Helpfully, May Blossom and Pipsqueak look like twins born four years apart, so I can illustrate this post with a picture of my own child to protect the identity of my niece. And yes, her hair was real. Two months ago my brother, Superchief, and sister-in-law, Doctor V, had their first baby. Pipsqueak, as she will be known on this blog, is, like both of her cousins before her, a beautiful, sparkly, dark-haired bundle of Refusal To Sleep. She is one of those babies who catch yo

Why the italics, you might ask. What has Gusto done to merit that? Nothing. Gusto is being an exemplary feline. It is the jellicle cats that are the problem around here. The cats created by T. S. Eliot in his 1939 book of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and made more annoying to the power of infinity by Andrew Lloyd-Webber in 1981. You see, about three months ago May Blossom, Garnet and I tagged along with Other Jess to a Year 6 Production of Cats at the school wher

So sweet, you’d never know they have tiny ear canals brimming with filth and germs. Nor that the one on the right is about to throw up in that car seat. My big brother emailed me today with two queries. ‘When you gonna blog again?’ and ‘How’s your wedding Adirondacks?’ The second question is easier to answer. The Adirondacks to which he refers so grammatically incorrectly are two chairs that he gave H and me for our wedding present. We got married in April 2009. He dropped of

Tomorrow is May Blossom’s third birthday. If you’d asked me three years ago what I thought my life might look like now, I would have looked at you like you were crazy, because I now realise I never really looked much further than a few days ahead. Pregnant, I could only focus on the birth. Once I had a newborn I couldn’t picture her as a toddler. As a toddler I couldn’t picture her as a pre-schooler. When I was pregnant with Garnet I couldn’t see how I could ever love another

Thing 1: Since one or other or another of his or my recent colds or ear infections or other random maladies that have blurred into one long misery I like to call Winter, baby Garnet stopped sleeping in his cot at all. He now sleeps in our bed at night, or in the car, stroller or carrier during the day. This is good because he sleeps much more soundly at night when he is with us, neither H nor I have to drag ourselves out of bed to resettle him, and he is a delicious bundle of

The state of the carpet on the stairs is too shameful to photograph, so here’s a picture of Garnet in a massive hat instead. Our new house has an upstairs and a downstairs. How fancy. The downstairs of the place was built in 1919 and the upstairs in 1981, so naturally, the previous owners (builders of the upstairs) decided to seamlessly join the two different  styles (Californian bungalow with nods to the Arts and Crafts movement and 1980s Blurgh) with a staircase I believe a

Remember when I used to write things on this blog? Those were the days, eh? Well, those days might be returning. Things are finally, hopefully, starting to settle down around here, after a few months of complete upheaval. We sold a flat, bought a house, moved all the things in the world, which it turns out we own, into the new house. And we all got sick multiple times, playing Pass The Bacteria over and over until one illness morphed into something else and no-one could remem

Because I want this to remain a mummy blog, and not morph into a beauty blog, I shall refrain from giving you the contact details of the salon I frequent for manicures. I will only reveal that it is run by the seven-year-old next door and she charges by the fingernail. In a marriage, it’s the little things that keep the romance alive. Tiny, thoughtful gestures that show your beloved that they matter. Things like taking pride in your appearance. Not letting yourself go. Becaus

‘It means he’s sad,’ I told her. ‘It’s a metaphor. Why do you think he’s sad?’ ‘I think it’s because he misses his mummy and his sister and his brother,’ she said. May Blossom is quite concerned with missing people at the moment. When I leave her, which is rarely, she frets about it beforehand, telling me she will miss me ‘so, so much’. But I’m not sure it’s really me she misses. Recently I went out without her for about five hours, and took Garnet with me. Their reunion upon

Come the week of the concert and my mum, who had bravely offered to babysit both May Blossom and Garnet, politely asked how we were going teaching Garnet to drink from a bottle. Ah, yes, that. Great! He’s really coming on, we lied. Honestly, we hadn’t tried since a few attempts when he was about four weeks old. At that point, he was pretty open to new things and happily sucked away at the newborn teat of the bottle for ages, to absolutely no effect. No matter how long it was

