Mother In Law's Malade Imaginaire

Mother-in-Law’s Malade Imaginaire

I don’t know why but my mother in law has two rather strange habits, one is that she is a clean freak –but since I hate cleaning, I’ve grown to embrace this quality. The second is that she is a hypochondriac! Everytime we eat anything, she seems to have a ‘reaction’ worthy of hours of notation and discussion preferably at the dinner table. Not to mention the hours she spends finding problems with her skin, hands,feet, and other useful organs. This never stops her from changing her diet or all of her overly strong detergents-that is because imho, most of these malfunctions, disfunctions and disagreeable diseases entertain her. It is her hobby. Being from a family, with (thank God) reasonably good health and an insistence upon it…I was brought up to just wait as any unpleasantness should pass and if not go to the doctors and get rid of it a.s.a.p.-certainly not to discuss it publicly and in regards to anything involving the stomach – do not go into detailed description to the point of nauseating strangers again PARTICULARLY AT THE SUPPER TABLE! But hey, that’s just me…

Anyway, since this sort of mindset has –I think-helped my family retain good health for centuries, I intend to breed it into our child HOWEVER, every time I leave for a few hours my MIL has a new upset that she has inflicted upon the baby. Usually it’s a long and terribly exciting tale of any gas that she may have had through out the day with colorful phrases and descriptions- you can imagine how I enjoy hearing these. (baby- I apologize if you read this one day and I have embarrassed you). Recently, upon returning from our Malta trip she notified us that the baby had ‘diarrhea’ –which seemed amazing since she’s 9months old and has NEVER had diarrhea and in fact has never vomited (something which I think is an amazing achievement for a 9mth old). It’s not that I’m saying she is immortal or her time for colds and flu like any baby will not come and go,…but I don’t really want her to inherit this fixation on illness. I think I’d much rather have her take up reading or tennis or maybe art history…but only time will tell if hypochondria, too is a communicable disease!

Buggie Free Zone

Buggie Free Zone
As you might know, we are apartment hunting in London. So, the baby and I have been pounding the pavement for months (literally) trying to find a place, except for the amazing amount of non-stroller/handicap friendly staircases in London, I can’t complain because I’m convinced I’ve been burning the baby fat (and I’ll be really peaved if I find out otherwise). However, yesterday the MIL was in town and I had a chance to view a property sans stroller! I actually had to think of how I could get there because walking with out the stroller seemed so foreign to me!

Strangely, the estate agent was a mom too and said to me, she remembered she’d gotten to a point where you don’t remember how to walk with out the stroller. It just throws you… I wonder if anybody else out there has ever had this feeling?

Cry Freedom

Cry Freedom
So, this weekend was our first entire weekend away from the baby (and the first time I spent even one night with out her in the same room). Needless to say,after packing and moving, traveling, living in terribly overpriced terribly ‘delicate’ (read breakable) Chelsea short term flat and spending the last TWO months of my life courting real estate agents while pushing baby, stroller, multiple property printouts, maps with makeshift attached carseat dragging from bottom of buggy…I was rather exhausted and between this and post-pregnancy looking more like one of Stalin's camp refugees! The good news was that my darling husband surprised me with an exotic weekend away, the bad news was that like with many husbands I had to insist on him coming up with this surprise. However, it turned out delightfully well. We went to Malta and stayed in a five star hotel, which was Marvellous. I was very proud of myself since I waited until atleast an hour had passed and I was on the bus to the airport before my first ‘check in’ call on the grandparents,whom I have realized I have living in fear of me on how to handle,carry, treat and feed the baby---just as it should be! That last comment if said allowed would have been said in lighthearted jest but let’s face it ‘nothing is ever said in jest’…

Anyway, even though we were exhausted and I was desperate to just sleep. I have had this on going sleep dep headache for I don’t know how long…
Two things seemed to stop us from getting the much needed sleep…one being that my husband is part Scottish, which means that since he’d paid for breakfast, we would be awake to eat it-even if it was doomsday! A true Scotsman never wears anything under his kilt-but that might be because he doesn’t want anything coming between him and his wallet!!! So, both days my ‘lie in’ seemed to have us up at 9am UK time! However, it wasn’t entirely his fault –the second problem was that I’ve never been to Malta and it’s FULL of important history and architecture-sadly, most of it someone else’s. Modern Malta seems to consist of people who were too rough to stay in Sicily. However, I should take that back because they were all generally polite and nice to us (even with out a baby-which many of you may know is the key to getting immediate generosity and kindness from almost all Italians and/or Mexicans).

