Caption Competition

Here we have the oldest, and youngest members of the Batsford clan. Just before I went back to work we spent the day over with Granddad Batsford and took the opportunity to snap some photos. I'm ashamed to say I only got round to taking them off the camera last night and when I saw this one, I had to share.

So captions via comments please ...

And the little one said, roll over, roll over!!

I’d like to meet that little one, and have a few stern words with them about having stolen my son and replaced him with a landed fish that I need to stake down to stop from flapping across the floor.

It’s a bit like watching a real drunk relative trying to break dance at a wedding, except small boy has the added disadvantage of have zero patience with life. He’s inherited that trait from both of us, but has spent the last 14 weeks taking it to a whole new level and frankly, the noise that comes from those lungs when he realises that he’s bitten off more than he can chew in the mobility department is worse than a hundred sets of nails down a hundred blackboards. If there were a choice between two rooms, one with Alfie throwing an “I’m stuck on my stomach and I’m not happy” ab dab, and the other with the Blackboard Orchestra, I’d be elbowing my way to the front of the latter and preparing to shout a hearty Bravo!!

I can’t even massage him any more without keeping one hand permanently round an ankle while I refer to the next diagram, otherwise I tend to put my hand absentmindedly where his legs used to be and find myself rubbing a handful of sheepskin rug.

Right now I am just grateful that we thought to invest in baby gates. I consider it money well spent because while Alfie currently shares the same design flaw as a Dalek in that he can’t do stairs, I’m betting the farm that he’s going to be doing laps within the next 2 months.

While I’m on here, I thought I would mention an upcoming event called the Reclaim Birth rally. It’s being held on 7th March and aims to march through London to present a petition about the closure of the Albany Midwives.

For anyone asking what the hell the Albany midwives have to do with them, and why should they give up their Sunday lunchtime to walk through the centre of town, here’s a quick reason:

The Reclaim Birth campaign is working to improve the standard of midwife services in the whole of the country - for everyone. The Albany Midwives are a London based group who, quite frankly, were a shining light in an otherwise bleak landscape of NHS maternity care providing a high rate of homebirth and personal care on a level that most other units can only dream about. They have been closed down for reasons not entirely clear but which have been described as a “contract dispute”.

If you still don’t get why this matters then look over the pond to where homebirth is illegal in some states, and where VBAC is illegal in many more. You have a growing number of women crossing state lines to achieve the birth they deserve, and more still having freebirths (where they birth at home without ANY midwife care) because they don’t want to be a part of a machine that treats birth like a medical emergency.

This campaign is about securing the services we already have, and improving them. It is also about saying no to a world where there is no choice to how you bring your child into the world.

Plus it’s a good opportunity to spend the day in town and follow an hour of righteous indignation with some good old fashioned duck feeding.

Excess Baggage

It's quite a common problem that us women have when we've given birth, in fact, here's my useless fact for the day: A woman is genetically programmed to lay down a stone in fat when she is preggers in Mother Nature's often misguided hope that it will be turned into milk. Clearly she's not on the Cow and Gate mailing list – unlike me - how they got my details is still a mystery to me!

Anyway, the point is that regardless of what you do or don't eat you are going to chunk up and once the dust has settled on the new version or normality you might do what I did, look in the mirror and think "Holy SHIT, what just happened!?!?".

I've never been keen on exercise, or at least anything that requires me to get red cheeked without a substantial pleasure payback, but seriously, this was no joking matter. The fact that I went back to work 9 weeks post partum just made matter worse because there is nothing that saps the soul more than a 12 hour day of motorway schlepping and desk driving.

Fortunately for me, there was an easy solution. There is a fairly large group at work who had previously been the butt of my razor sharp wit but who I now find myself joining with all the fervour of the newly converted. This group runs ... at lunch. Those who know me will now be re-reading this whole paragraph in case they misunderstood. I'll save you some time, you haven't. I am now running 3 times a week in my lunch hour. Now pick yourself up off the floor and move on.

We run round a collection of lakes and woodland and to be honest, it is exactly the sort of setting that keeps me amused. If we had run along some roads or even hit the treadmills I would already have resigned myself to a future of elasticated waistbands.

I won't lie to you, the first few times I went were hell, which is unsurprising considering I had done virtually no exercise for the past year. In order to get myself through I started thinking of these runs as preparation for our next bambino.

Again, with the getting up off the floor and moving on, I'm not pregnant and I'm not planning to be in the near future.

The point is though, that I want to be in the best shape I can be when we do decide to give Alfie a sibling to torture and that means getting my backside in gear as of now. It seems to be doing the trick, in that I finished the run today knowing I had loads left, but it has also accidentally led to a bizarre kind of therapy for me as well, a kind of mental preparation I didn't really seek out.

