The Harridan

I know – I know. I know I have a few ‘issues’ regarding my oversharing tendencies and unapologetic storytelling of my childrens’ devilish antics, and I am completely aware that they are quite likely to sue me when they progress past youtube clips of chipmunks and finally one day read my blog, which is actually their blog, only they don’t know it and they didn’t consent. Apologies to my boys, then, although, it must be stated that if they behaved nicely, there would be nothing to talk about. So it is actually their fault, if you think about it.

And so to photos of the new baby. I am in love, and he smells delicious, and his hair is fluffy and his ears are a bit scaly and his little mouth all pouting-fish-like and I CANNOT GET ENOUGH and so I must photograph him at all times, and post it on Instagram, which makes my feed repetitive because all the baby does is sleep. So I have to take different versions of him sleeping, so I don’t forget, and so you can all share in his sleepy loveliness, and so you don’t forget. This addled, hormonal logic makes sense to me, even if I have made some of my less baby-lovin’ my friends block me.

Just for the record, it will all be over soon, I promise. I shall return to photographing the dog, failed cakes, sample sale queue lines and perfect Ottolenghi flat whites just as soon as the baby starts to seem less like an extraordinary gift. Until then, a rehash of the last 7 weeks! You know you want it.

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So that’s it, then. A house full of boys and a dog and their residue and so many discarded socks and slightly-damp trousers and bits of drawings and chewed up pencils and sharp lego bits and piratical maps and scrabble pieces pushed down drains and stolen packets of Haribo and homework and dog hair and acorns and half-read papers and invoices and lip balm and keys, always keys.

THINGS I AM CONCERNED ABOUT:

1. We had a seven-seater Renault for getting kids to school in the rain, and trips to National Trust places and trips to Westfield to buy stuff from COS, but we all got a bit too numerous and large for it, and so Mark sold it and bought this:

Now, that behemoth has to take us to school and to Devon for Christmas, but it is terrifying to park, it smells like a mechanic’s overalls, it rumbles and growls like an army truck, the radio won’t work and the GPS isn’t plug-in-able, there’s no automatic locking system, the driver’s door won’t unlock at all and so you have to reach across from the passenger side with a screaming baby in one arm to flick up the lever, the alarm keeps going off unexpectedly and IT IS TOO BIG TO GET INTO WESTFIELD! No more mid-week shopping for me, then. And the boys sit opposite from each other in the back, a perfect distance from which to kick each other in the shins until we have to pull over and deal with the escalating shrieks. It has made me wail twice, I’m not ashamed to admit.

But it is kind of cool, though, eh?

2. Kate Middleton had a baby six weeks earlier than me, and her stomach is flat and teenage-like. I do not understand. Baffling. Was it all just a fat suit and she surrogated Baby Prince George out in order to retain her waif-like figure? Pffft. Whatevs. Baby Otis is better looking, anyhow.

3. Robin Thicke. Dumb name, dumb misogynist. A bit of a dick all round. But I am conflicted, Dear Reader! Because I really like that terrible, feminist-principle-compromising song! I cannot help singing it, and I turn it up when it comes on the radio! (Which of course, it no longer does, because of the behemoth’s non-radio-status). I am aware of the wrongness of it all, and I won’t play the album much anymore nor dance around the kitchen, imagining my bosoms to be as perky as that lady in the video. (I actually bought the album. I KNOW. I know.)

BENIGN ISSUES:

1. I got the diamonds for my birthday, and they are amazing.

Thanks to Mark, and to Baby Otis. The dazzling sparkle detracts from my under-eyebags and milk-vomity shirts quite nicely.

2. Halloween pumpkin gathering. We did this yesterday:

It was a giant pick-your-own pumpkin extravaganza in Surrey, with only a little bit of blustery rainy weather and poisonous fungi. We have succumbed to Autumn, and it feels good.

3. TV. Obviously, Breaking Bad has come and gone and we have to find something else to fill the aching void. Mark is watching Justified, which is seven kinds of stupid, and I am waiting to unleash the reputed delights of Six Feet Under. Any further suggestions would be very gratefully received.

Righto! It’s now time to make a lasagne and do washing and scold some boys and breastfeed and take stuff to the laundromat and work on my abdominals. Ahem.

