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With “not so little anymore” cousin Oliver
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Ladies who lunch | ||
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| “I think I’ll read this one next…” | Purple hat | In the bath with Small Ted |
Tasty stick… |
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| “Speed dialing Canada’s a breeze!” | Peeka… | …boo! | Breaking daddy’s glasses |
| May 31, 2002 Little Nova’s really sick now. She’s got a horrible chesty cough, and her temperature was up to about 102 degrees before I managed to bring it down with Calpol. She spent most of the day lying against my chest, either napping or staring listlessly at French Open tennis. By necessity, I did the same, especially as I couldn’t reach the remote… (We have to keep our array of remote controls out of Nova’s reach — not only does she extract the batteries and suck on them, she also pushes combinations of buttons that produce all sorts of unwanted results that we didn’t even know were possible, such as displaying the time in gigantic numbers in the centre of the screen.) I doubt we’re going to make it to Aphra’s birthday party tomorrow… |
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| May 28, 2002 Poor Nova has the most ferocious cold. No matter how often I wipe her nose, every time I turn around there are two thick tusks of mucus protruding from each nostril again. I’ve slathered her nose and upper lip with vaseline, which doesn’t do much for her appearance, but does make the wiping a bit less traumatic. At least she’s in good spirits, if a bit clingier than usual… If this cold doesn’t clear up soon I’m going to have to impose a quarantine. The thought of taking a congested baby on an intercontinental flight doesn’t bear thinking about. |
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| May 26, 2002 More socialising… popped round to John and Anne’s next door for birthday drinks (at 12pm — those two may be in their 80s but they can drink circles around us), where Nova ate three cheese biscuits and made a snuck a few crisps as well, and then down to Alyssa’s in the afternoon for Jamie’s 1st birthday tea. We didn’t stay long, as Nova wasn’t feeling that great — snuffly, drooly, and her eye seems to be watering as well… It sort of looks like hay fever, except I thought little babies didn’t get hay fever. She perked up a bit when we got back home, and ate a reasonable dinner of poached salmon, potato/sweet potato mash, and broccoli, followed by raspberry yogurt. Here’s hoping she sleeps well tonight, and wakes up feeling a bit better. |
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| May 25, 2002 Trevor and Marni had us round for dinner in their new flat last night. We fed Nova at home, changed her into her pjs and popped her in the car. Unfortunately she was so stimulated by the people, new environment, slidy hardwood floor etc. that it took a bit to get her settled in her travel cot upstairs. All the time I was giving her a bottle, she was chattering away between mouthfuls, a steady stream of dadadas and doits and brmmmbrmmms. Eventually she dropped off mid sentence, and I tucked her up and went down for dinner. They’d made a delicious spinach dip in a hollowed out loaf of bread to start, followed by mushroom risotto, asparagus and Caesar salad, and a fruit and ice cream cake to celebrate Trevor’s birthday. It was a really nice evening, but poor Adam was so tired (he’s been working until 4am then getting up at 7am last few nights) and by 10pm he was nodding off on the couch. Nova was so soundly asleep that I got her all the way to the car before she woke. She nodded off again on the drive home, but she got pretty indignant when I went to get her from the car seat. It took another bottle to settle her, but she slept through until 7:30am. |
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May 24, 2002 As soon as I put her down after breakfast, she heads straight to the CDs and empties all the shelves she can reach. She tears the little booklets from the Patricia Kaas and Jeff Healey CDs (I don’t know why she picks on these ones, but she always does). Next she heads to the bookcase and pulls off all the books that are stacked on top of other books, swipes the bamboo holders off the window ledge, then heads for the kitchen. She pulls all the food off the bottom shelf of the pantry, and empties all the tupperware and attachments for the food processor from the swing cupboard. It takes her about ten minutes, and there’s no harm in it, but there are a few cupboards with things like china and cleaning products that I don’t want her getting into. I’m having a devil of a time installing the safety devices I purchased earlier this week. Our cupboards aren’t designed to work with standard safety catches, and while I managed to jerry-rig one on the china cupboard, I had to abandon the one under the sink, and ended up buying a sliding bolt for the utility cupboard. I also bought this fridge “lock”, which I wrenched from its moorings the first time I opened the fridge, and Nova now routinely tears the safety corners from the dining room table. |
