Happy Birthday to Me

Felix banished me from the room the other day so he could make this, all by himself.



The first attempt at a picture of me, which as you can see went a bit "rog", has been clearly labelled as such.

Aww.


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You Forgot the Spoon

Me and Felix were making hot chocolate the other day, and he had decided to put a vaguely-marshmallow-shaped sweetie in it, which meant he needed a spoon, which he retrieved from the drawer in very efficient fashion, and put it in the mug. And I took it out again, before putting said mug in microwave.

"You forgot the spoon," he said.

"You can't put metal in microwaves, it might explode."

"But we can put it in the mug," he said.

"Yes, but it'll still be in the microwave."

"We could put it next to the mug?"

"No, it'll still be in the microwave. You can't put metal in the microwave."

"Is it against the law?"

"No, it's just a really bad idea."

"Can we put it on top of the microwave?"

"We could, yes, or we could just leave it here by the kettle, then put it in the mug after it comes out."

"OK then."


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The Top of my Legs

For the last few months now, I’ve been facing awkward questions from one of Felix’s classmates. He lives round the corner from us, so we often end up walking home together.

He's fascinated and delighted by my swelling tum. It makes him grin broadly and ask questions such as, "Is there still a baby in your tummy?" and "How will it come out?"

At first I was quite vague about it all, but my problem is that with my own (now 6-yr-old) son, I never evade questions. I always answer honestly, and in as much detail as he’s capable of understanding. My attitude is that if he’s old enough to ask, he’s old enough to know. But with someone else’s child… a child who is taken dutifully to Mosque every evening… how much am I allowed to say? Will I offend someone if I give too much detail? I have this idea that people with strong religious backgrounds, Muslims and Christians alike, frown on detailed sex education. I don't know if I'm even right about this.

But I'm no good at lying. I've taken to saying that I have a special hole for the baby to come through. "Where?" he says, now even more fascinated. "Where is it?"

"At the top of my legs," I say, and that’s as far as I go.

So far I’ve managed to have this conversation out of earshot of his parents, but the other day his father was there and, understandably, got embarrassed. Then started dragging his son away and telling him off. Meanwhile the only thing I could do was act as though everything was fine and I didn’t mind in the least. Which I didn’t.

It wasn’t helped, though, by my son being present. He obviously felt I wasn't being graphic enough, and decided to help me out. He started prancing about behind me, giggling and pointing and saying, "Here! It’s in her bottom!" and just in case his friend wasn't well-informed enough about my nether regions, he added, "Her bottom’s really smelly, she farts all the time!"

It might be my imagination but when I saw Felix's friend again today, his father seemed less friendly than normal.

Minefield, eh?


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I Took my Clothes off, Mummy

I was just reading this, during which the writer describes one of those memories, of a moment. When your child is crying, and you know it is all your fault.

I have one of those memories, one of those moments. It's incredibly strong. I doubt I'll ever forget.

It was such a small thing, and I doubt my son shares the memory. I hope he doesn't. He'll have others of his own, no doubt. That he remembers, but I forget.

Like me and my mum. When I was a teenager, my sweet tooth was strong, just as it always had been, just as it still is. And I knew where my mum kept her secret chocolate stash. In a drawer, her drawer, that contained only her things, that I was not supposed to enter. I don't remember what else was in that drawer. I don't know how far I explored (I've always been nosy). But I know that now and then I would steal her chocolate. When the urge to binge was strong, and I had no money or couldn't be bothered to cycle the half mile to the corner shop.

I replaced it always, as soon as I was able. She was a hoarder, a nibbler, a saver, just as I am now. She didn't dip into her chocolate supplies as often as I did. I wasn't found out.

Until I was.

Maybe there were other things going on. Maybe I'd annoyed her already. I'm sure I was generally infuriating. That the parenting of me, as with all teenagers, was at times distressing and difficult. Not to mention my twin crimes of both theft and invasion of privacy. But anyway she found out, and confronted me. And slapped me across the face, six times. Left cheek, right cheek, fronthand, backhand, one, two, three, four, five, six. This was the only hand she laid on me, apart from the occasional slap on the back of my legs when I was little. It was shocking, arresting, I remember where I stood. In the hallway, my back to the front door, the Forbidden Drawer in my sight.

And she has no memory of it.

And so to this other moment, my parental shame, the memory I hope is mine alone. Not shared.

It was bedtime, and my son was small. Two years old, I think. Maybe three. I was tired, grumpy, wanted to sit down and chill out. The bed needed making. Possibly I expected my partner to have done it and I was in a mood about that, I don't know. That's conjecture.