So step away if other people’s babies bore you or gross you out. I have to admit to finding other people’s babies a bit oily-smelling and flaky-skinned and veiny with worryingly skinny limbs and generally not that interesting.

Mine, however, tend to be dreamy. Just look at my delicious 9.7lb Otis Willoughby, whose head smells of biscuits and whose thighs are reassuringly chunky with a good amount of downy hair and heartiness. Thank goodness for my efficient placenta.

The details: the labour was five hours long, and it hurt more than I remembered that it would. It was as typically undignified as all labours, with vomits and unladylike deep squatting and ugly grunting towards the end. That whole pushing bit is a little too close to dying, is it not?  Then, I must confess, I was initially a little bit sad that Otis was not a Tabitha, faced as I was with yet another hefty purple-skinned black-haired lusty boy, but then that lovely little face and tiny little murmurs and good smells changed my mind fairly quickly. (PHEW). Having a newborn is simply lovely, and precious, and I would really really like to have one more baby to even out the numbers. Just sayin’.

The breastfeeding is all normal, in that my poor boobs have been torn and scabbed, torn and scabbed and now only one is toe-curlingly sore. The other is just eye-wateringly painful. Ha! And they insist breastfeeding shouldn’t hurt! I say, tell the truth. It hurts, then your poor nipples get fierce and then weeks later it is fine. You stop weeping at each slightly-incorrect latch-on, and you only whisper swearwords under your breath, and you hope that the various lumps you can feel are not some brewing mastitis-malarkey. And you learn to shield your poor nips from the shower spray, and you get good at wrapping yourself up in a towel post-shower in elaborate origami folds so as to ensure no piece of rough towelling gets close to your huge, throbbing formerly-unremarkable bosoms. And because it is your fifth child, no one bothers to look up from their obsessive pimp-my-landrover youtube tutorials while you whimper over in the Breast-Feeding Corner Of Pain. (That’s a whole other blog-post…Ahem.)

The nighttime wakings are tiring but kind of lovely, because you get your little squirmy baby to yourself, and you can play one-handed Words With Friends in real time with your NZ-based mother. And you can catch up on America’s Cup-related news before your husband wakes up and be the first to tell him the worsening news. (OH! OH! That whole sorry saga kills me, just KILLS ME!).

Speaking of husbands, here I pause for some vital advice to all Husbands Of The World:

Please refrain from yawning loudly all day and telling your barely conscious wife that you fancy a sneaky nap after lunch. KEEP THAT TO YOURSELF. Keep that little insidious nugget in your head as a harmless fantasy, and do not act upon it, even if you are convinced that you are coming down with a cold. You will make your sleep-deprived wife with the bleeding boobs and disposable knickers REALLY REALLY MAD. If anyone can have a sneaky nap, IT’S HER!

I hope I have made myself crystal clear.

In Other Non-Baby News:

1. I have finished the first part of Breaking Bad Series Five. I was a bit surprised by Walt’s humanity bypass. And he also became MacGyver. Where can he go from here? (All you with Netflix, don’t tell me.)

2. I am now attempting to love Homeland. Damien Lewis talks without opening his mouth, which is quite awesome, but also distracting. And his wife had an ill-advised mullet until she cut the ‘party bits’ off at the back. Deeply, deeply distracting also.

3. Casper has been in trouble at school three times in the first three weeks of the new school year, culminating in yesterday’s Red Card of Shame. According to my other (perhaps over-dramatic and not very sympathetic) boys, that is one step away from SUSPENSION. What a way to start the new year off, and with a new teacher, too. Sigh.

4. We have been showered with gifts and meals and cake since Otis arrived, and I haven’t had to cook or think about domestic boringness. Thanks for that, kind friends. Its like a birthday in my flat every day, with gifts and visitors and cards and flowers. As it is my actual birthday next week, and I will be turning an ancient and forgettable 36, I am making the most of the gifting and general celebratory atmosphere while I can. Take it where you can get it and all that. I have been mentioning how much I need some diamond studs to replace the one I lost while running around the park, and have been priming the kids to tell their dad how much I need and want them, and putting the auction house website on all our mobile devices, but I fear it is not going to happen. I shall keep you posted.