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| May 22, 2002 Adam and I watched “Planet of the Apes” after Nova went to bed last night. I mention it because Charlton Heston’s love interest — a comely lass fetchingly attired in a scrap of burlap — was called Nova. Or rather he chose the name Nova for her, as the human race had been reduced to a semi-wild state and lost the ability to speak. Even more surprisingly, one of Taylor’s (Heston’s) fellow astronauts was called Landyn, which means that two of my parents four grandchildren have the same names as characters from “Planet of the Apes”, and they aren’t the most common names either. I kept a close eye out for apes named Drew or Ceinwen after that, but didn’t notice one. They tended toward the Roman — Cornelius, Lucius and so on… |
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| May 20, 2002 We took Nova swimming at the Archway Leisure Centre yesterday afternoon. She looked so cute in her little red swimsuit with a polka-dot flounce (courtesy of Jules and Mary). Aside from the cleanliness factor — I don’t think I’ve found a London swimming pool that comes within a mile of the hygiene standards we take for granted in Canada — it was great. She loved all the noise and bustle, and was much more relaxed in the water this time. They had a few floating chair things, with built in leg holes to keep the baby upright, and she had a good kick in that, and even managed to propel herself around, to her delight. It worked much better than the tiny baby flutterboard, which she seemed to think was an oversized chew toy… In the change room after, she was crowing — that’s the best word to describe it –with excitement. Unfortunately, she’s been running a temperature since last night. She woke us up at 1:30am, and was very hot to the touch. We couldn’t get a straight answer out of the strip thermometer, but gave her a good dose of Calpol and took her into bed with us. She had a restless night, and is still feeling pretty warm this morning. I hope it doesn’t develop into anything worse. The last time I took her swimming, she was in hospital with bacterial pneumonia three days later… |
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| May 18, 2002 Adam came home with the fixings for a terrific pasta dish last night, and whipped up farfalle with a roast cherry tomato/olive/feta sauce while I got Nova off to sleep. I do 99% of the cooking, and it is such a treat when someone makes me a meal. We had a nice bottle of chardonnay and a green salad… and crashed out in front of the telly by 9:45. Nova may be sleeping through the night these days, but she still gets us up at 6am every morning. Nova hasn’t had a breastfeed the last three nights, and she hasn’t seemed to miss it… I skipped a day a month ago, but it was accidental (she fell asleep before I had a chance to breastfeed her) and I wasn’t psychologically ready to cut her (or me) off at that stage. I had always intended to stop by her first birthday, but didn’t have a particular schedule in mind. I thought maybe she’d go off it, but if anything she got keener as time went on. The health visitor recommended supplementing her with bottles, as she was still waking in the night at eight months, and that seemed to do the trick. I really enjoyed breastfeeding, and am so happy I was able to do it, but I think the time was right to shut up shop. |
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May 17, 2002 This afternoon I popped round for tea and frolics at their house. Pasc is lovely with Nova, and is possibly going to be our childminder when I return to work in July. I hope it works out — Nova seems happy with her, and they live less than 50 yards away (close enough for our hands-free phone to work in their back garden) so it couldn’t be more convenient. Fay is in nursery in the morning, and Sid starts school in September, so she’d be on her own with Nova part of the day, then the two little girls, and only have the three kids for an hour or so before we picked up Nova. There are some details to arrange still, but I really hope it works out… |
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| May 15, 2002 Took Nova to visit Karl Marx’s grave with Sue, Phil and Joe yesterday morning. (She didn’t seem particularly impressed…) I always enjoy visiting Highgate Cemetery. We didn’t do the guided tour of the old section, what with the babies, but spent an hour or so wandering about looking at the various graves and monuments until the weather turned against us, and we made a break for the Waterlow House cafe. In the afternoon I drove Sue, Phil and Joe to the Holloway Road tube while Marni watched Nova. It turns out they flew over with the same charter outfit that we are using and said it was pretty good, so that’s a relief. (I had to hand over the full amount before they had even started flying, which was weighing on my mind…) |