May Blossom at work in her office. A month or so ago we let May Blossom watch Singin’ In the Rain. We were on the hunt for a movie that wouldn’t frighten her, and that seemed to fit the bill. What I didn’t know at the time was that I would then spend hours every day afterwards explaining the finer plot points to her: why Kathy hits Lena in the face with a cream pie. Why Don Lockwood is trying to escape from his marauding fans. What fans are. Why it’s funny that Lena has an ug

Garnet has one elf ear. The other is a human ear. We are unsure what, if anything, to make of this. Garnet’s 24 days old. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster so far: lots of screaming and vomit. The screaming as been me, mostly, but the vomit’s all down to him. He has, thus far, been a very easy baby, which is extremely fortunate because I haven’t been an easy mother. Yesterday the GP had me do a multiple choice misery quiz – like those old Cosmopolitan quizzes about what kind

Our little boy was born ten days ago. Sorry it’s taken me so long to put him down and write a post to announce it. But if you smelled his head you’d understand. He is, like a Christmas blockbuster novel, unputdownable. His name is, you can rest assured, excellent, but I won’t be using it on the blog. Like his sister, he’ll go by a pseudonym. His is Garnet. That’s a nod to an ancestor of the same name ( an uncle with some large number of greats preceding) and a nod to the most

An optimist is one who happily rides her friend’s bike with no pants on. I am a pessimist. I specialise in negative visualisation. Much of my spare time, which these days is usually from 4 to 6 am when I can’t sleep, I spend constructing imaginary conversations with People Who Are Out To Get Me. At the moment, those people are usually involved in one of my many worst-case scenarios surrounding the birth of our new baby. I’ve made plans for how to stand up for myself and talk

One of the many dangerous roads of the world that are all out to get my children, according to my pregnancy-addled brain. Have you ever left the house to run a simple errand, like buying a baby’s car seat, and ended up going to three different shops, scattered to all point of the compass, and still not quite achieving your goal? Even though the whole miserable exercise took nearly five hours? I’ll bet you haven’t. You’re probably much too clever for that sort of lunacy. And y

Let’s just get this, in a six-seater version with loads of airbags. We need to get a new car. I find this simultaneously a very boring and very terrifying decision to make. Because cars cost heaps of money, as it turns out. And then they rapidly get less valuable the longer you own them. And there are many, many to choose from. Basically we want a vehicle in which we can fit two car seats. I’ve spent a lot of time recently dreaming up a panoply of worst-case-scenarios that ar

One of the many stunning gender-neutral outfits May Blossom will be handing down to her sibling. According to the medical establishment I am now 24 and a half weeks pregnant. That is more than halfway there. More than halfway to having equal numbers of parents and children in this flat, which frankly scares the bejesus out of me. At the mid pregnancy scan, which is also known as the anomaly scan (yes, Anomaly is a lovely name for a girl and it is on our list), we had the oppo

This pregnancy I have been plagued with insomnia, which is not something I have ever experienced before. I was the kid who could fall asleep in two blocks in the car, or while sitting on the front step waiting to be picked up to go to school in the morning. I have, until now, remained a good sleeper. But these days, about four nights a week, I wake around 3 and don’t drop off again until ten minutes before May Blossom starts her morning litany of requests for pasta, peanut bu

Here’s a blurry picture of the creature to be known henceforth as NB. Those are the initials of its in utero name, but could equally stand for New Born, Next Baby, Nota Bene or, optimistically, No Bother. (Or Nasal Bone, which may be why NB is stamped next to its Nasal Bone.) I’m twelve weeks pregnant, so I’ve finally given myself permission to write about it. You may have been wondering – or you may not have, I do realise you have other things on your mind – why this blog ha

That sort of casual attitude is exactly how I did NOT approach breastfeeding. I approached it with a delightful cocktail of fear, apprehension, conviction that it would not work and yet utter determination that it would. Being something of an over-researcher, long before May Blossom was born I was reading about breastfeeding and the low rates thereof in many modern western countries. I read blogs about how hard it was by people for whom breastfeeding was a disaster for mother