5. My stomach is doughy, but not as doughy as the last four times, and I am putting that down to that running I did, sooooo long ago. I have a plan to start running again, but not until I can at least walk to Boots without feeling like my nerves have been rubbed raw. I reckon another few weeks off of everything is in order? Including cooking and basic household chores?

Thanks for indulging me with my baby-talk. It’s going to be like this for awhile, at least until the hormones wear off. I will sign off with this little gem: Magic has been neutered, and he has to wear this Edwardian frill for another few days. He just rolls with it, ya know?

x

There may be a tiny bit of moaning in this post, a bit of more-than-usual whinging about the children, mostly due to my terrible advanced pregnant-ness and the hormones and the tiredness and the ligaments and the endless demands for toast and the constant maiming… Just a heads-up. Feel free to read no further and go find a pleasant blog with nice stories to tell and photos of creative ways with origami paper. I would.

My breakdown has slowly unfolded since we returned from Turkey – The Land Of Husband-On-Holiday-&-No-Domestic-Crap-To-Deal-With. It is still school holidays, and the weather has been gorgeous, and mostly I really like the kids, and spending time with them and doing holiday stuff and sleeping in and bumming around, doing touristy things and watching movies and mainlining ice cream. But then,at some unspecified moment, the goodness/badness delicate balance topples over spectacularly and you find yourself weeping by 9am.

Yesterday, in a typical almost-good-day we walked back from the park where there had been no sand-throwing or dramas with strangers or lost children requiring the help of the police over a decent period of three whole hours, and so we walked to Oddonno’s for gelati as a high-five to us all. We got there, the kids order raspberry and mango sorbets, vanilla and salted caramel, we sit at our usual booth overlooking the ice-cream-makers through the big windows, and then Casper starts kicking the other kids’ legs and then they kick back, and soon they are all on the floor, writhing and kicking and yet, skillfully, attempting to finish their ice cream, all at the same time. So we leave immediately, I tell them off in my now-usual-public-shouty-voice and I take them to Marks & Spencers for milk, because we have none, and we need some for the morning, as they do love their cereal. We get as far as the first Fruit On Offer aisle, and soon they have tackled each other to the ground and they are kicking and there is a security guard looming over them and then a checkout lady rushes up and looks around for the mother (who has lost her sunglasses in the violent fall-out and is actually primarily concerned with gathering them up, because they are a very nice Tom Ford ebay number and it is glarey outside) and then I notice the scuffle and the crowd and I pull them apart, like you have to do with locked dogs, grab as many hands as I can and we march out, but not before shouting at them (again, all loud and spittle-fuelled) that they will not get ANY CEREAL IN THE MORNING! At least, it shall be DRY MILKLESS CEREAL! And you will all be going into your room and there will be no TV and no iPad and there will be NO CHOCOLATE AND CHURROS TOMORROW FROM THE SPANISH CAFE BECAUSE YOU HAVE EMBARRASSED ME ONCE AGAIN BY BEHAVING LIKE BRATS!

Fairly Accurate School Holiday Good/Bad Maths Involving Percentages:

65% awful, soul-destroying, sob-making, heart-rate-raising and potentially dangerous owing to the cortisone levels

30% neutral (mostly because of TV)

5% of those moments where everyone is being charming/cute/funny/intelligent and compliant. Like below, a snatched snap of happy kids in the Portolbello Road sunshine eating nutella and strawberry crepes in a “rockin’ your neighbourhood” kind of way. And here, in the garden, when nana and granddad sent balloons and stickers and baby blankets for all, and they were enchanted and distracted from the usual default position of wrestling and crying.

But thats a scarce 5% over 7 weeks. Think on that, fellas, think on that. And there has been one solitary but fairly dramatic incident of dog-and-kid-walking that went wrong, involving the usual supermarket shopping traumas and one lost kid and the others who  fight in front of oncoming buses which resulted in me getting home, running to the bedroom and sobbing and muttering “little bastards!” in a soft, defeated, choked up way. And, incidentally, wondering where my audience was, because what’s the point in meltdowns when you are on your own? But I did tell everyone about the sob-fit, which went some way to making me feel better.

BECAUSE I AM 39 WEEKS PREGNANT! And all this stuff is HARD!