My son was mucking about. I'd asked him to take his clothes off, but instead he was jumping all over the bed I was trying to make, leaping on my back, being silly. I got stern, told him to take his clothes off. Let it be known that now was not playtime. He paid no attention. I lost my temper. I shouted at him to take his clothes off. I kept my back to him. I ignored him for some time.

Until I heard his little voice.

I took my clothes off, Mummy.

I looked round, and there he was. Shivering, crying, naked.

I took my clothes off, Mummy.


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Peace

Him indoors works in a community centre, which is currently sporting a rather lovely Peace Tower, consisting of the word 'PEACE' created by various local residents in different ways.

We were looking at it with Felix (nearly 6), and I said to him:

"What do you think peace means, Felix?"

"Well," he said confidently. "There's the one like 'I want peace and quiet!' and then there's the one when people say 'Peace, man' and then there's the one that means not having wars."

We don't know whether he was repeating something he'd heard - but still, it was in his own words and we were impressed.


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This Life of Mine

I feel the need to write something here but can't think what, so I thought I might just witter on for a bit and see what happens...

It's all been a bit bitty, my blogging of late. I'm in this strange, very transient, phase of life. The illness is more or less over (yay) but I still get nauseous occasionally (boo) and the main problem is I get really-really tired (double boo) and can't do as much as I want. My body keeps forcing me to down tools, and I have to listen cos, well, you know, there's a baby in my tummy. And even if it's a head-fuck trying to make yourself believe you have another human being squirming around in your middle, it's still there and you have to look after it, in this weird, not-being-able-to-put-your-hands-on-it kind of a way which in fact involves looking after yourself. Which doesn't always work if you also have this mad drive to accomplish the sixty-squillion things on your To-Do list before it pops out. The baby, that is, not the To-Do list. Oh God, how awful if I gave birth to a To-Do list! I don't think I'd appreciate that.

So, yes. Being pregnant is indeed a licence to be selfish. You can bagsy the best seats and get people to run around after you and generally be a fat lazy arse, but it's OK cos you're doing it for the littl'un, not for you. I still feel guilty sometimes though, like when I'm kicking Ally out of bed in the mornings to do the Daddy stuff.

So, the baby kicks loads, and often reminds me of its presence. But it's still mostly a future being, rather than a present one. I think there will be a baby, rather than there is one. And yes, when it wriggles and squirms I lift my top and gaze at my tummy in amazement - the flesh moves around and it's all very Sigourney Weaver. But it's not only there at those moments. It's there all the time. No matter what I'm doing, there is an actual live human being, existing inside me. It's easier to think that it's not alive yet than to get your head around the idea that it already exists, and technically could survive outside the womb from now on, although it would find it difficult and I'd rather it didn't.

I don't normally use "it" to describe it, cos I do know the gender. I've told everyone else, I dunno why I haven't told you lot (at least, I don't think I have - my memory is even worse than normal). But, you know, it's nice to keep back a few surprises. And who knows, maybe the radiologist got it wrong.

So, apart from playing host to a teeny-tiny person, I'm getting myself in a pother over my ginormous To-Do list. I need to stop doing that. It really doesn't matter if the front door catch doesn't get fixed or the baby's room continues to have Soot Dribbling Down The Walls as its main decorous theme. Or indeed if my next novel doesn't get writ (but have you checked out the word counter lately? I'm doing rather well - am proud of that).

And gawd, that whole novel-writing thing. Argh. Even though I have now chosen a plot and style and have jumped in and am determined to finish it... I'm not convinced I'm writing the right book. Or indeed that I can write at all. Despite having two publishing deals behind me, I don't feel like I have the faintest clue what I'm doing, or - more importantly - that I have any talent at all. All those people, writing brilliant books, and then... me.

I've been fretting over this book wot I'm writing and its chatty style. It's quite frothy and won't win any literary awards. As a sop to myself, and to discourage myself from switching genre in the middle of a book, I'm also writing another book on the side; one which is all about the words, the beautiful language, the clever stuff. And which I'll probably never finish (I've only written 350 words so far, and anyway there are only so many hours in the day), but does make me feel slightly better about the whole thing. And is probably going to be a kids' book, even though I haven't made my mind up yet, which is interesting in itself.

Climbing stairs is hard. It's like hauling a hippopotamus up behind me. So far I'm still able to get to my computer, which is up two flights in the attic, but there may come a day when all communication suddenly ceases because I am sprawled, panting, across the bottom few steps and unable to get any further. And it makes my hips hurt.

I have eleven weeks to go. Eleven weeks seems like a long time to wait before my body starts being a bit kinder to me (ha! What am I thinking? Have I forgotten how sore it all is for weeks after childbirth?). But not long to accomplish all the things on The Enormous List whilst getting steadily more hippo-like.

