In Montenegro it was too hot to consume anything but fruits and salads, and my son felt that the only reasonable response to being a 20 month old person was to run around and try to climb on places that have snakes. As a result of this no-food-all-action-all-the-time I shed close to 8 pounds in 10 days. I haven't shifted weight that fast since I gave birth, but since in London I have neither problem I am having pizza for breakfast while I sit in front of the computer and consider into which part of my day I should slot a lengthy nap. Left to our own devices the cats and I synchronise our hobbies.

Spending time with my son was beautiful (he talks! he doesn't shut up! I still haven't decided whether I'm more charmed by his conversations with inanimate objects or his statement-of-the-obvious sentences) and leaving him for another month was heartbreaking.

While my desires to write endless posts and read endless posts slug it out with each other, I leave you with an image of Postmodern Childhood: Collecting cigarette butts on the beach*




* A person cannot dissuade him from this course of action. I've tried. But I'm thinking he has a bright future in garbage collection.

Travelling to the Old Country with an 18 month old was traumatic in many ways that travelling with a 9 month old wasn't. Certainly as an infant he had a shorter attention span and was more difficult to contain and entertain, but he was also happy to be taken whenever, however, like a more or less sentient piece of hand luggage.

But last week was a Tale of Terror, starting with checking in the baggage (he watched the bags being loaded, tagged with a sticker and sent off to the Dark Unknown) which was all fine until he saw the attendant put stickers on his buggy and burst into immediate tears of terror that he was also going to be sent off to the Dark Unknown. Then he failed to understand why Daddy was not coming with us (cue more crying and pitiful holding out of arms and long mournful wailing of Daaa....Daaaaaa). The biggest insult of all was security, where the entire procedure (from having his shoes removed and being removed from the buggy) caused him to shriek with indignation and anxiety, which only increased when he and I were frisked. While he considered being felt up by a perfect stranger merely hateful, being separated from me and held by strangers while I was touched by strangers was not something he was prepared to tolerate and defended me with desperate body flipping and his most piercing screams.

I had expected to do a lot of running after him on the plane, but actually he was so traumatised by the entire experience of getting there that he clung to me with all the power in his body and all the determination of a Capricorn and (so long as I did not attempt to do anything outrageous like shift position) he was impeccably behaved.

In the 5 days since he has adapted to the Old Country and stopped being terrified of everyone and everything (the dog! the people! the elevator!) and has for the most part un-grafted himself from my person. Nonetheless there are still many things that worry him and if he loses sight of me or his grandmother he becomes very upset - as though only his vigilance is holding the family in place and without constant monitoring we might all dissappear.

You can imagine how good this makes me feel since I am effectively dissapearing tomorrow for a month and a half (although I'm confident he'll settle down within a day since he is left with beloved and familiar carers).I don't want to think about walking out of the house tomorrow, so mostly I don't (and what better time to indulge a pent-up crying jag than a plane journey?)

The novelty of toddler worship still hasn't worn off. Mostly he shows this in two ways:
1)Singling me out for attention and special tasks
2)Trying to defend me from perceived dangers and slights.

The three most common manifestations of 1 are

a)having him want to involve me in whatever he is doing, usually by coming and tugging at my arm while chanting (Za! Za! - from zajedno meaning together in our language) and then either assigning me special tasks (cleaning spiderwebs from the top of the shed) or going for a stroll around the house or showing me points of interest (some spilled water, a ladybird, an ant).

b)selecting me as the recepient of gifts (usually stray pens, socks, his books and toys) or asking whether he can draw on me with his pens (this is my favourite as it involves so much studious scribbling and standing back to admire his handiwork).

c) demanding my company during important moments (he will only agree to have a bath if I have one with him. I'm only allowed to wash his belly if he pours water on my head).

2. Defending me from insults is a noble gesture and a full-time job, since the world contains so many things that Matei considers objectionable and dangerous, particularly: bedcovers, toothbrushes and unaccompanied stays in the bathroom.

A solo bathroom visit invariably ends with a toddler weeping brokenly in front of the door: Maaaaaa.... maaaaaaaa. Any visitor who expresses a desire to bathe is met usually by a furious toddler who informs him that the bath is No! Maaa maa's! and the terrifying sight of me brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush has made him burst into tears and run to all available peopče in hysterics sobbing about Maaaa! In Peril! Help! Anyone attempting to take anything of mine is met with a particular firewall of fury and loud shrieks of No! Maaamaaa's! and currently no one is allowed to drink, eat, smoke, phone or watch television without Matei in some way trying to secure my share (usually by stealing the object in question and bringing it to me).

