Archive for November, 2009

And that’s as close as you’ll get to me singing that cheesey song!

Mission: Attend British Mummy Bloggers meet up at London Zoo.  Leave house at 09:00 to arrive at zoo just after 10:00.  See plenty of animals, have lunch with the girls (and dads and kids), finish up at zoo all before closing at 16:00.

Mission screwup: The boy getting invited to a sleepover the night before.  At the house of someone whose timekeeping is even worse than ours.

Yeah, this plan was never going to be easy to execute. 

I dropped the boy off at his friend’s house late Saturday afternoon.  It was dry.  In the few minutes it took to get a tour of their new place it started raining.  It rained through dinner, and was still raining as I fell asleep.  I’m guessing it didn’t really want to stop because that rain was still falling when I woke up.  Yep, at the crack of dawn, neither me nor 20something mum were impressed with the weather.

The husband and I did make it out of the house at around 09:30 after a fuss about suitable coats (there’s only two that do up around my oversized belly, one of which is the husband’s) and big umbrellas (neither of which we could find).  But hey, at least the rain wasn’t so bad.  And then a block away from our house it stopped.  We could hope.  Or not.  Because it wasn’t to last.  Dragging the boy away was a hassle - that kid has no sense of urgency – but it was done and we eventually arrived at the zoo at 11:00 and with only the bottoms of our trousers wet. 

After convincing the boy that we had no money to spend on car rides or the merry go rounds, we tried to spy the penguins.  For birds that normally reside in the coldest of cold, they were fairly well huddled up in their huts so no luck there. 

Gorillas then.  We passed the vultures heading that way.  “Birds of prey!” the boy shouted, absolutely fascinated with them.  Yeah, anything that might involve a little blood, guts and gore.  I don’t think he was too disappointed when I told him they only ate roadkill.

The gorilla kingdom was great fun, even before we got to see the gorillas.  Smelly elephant poo!  Well thank god you couldn’t smell it.  Weighing yourself in comparison to a gorilla.  The boy is a quarter of a gorilla (or at least with the husband standing on the back of the scales), I’m half a one and the husband is three quarters of one.  Just as we got to the indoor enclosure there was a gorilla passing overhead.  The boy was definitely quite taken with them. 

Then the reptile house seeing as it had started raining again.  We saw lots of lizards who are probably all now questioning their lizardly existence after the husband loudly exclaimed “it’s a gecko!” at every tank.  The boy seemed quite taken with the brightly coloured frogs.  I guess it’s not every day you get to see them in yellow and blue. 

And finally the part I was most looking forward to: the bloggy bit.  Of course the boy felt it appropriate to severely limit my mingling ability by deciding straight off that he wanted to sit down and do some colouring.  Lunch was revealed and I still couldn’t drag him away from that table.  Luckily though, he was soon convinced. 

I will admit, it was a little strange being in a room full of people that you know, but have no idea who they are.  Put 30 US bloggers I follow in front of me and I’d be able to tell you who they were.  However doing the same with 30 UK bloggers didn’t work quite so well.  It seems we’re all rather shy of posting our pictures on the internet or using them for our avatars.  I had more luck with recognising the kids!

“Vic!”  Ok, who’s this talking to me?  Oh I know, I recognise Baby Fifi who she’s holding.  It’s Zooarchaeologist!  So we lunched with her, DaddaCool and CafeBebe. 

After he’d finished stuffing his face (not bad for a boy who didn’t want lunch because he was too busy colouring) the boy was definitely getting bored.  Spotting my chance (and a large gathering of mummy bloggers loitering near the table) I herded him back to the colouring table.  Look, there was a spare chair and next to a boy, not a girl.  But no.  “Mum, I want to play with you.”  Come on!  This is the kid who is never shy around other kids, but put him in a room full of other bloggers’ kids and he suddenly wants to hide from the world.  Not a chance.  I sent him and the husband outside to join DaddaCool and Toddler Boy playing in the rain.

Which of course left me free to speak to the bloggers I’d come to see.  And look, isn’t it funny how once the food’s been eaten the men all disappear.  It was great to get to speak with bloggers I’ve been following and ones I’ve only stumbled across since the list of attendees came out on Friday.  It turned out I’d imagined some to be older than they were, others were thinner than I imagined.  It seems that yes, that lack of pictures I mentioned definitely makes things interesting.   

Of course the boy wasn’t going to let me stand and chat forever and he came to ask if we could go.  He grabbed a goodie bag for him (and what could be better than Star Wars Clone Wars) and one for me (with much more appropriate content) and we ventured outside.

For all of three seconds, because it started raining again.  We sheltered in the aquarium and unsurprisingly, there were quite a few other bloggers in there.  Once we were done the rain had eased off so we managed to see some of the animals that were outdoor.  Some of them were clearly as unimpressed with the weather as we were and were hiding inside.  The boy was quite taken with the tapirs swimming in their little canal.  I was definitely not taken by the smell!