There’s a little problem I have that no matter how tired I get, I don’t want to miss anything. Every time I go to a film festival, I find myself thinking tomorrow I’ll sleep in/go to bed early and the next thing I know I’m marching down to the first screening or tagging along for that elusive perfect party I might miss!

In the end though – I must say, Malta was wonderful and it turns out so was the baby. We still suffered from slight parental dependency and did need to check throughout the day but she was fine. I don’t know how people used to survive with out cell phones! When we came back she was happy and exhausted from an intense weekend of grandparents/baby lov-a-thon and thank God, we both took the next day off for rest –so in the end I got my rest. Now, if only I could convince my mother in law to stop coming up with new illnesses the baby might have...as she notified us that during our absence she (the baby who's never thrown up) must have had a dodgy tummy since she only ate a normal supper?!

Blog on the Wed

Blog on the Wed

So, for the last year, I have been looking forward to attending one of my best friends weddings. She’s Austrian and had planned a beautiful multi-ceremony and wedding feast in a gorgeous historical castle in the Wood Quarters of Austria. It was to be our first trip on the airplane with the baby, except SURPRISE! My husband just got hired for his new job in London and would be flying in a few days later…so, just the two of us, our two bags, a car seat and a terrible cheap stroller we bought last minute at Argos(ask me why he bought it there- I told him, everything I’ve ever bought there has broken). This stroller didn’t break though because I threw it out with great joie de vivre before we moved from Switzerland. Had we not been in a country full of clean freak informers, I would have most enjoyed throwing it from the balcony or rolling over it with the car a few times first…

So, back to the trip. To get to our fabulously glamourous fun time away, we (again read baby and me) had to take a cab to the airport, check –in, walk to the plane, be attached with a special seatbelt on the plane, we were not allowed to take said stroller on board and it was not waiting for us upon arrival…so, we (read I) got our luggage, pushed luggage trolley and stroller simultaneously through customs and out to lobby while holding a wiggly LOUD baby. We then met our friend Petra, who took us in her car to the train station, then we went through the same routine to get on and off the train, then FINALLY we were met at the station in nowhere (a.k.a. Moldau) Austria by my Tante Hilde and finally driven to her home, where all I wanted to do was sleep..or perhaps cry softly in a corner. However, because it is the woodquarters and people are REALLY REALLY wonderful. There were lots of people waiting to see us and catch up and feed us and –you get the drift. Finally, Gracie who hadn’t slept all day-she seems to have my fear of missing anything gene-finally she seemed to want to go to sleep. But because it was a strange place(or so I thought) our ‘angel’ who usually sleeps beautifully through the night, woke repeatedly on an hourly basis and woke extra early for some ‘quality time’ with mommy! You can imagine I was slightly tired at this point. Sadly, this continued for the two days till my husband came. I thought this would make things better and finally she slept through the night. I didn’t know what had come over her!

Then the day of the wedding, she started crying and crying and crying –through both civil and religious ceremony and through the salad course, fish course, game course and all of the desert courses (hey, I told you it was an Austrian wedding-it’s just not a proper Austrian wedding without a few desert courses or atleast a few entre-course chocolate opportunities!!!). Anyway, she wore us out and we finally gave in and left the wedding before the dancing had even begun – I couldn’t take it. On the way home,I thought what has happened to my angel baby? Is this the future? Is this a cruel phase? We got to the hotel and again she woke every hour screaming! We kept thinking –is it the new place? New cot? Is she too cold? Too hot? Too freaked from new surroundings? Are we moving her around too much?

We somewhat apologetically said ‘goodbye’ to our hosts and drove to Vienna. As I sat in the airport and watched what I thought to be Paul’s plane flying back to London, I looked down and saw IT staring back at me sharply...there IT was! A toothy little grin coming from our baby! She had a tooth! A perfect pearly lovely little ‘toofy’!!!! And she was showing it off to me!

Post notice-since she’s the first child, we tend to get carried away with everything –so after immediately interrupting my husband’s take off by calling with the news I’ll admit I tried to photo the tooth with my phone but common decency must have stopped us because the baby refused to show her ‘toof’ to the telephone.

