Menagerie a trois

This is my 100th post. Seeing as this blog is 15 months old, that’s not brilliant. Many of the bloggers I follow post every day or nearly every day and I am in a sort of wonder about this. Apart from the fact that some days all I could say would be a cross between ‘Ugh’ and ‘Wha?’, I think, as reflected by the fact that the only things I have to post about are the baby and the cat, that I just don’t have that interesting a life.

So, on that note the arrival of Maya the dog into our delicate household balance seems just as worthy of blurting out as anything new the spud may have done this week, such as, for example, working out how to climb into our bed from the floor using only his head for a safety net.

Maya is a lovely old grey muzzle with incipient arthritis who will attack any cat unfortunate enough to cross her path. It’s likely that she just wants to see what they’re about, unluckily this involves a certain amount of dog jaw / cat neck interaction which we’re keen to avoid. Sammy is a lovely, equally grey cat who is profoundly deaf and who would have to use his sense of smell to trap her sneaking up on him, if he still has one.

To put this in perspective, Sammy is 16 and Maya is older by as much as 2 years. They suffer cumulatively from arthritis, hip displasia, a heart murmur, ear fungus, deafness, incontinence, tumours, skin tags, vomiting and a persistent catnip habit. You would think that a tortoise could stop a fight between them however they are remarkably light on their claws and keen to have one last try for the title.

They've had one minimal confrontation and the ensuing bout of growling, hissing, back arching, leash lunging and tooth-baring mayhem had the Spud straining out of his buggy with much the same sense of glee which sees the frog straining out of his sofa whenever there's an F1 pile-up. Neither of them actually want blood, it's just the thought that counts.

The spud can't tell the difference between himself, the cat, the dog and his parents as yet beyond the fact that I doubt he will dive into Maya's chest and shake his head vigourously between her boobs the way he did to me at 'Sure Start' this morning. As far as he's concerned, we're all 'not spud' and equally open to abuse or adoration. He follows Maya around the flat literally squealing with delight and if he could keep up, he'd follow Sammy around in the same way. This means that should there ever be an actual confrontation involving 8 legs the spud would be right in the middle of it (10 legs then) and much as he can win in a battle between his ever-sharp nails and my bingo-wings, I would worry about his involvement in the war of the zimmer fur.

Thus, Maya and Sammy are being firmly kept apart and managing the feeding, sleeping and toilet arrangements for the three of them is giving the frog and I our own grey hairs.

Baby breath

Yesterday, the spud came back from the child-minder smelling... well... much more grown up than normal. I spent ages trying to work out what it was. BO? Someone’s perfume? Further advancement in the state of his poo? Nope, it turns out that the spud has garlic breath. Guess I went a little overboard with his pasta sauce...

It's been a busy couple of weeks and getting away from my little angel is proving to be quite an issue. This is largely due to having been under the weather recently (well, it's been raining a lot...) and er... um... feeling a bit Motherly all of a sudden, so I've been letting Charlie sleep in the bed with us more than is strictly necessary.

The truth is that I go to bed every night nice and toasty beside the frog but wake up most mornings a tad chilly next to the spud and with no memory at all as to how he got there. This poses a problem as it appears I am sneaking him in beneath my own radar, meaning that stopping myself is virtually impossible without a crack team of stealth bombers. The worst thing is that not only am I chilly due to Charlie having my share of the covers, I also have back-ache due to sleeping twisted so that my boobs are within snacking distance of his mouth - after all, do you really want to have to get out of bed and crawl to the refrigerator when you're that age? Besides, it's obvious that part of me is happy to be woken up by the sharp tug of tooth enamel. Why I am doing this to myself, I have no idea. Maybe I hated myself in a past life and this is my revenge.