I'm enjoying him so much now, and the thought of leaving him tomorrow and being apart from him for the next three months feels like a loss so vivid it might as well be a hole in space.

Sometimes the only cure for a blinding headache is to eat trifle at 2am. Now you know.

Matei has recently fallen deeply in love with me and likes to spend his leisure time chanting MaMa MaMa MaMa and bringing me little gifts (mainly weeds and stones from the garden. Sometimes snacks of fruit and toast. Occasionally handfuls of cathair).

Meanwhile my new found pedestal is accompanied by being the person of choice to do everything, although this is a very minor irritant and really I find it hard to surpress my glee and the desire to run around the house shouting I'm Number 1!

(Z is being delighted with these developments because a) he is a nice man and b) I had spent so long agonising that Matei prefers other people to me).

It is hard to describe how delightful I find this kid, especially now that he is talking. (He has twigged that the cry of 'Who's there?') is proceeded by doors being opened, so now when he wakes up and wants to be released from his room he starts chanting 'Who's there? Who's there?' with plaintiveness and/or passion until someone wakes up and takes pity.

He retains a forceful and determined personality, and being forced to put on dry clothes and clean nappies invariably provokes a rigid-bodied crisis (which is also liable to come when he's denied the fifth millionth serving of fruit, or coerced into a nap, or shackled with a bib).

Tomorrow I'm taking him to the Old Country to spend three months running around on the seaside (being catered to by his coterie of loving relatives and groupies) while Z and I stay in the UK and work (and go on a Man-And-Wife vacation) and experiment with sleeping-in on weekends and going out in the week (but let's face it, mostly mope and mourn).

Matei senses something is up (which possibly helps explain his newfound attachment to me) and has come up with all kinds of new rituals (including an insistence that whenever he and I part company he takes something of mine to carry with him and gives me something of his). I currently have an orange plastic ball sitting in my bag from just such an I-carry-your-heart-in-my-heart exchange, making me feel in equal measure elated and tearful.

Children are sneaky, like that. Not content with merely terrorising you and turning your life upside down, they then colonise your heart and make themselves indispensible and no matter what you lead yourself to believe you are never the same in their wake.

If my life (or, more accurately my sanity) were a WWF match, in one corner there would be


Towering Piles Of Coursework And Deadlines

while in the opposite corner stands
Toddler Who Has The Energy Of Bunny On Crack and the Malleability Of A Filing Cabinet, but No Concept Of Hazard Or Own Mortality


Toddlers and Coursework are inimicable, implacable forces whose soul uniting aspect is that they are both corrosive nemeses of a harmonious mind. Each is needy and makes endless demands on my time, each constantly distracts from the other and between their Campaigns Of Terror I can't remember the last time I slept.

I love doing my course, but it is brutally stressful at times and it very much leaves Z picking up the pieces as far as childcare is concerned. On one hand I long for a time when I could wake up and spend a leisurly weekend with my family, but on the other hand my clientwork is both enjoyable and necessary.

I've written before about my Matei-related challenges and anxiety - how I often feel on the outskirts of his life - that I am the person whom he gets along with least, the person who struggles hardest to find Fun Ways Of Spending Time Together. It's painful. Some days motherhood feels like dental procedures without anesthesia. It brings up every raw, unhealed place, every ghost I thought I'd left behind. Sometimes it revisits wounds I did not know I had. Sometimes I feel myself playing out my mother's life and it makes me sad immesurably, to be the person who cannot lift him up and throw him in the air, to be the person who is least around, to be the person whom he runs towards least.

Yesterday he didn't fall asleep until midnight (a combination of teething and the desire to point out every thing in the world keeping him awake) and while normally that sort of thing would drive me crazy (because there are Things! So many other Things I need to be doing!) yesterday I just let go and made us a nest in the garden and enjoyed the feel of him lying on my chest and I pointed out cats and planes and rustling leaves and I gloried in his little warm face on my neck and the feeling of love that takes residence in your stomach and speaks, and is spoken to in the space between, without words.

I am attempting to recalibrate my mind. Instead of assuming that things will go well and that I will feel good and then feeling dissapointed and self-flaggelating every time they don't, I'm going to focus on the good moments instead. Feel each one as a victory. Remember it and glory in it and set each one to shine in my mind's keepsakes, like a star against a cobalt sky.

