Six Months and Counting!

A candid photo of me and baby blue eyes. That's a filthy lie.
My arms were breaking and it was all we could do to get a smile
 in a pic that wasn't blurry. You're welcome.

Well, that went quickly. Our babe is six months old. To be more specific, according to this handy calculator, she's precisely 184 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes and 57 seconds old. Fifty eight. Fifty nine. It is terrifying and beautiful how time goes flying by. 

Mine never came out like this, but feel
free to try it yourself.http://www.vat19.com/dvds/magic-christmas-tree.cfm 

It's strange to watch a baby go older, because they change so quickly you can almost watch them grow. 

Did you ever have those crystal gardens, the ones where you stick a chemical-soaked piece of paper in a solution and it gets shaggy with technicolor crystals within hours? Babies are like that, except the opposite, because those things are dusty and inevitably disappointing whereas babies are infinitely and infinitesimally wondrous. Equally messy, though. But I digress.

Six months old...

It's strange to watch babies get older, because they change so quickly but you hardly notice the cumulative effect of all that growing until you wake up one morning and realise six months have passed and the floppy, sleepy little thing that you first met is suddenly so much more solid, so much more a real person, awake and working hard to become herself. 

...and cute as a button. In my totally
unbiased opinion. 

She can sit. She can roll over. She can laugh out loud. She eats carrots, sweet potatoes, apples, pears, broccoli, zucchini, oats, rice, avocado and bananas. She loves the water. She hates her snowsuit. She can say "gah," "bah," and "amah," not to mention "bzrp" and "boob." She can hold her toes and fall asleep on her own and put things from one hand into her other hand and into her mouth. 

Indeed she now can do a thousand small things that we take utterly for granted when we do them ourselves, but that she worked on for hours and days to get just right. 

And she's just getting started. What an exhausting thought. What a privilege to help her along with all the rest. 

We love this kid and always will. 

Try a Little Tenderness

You know that Otis Redding song "Try a Little Tenderness"? It's the one about being nice to a young girl who is "tired of wearing that same old shaggy dress". Well, like every other song that was ever written, if you just change one or two words around it applies perfectly to babies.

This is a (long) aside, but did anyone else have this phase in their early adolescence when they first became aware that the world is full of sex references? You start hearing about mysterious things like foreplay and fetishes and positions (for or against?), and realize that you can often take things two ways (*snigger*). And once you start to crack the code, you realise that popular culture is a 24/7 industrial-grade firehose of sex.  

My parents and teachers appeared totally oblivious but we who were in the know were privy to a non-stop barrage of sex on the radio, TV, movies, poetry, novels, comics, paintings... It turned out that sex was the basis of modern civilisation and all commercial enterprise. Once the veil was lifted, it seemed to me that Pop! Goes the Weasel was the only non-church song I knew that didn't have a sex reference, and even there if you snickered properly you could make it sound vaguely filthy.   

I think until I was 12 or 13 I just thought all those radio songs were about kissing. Which is astonishing considering that ubiquitous hits at the time included, for example, I'll Make Love to You (I mean, HELLO), Freak Me (opening lyric: "Let me lick you up and down")  and this song, which is basically like singing: "Hooray for your body/ let us have imaginative sex/ but no need to improvise/ I'll spell it out in the hook". 

I specifically remember hearing this song on the radio: "Mary Moooooon, she's a vegetarian/ *incomprehensible*/ She loves me so/ She hates to be alone/ She don't eat meat but she sure like the bone.".. and thinking, Ya. I know what THAT means, New Age Girl. And ohmygosh, the band is called Deadeye Dick. Subversive.

Anyway, I bring it up because since the baby came (not yet four months ago... but was there ever a time when she didn't exist?) every romantic song now seems like it was written about babies, for babies, with babies in mind. It's all so innocent now. All those kisses become sweet little baby smooches. Enchanting smiles are those priceless fleeting ones accompanied by drool and dimples.The dreams they are talking about are baby dreams, full of fluffy sheep and smiling stars. At Last. My Funny Valentine. I could go on. Having a baby is the great total de-sexualization of how I understand love songs. 

(Okay, that doesn't actually apply to "Freak Me" and "Stroke Me Up", but those only count as love songs in the grossest sense and even then it's a little iffy. Also, now that I am 30 and officially a mother I must point out that those songs are derogatory, vulgar and infinitely stupid. If songs about sex were cocktails, listening to them would be the equivalent of downing orange squash mixed with antifreeze when you could be getting down like scotch neat or something off the grapevine or perhaps a refreshing Hendricks and tonic. 