It’s lovely (it must be... you'll have to ask my other self for more details), but let’s face it, it’s not good. He’s getting the idea that all he has to do is… well, whatever it is he does at 3am to get me out of bed without actually waking me up (I suspect Derren Brown is involved)… and I come running to dutifully implant him in the middle of our bed, whipping out my boobs in the process. And he’s right. So far. The main problem is that he is suddenly much more attached to us than he was a few weeks ago and he cannot be left alone for a minute without his entire world falling to pieces.

Unless, of course, there is something contraband in his general vicinity, like the cat's bowl, an electric cord, glassware or some vital piece of paper-based information which will later turn up as that soggy thing you tread on and go 'ugh!'

It's clear that all he wants is attention but it's less clear how to create a balance between him amusing himself, him being lonely and me going mad - although given the state of his breath, I'm surely most of the way there by now. Perhaps time to give up the midnight boobs - even they smelled of garlic this morning.

I'm sure this post was going somewhere but it's taken so many days to get this far that I think I should just stop now.

Things that go beep in the night

eBay is a wonderful thing, isn't it? It takes the sting out of the fact that the spud outgrew his lovely Gap trousers 4 months ahead of schedule by allowing me to sell them on to parents of non-Spud babies for whom the size '6-12 months' is not a total fantasy. We have purchased a lot of things from eBay. We would have purchased the Spud from eBay if we could have except I was too busy trading in my last motorbike for him down the local garage.

We sold on his small cloth nappies and purchased medium ones, we bought the door bouncer, a baby bean bag, clothes, a restraining device safety strap for the high-chair, replacement parts for the breast pump (too much information?)... oh, and toys. Toys toys toys.

We laboured, before the labour, under the impression that we would give our little blob the best of the world that raised us as well as the best of modern life. This meant things like: cooking up all sorts of organic goodness (which he is now sick unto death of); bedtime stories (which he unfailingly tries to eat); exposure to wonderful music (most of which makes him cry); no Television (except, obviously, CBeebies so I can cram his open mouth while Makka Pakka fondles his rocks) and, naturally, wooden toys.

Hah! Wooden toys! Hahahahahahah!!!!!

Well it all started promisingly. We were given a little wooden rattle with a bell in it which swiftly became Favourite Toy Number One. Excellent. I then proceeded to buy the lovely 'Squish' toy on eBay which became Favourite Toy Number Two. Fantastic. We then had a visit from friends who bought over a Demon Plastic Noise Box which, unfortunately, became Favourite Toy Number Three and the moment when everything went terribly, terribly downhill. Bollocks. First the wooden toys lost appeal and then, worse, the DPNB could only hold his imagination for a few moments before he tipped it over, chewed on the battery case and crawled over to disembowel our CDs. Clearly, we needed harder stuff.

One day, after a morning spent rescuing our music, putting the batteries back into our remote contols and re-constructing 'Time Out' page by page we were struggling to entertain him in the car when The Frog bought us screaming to a halt in front of a toy shop and in desperation purchased the V-tech baby laptop, here-to-fore to be referred to as The Most Favourite Toy Ever In The Whole Wide World. This bought us moments, nay HOURS of peace and quiet. Or rather, hours of peace and nail-chewingly relentless beeping noises and barely recognisable jazzy, electronic renditions of old nursery rhymes. And thus began a nasty noisy-plastic-toy abuse problem. Plastic toys. That say things. Just kill me.

What, I may ask, WAS I THINKING???? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful life! Oh. My. God. These things, you know, they trick you into thinking that they've been turned off and then, just as a tired Spud is turning turtle and giving me that cute sleepy-baby-face one of them will go off and he lurches awake with a nipple-tearing jerk. 'Where's the Monkey?' 'Try MEEEEEE'. 'One, Two, Wheeeeee!' 'Boodly beedly bumbly boo boo be do'. It's like the House of The Living LED in here. And they breed. Once you see the effect on your offspring you HAVE TO buy more. And more!! They're so cheap on eBay!!!! Wooden toys? Pah!! I dutifully put the Spud in front of his wooden peg hammer board and just as he's getting interested in having a bash off goes another one 'boodlybeedlybee' and I think it's 'Old Macdonald ' but I really can't tell and he's off, pressing buttons and grasping at the lights.

