That may or may not be true

- Otters use hair gel.

- Otter babies are very slippery and are commonly shot more than 450 feet during the birthing process. An extra-elasticated umbilical cord generally returns the otter to its mother, or somewhere nearby. Or upstream.

- There is a documentary series in the pipes called ‘How The Otter Half Live’, about class divides in the Dutch otter community.

- There has never been an otter prime minister.

- Apparently (* Thank you La Lynne on twitter), Otters are called “The Black Beast” in the Gaelic. Which is reassuring, if it means there are no more threatening animals in Scotland deserving of the name.

- To the human eye, otter penises look very tiny. On the otter hand, however, they’re very large.

- Otters are multilingual, but speak very very quietly.

- The most famous burlesque otter dancer is called Lotta.
Lotta the Hotta Otta.

- Each year, otters vote for their favourite artforms. In 2011, Otters voted overwhelmingly for their favourite film, in a 90% landslide. It was Showgirls.

- Otters have very bad taste in films. And are very slow to get the latest releases.

- There are fewer blogs written by otters than there are blogs written by people called Simon.

- There are no otters called simon. The name is deeply frowned upon in the otter community, as it means something very, very rude in otter.

- A group of otters started a political demonstration in sympathy with the one in New York last year. However, Otterpy The Corner Of This River Bend did not make as big a splash as they had been hoping.

- A ha ha ha ha ha. Splash.

- Otters don’t really eat fish. They do, however, like to eat other things, moulded into the shape of fish. Like chicken.

- Otters would like me to apologise on their behalf to any primary school students googling ‘Facts About Otters’ for a school project years from now. Otters would like me to state that it was not their idea. I am not an official otter spokesperson. Or even an official spokesotter.

- There is no such thing as an official spokesotter.

I have been to see four films with Doozer at the cinema so far, at parent and baby screenings where the audience are free to scream, cry, go to the toilet in their pants, feed on things not from the cinema snack bar (like breastmilk) and fall asleep anytime they want to.
And the babies are allowed to do stuff too.
I’m kidding. I was talking about the babies.
The parents are expected to mainly behave with normal adult cinema decorum, boo hiss.

Anyway, I have previously seen:

The Artist
A beautiful and brilliant film, silent and in black and white, containing many subtleties that it is easy to miss while sniffing the nether regions of a baby in an attempt to work out whether they have committed a poo or not.

There was a man, and a dog. And a lady. And another man. Or lady. There were several men, several ladies, and a dog. Some things happened, and there was a bit in the middle I particularly liked. There were also some sad bits, which I missed as I was being vomited on. But when I looked up, my friend was crying, and assured me that something sad had, indeed, just happened. She just couldn’t remember what it was. I liked this film very much.

The Muppets
Apparently, a 10.45am screening of this film is what passes for a date night for new parents of around my age. There were a half dozen mothers with babies, a handful of fathers with babies, and a record number of both mother AND father with their babies. It was most touching.
I don’t remember much about the film.
It had muppets in it, and I liked it.
Doozer, meanwhile watched the last five minutes intently.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Like relaxing in a bath filled with lukewarm ovaltine, while watching sunday night bbc television comedy drama. Not very good, but ever so relaxing.
We both slept extremely well (during the film).

Today, we saw a film about someone who bought a zoo. Usefully, for cinema-goers who can’t remember anything about the thing they’ve just seen just after they’ve seen it - or, in fact, about the thing that they’re watching while they’re watching it - the film about some people who bought a zoo was called

We Bought a Zoo
It was about a man, who - wait for it - bought a zoo. He bought the zoo after the death of his wife, which had made him very sad. The dead wife, not the zoo. The dying of his wife had also made his children (who were both cute as buttons) very sad, like little sad buttons.

The zoo contained a lot of peacocks, a couple of monkeys, some snakes, a lion, and one sick tiger who was dying of either Poorly Tiger Syndrome, Tiger Cancer or Tiger Tiger Death Disease (it was never confirmed as any of them, though had symptoms of all), and Scarlett Johansson, who was trying very hard to look dowdy like a zookeeper and not stunning like a starlet, and mainly failing.

Eventually, the man learnt to let go of both his grief and the tiger, the son learned to love his father again, and everyone got off with Scarlett Johansson. No, that’s not true. The man got off with Scarlett Johansson. No one else did, not even the tiger (because he was dead).

And the zoo became a very good zoo, and everyone went to it. And the film ended, after being unspeakably long, and concluded with a completely unworkable parking situation.

Basically, a lot of people arrived to visit the zoo on its opening day (which was good), but then a tree had fallen across the single-track tree-lined road leading to the zoo (which was bad). However, everyone was so keen to go to the newly opened zoo (trust me, these don’t count as spoilers, it’s really quite obvious that nothing bad is going to happen in this film from the second it starts), that they got out of their cars, leaving them end to end in a single lane road, and clambered over the fallen tree to get into the zoo.

