Mid-winter

So the Baby Brother has been growing nicely, and then growing some more, and is now as large as he is good natured with a personality as big as his cheeks. At four months I can also confirm the ginger rumours and suspicions that have been bandied about. It seems that my family does, indeed, have a rogue red-head gene that skips generations and then sneaks in and over rides everything in its path.  He is a very amiable little gentleman (I say “little” meaning “young”) who smiles on demand and sleeps through the night, mostly. And I’m sure he will grow into his big flappy feet and need never know that that when the photographer tried to take his ID photo for his British passport it took her at least three attempts to get both ears on (as required by the British Government) because of the size of his cheeks.

Or that his parents affectionately call him The Beast sometimes, come to that.

                So it is June now  and mid-winter, since someone put all the seasons the wrong way up over here, and in Muizenberg that means big empty beaches to air our sickly, snivelling kids on and a roaring fire every night since we have no central heating and whatever Dutch man designed our house 100 years ago did so to keep the heat out. So there is kind of a Christmassy feeling around in our home exacerbated by the fact that I kept our Christmas lights up around the fire place just because I liked them and Santa has an honorary place in our house all year round. It seems I whipped TGP into such a frenzy that I accidentally over-installed the magic of Christmas and now he will not leave it alone, still singing ‘Jingle Bells” to any of his toys that will listen and insisting on Christmas episodes of Peppa Pig and Postman Pat. And besides I literally feel like it was two minutes ago we opened our presents.  When did it become alright for half the year to disappear like that? I had big plans for 2012 and it didn’t even bother to say hello to me.

In reality a lot has happened for The Ginger Prince since Christmas. He went from nappies to potty to toilet and turned three having not one but two parties; one at playgroup and the other at home.  I didn’t know you could get event-anxiety on behalf of someone else but it seems you can. And it may not has been wise to have 16 toddlers round at your house when you have an 8 week old baby to look after, unless of course you enjoy blowing up balloons and putting little bits of nonsense in party bags at 11pm every night for a week. Which we didn’t.  But it was a success, leaving The Ginger Prince a sweaty, happy mess. So mission accomplished there. Now it only remains for me to recover what is left of 2012 and do all the things I said I would. This is what’s wrong with settling yourself annual goals, they just stress you out.

The Baby Brother

I will spare you the goriest of gory details as many of you know them already. To nutshell it there was a long labour, a cord around a baby’s neck and a last minute caesarean. Before we had a chance to get acquainted he was whisked off to Intensive Care to ‘get checked over’  and it wasn’t until the next morning that he was wheeled in to be introduced to his Mummy, as I was tucking into a breakfast of sausage, egg and morphine (not a tongue salad in sight). It was only then that I realised what a scary business it had been- had the caesarean been two minutes later he wouldn’t have made it- but whilst I was being kept in the dark the little guy was fighting hard and being very well looked after and he made a full recovery within his first day of his life.

Furthermore there were no ginger suspicions at the time of birth since Baby Brother (BB) has such a lot of dark hair that it can be worn in a number of styles (I know this from experimentation- three days is a long time to be in hospital) and he looks as much like his Daddy as The Ginger Prince looked like me when he was unceremoniously slapped onto my chest three years ago in a very different kind of introduction. The recovery from the caesarean has been better than I imagined and I was up and about the following day and thereafter spent three days in hospital, pottering about in my horrible post-surgery hospital socks (forced to wear 24/7), reading magazines and being waited on hand and foot, whilst BB was wheeled in and out in his large Tupperware container.

                The spark of interest that The Ginger Prince showed in his Baby Brother whilst he was in hospital vanished when we got home and he saw that the little guy was here for good. Questions like “Can I get his blanket for him, Mummy?” were replaced with “Can we take him back?”, “Is he naughty?” and, worse still, “Is he a poo-poo head?”. In between these cheerfully framed questions were magnificent tantrums over bizarre things like being offered the wrong kind of spoon. These were the dark days but fortunately they didn’t last long and over the past six weeks TGP has been through every kind of emotion imaginable and has come out feeling and acting a bit like a big brother, most of the time, which we are all relieved about.