Aaaand this morning, there was fighting, and so I banished one kid to the bedroom, and in his rage he threw stuff around the room and broke my beloved 1940’s British Rail tiny child’s chair which I use everyday to hang out the washing. So, no milk, no clean clothes, more crying from me. Then I came out, accidentally broke a glass, broke down again, told the children through my snot that I can’t wait to be laid up in hospital bleeding with engorged bosoms and stitches with a new nameless baby because I CAN HAVE A REST FROM ALL THIS AWFULNESS! They looked a little worried.

DISCLAIMER: There may be something in the repeated crying that is related to pregnancy hormones and thus an incapacity to deal with things in my usual robust way, and maybe the lack of sleep owing to the useless bladder and huge stomach that suffocates you with its weight and girth, and the new cough that splutters out of my throat as soon as I relax, so I will give you that.

Anyway, I went off to Aveda to drown my sadness and resentment and got my brows blackened and my hair yellowed, all of which causes Mark to wince just a little bit. Here is me, eyebrows hidden in shame, nose looking mighty, but the face is a face of calm, because for three hours no one spoke loudly to me or tried to steal food or tipped anything over or hurt anyone. There was just whale music and massage and magazines. I could live there.

I think there is a hint of detectable sadness at returning home underneath that fluffy composure.

So, I have about a week to go before that new baby squeezes out and life has to rearrange itself around the mewling infant. And school goes back, and Ned returns to nursery a few days a week, and I have to stop avoiding chores like lifting stuff and doing bookwork. And, the stupidest thing of all stupid things, is that I will miss those little buggers terribly, and I will start longing for the next holidays. I is mental, innit.

Here’s some authentic tweaking at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Here are pasteis de nata from the Lisboa Patisserie on Golborne Road – a kind of thick, lemony custard tart from Lisbon. These are extraordinary. We bought 20, ate them fast, then returned to buy another 22.

A brief visit to the British Museum to follow a kid’s trial, before it descended into chasing each other around the Indian wood carvings and a bit of dangerous climbing onto marble light wells. It ended at Pizza Express with some unfortunate fisticuffs.

Enough of my parental woes. My next post shall hopefully be photos of a nice baby with a reasonable name, nothing rhyming or chavvy or comically themed. Until then!

We are back! Back from the south-west of Turkey, from a lovely villa in a little ghost town named Kayakoy, where there were lizards and huge grasshoppers and tortoises and 38 degree heat and so many ways with a vegetable. And water like this:

And ruins like this:

Hour-long treks up to the top of pointy mountains and back again, causing a few scrambly falls and blackened toenails and much, much sweating like this:

A sneaky tortoise in the garden:

and some grunting camels at the foot of Kayakoy, ready to ride for a few lira:

and a perfect villa with a shady, breezy treehouse and a pool which attracted dragonflies, frogs and bats at dusk:

There was one split lip, appalling behaviour at the airports both in and out, some thieving of gemstones, a little bit of exotic-creature de-legging and random crushing, daily violence and one blocked electric toilet on a boat, caused by some experimental throwing of shells down the loo, which caused the boat owners to don latex gloves and go fishing in it. Daily swims, daily ice creams, too much nutella and cocopops and the children’s first foray into fanta and coke, which of course made them mental.

I did a fair bit of this:

And read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Birds Without Wings by Louis de Benieres, May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes and Margaret Atwoods’ The Year of the Flood. And we ate out once a day and I forgot about domestic chores and how rubbish they are.

These guys had a wonderful time, with only a bit of blistering sunburn, water-logged ears, itchy bites, heat rash, some wetting of the villa-beds, sun-cream hysterics and wounds. Casper was very keen to spend the night in the melon patch with this guy, who protects the melons from wild pigs with his stick and his saucepan lid:

His family also harvest sea salt from the rocks, make their own bread daily from the wheat they grow and mill, sell tomatoes, olive oil, figs, peppers, honey from their hives, melons, plums, pickled courgettes and chilli, goats milk, bunches of oregano and thyme from the hillsides. It was all a bit humbling for this incompetent Waitrose snob. They also have a cottage to rent out at their little farm, which is cheap and cute right in the middle of their home industry, and close to the sea. Here’s the link if you fancy it: http://grandpasholidayfarm.blogspot.co.uk.