Lives are long. Hearts are resilient. Relationships are dented, but endure. As long as there is breath in me, I will not stop trying.

Your spouse cheerfully makes a thoughtless comment that you find hurtful/offensive and then feels surprised at your emotional response.

Your spouse equally cheerfully organises a Marvellous Secret day out in which you leave your child in the care of excellent friends, drives you for 3 hours to Bath, deposits you both in a spa in which pampering treatments have been booked for you and then after these and dinner drives you back 3 hours to London to pick up child and go home and does all this like it's no big deal.

Congratulations. You are married to Sagittarius.

You have given birth to a child with the ambitious stubborness of Napoleon, the malleability of a filing cabinet, who alternates between heart-stopping, parent-aging climbs and deep civic responsibility. Well done, you have spawned Capricorn. Your parenting should probably involve getting out of his/her way. You may also want to invest in some colourful hats to detract from all the bruises on his face from Colonization Of The Furniture Gone Wrong.

On the other hand, at least the bruises on his head nicely coordinate with My Twilight-Coloured Knee. A knee which was achieved when my foot met a slippery bathroom floor - in the terrible frozen tableau that unfolded I looked like I was about to ask the towelracks for their hand in marriage before I looked like I was going to be sick from pain and the thought of this incident occurring in the bathroom of dear friends, and not say a public building in America where I would at least stand a chance of receiving a nice settlement, instead of merely sympathy; for about a day I had a kneecap the size of an egg and my journey to work on Monday was enhanced by crutches. Still there are worse things than medically ordained Rest, and my extended unscheduled time at home is being all kinds of better by the fact that Matei has taken up both mime and opera.

I can't wait to see what kind of improving influence Eurovision Song Contest will have on him.

Here are two video clips of Matei, recording his loveable eccentricities.

In the first he stacks and unstacks some clothes hangers, in a way that either speaks of his enviably focused and methodical mind (another thing he did not inherit from me, if it weren't for his tempestuous shows of emotion I'm not sure we'd have anything in common) or his flowering OCD.



And the second video shows that improvisation is next to entropy because we lost the top of his sippy cup so that teaching him to drink through a straw seemed easier than trekking out to buy another one.

He has also learned the meaning of Yes (it was a long time coming), so now he self-importantly answers Da! (Yes) when asked if he wants or likes something.

Endless dinnertime fun at my house.

Summary of 16 months of parenthood:

Months 0-3: I wish people would stop telling me about how quickly time passes, because a sleepless night spent bouncing on a yoga ball as a last-ditch attempt to try and settle the baby = a very, very long time indeed. Whenever I hear someone admonishing me about 'enjoying them now' I sort of want to punch them, or hand them the baby to bounce while I have a several-hour nap.

Months 3-6: Baby somewhat less of a shithead. I begin edging away from the precipice of divorce and insanity and start of wiling away the night hours in sleep, rather than suicidal ideation.

Month 6-9 Still frequently isolated and bored out of my mind, but also able to praise baby for his good behaviour on beaches and planes and all that marvellous sitting and pulling up to stand he is doing.

Month 9-12 With the return to work and coursework time starts speeding up and essentially runs me over like an express train. All resolve about doing coursework in a timely manner flies out of the window as I spend my evenings on the sofa, catatonic with exhaustion. On the positive side, no longer resent son if he wakes up in the night since I tend to see so little of him during the day.

Months 12-16 Baby becomes a delightful human being - clever and gorgeous and utterly charming. His growing language comprehension offsets his tantrumy frustration although he remains stubborn as a mule. With the approach of galloping deadlines my mind becomes paralysed with stress, I feel unable to get on coursework in a timely manner so spend a lot of time lolling on sofas with migraines bemoaning everything and fantasising about being able to stop time by touching my index fingers and doing no coursework which only increases paralytic amounts of stress. Official current verdict - Time Going Way Too Damn Fast.

Dear Diary,

This day marks 15 and a half months of imprisonment in this frustrating world, and this miserable fleshly shell.

I hate the fact that I cannot watch airplanes every waking breathing moment of my day, and I hate having my nappy changed, but most of all I hate my mother. She's such a bitch!