              I, too, have tumbled through a few different feelings but am finally adjusting to having two munchkins, to the fact that TGP now looks enormous and to the fact that it takes me at least an hour and a half to get us all ready to go out. I cannot, however, adjust to dealing with Discovery Healthcare, our insurance company, who tried to refuse to pay for the emergency caesarean because they claimed I planned it secretly in spite of the fact that I went into labour naturally, had a midwife and had letters from the hospital saying it was a life-saving emergency with no alternative (PMB). Two weeks after the birth both me and AA suffered from repeated bouts of Telephone Rage which were unhelpful to everyone. They may have borne the brunt of my disrupted hormones but I think they brought it on themselves. One call was a record two hours of denial and disbelief. You will be pleased to know that they did pay up in the end, but only after we got a consultant involved. We were told from a couple of sources that they try to think of any excuse and hope you give up. If you are on this blog because you typed “Discovery Healthcare” and “Telephone Rage” into google then email me- we can loath them together. Not really, you should simply get over it, just as I so obviously have!

                On a more positive note BB is very, very, very cute and we are lucky to have him. And as you know new mothers are never biased. He may even turn out to have ginger persuasions after all - not of the TGP variety, more of an auburn hue going on around his dark hair, a touch of the Terry Wogans. We shall see.

Either way he fits into our family perfectly, and I think we’re going to keep him.

                                            Baby Brother's foot- cute

                                        
                                           My hospital socks- not so cute!

The mole and the countdown

The other day I found myself stuffing a mole into a paper bag and taking it home, for which I’m going to blame pregnancy hormones. I was at the local playground with The Ginger Prince when I spotted a mole wandering about on the grass looking both unhealthy and confused. Although never having seen a mole before I’m not sure what a healthy one looks like. Not being a fan of animal distress I followed him about and then proceeded to try to catch and ‘save’ him in TGP’s sun hat causing TGP to say repeatedly “No Mummy, no mummy that’s my hat” whilst the creature showed me his big teeth. A passer-by had helped me put him in a paper bag and it wasn’t until I was walking home with TGP behind me asking for carry (which wasn’t going to happen on account of my being nine months pregnant and holding a bag full of mole) that it began to dawn on me that what I was doing made no sense at all. By the time I arrived home the idea that, being a biologist, AA would instinctively know what to do was fading and when I unveiled the beast AA announced first that it should be taken back to exactly where I found it, sick or not, and secondly that it was a mole-rat. The word ‘rat’ in the title altered my attitude towards the creature, I’ll admit, and I was happy to let AA take him back to the playground to “help him find his Mummy and Daddy”.

So this (human) baby has to hurry up and be born before I lose my mind further. It is a strange thing to be counting down the days to something that you a) don’t know the actual date of and b) you are sort ofdreading so I have resisted for as long possible, but have now succumbed and just want to get it over with. We have 13 days until the doctor’s predicted date and one week if you want to go with the date suggested by the gay psychic at the gym.

Last time around I packed an eager little first-time-mum hospital bag that sat at the end of my bed for a month looking ever more forlorn and depressing and so this time I have been a bit more deliberately casual about readiness. Last Saturday night, however, I felt completely sure that I was starting labour, lay awake worrying about the many things I hadn’t sorted out yet (relating to The Ginger Prince, health insurance documents and most importantly snacks to eat in the hospital) and then instructed AA we would both go to sleep for a couple of hours as we would need energy later. Of course when we woke up in the morning feeling a bit silly (me) and relieved (AA and me) the very first thing I did was to go and buy a range of hospital snacks of which only a few Haribo still remain alive. The chocolate covered raisins and Jumping Jack cheese and onion popcorn didn’t survive a day, bless them, so if I have another labour as long as the first one then I’ll be very hungry by the time they offer me a tongue salad (which is, by the way, the actual item they served on the maternity ward in the Edinburgh hospital where I had TGP). Even if there was a time when one might want tongue salad (which there isn’t) it really is not after just having a baby and in my drug-addled state I thought it was an actual joke and AA was in that queue to McDonalds before the staff had finished explaining to my drug-addled brain that this really was lunch. Let’s see what Vincent Pallotti private hospital can rustle up to dine on whilst I recline in what I hope and pray will be a private room.  But since I have gone for a ‘natural birth’, which seems to be a hippy option here, it is not impossible that they will offer to Braai my own placenta.  We shall see.

