Cramming for the Big Exam

Recently, as any dedicated future parent would do, I have been investigating learned sources on child rearing (google, youtube, facebook, buzzfeed, random blogs).

And as always with the internets, I have found that all their Secrets of Successful Child-Rearing prove not so much informative as contentious, focussing overwhelmingly on the negative – sidestepping the actual advice, but elaborating on the potential catastrophic results of choosing the wrong method. (A child that is left to cry will become a psychopath, while a child that is picked up when it cries will become a manipulative tyrant; a child that is fed on demand will be needy and self-centred, while a child that is fed on a schedule will have mushy intestines and an inferiority complex, etc., etc.)

There are so many vague shades and offshoots of so many theories that it is impossible to name or number them. There are nurses who interpret the infinitesimal variations of baby’s cries, and sages who teach comprehensible sign language to infants, and mystics who tap into the powers of intuition, and militaristic nannies who program their charges into responsive robots, and hippies, and disciplinarians, and strict-rule-followers, and no-rule-followers,  and conquerors of their children’s whims, and slaves to their children’s needs.

About one thing they are all, however, in agreement – child-rearing is by no means natural, instinctual, or even possible at any time in history previous to our recent understanding of psychology, neurology and the science of social behaviour. (Well, except for those promoting the Amazonian tribe method, but then could those poor tribeschildren really reap the benefits of their upbringing without fully understanding the development of neurological signals that it was promoting, or at the very least, without jotting down a few statistics?)

So after a few months of careful reading, I have come up with the fundamental conundrum of new parents: a) child-rearing is a mysterious and elusive form of magic which no one understands, and upon which no enduring wisdom can be imparted, even from the perspective of experience; b) all children, through all the eons of history, have nevertheless managed to grow up, and quite possibly retain no memory or trace of their parents’ blunderings in their early months.

Having agreed on the impossibility of the task they undertake, all child-rearing methods also ultimately set the same goals. For the purpose of oversimplification, I would say that all their discussions seem to hinge around one central issue in the early months of parent-child interaction: establishing who’s boss.

There are many variants of the “Do not let them rule your life” camp, all focussing, to one degree or another of extremism, on the importance of inculcating the newborn into the social world it will, eventually, have to come to accept. There are equally as many of the “Nature knows” camp, astutely separating the actual, visceral needs of the infant from the constructed, overlaid social needs of its parents.

Faced with this intellectual, ethical and philosophical dilemma, without yet being in possession of a subject to experiment on, I have no other option than to put my own life habits and needs (adult, socially constructed) to the test, and to examine them from both points of view – the “Do what the parent needs” routine-based infant flash-course on adult life patterns vs. the “Follow your baby’s instincts” nature-based complete enslavement by the unpredictable needs of your child. Highlighting a few of the pet peeves of infant behaviour that parents of both camps struggle against, I have found the following interesting behaviours in myself:

 

Night feeds

The number one developmental step in any type of newborn training seems to be dropping the night feed. This, I am promised by various proponents of various methods, can be achieved in 1 week/3 months/6 months/2 years by careful adherence to schedule/instinct/willpower/calculated daytime force-feeding/magic. But whatever the means, most methods agree that the getting-up-in-the-night-to-feed is an ogre that must be chased away as soon as possible.

Now, over the past several months, my body has been meticulously cultivating the opposite tendency, so as, I suspect, to plant in my mind the certainty of night-feeding as a necessity to health and happiness. Not to say that I have not tried several of these methods myself: the cry-it-out method (my empty stomach doesn’t so much cry as grumble, but the sounds it emits are equally disturbing); the move-your-schedule method (I time my daily meals and my bedtime carefully for optimum results); the pre-bedtime-forcefeed method (a big warm bowl of cream of wheat before I turn out the lights is just the thing). I train my digestive system for longer breaks, or shorter breaks, for larger meals, or smaller meals, to no avail. There’s nothing for it but to take up a banana, or a sandwich in a Tupperware, every night before I go to bed, in anticipation of my 3am feed.