Seriously: how is anyone going to get out of that situation happily? Unless the people at the very back of the solid queue of cars are by coincidence the very first ones to want to leave to the zoo, and the people next-to-last the ones who happen to leave second, and so forth? Logistically, there is literally no way that this could end happily.

Honestly, I may be picking on it because it arrived at a point when the film had been going on for approximately 967 hours and I was concentrating very hard due to needing the toilet, but it has been annoying me for the rest of the day.

I mean, even if they happened to manage to move the tree, how would they get the driver of the first car in the queue back in order to move it forward into some kind of turning circle, let alone oh alright I’ll leave it now.

It turns out that buying a zoo is a mainly positive thing to do, though quite longwinded and logistically unsound.

Next week: Some film about some people who do stuff until something bad happens and they have to find a way to continue doing the thing they were doing in the new circumstances that have arisen.
I’ll let you know what it’s like.

I have been going to the cinema with Doozer. It is something you can do at both cinemas in Brighton, the big one (which mainly shows new big releases and is nearer to my house) and the little independent one (which shows a more interesting selection of films but at a time the keeps clashing with other things in a way that means I haven’t been to any of them yet)(there is literally no reason for telling you this apart from to explain the selection of films I’ve so far been to see)(And now I’m double-explaining something that you probably weren’t even questioning anyway. Should I go back and delete this bit? Should I start all over again? Should I delete the whole post in case this dithering puts you off reading it? Delete the whole blog in case you realise it all to be endemic of everything that’s ever been posted here? It is a quandary.)(I’m going to start all over again)(Oh, no, I tell you what, I will change the focus of this post, and write the stuff I was going to write in this post in another post, I’m in a typey mood this evening).

The cinema is good. They leave the lights up a little, and play the film not as loudly as they usually would, and the screening is open almost exclusively to parents and tiny babies, who therefore feel free to wail when they wish to (the babies) feed at will (same) change nappies (the parents) and fall asleep without judgement (both).

I have also done a baby massage class, which was very informative both in terms of how to do massage, AND how long exactly it takes between removing Doozer’s nappy and him weeing everywhere, so that was very good.

Next, I will go to another class. Some kind of singing and playing and goodness-knows-what class, but you know what? It doesn’t really matter what the class is in. I’m still too shy and too scared to meet and talk to people at coffee morning type things (I can picture myself at one: I would walk in with Doozer, head straight for the coffee table, pick up a drink, stand in a corner staring at it/some leaflets/posters/anything there was to stare at while the drink was too hot to drink, then panic when someone tried to start a conversation with me, make a joke that was completely inappropriate and almost certainly inaudible, and run out of the door, HOPEFULLY with the baby. Mine. That is precisely how it would go.)

Otherwise, we walk along the seafront, we sit in the living room staring at toys or in the bedroom making faces, or try and work out which cry means ’sleep’ and which cry means ‘hungry’, and how to turn a slightly sleepy face into a nap. I go out for coffee with people from our birth class, and we compare notes on how much sleep, and where sleep, we get, they get, everyone gets; how many feeds and how much everyone eats; the babies - how long they are; how heavy; how maddening and how adorable our offspring can be, and whether it’s all normal, or whether we are, as we suspect, not doing as well at this as everyone else, like they got sent the manual and we didn’t. And we come away feeling a little bit reassured, and always a little, tiny bit more paranoid about something else.

And now, in the evenings, I sit with two hands while the monitor beeps to let us know it is working, but he’s not making any noise, upstairs. So, slowly, I learn to type two handed and fast again.

This is fun. It’s not always fun, and it’s completely different to what I was expecting. But I think it’s going to be ok. I think.

And another month of not getting around to writing in my blog about all this amazingness.

Still, now we’re emerging into a different bit, with Doozer now eight weeks old, and finally getting the hang of napping in a crib (sometimes) rather than hotly and adorably curled on someone’s chest, I can now, in theory, use these magical two-handed hours to do exciting things like typing. And folding more laundry. But also typing.

So. What have I learnt in the last four weeks? Well… No one ever told me the hoover was going to come in so useful, for a start, and

Oh crap, he’s waking up.
I’m going to come back to this later.

Here is a very cute picture instead:

Exactly one month ago as I type these words, I was in the second stage of labour (that’s the pushing bit, where you get the baby out). By the time I finish this paragraph, it will be exactly one month since the baby was born.