And here are the melons, and the brilliant bread (good with nutella and dripping butter):

It was awesome. And now we are home, and we have to cheer up, and start getting ready for impending new babies, and get used to walking the dog, and do homework and awful stuff like that. The dog seemed to have a lovely time with our flatsitters, although he did eat our curtains and our Turkish rug, a few shoes, toys, and a baby blanket. And he has learnt to escape through our gate onto the road and into the dog-forbidden-zone of our garden, which has seen me run/waddling after him twice in two days and having to carry him home in my arms, squirming and licking my face while the shock of the run/waddle threatens early labour and much oogling from neighbours.

AND IN OTHER NEWS:

I bought a Clarisonic because India Knight said I must, and Gywneth Paltrow says I must, as does every beauty blogger in the known world, and because through daily use of it, will slough off my mid-30’s skin, only to emerge as beautiful as Grace Kelly in her Hollywood heyday. It must be charged for 24 hours before use, however, and Mark has soundly schooled me in the ways of electronics and battery life and though I want to start using it now, like NOW, so my gorgeousness can emerge a few hours earlier, I know I must heed to the Battery Rules Of Life. So I have had to wait, and it is killing me.

I shall report back.

One more photo of that Turkish water.

Now I must go and pay attention to the small children. It is good(ish) to be home.

Where I Stand On Wee

When I was about 11, I went on a trip with my friend Raechel and her family from Whangarei to Wellington. It took a few days, and on the way there we stayed at their friend’s house in Auckland overnight. The family had two vaguely pimply sons, and Raechel and I stayed in their room. The lasting impression I have of this perfectly nice family was that the boys’ room and their toilet smelled strongly of wee. It has never left me, the memory of that smell, and nor did the strong and righteous conviction that I would

a) never willingly have boys

b) if I did, they would learn not to wee on the floor

c) and they would clean it up if they couldn’t manage it.

Well, after yet another Morning Of Stinky, I wish to put things right.

I want to apologise for those childish smug impressions and commiserate with the mother. I take it all back; the wee thing is all-pervasive and revolting and I am unable to conquer it, as clearly no mother ever really has. Every morning our kid’s room is almost foggy with wee mist, like the Wuthering Heights moors but not peaty, just pissy. There are always strewn pyjama bottoms damp with some suspect urinary residue, transferring itself into the carpet. The dog has totally taken this all to heart and earnestly and persistently goes into their room to add his own weesy patches, in some primitive effort to hide his own scent in the foulness of the boy’s room. Every day I am in there, sniffing pants and feeling crotches, opening windows, wiping down floors and toilet seats, and testing sheets for wiffyness. It is doing my head in.

And So Many No’s

My running – that glorious sweaty thing I did for 18 months where my legs got quite lithe and my face got all red then calmed down for the rest of the day to a nice simulacrum of a recent laser-treatment and where my cheekbones popped out and my arms finally stopped being so fatty at the top bits and where I could sneak out of the house and plug in my earphones and not listen to anything else but the literary cool of Deborah Treisman unpicking short stories from The New Yorker, well, it is all over.

I went out yesterday and I ran for about five minutes with the dog on a lead and my bladder really quickly said NO and my ligaments attempting to support the big stomach said NO and my running top rode up to show a bit of belly like Melanie Blatt’s from All Saints used to which was the sort of thing I liked in 1998 when I was young and a bit clueless and so I gave in and walked around instead, enviously watching the proper runners and their muscles and their red faces and sighing a lot.

So, it is really all over. All in all, the running gig has been a marvellous revelation that I do wish I had started when I was 14, not 34, so I could have avoided my youthful flirtation with bingeing and purging and the wasted self-flaggelation for eating too much dinner/toast/dessert. I could have been awesome, with a really great assortment of trainers. I am really hoping that after this brief hiatus from the joys of running, I can get one of those jogging strollers and I can get back onto the horse (as it were) after that enormous baby exits for good.

