies with a variety of illnesses that violated one or more of us nearly every single day for three solid weeks. We were very lucky in the sense that none of these illnesses affected you too badly, and for the most part you were your boisterous, happy self. In another sense, we were unlucky for this same reason, if only because it wasn’t easy to convince you to stand in your walker in front of the telly while we took turns rotating from the bed to the sofa to the toilet until it was time to feed you and put you to bed.

Somewhere in the midst of this, a doctor told mummy she wasn’t allowed to be skinny anymore, because she hadn’t earned the right to wear size 6 jeans (which, in this country, is actually a size 8). No, mummy cheated the system by acquiring a thyroid disorder that turned her closet into a veritable storeroom of unwearable tents and, more significantly, messed around with her mood, which has been up and down and all around, but mainly buried down beneath a heavy duvet, which is where mummy wishes she was most of the time.

Anyway, that’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m working on feeling better, and meanwhile am painting over the big brown scribble I made all over poor, defenseless planet earth and its inhabitants. I’ll let you know how that goes.



And it turns out that your growing wariness of outsiders is a good thing. It makes perfect sense, now I think of it. How else would you know not to go crawling into the lap of a psychotic dictator or a diseased leper or your grandmother after she has said something rude about the way I walk, with my arms held stiffly down by my sides which, I should point out, is the strained and cautious walk of a person who has spent the bulk of her life beneath a cloud of cruel scrutiny, ruthlessly delivered by the woman who raised her? You wouldn’t, and so this is part of what you must teach yourself.

It’s been a little strange, though, to watch you go from open and beaming to guarded and vaguely fearful almost overnight. But both my baby newsletter and the health visitor say that you’ve worked out who the important adults in your life are, and although you might deign to smile at a table of pretty girls if you’re feeling secure in my company, for the most part you will wail like you’ve been stuck with a pin if someone looks at you wrong or, god forbid, tries to pick you up. This makes the baby gym class we signed up to on Wednesdays a little uncomfortable for both of us, but I’m sure you’ll get used to the lovely woman who encourages you to walk on the balancing beam soon enough.

Apart from the onset of shyness around strangers, you are steadily gaining confidence in yourself and in the world around you, conquering whatever obstacles you come up against and gumming happily on the rest. The other day we were deep in conversation when suddenly your father looked over and said “Hey, he’s standing up.” And so you were! You’d been trying to pull yourself up by holding onto the back of your walker since the last time we’d helped you to do that, and lo and behold, it turns out you no longer need a cheering section to get to your feet. I’ve also watched you pull yourself up by holding onto the seat of the sofa, but only because you spotted my iPhone and saw that it needed chewing.



I am no longer under the illusion that I’ve given birth to the only developmentally-challenged infant on earth who is destined to never grow to be any bigger than a bread loaf and will always impart his needs through screaming, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t surprise and delight me on a daily basis. You have to remember that until you came along, your mummy had only ever lived with cats. It takes approximately two weeks before a kitten outgrows that cute tiny kitty phase, after which it spends the next fifteen years knocking your picture frames off the mantelpiece in a misguided effort to get you to feed it. Babies, on the other hand, go from being inconsolable lumps of scream to actual humans with their own mobile phones, and the shift from one stage to the next is palpable.

The other day I was encouraging you to drink from a cup, and after you struggled to allow some water into your mouth before I pulled the glass away, you smacked your lips. Only that: you smacked your lips, except for me, it was the equivalent of a ten-year-old cat clearing its throat and then asking you to please pass the fish snacks, it was just that astounding. I have to keep reminding myself that you are not a one-dimensional animal or even a very clever one-dimensional animal – you’re a tiny person, and with every passing day you are shedding the mystery of mute infancy and becoming ever more sentient. It’s thrilling, and also a little sad, because I want to freeze you like this forever. You’re my little boo, but one day you’ll slam a door in my face because I won’t let you buy a Vespa with your postgraduate savings.



Even though you are still waking up many times in the night because you can’t get back to sleep unless you are pressed against me, your hand curled loosely around the collar of my shirt, your lips pursed and sucking the air, and even though I am exhausted and sometimes desperate for a bit of time alone, I know that I have to try and stay with you in these baby years, because I’m told it’s over far too quickly. I can’t imagine you being anything other than who you are right now – this beautiful, smiling chicken who pumps his little arms excitedly and nearly hyperventilates at the prospect of milk; who screeches with delight as someone chases him down the hall on his belly; who grins and lifts his arms with the anticipation of being picked up.

You were in Camden earlier, suffering your father’s five-comic-a-day habit so that I could get some writing done, and though you weren't gone for more than a few hours, I was already missing the way your eyes burn a hole into the back of my skull if I turn away from you for more than a few moments, and the sound you make when you want my attention, like a little Einstein discovering the theory of relativity over and over again: Ahhhhh!



I guess one day we will only have photos and videos and memories of this time, which we’ll share quietly with one another while you conquer the world in the privacy of your own bedroom. But right at this moment you are kneeling by your walker, cooing and pushing the buttons on your activity tray while daddy prepares a lovely Thanksgiving dinner for your Canadian mummy, and I’m going to file away this letter and come and join you now.