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May 13, 2002 More horrible weather… which is a real shame because it would be great to get outside with Nova and Joe-the-human-dynamo. We did brave the Highgate Woods playground (after my successful showdown with the bank), but it was so cold and miserable that we didn’t last long. Joe soaked his trousers going down the slide, while Nova sat on the G2 section of the Guardian and swung back and forth in the rain. Spent the rest of the day indoors… Nova has taken an aversion to her bath. She just doesn’t want to get in and once she’s in, she won’t sit down. She had a bit of a tumble in the bath at Jules and Mary’s but it didn’t seem to particularly bother her at the time, so we’re puzzled as to what’s going on. I try not to make an issue of it (and it is actually easier to wash her when she’s standing up), but I hope it’s just a passing thing… |
| May 12, 2002 Went to a “coming out” tea for baby Oliver this afternoon at Freddy and Beulah’s for the extended family — Stella and Leslie, and Andrew and Sylvie and Simon and Mel and their collected kids — I think there were twenty of us. Beulah put on a lavish spread of crustless sandwiches, scones and cream, teabread, mocha squares, fairy cakes, lemon meringue pie… Nova sat on my lap and worked her way through a smoked salmon and an egg sandwich, followed by a whole fairy cake. She didn’t even get much on the carpet, although she did cause me to drop some blackcurrant jam on the beautiful white table cloth (sorry Beulah…) Sue and Phil and their almost two year old son Joe arrived this evening. They are staying with us for a couple of days before heading back to Phil’s parents. Joe was only 6 months old and yet to crawl the last time I saw him, and my how he has changed. He’s a tempest of energy — I don’t think I saw him still for more than a few minutes. Sue’s a friend of mine from UBC, so we go back almost twenty years… |
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May 11, 2002 Well, the new car arrived yesterday! Adam picked it up after work and drove home in it, and it is beautiful. After I put Nova down I went out and sat in it, and pressed the different buttons — CD player, air conditioning, sunroof etc. It’s good fun being able to open the car doors with the remote control thingy as well. I opened and shut the doors from the dining room a few times, just because I could. The Volvo has done good service, but we really did need something more reliable. It’ll be so nice to have a car you know will start and don’t worry that it will die in the middle of the road when you drive it. This is the first car I’ve ever had that isn’t at least a dozen years old, that costs more than a couple of hundred pounds, and that doesn’t require “specialist knowledge” to drive. It was just the thing to take my mind off the bank card fiasco. Earlier that afternoon, I’d bundled Nova up and gone to the Lloyds bank to take out some cash for the weekend. The transaction went through fine until the part where I was waiting for my money. The machine beeped and beeped and beeped, then made a kind of a burping sound and said “We have retained your card — please contact your branch.” Assuming it was a problem with the Lloyds card, I foolishly put in my NatWest card, only to have the same thing happen. Although it was four in the afternoon, it wasn’t possible to contact my branch, as they keep the Victorian hours of 10-3, Monday to Friday. After a frustrating half hour hanging on the phone and speaking to various nameless, blameless call centre drones I discovered that I could do exactly nothing until Monday morning, and that they were planning to destroy my NatWest card “as a security measure”. I think that call centres are the most fiendish development of the last decade. Should you have a complaint, it is almost completely impossible to speak to anyone with any authority or responsibility, and they’ve all been trained in this infuriatingly patronising customer handling technique where they treat you as the problem to be solved, not the thing you are calling about. |
| May 9, 2002 We’ve had Blaine and Anne Rowe staying for the past few days, which has been really nice. They are a lovely couple from Prince George, who lived in the next block to us. Blaine taught me French in high school, and before they arrived I wondered how it would feel to call him Blaine instead of Mr. Rowe (completely fine). Yesterday he said, “You know, I taught French to four of the five of you kids”, meaning Greg, me, David and Wendy. Nova’s been hard work for the last few days. She is very clingy and quick to cry over the slightest thing. She’s still got a bad cold, and shows some signs of teething as well, but although we’ve hung her upside down and inspected her gums we can’t see any teeth breaking through. She’s still eating well, and tonight she tucked away a healthy serving of spaghetti with pesto sauce, steamed broccoli, a large breadstick, and a strawberry yogurt. |