I suspect my body of scrupulous mental and physical preparation for life with an infant. Or it could just be the curse of a fast metabolism, and one that is not entirely new for me. Although I’ve never been a night snacker before, I have frequently, throughout my life, woken up hungry in the middle of the night – not just a bit peckish, but the victim of painful, gut-roiling, nauseating hunger (often, inexplicably, causing me to wake from dreams of crawling through a desert with my belly bloated and burning). As a child I would wake up in the morning so hungry I would start to gag and be too queasy to eat; as an adult I have always found the sensation unpleasant, but ignorable; at the moment, the night time hunger is unbearable, and has to be addressed if I am to get any sleep at all.

Which makes me wonder – if I can’t bear the discomfort of waking up hungry at night, how reasonable is it of me to expect this of my child? I imagine myself, leaning over her crib at 3am, saying sternly through her cries, “You go back to sleep now, it’s not time for your breakfast yet,” as I calmly munch my banana. No, regulated digestion is not so easily conquered, and night time feeding has come to seem to me very logical indeed. I will bring two bananas, and make it a picnic.

 

Not sleeping through the night

A small addition to the above – according to all the methods, it seems, a good baby, a developed baby, a mature baby, is one that is sleeping through the night. This achievement is recommended at a variety of different ages, depending on the method, but no one doubts that it is a key achievement in the progress toward healthy adulthood.

There are camps of sleep-trainers and anti-sleep-trainers. There are sleep-trainers who recommend crying-it-out, and sleep-trainers who recommend patting-and-leaving, and sleep-trainers who recommend complex timed systems of variegated intervals noted carefully in a sleep log and increased according to formulas of high-level mathematics. There are those who think the child must learn to sleep on his own, and those who think he must be shown how, and those who think he knows how instinctually but lacks a feeling of security and confidence because he is/isn’t placed in his own room/a swaddle/a lambs-wool sleeper-suit/a magical cocoon of rocking rhythms and low mechanical sounds.

So how to impart this mysterious wisdom? I ask myself. And I look back on my years and years of sleep experience, and find that, after all, I am not the right mentor for the job; I have never, to my shame, been much of a good sleeper myself. I wake during the night more often than not, and can’t often get myself to sleep inside of an hour. Sometimes I simply don’t sleep at all. I remember as a child wandering, confused, around the dark house and looking periodically at the microwave clock, unable to understand why, despite the best efforts of my sleep-deprived woolly-brained head, I was still awake. I remember recurring stages in life where I dreaded the empty hours after bedtime, staring at the ceiling and trying to will myself to sleep, arming myself whenever possible with something I’d read or seen recently, to think about in the dark and distract me.

So if my child lies awake at bedtime, fussing and fussing and not wanting to sleep, I can hardly say, you must sleep! Can I? I guess we’ll just lie awake and fuss together.

And another thing – recent research would have us believe that sleeping eight hours straight is not a natural habit at all, but a learned one, fitting in with developing social behaviour (leisure time, work hours, access to artificial light, the cult of busy-ness) that has come into being in recent centuries. Our bodies’ natural urge, apparently, is to sleep in interrupted intervals, pausing between sleeps for minutes to hours of quiet, normally inactive wakefulness. The existence, and later disintegration, of this practice has been recorded or alluded to (so the internets inform me) in the diaries, musings, medical texts and fiction of previous ages. Does this mean it’s our babies who should be teaching us the patterns of healthy sleep, and not the other way around?

 

Frequent pit stops

The internets warn that one of the woes of early parenthood, especially for the active sorts who count on leaving the house, is the doom of the frequently-changed diaper. The mess, the hassle, and the widespread Fear of Poo have all been discussed at length, but the life-changing Disruption of the Pit Stop seems to be up there among the major inconveniences. Unless you’re in a park, or at someone’s house, it seems you will always be on the lookout for either a bathroom (with changing table) or convenient substitutes.

Well, this is an easy one for me. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not always been on the lookout for a bathroom. Never having mastered the skill of increasing the capacity of my bladder by the most well-intentioned willpower, I have found the skill of sniffing out a bathroom in the unlikeliest of places, or of storing spied bathrooms in the recesses of my mind for future use, to be indispensable. (And my poor husband, who before he met me never knew the trauma that Bathroom Location Uncertainty Syndrome can cause, has taken to prompting me, before leaving home or, say, a restaurant, as one would a small child, “Would you like to use the toilet before we go?”)

