Cupboard dry! Iron dry (ie, wet). Cupboard dry plus!!? And, for those who bought a tumble dryer to, er, make their clothes actually pretty much dry, we have the special option: Extra dry. Wow. This place will always amaze me.
Wednesday 16 November 2011
Wednesday 2 November 2011
forward and back
Today I came back to the city where we've been based for almost 4 years. One thing that bothered me about this city was its poor public transit. It is expensive, and extremely, ridiculously, execrably unreliable, and the drivers are often both rude and unhelpful. The first thing that happened on my arrival today was that I paid 2£ for my £1.80 ticket and instead of giving me 20p the guy printed out an EXTRA long ticket, which, if I had endless time at my disposal, I could return to their office for my cash, or so I gather. You just couldn't make this stuff up.
On the way to my packed afternoon full of work meetings we passed places where I'd been miserable (often transit-related, as it happens) and places where we'd been just so happy. I realised how much of my life experience now, how many of my memories, are about Nina (with a little of baby Annika in there too). There are untold hours at playgrounds, alone, with my lovely lovely friends and their little ones. Many hours, all together, walking the quick 10 minutes to and from their old nursery, Nina climbing on everything. Oh god, do I miss that commute with the desperation of someone who now commutes in London with a 7-month-old screamer and an exhausted, if very game, 3-year-old... Driving to/from her toddler gymnastics, taking her to the museum, spending time with her friends and ours, looking at the fountain... I walked near the hospital where they were both born, remembering the roaring, the trauma, the thrill of it, the warm lump of tiny baby suckling for the very first time... I passed the church where when Nina was a baby I took her to the baby music group; we still sing the little songs for Annika, or we tweak them to mock difficult bits of ours lives. I passed the bench near the Sainsburys where you sometimes see drunks but where I once, trying to get home probably from the music group, breastfed and breastfed and breastfed and couldn't get Nina to settle in her stroller, and eventually walked the 12 minutes home with her completely FRANTIC, worrying that I looked like a terrible mum. My neighbour said "don't you worry what anyone might think, if your child is making that noise she is going to be just FINE". I asked how old her daughter was, and she said '34'. I was so consoled. Her husband later told me he used to try to sleep while his foot rocked the buggy to get their baby to sleep, but he never quite got a good sleep while doing that :)
How did the distinction between me enjoying something and Nina enjoying something get so blurred? When she's happy, we are happy (and, er, conversely - that's probably it in a nutshell). It's not that I don't have a sense of self, or selfishness, believe me, I do. But in my picture of a 'really fun thing' to do, Nina is there, with her little grin of pure delight, as a huge film bubble rises around her at the bubble show last Sunday at the Science museum.
I think there is nothing that having children makes me aware of more than the passage of time.
Photos preserve an image, but in the end, don't we remember the photo and not the moment? How many moments do I really remember from Nina's babyhood? How can I preserve Annika's, those smiles, those wispy giggles, those little hands pinching my arms while she breastfeeds, those early 'da da ga ga's and the whole-body exuberance she shows when she's lying on her back and I come in the room and move towards her? And the other side: those screams, increasing in frantic intensity, during an epic trip home that should have been a 45 minute walk in the park (literally) that turned into more than 90 minutes of stopping for bathrooms, buying dinner, breastfeeding, formula feeding, puree-providing, cuddling, shoe-fixing and of course sneezing, all with a bad cold. And then there are the moments of tiredness, perpetual, endless, tiredness, tiredness whose pervasiveness wears you down so that you stop even mentioning that constant companion: tiredness. Since A. started dealing with Annika at night, mostly, this has faded. My hero.
Does writing about these moments lead to better, higher-quality memories of them than photographing them or making videos? Or will nothing really allow us to keep our babies forever?
On the way to my packed afternoon full of work meetings we passed places where I'd been miserable (often transit-related, as it happens) and places where we'd been just so happy. I realised how much of my life experience now, how many of my memories, are about Nina (with a little of baby Annika in there too). There are untold hours at playgrounds, alone, with my lovely lovely friends and their little ones. Many hours, all together, walking the quick 10 minutes to and from their old nursery, Nina climbing on everything. Oh god, do I miss that commute with the desperation of someone who now commutes in London with a 7-month-old screamer and an exhausted, if very game, 3-year-old... Driving to/from her toddler gymnastics, taking her to the museum, spending time with her friends and ours, looking at the fountain... I walked near the hospital where they were both born, remembering the roaring, the trauma, the thrill of it, the warm lump of tiny baby suckling for the very first time... I passed the church where when Nina was a baby I took her to the baby music group; we still sing the little songs for Annika, or we tweak them to mock difficult bits of ours lives. I passed the bench near the Sainsburys where you sometimes see drunks but where I once, trying to get home probably from the music group, breastfed and breastfed and breastfed and couldn't get Nina to settle in her stroller, and eventually walked the 12 minutes home with her completely FRANTIC, worrying that I looked like a terrible mum. My neighbour said "don't you worry what anyone might think, if your child is making that noise she is going to be just FINE". I asked how old her daughter was, and she said '34'. I was so consoled. Her husband later told me he used to try to sleep while his foot rocked the buggy to get their baby to sleep, but he never quite got a good sleep while doing that :)
How did the distinction between me enjoying something and Nina enjoying something get so blurred? When she's happy, we are happy (and, er, conversely - that's probably it in a nutshell). It's not that I don't have a sense of self, or selfishness, believe me, I do. But in my picture of a 'really fun thing' to do, Nina is there, with her little grin of pure delight, as a huge film bubble rises around her at the bubble show last Sunday at the Science museum.
I think there is nothing that having children makes me aware of more than the passage of time.
Photos preserve an image, but in the end, don't we remember the photo and not the moment? How many moments do I really remember from Nina's babyhood? How can I preserve Annika's, those smiles, those wispy giggles, those little hands pinching my arms while she breastfeeds, those early 'da da ga ga's and the whole-body exuberance she shows when she's lying on her back and I come in the room and move towards her? And the other side: those screams, increasing in frantic intensity, during an epic trip home that should have been a 45 minute walk in the park (literally) that turned into more than 90 minutes of stopping for bathrooms, buying dinner, breastfeeding, formula feeding, puree-providing, cuddling, shoe-fixing and of course sneezing, all with a bad cold. And then there are the moments of tiredness, perpetual, endless, tiredness, tiredness whose pervasiveness wears you down so that you stop even mentioning that constant companion: tiredness. Since A. started dealing with Annika at night, mostly, this has faded. My hero.
Does writing about these moments lead to better, higher-quality memories of them than photographing them or making videos? Or will nothing really allow us to keep our babies forever?
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