Oh no, wait, that paragraph was very short. Well, in theory, if that paragraph was longer, then by the time it finished, it would have been exactly one month, to the second, since Doozer was born. Perhaps the monthiversary will coincide with the end of THIS paragraph, instead. It’s not quite so momentous, but here’s hoping…

Nope. The end of that second paragraph came and went, and still no monthiversary. I mean, not that the end of that paragraph was anything particularly momentous or noteworthy, it wasn’t even very celebratory of the event itself, more placemarkery and OH DAMNIT, I went to stir the dinner and didn’t notice that the precise monthiversary of the birth of Doozer (7.21pm GMT on the 11th) happened at some point in the middle of THIS paragraph, which, frankly, was a very poor paragraph for it to fall in the middle of. Was that a split infinitive? Oh god, it just gets worse, doesn’t it?

I have written everything I remember about the birth elsewhere, where I can keep it, without making the squeamish squeam and the childfree scream.

But the main things I remember are these things:

1) I will never regret having a homebirth. It was lovely. I’m lucky to live twenty minutes from the nearest hospital in an area that supports and has a lot of homebirths, and I was very fortunate to have a good, relatively easy labour. But it was extremely relaxed, and happy, and two hours after Doozer was born, the house was quiet and we were all tucked up in our bedroom (though this was also a little weird, as detailed below). I am glad to have made that decision.

2) There was a good hour in the middle there, however, where I was not pleased to have chosen a homebirth at all. I believe it is called ‘transition’, and is the point between contractions and the pushing where everything gets a little scary.

Regardless. I was not pleased at the fact I was having a homebirth. I was terrified at how much pain I was in, I was knackered, and I was angry. Angry with myself for deciding to do it, angry with My Beloved for being on board with it, and (particularly unreasonably) angry with my lovely doula for supporting me through it. The only person I wasn’t angry with was the midwife who had just arrived from the hospital, taking over from the community midwife at the end of her day-shift.

I saw her - the arriving hospital midwife - as some kind of shining beacon of medical wonder and the glory of modern science. “Katrina” I remember hissing at her, convinced that if I called her by her first name it would be more likely to catch her attention and sound more authoritative and charming. “Katrina: why are you letting this happen to me? Katrina, please - let’s be reasonable about this. Hospitals are brilliant. Come on, Katrina: Take me away from these fucking hippies.”
By which I meant… I don’t even know who. I’m guessing “anyone who thought this crazy homebirth thing was a good idea” - so that’s, well, myself, mainly.

3) The moment they came to me and said “We’ve been talking, and we’ve decided, you know, perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst idea to maybe arrange for a transfer to the hospital, and epidurals are extremely good if you’re in this much pain, and if things aren’t progressing so much and you’re very tired and…” I probably could have been more gracious than to reply “Oh well NOW you say that! Now it’s too late! NOW the baby’s coming out. I have to push. I HAVE TO PUSH.”

It was not the most dignified and ladylike response. Then again, we were having this conversation while I was sitting on the toilet (it’s not unusual, honest, and please believe me, Doozer was not born there - we would have called him Elvis if he had been) so dignity is clearly something that I wasn’t overly concerned with at the time.

4) At some point before that, I think, someone told me that I should eat something, and brought me, at my request, a tub of peanut butter and a spoon. There was a bowl of fruit in the room we’d set up to give birth in, and I - apparently - picked up a banana, peeled it, and proceeded to stick it straight into the peanut butter and eat it that way (another good argument for calling Doozer Elvis. He loved that combination, they say. Ah well. Too late now). This is not something I have ever eaten before, nor would eat again.
I have no idea how the banana even held up against the peanut butter.
It was crunchy, and everything.
The peanut butter. Not the banana.

5) I will never forget the night after he was born. Given that he was born at 7.21pm, and that everyone else left by about 9 or 10, we were tucked up in bed by our normal time. Sleeping in our normal bed. On our normal sides. And being knackered, at that. All I remember was being woken up every hour or so by little squawks and snuffles by Doozer, sleeping hard in the crib joined to the side of the bed (babies tend to sleep through that first night, too. They come out pretty exhausted from the whole birth thing) and thinking “HOLY CRAP, SOMEONE’S LEFT A BABY IN MY HOUSE! WHERE DID *THAT* COME FR… Oh no, wait, it’s Doozer.”