This developed survival behaviour was exacerbated by the general opinion, imparted to me at a young age, that needing to make frequent pit stops throughout the day was somehow naughty and irresponsible (the correct number, practised by normal adults, was three per day, I was told.) And so bathroom-hunting while out and about took on something of the clandestine; it was a race against time, a manoeuvring and a manipulation, a system of second-guessing, so that the adults could be tricked into believing the conveniently-placed bathroom had shown up of its own accord, begging to be used. This habit has not left me. The basic requirement for any outing, no matter where or for how long, is access to a toilet, and bathroom reconnaissance precedes any possible enjoyment of the trip.  

So essentially, having to schedule the day, and the route of travel, around frequent pit stops (and/or diaper changes) is something I would be ungenerous not to sympathise with, if not encourage. If my daughter is anything like me, she will need this skill in her future years.

 

Crying for absolutely no reason, and needing to be cuddled

                Babies, some experts warn, are manipulative creatures who will do anything to get your attention; once you give in and respond to their fussing with a cuddle, they’ve got you eating out of the palm of their little chubby hands. Children, others say, need to develop a sense of security from an early age, and should be trained as quickly as possible to comfort themselves, by watching your example, then being left to their own, patiently encouraged, devices. Infants, still others claim, go through a phase where they simply cry for no reason; this crying is not caused by any discomfort or need, and should be kindly, but firmly, ignored, otherwise it will only continue. There are also those convinced that every cry is a communication of a specific need, which the super-human parent of super-linguistic capabilities should decode and answer, and not simply cuddle away.

But in all cases, it is agreed that the cry-cuddle cause-and-effect chain risks turning into a cuddle-dependency-caused-cry, if you make the fatal mistake of over-responding. Devious or innocent, instinctual, crafty or genuine, the various child-rearing methods seem to agree on two points: uncontrollable crying is motivated (perhaps intentionally) by a specific stimulus, and is a bad habit from which the child should be quickly weaned.

                Now, all this may be very true. But when I find myself in the uncomfortable situation of crying for no reason, then neither self-soothing, nor the domination of adult logic, nor an engulfing sense of security, nor the practised patterns of habit, make any difference. I just want a cuddle, dammit.

In the last several months, I have not often been victim to the overpowering mood swings generated by pregnancy hormones, but I do have my moments, from time to time, when I’m too exhausted to find life anything but hopeless and collapse into pointless, uncontrollable tears. Once it was the utter agony of trying to make a bowl of porridge, without having slept properly the night before, that brought it on. Once, it was the contemplation of the tragic yet poetic death of a turtle, the collateral damage of a story about avian hunting techniques told during a jolly fireside conversation with friends. Once it was nothing more than the sheer expanse of the empty weekend day and the mountain of things to fill it.

Whatever brings it on, I am fully aware each time that there is absolutely no reason for it. Nevertheless, it is overpowering and uncontrollable. And there is only one thing to do – cry it out, and be cuddled.

Without exactly encouraging the habit of regular abandon to uncontrollable crying comforted only by a pat and a cuddle, I can’t help sympathising with it, since I experience it myself. Another example, no doubt, of my body surreptitiously preparing me for parenthood. And I hope I’ll respond to the bewilderment and annoyance caused by my child’s uncontrollable crying with un-resented and guilt-free cuddles.

 

A fascination with putting things into other things

                This last one is a habit, an innate need, which my poor baffled husband will never understand. Why do I like to take objects of various sizes, and organise them by mystical criteria of classification, and place them inside receptacles such as drawers, and boxes, and Tupperware, and cupboards – and then remove them, and re-arrange them, and house them once again? What is the origin of my need to possess boxes of different sizes, and multiple sets of drawers; what is the mystery that determines what objects will go into one, but not another? How much more can I possibly fit into their seemingly infinite interior spaces?

                So yes, babies of the world, I understand your need. I understand the irresistible urge, when confronted with a drawer, to open it, and when confronted with its contents, to empty them, and when confronted with un-housed, loose miscellanea, to insert them into every imaginable receptacle within reach. And I can only hope that when my own child begins to explore this great pleasure of life, I will not be too overbearing with my prior wisdom and preferences as to where and how, but will consider the Putting of Things into Other Things as a group activity, an exploration, a tireless pursuit.