A mole-rat. Similar to the one in question, although not the actual beast. Slightly scarier and less mangey looking. 

Christmas in Africa

So it turns out that what with hot weather, no turkey and general lack of festive fuss Christmas does not feel so Christmassy in Africa. The few half-hearted decorations on the beach front in Muizenberg were hidden by the swarms of people who descend there over the holidays to eat picnic lunches and play in the waves and there is little interest in the dejected looking Santas roasting in their suits in the Shopping Centre Grottos. In the privacy of our own home, however, I seem to have worked The Ginger Prince into a UK style Christmas frenzy. Each morning preceding the big day there was an advent calendar palaver as he tried to climb up the kitchen units often at least partially naked (because it’s getting so damn hot) shouting “Christmas Treat! Christmas Treat!” putting one in mind of Gollum and with the chocolate securely in his hand he scampered off into another room to nurse this treat until it melted.  

                My sister and her boyfriend have come, whizzed around Cape Town and surrounding areas, pruned our garden, sorted out our BBQ area and dining room, entertained TGP and are now sadly gone. They did leave the guest suite ready, however, for our two new guests, friends from Scotland, who arrived four days later, on Christmas Day itself, just slightly behind Santa’s sleigh and also bearing gifts. We had Braai and treats in the garden on for Christmas whilst TGP splashed about in his new paddling pool and then a week later yet more Braai and treats in the garden on New Year’s Eve. This time thrown into the mix was a New Year ceremony that we adapted from all the dippy hippie things we have ever done and which included a Tibetan Prayer flag hung in the garden, the symbolic ringing of a bell to signify bad things departing and good things arriving and the planting of a Pomegranate tree underneath which are buried all our hopes and dreams written on little pieces of paper. As a final touch the earth around the tree was watered with water gathered from two oceans (Indian and Atlantic) whilst on the way to Cape Point a couple of days before.  These are the types of things you do when having a sober New Year, or at least you do if you’re me. AA made a truly admirable effort to ignore these goings on and concentrate only on the spatchcock chicken he was BBQing until all the weirdness had stopped and he felt he could safely drink fizz and join in a painful rendition of Auld Lang Syne sung along to You tube cheered all the while by the lie in I had agreed to giving him, since I would have no hangover to nurse anyway, whilst I took TGP to the huge and empty Noordhoek beach on New Year’s Day.

I am now a scary seven weeks away from another (hopefully better) childbirth followed by the reality of having two kids, neither of which seems to have sunk in yet. A week or so ago I went to the gym, for the first time in probably about six weeks, and whilst in the middle of my lazy pregnancy work out, which principally involves watching sky news whilst ambling on the cross country ski machine, I was approached by a big, camp, shiny face who asked me if I was having a boy or a girl and when it was due. Upon being told I was having a boy in February he said that he had ‘sensed’ I was having a boy as he does psychic readings and that when I walked in he had watched the whole birth play out. He went on to tell me that if I thought the baby was coming on its due date I was in for a ‘big surprise’. Of course I loved all this and, having been re-assured that the birth was fine, I asked him if he had any tips for names since I was totally stuck. Once again he said that he could have told me that we hadn’t decided and that yes, he knew the right name but wouldn’t tell me because I needed to get there on my own. I was generally delighted with this psychic gay premonition but my sister pointed out that predicting that someone who is seven months pregnant is going to have a baby is proof of nothing. No pleasing some people.  

                                          Muizenberg Beach on Christmas Day

                                          Our Tibetan Prayer Flag