Full time job

I go back to work in just over 2 weeks and have been dreading it. As Eve gets older and more interactive, she gets more fun to be with. She is especially fun in the morning when, after the Boy goes to work and Eve is fed, we play in bed together and she is at her most adorable. I found myself the other morning at 8.30 getting all tearful because this lovely mummy-daughter time I have had since Eve was born will be when I am on my way to the office.

The basis of my desire to be a full time mum is mainly rooted in the horror that strikes me that someone else will be her main carer and will be the person who will be there for her when she is sick or needs a cuddle if she falls over. This is entirely about me and my emotions, our nanny is brilliant and Eve will be loved and cared for wonderfully. I am just not sure I want someone else to fulfill what I think should be my role.

However, it has been useful that over the past few days since my parents left and I have looked after Eve full time on my own, I have had a sense of what full time motherhood would be like. After all, one should go into a job knowing what the role and responsibilities are before taking it on.

What I am about to say may offend some, but the truth needs to be told.

I love my daughter and I am having a great time with her. However, by 5pm today I was bored. There are only so many times you can sing "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" before it does your head in and you start substituting other body parts. I have found that many nursery rhymes lend themselves to naughty or rude versions if you are in a creative mood. I even found myself doing the washing up this afternoon for something different to do.

Of course every time Eve smiles or giggles, it lifts me. She has started to chat in baby talk and loves singing along with me. All this is adorable and a lot of fun. But some people like babies, some people find them a bit boring. I love Eve and she is more interesting than most, but my brain has not worked (other than reading the Economist) for 3 months now and it wants to get back in shape.

So, providing I can get flexible hours or maybe working from home a couple of days a week, I am really rather looking forward to being a Mum and having a career. A decision made not too late considering I am back at work shortly.

Sleeping with the enemy

After the vomfest of the junk, Eve slept through the night for the first time, a whole 9 hours. I, of course, only slept 6 and then lay there waiting for her to wake up!

This was only achieved, I must confess, because for most of it Eve was asleep on me. Among Eve's many qualities is having a lot of wind and needing to fart a lot. A few weeks ago she was waking herself up a few times a night with it because she can't pass it lying on her back. Each time I would get up, pop her on her front for half an hour until it was over, and then put her back down. It started to piss me off so, after one such night, I just put her on her front on me and fell asleep. We both slept for 4 hours.

The cot death research means that putting her on her front in her cot is really stupid and dangerous so, if she needs to sleep on her front then on me is the only option.

Every baby book says that babies should sleep in their cots, and sleeping with their parents means they will never be able to independently sleep. As a result, I tend not to tell people that I do this. I con myself that because Eve goes down in her cot each night (only to be taken out 2 hours later when the farts appear) that she is not getting into bad habits, but let's face it she much prefers sleeping on warm soft mummy than in her cot.

Everytime I tell anyone I do this they look aghast and I get comments like "you are making a rod for your own back", and some people look at me with such horror that you would think I left her rolling in her own poo in the gutter.

Until yesterday at baby group. We were talking about routines and I rather proudly said Eve slept through the night. All eyes turned to me "How?". I confessed that she sleeps on top of me so I had sort of been cheating. A small voice next to me piped up "I do that too, he sleeps much better like that". Someone across the room then said "I was feeling so guilty but I do it too, I need to sleep". The session then turned into a scenario akin to an AA meeting "Hi, my name is Yummy Mummy and my baby sleeps in my bed".

After trying to get her to stay on her back last night, and waking up with her crying for an hour, I no longer care. Perhaps when she is 18 and will still only sleep with her mummy I will care, but right now I need my sleep too much too.

Junk

The title being a reference to boats that can be hired for a trip in Hong Kong, as well as the amount of stuff I have to take with me on the aforementioned trip as a result of taking Eve with me.

A year ago, my very good friend R booked a junk for her birthday. It took us around the island in the warm sun, to lunch on a small island, and then back via a quick swim. I got pretty drunk (drunk as a skunk on a junk) and had a great time. And looked pretty damn fine in a bikini.

This year, R booked a junk again to repeat the same trip. However, my experience was somewhat different. I love my daughter, I really do, but a reflux baby is not quite a portable as perhaps I would like.

It started quite well. I made it out of the house after only one change of clothes (me) because Eve decided to wait until she was in the Baby Bjorn before she vomited up her breakfast. Being quite organised, I made it to the shopping mall near the pick up point to buy a card and gift, get the latter wrapped, and meet a friend to grab a croissant then was only 5 minutes late to meet the party and board the boat.

Eve initially slept like a log and various people marveled at how pretty/quiet/sweet she was.

Then the chaos began. Firstly, she was hungry. Feeding Eve without her super duper baby-sized feeding cushion is a challenge at the best of times, but on a rocky boat in swell it was a real challenge. She bobbed on and off while eating, usually a sure fire sign that she is going to vomit the lot back up. When I passed her to the Boy for winding, this is exactly what she did, all over the deck of the boat - while I cleaned it up and C, who was already feeling seasick, went a nice shade of green.

When we finally got to the pretty little island, Eve waited until the food came and then decided she was hungry again. I didn't know many of the people there, we were in a small Chinese restaurant that packed us in very tight, so I thought the better course was to find somewhere else to feed her rather than whip out a boob at the table. Except that it was very sunny and I was anxious not to get Eve to hot so finding a shady place took a bit of effort. Not that I worried for too long because on the way to find a feeding location, Eve did a huge poo and the mission's objective changed.

