Shark in the Dark

Would it be wrong to buy one of these? (It would be wrong, mainly because it's £89!). Available here.

(Not) remembering my first day at school

I've been reading lots of blogs and tweets and Facebook updates about people's children starting school and the pride and the worry and the changes to routine and it struck me, I don't remember my first day at school. 

I remember things that happened at nursery - song circles and the willow tree in the garden and my mum helping hide chocolate eggs for an Easter Egg Hunt and the accident that led to me being hospitalised for dehydration after refusing to drink with my battered mouth, and the nursery nurse I thought was a witch (because she had a wart on her face not because she was mean) and I remember a few details of my early school days such as where the classroom was and the blue maths workbook with an owl on the front and the teacher's name but as much as I try I just can't summon up the first day. 

Which means it must have either been a complete non event or so traumatic I have buried it. I suspect the former. Which should be somewhat comforting to parents of this month's newbies shouldn't it?

A dress to give birth in - wtf!

I like to look through the catalogues of child related things I get sent and play a game with myself where I look for the most ridiculous purchases.

For a while I thought it was the sock-ons, sold at £4 a pop by Jojo Maman Bebe but I do at least concede that it's hard to keep socks on the feet of your baby and this product would do just that, though I personally am of the school of thought that thinks if your baby wants to pull their socks off they should be allowed to do so.

Yesterday though I received the Great LIttle Trading Company catalogue, full of mostly superfluous but really rather expensive items. Two in particular caught my eye for the ridiculous purchase game. The duvet grippers to stop your child's duvet falling off, and the inflatable bath spout cover. Yes, really.

Still, nothing has yet beat the NCT shop's Birthing and Maternity Dress so that you can feel feminine whilst giving birth. As if giving birth wasn't feminine enough. It's one of the many reasons why I have become ever so anti the NCT.

My baby is a genius!

My baby has now been out longer than she was in and I'm not sure which is more mind-blowing, that she went from nothing to a living human being whilst in my womb or all the things she has done in the nine months since being born. 

These include, but are not limited to: learning to use her hands, smiling with her mouth and her eyes, learning the difference between night and day, recognising her mummy and daddy and other key players in her life, wondering about the nature of objects and touching, licking and smelling them to find out more, eating and showing preferences and dislikes, having a sense of rhythm, working out mirrors (something I'm not sure I understand myself yet), making herself laugh with peepo, making us laugh with peepo, allowing herself to be comforted, comforting me with a stroke if she thinks I'm upset, knowing if she is hungry or thirsty, opening things, closing things, getting our attention with noise, being quiet to avoid attention if she is doing something naughty, making choices about what to play with, playing, concentrating (with an intensity that has led my mum to say the baby has the greatest concentration of any person she knows), understanding the word no, ignoring the word no, forgiving us when we mess things up, recognising whatever it is that makes humans human and responding to them differently to animals, turning pages of books, getting to grips with the idea of animal, vegetable or mineral, working out the difference between solid, liquid and gas, being wary of weird people, sharing, possession (ie not sharing), using language, making a plan, enjoying sensations such as the warmth of the sun, getting cross, bouncing and watching the world go by. 

What a clever clever baby I have. 

My osteopath got me pregnant

I have told this story to so many people that I've decided the easiest thing to do now is blog about it and send the link to anyone who asks, rather than write it out every time. It comes with a health warning though as I don't wish to peddle snake oil, and I'd hate to give any credence to alternative therapies such as homeopathy, reiki, aromatherapy or any other laying on of hands. As Tim Minchin says in his song about 'alternative medicine', if it worked it would just be called 'medicine'. And it may have just been co-incidence and that our time had come, but the usually rational, sceptical me really believes that osteopathy got me pregnant. There, I've said it. May Hippocrates strike me down (only for me too be revived by some water with a memory of some passing lavender but no memory of all the shit and piss that passed through it). 

When we had been trying to conceive for a couple of years, after medical investigations had found no major reason for this and before fertility treatment had commenced, I slipped over on ice and hurt my shoulder. I decided to get it sorted out by an osteopath and rang a practice I had used before for a previous injury. The osteopath I had seen then no longer worked there but another did and I booked in to see him. 