Take yesterday, for example. When I wished to be carried and elected to cast myself down on the pavement weeping brokenly to communicate this need she said: 'Either walk or ride in the buggy'. Stupid cow! She just doesn't understand! And then after she strapped me into that infernal wheeled contraption Against My Will and in clear defiance of my Curved Back of Rigor Mortis Posture she had the temerity to offer me a consolation biscuit!

A biscuit! The insult is really too much. I cast it down on the pavement in my rage. Pah! That is what I think of you and your BISCUIT, whore!

As if that wasn't enough, then she wouldn't let me drink from her bottle of ice tea! I couldn't believe the betrayal I was witnessing. I felt in that moment that all I had ever wanted in this world was that bottle and our separation crushed my spirit. My heart is as biscuit crumbs beneath a cruel buggy wheel of rejection.

I weep, I weep, I weep. Come, sweet dummy! I hasten to my sleep.

Matei has decided to start going to bed later and waking up earlier (ostensibly so he can have more time in which to babble baby nonsense at me) and I'm not sure what to call this crime (mutiny? sedition? treason? disturbing the peace?) but I Do Not Like It and I'm refusing to go down without a fight. Guerilla countermeasures have been initiated, mostly in the form of getting him to run in the fresh air until he keels over.

Z killed the computer with a defragment but has resurrected it at long last, and we celebrated by watching The Changeling - which was an excellent film, albeit terrfying, and I'm still not sure why my mother said it had 'a happy ending'.

I hope chocolate and good times have been had by all. An empty bottle of sloe gin is my new definition of an excellent evening.

Work disaster! I have taken it upon myself to do Thankless Presentation which is proving even more soul-destroying by having several hours of my work vanish just now. Argh, argh, argh.

Also daylight savings time has stolen an hour from me recently, and I still have not recovered.

Therefore, in a brief bid to stop my mind from imploding I shall tell you of things that have made me happy recently:

1) Taking Matei swimming on Sunday. We frolicked in a warm pool and within three minutes his initial Baby Death Grip was replaced by an urge to jump out of my arms and drown try out a leapfrog-like swimming style. Great enjoyment was had by all, compounded by the fact that several hours later he took a two hour evening nap (from 6 until 8 pm) - which is unprecedented because he prefers to confine his daytime rest activities to one 45 minute sleep. Although we feared that this would mean he would not fall asleep again until 3am, by 8:30 he was exhibiting signs of tiredness and after we exchanged some smiles he lay his head against my shoulder and slid his arm around my body and I lay there listening to his breathing becoming deeper and deeper and that was that. As a bonus he stayed in his cot and didn't stir until 8 in the morning and Z and I got to enjoy the luxury of being able to stretch out in our own bed and sleep without anyone kicking us in the teeth.

ALL HAIL THE MAGICAL HEALING POWERS OF WATER.

2) I have a new spring cardigan which is pleasing to me on account of a) its fiery coral colour b) the fact that it was on sale.

3)I am going to be reading at Cringe tomorrow night. Free entry, teenage diaries, bad poetry and the promise of alcohol! You know you like it and want to come. If anyone wants more details about it, consult Antonia.

Things my child has learned in the last week:

*How to blow kisses

*How to blow soap bubbles

*How to carefully put a cap onto a bottle and then unscrew it again

*How to chant 'Yes yes yes!' with the fervour of Meg Ryan in When Harry met Sally when he spots something he's keen on.

*How to climb onto a desk using the bed, the chair and his own NINJA POWERS.


Things which I have been trying to teach him but he's failed to uptake with enthusiasm:

*To articulate his hunger by bowing down to me and saying: "Please nourish your humble servant"

*To chant "I love big butts and I cannot lie!" while conducting an interpretative dance sequence

*That any hour before 7am is an Illegal Wake Up Time, punishable by excommunication.

If I see another newspaper headline along the lines of : Jade Goody - last hours I am going to growl at someone. Will they ever leave the woman alone and stop afixing poignant, and touching to every single thing that she does? Ghouls.

Matei has some kind of rash and fever-inducing virus, which he has kindly passed along to me (babies are worse than rats when it comes to spreading disease) and I am feeling closer to death than usual today. I have retaliated by wearing my ultimate comfort outfit: black hoodie, jeans, Rocker Hello Kitty T-shirt and childish socks with unicorns on. I also have bitchin' new glasses.

I have taught Matei to say "bum" and "underpants" which are in our language fairly simple words beginning with a guh sound which he has been practising diligently over the last two days. He is totally in love with these words and has been chanting "underpants underpants" to himself the last 15 minutes.

