This and That

I’ve been on leave now for eight weeks. My days are so full, I hardly ever manage to leave the house. I’m busy from morning till night, up and down the stairs, in and out of the garden, finally collapsing into bed by 10pm, thoroughly exhausted. But after these eight very full weeks, I would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is I do all day long.

There have, of course, been a few outings, here and there – into town to meet friends, on a shopping expedition, to the doctor’s. But these are invariably strenuous and tiring, and require a good few days’ rest to recover afterward. No, I would not say that I am gallivanting about, enjoying my last weeks of freedom. Instead, I dress each day in different combinations of sweats and sweaters, slippers and garden shoes, and embrace the multitude of tasks that lurk in every corner of the house, quickly forgetting that I ever had a busy life outside it.

I’m contemplating this as I sit in a lawn chair on the deck, with half-closed eyes and my legs stuck out into a patch of sun. It’s mid-morning, and I’m taking a break from the day’s activities. Prior to this, I was very busy sitting in a wicker armchair on the upstairs balcony, reading, and taking a break from what I had been doing earlier – namely, eating, and taking a break on the deck.

I stand up and make a decision – best not to delay the day too long – lots to do – best to get my nap over with right away. I head back upstairs and lay my foggy head on the pillow, gratefully closing my eyes. What a tiring morning it’s been so far.

So there’s part of the mystery solved. There seems to be a lot of getting tired and taking breaks going on. What on earth is making me so tired? (Oh, I mean besides the acrobatic octopus that’s renting rehearsal space behind my belly button and siphoning off a portion of my meals.)

 

The octoacrobatopus in profile

 

Strictly speaking, my day begins at 3am, when I am wake up for my scheduled bathroom break. Or because I’m being used as a human punching bag, turned inside-out. Getting out of bed on first waking is always precarious, as I can never be quite sure in what position my hips have fossilised, or into what position my slippers have disarranged themselves in the dark, or between which sensitive organs an exploratory baby foot has been lodged.

Upon returning from my strenuous waddle to the bathroom, my legs now fully awake and reinstated under me, it’s snack time. Piotrek, who would sleep through an attack of grenade-throwing tractors mounted on his pillow – Piotrek, who can sit up, answer questions, make speeches and compose ballads about the moon without ever waking up – suddenly seems liable to me to be ripped out of fragile slumber by the crunch of my crackers or the rustle of my plastic sandwich bag. (For successful, silent night time snacking, I recommend a banana – peeled slowly under the covers, to avoid the risk of echo – or a sandwich on soft bread, placed in a Tupperware with the lid balanced on top, but not sealed.) Like a well-trained spy, I take my precautions of subterfuge prophylactically, sometimes eating in the hall, sometimes even in the bathroom, sometimes hunched under the covers.

Next, it’s time to lie down and begin the Hunt for a Viable Position. (Baby K provides her opinion on this via kicks of disagreement.) As the season progresses, the time allotted to this activity grows shorter and shorter; by 3:30 I can see the first glow of daylight behind our white curtains, and by 4:00 it’s time to begin the next activity – Watching the Dawn. (Sometimes, I do this from behind closed eyelids. It makes no difference to the intensity of the experience.) By 4:30 or 5:00, I grudgingly put on a pair of earplugs (the birds have a standing invitation to join me in the dawn-watching activity, and are unmanageably chatty throughout) and an ever-flimsier eye mask.

Between 5:00 and 6:00 I usually devote the peaceful, earplug-induced quiet to contemplating whether or not I will be too groggy to get anything done, if I just get up right now. At 6:00 Piotrek’s alarm goes off, and he hits snooze. Inexplicably, I suddenly start to feel myself pulled into complex and mysterious dreams about the hidden second kitchen we’ve discovered under our stairs, or our journeys to distant lands to discover the truth about juice. I clamber out of these dreams a moment later, poking blindly (because of the eye mask) at Piotrek’s pillow to see if he’s still sleeping. He’s gone. It’s 9:00.

 

The sleepy 5am garden

 

It doesn’t always happen precisely this way; there are days where I manage to wake up in enough time for Piotrek to bring me coffee in bed, or when I get up early and even make him breakfast. But most of the time, I confuddle the creakings of the closet door and the thud of his dresser drawers with the strange inhabitants of my dreams, until I finally manage to wrench myself awake, alone in an empty house flooded with mid-morning light.

 And then I get down to the Projects.

 Like – reading. A very important part of the day. In bed if it’s cold, on the balcony if it’s not. Everyone says I won’t have time once Baby K arrives, so there are a lot of books to get through in the next month.