 

I’m sure that if I looked hard enough, I would come up with many more examples of infant-like behaviour in my daily life. But based on what I have contemplated so far, with the caveat that I do consider myself to be a rational and intellectually developed being, I can find no justification in my own behaviour for inflicting any sort of regimented life training on my child. And so we will merrily fuss ourselves into wakefulness at all hours of the night, keep irregular schedules, hold midnight picnics, eat whenever we feel like it, stop for bathroom breaks as frequently as we like, and joyfully unpack drawers and cache their contents in mysterious hideaways whose systems of organisation only we understand. And so, I am promised by the internets, my child will quickly become an ungovernable nuisance and ruin the peace and stability of my life. Oh, well.

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, how does your garden grow?

 

 

 

…with sticks and stones that break my... shovels… and my polar fleece is no longer white as snow…

...goes the classic nursery rhyme about two ignoramuses working in their garden.

While most of March was spent sitting in front of our computers (the Lord of the Manor had his exams, his Lady had an overload of work), our rare moments of repose were spent discovering our vast ignorance of the natural world.

Much like the early explorers, we spent many a long afternoon promenading around our new possession, pointing at creatures and objects saying, “What is it?” “Some kind of bush, I would say.” “No, indeed! I would say a tree.” “A tree, you say?” And we would survey the brown, stick-looking pointy things poking up out of the ground, and wring our hands. “Will we ever know?” And the conversation would invariably end with, “Mother-in-law will tell us.”

A Plant of Some Kind

We schemed and plotted to have Mother-in-Law and the Army of Aunts over for a party of tea and digging, in the hopes of solving the Mystery of the Unknown Sticks. Mother-in-law, for those who have not met her, is an all-knowing expert-of-the-garden, and does wonderful and magical things like turning seeds and soil into jam, and materialising magical stocks of sour cucumbers. Her verdict, however, was more elusive than elucidating – either, “It’s a type of bush of some sort,” or, “Well, let’s wait to see what grows on it” (interspersed with, “You really ought to cut these back,” or, “Don’t you want to clean out these dead leaves? Where’s your rake”)

And so we settled back to enjoy the early spring, content in the knowledge that by September, at the latest, we would be able to say with certainty if the small tree-like object in the middle of the lawn was in fact an apple tree, and if the twining leafy thingies under the deck were indeed roses.

 

With animal life we are no better. So far, I have identified from our rotating menagerie: a sparrow, an earthworm and a duck. There was a massive buzzing thing the size of my hand that burst in through the open back door, emitting a roar like a helicopter and sending me scuttling up the stairs to refuge which, when it stopped bashing itself against the window for a second, turned out to be a small, furry bumblebee. There was a small creature I unintentionally evicted from its burrow while digging in the compost heap which looked to my untrained eye like a mouse, but did not behave like one (do mice swim? Do they have black stripes down their back? Do they live in compost heaps?) There are the buzzing things which I identified as wasps but Piotrek assured me were “far too furry”. There is a whole organization of very busy birds criss-crossing our garden each morning, passing messages, checking this and that, holding meetings, of which I so far noted that some have blue feathers in their tails, and some do not. And there are the swarms of teeny-tiny insects that hover nebulously over one spot on the lawn every evening, which we currently name, “Dammit, I think these might be mosquitos… or are they too small?”

One thing we were able to do on our own was to identify the Things That May Be Alive and Things That Are Definitely Dead. And this is how we progressed toward our very first harvest: a harvest of sticks.



  We, in our growing wisdom, identified several items of our garden inventory – overlong strands of brown grass trampled flat, brittle twigs, tangled bits of overgrown bushes, broken branches clogging the little stream beyond our gate – as either candidates for relocation to the compost heap, or potential firewood. I with my secateurs and Piotrek with his axe set to work one sunny March Sunday, clearing out the messes of last year’s decorative hedges and ending up with heaps of kindling.