The highlight of the boy’s afternoon was  something I don’t think he’d ever expected to see in the zoo: the spider monkeys.  Because what can be greater than seeing something out of Ben 10 up close?  Apparently not a lot.

We were next to the bugs just in time for the spider talk.  My body was starting to give up by that point and I took one look at the big hairy spider that was out of its tank, one look at the chairs on the other side of the hall and I knew where I was spending the next few minutes!  Of course sitting down really wasn’t one of my smarter ideas because by the time the talk was over my pelvis had decided it would much rather be well on the way to seizing up.  Yeah, we love this pregnancy lark.  The boy was rather fascinated by all the bugs (must be a boy thing cos I really don’t understand) and the husband was thrilled to see the same sort of monkey he used to have as a pet when he was still a small kid. 

By the time we came out of the exhibit it had started raining again.  This time it wasn’t just any rain, it was the torrential downpour style rain that gets you soaked through in under a minute.  We took a quick stop to try and see the penguins again as we were walking past and they didn’t seem bothered by the rain at all.  I guess a bit more water doesn’t matter when you’re going swimming anyway.  Then we decided to head back home, or anywhere dry at least.

Already soaked from walking out to the main road, I thought it might be a better idea not to walk backwards to the bus stop only to have to wait 12 minutes for the next bus, but to walk forwards and wait at the next one we found.  Slight problem there in that we didn’t find a bus stop along the way.  The walk back to Camden didn’t take too long but it was very wet.  So, as we passed a shop selling golf umbrellas we figured it was worth the £2.99 to stop and get one.  The husband was equipped with his huge waterproof coat so I struck gold with the brolly, except that the boy wanted to hold it, and there’s about 60cms of heigh difference between us. 

Costa saved me from crawling under the umbrella towards the tube and we stopped for hot chocolate.  Then the boy decided the packet of crisps he’d eaten wasn’t nearly enough so we had to stop at Burger King.  Yeah, we’re all about the good nutritious food on the weekends.

Getting home after leaving the tube was a tad problematic.  My pelvis had decided that the best part of an hour sitting down meant that it really shouldn’t have to get moving again and the husband took a few steps before realising that his knees had come to the same conclusion.  The only one of us that wasn’t hobbling round like an old biddy was the boy!  And then getting back out into the rain was a torture; it was colder and wetter than before and those wet clothes that had just started to warm up (cos they were never going to dry out on the tube) ended up feeling even more horrible than before.  The first thing we did when we got through the door was create a pile of soggy clothes on the floor. 

Despite the rain we had a fabulous time.  Many thanks are given out to Susanna and the event sponsors Super Savvy Me for their hard work.  And seriously girls (and guys), if you’re a British mummy (or daddy) blogger, go and join the group – you could be joining us next time.

There’s less than a month to go and now all the American types have gotten thanksgiving out of the way we can all start to look forward to that next important event.

You got it!  Christmas.

Now normally I’d be protesting that I didn’t want to know until the week of, but this year I’m feeling rather smug.  I’ve done virtually all of my preparation already.

I decided that this year I needed to be organised and have everything ready as soon as possible.  Although I don’t hit week 37 (and full term according to the second due date) until 27 December, it wouldn’t do to push Christmas aside only to find myself in labour and yelling instructions to the husband as to what and where to buy all the presents.  There’s a reason his own family don’t get presents you know.  So I made full use of all the supermarkets had to offer and got that shopping done quick. 

Sure, I haven’t bought anything for the husband yet, but he doesn’t know what he wants anyway.  We have a list of things to get for the boy but Amazon will do that job nicely and to be honest, he really won’t be that excited with what we’re getting him.  Not when the rest of the family will shower him with the good and expensive gifts.  I’m a cruel and evil mother; I’ll be buying him books to help him learn to read. 

I’ve still got to write our cards out (the list is incredibly small though – so many people get their Christmas greetings through Facebook now)  but that should take up half an evening in front of the telly.  And I’ve got to wrap the presents, but even I could manage to do that between contractions. 

And really the rest is easy.  We’re decamping to the mother’s for the whole of Christmas so once again we can avoid the nightmare of cooking and cleaning.  Best of all, I’m hoping that my enlarged state means that I can avoid any pretense at post-lunch washing up.  After all, you wouldn’t want to make a heavily pregnant woman stand for that long.  And trust me, in my family there’s always a lot of washing up afterwards. 

