Oh, It's A Mommy Blog Now

Hello everyone! Guess what I have had?

Yes! A Baby!

(Is that what you were guessing? Probably not eh. Probably you were guessing something like “a large gin.”)

WISE WORDS, TACO CHILD. WISE WORDS

I have had a lovely baby girl, who will one day grow up and have a blog all of her own, unless of course she decides to do something more productive with her spare time. Like ballroom dancing, playing the bagpipes, or historical reenactments.

(Good God I hope she does not want to do any of those things. Can you imagine spending your weekends watching your delightful offspring do historical reenactments? Mum I’m so sorry about all those brass band concerts.)

This Baby-Having* means that a) I will have to retire my mug that says “everybody is getting married or pregnant and I’m just like BRAAAAAAAP” and b) I can finally realise my dreams of becoming a Mommy Blogger.

*I was going to say “surprise Baby-Having” but I suppose it is only a surprise to you. I knew about it well in advance.

THIS IS THE MUG IN QUESTION. CAN ONE GET MARRIED AND PREGNANT AND STILL BE LIKE, BRAAAAAAAAP?

Anyway - thus begins my Mommy Blogging career.*

Any minute now I’ll move to the country and start posting nothing but organic baby food recipes and smug photos of my child romping in the forest, clad in hand-sewn hemp garments and smothered in beeswax-based home remedies. All while waiting for my goat’s milk soap business to take off.

Do all Mommy Bloggers feel like a wrung-out sausage and smell like old milk?

Who would know. Certainly not me. I am awash with the glow of motherhood.

*this is better than what I normally say when announcing my New Baby, which is “I have entered my MILF era.”

DON’T MIX UP THE BABY MILK AND THE SOAP MILK!

Anyway! I don’t have any soap (yet) but I do have a baby. She arrived on Jan 27th and she is doing great, you’ll hear more about her later but for now, would you like to hear my Birth Story?

Of course you wouldn’t, nobody wants to hear anybody’s Birth Story.

Did you know, though, that your water breaking at 4am is not the dramatic WHOOSH GUSH EMERGENCY ROOM scenario that one sees in the movies? It’s much more of a “get up to do a wee and wonder if you’ve already done the wee without noticing” scenario. Then you have a small dilemma about whether or not to call the midwife, because on one hand, waters breaking! Baby imminent! Whoosh gush emergency room!

But on the other hand, the baby doesn’t seem THAT imminent and everything in your middle-class-British-heritage being is telling you that it just isn’t very polite to make phone calls at 4am.

good morning, I AM LITERALLY IN THE PROCESS OF HAVING A BABY, BUT I WOULD HATE TO BE A BOTHER.

So because I wasn’t having contractions*, and nothing was really happening except what the midwife would later describe as a “slow leak” (which, ew) I just went back to sleep and hoped I didn’t wake up with the baby halfway out.

*I didn’t have a single contraction in the whole process. If that’s the part of my Birth Story you were most looking forward to, I’m very sorry to have let you down.

Speaking of ew, despite what movies and television and your irritatingly gung-ho-about-pregnancy relatives may tell you, 90% of pregnancy and birth is not magical, it is just super gross. Ho ho ho miracle of new life my arse.

Speaking of arse, did anyone ever tell you how much you fart when you’re pregnant? I have never farted so much in all my days. It turns out the legendary ‘glow’ of pregnancy is actually just a haze o’ fart. Maybe they should put that in sex education classes.

But alas, they do not. Somehow, in between the chat about morning sickness and pickle cravings, it just never comes up.

STATISTICALLY, TWO OF THESE WOMEN HAVE PILES. MIRACLE OF LIFE!

(I DID NOT GET PILES. I DON’T KNOW WHY IT’S IMPORTANT THAT YOU KNOW THAT.)

Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. You may have deduced that I didn’t have a wonderful time being pregnant. But it was worth it because now I have a cool baby. Let’s get back to that!