I love you, chicken.

Hartley: Seven and Eight Months

Hello Little You!

Well. It’s been quite some time since I’ve written to you here, and as usual, I’m at a loss as to where to even begin.

Some people might think me crazy for saying I have no time to write anymore, when I’m clearly active on one of the biggest time wasters to hit the internet thus far – Twitter. But one-hundred-and-forty characters is pretty much all the time you’re willing to give me, at least once I’ve done the essentials like bathed, eaten breakfast, had my coffee and maybe read a page or two of a book. I suppose if you tallied up all those one-liners, you’d have a decent block of time wherein one could feasibly write letters of adoration to her firstborn son, but that’s not how life works, at least not for us.

After I last wrote to you, the three of us flew to Canada to visit family, and it was there that you turned seven months old. I think we were all more than a little surprised by how well you adapted to the situation. A long-haul flight across the Atlantic with a seven-month-old baby is a harrowing idea for those of us with children (and those of us who fly with those of us with children), and I wasn’t sure how I was going to help you settle into nine hours of lap time, being that you’re not a lap baby by any stretch of the imagination, and being also that mummy is a very nervous flyer.

No matter how many statistics I hear, or glasses of wine I imbibe in-flight, nothing can convince me that flying is a perfectly safe way to travel. And mothers don’t follow you around with their tops undone, asking if you’re okay and making sure you don’t pull the stereo speakers off the table and onto your head because they have nothing better to do – no, we are programmed, PROGRAMMED to keep our babies out of danger. And so if any part of me, however irrational, believes that by getting on a plane I am somehow putting myself at risk, try and imagine how much bigger that fear becomes when I add you to the mix.

Regardless, we got on the plane, mummy forced herself to chill out, and we steeled ourselves for countless hours of you crying and us pacing the narrow aisles. But you know what? You were fine. No, you were better than fine: you were a brilliant little flyer. From the moment we got into the air, you transformed into a baby I’d never met before. Although you were confined to my lap for 95% of that flight, and even though you missed an entire night of sleep, you didn’t complain once. I spent most of those nine hours shrugging at strangers and saying “He’s not usually like this,” because I wanted them to know how very lucky we all were that you’d left your former shouty self at home.



Even when we disembarked and we buckled you into your car seat and subjected you to the most annoying drive of your life, because your grandparents can’t drive anywhere without getting lost or having an argument but usually both, you still managed a smile. When we got to the condo, I let your cousin Danielle take you upstairs in her arms, because I was practically blind with exhaustion and you seemed fine. And you were fine: all the way upstairs in the lift, all the way down the hall leading to the condo, and all the way into the living room, where Danielle finally lay you gently against a cushion on your grandparents’ sofa, you were fine. And then you completely lost your shit, because you had no idea where you were, hadn’t slept in over fifteen hours and had no clue who any of these people were. Pretty understandable, really.

But then your aunty Gabe offered to help me bathe you, and so you had your first bath outside the little plastic bath we’d been using at home. I dressed you in clean pajamas and your cousin fed you your peaches and banana in the plushest high chair we’d ever seen, while Aunty Gabe unpacked, folded and hung all our clothes for us. Then I did something that daddy still wishes to this very day I hadn’t done: I taught them the song I sing to you when I put you in your boo bag, and so the three of us surrounded you on that giant, marshmallowy bed and sang the boo bag song to you until your father left the room in shame.

I thought there was no way you’d concede to sleeping in a strange room, in a strange cot, which was a travel cot and so nothing like your cot back home, but after a few minutes of crying you settled into a deep sleep, which is something you did every night thereafter.



I don’t want to spend too much time on Canada because so much has happened since, but I will say that we flew back to the place your mummy was born, and it was a trip that made her very happy (she saw one of her dearest friends marry) and a bit sad too (it had been nearly three years since she’d returned, and home had lost its shine, which is something I’ll explain to you one day). At one point on the flight back to Vancouver, you let out a scream that continued to rise in pitch until everyone in the adjoining rows was staring at us. I thought that might have spelled the end of your flight tolerance, but it turned out you were only politely informing us that your foot had become trapped between the arm rest and the seat. Sorry!

In spite of the fact that we suffered two weeks of terrible jet lag, and you wouldn’t sleep in your cot - wouldn’t sleep at all - once we arrived home, I am so happy that we made that trip. It gave daddy and me a chance to catch our breath, but more importantly, the new environment, all those different experiences, and the loving, varied attention you received from family and friends brought you out of yourself, gave you confidence and turned you into the happiest baby you’ve ever been. A few days ago, you turned eight months old, and the three of us celebrated by taking you to an exhibition at The Serpentine before denying you chocolate ice cream at Harrods, though we gave you tastes of vanilla (we’re not that cruel).



The other morning, after very little sleep, I opened my eyes and caught sight of a small, strange face looking back at me. I must have brought you back into bed at some point, because there you were beside me in the push up position, breathing into my face and grinning at me like someone with very good news. It took me a few moments to recognise your sweet face, because I still remember when you were too little to meet me at face level of your own accord, and part of me hasn’t caught up to this other baby who can sit upright without support, handle and chew a variety of finger foods with his bottom two teeth, and laugh at all my jokes because he knows exactly what I mean. You are becoming less like a baby and more like a little boy every day. I remember when I thought that this would make me sad, that I would lose the tiny infant I first fell in love with, but I now realise that I am steadily gaining more and more of you, and that there’s nothing to be sad about at all.