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| May 8, 2002 Well, Arsenal have done the double, so “up the Arse” as their supporters say. (For our non British readers, doing the double means they have won both the league title and the FA cup in the same season.) Needless to say, Adam is exceedingly impressed with this achievement. He’s planning to get Nova a little Arsenal babygro to memorialise the event, but he’s been saying that since she was born, so I won’t hold my breath. |
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May 6, 2002 Bella wasn’t quite sure what to make of Nova this time. She’s moved on from being the kind of baby that lies there and lets you stroke her hand, to the kind of baby that grabs your new purse and stuffs it in her mouth, that breaks up your train tracks, knocks your toast on the floor etc. but is still too small to play or negotiate with. We were planning to head back on Sunday afternoon, but Nova had such an unsettled night, that after lunch out at a restaurant in Bury, and afternoon tea with some friends of Jules and Mary we were too exhausted to face the drive. Unfortunately she was even worse on Sunday evening, and bellowed so loudly that poor Bella was driven from her bedroom to the relative quiet of her parent’s bed. Even more unfortunately (for me), she wouldn’t let anyone but mommy comfort her. I spent from 10pm to 1am trying to settle her, before finally bringing her down to the livingroom where she fell asleep on my stomach watching late night television. We think she may be teething again, although she has a rotten cold as well… Jules and Mary finally saw the back of us about 9am this morning, when we headed off with our tiny terror, two bags of clothes for Nova, and a lovely “big girl” front facing car seat! |
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| May 4, 2002 Antonia and Oliver came around yesterday afternoon and the two cousins hung out. Nova seemed to regard him as an oversized toy, and was keen to poke and prod and pull. He took it all in good humour, and gave us some lovely smiles. It is so nice when babies get to the smiling stage. He’s getting so big, and although Nova is much longer there’s only a few pounds in weight between them. Nova had quite an adventurous dinner last night, of ratatouille with quinoa, followed by a chunk of raw apple and a quarter of a kiwi fruit. I thought the kiwi was quite sharp, and didn’t really expect her to like it but I think she enjoyed the new texture. She is quite insistent on feeding herself at the moment. I’d intended to give her the soft chunks of aubergine and courgette to eat with her hands and feed her the quinoa on a spoon, but in the end I just put a mound of it on her plate and let her get on with it. |
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| May 3, 2002 Adam and I had one of those all too rare evenings out last night when Trevor and Marnie — Canadian friends who are staying with us while they find a flat in London — babysat. We went for dinner to a Greek restaurant in Archway we’ve been meaning to try for ages. The menu was based around grilled meats, but they had something called the fish meze — “a selection of cold and hot dishes served in a leisurely style” — that sounded up our alley. It started with the usual suspects — hummus, taramasalata, greek salad, pitta — as well as pickled anchovies, and marinated prawns and squid. This was followed by a huge platter with two big fish and veggie kebabs. Very nice meal, but not a great bargain we thought, until the kebabs were followed by a small dish of grilled king prawns. And two large salmon steaks. “That was very nice,” Adam said as the waitress cleared the platter. “Oh, you haven’t had the fish yet” she said, and returned with a whole grilled white fish and a bowl of chips. As much as we like fish, it was a bit too much of a good thing… |
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| May 2, 2002 Went to a great new playgroup at the Chomeley Evangelical Church yesterday. It was much larger than the other two groups we’ve been to, and there were a lot more babies Nova’s age. As I put her down she was off like a shot seeking out new toys and meeting other babies. A lot of the interaction seems to be about tussling over the same toy. She was certainly able to hold her own, and at one point removed a Fisher Price console from a little girl old enough to say, “Mummy, that small baby has taken my toy!” I went with another local mom, Tracy, but everyone really friendly, and I had any number of those baby-related conversations you get into with other new parents. Nova was pumped up by the whole experience it took a while to calm her down when we got home. |
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