Divvying up

So now I'm back at work, albeit part-time and last night my husband and I were sitting trying to work out how the household chores will work out as we enter a new phase. While on maternity, and mostly because we wanted the baby to sit and eat with us, we ate dinner at 6pm, which meant the minute my husband walked through the door, which meant I made dinner every night (pre-baby we used to alternate this task religiously). That was okay, although I did run out of ideas - and interest - I enjoy cooking but every night is a chore, not a creative process. It made sense because of the social aspect, the timings, and because I wasn't out at work. But now? My husband's new chore is to drop off and collect the baby, every day that he is at the childminder's, so then it sort of make sense that I should cook. But five nights a week? Forever?

I don't feel hard done by or outraged. It's more of a nagging feeling. I could say okay, we'll eat late and he'll cook on alternate nights. But eating together matters to me and so that's 2 nights, and then the three nights where I am at work he has a new chore and I'm more likely to be at home by 5 while he (and baby) will not get in till 6.15.

I don't have an answer. The weekends are okay, he makes breakfast, I make lunch, each of us cooks one evening meal just like we always did. The best I've been able to come up with is that perhaps on Sunday night he should cook and cook double portions so Monday night is just heating up? And that I revise our shopping so that a few meals are very quick and easy to prepare... takeaway would be the easy option of course but that's really not very good for the waistline and I could do with my waistline decreasing, not increasing.

So... I think we'll have to mess around with the formula till we find something acceptable. It's a tricky one. The best solution is to find something acceptable, wait a few years and teach the kids to cook us dinner. After all, they don't work....

Sick of being sick

Thank God for washing machines. Ours has been on continuously for the past week and a half. Our baby got a tummy bug which resulted in endless throwing-up and - ahem - accidents the other end. Within two days he'd run out of all his clothes and was in a vest with the heating turned up to keep him warm while we frantically hung washing on every available radiator round the house. The bedding went the same way - our travel cot was pressed into use while the cot mattress was washed and dried sloooowly. Our own supply of clean clothes dwindled but his clothes took priority over ours on the radiators.

I'll give NHS Direct a nod here as they were unfailingly kind and helpful - and reassuring which matters most - on the phone when I rang. Although their first line of questioning, for meningitis, does make your heart stop for a moment and have you muttering prayers of 'please don't let it be that' while you're on hold for a nurse.

As the baby got better, my husband got worse, his own tummy bug exactly mimicking (in milder form) the pattern of illness - feeling better, then worse, over and over again. I stopped saying 'he's on the mend' after a few days of being proved wrong.

By the way don't call an out of hours doctor unless you are willing to be called in to see them. I rang NHS Direct for the last time just to check it was usual for a tummy bug to drag on for more than a week and whilst they were kind as usual they suggested I call my out of hours doctor just to be on the safe side. When I did (by this time it was 9pm and the baby had been asleep for two hours) they insisted I should bring him in. "What, now?" I asked. "Yes." I considered refusing (it seemed to me what he most needed was uninterrupted sleep) but when a doctor tells you to bring your baby in to the hospital where the out of hours surgery is... you sort of have to do it. So I called a taxi, got the baby out of bed (husband lying in bed feeling horrible), took him to the doctor who looked him over and said he wasn't dehydrated and to carry on as I was - we got back to bed by 11pm.

And then work loomed. Now that I'm back at work for two days a week initially it became clear the childminder was not going to be an option as the baby was still too ill and equally I could not, after only one week back, bring myself to cry 'ill baby' and not be at work. So I left a still-poorly husband with a still-poorly baby and the two of them mostly sat in bed with toys and telly (and plenty of spare clothes and towels for accidents) and were poorly together. Thankfully they were both reaching the tail end of the illness. Meanwhile on my second day at work I spent the day fighting off low-level nausea and as soon as I was safely through the work days started to feel vile myself.

So now my husband and the baby are back to normal and I'm at the tail-end of it all. It's been a week and half of household illness.

And there are still about 6 loads of washing in the laundry basket.

Piranha!

There's a rather depressing scale for artificial intelligence which compares AI to infants and various other creatures, so your baby is equivalent to an earthworm till it's 5 months old, then a fish till 9 months, then a quadruped mammal, etc. It's a bit disheartening to have your lovely baby (whom you think is an undiscovered genius) compared to a fish.

However in one respect my baby is certainly a fish. He is a piranha. He got teeth very early and with four teeth, two top and two bottom he launched himself on the world. He has tried to bite the childminder's nose off (this I blame on my husband who taught him the game), visitors have to be warned not to put a finger in his mouth and when you hug him he wraps his arms round your neck (ahh, sweet) and then savagely sinks his teeth into your shoulder. I have actual scars.

The first night after being at the childminder he slept a bit fitfully and I thought oh, cute, he missed us. Mmm, not so much. Yesterday a new upper tooth was revealed while its twin lurks on the other side, its white outline clearly visible, ready to pop out any minute. Soon he will have 4 teeth on top and two on the bottom.

I have to take my hat off to the amber teething anklet and necklace he wears in that we haven't used Bonjela since we got it (except one day when we left it off - fools!), so at least the teething process is going smoothly.

I need some sort of body armour for protection. Meanwhile I am offering crunchy apples and cucumbers so he has something to bite that isn't us.

I have warned him: don't push your luck. He may have almost 6 teeth now.
But I have 27.

Well, we missed YOU!

A photo of a happy baby playing on a rug shouldn't really make you cry but when our baby went for his first real day at the childminder's she very sweetly sent us reasssuring photos and texts all day long. The first photo made me burst into tears. He looked happy and I knew from the text he'd eaten all his breakfast and drunk a bottle of milk with no problems at all - but the thought of your own baby somewhere entirely 'other' for the first time can be a bit overwhelming. But as the day wore on and he passed every expected hurdle - eating/sleeping/drinking - and laughed and played and tried to bite the childminder's nose off, I felt myself relax. When he came home we lavished hugs on him and he looked faintly bewildered. My husband looked a bit cast down. " I thought he'd miss us a bit," he protested. "I'm glad he was happy, but still..."

He did wake a few more times than usual in the early part of the night, not wanting milk but just to be held for a few minutes before he drifted off again. I suppose he just wanted to make sure we were still there. So he must have missed us a bit.

And it's quite nice to work again... and I think they missed me - or at least needed me back to hit targets!