I’m glad that you’re still so good at smiling, and I honestly believe that you could build bridges with those big silly grins of yours. The other day I took you into the dentist’s office, where I barely registered a sulky looking youth with long greasy hair and dark circles under eyes obscured by furrowed, pierced eyebrows. You, on the other hand, gave this boy your whole attention, disarming him with one of your charming grins and eliciting an unguarded smile from him as well. It wasn’t until I noticed this interaction that I realised that I’d made an unfair judgment about someone I didn’t know based on how he looked, which is something that you would never, ever do. I know it’s because you’re a baby, and babies haven’t been shaped by societal stereotyping, but it gives me a glimmer of hope nonetheless, because you continually remind me that nearly every single person on earth has the same good things inside them.

Sometimes when we’re out for a walk together, I look into the faces of people who seem bitter, depressed, lonely and generally unhappy, and I worry that some of them might have started out exactly like you: enthusiastic about what life has to offer, happy to experience this magic among so many others, and secure in the notion that people are inherently good, loving individuals who mean you no harm. I worry that one day you will grow too wise, see things - the world and its billions of inhabitants, some thriving and some always in the grip of terrible things - the way they really are, and that these two elements combined will break your heart. I can’t think of another way to explain so many unhappy faces in such a beautiful, thriving city, Hartley.

And although nothing I say and do could forever shield you from the sadness of being, I hope that you will always find ways to smile at strangers, that you’ll show compassion for people who aren’t as fortunate as you, and that you’ll strive to find the magic in living, even if life gets hard, because it’s there. I promise you, it’s there. You’re living proof of that.



I love you very much, darling.

Away

What makes me think I could do this again? I don't know. Something.

I'm quite behind on the one little online luxury I allow myself, mainly because I feel I'm not being completely selfish with that time, and possibly because I'm arrogant enough to believe that I could be making an investment in his future emotional inheritance.

But actually, it will be a number of years before he'll know how to read these sentimental outpourings of mine and, indeed, a good few more before he'll even want to. I've got at least two decades to complete this series, and that's if we still communicate online, with words, written with our tentacles. Fingers! I mean.

For those of you still with me, though, I can offer you the Cole's Notes version of the last eight weeks:

We took Hartley to Canada for three weeks, so that he could meet the rest of his family and finally pay a visit to his second home. In that time, he turned seven months, but not before growing two teeth and learning to crawl - a skill he uses mostly for good, though sometimes for trying to launch himself off the sheer quiltface of the bed, like a happy wee lemming pursued by the notion that something more exciting exists just three feet lower.

In less than two weeks he'll turn eight months old.

I love him more every day.

Some wise T-shirt once said: "Every Life Should Have a Secret Plan" or something to that effect (I don't actually own the t-shirt). We don't have any top secret plans to sit on yet, but I think we're working on it.

Hair

It’s not true, what they say about the smell of babies, or if it is, it’s a universal illusion perpetuated by a shampoo commercial.

In the dark, I kiss your small, hard, delicate head. I cup it in the palm of my hand and press my lips firmly against your temple, linger longer than is necessary, as though I could sink this message down into the roiling quicksand of your subconscious.

... love ...

I lob these words into your slumber, the sounds reverberating incomprehensibly: I love you, whispered furiously, like force could crack the shell and release their slippery innards, leak them into your dreams.

Your hair does not smell like baked bread, or clean sunshine or talcum powder – it smells of nothing. I inhale the absence of smell, breathing the warmth back into your hair. It contains a slight, melting whiff of the dinner we cooked earlier which, if anything, accentuates the perfect, nothing smell of you.

Love: I’m unlearning the words to every meaning I know.

Hartley: Six Months

Hello little you!

So, how does it feel to have lived half a year already? It must feel pretty good, because these days it’s not difficult to coax a smile out of you, and you’ve already learned to anticipate when something worth smiling for is about to come your way. I have only to touch the top button of my blouse or dress, for instance, before your arms and legs begin their mad cycling and pinwheeling, and you’re curled into position for a feed, slapping your thigh and hyperventilating with wild abandon, your eyes popping out of your head like you’ve just won the boob lottery and – lo and behold! – you have.

You’ve gone through so many changes these past few weeks that it would take me three Saturday mornings of you being out with Daddy in order to record everything, and that’s if I were able to discern some sort of continuity. These letters are some of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write because before you can put something into words, you must first suspend the dizzy, elemental churn of existence in order to peer inside and see what’s there. But every time I hit pause, the organic soup of the experience gains an inaccurate definition that defies description.

What is your mummy banging on about now, hmm? Let’s just start from the beginning, shall we? Any beginning will do.

This month I worked very hard at streamlining our lives in such a way as to eliminate any unnecessary noise that might obscure some of the things you’ve been trying to tell me. A week can seem quite long at the starting point when you’ve got so many hours in a day to fill, and up until recently, I’d been filling them with activities in the hopes that this would provide you with some structure. Rather than let your moods dictate events, as I should have been doing, I went about it the opposite way, sometimes to the detriment of your happiness.

