THE BOOBS SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT ALL

You all know I should be on the NHS ads for breastfeeding having fed the kids on average till the age of two. I have never given a baby a bottle in my life and would need to read the instructions if I had to! So you would have have thought my boobs wouldn't be able to experience anything new on the feeding front. I have had thrush on the breasts from all the kids' mouths in the early days. I've had blocked ducts at least three or four times with each baby so I know all about cabbage and boob-combing. I've had mastitis (the worst illness of my life - like flu with knobs on) once with Charlotte at nine months, and once with Léon so know the first signs of that mean beg for antibiotics instantly before you are shaking so much you can't get them into your mouth. When I had Anna I got cracked nipples for the first time ever and had to resort to those awful nipple protectors at least on four occasions. I cursed the little besom for sucking wrongly but got on with it.
This week, however, has been the worst of my eight or nine years of breastfeeding. Last Tuesday night my left breast felt like I was developing a blocked duct so I had a hot bath and combed. No result... so I went to bed having taken two nurofen and slept a total of 35 minutes in the whole night. My temperature soared, my clothes were soaked through and I was in a great deal of pain. I assumed mastitis and begged for the antibiotics on Wednesday. I managed half a night's sleep but again had to change all my clothes and was still in agony. Friday didn't see it improve and it was starting to nip.
I noticed Amaia's mouth was white again - did I have mastitis with thrush thrown in? I googled.
I seemed to be showing the signs of the thrush being inside the ducts rather than on the nipple. Inside I was on fire and I could feel swollen lumps all the way along at least one of the ducts between my nipple and my underarm. Even when you know it is feeding-related, feeling tangible lumps inside your breast sits uneasy with you as a woman :-(
I have now been on a different set of antibiotics since Monday and have had oral thrush treatment. I can now almost touch my breast but often get a short hot stabbing pain on the inside and feeding has gone from excruciating to vaguely unpleasant so I have a way to go yet. I just hope when I finish my antibiotics tomorrow things continue to improve slowly because the next 22 months are going to be a nightmare otherwise!

WOOLLY BOOTS WITH LACES

Socks and shoes have always been an issue with tiny babies. Apart from the ridiculously expensive Baby Gap socks I have never had a baby who managed to keep his or hers on at all. When you are born around Xmas, you don't want to be hanging around barefoot. Until I had Anna, I had persevered with countless lost socks and shoes and frozen toes. When Anna was born Thomas's Danish cousin sent us a pair of home-knitted booties. I put them on her one day without thinking about it and realized that the laces meant they didn't fall off, and therefore the socks also stayed on. Bingo! By the time Anna was six months old, her one pair of booties was pretty scabby but had definitely proved useful. This time round, my mum must have remembered me raving about them because she knitted Amaia five or six pairs. I, too, made her a pair so Amaia has never had cold feet in her life! I'm a bit annoyed at myself for not thinking of this earlier. I guess very few people knit baby clothes now that shop-bought clothes are actually cheaper, but when it comes to shoes I'd definitely recommend these over any of the cheaper shop models that, like the socks, simply fall off. Time for back-to-basics on the baby shoe front!

PUBLIC OR PRIVATE?

Now here's an example of a completely irrelevant piece of journalism. I clicked on it having worked for exactly twenty years in the private sector surrounded by friends in the public domain so considered myself well placed to analyse it. But comparing one random person in the private sector with anyone is utterly pointless given private companies set their own agenda.

So for all you public workers out there who are rushing to hand in your notice tomorrow to pursue a job in the private sector here's a bit of the UK private sector I know (from my own experience, and that of other family members).

Core hours are probably between 35 and 38 hrs a week.

Salary is probably on a par with or slightly lower than public sector for equivalent post. With rises of 1 - 1.5% annually for 10 years many private sector jobs have nosedived behind public equivalents. (For example when I started work in publishing in 1991 I earned 30% more than a school teacher, by the time I left the sector 18 years later I was 30% below a school teacher with the same number of years experience because of low annual rises and salary scales that had been abandoned but not replaced.)

Holidays 25 days a year - but taking them given your workload is unlikely so count on losing 3 or 4 at the end of every holiday year.

Overtime - Twenty years ago rates were written into your contract, ten years later rates were dropped as was overtime, now overtime is an everyday occurrence, compulsory, unpaid, and you never hear a 'thank you' - this is the case for all the private sector job holders I know.