6) The midwife I had been looking to as some kind of shining medical angel was, I realised while thinking about the whole thing after the birth, slightly too fond of smalltalk than I cared for. I remember trying to make polite chit-chat about her holiday during a particularly painful contraction.
An hour after the birth, when I was lying on the spare room bed, staring at my new son, trying to work out the whole feeding thing, I remember having this conversation:
Midwife: “Did you want to keep the placenta?”
Me: “No.”
Midwife: “Because some people do.”
Me: “No, thanks.”
Midwife: “They have it encapsulated. Boiled down and turned into tablets.”
Me: “Yes. I know. But, well, no, I’m alright, thanks.”
Midwife: “So you don’t want to keep it?”
Me: “No.”
Midwife: “… You sure?”
Me: “Yup. Thanks. But…”
Midwife: (Spots cat sneaking a look into the room, again) “You could feed it to the cats.”
Me: “Sorry?”
Midwife: “Well, as a treat, I mean. It’s very nutritious. You could keep it, and feed it to the cats.”
Me: (Tries to imagine cooking up a part of my own body, chopping it and feeding it to my pets, allowing them to get a taste for not only human flesh, but MY human flesh, then awaking one morning, only to find them sitting by the side of my pillow, licking their lips and looking decidedly un-petlike. It would be the last thing I ever saw.)
“No. Thank you. But no.”

The amount of laundry currently being done in this house has to be seen to be believed. Things hang from every surface, drying as fast as they can in a house chilled by the chilliest winds of the chilliest February I can remember.*

[*This is not saying very much. My current build-up of broken sleeps and short nights and long days mean that I can barely remember what happened half an hour ago, so not being able to remember any other February is hardly surprising. I do not remember what I left this room for ten minutes ago, although I'll probably remember in a bit now I've come back empty handed. Today I managed to pay at one of those self-checkout things at the tiny supermarket at the end of the road, and then walked out without my shopping, only realising two hours later. Still: I remembered the baby, so I'm counting the outing as a success.]

It is not just the baby clothes that are making up the laundry motherlode. They are very small. Baby sized, in fact (and he is quite a small baby, at that), so don’t take much room in the washing machine or the hanging space. What take up more room is the adult sized things that have been covered in baby-matter.

Babies, I have learnt these last few weeks, are prodigious creators of matter, from either end. Doozer’s main business appears to be in the transfer of milk-matter from my breasts to cotton muslin squares, via a short visit to his stomach. Sometimes, however* (*around 479 times a day) he misses the muslin, and hits me. Or his father. And whatever we’re wearing at the time.

Laundry volume, therefore, is quite high. It would be higher, but my standards are currently quite low.
And getting lower with tiredness.

Usually, the biggest splattering of sick comes just before we have to go out somewhere - for an appointment, or social engagement, such as they are. Usually, this will mean I’ll have time to change Doozer, but not both of us.

I now find myself looking at the thing I’m wearing and thinking “Has this got sick on it? How much sick? Oh. Some sick. Is that too much sick, I wonder? I mean, how much sick IS too much sick, really? This can barely be seen. In fact, if I put this cardigan on, it can’t be seen at all. Oh, this cardigan has sick on it as well. But not MUCH sick, right? No, this is barely any sick at all! This is definitely a passable level of sick…”

It is surely only a matter of time before we start wearing clothes printed with a tasteful baby-sick-splatter pattern (there is a market for this. Surely someone is making these already) or just forego clothes altogether.
To be honest it’s more likely to be the first.
Oh who am I kidding: to be honest, it’s more likely to continue exactly as we are now, but I’ll start trying to convince people it’s the first in order to try and persuade them that I’m not a posset-splattered slattern after all.
(Which, of course, I am.)

It has been almost three weeks since I posted. Please forgive my unintentional hiatus, I have been a bit preoccupied. Also, I have been learning to type one handed. This has been going well. I have also mastered the use of a baby sling, meaning that occasionally I can type TWO-handed, and actually employ pleasant things like capital letters and punctuation.

Some things I have learnt in the last three weeks include

1) How to change a nappy. I had never changed a nappy before this point. I have now changed eleventy-billion. I am pretty good at it. Baby poo looks like pesto. It’s going to be a while before I can eat pesto again.

2) How to feed a baby with my very own breasticles. It is harder than I thought. We went to many hours of classes, which, I have realised in retrospect, were very high on nice and well-meaning propaganda about the health benefits and ethical correctness of breastfeeding etc etc (had I not already been convinced that breastfeeding was a good choice, perhaps this would have been helpful, but five hours of being told how brilliant something is isn’t, it turns out, very helpful in *doing* that thing), and very low on practical advice. If it had been said, even once: “It might be hard. It might feel very uncomfortable and you might be miserable, and it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it’s natural to have different feelings about it, but persevering will be worth it.” that first week would have been a lot easier to cope with. It is going ok now, but I still feel like we’re making it up as we go along, Doozer and I.

3) Sleeping in two-hour chunks is not all it’s made out to be. If anyone has ever made it out to be anything other than rubbish. Because it is. Rubbish, I mean. However, it does make other things seem very non-rubbish, by contrast. Like sleeping in three-hour chunks. Suddenly, sleeping in three-hour chunks seems like an enormous treat. I get very excited about a three-hour sleep right now.