I'm also doing some storytelling - will be doing some this Friday in fact - but it's all strictly amateur and I've reined myself in re plans to become Tip Top Professional Storyteller. There's only so much one woman can achieve, and I'm officially on maternity leave now. I have no clue what or who I will do / be when the baby gets bigger. There are too many imponderables, and for once I've managed to stop myself making obsessive plans for the future. Something'll come along, I guess, although this whole global economy meltdown thing is worrying me slightly. But only slightly. Tranquilising pregnancy hormones. They're ace. And they keep rushing around your system as long as you're breastfeeding, so I'll hopefully live in a little contented bubble for at least the rest of this year. Well, I did after Felix was born. I s'pose I could be in for a shock, but no point worrying about that now.

We're having a home birth, so I don't need to worry about my baby getting swapped for someone else's. No, sorry, that was ambiguous. We're not having a home birth because I'm worried about swapped babies. It's just that, given we are doing the home thing anyway, I should be pretty sure it's my baby I'm bringing up. Unless some absent-minded midwife packs someone else's baby in her boot by accident and gets it out of her bag and puts it down somewhere in my house after my baby's born.

I once had a dream, before I was a mother, that I had a baby. It was a recurring dream theme, back in the childless days. These babies would just appear, and I would think, 'Oh, that's odd, I don't remember being pregnant,' and then I'd forget them or lose them or otherwise fail in my mothering duties. In this one dream, I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Then a few days later, I thought, 'Hang on, didn't I have a baby? What did I do with it?' and there it was, at the bottom of a deep coat pocket, covered in ancient boiled sweets and bits of fluff.

Felix loves that story. He listened intently when I told it to someone else the other day, then repeated it back to me out of the blue yesterday morning.

'And you put me in your pocket,' he said.
'Well, it wasn't you I don't think. It was before you were born.'
'It was probably Conor then, from my class at school. He's older than me.'
'I don't think it was Conor either. I didn't know him then.'
'But it could have been Conor. I like to think of it being someone.'
'Oh. OK then.'

Anyway, Emmerdale. Oh sorry, don't you watch it? It's a British soap. They have this brilliant storyline at the moment. First there was a cot death, which I thought was handled unusually well, with a lot of focus on the aftermath, rather than sweeping the whole thing under the carpet and forgetting about it, like soaps normally do with dramatic storylines, until some character makes a brief mention of it years later, and you think, 'Oh yes, you once got tied up and raped in a garage and all your family were massacred, yes, I forgot about that.'

Well, anyway. First there was a cot death, and the announcer made a special warning at the beginning of the episode, so you would know it was going to make you cry, and I had to watch all the same, and it made me cry buckets. But now, just as they're still getting to grips with their grief and all that, now they've discovered it (probably) wasn't even their baby that died! Their babies were swapped at birth! Their baby is alive and kicking and living in a caravan with the next door neighbours! Who don't have a clue what's going on!

When I've told people (people who aren't as addicted to soaps as me) about this wonderful turn of events, they've clicked their tongues and sighed and said how silly. But personally, I think it's brilliant. What a wonderful dramatic twist! Whatever will happen next??!! And why can't I have ideas like that?

Coronation St have got a swapped-baby story going on at the moment, too. I'm similarly impressed by their dramatic ingeniousness. So, there you are, you have one teenage son, an only child, his father is dead, you dote on him. And then you find out he's not your son! Some other child, who lives in a posh house and goes to a posh school on the other side of town, is your son! And he looks just like his dead dad, who you loved terribly and miss awfully! And then there's the whole thing of who thinks what, with the other mother refusing to pay any attention, and the other son desperate to become your son cos he's a spoilt brat and doesn't think his family is good enough, and your original son is getting all jealous, and his real father is desperate to get to know him cos he doesn't like his own son who isn't really his son anyway... wonderful.

It is weird though, how two of the main three British soap operas have come up with the same unlikely plot. This plot-duplication thing happens a lot in soap operas. It's a bit annoying. Do they steal each other's ideas? And if so, why? Surely it only lessens both storylines, and certainly doesn't make you choose one soap over the other, just makes you feel exasperated with both of them? Ally has a much better theory, though, about why it happens. All the soaps are under constant pressure to come up with something amazing, something new, something which hasn't been done before. That in itself will be quite a small pool, as most things have already been done. And, of course, in the same way as people only pay attention to the next door neighbours they amazingly meet in far-flung corners of the earth and never think about all the people they don't bump into, most of the time the stories don't collide. You only notice it when they do. And there was something in the news a couple of years ago about some family somewhere in Eastern Europe or somewhere, who the baby-swap thing happened to. It might have planted seeds in the heads of several independent script writers.