It finally dawned on me that neither of us was benefiting from our strict, weekly lunches with the postnatal group. You’d had your hair pulled, nose tweaked, and head knocked far too often for my liking, and any concern I showed for you was met with derision from certain mummies who believed that I was only inhibiting your learning curve. I came away from these meetings with the impression that not only was I turning you into an oversensitive, socially inept, blubbering mess of a child, but if I didn’t get you to sleep in your cot right now, I’d be sharing a bed with you until you were old enough to grow a full set of sideburns and handlebar mustache. For your part, having to work your feeds and naps into these hours-long sessions made you miserable, and I think you dreaded Friday afternoons nearly as much as me. So one day I told everybody that we were going to stop coming, and that’s just what we did.


Since then, I’ve let you determine the shape of our day. Apart from an hour-long walk, which I’ve instigated for the good of us both, and usually around naptime, you pretty much take the lead from one hour to the next. Your daddy bought himself an iPhone, which gave us enough bargaining power to secure you a walker and a baby gym, both of which have accelerated your development in ways that have surprised all three of us.

One Saturday morning, your daddy took you out so that I could rest and then go out to a class that I take a few times a week. It was a very hot day, and when I got back, daddy was molded to the sofa and you were stripped down to your nappy, standing in your walker and clutching a bottle of water to your chest, watching television and stamping your little feet against the rug like a tiny happy ox. At this moment I had to concede that my helpless, anxious infant had somehow transformed himself into a strong, confident little boy.

We still spend many hours glued together, you and I, and sometimes when you see me leave the room you’ll cry like your heart is breaking because it seems like I might never come back. But there are also times when we’re going about our own business, happily coexisting and unconcerned about what the other is up to. At these times I’m usually eating a meal or tidying the flat while you watch Cbeebies in your walker whilst exercising your legs (stamp three times and then stretch onto your toes, stamp three times and stretch, &etc.) or play in your gym, where you pivot on your belly in order to reach your toys.


Oh yes – the pivoting. You used to hate being on your back, but you were never able to hold yourself up on your front for very long either. The walker provided some relief but this got old very quickly. One day I put you on your back under your gym in order to make the bed, and you started complaining right away so I had to be quick. Before I could make it back to you though, you’d stopped crying. I took that opportunity to hang up some clothes, and when I came back into the room, I saw exactly why you’d stopped crying: you were on your front!

I’d heard about this phenomenon of babies rolling onto their fronts but I never imagined that one day you would do this of your own accord. You hated being on your tummy so much that I always thought you’d be one of those babies that skipped the crawling stage altogether. The next time you rolled onto your front, me and your father were preoccupied with something on the television and so I missed it again. I needn’t have worried though – a few days later I watched you finish a feed, roll onto your front, do two massive farts and then fall asleep with your face buried in the mattress. You woke again a few minutes later, pushed yourself up and grinned at me like you’d just been awarded a gold medal for body surfing.

Now we can’t stop you from rolling over, and we have to be very careful at naptime and bedtime because you don’t always tell us that you’re awake. Instead, we’ll come in and you’ll be in the push-up position in your boo bag (which is what we call your sleeping bag), nodding your head like a sea turtle and stuttering with the effort of it all. The other night you woke up crying, and no wonder – I came in and found you propped up on your hands and thighs, only half awake and facing the opposite direction from where you’d fallen asleep. It seems the impulse to be on your front is beyond even your own control at times.


In terms of your verbal skills, except for when you’re sleepy and patting at my face while droning ‘ahhhhh,’ there is nothing very gentle about your elocutions. One day you stood up straight in your walker, flung your arms over your head and made a strangled roaring noise in your throat like a monster rising from the depths of the sea, or like a zombie getting ready to eat someone’s face off. You did this because something on the television excited you, and when you heard my laughter, you grinned at me and did another massive roar.

Your daddy was away at a conference and I searched fruitlessly for our mini video recorder because I was sure this was something you’d never do again. But a week later, when the three of us had stopped to take a break from some shopping we were doing in town, all of Starbucks turned to see what on earth was going on, as you stood on your daddy’s legs and roared at the posters tacked to the bulletin board above your head.

You’re just as boisterous about your interactions with inanimate objects. There are no half measures with you, and if you can’t fit something into your mouth, you are busy trying to smash it to bits. If there’s nothing to smash to bits, you resort to slapping the floor, the book, the walker tray or whatever is within reach, because the physical world must be subjected to some type of impact by your hand at all times. Nothing and no one is safe, not even your daddy’s prized iPhone.


That’s not to say you’re not incredibly sweet, because you are the sweetest, most engaging little person I have ever met. You match me smile for smile, and that smile still erupts across your whole entire face. Your silly gummy grins are infectious, and you offer them indiscriminately when we’re out together, whether or not mummy wants to have an interaction with a flushed, giggling indie girl on the tube or a hard-bitten clubber shouting into her mobile phone and wearing last night’s dress. You seem to bring out the best in everyone, and I have yet to encounter the face that doesn’t smile back at you and mean it.