The last proper run I did I lost my diamond stud earring somewhere around the perimeters of Hyde Park while fiddling with my earphones. So I have been obsessing over what to do with my remaining stud. I finally decided that I needed to get a new piercing through my upper-ear cartilage, but not tell Mark as he would think it was trashy, and he would be right, but what are you to do with a perfectly good diamond, sitting there in a box, taunting and teasing and making you feel like a Bad Lady Who Is Careless With Her Precious Things? At least if it was stuck into a new hole, I would know where it was. So I went to an ear piercing shop and they showed me the studs to choose from and sat me down and then my pregnantness popped out from between the layers of my coat and she said NO. We cannot pierce you, unless you get a letter from your GP. So I gracefully left and at my next antenatal appointment I asked for a letter and they said NO, because they only write them for flights and there was no reason why I couldn’t get a piercing and just to go to a different place. And so I did, which was a beauty salon near the boy’s school, and they didn’t speak much English, but their eyes screamed NO when my untameable stomach popped out again and then their voices followed that up with an audible NO, just to make it clear.

Then I was a Westfield on Saturday trying to make myself into a devastatingly glamorous hostess for Mark’s birthday party, with new orange nails and a blowdry from the Hersheson Salon and some fake eyelashes for a bit of Essex-spice. But the Hersheson lady said NO (admittedly, because there were no appointments) and the fake eyelash lady said NO because of my increasingly obvious pregnantness. No to PLASTIC EYELASHES? A FEW DROPS OF EYELASH GLUE? A TINY HOLE IN MY EARLOBE? My poor womb has been getting disrespected. It is actually perfectly good at its job and my baby won’t feel a thing. But what can a lady do in the face of pregnant-lady-health-&-safety-paranoid-measures-of-your-local-shops?

So, no running, no piercings, no fake eyelashes for this crazy risk-taker. Ahem.

Anyway, Mark turned 50 on Thursday, and we had a party, and I managed to find some strip eyelashes to stick to mine eyes. I couldn’t find any devastating things to wear, mostly because my bosoms have refused to grow any bigger, and so I look ordinary except for a big fat midsection and the beginnings of swollen feet.

Mark was looking devastating though, hardly any older than he looked on Wednesday, especially since he has taken my advice to keep an eye on his wild-man white lone eyebrows which often stick out alarmingly perpendicular to his face, and to exfoliate and moisturise the dry patches of Old that keep appearing on his visage. He is trying not to become too interested in golf and whiskey or being generally too curmudgeonly, and to try to listen to music other than Garth Brooks and Fleetwood Mac. But it is hard for him.

Here he is, looking a little stunned, and only a bit whiskery, about to drink a flat white and eat too much food at Grangers, on his birthday last week:

And here is a crab, picked up from the shores of Southend-on-Sea, on one of the three sunny days we have had this year:

And here is me, Barnaby, Ned, and a massive amount of regrowth:

And an apology for the false-alarm-whoopsy-daisy fake posting I did earlier. You can blame WordPress.

The flat is dying, and so are its innards. The boiler keeps turning off by itself, so the hot water runs out, and the radiators are working intermittently. The oven broke, so we have to have meals from the stove, which are confounding me and making the children nostalgic for fish fingers. The washing line has pulled out from the wall, so things are not drying, just getting stinky, like a wet dog. And the dog tripped me up a week ago on my early morning waddle/run, onto gravel just outside Kensington Palace, and I have bloody hands and knees and I look a little like a self-harmer.

But LOOK! the sun has been coming out a bit and I can now wear mid-warmth jackets. PHEW. Here is me at a wedding a few weeks ago with the dapper father of the groom:

I mostly include that photo to show the sun, to show my 5 month pregnantness, and also to show my awful shoes which caused much hobbling and sadness and welts. I also have awful nude tights on, the kind that have a sausage-skin sheen to them. The wedding was lovely and all of the women wore long gowns or short cocktail frocks with salon-ed hairdos, enormous shelves of fake eyelashes, spray tans, huge, high shoes, wraps, and the biggest fascinators this side of Race Day. See if you can spot them:

It’s not very hard. And we stayed here:

We are duck confit and braised beef and chocolate mousses with honeycomb icecream, and we were entertained by a video booth, pick and mix sweet table, disposable cameras, lipstick-and-loveheart lolly favours for the laydeez, hidden soprano singers, endless champagne, Marines in uniform, and a big communal breakfast the morning after. It is quite a different scene, this English wedding thing, after many New Zealand weddings where the local community hall is booked and everyone brings a plate to share for the wedding breakfast, and you do your own makeup and quite possibly buy a second-hand dress.