 

Our first harvest

 

The garden has turned out to be fairly addicting. We still have no clue what to plant, or where, or when, but there is always something to trim or tidy up. Piotrek has drawn an elaborate plan for our vegetable patch, which after a month of hard work with a pitchfork (several pitchforks, if we count the ones that were sent back to the store in disgrace with broken handles) has expanded to include all the components of a very yummy salad. And I have woken many mornings in the light of the every-earlier dawn to look out the window and find the Lord of the Manor, wrapped to the nostrils in a duffle coat and woolly scarf, hacking away at his squares of earth.

 

In no time at all, Piotrek has morphed into a hairy, sweaty, dirt-covered, pitchfork-wielding peasant:

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

This plan was definitely laid by a man, but I’m not sure if the mastermind behind it really wasn’t the mouse…

 

To begin with, we seem to have mice living in (or regularly visiting) the roof space just over our bed. That is, we hear something that may be little scamperings, or may be branches scratching the rooftop, or may be uncharacteristically nocturnal birds on downhill skiing expeditions over our roof tiles, but we’ve decided to prepare for the worst and assume it’s mice. What to do, what to do?

 

Obviously at times such as these, we turn to Uncle Google. You may remember from our previous adventures as new home owners that Piotrek is a Man with a Plan, and he got down to stakinghis best-laid plans against the hypothetical mice right away. While I was at work one day, he did a thorough analysis of all the various types of mousetraps and mouse repellants currently being discussed throughout the mouse-harboring homes of the world, and after weighing the pros and cons of each, finally settled on a winner:

 

The Bucket Trap

For this contraption, you will need a sizeable bucket (say, an empty bucket of white primer left over from your recent painting party), a thin metal rod, an empty beer can, and some peanut butter.

 

(What really swayed the decision to select this trap was the overwhelming curiosity to see if Polish mice like peanut butter as much as American mice purportedly do.)

 

Cut a hole in the beer can at each end. Insert the metal rod. Smear the can in peanut butter. Suspend over open bucket. (The online version had the added step of filling the bottom of the bucket with liquid, but we didn’t actually want to drown the mice. We just wanted to trap the mice. I suggested smearing the bottom of the bucket with peanut butter so they’ll get stuck down there, but we decided against this due to: a) the temptation to overeat a delicious but ultimately fattening delicacy which may lead to health problems later in their lives and b) the possibility of the peanut butter actually acting as a suction against the walls of the bucket, helping them to escape, and resulting in little sticky footprints all over the floorboards.)

 

The traps that we decided against included:

 

The classic cheese trap: Too risky. We are in no way willing to give up any of our cheese.

 

The sound deterrent: Apparently there is some sort of noise you can play that mice hate that will scare them off. No guarantee that we will not also hate it, especially after being forced to listen to it all night.

 

The bucket-balanced-on-a-stick trap: Piotrek was convinced these would be too difficult to set up in such a way that the bucket wouldn’t just tumble over, mouse or no mouse. I suspect his opinion is also tainted by the disappointment of a failed early childhood expedition, masterminded by his older cousin, to trap Smurfs, for which one apparently uses a very similar construction.

 

The cat trap: Since you’re not really supposed to get yourself a cat while pregnant, I thought we could try dressing Piotrek up as a cat and sending him into the crawl space to keep watch. We didn’t even get as far as finding a costume, however, as his meow was far too unconvincing.

 

The bucket trap was put to the test overnight. I heard nothing – no scamperings, no creakings, no thuds at the bottom of the bucket and no smacking “mmmm-mmmm”s through a sticky mask of peanut butter – so it was with great trepidation that we opened the little door behind our bed and pulled the bucket out of the crawl space this morning.

 

Now, to the untrained eye, it was empty and untouched. But to our expert eyes, those little straight lines traced through the peanut butter on one side of the can – yes, those ones which look suspiciously like the little indentations of a slightly serrated knife – say, even, a butter knife – those very lines were undoubtedly traced by the claws of a mouse.

 

Only this mouse was a rare athlete and escape artist, because he got away without a scratch. Or the trap didn’t work. Or there was no mouse. One of the three.

 

Conclusion – The mouse who came to try out the trap last night has now gone out to tell all his friends, “We have the Best. New. Neighbours. Ever! They’ve installed a snack bar AND gym!” The bucket trap scam was clearly a cunning plan laid and posted on the internet by a mouse.

Where's Helmut?

Since we’ve reached the halfway mark, it’s high time for a Helmut update!