I am much more relaxed about things than I used to be, and this has given you a chance to relax and enjoy the process of learning too. We’ve had more fun together since I stopped worrying about doing what’s right for you, and instead just started doing it. It’s a good thing, because today we are heading into the uncharted territory of solid food and I want you to be able to approach this adventure with as much confidence and enthusiasm as it deserves.

A whole lot has happened in six months, though the time has gone by far too quickly, as they said it would. I’m so thankful to have another six months of getting to know you before I go back to work. I wish it were longer.


Happy half-birthday, my stompy little ox. I love you more than you can know.

This imaginary hour

Bruce and I were having one of our many theological conversations (I hesitate to call them debates since neither of us are particularly invested in what we’re saying), and Bruce put to me the idea that since we can’t conceive of infinity, maybe there is a God. A rather A-Z analysis of a more complex idea he had, but this was the general thrust of his argument.

I countered with the theory that Infinity didn’t exist until humans came along and created it – an unfortunate by-product of an artificial notion of time.

This got me thinking, though, about Time. Paul Auster kicked it off really, with his wonderfully clear prose in Man in The Dark, and though he wasn’t writing anywhere in the vicinity of my thoughts (or perhaps my thinking wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of his writing – that sounds right, actually), it was as though his words had suddenly cleared a path through the unruly jungle of consciousness itself and I realised:

We live every moment of our lives, as it’s happened and as it has yet to occur, simultaneously - all the time. This is to say that we are the clocks, and each event we have lived, and will ever live, has been etched into our faces from very early on, maybe from the moment we became self-aware. Maybe even those who lack self-awareness do this, as it’s not something to realise but is instead a state of being.

I haven’t thought it through any better than that and, in any case, I’m sure it’s a load of bollocks like everything else that shoots into my head. But today it helps me to think this for some reason.

I keep looking at families in the midst of their lives and wondering when we will ever reach this or that stage ourselves, always forgetting to recognise what is happening in the here and now.

It is so important to try and glean as many nutrients from this moment as you can, or you’ll be waiting a good long time for that imaginary hour to arrive.

Twitter you can't have these

I suspect that most of us read books so that we can try and come to terms with the nature of reality, which is to say, the end of all things.

Moments before the last line of a book flies up to obscure the windscreen, I close my eyes as one would before some ultimate, indelible impact.

Always I am afraid to say these kinds of things out loud, in case. Well...

Birthday

Today I turned 33! I’m the same age as Jesus was when he built a lovely oak cabinet or rose from the dead or did some other neat-o trick that only card-carrying mankind saviours can lay claim to. Fabulous!

Bruce is off from work and we have a great day planned – a shopping spree for some new clothes this afternoon, a short break (for me) from child rearing and then it’s dinner out with a big group of friends at Mela - a restaurant I’ve been dreaming fitfully of since I last ate there well over a year ago. I’m a very lucky gal, I know.

It’s also the anniversary of that fateful night Bruce and I fell in love at the karaoke bar in Soho, kicking off the maddest and best three years in the recorded and unrecorded history of me, so – happy day x 2.

Gosh, this poor neglected little blog! Ah well, Life’s got my full attention now at least.

Hartley: Five Months Old

Dearest Hartley,

You are five months old today and I almost wrote six, not because I’m willing the time to go by more quickly but because I’m very tired. For the past two weeks you’ve kept me awake, scrabbling at my back or my arm or my breast with your sharp little nails that I trim and trim but which still manage to retain their sharpness, scrabbling and squawking because you are hungry – hungrier than I can keep up with, even when I’m wide awake and cognisant of where my nipple is in relation to your little mouth. I’m sorting this out for us, but at the moment my brain is (baby) mush, and this is why when someone asks me how old you are, I have to round up to the nearest month. And sometimes I can’t even get that right.

One day when you grow up, you will come to know what I am like, and then you’ll be shocked to discover that not only was I considering feeding you baby rice before you reached six months of age, but that this decision came to me easily and without a note of dread. This is because motherhood is set up in a way that is conducive to how I learn – you never have to do anything new until you’ve talked it through with at least ten other people, at least six weeks prior to having to do it, and by then you feel like you’ve been mixing expressed milk with a cream-of-wheat-like substance for your heretofore exclusively breastfed infant your entire life.* Though in any case, sleep is much more important than doing things by the book, and this is why you and I still share a bed.


Your learning curve is much steeper than mine in many ways, and if you thought about how much an infant has to figure out in that first year of life, you would never balk at returning to school to complete a PHD, because there at least you have a frame of reference. Your frame of reference was a relentless vortex of sound and sensation you had yet to decipher as your own wrenching cries (I’m still so sorry about that), and the particles from that existential detonation are still travelling outward, making new constellations for you to try and connect up, to try and find sounds for, to name.

But I truly believe that in the midst of all this scary learning, you and I are actually good influences on one another. You have instigated so many positive changes in me over these last few months. I am cynical about many things, for instance, but I could never be cynical about you. When I disentangle myself from you after your last somnambulistic feed and stealthily tiptoe off to the next room to tell your father that you look like an angel, I really do mean what I say – clichés are what they are, and far be it from me to dispute the celestial nature of your lovely features while you sleep the sleep of one who has never tasted a moment of bitterness.