The worst thing is that there is so much choice in this world of toys that go 'boo' that after three minutes, the Spud has information overload and has to leave the room. And all his toys, wooden or otherwise. In fact, he spent longer playing with a metal bowl full of water in the garden this weekend than he did with all his hell-toys combined.

Tomorrow, I throw them all in the cupboard and start cutting up a giant cardboard box. I bet we'll get days of fun out of that, provided I remember to soak them all in water to shut them up first.

Slummy Mummy

I admit, I am not the most glamorous thing to have ever graced the streets of London (or any other city for that matter), but I have had my moments, back before most of me headed south. I am, however, normally presentable. The last time I checked I owned a hairbrush, a case of reasonably pricey make-up and a few decent (and indecent) little dresses. I'm not being unrealistic here when I say that when I'm out in public I don't expect to attract much attention but when I do, I labour under the impression that it's normally of a reasonably positive variety. 'She looks like a nice person'. 'I like her shoes', 'Oh look, a mummy'. Worst case scenario here is that nobody notices me at all and they're just thinking 'Oh God, another baby'.

So. Out I went on Monday to pick the spud up from his child-minder. I'd been working inside all day (in my new cell office in the cellar) and since that morning I'd had to rush into the pit office right after changing a poopy nappy to make a conference call, worked straight through and then cut a telephone call short to dash off to meet him, I was pretty much the way God made me that morning. But with a pair of tracky bottoms on.

And lo it was sunny. And I smiled. And, as I was walking, I passed two gay young ladies dressed for summer prancing and dancing and showing off. And I smiled at them. And they laughed... AT me!! The little c...critters. In fact they didn't just laugh, firstly they did that thing where they looked me over, smirked at each other and then they laughed, as they danced away with their skinny legs and their cotton dresses and their poncy little dog.

I looked myself up and down. I was wearing a pair of pink suede winter boots (because I was late, they fell out of the cupboard when I opened it and they don't require laces or zips), grey tracksuit bottoms, a black t-shirt from the day before with puree on one shoulder, baby sick on the other and grey cat hairs all over it and I was carrying a woven shawl (for the spud's legs because it was cold). I looked like something winter had yakked up after an all-nighter with the abominable snowman.

Immediately I was depressed and only the sight of the spud grinning up at me all the way home made me feel good again.

The bad-mother part is that the spud, due to my stellar parenting skills, has had a runny tum for several days. This is because I introduced him to unsweetened, organic fruit juices. Which he loves. Which you dilute 10-1 with water apparently for babies his age. That, my dears is 10 parts WATER to one part JUICE. Not the other way around. Poor little bear. He's pooping out pearl barley that was in a stew I fed him two weeks ago. Organic pineapple juice - reaching the places other juices fear to go.

Anyway, so there we were, walking down the street, me in my gay apparel and the spud with poo leaking out of HIS tracky bottoms (because he's outgrown all his proper trousers and that's all that will fit him at the moment) and I felt as though someone should just issue us an ASBO and have done with it.

The worst part is that today we went to visit some neighbours who have been threatening to invite us around to meet Charlie since the day he was born and I showed up in the same t-shirt. The implication is clear. I have ceased to exist except as a mother. My best hope is to remain invisible, or at least to do enough to perk myself up so that my son doesn't cringe with embarrassment once he's old enough to notice.

Pass me those chocolate digestives... and wipe that look off your face while you're at it.

Lazy Mum...

I am writing a new post however in the meantime, here's the spud doing his latest dance...

Pouring rain

It turns out that moorhens have freakishly long legs. I'm not sure if it was just the rain or that the rain also drove the people out of the park; but whatever it was, the waterbirds were out of the ponds and swarming the park yesterday.