A little girl helpfully pointed me to the rancid, disease infested, dirty hovel that passed for a toilet. In the absence of anywhere else in the shade, I laid the change mat out next to the sink (in which a small family of unidentifiable bugs were living) and got on with it. Eve, being very much her mother's daughter, took one look at the disgusting surrounds and started to scream.

She was still screaming when she was in a new nappy and dressed, so the original mission continued. By this point, shade was merely a luxury, and anywhere with a seat would have been OK. Not far from the rancid hovel was a car park sort of thing. I say "sort of thing" because there are no cars or roads on this island so why there needed to be a car park was up for grabs, but it had a bench and I fed her. Or rather, she hung like a limpet off me and sucked for all she was worth because without the feeding cushion or an equivalent I practically had to sit her upright in front of me and attach her to a boob.

Did I mention there was no shade and it was bloody hot?

At the first sign that she was at least sufficiently fed to stop screaming, I walked back to the restaurant and ran into the Boy who had decided to come and find me. He politely pointed out that I had vomit down my back - the little darling had immediately vomited up everything she had just ate.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a bit of a stressful blur of vomit, feeding and poo. The poor darling, it was not her fault, she was feeding in such a bad position and with so many distractions that she kept of throwing up and then being hungry again. I pretty much fed her all afternoon.

I have never been so glad to get home.

Postscript: This was all compounded by another couple on the boat who had the "perfect" baby (one month older than Eve) who fed well, didn't cry and played sweetly with everyone.
Postscript 2: Did I mention I also get seasick?

Attention seeking

Over night the cat threw up. Clearly, as she is a clever little thing, she has realised that the best way to get attention in our family at the moment is to vomit.

I am waiting for the Boy to join in now.

Like mother like daughter

Since Eve was born I have been clutching at straws that there might be something, other than being a bit stroppy when she is tired, that she has inherited from me. She has the Boy's hair colour, blue eyes and occasionally looks scarily like his brother or my mother in law (if you are looking for something to screw with your head at 3am then feeding something that looks like your mother-in-law takes some beating). However this week I have finally found an area where Eve is like her Mum.

To explain this I need to take you back to Cardiff University Student's Union bar in the early 1990s. My sister was at Uni there and I, as a 14 or 15 year old, had gone to visit her. The bar doormen were quite tough so to get me into the bar she had to sneak me in quite early before the bar got busy and the doormen got picky. This meant I was in the bar with my sister, some of her friends, her ex boyfriend D and the Cardiff Uni rugby team at about 6pm.

To begin with the evening was quite refined, or as much as students ever are. I began by drinking pints of the tipple of choice of your average teenager, cider. After a few pints of the nicer tasting stuff, I moved onto larger. Hitherto I had never liked lager, but after a few pints of cider I was willing to give it a go. A couple of pints later, and a drunken conversation with a cute member of the Uni rugby team, D and I decided it would be a top idea to drink vodka with orange. After one drink, the mixer seemed like too much effort, so he and I stood by the bar just downing shots of vodka.

My sister, showing much common sense and foresight, decided at this point to go and spend the night with her then boyfriend leaving me in the capable hands of D and her flatmates. We stumbled back to the flat where my memory gets a bit hazy.

My next memory of the night was walking into her sitting room where her flatmates were sitting and asking them what I should do with the vomit I was holding in my hands. The next memory I have is of them cleaning the sitting room floor, and the final memory is of me lying with my head over the side of my sister's bed with a bowl underneath it.

The next morning it transpired that I had pretty much redecorated the flat. However, displaying a remarkable new talent, I had not at any point got vomit on myself but rather been very effective in projecting some distance and with considerable velocity (apparently the one down the mirror was especially impressive).

It was as I held my daughter yesterday as she projectile vomited all over the floor, bookcase and pot plant (fertiliser anyone?) but not on herself or me that the Cardiff Uni incident came back to me and I realised I have passed to my daughter a very important talent.

Awareness

Eve becomes more and more aware of things everyday. This has two implications. Firstly, she is cute as a button as she smiles, gurgles and hits things. Secondly, she doesn't want to ever go to sleep.

Bleary eyed yummy mummy today...

We are family

There is nothing like being a parent to give you a profound sense of gratitude for what your parents did for you. Until I had been through the sleepless nights, wiping up vomit and poo, worried at the hospital (and this is just in the first 10 weeks) I found it hard to truly appreciate what my own parents have given up for me. I am increasingly incredulous that even those who don't much like their parents should at least be grateful.

Take, for example, my friend P. He has had every opportunity provided to him by his parents - a stable home life, a good education, support in his choices whatever they may be but he is still resolutely mean about his parents whenever he speaks about them. He finds them dull, boring, uncultured, and lacking in interesting conversation. He seems to dread his rare trips to see them, and moan about them when he does. I have never met his parents, they could be all of the above, but even if they were a couple of axe murderers they still brought him into the world, and cared for him, and made him who he is. This alone should ensure some respect, if not love.

My own parents are visiting at the moment and being the doting grandparents. I can only imagine how odd it must be to see your child with a baby of their own. Perhaps a sense of pride that I didn't turn out so bad? That I grew out of the stage where I [insert one of my many odd stages], that I made it to my 30s in good health, and that I didn't end up with any of the many unsuitable boyfriends I previously dated?

As I change Eve's nappy, or hold her as she cries, there are loving and knowing looks exchanged between my parents and I as I do my best to convey "I now understand what it was like with me, and thank you more than I can articulate". I suspect I actually just look a bit bemused, but the thought is definately there.