Spoiler alert: I did not wake up with the baby halfway out. She arrived that afternoon by c-section (or as I prefer to call it “airlifted out”) and the only thing you really need to know about that is that at one point the spinal anaesthetic started to wear off, and I politely informed the medical team by saying “Sorry, I’m not trying to be dramatic.”

HELLO THERE, I CAN LITERALLY FEEL YOU RUSTLING ABOUT IN MY UTERUS, BUT I WOULD HATE TO BE A BOTHER.

The medical team was great though; during the hairy part of the c-section, after the baby had been evacuated but before they crammed me full of fentanyl so I could no longer feel my insides being rummaged about in, the anaesthetic tech started rattling on to me about all of her pets (a distraction technique which I appreciated immensely but which was deeply surreal at the time).

If you haven’t held your newborn baby for the first time while half-focusing on a story about a greyhound and a rabbit and watching a surprisingly jovial doctor wiggle a metal trowel about in your midsection, have you really lived?

IN THEIR DEFENCE I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO LOOK AT THE TROWEL BUSINESS, BUT YOU CAN SEE THE REFLECTION OF WHAT THEY’RE DOING IN THE THEATRE LIGHTS, AND I AM AN INQUISITIVE SORT OF A PERSON.

Anyway! That’s enough Birth Story. On to the baby! She’s great. At the moment she’s 22 days old and trying to do a poo in her sleep. Her core skills are eating, sleeping, and removing her hat. This is a good starting lineup and I am confident she’ll learn more.

I’m afraid you won’t get to see a picture of her because I think she can decide how on the internet to be when she’s a bit bigger, but perhaps you would like to imagine a small, cute version of me, wearing a onesie and dribbling milk all over myself.

She already has a battery of nicknames, most of which sound like bad musical artists (ref: ‘Tiny Bumbino,’ ‘Lil’ Wiggler’ and ‘Milkmeister Moo.’)

When greeted with Milkmeister Moo my husband* said “Oh, we’re calling her that now, are we?” which the Milkmeister and I found to be unnecessarily judgmental.

*oh yeah also I got married. BRAAAAAAP!

IT TURNS OUT MILKMEISTER IS A BRAND OF MILK CANS AND SO OUR REAL ISSUE HERE IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.

We were told time and time again that the first six weeks of Having A Baby are an endless hellscape; a Dante-esque merry-go-round of feeding, changing nappies, crying (both you and the baby), bleeding, sweating, leaking milk and shouting at your husband, all while getting no sleep.

MIRACLE OF LIFE!

However, I am pleased to report that it’s going much better than expected and we are bumbling along nicely with the Tiny Bumbino*. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been some less-than-stellar moments - see “baby shits on your thumb” later in this post - but there have been lots of fun times.

There is “first time your lovely baby falls asleep on you” and “first time your lovely baby plays in the jungle gym” and “first time you pretend your lovely baby smiled at you even though she’s too small to smile with any intent and is literally just stretching her face.”

There is also “first time your lovely baby shits directly on your thumb**” and “first time you run out of clean bottles in the middle of the night” and “first time you have to refill the overly complicated nappy bin and the only instructional video you can find is in Italian, and the only part you understand is where the woman keeps saying ‘è facile!’ but in fact it is not particularly facile, it is actually quite difficile, but at any second the Milkmeister will awake and the nappy bin will be required and so you just sort of cram the refill in there and hope for the best.”

E FUCKING FACILE INDEED

On balance it’s more fun than not, and we are into the part where we try and sort out a Nice Routine where we all just enough sleep to not go mad. Thankfully the Milkmeister enjoys sleeping as much as she enjoys eating and removing her hat, and so everything is going pretty well so far.

I will be back presently to let you know how I got on with the nappy bin.

*Not a typo. If I meant Bambino I would’ve put Bambino, but we have had quite enough Italian for one day.

**There was also the time she did a poo with such force and gusto that her sock flew off and her dad, surprised, shouted “She shit her sock off!” Which, while an accurate assessment of the situation, was a particularly unfortunate turn of phrase.