I've started to think of these runs as a sort of labour. The first woodland section is physically quite easy, so it has become my early labour with everything getting going. The first lake is the biggest section, and hard to motivate myself around because it seems to go on forever. Bit like the main bulk of labour really. Then there is a horrible little mud track where my lungs start aching and my calves start burning and I catch myself thinking I can't carry on and can't I just stop for a little while and carry on later. Just after that we open up onto the final straight of the second lake where I can visualise being in the second stage of labour.

You're probably sitting there making cuckoo noises at me now, and guess what, I don't care. This is a really nuts visualisation, I know that, and I didn't seek it out, but it just makes those runs FLY by. What I hope it will also do - and of course this is reliant on me keeping to that same run for the next few years - is that by the time labour is something I need think about, not only will I be physically prepared for it, but the visualisation will work in reverse and I will be able to tap into my memories of running round the lake to help me though.

Or alternatively, I'll just get my waist back. Either is good.

Wired and Tired - a BAD Combo!

I’m sitting here with my eyelids stapled open and pins under my nails in a vain attempt to stay awake thanks to a certain little baby. I’ve been up since 3am which is a clear 2 hours off my usual streamlined sleeping schedule and in truth, there isn’t a cup of coffee strong enough to make that puppy fly.

The irony of the situation isn’t lost on me, in that I have spent the last week discovering another common mothering fear – cot death, or SIDS I suppose I should say these days. I’m sure by the second or third child, you experienced mothers are letting your little bundles fall asleep face down on a shag pile rug, but as a first time mum, I must admit that sleeping still provokes an irrational fear in me. Every evening when I take him upstairs, kiss him ever so gently on the head and whisper “I love you” in a voice I hope won’t make those little blue peepers spring open, I get a horrible knot in my stomach and a little voice says “what if something happens to him? You’re leaving your precious little baby alone in a big cot all by himself and anything could happen.”

It is the most ridiculous thing in the world, this paranoia, and every time I have mentioned it to other mums I am greeted with a roll of the eyes and a hearty “oh that’s normal”. Really?!? It is?! Now correct me if I’m wrong but surely this falls firmly under the category of INFORMATION THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN USEFUL BEFORE NOW, because frankly, nobody ever mentioned it, and it would have saved me a lot of stressing had I known that this was just a normal part of becoming a mum!

Anyway no fear of Alfie being too quiet for comfort last night and the source of that little SNAFU was his latest growth spurt. Having devoured two 8oz bottles of hungry baby milk, which usually sees him through the night just fine, he decided that no, a third was in fact required and should be delivered forthwith to his quarters by Minion Number 1 (that’s Keith by the way).

Man alive, we weren’t either of in a good mood by the time he’d finished that bottle, especially when his little feast didn’t solve the primary problem (as we saw it) of Alfie being wide awake and alternately chattering away to himself and shouting at us to come and get him. Turns out, after we caved in and brought him to bed with us, the problem was that he needed two of the biggest burps you’ve ever heard. When I’ve finished typing this I actually need to call a glazer to get a quote for the windows he blew out.

For some reason a chronic lack of sleep has made me feel quite reflective today, and I was thinking back to what I wanted from these early days of motherhood and comparing them to how things turned out.

First up was the home birth – hmmm, less said, soonest mended there. I haven’t actually spent a lot of time thinking about it yet, but I know that when I do, I’m going to have a lot of issues that I’m going to need to talk through. I remember especially thinking recently about the phrase I took from Ina May Gaskin’s writing - “your body is not a lemon” - and wondering whether in fact mine does have a certain citrusy odour about it. I’m not sure, and it is something I hope I will write about a lot more in the future because I know there are a lot of other women out there who struggle to feel positive about their birth experiences and it always helps to know that you’re not alone.

Hopping neatly onto my second soapbox we have breastfeeding which once again I regard with a whiff of citrusy undertones. I don’t feel like I can take full responsibility for this one though, Alfie made his feelings very clear from the moment we were wheeled out of theatre and he point blank refused to go near anything even vaguely boob shaped. We tried rebirthing, which just resulted in Alfie getting super relaxed and pooing everywhere. We tried different positions, which did lead to a degree of success in that he at least attempted to nuzzle, if not latch. We finally settled on the compromise of his getting his own way and drinking from the bottle while I got my own way in that I filled it with my breast milk. We combination fed for 6 weeks until I finally caved under the pressure of time and he is now bottle fed. I don’t apologise for it, nor do I feel guilty, but I do feel an intense sense of disappointed that we couldn’t make it work, that we never really stood a chance of making it work even.