 

There were long weeks of succumbing to persistent naps, indulging cravings for cream of wheat, snuffling, moaning about my hyper-sensitive tailbone and weaning myself off nighttime snacking, but by now I‘ve started to feel a bit more normal. I stay up until the evening. I sleep through the night. I go into town to see friends, and come back again still conscious enough to speak.

After a month of working from home, I finally decided it was time to make an appearance in the office this week. It was fairly exhausting, and I had to go to bed as soon as I got home in the afternoon, but it was also rejuvenating to see my friends after so long.  Apart from one day in January, I haven’t been in the office since around Christmas.

 

And all week long I could see people, despite themselves, constantly eying my stomach, first with interest, then with confusion. “Congratulations...um, right?”

So apparently I’m not showing quite as much as I thought I was. Looking down from my perspective, Helmut looks round, robust and (to put it in Piotrek’s words) a bit pointy (he/she seems to prefer my right side for now.) So I took an experimental photograph:

Helmut at 19 weeks/4.5 months

 

Maybe Helmut isn’t actually all that visible yet – especially under clothes – but he/she’s getting bigger all the time. I’m no longer waking up for midnight snacks, and I’ve been sleeping through the night quite a lot, but I’m also woken up often by my migrating organs as they move to make room for Helmut’s nightly ballet practice and spontaneous interior renovations. But in the battle between Helmut and my stomach muscles, the stomach muscles are still holding their ground.

When the doctor examined me a couple weeks ago, she exclaimed, “My goodness, your stomach is hard! Doesn’t it hurt?” Isn’t it supposed to? No, apparently not. I’ve been advised to take lots of magnesium and do relaxation exercises, and gradually accept the fact that losing my impeccable posture is in no way reprehensible. That’s going to take some getting used to.

And speaking of being examined, I finally went to that doctor recommended by Ania. Revelation! She obviously takes as much time as each patient needs – she was running an hour late when I arrived, and when my turn finally came, she spent nearly an hour with me. She was very thorough, easy to talk to, listened well and explained everything in great detail. She even did a quick ultrasound, although all that we could see was a partially-obscured bottom and an occasionally wandering hand.

Most importantly, I got the essential signed declaration to hand in at the office, making it even more official than the team announcement and ensuing gossip machine. Everyone at work seems super excited about this baby – almost as excited, I would dare to say, as my own mother (it’s their team baby, you understand).

I had a discussion with my line manager, and we’ve set a date for my maternity leave. Apparently, my yearly assessment and future salary will come out better for me if I don’t work for more than three months this year, since in that case they'll just base my 2014 assessment on my 2013 results. And since I’m not going to be able to take on any major projects this year, it’s been impressed on me that there’s not much point in hanging around and exhausting myself while achieving nothing exciting enough to record in my personal development plan. So my leave will start on 1 April, and I’ll just have to find something to do with myself for the three or so months until Helmut comes.

Beforehand, I did ask several colleagues what the “normal” timeframe is for starting maternity leave is. Two months before your due date? Oh, no, everyone vigorously shook their heads. Only so-and-so ever did that, and she was a little crazy. No, anyone in their right mind would take at least three, maybe four. Many people have asked me why I bother to come in to the office at all. Wouldn’t I prefer to stay at home? I mentioned I had started to miss being in the office, and people rolled their eyes, like I was telling a joke.

It came over me later that I have very little time left before I give up the daily struggle against the whims of over-entitled expats and the absurdities of the statistic-crunching projectmongers for the pleasures of home repairs, diaper stocking and long ponderings over subtle differences in shades of paint. It’s difficult, when it comes down to it, to feel too disappointed.

The Joys of Home Ownership – Part II

So we were having a little trouble with the heating, that first weekend in the new house. This is nothing new to us. Looking back, we have never once shared a home with adequate heating.

Our flat on Urzędnicza, with its bizarrely-aimed toilet flush, broken shower head, and heavy 50’s-style furniture that took up loads of space but fit very little in it and left all your clothes smelling like stale perfume – photographic evidence from our six months of residence there in 2008-2009 show us wrapped from head to toe in flannel blankets, hunched over swiftly-evaporating glasses of tea.