4) People are lovely. And very generous. Things have been arriving, since the baby. Boxes of hand-me-down clothes and random useful stuff and toys and things. People are lovely. You, in fact, if you’re reading this - YOU are lovely.

5) You do not need to take a baby to the registry office in order to register a birth. Because, by the magic of modern science, they just believe you when you say you’ve got one, even if you haven’t got him WITH you. Either that, or they just trust you. Whatever. We registered our son. He is now an official person. Let the oppression by The Man commence. Or something.
(Please note, we did note register him as Doozer. Much as I might have argued the case for it)

6) Muslin squares are the greatest invention in the history of the world. Simple white squares used for wiping up baby sick, impromptu baby-sheets, swaddling, catching baby sick, protecting the one corner of your clothing not already covered in baby sick from baby sick (though frankly, what’s the point anymore?)

7) Daytime television is TERRIBLE. But I’m still working out what to do while pinned under a feeding baby and when out of reach of my computer, so I’m watching a LOT of it. I am becoming an expert. I should very much write about that.

8) Babies are alright. Or, in fact, quite good, really. Whatever the case, they are not as terrifying as I previously thought. They’re only about half as terrifying. But then, I’m pretty easily terrified, so that’s not a very accurate measure.

9) I’m not going to be able to write long blog posts for a while. Much as I very much want to. This one’s been sitting here staring at me ever time I open my computer for a couple of weeks now. And I can’t even remember half the stuff that was meant to be in it (and there was a LOT of stuff). So I’m just going to have to do shorter posts for a bit while I get used to this. But I have to write *something*, because I’m going a bit mad otherwise.

10) I am really enjoying this. I am very tired. I am constantly confused by the tiny dictator who has taken over my house, and why he might be shouting in my face this time. But I am very, very happy. We have somehow created a very good baby.

After a long time of testing the baby in closed laboratory conditions in an undisclosed location (or “a uterus”)(or rather “my uterus”), it suddenly came to light that the baby was ready to be released from its ‘alpha’ testing phase. So we launched it.

Doozer was born, at home, at 7.21 on the 11th of January. He weighed, at birth, something around 7lb. Maybe 7lb2ish. We don’t know for sure, because the last bit of Doozer-launching happened a bit too unexpectedly and quickly for them to send the second midwife out. The second midwife, apparently, is the one in charge of ‘bringing the scales’.

This is him about an hour after he was born:

And this is him the day after - by which I mean ‘today’ - with me:

about 18 hours after he was born.

According to both the midwife and the gp, I do not look like someone who gave birth yesterday. I’m not entirely sure what they were expecting: an unwashed panicking harridan dripping blood, but if they were, I at least managed to look, for the duration of those visits, not like that.

This is, I admit, a better picture of me (who you’ve met before) than Doozer (who you haven’t), but it does at least show a little of how proud I am of him right now.

Ah yes. And he hasn’t quite got a name yet. Not that we were expecting him to fly out of my mimsy with a name badge saying “HELLO MY NAME IS …[NAME]… HOW CAN I HELP?” (though that would have been useful), just that we have been sitting and calling him by the remaining names on the shortlist trying to decide what suits him best. Maybe tomorrow.

Also tomorrow I may write down what the labour/birth was like. People often write these things down to be helpful and informative to other people. I just want to remember it. I do not think my story will be particularly helpful or informative. It might be rather more ’sweary and undignified’, but frankly, there’s only so much you can do with the raw material of persuading a fully formed human being to emerge from a place somewhat smaller than itself.

Anyway.
Doozer arrived.

We are, as should be expected, completely and utterly in love with him.

The midwife and the gp did their home visits today. They in turn said that he was a model of perfection and, what’s more, had the most adorable nose ever recorded in medical history.
Or maybe they didn’t say that. Whatever, that’s certainly what I heard them say, even if they didn’t actually say it.
(I’m almost 100% they probably did, though)

I am sitting waiting for my baby to decide he is ready to emerge, singing a little waiting song.
It is mainly a very patient little song, but with an occasional few bars of “OH COME ON, LA LA LA, I’M TOTALLY READY AND BORED OF WAITING NOW, DOO BE DOO BE DOO.” every few verses, just to keep things lively and interesting.

It is completely normal that he hasn’t arrived yet, of course. As I have mentioned, the estimated due date thing is really more of a four week window, and first babies are almost always in the second half of that window, and he’ll come when he’s good and ready and OH COME ON, LA LA LA, I’M TOTALLY READY AND BORED OF WAITING NOW, DOO BE DOO BE DOO.
See?