Its been a month of stuff like that, with the children being looked after by kind babysitters and extremely kind friends two weekends in a row. There was a wine-tour through the Denbies estate in Surrey (a cold, cold day with a bonus few hours after the tour where we ransacked the market town  of Dorking looking for antiques in between sheltering from the rain) and a day in Legoland and today, a magnificent thing – all four children were dispatched to school or nursery and we had a few hours off in Acton to drink coffee and eat cake! Here we are, all alone, and excited, sitting in the sun. (What you can’t see in the photo is a big piece of raspberry stuck to my top lip which Mark couldn’t see because he is useless without his old-man glasses and I didn’t notice until we had visited all of his friends and colleagues in the entire street).

So Ned is going to nursery three mornings a week and I must use the time to be sensible and productive and not bid for Tom Ford sunglasses on eBay. Ned kind-of likes going to nursery, but weeps a bit first.

BAD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED

1. On Sunday afternoon, while we were all battling with the bigger kid’s homework, Ned put a football into our microwave oven and set it on fire and once we had put out the flames, the communal alarms went off and made the neighbours stand outside their own flats owing to the noise until the landlord came to turn off the alarms, after about a two-hour wait.

2. The 20-week scan came and went, and the baby seems to have large testicles. So Mark thinks he could be called Jed. I said that that wouldn’t be ok, because it rhymes with Ned. He looked at me as if I was mental, and said that it was no different than having a kid called Noah and a kid called Ned. Because they both start with ‘N’. Its very hard arguing with that man, when he makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

3. The dog has turned from a skittish cute small fluffy puppy into a big thick mental untrained nutter. On Saturday morning after chasing a dog, while I was talking to a handsome man about (ironically) dog-training, Magic ran out of the park and into Bayswater Road, dodging buses and taxis, and tried to find his way home.  Some woman grabbed him and I ran after him, and there was quite the crowd gathered to see who was responsible for the cute, untrained, nearly squashed-on-the-road boofhead canine.

“He’s Mine! He’s Mine! I’m his incompetent owner!” I shouted to the assembled and disapproving crowd, all pregnant and useless-looking. It was deeply shaming.

4. I’ve moved into fat jeans.

GOOD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED

1. We are going to Turkey for two weeks in summer to stay in a villa that has a huge pool, an outdoor barbeque, an outside shower, and is close to the lagoon of Oludeniz and the ghost town of Kayakoy. I can barely contain myself. There will be reading on the loungers and meals out and coffee and browned bellies and hopefully no earache like last time. Also, it would be good if Noah didn’t fall into the sea or the rapids.

2. The sample sales have been kind to me. The Stella McCartney one had knickers for £5 and bras for £10, and lots of terrifyingly well-dressed rich women who were talking about Aspen and New York and weddings in Tuscany. And it took an hour to queue to get in and an hour to queue to pay, but my underthings are so silky and new, it doesn’t matter. And a trip mid-week to Bicester saw me buy a Prada lace collar which, sadly, doesn’t do up. But it could, if only I knew how to sew things. Here’s the queue and a smattering of rich girls in their pilates gear:

3. Barnaby won a short story competition at school, and got given a notebook and a pen in assembly. He can’t remember writing the story, which I find odd, but we’re just going with it.

Casper, on the other hand, needs a haircut:

I’m now off to pick up Ned so we can hang out in the garden and not pick flowers or turn the taps on and off or pick all the figs off the tree. Wish me luck.

Usually, when I think it is time to post something, I think about what we have been doing and try to dredge something interesting from the photos I take on my phone. A recall, a bit of help from the diary, a bit of trying to remember, a bit of an exaggerated retelling of what we get up to. This time though, since my last post, we have been in the middle of having a kid in hospital with meningitis – a new kind of experience that has swallowed up everything, and left us all a bit shrunken and small and deflated and with a bit of the shakes.