Then came the basement on Gontyna, where it was always damp, always mouldy, and always 17 degrees, no matter how long the little electric heater went, how securely we sealed the cracks in the windows with tape, or how much we jumped up and down to get warm. (It was always 17 degrees in summer, too. Strange phenomenon of partially-underground living.)

Next it was three years on Spokojna, where we felt ourselves so expert at living in cold that we decided to save money by never turning the heat on, holing up in the bedroom (under the covers mostly, in my case) during the winter months and making rare and well-wrapped forays out to the kitchen as seldom as possible.

And finally, that wretched place on Łazy for the past four months which, being in a modern block of flats and equipped with city heating should, like all such flats, be chronically overheated. But it’s just or luck that ours was on the ground-floor and unrefurbished, and the damp and cold blew up from the floor like a persistent wind. Not to mention that only half the radiators worked, and the water heater in the kitchen was most decidedly broken.

So frigidity is nothing new for us, and we are known, among our friends, as that couple who are fun to visit as long as you bring an extra pair of socks and don’t remove your coat. But we dream, secretly, of one day living in a home where we can remove our coats and hats indoors, even in the dead of winter, and walk from room to room without manoeuvring our thickly-stockinged feet around the trailing ends of blankets.

So it was a little more than mildly disappointing when we woke up that first morning to ice on the windows and an indoor thermometer that had dropped to 10C.

But Piotrek is no one if not a Man with a Plan. And in my experience, once he has got a Plan into his head, it is best to let him see it through to the end. And that is how we ended up with six cubic metres of chopped wood blocking our driveway.

What you do, when it’s freezing cold and your gas heater is not working, is you look online until you find a moderately-priced wood supplier who will deliver for free. And as the lowest possible free delivery volume is six cubic metres, you call them right up and have all six of those cubic metres delivered the very same day. It is a good investment – it will last you into next season at least.

On his Halfway Tea Break

When the delivery truck comes, it is a bit of a let-down that it cannot, unfortunately, back down the icy, snowy, slippery slope leading toward your front gate, and you might feel a pang of woe as the decision is made by the man at the controls to upturn the truck bed and dump the entire load right between your front gate and the road. But there’s not much else he can do, and so he drives away and you are left with a heap of wood in the middle of your drive, a metre high or so, and completely blocking your car, which you had considerately moved off to the side of the house, to make way for the truck.

Never fear. Those who have visited the house may remember, among the other junk piled up in the outdoor shed, a strange contraption made of a sled mounted on skis, at which we all had a good laugh. It does not take long for a Man with a Plan to discover the true destiny of this contraption.

With a string wrapped round the end, and some boards propped up to hold it in place, the wood chunks are loaded onto the sled one by one, then pushed down the slope, steering with the string, propelled by momentum all the way to the wood shed at the back of the house, where it is unloaded, piece by piece. And there you have yourself some winter entertainment that will keep even the most industrious busy for five or more hours.

With the slight complication that, within three or four hours of the delivery, we were due to drive out of our driveway and pick up friends at the train station. But Piotrek was dogged, and kept at it all afternoon, and by the time our friends called from the station, only a scattering of logs remained in the drive.

And thank goodness for Piotrek’s Plan, because by Sunday morning the gas situation was still not looking hopeful.

The heater won’t switch on for lack of gas flow, but there is evidently quite a bit left in the tank. After more online research, another Plan was hatched – to heat the tank. Say the Internets, the gasses will not mix properly if the tank gets too cold. (It’s -11 outside – it’s probably too cold.) So a hunt was started for an appropriate container (one of the used paint buckets won the casting competition), hot water was poured in, and the gas cylinder was placed over it, fitting snugly against the rim. After a few shakes, the gas started to flow, the heater went on, the temperature rose, and eventually we could feel the effects in the radiators. With the fire going and the radiators back on, it soon reached 17 degrees in the living room. It was so warm, I even removed my hat.

We’d pushed the sofa up against the side wall, next to the fire, and set up Piotrek’s desk under the back window, so that he would be less tempted to fiddle around the house, and more tempted to study, with the warmth of the blaze on his back. We drank some tea, ate some scrambled eggs, went to bed (with the electric heater running again, just in case) and hoped for the best.

