Corpus Christi funtivities

Happy Corpus Christi!

...says Baby K who, according to the Internets, is now the size of a small watermelon. It's fortunate we had a small watermelon on hand to check.


In the world of planning-for-a-child-filled-future, we are busy little bees. (Almost as busy as the actual bees that are currently in an absolute frenzy in our garden, painstakingly vacuuming Every Single Flower.)

As of about now, I am "full term". I thought this would mean, when I went to my last doctor's appointment on Monday, that we'd do an ultrasound and I'd get the answers to all those burning questions, like, is there actually a watermelon inside me? And, if it keeps growing, won't I explode?

No such luck. There is to be yet another appointment, a week from now, to do all the measurements and assessments. (I still have no very clear idea of what is being assessed; we never really discuss these in depth, as several months of scrutiny have failed to turn up anything remotely interesting or suspicious in any of my bodily systems. Not for the first time in my life, I wonder if there's really any point in going to a doctor at all.)

Just in case, I did ask if there's a chance Baby K might appear before we manage to measure her next week. Oh, no! Not a chance! I'm assured. There's absolutely no sign whatsoever of anything happening in the near future.

The doctor did mention that she's moved quite low down, but doesn't seem to have entirely dropped yet. My personal opinion is that she's riding very low and very high at the same time - but I think this may have more to do with my size than with hers. She is also now very adept at both splits and handstands.

As they informed us in Baby School, which we graduated from a couple weeks ago, you may notice certain signs of approaching labour, such as going into a cleaning frenzy. So every morning, when I drag myself and my two very separate and unresponsive hip sockets into a reluctanct sitting position after long hours of intermittent abdominal-wall-punching, wandering about the house, snacking and blowing my nose, I look over my jumbled miscellaneous piles of Stuff all over the bedroom floor and test to see if I am inspired by any unquenchable desire to straighten them out. So far, the answer is consistently "no".

The same can be said for Baby K's room. As I imagine she won't be sleeping there for the first several months, we haven't made it that much of a priority to finish, beyond painting and setting up the two meagre articles of furniture - a dresser and a crib. And despite all the list-making and online information-seeking, it's taken us a while to get down to the actual buying-and-setting-up stage of the baby prep activities.

But this week, there has been progress. I put in a huge order to Allegro (our eBay, if you didn't know) for all those intensely fascinating items you have, I'm sure, always dreamed of owning but never had the opportunity to - freezer milk bags and wet wipes and dry wipes and gels and creams and sterile swabs and all sorts of hospital gear, and a little pacifier container with a hippo on it. Yesterday, we went on a spur-of-the-moment excursion to Ikea and came home, a little unexpectedly, with three new sets of shelves (all those wipes need to be put somewhere) and armfuls of bins of different shapes and sizes.

Add to that my recent, miraculous discovery of the true glory of Roban - our local chain of used clothing stores where, it turns out, you can buy baby-sized H&M jeans and baby cargo pants and onesies and sundresses and all sorts of things for 3PLN a piece - and I am even finally stocked up on the previously evasive supply of nightshirts that the hospital advises you to bring. (I cannot remember the last time I wore anything called a "nightshirt". It was a long hunt.)

Wearing one of my miraculous finds from Roban. Also, it was Emmeline's goodbye party last week.

Today was spent putting together furniture and puttering around the garden. I pulled up buckets of weeds from our sadly neglected carrot patch, while Piotrek whipped up three sets of shelves, a small desk and a diaper bin. Also, there was a minor tragedy when a sparrow flew head-first into our back door and, apparently, broke its neck. We laid it out in a paper-towel-shroud for some time in case it came to (this is not the first time a sparrow has collided with our back door), but this one was most definitely expired, so we held a small funeral and buried it in a patch near the compost heap. (I was for digging the grave under the trees near our deck, but Piotrek encouraged me to note how many of the late sparrow's friends like to flock about the compost heap, and how it would be much happier down there.) We have also unpacked the entire pantry in preparation for tomorrow's delivery of a full grown-up-sized fridge, including a freezer where, we imagine, we will soon be storing all those freezer bags of milk, along with all those carefully-prepared frozen meals in Tupperwares that you're supposed to stock up on before a baby arrives (say the Internets). Another of those things I plan to suddenly find myself desperate to do, once the promised hormones kick in. Whenever that is.

 

In addition to these exciting preparations, the contents of my hospital bag are now finally splayed in thematic piles all over Baby K's bedroom floor. Considering I've even taken the vital step of deciding which clothes to pack - for both of us - we're obviously ready to go. I mean, I will put the stuff into the bag and all. One of these days. When those aforementioned hormones kick into gear.

 

The truth is, I'm mostly just too tired to do much of anything these days. Since my muscles are more sore every day than if I'd been working out at the gym for twenty-four hours non-stop, my limited energy is generally devoted to an hour or two of extremely relaxing yoga, and my long lists of ambitious house-cleaning projects stops short after the first round of dish-washing. So while Baby K evolves into ever more of a watermelon, I devolve ever more into a Lump Extraordinaire, and resign myself to an early summer of reading mom blogs, reading spy novels, and watching youtube tutorials on cloth diapering, swaddling, baby slings and hypnobirthing.