I suppose I should mention my third and final soapbox at this point – Jabs - and on this subject at least, we have remained uncompromising. Alfie is now 12 weeks old and has not yet received a single jab. I was actually very pleasantly surprised at the reaction from our GP who was happy to respect my decision and offered to give me his own views (rather than those he was paid to have) should I ever want to have a discussion about them. I feel really good about decision not to have Alfie jabbed, and even better that for the first time, we found a healthcare professional that was able to support us totally in our decision.

For now my eyes are fixed firmly on the future, because I am determined to make our experiences count for something positive. I have recently started taking the first tentative steps towards getting more involved with the NCT locally because I would love to use my time and energy to help other women get the births they deserve, rather than them be added to the ever growing list of people who are left feeling broken by our maternity services.

Amazingly, it seems Karma has decided I could do with a little helping hand to get started and I have actually been given a “golden ticket” to the NCT’s upcoming Big Weekend. What this means is that Keith, Alfie and I have an all expenses paid trip to sunny Telford to hear some of the great and the good of the baby world share their wisdom. In all honesty, I don’t think I am overstating my current emotional state when I say I am BUZZING.

Keith is less enthused about the conference although the pill has been sweetened somewhat by the knowledge that there is an RAF museum nearby for him to play fighter pilots in with Alfie. While they are running around making “NEEEEEOOOOOOOOW, hudddddudddudddduddd, dive, dive, dive” noises I will be staring wide eyed at Gill Rapley (author of Baby Led Weaning), Davina McCall and most importantly – seriously, I’m doing a JIG about this – Ina May Gaskin herself.

Oh yes, you heard me right, she’s coming from the States to be the keynote speaker at the conference and I am going to be camped out on the front row, possibly even with a hand painted sign. To have the chance to hear all these women speak just feels like such a blessing. There are also workshops about different roles within the NCT as well as green parenting issues, and a baby fair and I just get this feeling that I’m going to come back from there with a real sense of what I can do to make something positive out of the emotional baggage of Alfie’s birth.

Oh Dear

My little bundle of joy is having a bad day today:

This was part of a discussion with Keith earlier ...

oh dear, the toddler in him has begun
he cried when feeding,
timmy time came on and he wanted to watch it
he kept rolling his head to the side
i turned the tv off
biggest tantrum ever
tv is back on now
he is quiet
attempts to feed will recommence in 5 minutes lol

This does not bode well!!

Snot

We’re deep in the hurt locker that is cold season here at FTC, and the fault lies squarely at my door, having brought home a real rip snorter from work. I came down with it first, although Keith claimed I wasn’t ill, I just thought I was ill, which I thought was sage advice and have since repeated back to him numerous times now that it is he who “thinks” he is ill.

Anyway the point is I brought a cold into the house, and that house happens to contain a small child who’s body has not yet been subjected to the yearly barrage of snot-sneezes. Apparently that is of no great import to our son who coped far better than us adults and merely had a few days of being thoroughly grumpy and whingy.

I’m not sure if I have mentioned it before, but I never tire of it, so I will mention it again – but my son is just comedy gold when he cries. Not the crying itself of course, I don’t find my child’s misery funny, but the way in which he chooses to express it has me in stitches because in between the Waaaaas and the ROOOOOS there is another sound, which roughly translates to MMmmnnnnnmmnnnnnnn and is accompanied by a comedy downturned mouth and the poutiest lower lip you’ve ever seen. Seriously, people have approached me to ask me when they built a ski jump in Arlesey, it’s THAT pouty. I love that little face, and I hope he never stops pulling it because there is something to be said for having the ability to look sad in the same way that Mr Men do.

More important news is that this week we have discovered feet and also THINGS. Evenings are now quite a well oiled machine, quite literally in the case of Alfie’s massage which kicks off the whole bed time routine. Up until now he has limited his responses to the bubbles and the crossed eyes and the copious amounts of talking, but this week he has discovered that these feelings are coming via bits of his body. There have been moments, where he seems to almost startle at the sight of his feet in a kind of “whoa, where did you come from?” way and Keith said he reached out and tried to grab them a few days ago. I missed it because I was turning the page in the massage book, klutz that I am.

He has definitely changed in his perception of things around him. He started interacting with toys and people ages ago, but whereas before he would reach out to toys because they were bright, or making a noise, now he is holding them and examining them in way that makes me want to pass him a scalpel and mop his brow. His favourite purple elephant which hangs from his car seat could be first in the firing line I fear.


Oh, I might have mentioned before that we plan to wean Alfie using Baby Led Weaning which is a concept that is becoming a lot more popular recently. I was looking online last night to start researching good sources of recipes and I found a real blinder called My Daddy Cooks. I know half of you are now rolling your eyes in a “duh! Where have you been??” because this guy has been on the news and GMTV and everything but if you’re part of the other half that is now going “Huh?” then take a look at this blog, the guy is excellent and I suspect might become Keith’s favourite cooking resource over the next few months.