We have a lot of water birds in the park behind our house. As well as the usual ducks and Canada geese we have some smart brown tufted ducks, dozens of coots and moorhens, the odd heron and the other day a rogue cormorant diving in the big pond with it's dinosaur face like something out of the Plecioscene era. I'm used to the moorhens lurking in the reeds with their little red beaks but have never seen one walking around and there they were, the moorhens, bobbling about on their stilty legs looking like the aliens had landed. They had young, as well which looked even stranger, puffs of grey-black fuzz on top of lollipop sticks.

I'm not sure if it was the rain that rained all night outside his window or that it was a bank holiday and all sensible Londoners were either out of town or snuggled in bed for the day but the Spud had slept 11 hours straight that night for only the second time ever. He refused naps all day however and by 3pm was red-eyed with sleep deprivation.

I thought that bundling him up in a blanket and his pushchair and taking him for a walk in the rain would help. The rhodedendrons have all come out and I don't remember them being so many or so colourful. There is cow parsley up in the wooded areas and flag irises around the ponds. And ducklings. And goslings.

I tried to interest the Spud in these things and for a moment his eyes lit up at the ducks however the rain distracted him and I realised shortly afterwards that I was making 'quack quack' sounds and doing the baby-sign for 'duck' for my own benefit as he was busy trying to grab rain drops from the inside of his plastic cover. And I was wearing birkenstocks and no rain coat. I plead motherhood.

We weren't quite alone. There were joggers, two of them, clearly insane and in matching red tops running with a grim look of satisfaction on their faces. They were followed shortly aftwards by a third even more insane person with a big f-off grin on his face and dangerously short shorts. There were two over-grown boys on those wretched mini-motorbikes cutting a swathe through the puddles, wearing plastic bin bags. There were dog-walkers in various anoraks and rain-capes and exuberant dogs headed for the puddles and one, solitary smoker in her mac standing under a tree watching the birds. There were some small birds with white fronts paddling around and I asked her if she knew what they were but she didn't. I wondered why she was there, standing with her cigarette. Turned out that the small birds were baby coots, blowing with the wind.

The tufted ducks have at least five chicks. I would swear there were six but they were so busy turning tail and diving under the water with a fluffy 'plop' that it was impossible to count. But there are six, I'm certain.

The motorbikes screamed past again, surprised to see anyone out in the rain. I waved them away from the moorhen chicks who stuttered and stilted their way back to their wobbling parents. I checked the push-chair and the Spud was asleep. I couldn't feel my fingers so I plashed my way home to a nice cup of tea and half an hour of baby-free time.

Sand testing: all clear

Just an update here and a big thank you to everyone who has wished us well over the past weeks.

The day I posted the last post, we had a slightly sandy nappy which I thought was just the advance guard however as he is now passing seeds from the bread he had several days later, either he's got serious retention issues or all the sand went through already! So for anyone considering feeding their child sand, go right ahead.

The croup is over and he's now sleeping in his own bed again - all the way through last night which is brilliant.

He's asleep now and I am avoiding the house-cleaning. Now that he's crawling everywhere and is enthusiastically digging into all sorts of corners and places the light normally never sees (I am constantly amazed by the places his fingers can get and the things he is interested in moving) I realise that I must turn from being a '2' on the 'Slattern to Super-Mum' scale up to at least an '8'. So far, these are the things I have had to remove from his mouth in the past three days and which clearly should have been vacuumed, polished or tidied away:

- Carpet Lint
- The mulched-up corner of a paper flyer that fell out of a magazine
- A little black dry thing that could once have been part of a banana skin
- More carpet Lint
- Part of a mulched-up magazine page
- Cat food
- Kleenex
- A pen lid
- A packet of silica gel he dug out of a camera case.