Mainly, I am tired. Physically tired of being pregnant, and emotionally tired of it too. Tired of talking about being pregnant, and of hearing well-intentioned cautionary tales about pregnancy and birth, and of worrying about whether I am making things difficult for people socially or emotionally, just by being pregnant, and frankly, I just want to hide. Not in a bad way, just in a ‘retreating into a nice warm cave like a polar bear’ way.
Which is, frankly, an entirely normal thing for me in winter anyway, it is just magnified. By about a billion.

When it comes to persuading the baby that this is a perfectly good time to come out, there have been several different theories posited, some about eating, some drinking, some exercise, some alternative therapy related and some, well, ‘other’.

The most intriguing, though are these:

a) THE MOON!
I just got an email from one of the wonderful lovely women in my NCT birthing class, suggesting that lots more people go into labour during a full moon than not. Because of amniotic fluid acting like the tides of the ocean, etc. And, it being a full moon tomorrow, that consequently, we would all suddenly be exploding with baby on the same day.
I mean, it’s a lovely idea, though if THAT powerful, you would imagine labour wards would take these things into account, close the doors and go on holiday to the caribbean for 27 days out of the month.

b) BE PREPARED
Is not, apparently just the boy scout’s marching song, it is also what you have to do in order to persuade a baby to be borned. It was suggested to me that perhaps some kind of psychological block could be behind the non-appearance of baby. Is there, it was suggested, any work left over to do? A room that needed cleaning? A tiny piece of DIY that needed finishing? No… no, I said, no, I didn’t think so. My birthing room is ready, my bag is packed in the slim chance I have to go to hospital after all, everything for Doozer is organised and arranged in the corner of our bedroom.
Did we have a car? Did it need MOTing? Were there outstanding bills? No, no and no.

Was there, came the next question, perhaps someone in my extended family who was due to die soon?
Not that I could think of, I said.
And if there was (in my opinion) and they seemed to be taking their time about it (in my opinion), what, (in their opinion) I should do in order to rectify the problem? To sort out this interesting ‘one in, one out’ policy?

The answer I will keep to myself.
For reasons of legal propriety.

Still, it did make me think.

Perhaps I will go quiet now. Completely quiet.
I’m sure you’re not all checking in daily to see whether I happen to be liveblogging labour or not, but just in case you are, I think I might just turn off the internet for a few days to sleep and prepare. After all, the thing about having a blog, and a twitter account, and a flickr account, and another half-dozen things that need updating means that I do ALWAYS feel like there’s something I should be doing…

So I may just need not to worry about those for a week or so.
So, y’know, don’t be surprised if I’ve gone quiet. Don’t feel the need to ask about whether it’s because I’m in labour, or conjecture on whether Doozer’s arrived or not. When he does, my blog will be one of the first places that it gets announced.
Until then, I may be quiet. Or I may not. Depends how I feel tomorrow, or the day after, or however long this takes.

But until then, I may just go offline and sleep instead.
And prepare. And NOT KILL ANYONE, AT ALL.
Honest, guvnor.

*Signs off, and retreats to a nice warm cave*

My mother brought down some very old schoolbooks containing - well, mainly me trying to write the letter ‘J’ the right way around, but ALSO - some stories and pictures and other early examples of my narrative genius. Or rather, lack, thereof. I posted another example here. I have never been any good at fiction, really.

Or perhaps I have. Perhaps the immensely tragic tale below - possibly my first official piece of published writing - represents the pinnacle of my fiction-writing ability. Which is good, if sad. Because this is good, but sad. SO SAD.

Ahem:

Just in case you can’t see that picture, transcribed:

THE BALLOON PRINCESS
Once there was a princess who loved balloons. She got lots of balloons. One day she had so many that she flew away: but she was a sensible princess. She let the balloons down and then she never had balloons again.

by Joanna Pickard
Class 5

(Class 5 would make me about 6, six and a half)

1) Yes, yes, my full name is Joanna, let’s move on.
2) THIS IS THE SADDEST STORY EVER TOLD. Well I think it is, anyway. Because:
a) It could have had such scope. There was room for such possibility.
b) The princess had all the balloons she could ever have wanted (and she REALLY wanted balloons, she loved them, you know).
c) She could have flown away! Gone to space! floated around the world! And what did she do? She let the balloons down.

It might as well be called ‘Little Girl, Don’t Bother Having Dreams’.

I want to grab the little girl who wrote this and hug her SO HARD. And then give her balloons. Lots of balloons. Enough balloons to fly away.

(It is now two days past my due date and no, since you ask, I have not had a baby yet.)

Doozer was due yesterday. He didn’t come.

This is FINE, obviously. I’m not grumpy.
Or tired.
Or impatient.
Or so bored of hoisting myself off the sofa and up the stairs to the bathroom that I have recently been going to bed hours early, because at least that’s on the same floor at the toilet.
Or listless, or anxious, or overthinky about everything.
It’s not like I’m ANY of those things, or even ALL OF THEM AT ONCE.