 Also – making lists. Someone’s got to do it. Lists of things we need to buy for Baby K. Lists of things we don’t need to buy for Baby K. Lists of furniture we need, and furniture we wish we had, and furniture we wish we didn’t have but will make the best use we can of it, because we are a family that Never Wastes Anything. Budgets. Lists of things that need to be repaired. Lists of things that are lying next to the wall where they hope one day to hang on proper hooks, or of holes in the wall that hope one day to host hanging things. Lists – sorry, excel spread sheets – of Baby K’s clothes (it’s hard to keep track of all those different sizes. Really.)

 Then there are the little routines. Every morning, as the sun advances, opening series of windows to let in the heat and warm the house. (Until this past week, when we had a heat wave, and it was suddenly all about letting in the draughts.) Eating First Breakfast on the balcony. Washing the dishes. Tidying the kitchen. Eating Second Breakfast on the deck. Putting on laundry. Hanging up laundry. Folding laundry. Minutely changing the position of chairs round the coffee table. Cooking, from time to time.

 I’ve also painted Baby K’s room with carefully-measured panels of folkloric flowers. I’ve unpacked All the Boxes, and All the Suitcases, and arranged everything, by type, size and colour, in proper drawers and on proper hangers. (This, I’m afraid, has thrown my poor husband into complete disarray, and he is now even less able to find any of his clothes than he was when they were all crumpled in a heap in an open suitcase.)

 On the rare occasions when I connect to the internet (did I mention we have no internet this month? Hence the frenzied activity in the closets and dusty corners, I suspect,) I do market research on our expected expenditure on exciting new items like nursing pads and disposable mesh underwear, and wet wipes and diapers, and diaper bags and baby slings. And I put them all in my budget (in excel, of course), along with the fridge (with freezer) and the new oven we keep meaning to buy, and wonder how many years down the road it will be before we manage to buy bookshelves, or put pictures on the wall, or hang curtains. And I add those to a list or two as well.

 I’ve packed and sealed boxes of clothes I have lost all hope of fitting into this year. I’ve stocked the bathroom shelves with our armoury of slow-depleting Christmas-gift shampoos. I’ve become the patron of missing socks, the sock matchmaker, finding a place of rest and comfort fort he happily paired as well as the celibate. I’ve been a weeding fiend, methodically liberating each fragile beet shoot from its prison of weeds, and a snail hunter, gathering the evil armies into my plastic bucket and catapulting them to the other side of the watery ditch at the bottom of the garden.

 And more and more, in the course of these exciting quests, I find myself compelled to sit down and take another break, sometimes from what suddenly seems like an unbelievably strenuous fifteen minutes of squatting in a garden patch, sometimes from nothing more demanding than eating a bowl of oatmeal on the deck. So putting it all together, the days go by pretty fast.

The “Bottomless Well” (as they say here)

Last week I opened the door, once again, to the delivery man. This time it was the crib.

“Hello, I see you’re stocking up,” the delivery man said. I took a closer look – it was the same one that had delivered the stroller (in two massive, partially squashed boxes) three days earlier.

“It’s a bottomless well,” he informed me conspiratorially, “and that’s without even getting started on the diapers!”

Piotrek and I have never been in any doubt about the massive invasion of Stuff that is imminently upon us. We (yes, both of us, not just me) have made list after list of Things We Might Need, Things the Internet Says We Need, Things Friends Have Needed and Things We Saw Online That Are Sure to Be Necessary. We have found ourselves, on many a late weekend afternoon, wandering numbly through the overcrowded aisles of one of the hypermarkets, gazing at rows of baby gear, picking things up and putting them down, and eventually leaving, bewildered, with our shopping bag full of ice cream, French cheese and garden tools.

Recently I found myself, with the help of an experienced friend, trapped in a wholesale baby gear supplier’s between closely-parked prams and towers of packaged pastel bedding. While I hovered along the edges of the daunting shelves, giving an inquisitive poke to various sausage-shaped objects in glaring shades of pink, my friend test-bounced the more accessible of the closely-parked prams with an appreciative sigh at their super-sized wheels, and her one-year-old son bravely grasped each buckwheat-filled baby mattress one by one and thrust it to the ground.

I had not, of course, come unarmed; I was clutching, defensively, not one but three print-outs, from different sources, of “baby essentials”. Each list was at least two pages long, and contained carefully itemized toiletries, textiles and clothing of every imaginable shape and purpose.

It would of course have been more helpful if the lists had bothered to describe either the shape or the purpose of any of the mysteriously-named objects.  What exactly is the difference between “pajacyki”, “kaftaniki”, and “śpioszki”? (“Bodies” I’m OK on. I’ve got those. Quite a lot, actually.) What is the potential physical/psychological damage inflicted on the child who leaves the hospital without one of these fashion items in his/her travelling bag? (A travelling bag stylishly clipped to the handle of a 3-in-one travel system on super-sized wheels.) And how many of them do you put on at once? Do they have to match? How many different kinds of sheets do you need? Why are there fluffy pastel lambs on everything?