Company pension - final salary schemes were phased out 7 or 8 years ago for the most part and thereafter those on final schemes have become easy picking in every round of redundancies but this is of course simply 'coincidence'.

Bonus - 1% if you were eligible, in my own case I was not and never received a bonus in 20 years though other family members have. Often private sector workers receive an annual bonus instead of a salary increase so they have, to all intents and purposes, been on a pay freeze for most of the last 5 years - not great for mortgage purposes.

Benefits - Healthcare discounts and money-saving offers at selected retailers. Again in my case this was not something I was eligible for though other family members have received these.

Union membership - if you want to pay every month you could join a union but no one will strike or complain because of job insecurity so it is irrelevant.

Something the article doesn't mention is sick pay. Sick pay is something public workers take for granted - I have even heard of NHS workers applying for holidays to be retaken when they've fallen sick on holiday. In my experience sick pay in the private sector is irrelevant as being off sick just isn't allowed - with redundancies hanging over you always, being off sick became a luxury about 4 or 5 years ago.

TWO NEWBORN BABIES

Today I took Amaia to visit her new playmate 'Lana'. Lana was born exactly six weeks to the day after Amaia. Because Lana weighed only 60% of Amaia's weight at birth, and because Amaia has had six weeks to gorge herself on breast milk seeing them together was quite comical. Technically they are both newborn babies but with Lana still too little to fit in the 0-3 month clothes and Amaia already into the 3-6 month size despite her tender age, I don't think many people would consider Amaia a newborn beside Lana! Amaia looks like she could eat her for dinner. Funnily enough after I left Lana to drive home, I bumped into a friend who hadn't seen Amaia yet. Her own kids are grown up so she took one look at Amaia and announced Awwwh - she's soooo tiny! It's all relative, I guess!

ASDA

This is the mother and child row of parking spaces at Newton Mearns ASDA today. Needless to say when I did find a parking space, I also found the shelves of the supermarket fairly empty. I guess the delivery trucks were having trouble negotiating the weather conditions. So we're having a bit of an improvised dinner!

OUCH

I hadn't managed to get out all day, not even for the school runs but with the rain on, I decided to attempt it at 3pm. The blue car was the obvious choice, being heavier and more powerful. I jumped in, turned the key and bang, the car sunk. I jumped out and saw I'd blown a tyre. I found that a bit odd, given I hadn't actually moved so couldn't have run over anything under the snow. The thought of jacking up such a big, heavy seven-seater didn't appeal, especially in the snow so I checked with Tesco Breakdown and was pleased to hear that my policy covered someone coming out and changing it for me. Within the hour a bloke with a jack knocked my door. He said it'd take ten minutes. Of course, he then rang the doorbell to say he'd found the wheel spring had snapped bursting my tyre, so firstly my tyre couldn't be changed, secondly I would need to be towed to a garage for repair and finally he couldn't get the tow truck down my street until the snow had melted. That was Thursday. The street and car are still in the same state and the seven of us are wondering how to walk as far as Silverburn to go birthday shopping for both Mum and Amanda. I am considering going out with my hairdryer on an extension cable if it hasn't gone before Monday. Thomas is going down south next week so I am trying to work out how to drive five kids and myself to school, not that five need to go to school but I can't really leave Anna home to babysit Amaia while I do the school run! It's going to be another fun week.

DECAPITATED SNOWMAN

I went out into my garden and found this sitting on the garden table. I have to say it reminded me of many of the old Calvin and Hobbes snowman sketches. Should I be worried about Charlotte's psyche?

AMAIA-LÉON

I've been saying since day one that Amaia looks more like Pudge than she looks like the others. Today I happened upon this photo of Léon taken at five weeks. There's a definite similarity... 

LEARNING TO GARDEN

My parents have always lived in a house but to say they were never keen gardeners would be an understatement! They like a wee bit lawn, some quartz chips and an ornamental plant pot or two and would happily have someone else cut the grass if money was no object. They have never to my knowledge grown anything to eat: no herbs or fruit or veg. Consequently, what I learned from them was that instead of weeding, you cover your garden in plastic, put stones on top and then pots, thus removing the need to weed. Being more of a flowers and food girl, I didn't follow their polythene advice and therefore spend a good deal of my summers weeding. Thomas's mother was over seeing Amaia the second week in January. Brita is a big gardener. She went out to weed one day. I found this a bit strange given the baltic conditions but she explained that weeds are really easy to pull out in their dormant January phase. I went out to my raspberry patch to test her theory. The patch that is a day's work mid-summer took less than an hour to weed in January, and the weeds were so weak I could pull them out without a tool. I was amazed. Forty two, and just learning to garden now!