He has taught himself to pick up bits of fluff and cat hair off the floor and turn them into the nearest adult in return for praise and applause. However, the last few days he has been going directly to the source and plucking handfuls of hair off the actual cats and then toddling over to us with the loot, radiant with his own cleverness.

The boy is an applause-junkie. He has learned how to clap and now claps every single time he is proud of something he has done and looks offended if you don't join him. On the other hand he is prepared to give as good as he gets, and offered me extravagant praise and applause when he watched me unload the dishwasher. This is exactly the same attitude I have been trying to instill in Z, but without success so far.

Today my mothering techniques have mainly involved lying in his playpen like roadkill while he bangs my head with some plush toys. I am tired, tired, tired. Have pity, send biscuits.

The baby has become passionately attached to the broom. This is brilliant, as it's the one household object I'm unlikely to fight him for.

I wish I had known a year ago how happy I would end up being, or how much I would enjoy this boy.

When he was born I thought he looked like a spaceman, someone who has come on a long journey and from far away. He had deep-space eyes. Undersea eyes. Dark grey and liquid and unfocused. He wasn't my son as I know him, then. He was a cranky traveller complaining about the service.

I adore Matei, but I feel little sense of connection with him. We are so different in our appearance and our interests that I most often feel that we're barely related. When I see him I don't see myself, I see someone who is his own person and has been from the beginning.

Matei didn't come into this world to please me or bond with me. I am part of the scenery for sure, but laregely I feel superfluous. I am the flesh that housed him, the tunnel through which he barged into the world. I am the meal-provider, the comforter, the supervisor, the cheerleader, the orifice-wiper. He is very fond of both me and his father, running towards us multiple times a day to hug us and our legs, but we are still small fry, the ballast.

Matei's primary interest is the world. He is the rock and box climber, the intrepid explorer. Beyond the reaches of the playpen jungles wait for him, the mountains beckon, the seas shift and stir for him. I know what he hungers for is so much larger than what I can provide. I am a stepping stone, always have been.

If any of that sounds sad, it doesn't feel sad. He doesn't need to be gazing at me with fanboy love for me to find him delightful. It is enough to watch his passion for bottle caps, or his precariously stacked block towers, or his love songs to the cats. It is enough to listen to his high-pitched laboriously-crafted words (Gimme and That at the beginning, followed by No and All Gone and Cat which led me to wonder who those mythical children were who chanted Mama; however as of last week Z and I are also part of his vocabularly, he grins widely and presents us with our names offers them up with outflung arms like a gift of bright flowers).

I remember how a year ago I wanted to punch in the eye every single person who told me to 'enjoy it because it goes by so fast!' because time couldn't pass fast enough for me and each endless night dragged on like a punishment.

I wish I could go back in time and find that despairing, sleep-deprived me. I wish I could give her a hug and stroke her hair and tell her to go have a nap while I watched the baby. I wish I could tell her that everything would work out all right, and that he'd learn to sleep and stop demanding food every 3 seconds and that he'd turn out to be beautiful and fierce and charming and sociable and more clever than she'd dare imagine. Of how proud she'd be of him when he learned to walk, and how much prouder still when he stopped trying to throw himself bunjee-style off high surfaces in favour of descending feet-first instead. How he'd stop arching his body back like a bow every time when she tried to soothe him, and how she'd stop resenting getting woken in the night. How on a perfect cold, bright day they'd stand together in the garden and how he'd be self-importantly picking up leaves one by one and putting them in the bin and how she'd be clapping her hands and laughing and he'd be grinning and looking fit to burst with pride at his accomplishments, and how the sky above them was vast and clear and exultant with winter light.

It is difficult to equate the person he is now, with the irascible infant he was last year, or the newborn with his cross wavy hands. It is similarly difficult to picture who he will become - the talking toddler, the self-sufficient boy, the surly teenager. I look at him and I see all the other ones waiting, stacked inside like Russian dolls.

And above all I feel this immense, sweeping gratitude at having been granted this person, this child. Having been allowed to watch him moving ahead excited and determined, throwing out his arms to meet the horizon.

The mess in my house is currently unquantifiable. Z and I are painting one of the rooms, because we are hardcore profoundly insane. The painting may sound relatively simple to the childless but it involved the following:

-Z looking after the baby while I cleaned out our storage area. (A process rendered more enjoyable by the fact that I could finally move around in there, and find and pair all my shoes; so pleasurable did I find it in fact that I may have gotten a bit carried away with lining up all my ballet flats and lost track of the main task. Fortunately both Matei and Z were on hand to howl at me).