A painful truth every new parent must be reconciled with is that babies – as we are led to believe by the market in baby goods – absolutely must be surrounded by stomach-turning combinations of candy colours, twisted into ghoulishly grinning animals, inexplicably spattered with busy minutiae such as bumblebees or stars, and more inexplicably still, printed in random places with random English words in incoherent half-sentences highlighting sentiments such as “friend”, “sweet”, “little”.

Does a baby feel safer in its crib, rolling back and forth over a sea of sheep grins in colours reminiscent of absolutely nothing in its surrounding world? Does it gaze at the comforting invocations of friendship and camaraderie that buffer its sweet little world and feel it has a verified, validated place? Or are the fluffy candyfloss miasmas for the benefit of the adult, who in their presence feels appropriately fluffy, warm, sweet and gooey?

Standing in front of a shelf of nursing pillows, enthusiastically urged by my friend to choose “the one I like best”, I felt not warmth and fluffiness, but a sort of queasy self-consciousness, as though I were being urged to select a smelly medication for an embarrassing disease I would rather not admit to having. I felt, somehow, idiotic picking up and contemplating a very unsystematic smattering of yellow stripes, brown giraffes, teddies in red t-shirts and distressingly polka-dotted butterflies on a background of intense sky-blue.

My friend remained unfazed, as though the abominations in fabric printing were entirely normal, and handed me a blob of bubble-gum pink, where generously-petalled pink flowers competed for space with toothy bunnies. “How about this for a girl?” she suggested. My inner cringe held me back from examining it too closely.

“I think I’d prefer something without… patterns,” I said meekly, scouring the shelves in desperation for a solid-coloured pillow that might have been pushed far back into some upper corner. I was handed something in a pastel shade of apple green, besmeared with only a faint spattering of stars and comets. “Green isn’t really my colour,” I said more meekly still, and grasped desperately at a package which seemed to promise a more eye-soothing combination of polka-dots and red stripes. “This one will do,” I said with forced confidence, before noticing that the polka-dots were only the prelude to a playground of butterflies, bumblebees and flowers rocketing through clouds.

At the end of nearly two hours of circling and searching, during which I became increasingly numb and passive, an expensive stack of pastel objects formed on the countertop, for which I found myself, in disbelief, counting out from a stack of 100-złoty bills.

Our daughter is now equipped with a foam-backed swaddle (in a blue-and-white chequered pattern, as a nod to my mild pink intolerance), two hooded towels, a set of rubber-backed and non-rubber backed sheets (in solids of glaring bubble-gum, glaring periwinkle, and white), a stack of flannel cloths covered in giraffes, teddy bears and grinning lambs (there were no other possibilities), and one outfit in newborn size with the least-offending of the proffered designs, roughly-sketched blue puppies. And the nursing pillow, with its fields of rocketing butterflies on a crash-course into orange-and-green polka-dots and red stripes.

 

Can you spot the difference between the bodies, pajacyki, kaftaniki and śpioszki?

 

I had opened the door, once again, to the courier earlier that day. “Hello again – I believe I’m picking something up this time?”

“Yes indeed,” I told him, and pointed to the two squashed, now re-duct-taped boxes containing the Disappointing Stroller that was being sent back.

“Something I delivered?”

“More than likely,” I concurred.

He wiggled the awkward things out the door, and the Quest for the Stroller continued.

It has been many months now since Piotrek began scouring the internet, the consumer reports, the second-hand shops and the price comparison websites for the Perfect Vehicle. This is no easy task. (Learning the lingo of the stroller, for one, took me several long investigations. I have now become accustomed to pricking up my ears at phrases like “hand brake”, “sprung frame”, “pumped wheels”, “adjustable headrest”, “flip-over handle”.)

I read, more and more intensively, online reviews in which experienced stroller-users, mostly of the vehemently disappointed variety, moaned about the trials and sufferings of buying a stroller with too heavy a frame, or too slanted a seat, or too complicated a system of clips and buttons.

Now, for all our reading, and looking at pictures, and comparing reviews, the truth is we had only really seen one stroller. Piotrek, on more than one occasion, had test-driven our friends’ daughter in her Graco Symbio, and pronounced it “very good indeed”. And while we always intended to visit one of those stroller wholesale megastores to test drive All the Models before making a decision, there were always better, more pressing things to do. And that is how Piotrek began a cycle of compulsive bidding on second-hand online auctions for various Symbios, resulting in the somewhat spontaneous purchase, through a second-hand stroller company, of a grey one that was delivered in those two massive, partially-squashed boxes by the conspiratorial courier.