NO MORE DAHL :-(

Looks like I'm off lentil dahl for lent... possibly till Easter 2011 in fact. I had a lovely bowl of it on Saturday at 6pm. Around 8pm Amaia started to grump and grizzle, then the farting started, followed by the burping and screaming. The ill effects finally subsided enough to let her sleep at 3-19am. Nice as it was, it just wasn't worth the fall-out :-(

WHAT A PAIN IN THE ARSE WEEKEND

André was having the three big kids this weekend. I was looking forward, therefore, to advancing leaps and bounds on our book-moving project given we only had a two year old and a newborn to look after! I quickly rushed to ASDA before getting the biggies from school on Friday. With Anna and Amaia in a baby/toddler trolley and Léon walking by my side I started to slowly tick off the items on my list. It was about 2-25pm. Suddenly I realized I didn't have till 3pm to shop because Marcel gets out early on a Friday. I picked up Léon and threw him in the trolley along with my shopping and started running round like a mad thing. A trolley full of goods and three kids is quite heavy to corner with at high speed. My back is still a little delicate given it is only 5 weeks since I had a baby elephant but I got to the checkout with five minutes to spare.

I threw the shopping in the car and lifted in kids 3, 4 and 5 then zoomed round to the high school just in time for kid 1, then down to the primary for kid 2. On the way home I heard a crash and realized my box of eggs, thrown precariously into the boot, had upended and smashed. On arrival at the house I found my parents had dropped by for coffee so didn't want to dwell on mopping up the car. I ran out quickly with a pack of baby wipes. Three eggs had smashed and run from the boot, between the two back seats and under the three middle seats. I couldn't be bothered opening the side doors so stretched in as far as I could, hurting my back a second time. Eggy disaster was minimised.

I came in and went to change Amaia's nappy. My back, I thought, gave a little twinge. By an hour later I couldn't sit down. My bum/back/tail bone was in agony. I have been unable to sit, stand, turn in bed all weekend. Moving books has been impossible, in fact sitting drinking a coffee has even been a complete 'pain in the arse'. What a bloody nightmare! I have no idea what I've done or whether tomorrow will be any better :-(

I DIDN'T MEAN GIANT COOKIES!

Why is it you need to spell everything out to kids? You ask them to fill the dishwasher, they fill it but don't switch it on.. You buy them a laundry basket for their room and they fill it (once you've pointed out its existence) but it still doesn't occur to them to bring their basket down to the washing machine. You tell them to go make cookies, because they're finding being off school boring, but unless you state expected dimensions, you find they've thrown together cookies bigger than your oven using so much Belgian chocolate, you need to take out a second mortgage!

MEDICINE INSTRUCTIONS

Don't you love medicine instructions? We've all had the cough mixture for four year olds that warns them not to drive or operate machinery if the medicine makes them drowsy. Poor Amaia (aka the mushroom factory) has been suffering terribly from oral thrush since she was a few days old. We're on our third bottle of Nystan suspension and she's only five weeks old. I had to laugh though when I read the label. Unlike the other two bottles where the pharmacist had typed 1ml four times a day, this week's bottle says: 1ml four times a day, shake well before use, finish the course, keep in mouth for at least two minutes before swallowing! Now I know at five weeks Amaia is more advanced than she was at three or four but I am not sure she is able to follow this advice to the letter just yet!

DID I MOVE HOUSE?