In mid-term break last month, Barnaby got sick, and vomited and went to bed for days and days and didn’t eat or drink or move. The doctor said he had had a virus and would get better with rest. He didn’t go back to school after the holidays, but stayed in bed, asking to be lifted from his top bunk when he wanted to move to the couch or go to the loo. He had constant temperatures, he was asleep most of the day, he wouldn’t eat and wasn’t interested in drinking. He got skinny fast. NHS Direct said that as long as he was drinking, he would be ok, but it had to be monitored, and he had to be peeing, or else he would have to go to A&E. So he drank a bit more with encouragement, but still had temperatures and wouldn’t really move. Then one morning on his way shuffling down the hall in his baggy pyjamas and sweat-slicked brow he said that he couldn’t see anything – he was grasping at the walls and his pupils were dilated and he was panicking. We took him up to Paediatric Outpatients and they said he wasn’t going to be going home. He went in straight for a CT scan, and that night, once they found a contained cubicle for him in the paediatric infectious diseases ward, he was given anti-viral and bacterial drugs, an IV for fluids, a lumbar puncture and the tests began.

And he looked like this:

Small and skinny and sweaty and so tired. We stayed with him alternate nights, dispatching the kids to school and various friends, and we waited for him to get better. The doctors were trying very hard to identify what was wrong with him, and came up with viral meningitis and encephalitis, possibly caused by a dormant glandular fever or even (but not likely) TB. By the fifth day, he was ok to go home.

Ned came up with us to collect him after not seeing him for five days. They were very pleased to see each other.

All the other stuff took a backseat. We are tired but very pleased to be back to normal life. Barnaby is back at school and managing well, and he is losing some of that painful thinness. It was horrible and hard and exhausting for everyone. I have a fresh perspective on stuff now, I think. And I am very glad my smart, tough and good kid is well again.

Meanwhile, we are all struggling through a repulsive Spring. Everyone is cold and wan and lined with wintery leathery skin and dead eyes. Even the dog is depressed.

Casper turned 5 today, and we went to Bramley’s indoor play area, which was just as well as it is snowing a ridiculous blizzard outside. Every year we have had Casper’s party in the garden. This year, we had to huddle somewhere inside for sanity’s sake. Here is Casper recovering from an altercation from a Dad who marched up to us all and demanded to have ‘a word’. I said ‘Yes?’ and he told me in a very angry way that his daughter told him that he had punched his kid and that was unacceptable and that if he couldn’t be controlled he shouldn’t be allowed in a public place.

Casper was hiding under the table, looking pretty guilty, and so while I was all outraged because I thought that there were better ways to handle this thing than coming up to me all aggressively and scary, I defensively apologised and asked what else he wanted me to do to remedy the situation. Mark very wisely began placating both the man and me in an impressive project manager stylee. Casper crept out from under the table and cried, very embarrassed and wounded, and then it turned out upon grilling the kids who were there at the time that the man’s kids were being annoying as well and it wasn’t a punch in the face, but a rogue ball in the eye, so I had to sneak off to the toilets to cry a little bit, before muttering lots of offensive swearwords aimed in the man’s direction. It is best not to cross mama bears, especially when they are a little bit unbalanced and four months pregnant. And the bescarfed man went back to his book, which was some uptight tome on the dangers of Vitamin K, and I shot him looks every now and then, and ate four slices of this to calm me down:

That’s Casper’s birthday cake, homemade, and a tiny bit mental. You are looking at a lot of late-Friday-Night obsessive liquorice-cutting and icing-related anxiety. But it was quite awesome. Not awesome enough for me to shake off the mean man though.

When you have a kid like Casper, who is prone to being a pain in the ass, who is impulsive and who gets silly and who playfights and fair thwacks his brothers, who hits first, thinks later, and who is generally a difficult child, what are you to do? Not take him out? Or take him out, and hope for the best, and get involved and apologise when you need to? And what about the man – he gets told some kid hit his kid – should he get steamed up and get at me, or should he tell his kids to keep away from the mean boy? Doesn’t this kind of thing happen in these indoor playgrounds filled with sweaty fiery kids who have been housebound for months? I think my perspective on acts of violence between kids has been a little bit skewed, perhaps. I suppose I think the man and his kids should have sucked it up and stayed away from the confrontation, if only because it’s the poor kid’s 5th birthday today.

Humph. Anyway. Parenting sucks sometimes. On that note, I’ m off to eat a drawbridge.