Oh no, wait, I am.

I am partly just so excited for it all to start happening, partly wanting just to get to the moment when we get to meet him, and hold him, and partly wanting to get to the - not scary, but certainlyintimidating, like someone saying “At some point in the next couple of weeks, you’re going to have to run a marathon. I’m not going to tell you when, though, I’m just going to walk up to you with a starters pistol, shoot it, and then you have to start running” - labour and birth bit, so we can just DO that, and stop waiting.

Waiting waiting waiting.

I’m very bad at waiting. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before. Really terribly, terribly bad.

The due date came, and went, and I felt a bit flat. As much as I rationally know that a due date is pretty much an arbitrary thing, it’s still the thing that we’ve been talking about, working towards and seeing written on the front of every medical note for the last 8 months, so watching it come and go was somewhat deflating.

Today I went for a session of reflexology, some part of me hoping that maybe, just maybe, she would squeeze my toe and the baby would fly out, like some massively more impressive version of pulling someone’s finger to make them fart. It didn’t work. Or not yet, anyway.

Excellently, yesterday, on my due date, we had agreed to go to the theatre in the evening, believing that if anything was going to drive Doozer out it was the prospect of having to sit through a musical if he didn’t come.
But still, no Doozer.
One day, will will have words about that.

So I am finding things to do. Blogging. I need to do that more, though I’m scared of sounding whiny. I will find other things to write about that are about NOTHING TO DO WITH BABIES AT ALL. That is what I will do tomorrow. Also, tea and cake with the other enormous pregnants of my NCT group. And a film, I think. And some relaxing. I hear that is meant to be what I am doing right now.

And not being very good at it.
And not giving myself a bad time for being very good at it.
And not being very good at not giving myself a hard time for things.
See? I’m keeping myself busy after all.

12 things I want to do in ‘12

1) Have a baby.
This one’s a bit inevitable, I think. I’m two days off my due date.

2) Write more
I always want to write more. I mean, I do little else, practically speaking. But more. I want to do it more. I want to do it effortlessly and productively, words running from my fingers like little letter-filled drips from a leaky tap.

3) Write better
I am pleased with some of the things I’ve done in 2011, of course. But I still feel like I haven’t written the thing I meant to write. I want to write that thing, this year. Even if it’s only a sentence. I feel like I’ll know when I have written it.

4) Get my brain working in non-linear ways and squiggly tangents again
I’m hoping that sleep deprivation will help with this. I’m hoping sleep deprivation will be useful for something, at least.

5) Learn how to make ginger thins.
They’re a very good biscuit.

6) Not move house
If we can help it. If we can get to the end of this year without moving, it will be the longest period I’ve spent in one house for 17 years. So if we manage not to move house, country, city or anything else due to exciting changing-life circumstances, that would be remarkable in itself. But I won’t hold my breath.

7) Take photos. Lots of photos.
And set myself (small, manageable) projects.

8) Get good - or at least passable - at being a person with a baby.
I am also hoping this is inevitable. But you cannot be too sure. As long as Doozer is healthy and happy, then I think that I will - we will - be passable people-with-a-baby. Anything better than that is a) a bonus and b) probably a matter of opinion.

9) Wear the same dress on my birthday this year as I wore on my birthday last year.
We shall see.

10) Win the lottery.
Yes, yes, 10.1) PLAY the lottery.

11) Be better at being in touch with people. And emails. And video calls. And all of that
Same as last year, then. No but this year I will. I WILL.

12) Be nicer. And more patient. And calmer. And happier.
To be fair, this was a last minute substitution. It was GOING to be “Seriously: I need to learn how to make ginger thins”, because let’s face it, they’re a really, really good biscuit. But I thought it sounded trite, so I should do the other stuff instead. OH NO WAIT I JUST THOUGHT OF SOMETHING!

12) Learn how to make a really good homemade ice cream sandwich. Every bit of it from scratch.
And all that ‘nicer/patient/calmer/happier/more forgiving’ stuff as well, obvs. I just tend to think that if I had a good ice cream sandwich in my life, all that other business would follow naturally. Also: ginger thins.

In the last few weeks of 2011, I made a thing, for Doozer’s room. I wasn’t sture what it was going to be when I started, I just started doing small squares of tiny cross stitch, like this:

Which eventually turned into a border, as soon as I could work out how many big whatever it was I was doing should be:

I worked it out, one stitch at a time, and, while doing it, thought about Doozer and what life will be like when he gets here, and what he might grow up to be like. I think that’s why people do these things, traditionally, isn’t it? In order to spend time meditating and thinking about someone, or something? I never realised that before. It is a nice thing to do. Even if you’re making it up as you go along. Maybe even more so then.