Where he found them? Who knows. Under the armchair? Behind the kitchen bin? Why does he think they are edible? Because they're bite-sized? Who knows. Either way, today the entire place gets sucked clean of anything remotely confusing for a hungry baby. A quick note lest you think I am entirely careless, the packet of silica gel was half empty and I did put in a call to poison control. Their diagnosis was 'relax' (You try it...). We found most of the contents on the floor later and whatever he ate must also have passed into his nappy by now... as my Dad pointed out, he ate a load of silica in the sand a few days back so why worry?

Everyone told us we were going to have to 'put things up'. 'Oh, now it's time to Put Things Up'. 'Everything's Got To Go Up now' they say. We were thinking that we'd try to avoid this but it's clear that at least for a while, some things have to go out of reach. Particularly if they are silver and have buttons on them like, for example, telephones and remote contols. Given the array of remote controls in this house (I think there are six in the living room alone) and the number of cordless digital and mobile phones running rampant in every room, this is like the Spud being sent on a technical version of an Easter Egg hunt every day and every day finds him standing taller and reaching farther into the recesses of shelves and tables where little clusters of digital flotsam are huddled away from drool and prying hands.

I thought it would be simple to buy toy versions of all these things and it is, but only in primary coloured plastic which is no use to us at all as Charlie knows immediately that they Don't Do Anything and are not out-of-bounds. So, I am shortly going to go to a pound shop and buy several of those cheap 'all in one' remote controls and scatter them temptingly around the house without any batteries in them for him to play with. It's the only solution.

The Sands of Time

We have been to the beach. I now understand the final implication of having had a baby which is this: that I will Never Be Able To Relax On The Beach Again. This is a calamity of monstrous proportions given that I have spent a large percentage of the time I have been on beaches lying around doing absolutely nothing. And liking it.

Now. I am not completely naive. I realised that I would need to be more alert while near the sea with the spud however I suppose I had blissful visions of him digging curiously in the sand while I kept one eye on him and one eye on the latest 3-for-1 deal from the airport bookshop. The trouble comes in the bit before this vision of litoral loveliness, the bit where you divest your infant of his clothes and spread him in sun lotion before putting him on his roomy blanket, only to watch him slowly but steadily acrete sand. Within three minutes he looked like one of those inside-out maki rolls at a sushi bar which are covered in sesame seeds.

This didn't seem to bother him however. No, because sand has yet to register on the list of Things Which Are Not Good To Eat. In fact, sand is apparently Very Tasty because the Spud spent ages picking up handfuls of it and cramming them into his mouth. Two minutes after picking him up, dusting the sand from his face, force-feeding him water and putting him back on the blanket I found myself repeating the performance exactly only with a MUCH more pissed-off baby who didn't want a drink and who wasn't going to stay on the blanket ever again.

I did at that point what any respectable married Mum would do and handed him over to his father. Dads being what they are (an aside here: I took Charlie to the swings on my way home from the child-minder one day at 6:30, an hour when most children are at home being fed their din-dins. There were half a dozen other parent-children groups in the play park and every single parent was a father. I immediately felt irresponsible and went home) anyway, Dads being what they are, ie, all cute and manly and eager to introduce their Very Small Babies to all the things in life that they enjoy such as chocolate cake, jazz music and cold sea-water, the Frog decided that a great thing to do with his eight-and-a-half month old son would be to take him down to the freezing cold sea to dip his feet in.

The Spud wanted nothing to do with it. One look at those foamy waves and he went into reverse complete with those little 'meep meep' backing-up noises. The Frog tried manfully and unsuccessflly to get him to put his tootsies down on the wet sand, and after much larking about decided to put down the entire child. This, surprisingly, was when I decided they were doing OK and went back to my book in hopes of getting a full page down me before they returned, which they did half a page later, The Spud looking Extremely Satisfied with a face full of wet sand and sandy hands to match. "I think he was eating it" said the Frog, unnecessarily.

While I am certain that a nappy full of wet sandy poo is not going to be very pleasant, the point is not, as I am sure you are aware, that he may suffer any discomfort around the hind regions as a result of this exercise in healthy eating but whether or not anyone else will notice.