After a brief period of congratulating ourselves on having finally come to a decision (not easy for either of us), on having cheated the system and bought a high-class model for about a third of the price, and on the very comfortable and elegant design of this object we would now forevermore be attached to whenever we left the house, the disappointment set in. The thing was far more used than it had appeared in the pictures. The straps were so ratty they were almost unusable. The cushions were dirty and faded, and the framework was slightly sagging. And the carrycot attachment – what a disgrace! It turned out there was no separate carrycot at all, just a wobbly cushioned insert, with a dented cardboard frame and missing snaps, that was meant to sit snugly in the flattened seat of the stroller, but rather perched on it precariously, threatening to toss the baby out at the smallest bump.

As is logical when one feels oneself cheated, we immediately took ourselves to the baby megastore to check what we may have missed out on by choosing too quickly. We were confronted by row upon row of dwarfing, massively-built vehicles that looked roomy and sturdy enough to swallow me whole, never mind a baby.

“Do you have any specific questions about any of the models?” asked a very young, beany, spotty man who did not look like he was nearly old enough to have real-life experience of a stroller.

Do we have any specific questions? Yes, indeed: What, specifically is the difference between any of these monster trucks, and which specific model does one really need?

I think I muttered something about it being “light”, while Piotrek threw in a few knowledgeable-sounding phrases about springs, clip attachments and the weight of the carrycot. (It turns out all carrycots have a standard size and weight. Obviously.)

“Well, you’ll want it to be sturdy,” the beany young man said, bouncing, as illustration, a huge cream-coloured boat mounted on wheels the size of pumpkins. We nodded in eager agreement – of course, of course we wanted it to be sturdy, of course we had thought first and foremost of the comfort of our daughter. “Sturdy… and light,” I interjected hopefully.

They all have names like “explorer”, “roamer”, “move”, “pulse”. “What’s the name of that second one we looked at?” I asked Piotrek later, as I searched for used models of our successful finds online. “The lightweight grape purple pumped-wheel adjustable-handle with the one-click fold system. Mutsy Explorer? Mutsy Adventurer?”

“Mutsy Conquistador, I think,” he decided.

There had only been two strollers, in the entire megastore, light enough for me to handle, narrow enough to manoeuvre between, say, the standard aisles of a supermarket, and sturdy enough to survive the trials of Polish sidewalks. One, the X-Lander X-Pulse, turned out to be a new model, too new to be available used. (All the other models were far too heavy and clunky. I tested them.) The other was this Mutsy Contraption, apparently at the upper end of baby travel design and not to be found gathering dust in the basements of mere mortals. So the search came to a standstill once again.

                Which is why, really, I found myself with my friend and her son in the pastel nightmare of the baby wholesaler’s, wedged between stroller frames. She had had the novel suggestion of foregoing the mainstream international baby design industry for the cheaper, simpler Polish manufacturers. “You know,” she said, “Polish models – Polish conditions.” And she was right. These smaller, lighter, simpler models were clearly made to be lifted in and out of trams, and ride smoothly over sidewalks full of holes. It took me seconds to locate three or four very promising ones. (I was aided in reducing this to two by a very helpful shop assistant, who marched between them barking, “Not this one – it’s rubbish. It’s heavier than it looks and the wheels don’t turn properly. Not that one either – no one would buy that one. Anyway, there’s no carrycot.”)

                By the time Piotrek joined us, I had pushed, bounced, clipped, unclipped and weighed my two favourites over and over, finally settling on one that was light, elegant and manoeuvrable. With one small drawback – it only came in rose pink.

                “But didn’t you say it would be a girl?” the shop assistant asked with some confusion. “This is nice, for a girl.” I pointed out to her the very real danger of my husband’s diminishing sense of masculinity should he be condemned to push a rose-pink pram around for the next three years. She nodded thoughtfully. “Is there another colour?” I asked. “Black, maybe? Or blue?”

                It turned out that what they had on the shop floor was pretty much it. “There is, of course, a similar model, that one next to you, in blue,” the shop assistant suggested. I found myself to be standing on top of a slim electric-blue pram with sturdy but modestly-sized wheels, that bounced and turned as deftly as the others. “There is also one other colour,” the she added, and pointed to the shelf up in the corner of the room.

                And there it stood – our red rocket, svelt, comfy, sporty, stylish, beaming with an aura that said, I am the fastest and the smoothest ride in town. The Bebetto Nico. (“Of course, you pay for what you get,” the shop assistant barked helpfully. “This one’s cheaper than the other – it doesn’t have the seat insert, or the cup holder. But really, they’re all the same, aren’t they, I wouldn’t bother with half the stuff they throw in. But those manufacturers have to come up with something new every year…”)

                So we are now the proud owners of a shiny red pram, with clip-on red toddler seat and a sleek black clip-on car seat, each with a generous hood that can be extended to engulf the child entirely in a protective red cocoon. It’s standing in the kitchen, with the carrycot attached and the headrest up, and I go and give it a little bounce every now and then, on its shapely, well-sprung wheels.

 

Our Red Rocket

The Stroller Cocoon

The swanky carseat and strappy bag