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.