 

And that's really all that's been going on, these past few weeks.

Can you tell which is which?

 

 

 

Mother's Day, observed

Last Monday was Mother’s Day in Poland, and I received my first tribute of the occasion.

As I was walking to the train station, a man came up alongside me on the sidewalk and started flagging me down with “Hello! Hello! Excuse me!” Now, as he was a man of the toothless, unwashed, sketchy-looking variety, and I have an often-proved talent for picking up undesirable stalkers, I’m afraid I employed my usual mode of action in such situations and kept walking as though I had not heard him, aided by a very loud passing truck. To which, in a demonstration of admirable persistence, he responded by suddenly leaping into a bush. As I continued on my way, he tore out the nearest wildflower and hurried once again after me, wagging the flower in my direction.

“I only wanted to give you this,” he said, “for Mother’s Day. I gave the very same to my own mother,” he solemnly promised me.

So I took the flower, and thanked him profusely, and he took this as an invitation to join me in my rather hurried walk (I didn’t want to miss the train.) “You know you’re supposed to eat them as soon as they’re born?” he said. I shook my head in a show of surprise. “Yes, you are, and if you don’t, then twenty years later you’ll regret it!” He laughed at his joke, then said, no, of course he was only joking, having children is a beautiful, beautiful thing. He himself has two sons, and they help him in every possible way. “And you will have a girl, I think,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, “how did do you know?”

 “I have two sons, and there has to be some balance in the world.” On which he reached the post office, and waved goodbye, and I continued on my way, realising about halfway to the station that I was still holding the flower out in front of me, like a banner.

 

My first Mother's Day present, after a long train ride

As to the actual Being a Mother bit, it’s gradually moving out of the theoretical zone into the realm of anxious practice. Piotrek and I have recently begun Baby School, among other things. We’ve been to one weekend session so far, where we were presented with dolls and baskets of clothes, and invited to practice dressing and undressing, lifting and lowering, taping and untaping the ends of diapers, and running brushes over imaginary heads of hair.

The school is in an old building in the city centre, with large, high-ceilinged rooms, parquet floors, and bits and pieces of décor in deep, solid, calming colours, such as dark pink bean bags, and dark blue exercise mats, and forest-green mugs, and a shiny purple tea pot on a little striped rug. All the couples sit in a circle on the bean bags, smiling at each other and at the young, relaxed, encouraging midwife who reassures us that we all know what we’re doing, and as we shall soon see, our children will be happy as little burbling clams.

We learned the art of bathing, and various techniques for cleaning parts of the face and body, and how to put on a disposable diaper, and which type of hair brush to buy, and how to use it, and when best to cut fingernails, and the easiest way to lift little legs and haunches to ease them in and out of onesies.

We did not, however, receive instruction on the mysteries of the reusable diaper. I have, of course, watched a YouTube tutorial on this subject, taking notes on the various models, recommended brands, and tried and tested uses of all the complex parts of the new-fangled reusable diapering systems currently available on the market. But the inserts, covers, pins, pads and other bits look far more formidable in real life than they did on the screen.

In the midst of sorting piles of baby clothes into “more white” and “more pink”, with the intention of trying out our sample packet of baby laundry powder from our Baby School welcome pack, and having recently received a miraculous package of fun and joy from Mom including beautifully hand-made diapers, I decided to put my diapering instincts to the test, and try out all the different materials. I practiced stuffing pockets, and covering pre-folds, and double-padding with ordinary flannel squares, and lining up elastic leg holes. I will just say – it’s trickier than it looks. But if we’re being generous with our definition of success, then I succeeded in getting the inner bits of diaper into the outer bits of diaper, and in pinning pre-folds and tetra squares without puncturing either myself or the stuffed-animal models that were eventually drawn into the experiment.

 

Victims of Diaper Practice

 
As we held fluffy pink plush breasts up to ourselves and practiced positioning our dolls against them in the various breast-feeding holding positions, our friendly instructor at Baby School reminded us again and again to ignore the markets, doctors, hospital midwives, family members and various random old ladies who will, under guise of kind encouragement, appeal to our natural feminine sense of guilt and try to convince us that we are doing something wrong.

The baby-product market will have you believe that you are inflicting slow, residual damage on your child’s bottom if you don’t prophylactically apply their creams and oils three times a day, while in fact most babies require nothing more than water to keep them clean. Your grannies and your paediatricians will blame your child’s sub-par weight gain on your “weak milk”, while in fact there is no such thing. Your friends and relations will thoughtfully attribute your baby’s crying to a wet diaper, while in fact, babies are very unlikely to notice that their bottoms are wet at all.  In fact, your baby’s crying, our instructor assures us, will almost never result from something you have done wrong.

Which, as I struggle to make the legs of my last pre-fold stay up over the feet of my blue stuffed elephant without cutting off his imaginary circulation, seems to me to be the best advice so far.

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

 

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.