Anyway, to bring it back to the beginning of this post, "Try a Little Tenderness" is one of the songs I play for my baby to amuse myself, except our version is about young girls who grow weary of the same old diaper. It helps to remind me in my more aggravated moments that rather than joining the baby in a flood of frustration I should just try a little tenderness. 

Cute, right? But forget all that. I was wrong. What nonsense. The thing to try is a little BABY FORMULA. 

Until now I have been an exclusive breast feeder. But the other night I was going somewhere and was not able to pump, and so for the first time ever our sprout got fed a solid 200mL of formula. I felt so guilty, even though I am actually still breastfeeding. Whatever. The point is, she slurped that ish right up, slept for eight hours solid and was a warm dumpling of satiated joy all morning afterwards. The transformation was total, like a desert traveller who survived three months on bitter sips of mud before being given a whole goatskin of Evian. Redemption. Inner light. It was so awesome. Love and peace reigned for hours on end. So yes. Forget tenderness. Try a little formula instead. 

P.S. I just can't end this without noting that I am still breastfeeding so please do not yell at me. I'm not sure who I'm addressing this to other than my inner demons, who wear soft hair and natural fabrics and look surprisingly like members of the La Leche League. 

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

The big news today is that the Duchess Kate has pushed out a new heir to the British throne.  Well done, Kate. You spent your pregnancy skinny and attractively dressed, and now you've given birth before me. You, Kim Kardashian, my friend A-, and another lady whose pregnancy I've observed from the shadows of Facebook. All of you have babies. I have performance anxiety, is-my-baby-okay anxiety and swollen feet.

So far actual medical intervention is unnecessary. Thus the mature thing to do would be to relax, wait and enjoy what everyone keeps telling me are the last moments I will ever have to myself ever again for the rest of my life ever until we are all dead. 

Instead, I'm proactively implementing a boatload of tricks based on superstition and magical thinking. 

There is a lot of advice out there about how to get things going. In fact, from the moment you are pregnant the Internet tells you that if you so much as sneeze too lustily your baby might detach and fall onto the floor. I therefore avoided large quantities of raspberry leaf tea, rosemary, ginger (the list goes on) for the last nine months. In retrospect, that was stupid. 

It may not be scientific, but since we're talking about home remedies, I think my anecdotal evidence is at least as valuable as your double-blind study. 

It is therefore with great confidence that I can now reveal this list of Things That Do Not Induce Labor. 

1. Sex. People give all kinds of reasons why sex supposedly helps get the ball rolling, ranging from the prostaglandin in semen to all the bouncing to the oxytocin to the belief that orgasms might turn into contractions. It makes so much sense, right? Unfortunately, according to my careful research, this is all nonsense. Total bollocks. 

Sex causes pregnancy (I think, although I may need more data points). It does not end pregnancy. In fact, there is even real science to back up the fact that it doesn't end pregnancy. Sorrow. 

2. Rosemary.  I avoided rosemary tea for the last few months because I had some vague idea that this fine herb, when consumed in big quantities, induces labor. Yesterday I ate a branch of rosemary the size of one those pine boughs that you usually use to decorate your Christmas mantelpiece. Nothing. 

3. Ginger. See above. Also see above for pretty much every herbal tea except, like, lemon and mint. 

4. Magic birth tea made out of cinnamon, cloves, ginger and verbena. I'm on my fourth liter of the stuff, although at this point it's mostly because the bitter flavor is starting to grow on me.  Nary a cramp, though. 

5. Tampons dripped with evening primrose and clove oil. This one's great because the tip was accompanied by a warning to not try this right before I go to bed because "you don't want to have to get right back up an hour later!" I sort of felt like anything this counterintuitive and inconvenient would have to work, but sadly, no. 

6. Walking uphill and downhill. This one, along with "lifting things," is kind of like saying that life causes you to go into labor, which I suppose will always eventually be true.  

7. Eating spicy food. Last night we spent 50 euros on order-in Indian food. Nope. 

8. Trying to induce labor. I think I'm just going to have to give up and go with the flow. Unless medical intervention is necessary (and knock on wood it won't be!), this baby will come when it comes, right? Anyway, my midwife says being really relaxed induces labor....