-Z and I working as a team to take everything off the shelves in the room and put it in the newly-cleared storage. In order to be able to complete this task we let Matei amuse himself by doing whatever he wanted that wouldn’t actually lead to the destruction of himself or the house. He chose to spend his time dismantling the living room and creating a breadcrumb trail of CDs to mark his passage through the house.

-Z dismantling shelves and painting while I fed, pyjamad and lulled to sleep the baby.

- Both adults collapsing in bed freezing cold and tired.

So at the end of all that, the walls look lovely but the rest of the house looks like it’s been looted and ransacked. It is debatable whether I will have the strength or time to amend this state of affairs tonight.

Also, Z has paint all over his hands, my hair is standing up at odd angles, my throat is sore from the dust and my son is high from the pleasure of having been permitted to tip out the contents of every box in the coffee table and hasn’t had a bath in three days.

Stay tuned for the pictures of the finished product and please don’t come visit me yet.

Heh, it's been a long time hasn't it? Children and work will do that to you, I find. Save yourselves! Put internet first! Don't fall prey to their shackles!

Things I have lost in the last week thanks to having a small grabby child and my own incompetence filing system of moving things randomly out of his reach

* The bath plug. The only one of its kind in the house no less. Therefore for three days now I have been experimenting with the bath-plugging power of paperweights, bowls and little rubber mats with suction cups. (The mats won)

* A dragonfly barrette.

* Two library books.

* My client log sheets.

* Three pairs of socks. (Removing my socks from the box under the bed is the baby's passion. Getting a few extra minutes of meditative shut-eye is mine. A barefooted future looms).

On a related note, some items I have found myself inexplicably sharing a bed with the past few days, thanks to Matei's habit of bringing me random gifts and stuffing them under my pillow

*A plastic duck

* Two Tupperware lids

* A teddy bear wrapped bondage-style in a pair of my tights

* My favourite: a tiny wheelie suitcase

And now, on a completely separate topic, is anyone other than me yearning and contemplating ways of going to BlogHer?

Hello!
It is New year and I am crazy!
You will know that this is true when I tell you that I've spent a week of my life tagging all my old entries since 2003. This made me realise several things:

1)My kitchen cupboards may be a mess, although at least my blog is tidy.

2)I used to write a lot when I was unemployed.

3)Not all of it was unreadable drivel.

4)In fact my writing then was better than my stream of consciousness stuff now. I may be able to wing it through many aspects of life on charm and eyelashes alone, but blogging isn't one of them.

5) I changed a lot of privacy settings, because stuff that was current and pressing then is now History and the people I was protecting no longer need it.

In other news, I may end up needing some kind of midget-sized mask if I want to take my child out in public again. Matei may have learned walking but not Picking Up His Feet When Coming Across Obstacles and instead he has been meeting these obstacles with his face. At the moment he has bruises on his forehead, his nose, a cut on his ear and two bruises like dimples on his cheeks (but at least they are symmetrical!). He is starting to look more and more like baby P every day and me explaining that 'He walked into a door' doesn't sound that good either.

Hmmmm.

The Season of Parties is also over but he refuses to be convinced of that and has been holding nightly parties of his own in his bedroom. Largely they consist of him dancing in his crib and chattering brightly in baby nonsense 'daddadadaDAbabababBADADA'. I would be willing to turn a blind eye to this behaviour, except that he is unwilling to do it in the privacy of his own bedroom. Nooooo, baby needs an audience. Perhaps I really shouldn't have watched all that X-Factor when I was pregnant.

Our putting him to bed ritual used to involve bathtime, and then guzzling a bottle of milk and burping like a trucker and snuggling with Z and me on the sofa while we stroke his hair and watch television and he nests like a kitten until he falls asleep. A pleasant thing for all involved. Except that nowadays instead of snuggling on the sofa what he prefers doing is jumping up and down like a maniac and maybe smacking one of us on the head with the remote.

Therefore, shows are recorded while parents take turns sitting with the baby in a completely dark room, rocking in the rocking chair. And all throughout Matei keeps giving us these alert, indulgent looks that say: "I am never going to sleep! Never never never! But because I love you I will consent to sit in your lap for the next three hours if this pleases you and chatter at you while you sing me my lullabies until your voice breaks, shortly followed by YOUR SOUL, and every single time you put a dummy in my mouth I take it out in order to tell you more about my day. BababababaDADADADADAH!"