When I moved in with Thomas he had a large library of books. To frighten anyone who knows me, he had about six times as many books as I'd acquired after nearly fifteen years working in publishing with a subsidised bookshop. When his one man flat became a five person flat overnight about 80% of his books were moved into storage. When we moved to the house, I moved in my books. All my books plus 20% of his are the books you've all seen in our house over the last four years. They take up two whole walls of the TV room, one wall of the living room, one in the hall, one wall in the office and two shelves in the kitchen. Added to that each child has a shelf or two of kids' books in his or her room. Our storage room ran out at the weekend :-( so we went to retrieve the seventeen large boxes of books (see this photo for the size of one), all my old paper photos from 20 years with a professional slr (you can imagine - if I start scanning now, I may fit them in before I die), and all his papers (approximately ten large shoe boxes). With six boxes still off-site, we have lost access to the living room and dining room already. Thomas now needs to go through these and pile them into the categories: keep downstairs, keep in the loft, give to charity, sell, bin or burn, wrap up as Xmas presents to be given until 2050! I can't help because they aren't mine, so this needs to be fitted in after work, meaning it will potentially take weeks. Of course I already live in dread of where the 'sell' pile will be stored while the countless obscure tomes fester on Amazon for the rest of eternity. The loft pile is also an issue given Thomas hasn't floored the loft yet :-\ We can, of course, no longer have guests other than the odd individual who can be given a coffee in our TV room. We certainly can't have anyone stay over as the living room futon is no longer visible at all. Walking through my house makes me want to run and hide and cry. The health visitor is likely to start treating me for post-natal depression, I am becoming so unstable - not realizing it is post-book-retrieval depression instead! I have found one way of helping out. I went through our current shelf yesterday and threw out 80% of my own reference books to make space for his stuff. I figure anything non-fiction can be googled these days. If I never see another reference book, it won't upset me. But one question does puzzle me... before Thomas met me, how long was he planning to live to actually get through all this crap? 180 years maybe?

CAN HAIR LIKE THIS BE A FAMILY TRAIT?

Marcel, Charlotte, Léon and myself have no problem getting up in the morning and just 'going'. We can have a shower if we're in the mood, or simply dash out if we've got washed the night before. Anna on the other hand looks like this every single morning in life so needs to wash her hair before facing the world. I assumed things would improve as her hair got longer and heavier but it is actually getting more unmanageable! Thomas has the same problem, despite being bald his hair does this too and can actually stand on end as soon as it reaches about 3mm in length. And worryingly, he assures me it was much worse when he was a long-haired 70s child. I already have my fingers crossed that Amaia has followed our side of the family or we'll have to fit several showers into the morning school routine from age 4 :-(

CAN YOU AFFORD KIDS?

I've been tidying and changing bedrooms around in my house since Hogmanay. While moving Marcel I found the shoes we bought him for my wedding just less than a year ago. They are size 5 (38). He threw them downstairs and they happened to land beside his current school shoes which are size 9 (43). Imagine how many pairs of shoes that means I've had to buy in the last eleven and a half months (with almost no money)! And then multiply that by five!

GORDY BOO 'BIKED' MY TOES!

Anna has been amusing us linguistically recently. She has taken to inventing her own very expressive verbs. It started on Xmas day when her cousin Gordon got a new bike. Hampered by the subzero weather, he was trying it out in the hall in his flat as Anna walked out of the dining room. As he ran her over she indignantly wailed Gordy Boo biked my toes! This week another yell was heard from the dining room, this time in our own house. She walked into the kitchen holding her hand aloft crying No-no (her name for Léon) doored my fingers! As a lexicographer, I can't wait for the next instalment of Anna's dictionary of verbs :-)

DEALING WITH TERRORISTS

One thing I have learned over the years is the way to deal with these angelic little terrorist trolls when they decide they'd rather you held them all day than spent time doing dishes, washing clothes and the likes. Although this little cherub is more than happy for me to break my back wearing her while doing chores around the house, I am still trying to work out exactly how to wear her in this carrier while helping Thomas floor the loft. Having her on my front and crawling around isn't ideal, and she gets in the way of both the hammer and the screw driver. I guess I need to stick to painting ceilings for the next few weeks!

WHEN TO EDIT?

Thomas and I often look at Photoshop Disasters. I am often amazed at the quality of the things some news media publish and momentarily consider giving up the day job to become a full-time photo editor. Many people overlook the simplest rules when editing digital photos such as colour blending, duplication, failing to remove all the evidence, the symmetry rule, removing too much, plain stupidity etcetc
I have to say the one they uploaded on my birthday made me smile - how was this picture created and when did it become simpler to go to all this trouble rather than simply taking an actual photo of an air stewardess in front of a plane at your local airport anyway? Does no one ever stop and analyse that?

ESKIMO KISSES

When I was little my Dad used to call rubbing noses Eskimo kisses. The other day the kids were kissing and hugging and Thomas asked if they knew how to rub noses instead - instead of rubbing their noses together as we intended, they each rubbed their own nose with their hand - it was very cute!