On the day of my appointment I had terrible period pains. I got these every month - the crippling distracting awful pain would last for about four hours and a lesser version would hang around all day. It started just before I left the house but determined to get my shoulder sorted I made a hot water bottle, shoved it in the back of my skirt and got the bus. I may have looked ridiculous but bus passengers in their jim-jams are not an unusual sight round here so a hot water bottle barely raises an eyebrow. 

The osteopath worked on my shoulder then asked about the hot water bottle. I explained and he said he could fix that too. He did something to my back, higher up than the pain, and the pain disappeared instantly. I was so impressed I asked him about fertility. He felt my back again. Of course you're not conceiving, he said, you're all blocked up and your body won't conceive until it is helped to fix itself, or words to that effect. 

My period pain came back a couple of hours later, on one side only. The next week I had another appointment for my shoulder. I told him about the returning period pain and he felt my back, agreed that one side still felt 'blocked', and did something more to my back. I am a sceptic - of course he said one side was blocked, I thought, because I told him the pain had come back on one side, like the guesses of a dodgy psychic. 

I had another period. The pain was minimal - about 90% better. If nothing else comes from the treatment, a fixed shoulder and a 90% better period pain is enough I thought. But encouraged by the amazing improvement in the period pain I went back one more time. The osteopath did something else to my back. I think you'll be ok now, he said. He was right - that month I conceived. 

It may be coincidence. It may be that at over two years we are just one of those couples whose stats combine with people who conceive first try to bring the national average to about a year. But actually, much as I am loathe to sound new agey, much as I promise I don't own a single crystal and am not interested in the colour of my aura, I really think that osteopathy got me pregnant, or as I no doubt annoyingly like to say to my husband, my osteopath* got me up the duff. 

(*You can email me on goodynuffmum at gmail dot com if you want his details)

The shower monologues

I don't shower every morning - what mother of a baby does? (oh, you do - bugger) - but on the days when I do and when the baby is not in the mood to wait for me with her toys in her cot or nap while I do it, she sits in a highchair in our bathroom chewing a rubber duck and watching me. And because we are both happiest when there is a steady stream of chatter, I explain to her what I am doing, what shower gel is, why suds need rinsing, the difference between shampoo and conditioner and that kind of thing. And on the (increasingly rare) occasions when I shave under my arms or defuzz my legs or deal with the bikini line, I try to remember to tell her that these things I am doing are what some mummies do, but they aren't necessary and she should never feel that she has to remove body hair, but that it's okay if she wants to as long as she doesn't feel pressured into doing so, and to come to me for advice before she does it so that she doesn't cut her teenage legs to shreds with a cheap bic razor, and that if underarm hair is good enough for Julia Roberts it should be good enough for everyone else etc etc.

Boy do I tie myself up in feminist knots. Luckily for me children rarely take notice of who their parents were before they existed, so she will probably never take in that I wrote a book on feminism or that The Times, one heady day in 2009, listed me as a feminist icon alongside Nigella Lawson and Michelle Obama (hahahahaha!) and will come to her own conclusions about hair removal, no doubt influenced by whatever the fashions for it are at the time. But while I hope that she makes up her own mind about most things in life, I hold on to the belief that these 'discussions' will help lead her to consider herself a feminist, and that my ramblings in the shower will have some influence, and go in at some level. However on the days she goes downstairs to sit in the same highchair and watch her dad shave I bet she's not subjected to such monologues and I bet he's not tortured by getting the conversation right. But that's because men's beards are not a feminist issue - something I must remember to talk to her about next time we're in the bathroom.

She's perfect, we kept her.

A friend used to tell me I thought too much to which I used to reply "You can't think too much" by which I meant "You CAN'T think too much" rather than "YOU can't think too much."

But it is possible that I have been thinking too much about our current favourite book. By current I mean for the past six months with no signs of falling out of favour - and that's just me, though the baby likes it too. 

It's Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo. In it the narrator, wanting a pet, is sent various animals by the zoo but there is something wrong with every one - the elephant too big, the lion too fierce, the frog too jumpy - and the narrator sends them back until they send the perfect match. 

It's a lovely lovely book. It was a 'being born' present from friends and we read it most days. But sometimes I worry that it's giving the baby the message that if something isn't quite right you just get rid of it. "We love you despite any imperfections," I tell her. "You can be as jumpy, fierce or big as you want and we'll still keep you." She looks at me, quite rightly, as if I'm mad. 

(It really is lovely. And it has flaps. I recommend it as a present for any parent child.)