You are still rooty tooty in that way you started off being when you were my little anaconda, except now you could feasibly dislodge the bolts from your cot with that insatiable mouth of yours, and when I come back into the room from washing my hands, I usually find you on your side, your head practically meeting your heels as you contort yourself in an attempt to grab hold of - and root on - a package of nappies, a pillow, a rolled up blanket or something else I would have never thought you capable of getting your lips around. Whereas the idea of such a mouth - wet with dribble and sometimes worse - would at one time have inspired the purchase of a contamination suit, I actually feel privileged that you’ve appointed me as your personal chew toy, and when I see you coming for the side of my face or my nose with the intent of latching on in your breathy, slobbery way, I don’t duck. You can slime me any day, darling; In fact, I’d feel hurt if you didn’t.


I say that I’ve influenced you, and I’m sure that’s true, but actually, I can’t think of a single thing you do now that didn’t somehow arise from your own strong will. Sometimes I look at you and marvel at how you’ve managed to not only come away with the absolute best qualities your father and I possess but, by some incredible alchemy, translate these into a fully developed little person who constantly exceeds both our wildest dreams and expectations about what you would be like. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t hear your father exclaim, Aw, he’s so lovely! which, you should know, is a complement of the highest order from a manly man who does not easily gush.

Your personality isn’t so much emerging as it is intensifying, and you have very definite ideas of what you like (which you reward with a massive grin or a screech of delight) and what you don’t (a warning noise like a whine that quickly becomes a scream I can only liken to that of a heroin in some murder mystery movie, as when the shower curtain is pulled back to reveal the man with the sharp knife). We’ve learned very quickly that it isn’t prudent to let you sit in your sling-back chair in front of your favourite programme for any longer than it takes us to wolf down our dinner, and in fact, I can hear you demonstrating this in the next room as your father desperately tries to entertain you while I bash this out.

That’s another talent you’ve picked up – the ability to tell the difference between real engagement and the artificial kind that gives us the opportunity to take a wee break. Your patience is becoming more limited and I find I have to step up my game in order to keep you from unnerving the neighbourhood with your shouty shoutingness. I’ve been told that this means you’re exceptionally bright, but then again, that advice came from the owner of a toy shop during a recession, so I’m not sure how much of it I should trust. Still, I tend to believe every good thing I hear about you because secretly (not so secretly) I believe all of it.


I could point to how strong you are becoming, only wanting to stand or sit up at every opportunity, and how vocal (your new favourite sound is ‘em,’ as in EMMMMMMM!, as in you’re not happy about being left on the bed while I run to wash my hands for the fiftieth time that day, and sometimes this sound turns into an indignant ‘mum’ sound, like EMMMUMUM, which I know not to interpret favourably), and how you will grab at whatever is within reach and immediately set about stuffing it into your mouth, but it seems you’re only doing all the things that babies are supposed to be doing, so I’ll hold off on designing the trophies for these particular accomplishments.

But know this: your mother is always watching you, and when she isn’t driven to laughter or tears because of something you said or did that day, she is more than likely welling up with pride because, in her humble opinion, she truly believes that she has the most beautiful, amazing and gifted infant of anyone, and that is more than enough reason to celebrate.


Happy fifth month, my boo-faced boo. We’re doing marvellously, you and I.

*After having read that weaning foods don’t necessarily lead to better sleeps, we’ve decided to postpone this move for now. I’m a bit relieved, actually.

Windows of opportunity opening

This morning Bruce took Hartley to work. I’ve known this for a week – ample opportunity to stay up late and worry about how to fit in every last thing I’ve wanted to do alone for the past four months. I woke at 4.30 and never did get back to sleep, which only contributes to the surreal, dreamlike feeling that being alone gives me now that I’m tied to a whole other person 24 hours a day.

After we parted ways at the end of our street - Bruce heading off to East Finchley Station with our small boy strapped to his front - I turned in the direction of our favourite restaurant, which serves up just about anything for the indecisive, and not too badly for what it costs, to have a solitary breakfast of porridge. Once there, I had sufficient time and space to notice that the service was unbearably slow, the porridge oats mixed in with fruit that was obviously cut up with the same knife used to trim garnish for the savory dishes, and that everybody else had one or more children, none of whom held a candle to my beloved, at least in my eyes.

Then it was back home where, in a state of urgency, I made a hot cup of coffee and contemplated also opening a cold (non-alcoholic) bottle of beer before dismissing this as an indulgence even yours truly couldn’t stomach. I ate a chocolate cupcake standing at the kitchen counter. I ate another cupcake, faster.

And here I sit, watching the sands of time luge madly down the gullet of a modestly sized hour glass and wishing I’d just made a plan and stuck to it. I’ve managed to read half a short story and lie supine on the bed for as long as I could stand to relax, and now I feel the need to move again. I was meant to visit the lido, which is finally open for the season, but the weather has taken a turn for the grey and, although warm, does not inspire outdoor swimming.