After slowly beavering away on it on and off in the evenings, when not working or staring at my laptop trying to be working but feeling all brain-tired instead, it turned into a finished thing. I finished it just before new year. It had turned into an elephant.

And now it is finished. So Doozer can arrive.
You hear that, Doozer?
YOU CAN ARRIVE NOW, YOUR ELEPHANT IS DONE.

Thank you.

I managed one camping trip in 2011. It was a week or so after I discovered I was pregnant. We were in California.

I’d (blimey, how much have I detailed of this already? I can’t remember. I have memory issues at the moment. Apparently the small beautiful parasite still living in my abdomen is somehow eating my brain) I’d found out I was pregnant the day before my birthday. A birthday when I had, no less, arranged to see lots of my favourite San Francisco friends for a meal entirely composed of cocktails and raw fish. And couldn’t tell any of them why I was sitting there looking hungry, sober, sleepy and shellshocked. A few days after I found out, we ran a 12k race. Yes, slowly, but I’m still unbearably smug about it.

And then we went camping. I never want to forget it, that’s the only reason I’m writing it down.

We took the tent and camping gear that we’d left at a friends house when we moved from San Francisco, knowing we were more likely to camp there before anywhere else. I’d booked a campsite on a beach a couple of hours up the coast from the city. Right on the beach, basically. So close you could go to sleep to the sound of the waves and the smell of everybody’s firepit embers. It was practically the most perfect romantic thing I had ever imagined, in theory, and I had been thinking about it for months.

And suddenly, it all felt different. And weird. I was in one of my favourite places in the world, and all I could think about doing was getting home to go to see my GP (I’m not sure why. Because I thought she would say something wise and useful, I think. Which, of course, she didn’t. She said “If you say so” and then sent me off to see the midwives. That’s what they do).

So the whole thing seemed removed from what I expected it to be anyway.
And then it rained. Torrentially.
Torrents of rain. Hard, and constant, and cold and apparently unending, it rained. It started tipping down when we turned off the freeway and into the river valley that leads to the sea. It didn’t stop. The closer we got to the sea, the more it rained.

It poured as we parked the car and sat there, trying to figure out whether to try waiting for a lull in the rain to put the tent up. And we decided we should. And so did. And then, after picking the most sensible tree-shaded corner of the pitch, put the tent up, blew up the air mattress and crawled inside it faster than we’d ever previously managed.

And then we lay there, in grey afternoon light, napping and listening to the Pacific get poured through a sieve onto the tent roof on top of us.

And then feeling it, as it slowly soaked through a vulnerable spot where the top sheet was touching the lining and started pooling at the bottom of the tent.

The nearest town with a shop big enough to speak of was half an hour’s drive away.

Together we went and sullenly ploged around the small shop that seemed to serve as chemist, post office and holiday goods emporium. They had, it turned out, sod all of any use.

It was at this moment that I turned into McGyver. Or, for those not of the right age bracket to remember the reference, to “a person who was going to be able to fix complicated technical problems with only some ripped clothing, a ball of string and some sticky tape”. We bought the only potentially useful things they had: coincidentally, some cheap disposable rain ponchos, a ball of string, and a roll of duct tape.

Together we rigged up some complex canopy, strung from the apex of the tent and six different branches. Theory was, it would catch the rain and divert it away from the tent and safely onto the ground downstream of where we were sleeping. It was not attractive. It was shoddy and looked like it all might collapse at any second.

And, magically, it worked. The rain kept on falling, and the tent stayed dry. All the way through the next day, the rain fell, as we lay in the tent, reading and sleeping and listening to the water hitting the beach that we’d intended to have long romantic walks along.

Our second night there, the rain eased off for a long enough time to make us think that it was going to stop completely (it wasn’t, of course) and decide to have the dinner cooked on the firepit.
It stopped raining, in fact, for exactly long enough to light the fire.
But only just.
We took it in turns to stand over the barbecue, holding an umbrella over the fire and the food. When, eventually the food was ready, we opened the boot of the rental car and had a picnic sitting in the trunk because it was the only place dry enough to eat. To eat food that was a little soggy, that is.

The third day we were there - the day we were leaving - the sun came out. Of course. It looked like this:

And then, mainly because I had to go and catch a flight to another city to do work for a few days, we packed up and left.

And that was my favourite bit of 2011. Or one of them. The one that is currently playing in my head and making me feel better about all the chaos and panic and amazing mess that is to come.
So please excuse my soppiness, and self-indulgence. I just didn’t want 2011 to slip too far away, and head too far into the next bit without remembering this.
There were a lot of good, memorable bits in 2011 for me.
But the wettest camping trip that ever existed is the one I don’t want to forget.