Money, keys, passport, tooth fairy

France again and time, I’m afraid, to recant any smug or otherwise unwise remark I may have made in the past about travelling with one’s baby. Oh, it’s just fine when they’re young enough to sleep all through the flight. It’s not even too bad when they start staying awake as long as they’re young, feeble and undeveloped enough to remain docile. Now, however that the spud is motile and possessed of no uncertain strength, I think we may have to remain in England for the foreseeable future. Make that London. Hell, make it the apartment.

Just to recap, the flight we take to visit the outlaws in France is under two hours long, we’ve done it three or four times with the spud already and therefore we were little expecting the twisting, arching, kicking drool-storm that accompanied us from point A to point Collapse. The spud is teething. Again. Not to be repetitive or anything but just as one is becoming all frolicsome about the notion of baby teeth and being patronisingly reassuring to those parents just embarking on this dental adventure, along comes another pair of teeth. Because they come in pairs – although I hasten to add that this does not mean that they necessarily come simultaneously, no, just close enough together to make one grind one’s own teeth into a powder in the intervening hurricane. Anyway, so along they come and the whole nightmare starts again, only worse because by now one has lost all the good teethers overboard into the wake of the buggy and the teething gel is on it’s last squeeze and besides which is packed in the hold and one is trapped, knowing one’s little darling is in pain, with nothing useful to offer other than a clean shirt to sick up onto.

So here we are, in France. We’ve been here scant hours and we’re already worn to the bone. The spud has refused anything solid except for a soothing gnaw on various anatomical teethers such as my chin and the frog’s toes and has had a procession of bottles and boobs which will surely equal a nasty nappy in the morning. He has had the gel and the Calpol and is sleeping in what passes for a drugged stupor in baby-land. We have killed half a bottle of wine and are too knackered to approach the other half. This is largely because after the flight, (which he spent standing up and shouting, being restrained in a wet, squirmy mass like a lap-full of eels and then just as we were landing and therefore unable to leave our seats, releasing an enormous putrid poo into the already close atmosphere of the crowded plane), he spent the afternoon alternately ripping the apartment to shreds and screaming that we were trying to poison him. In the end he had both boobs, a bottle, another boob, the Calpol, the gel, half a bottle, the other half, two more boobs (yes, I have five boobs) and then plopped to sleep with a loud fart and a vaguely ‘I’m going to throw up’ sort of ‘eh, eh, eh’ noise.

He hasn’t thrown up. I’m having a bath. Night all.