I would take photos, but my favourite subjects are being fawned over by men and women I don’t know, and anyway, doing so would probably eat up all my time, as it takes me a dog’s age to get the shot I want and then choose just one (sometimes two) from a spate of about thirty. I would write a proper blog post, but feel that I’m disciplined enough with my daily dishwashing and laundry, nappy changes and long walks around Alexandra Palace. I could put on a record and lounge about the place moodily, but cannot decelerate quickly enough to enjoy the experience, and anyway, it’s too messy for moody lounging.

On Monday Bruce and I are going to see Synecdoche, New York (against our better judgment and that of the reviewers) and then have a quick dinner somewhere local, to celebrate our second wedding anniversary. There are so many little windows of childless opportunity opening up, their fisheyes briefly flashing the world of double-handed typing, hot drinks and messy lunches before wincing shut against the glare of present-day responsibility. I won’t stress out too much about wasting time as long as I know they’re still there.

Well, I’d better head out and find something to do with the last bit of free time I have left. I did know I’d probably come running to the internet to mark the occasion, but it’s time to take it offline now.

Behind the scenes

This afternoon my friend’s nine-month-old daughter may or may not have swallowed a thumbnail-sized sunglasses detail she may or may not have chewed off the arm of a pair of sunglasses. The point is, the mother was up like a shot, banging her kid’s head against the rug in a frenzied attempt to determine if she was choking, then hanging her upside-down whilst gagging her with a finger to try and bring up the offending ornament as she screamed like a baby that was probably going to shit out a foreign object sometime in the next 24 hours.

Then on the phone to a friend with five children of her own: I mean, what do I do – do I take her to the doctor, get her x-rayed, have them open her up, what? By then the child is breastfeeding calmly and Hartley has stopped crying because he’s back to being the centre of my universe. We’re all waiting for an answer because none of us have been through this before, though we’ve definitely reached an unspoken consensus that probably she is fine, and anyway, the friend’s children have never swallowed anything they’re not supposed to.

This past week has been difficult. There are many things about being a new parent that I simply cannot think about too much or I would spend the bulk of my time crying instead of inventing new games for him to play and trying to remember the words to picture books so that I don’t have to keep turning them away from him to read what they say.

The bond I formed with him in order to survive the experience is the very thing that now makes it impossible to even fathom being away from him for more than an hour at a time. Every first-time mother goes through it I guess, but I don’t trust the world or anyone in it at the moment, not with Hartley, and if I could spend the next eighteen years with him strapped to my front without being crippled by the weight of him, well. Don’t tempt me.

Next week Bruce and I are celebrating our second-year anniversary and will leave Hartley with someone else while we catch a film and go out for an early dinner. This woman has known Bruce for a very long time, is practically like a second mother to him and has two children of her own. She was the first person outside the family to meet Hartley, having driven us home from hospital after everyone else resigned themselves to the fact that we were probably never getting out. She will make a very good babysitter, and will not call us to come home early at the first sign of trouble.

No, the point is, everyone keeps trying to get me to feed Hartley a breadstick, a baby cookie, you know, whatever. Leave him for an evening, a night, a whole weekend – take a break! These are just suggestions, and what’s the harm in a bit of food? It’s symbolic, see. I not only feel obliged to intercept the offer – sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who would. And I simply cannot follow Hartley around for his entire life fending off the well-meaning gestures of others.

I don’t want a break, or a breadstick, or to reclaim my life. I just want to stop feeling so afraid.

Hartley: 4 Months Old

I can’t remember who said that a baby isn’t really a person until (s)he learns to laugh, but your mummy must be only half human, as she finds most of the things people say not very funny and spends the bulk of her time with other mummies only pretending to laugh. You, on the other hand, need only go from a fairly placid expression to that maniacal grin of yours and I just can’t help myself - I am ROTFL (you’ll not only know what that means one day but will probably find it rather dated). And I guess on the 20th of April at approximately 1600 hrs you decided to get all personable, because that is when I heard you laugh for the first time.

You are easily bored at home and even though we’d been out for most of the day and I hadn’t once resorted to putting you in front of the television, I was running out of ways to entertain you. I started lifting you over my head in a kind of rhythmic, vertical airplane ride so that I could keep my eye on the Gilmore Girls and suddenly you made a noise that sounded so perfectly like a baby laughing I thought you might be hiding a tiny tape recorder of sound effects in your nappy (thank you for not doing ‘gun going off’ or ‘woman screaming,’ by the way). I brought you down to face level and studied you for a moment before throwing you back into the air, again and again, making you laugh and laughing with you until my arms ached.


Try as I might, I could not for the life of me get you to replicate that sound for daddy, not even after a feed and a lovely nap and me saying, Wait, watch, I think he’s going to do it! while I pumped you into the air for the twentieth time and you sucked your fist at me with mild interest.

Of course since then, we’ve been doing our best to understand just what it is about us you find so amusing. Sometimes I’ll be feeding you and typing an email over your head and for no discernible reason you’ll stop mid-suck to look up at my face and laugh. I find this unbearably sweet and always tickle your chin and kiss the folds of your neck whenever you do this, so possibly you’re just discovering better ways to get our attention – ways that do not involve indignant squawking, which you always resort to if I leave you to amuse yourself while I dry dishes or put away groceries or hang out the washing. I think you are expressing your resentment at having to watch your mummy occupy a traditionalist role within our household. We may need to hire a maid.