Electric Cine-mom

Electric Cinem-mom
Today I had one of the weirdest experiences of my life (and this is coming from someone who’s attended Cato Kailin’s birthday party and met her gay sugardaddy while crashing the Golden Globes…). The baby and I went to the movies at ‘Electric Scream’. Every Monday, the Electric Cinema on Portobello Rd. has a three o’clock show for mommies and babies. Now, watching a movie in English with English subtitles to cover the screams emitted by the audience wasn’t too weird (in fact, it's trick I do at home), although watching it in an old fashioned theatre with a bar and trying to get one’s stroller which was somewhere deep in what was a makeshift buggieparking lot-that was weird. But the true weirdness started when as I walked toward the theatre, noticing that I was tailing…what was at first sight a few strollers and then grew into a large throng of strollers and then looking behind me and seeing there was a million mom march going on behind me!!! THAT WAS WEIRD! If you haven’t experienced this and you have a child, I would very much advise that you try it…if only for the surreal and fellini-esque quality of the experience.

It was like being in one of those Armageddon/zombie films where all of the zombies are taking over the streets marching towards civilization. Portobello Rd., which on weekends is full of tourists, was almost completely empty aside from the mom parade! Not only behind me, but once inside the long line at the ticket office and the usher offering to park your strollers in the back area that had obviously been evacuated in order to be filled like an underground valet parking area –every kind of buggy known to man wedged up cheek and jawl with one another! The only hindrance was wondering if I should have tipped the usher –for getting my double parked stroller during baby’s mid-movie meltdown

Mommy MacGuiver

Mommy MacGuiver
Today I realized that being a Mom is the closest thing to being MacGuiver. Whilst sitting at the Real Estate Agents waiting for an appointment, he said ‘oh, I’m sorry I forgot your spoon for that coffee’ and I said, ‘oh no problem, I used the baby spoon I always carry’. Earlier, the baby spoon had not only fed the baby but also amused her as a toy in the car and soothed her as a teething ring in the office. I then opened my bag to make an appointment on my ‘mom palm’ (z22-it’s fab-just a calendar, contacts and memos –none of the other ‘extras’ which no one I know actually uses). The ‘mom palm’ was attached in my very expensive looking wallet with Velcro-though you couldn’t see it. Why did I have Velcro see my earlier genius-proving blog. I then needed to hold some books together that didn’t fit under the pram. Voila, I used some of the extra yarn I’d bought to keep those mittens and shoes from vanishing …now if only I could find a way to keep her little winter hat on…

Sock Hop

Sock Hop
Girls, I am a GENIUS! You heard it here first –velcro! That’s right, I bought Velcro because whoever invented baby shoes and baby socks is the devil’s apprentice and a woman hater!!!! The dang things fall off every five minutes and when they aren’t naturally falling off-I’ve discovered my ‘little angel’ has a way of utilizing the stroller to get them off!
So -- VELCRO on the inside of the shoes will stick to the tights (still not 100% with the socks – but I think that’s because I have a very determined child). It’s days like these, I feel like I might be getting ahead just a little.

blog out the noise

Blog out the Noise
Before having a baby, I was a part of the film world,a sundance regular, a self named ‘indi-wood princess, essentially a film snob. I would watch not only foreign movies but only foreign movies such as ‘italian-fifties only’ or ‘scandinavia-only if it’s new Denmark, old Sweden and those two Finnish brother’. I would rather have chewed my own liver out of my body than watch anything with the initials J.Lo in it and the thought of paying for any movie much less one with Jim Carry –chinese water torture first please…

HOWEVER, now that I have a baby and the attention span of flea (ADD is nothing compared to mommy amnesia), I am not only in desperate need of cheap light hearted entertainment…I find I will not only watch, but love anything which anyone might refer to as ‘retarded’. Formulaic Romance story, light hearted yet completely contrived comedies where I already know what all the jokes will be before the roll of the intro credits – FANTASTIC! The more the merrier. Yesterday, I PAID to watch a film with Queen Latifa! Not to dis’ the Queen, because I like her but not as much as say Bette Davis or Liv Ullmann! But IN MOMMYVISION….She gets my Oscar vote! Recently, I even watched the entirety of Sara Jessica Parkers films…and I’d highly recommend them to anyone with an under 2.