And the no sooner have we stamped out an uprising and sent him off to sleep finally, then he wakes up at some pre-dawn hour for another round of singing and dancing.

And then we do the same thing (in fact much as I was doing the same time last year, only with fewer tears and less cursing) in which our son looks at us in a cheerful, alert (so bloody alert! How can he be this energetic? Maybe we should put him to weaving carpets to tire him out a little) way all: "Isn't this nice? To think we could have wasted all that time sleeping, when instead you could be stroking my hair and I could be smacking you in the face lovingly. Let's do this again tomorrow."

Now and Then

Z is babysitting by sleeping next to the baby in its little caged enclosure. The baby is amusing itself by pulling at his chest hairs. It is hard to picture a more idyllic family scene.

It seems so weird to think that a year ago I was hugely pregnant, taking up most of the sofa and playing something like an 11 hour card game with Z and a friend, having no idea that shortly after midnight I would bolt awake with the clusterfuck of abdominal pains heralding the arrival of Matei. If I had known I would certainly have gone to bed earlier.

It's the eve of his first birthday and my son is walking.

Also, perfume may or may not be a baby sedative. Today Z sprayed him with some of my scent and the baby slept for a record of 3 daytime hours. Further experiementation is warranted.


Matei and the cats - an unrequited love story

Matei is naturally flirtatious, has always been. When he wants to impress a human (usually a waitress) he makes cooey noises, and batting eyelashes and then offers them his index finger to kiss and shares with them whatever treasures he has in his possession (like his dummy, or whatever plastic crap he has found and is chewing on).

Matei has consistently been trying all his Love Methods on the cats but they remain unimpressed and long-suffering.

M: (Patting the cat by smacking it on the head repeatedly)
Cat: (glaring and moving away)

M: (cooing for all that he is worth, with batty eyelashes)
Cat: (looking away with contempt)

M: (extending his index finger towards cat for the cat to kiss)
Cat: (flicking its whiskers in contempt)

M: (bringing the cat various treasures - my shoes, a pile of DVD cases- and piling them onto cat)
Cat: (jumping away while hissing)

M: (offering the cat some of his banana and prodding it in the face with it)
Cat: (recoiling)

M: (having cornered a sleeping cat, he lays his face against its body and sighs in rapture)
Cat: (putting up with this through gritted teeth)

I guess their love is not to be until he learns how to dispense cat treats.


My favourite thing about the baby has to be the way when he gets very frustrated and upset he grabs his dummy for some frantic sucking, in the exact same way that my mother in the same emotional context inhales a cigarette.

Ways in which the Universe has made me weep lately:

1)To the wanker who stole all my money and used it to pay for taxis and hotels via internet fraud - I wish you would be one of those people end up killed in freak accidents by their beds or the laundry or something.

2)To my bank who authorised the transfers of large sums of money from my account without bothering to contact me, until it rejected my card in the supermarket a few days later and sent me a kind letter saying I had exceeded my overdraft limit that will be x fee please - I make glarey eyes and think of you in a shouty voice. Also, I should warn you right now that I do not intend to pay those fees.

3)To the council that cashed my check for service charges but then saw fit to lie about it and refer my details to a debt collecting agency who sent me a kind letter saying they wanted the money I HAD ALREADY PAID plus £200 for their kind service of breaking my kneecaps collecting this debt - I have actual proof from my bank the cheque has cleared which I shall wave in your face very soon WHILE making glary eyes and shouty voices.

4)Dear Universe, although I appreciate all these hints to make this Christmas economically sensible, I think you can stop now, because Universe, I need to eat. And the baby needs diapers and eats more than I do. Thank you kindly.

5) To yesterday's client re: your kind offer to 'fuck me up'- thank you but no.

6)To my son - my darling, though I cherish your adventurous spirit, the union between your nose and the furniture will never be a happy one. I suggest you learn this lesson as soon as possible. I want you to know that although your injuries may have a karmic component to them*, they give me no joy whatsoever and you can stop with them now.

Matei's Cranium: 1, Nina's Cheekbone: 0

My newest unlikely explanation for my black eye : "The baby hit me."

This is what comes of trying to comfort the congested little ingrate in the comfort of the parental bed, while he thrashes around wildly and headbutts all and sundry.