You’re growing in so many ways now, and so quickly, that I’d need to completely deconstruct you in order to tease them all out. I won’t attempt this, but I will itemise some things I don’t ever want to forget in case you outgrow them before next month:

• The way your squawks of indignation turn to excited shrieks as you see me fumbling at my nursing bra. If I reach you before you’re good and ready to pack up your pity party, you’ll make a few more noises of despair, even though my nipple is in your mouth and you’re already contentedly feeding.
  

• The way you lace your little fingers together while you eat

• The way it sometimes takes you a few seconds to calculate whether or not the occasion of having woken from a deep sleep warrants a cry and, once you’ve decided that yes, it does, the way your bottom lip pops out and you let out a staccato waah that sounds more like baah before bringing down the house with your hoarse, boyish wails. Forgive us – we laugh because we love these. We practically stumble over ourselves to make you feel better, although once I rocked you in my arms while daddy filmed you.

• The way you smile at me whenever I appear in your line of vision. The way you smile extra hard at daddy, now that you realise there are two of us on your team, and that one of us is not afraid to hang you upside-down from his knees.

I could go on and on, but I don’t think I can convince you to nap for much longer, and anyway, I hope that you’ll keep doing these things that are unique to you, and that I won’t have to resort to writing them down so as not to forget them, at least for a little while.

In the meantime, please know that your smile and your laughter mean more to me than anything, because sometimes it hits home that you are doing these things for me and then I feel sorry that you got stuck with such a silly, frightened, self-conscious mother who has to push through all her insecurities just to get you out of the house and around to all the people who want to see and play with you.

But it’s hard to stay anxious when the most beautiful little boy in the entire world is beaming at you with his whole face, and then you know that you musn’t be doing too badly.


Happy fourth month, little smiler. I love you hugely.

Just trying something out

Do you know how hard it is to find an embedded player that will play stuff on your website for free? When you have a four-month-old boy on your hands?

More on that later, when we've gotten over our respective illnesses and I've found a bit of time to be serious.

In the meantime, please have a listen:

Recipe #1 – Snoopy Sno-Cones

Ingredients:
Snoopy Sno-Cone flavoured syrup
Ice

You’ll need a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine for this recipe. Dig out your old SSCM from storage or, if you led an impoverished childhood or live in some backwoods place like Europe, buy one off eBay.

Make sure you clean all the parts with warm, soapy water, because whether or not you have a second hand SSCM, you don’t want manky old 1980s dust in your sno-cone, now do you? No you do not. I’ll see you back here in a few.

Instructions:

Remove the rooftop (aka Snoopy) from the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine. Why is Snoopy wearing a red hat that looks vaguely like the product? I don’t know. What does a Charles Schultz character have to do with an ice treat anyway? We could stand around debating the philosophical nature of capitalism and the exploitation of childhood nostalgia all day long, but the point is, your ice is melting, so try and keep up.

Put your ice cubes down the chimney (I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry – he never sleeps there) and drive that Snoopy roof home. This is what you’ll use to keep the ice in place while you hold the dog house with your feet in order to get a purchase on that flimsy plastic crank. Now get cranking! Do you remember that part in Edward Scissorhands where he is making an ice sculpture on the lawn of Winona Ryder’s parents’ house for their Christmas party and his scissor hands are flying around the block of ice at such a rate that the ice chips are spinning off it in big clouds like snow and Winona is dancing around in the blizzard of ice chips in slow motion like a ballerina princess? Yeah – SO RETARDED. Am I right?


Anyway, where were we. Oh yes – cranking the ice. So keep cranking out that ice until Snoopy’s butt hits the roof of his house and the crank turns effortlessly in your hand. If you’re lucky enough to have managed not to lose the plastic shovel, try your best to scoop that shit out into a cup, otherwise just use a spoon. It’s less authentic but we’re not five anymore (oh, unless you are five, in which case: hey little guy! Does your mummy know you’re online? Well you’d better ask her to help you ‘cause I sure as shit can’t afford the legal fees if you go grinding your knuckles off or choke on an ice cube or something) and, anyway, the end result is the same.

So now that you’ve got your tiny, hard won cup of ice chips, it’s time to squeeze out the syrup from your snowman, who obviously buys his hats from the same crap store as Snoopy – maybe they were two for a dollar. Oh hey look, it’s Woodstock! Painted on like some cheap afterthought! Just for a change, hey Woody? Well, it was always about the dog, so don’t look too surprised. At least they painted you twice, though I see by your exclusive lack of sno-cone that you still haven’t managed to assert yourself. This is why you’ll never amount to anything more than a sidekick, even if you went on American Cartoon Character Idol and met Ryan Seacrest in person. Your journey ends here my yellow-feathered friend, so why don’t you just dry your tears and sing us out, yeah?

You know that shovel doubles as a spoon, don’t you? Oh man, what a saddo you were. Well, enjoy. Don’t eat the yellow sno.

(Makes: 1 big sno-cone or 5 Woodstock-sized cones)