But you notice there’s one thing I’ve not mentioned: the decorations.  You see this year we decided to go minimalist on the decorations.  It would be just my luck to put off pulling the things down until the last possible moment and then find myself rushing around between contractions on the twelfth day of Christmas in a panic trying to clear up the mess.  So we said tree.  We’ve got a small house anyway so there’s not a lot to decorate.  (Not that that stopped us from getting a 6 foot fir in our first tiny flat, but that’s a different story entirely.)

A few years back the mother bought us a fibre optic tree.  A cute little 3 footer because we didn’t have space for anything remotely resembling a proper size.  It lasted that Christmas but when we brought it out of the loft last year those pretty little sparkling lights would turn on.  The husband took a brief look at the wiring but in the end we packed it off with instructions to the father to take a look.  Needless to say he never got around to it (because lets face it, it would be easier just to buy a new tree) so last year’s tree looked like a green mass of plastic fir.  And not a very good one at that. 

Fast forward to this year and that fibreoptic pack is still sitting in the utility room at the parents’ house, still unchecked and I’m thinking that it might just be time to buy a new tree.  I’ve looked around, found a few trees I like and had the boy’s approval on them all.  Except there’s one very big problem:

The husband is too much of a tight wad to let me buy one.

He’s got no problem spending more than that on a takeaway dinner, but not on a Christmas tree.  Apparently it’s not worth it if we’re not spending Christmas day at home, there’s no need to decorate the house for Christmas.  He’s one step away from turning into his mother (heaven forbid!) who won’t even celebrate Christmas at all (except the part where she gets to spend absurd sums on grandchildren who don’t appreciate the value of the money she’s spending on them).

So I’m going to tell the mother what a miser he’s being.  And hopefully she’ll buy me my tree.

The end is in sight.  I can reach for it, count down in weeks instead of months without the number (and the time it represents) scaring me.  But before I get there, I might just go out of my mind first. 

You see I’m bored of talking about my pregnancy.  It’s like those first few days after telling people, when you tired of the same old spiel: this is my due date, no we don’t know what it is yet (I’m 12 weeks, not 20!), yes we’re excited and if you make me tell this story one more time I will scream.  In the end, I gave up telling people.  They’d hear along the grapevine (if they’d not already seen it on Facebook) and at least I might be a little more refreshed when I had to face those same questions again.

But now I can’t hide behind people’s lack of knowledge.  The bump announces my arrival and there’s no avoiding the fact that I’m hideously pregnant.  The questions have changed but the repetition’s remained the same.  It’s not so bad when you stay in the same place all the time.  People know that you’re having a boy, that it’s due in January, that the boy is excited to be a big brother.  But I don’t work in the same place all the time and so I keep getting asked those same questions over and over again.  I’ve returned to one of the corporate departments, the same one the Tyrant works in, the same one I visited in August and September.  The girls here know the answers to those questions; they’ve asked them twice before.  But still, it seems that I have to answer them again.  And again.  And again.

Now seeing as I have to endure these crazy questions, I thought I’d share some with you.  Maybe one of us can get a laugh from them.

‘How’s the baby?’  Alive.  Kicking.  To be honest, I don’t know.  The placenta sustains the baby, it’s not as if it gives me a direct line to his every thought.  A medical professional checks the bump over every few weeks, can find the heartbeat and measure to check he’s roughly the right side but they can’t ask the baby that question either.  You’ll just have to wait until I pop to find out the answer to that one.

‘You’re getting big, aren’t you?’  Or the other variation, at five months, was ‘oh my god you’re huge, you’re not going to be able to fit through the door soon.’  Thank you.  I know I’m getting bigger (or at least I can happily say that the bump is because I’ve put on very little in the way of weight myself).  That’s what pregnant women do, grow bigger, because they’re growing a human being in their belly, a human being that’s going to pop out at a weight in excess of 6lbs.  Then there’s ‘Are you sure you’re you’re not having twins?’  Yes, very sure.  Five scans have shown only one baby, the midwives and doctors have only ever found one heartbeat and my bump measures perfectly fine for a bump with one baby in it.  It’s not twins.

‘When are you going on maternity leave?’  The exact same date I told you the last two times.  Just before Christmas.  It’s not like Easter, the date doesn’t change each year.  And you asking all the time doesn’t make it happen any sooner.  And no, while we’re on the subject, I’m not leaving it a bit too late.  I’ve timed it perfectly to avoid going out of my mind with boredom before the boy breaks up on Christmas holidays and if the kid doesn’t pop out before the boy goes back to school, I don’t know what I’ll do to stop myself going crazy whilst I wait.  It’s a bit like being asked ‘when are you due?’ multiple times by the same person.  The same date as the last six times you asked.

‘Do you know what you’re having?’  A baby?  A puppy?  The creature from the black lagoon?  Yes I do know, it’s a boy.  The same as the last time you asked.  These things don’t often change.

I just hope I don’t go past my due date because that snark, I might just let it out by then.