Spudless and Nappy free Days 4 and 5

With flights and jet-lag I have managed to reach Day 4 of being without my little snuggly potato while actually having been away for 5 days. I've also not slept for the last 25 hours, it seems that having a baby means that one is forever listening out in one's sleep and, if one is trying to sleep on a jet-liner, one is always hearing something whining in the background and that, my friends, is that.

I am in fact home at the moment but as I am supposedly working, spuddy boy is with his minder and I have another 4 hours to go before I see him. I have this one piece of information to impart to any parent who has yet to be parted from their infant for any length of time: one misses them more the closer one is to actually seeing them. I'm sure Einstein would have some theory about temporal dynamics to account for it but I'm stumped. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that the closer one is to seeing them, the longer one has been away QED? Oh just ignore me.

I managed for a day or two to feel quite chirpy about the whole separation business. He was fine, I was fine, the world was fine, everything was fine until the plane crossed into UK airspace today at which point suddenly he was in reach, practically. Nearly there. I may even have flown over him at one point. Who knows? Anyway, it was wretched. Not in a tear-jerking, mawkish slit-my-throat-and-I'll-bleed-marshmallows sort of way but wretched in a stomach-churning 'what if the jet crashes now and I don't get to see him' sort of way. I managed to imagine more disasters befalling the two of us in the final hours of our separation than in all the hours I was away put together.

I can already tell that this feeling will swiftly depart, to be replaced by one of abject stupidity when I realise that all I really wanted was a few days by myself without my clinging appendage and that in fact I have wasted 5 perfectly good days worrying about a little perambulating flesh mountain that firstly didn't miss me at all and secondly is not actually in any danger.

You try telling yourself this however when you've woken up at 4:30am having dreamed that your little child has wandered off and gotten lost and can be heard crying louder and louder for you but you can't find him because it's dark and somehow there's a circus in the driveway and someone has built big walls in the front garden and you forgot to put the lid on your imaginary pool. Yeah fellow parents, you try waking up from that dream not being able to dash in to the nursery to listen for breathing... you try it and see how you manage in your stinking hotel room with nothing but a blog for company. The rest of you, just imagine you can see someone breaking into your new car/nicking your laptop/smashing your Lalique vase/stealing your identity while a troupe of jugglers prevents you from running after them. Just go on.

OK, better now. Due to the magic nature of blogging-whilst-working I am now only 2.5 hours away from seeing my Spud. Must prepare a special glaze for the occasion.

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