So. Yes. I love soap opera.

Oh, shut up. When the baby gets old enough to express a preference, I'll probably have to give up soap operas, like I did when Felix was little. Let me have my few months of soap-swallowing fun.

And now I s'pose I better get back to that list. I should probably go back and edit this post as well, or at least split it into a few smaller ones. But I can't be arsed. Sorry.


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Even Less Cool

NB: don't read this post if you've only just arrived! Read this one first!

No, go away. Like I told you. Shoo. Then come back.

...

I have to own up, cos I'm rubbish at lying and anyway I know you'll all be expressing great consternation for the plight of Heavily Pregnant Lady in Playground Disaster Shock.

It didn't really end like that. I climbed back down again after perching there for ages and enjoying the view.

The rest did happen, though.


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Trying to be Cool

Pregnancy makes you tired. It makes you tired because you have to carry an extra couple of stone around your waist all day. It makes you tired because your body uses all its energy on baby-building and doesn't leave much over for you. It makes you tired because babies hog all the space in your middle and squish your lungs into a smaller space, leaving you out of breath all the time. It makes you tired when it gets you so ill you spend three months in a rocking chair and get really unfit and then can't get back in shape again because pregnancy makes all your body-bits vulnerable in a way which renders all but the lightest exercise inadvisable.

But despite all this, today I found myself in a playground with my son, at the top of a climbing frame and rather pleased with myself and my rediscovered monkeydom.

"You used to like being cool, didn't you?" says Felix.

"Why, am I not cool any more?" says me.

"No, you're too old!"

"Oh."

"Emma* used to like being cool, as well."

"Is she old too then?"

"Oh yes. Anyway she says she stopped trying to be cool cos every time she did, bad things happened to her."

Me: "Oh."

And then I fell off the climbing frame.



*Emma = a friend of ours, who I always think of as young, because she was only 18 when we met her. But that was 13 years ago.


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Those Holes in Your Mouth

5-yr-old son Felix makes an announcement out of the blue:

Felix: "There's one hole in your mouth for water, and one hole in your mouth for food. The water goes down to your lungs, and the food goes down to your tummy."

Me: "Actually it's air that goes down to your lungs."

Felix: "Yeah and if something goes down the wrong hole, then somebody needs to tip you upside down, like this - " [holds head upside down] " - and you go Agh! Agh! Agh!"


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What do you do for a job?

My 5-yr-old son Felix, in conversation with a friend of mine:

He was sitting on a high stool in the kitchen, bum and feet on the stool, knees somewhere around his ears, one elbow on the worktop, looking like a cheeky little gnome.

Felix (in v. grown-up mode): What do you do for a job?

Friend: I do research.

Felix: ???

Friend: I find things out for people who need to know stuff.

Felix: My cousin Joseph's mum goes around and finds homeless people and gets flats for them.
[sympathetic look]
I think that's more interesting than your job.

Friend (slightly defensively): Well, it earns my living, and we can't all do the same jobs.

Felix: It is more interesting, though, because she gets to go all round the town.

Friend (giving up): Yes, it is more interesting.

Felix (satisfied): Do you know I know the answer to what is one hundred plus one hundred plus one hundred?


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Stretchy Jam

Felix (5 yrs old): "Why are we going so slowly?"

Me: "All these cars are in the way. It's called a traffic jam."

Him: "It's like all the cars are stuck together with stretchy jam. Cos some of the cars go faster than the others and then the jam stre-e-etches."

...

[I am singing Peace in the Valley (Alabama 3 version) loudly in the kitchen]

Felix: "You sound like a rubbish singer on X-Factor."

...

[I bip the horn in a strange car by mistake]

Felix: "You did a horn fart!"


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Felix Pics

This was originally just a few links to some photos my dad sent me, which he'd put on facebook. I'm not a member of facebook and it didn't ask me to log in or enter any passwords or anything, so I assumed that if I could see them, so could everyone else.

I've tried putting using different links to see if that works, but if not I'm intrigued. How did facebook know I was me and not somebody else, when I all I did was follow a link from an email? Did the email somehow contain cookies? In which case, wtf? I don't like the sound of that!

I'm very interested to know whether the revised link works for non-Facebook members. Le me know in the comments box.

Three pictures of Felix (my son, 5 yrs old) up a tree, talking to my cousin Matthew at a family wedding, and on a car roof.

Awww.


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More "Felixisms" Stuff

There's more! The posts on this page aren't the only "Felixisms" posts.

For all posts labelled "Felixisms" and posted before September 2007, please go here.


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