None the less, he seems fit and healthy now, happy and hungry and back to normal. Now all we have to do is wait, impatiently, for time to pass the sand.

I'm hoping prunes will help.

Holy something...

Here we are, one day post-christening, licking our wounds in France. I would post a picture of the happy event except for the fact that firstly I didn't bring the computer connector for the camera and secondly, I don't think I have a decent one as nobody would stay still long enough for me to take any bloody pictures.

This is due to having dragged family and godparents from across France, the UK and Canada who then largely had to rush off to catch planes and trains because christenings are not important enough to lose a day of holiday over. The straggling remnants were largely deaf, French-speaking or both and so getting them to stand in something resembling a line around the Spud proved nearly impossible. Besides that, due to a naming ceremony we are having for him later in the year, the nice linen trouser suit I made for him had to be a couple of sizes too big, meaning that between the top riding up and the trousers riding down, he was largely unclad.

The ceremony went well and not being either French or Catholic the whole thing was new to me. We had a fantastic old priest who rustled the families of the three babies being Christened around the church in the same way a cow-poke rustles cattle. Firstly we all had to exit the church and stand in a circle to perform various actions and responses, much like an ecclesiastical version of the Hokey Pokey, which he conducted with great glee and gusto, not to mention a few digs at the English. We were then led symbolically into the Church in a parade and bullied cheerfully through a ceremony in which it was clear that neither English nor French knew exactly what to do. Much embarrassed standing in circles and waving about of babies later, he shook us all meaningfully by the head and bid adieu. (Yes I know this was a benediction, it's called literary license).

Charlie was an angel during Mass, partly because he has never seen so many people all standing around doing the same thing before and that required some digestion and partly because his canny French Grandmere bought with her a bag full of very crusty crusts which kept him gumming quietly for the whole hour (and presumably required more digestion). By the time the christening rolled around however he was remorselessly fed up and decided it was time to jump up and down and shout a lot. Luckily the other two babies felt the same so we were not terminally embarrassed. In fact, we naturally are labouring under the belief that he was the best-behaved baby there, despite the fact that at one point the poor priest had to pause and look meaningfully at him before continuing.

For me, the biggest struggle was keeping his Grandmere happy by making sure he was wrapped up against the cold. To this end she supplied a crocheted shawl which, while I'm certain would be fantastic lapped around a sleeping infant, when placed anywhere near the vicinity of our struggling monstrosity became firstly a twisted rope and then a puddle on the floor, so I spent most of the time we were there man-handling the thing as though trying to win an origami contest while re-assuring my mother-in-law that I was In Control and Perfectly Able to Mother my little potato without the need for intervention.

For his part, he is on good form despite nearly going head-first into the font trying to work out where the water was coming from/going and having a near miss with the christening candle and little grabby fingers.

He is still a bit Croupy but tellingly, only in the evenings when he wants to stay up past his bedtime, at which point he suddenly gets a sad little bark on his in-breath which is accompanied by a moist look in his eyes and a little French moue. If we ignore this velvet painting we are then treated to the full symphony which frankly is getting tired. Not as tired as we are however as every time his breathing gets a bit thick (which is every night at the moment) we dash him into our bed where-upon it magically clears up in moments. We however then spend the entire night waking every five minutes to listen to him. He is lapping this up and last night while my finger was clutched in his little fist and I was stroking the back of his hand I came across a hairy bit and realised he was happily clutching both our hands at once and lying fast asleep with a big grin on his face while we put our backs out trying to keep him happy.

In France, the word for 'crawl' translates into something lilke 'move like a crab' which is what we are all doing at the moment. I can't wait for him to get better...

Full House

Before yesterday, I would possibly have thought the word 'croup' described an action one might see performed at a casino, perhaps involving the scooping away of all one's worldly wealth by a po-faced staff member wielding a tiny garden hoe and a bow tie.