Well, we weren’t too hopeful. And it’s just as well, since by Monday morning, the gas had gone off again, and hasn’t worked since. An investigation into alternative means of heating is still underway; meanwhile, it’s picnics in the bedroom (the only warm room in the house), multiple layers of fleece, adventures in curtain-hanging, and lots of jumping up and down.

The Joys of Home Ownership - Part I

Snow has fallen in Zabierzów, ankle-deep and crisp, and that questionable miasma of overgrown lawn and mud behind our house has turned into a lovely vista stretching down to endless white fields. We stand at the back doors, our noses pressed to the glass, to enjoy it, wrapped in our winter woolies, two pairs of flannel pyjama pants, two pairs of woolen socks, three sweatshirts, hats, scarves, and occasionally coats.

We're not venturing outside - the back doors are still sealed with layers of masking tape, blocked by rolled towels, unpacked Ikea furniture, bits and pieces without shelves to put them on. We're dressed this way because we haven't yet figured out how to make the heater work properly, and it's 10 degrees inside.

This is day 2 of our official move-in, a Saturday. All Friday long, Piotrek and his parents were putting on a final coating of paint in the hall, tidying up, and trying to get the house warm after the recent cold snap. By the time I arrived on Friday evening, the gas cylinders had been replaced and running for several hours, although the radiators were lukewarm. By bedtime the upstairs temperature was still around 12C, so we decided to sleep downstairs, on our new Ikea fold-out sofa, next to the fire.

For the first time in years, I woke up to the sound of complete quiet in a pitch-black room (despite our current lack of curtains). It would have been heavenly if my nose and ears had not frozen stiff. As I pulled my winter hat more firmly over my eyebrows, I noticed there was no more crackling coming from the fireplace, and the radiators had lost their gentle whirr. I stuck my hand out to the one nearest me - ice cold. The fire was out. Our indoor thermometer showed 12C.

On a trip to the bathroom, I observed through the window into the shed that the gas heater was not running. Time to investigate, I resolved. I climbed back under the covers and poked Piotrek - "Go investigate," I told him.

And so began a very long, cold morning of “I’m going to reset it,” “I’ve done that already,” “I’ll try it again,” “That won’t do anything,” “There’s an error message on the panel,” “What does it mean?” “I have no idea”, etc, etc.

As all wise and resourceful people would do, we googled it, and discovered an instruction manual for our gas heater online. (Before finding the instruction manual, Piotrek also found a consumer review forum, in which customers emphatically confirmed that, unlike other models, this one “never breaks down.”) We discovered that error “F-1” could, in fact, be any of a list of things having to do with gas not getting from the tank to the heater.

After a lot of fiddling, it was unanimously decided by our skilled crew of one that the valve had not been connected properly, and instead of flowing into the heater, some of it had been leaking away. (I would like to add, for the peace of mind of all readers, that Piotrek, said skilled crew of one, has reassured me in countless long explanations that there is no possibility of any of us being blown up in any of the gas-tank-related fiddlings here described.) The result of the leakage was that we burned off an entire tank in one afternoon, and it was simply empty. Since the tanks cost 50PLN apiece, this was not necessarily good news, but we were overjoyed as soon as we connected the second tank – removed from its station as the cooking gas supply – and felt the radiators fire up from ice cold to burning hot. Hoorah!

I spent the rest of the afternoon removing the cardboard and plastic from the floors, washing the dishes and stacking them precariously into a sieve to dry (still no drying rack), and walking around the kitchen in circles scratching my head while I tried to decide which of the awkwardly-placed low cupboards was least inconvenient for pulling out a box of tea. With the fire going and the heat on, we got as high as 19 degrees by the evening, when some friends came over and we ordered pizza from what has quickly become our “regular”.

For good measure, we duct-taped a flannel sheet over the bedroom windows, propped pillows in the window sills, rolled sweaters at the base of the balcony door, and stood a massive great suitcase in front of it to block any draughts. We then turned the electric heater on for about half an hour and closed the door, and it quickly became toasty warm. And while it remained toasty warm in our little sealed room, during Saturday night the heat went off once again, and we woke up to a sparkly, snowy day with 10 degrees downstairs and the same error message flashing on the heater in the shed...