It is, however, nothing to do with gambling at all and is instead the name for a group of infections caused by some cheeky little virus that hangs out in the back of the throat and on a whim makes one's baby sound like something out of the animal kingdom - a seal for example or perhaps more appropriately in the case of my 23lb potato, a walrus.

What amazes me is that when I went to pick up Charlie yesterday and he was making this noise (on every breath both in AND out I have to add) I managed to get him home and ring NHS Direct and speak to a nurse and not lose a lung out of my nose in panic. He on the other hand seemed unaware that anything was wrong and while being cuddled on his father's lap happily tried to use said parent's testicles as a trampoline while laughing like a troll. 'Harp Harp Harp!' he went 'Woof oof oooooh' went the frog.

The NHS rang an ambulance on the back of listening to the noise over the phone and the ambulance crew gamely drove C and I to the children's A&E leaving the frog at home with an ice-pack. We then had to wait in the waiting room with another little boy with croup.

"Whuh" said Charlie
"Hueeh hueeh hueeh" said the little boy
"Bar Bar"
"Augh auh auh HAH"
"Ehk ehk PARK"

And so forth while I exchanged looks with the parents carefully designed to be amused and yet caring at the same time. God knows we don't want them to think I was laughing at their baby or judging the clearly less serious nature of his cough compared to the blob's. Mark mark.

Finally the doctor saw us, dosed him up with steroids and then informed me that we had to stay in for four hours for observation. Having rushed home from work to get him from the child-minder and then spent the intervening time talking to doctors, I was starving and knackered and envisaged a nice darkened room in which we could lie down and I could give Charlie a boob while we both drifted off to sleep to the exotic sound of his breathing. The reality however was that I was expected to wait, with no dinner, on plastic chairs in a waiting room packed with other ill chilren under fluorescent lights for FOUR HOURS with a sick 8 month old baby who had not only not had his dinner either but who is normally asleep at 8pm.

You can imagine the ensuing scene. After having a meltdown nice chat with the doctor I was ushered out of human view to the baby changing room which contained one filthy plastic children's chair, one filthy two-seater plastic adult chair with metal arms, one bright overhead fluorescent and a bin with a 'hazardous waste' bag in it. But no changing table.

At least this was our own private room and after disinfecting it as best as possible using only wet wipes and my own spit (because one thing you learn as a parent is that wet wipes and spit can sterilise anything), I allowed Charlie to crawl around while I tried to fold myself onto the chair in an approximation of having a nice lie-down. Finally the frog arrived with food, toys, a travel cot and pyjamas and about five minutes later a nice doctor arrived to give us the all-clear and send us home, whereupon I had to creep through the waiting room carrying all my loot while the other parents looked curiously at me as they tussled with their now over-tired and feisty baby on the plastic seats, almost undoubtedly having picked up half a dozen other vicious maladies from the surrounding hordes of equally weary family units.

I tried not to feel smug in any way and in fact once I realised that I had jumped a queue of sorts I felt guilty. Not for long however as nature has a way of balancing these things out and while those parents hopefully went home, put their infant to bed and had a nice quiet snooze, we came home to Sammy who had taken our absence as an excuse to have a night out on the tiles. The minute the lights were out he began tossing his catnip mouse around the apartment in a routine that involved shouting threateningly at it for several minutes on the livingroom floor before giving it what for in every room of the house including the bedroom, where apparently it took repeated refuge in our bed and had to be routed out diligently from our feet and then punished on our pillows before escaping magically back to the livingroom so the entire performance could be repeated.

This in turn woke our croupy loved one who we took to our bed to calm down and who was then woken every time Sammy decided to throw his mouse in our direction. Between the yowling of the cat and the barking of our baby we got about five minutes sleep last night (in between dreams about animal rescue centres) which, clearly, is why I'm still awake at 11:30 and posting on this blog.

Obviously it's time for bed. Tonight I have hidden the mouse and am about to dose Charlie with both boobs and so hopefully I can gamble on getting some sleep. Here goes.