A crooked road to genius

Forget mama brain syndrome—it turns that having kids will make you smarter. Take that Mensa. Now I'm off to my day job at the rocket science factory, just as soon as I can remember where I put my shoes...

Diversion from the road to improvement. 

Voodoo child

My autumn garden is full of spiders. Yesterday I watched a fly go from creature to cadaver in the skip of a heartbeat and the twitch of eight legs. Webs loom everywhere I walk, ghost-like apparitions right at head level. My face has been snared a few times and I suspect it might be me, not the flies, they are after.

Tonight I put on my shoe and felt something soft and leathery squish up against my toe. My brain said mouse, but reaching inside I discovered it was just a shrivelled, slightly fuzzy chunk of green pepper. I recognised the bite marks and the modus operandi. 'Don't mess with me Mama,' the pepper implied in Ana's voice, 'I know where your shoes live.'

Garden-variety Shelob

Ana is an old hand at threats. When she was 18 months old we drove to an old fisherman's cottage on Anglesey for a weekend. In the evening she slept like an angel in her travel cot, while Papa and I watched little fishing boats cast their nets into a peaceful sea. A tentative sense of calm crept back into our lives; we decided that everything was going to be okay and that travelling with kids could even be fun. But it only lasted until the following afternoon. Halfway through nap-time I heard a loud smack from Ana's room, followed by an angry roar. A moment later, vengeful toddler footsteps thundered down the hall. Papa and I were trapped in the sitting room, mugs of tea still in hand as a shrieking, wild-haired toddler came for her revenge like something out of a horror film.

Travelling with Ana was out of the question now that she could shimmy out of a travel cot head-first and pursue us to the ends of a holiday cottage. Naively, we thought she could still be contained behind the trusty wooden jail-bars of her cot at home. Not long after the Anglesey incident, I went to Germany for a weekend, leaving Papa home alone with Ana. My first morning away, he rang to say that Ana escaped the cot and woke him with a very sweet 'Papa thirsty?' and a very cold cup of water in the face. Ana got a proper bed and a gate across her door after that.

We don't get too many Houdini-style escapes these days, except when a very sleep-deprived Mama forgets to shut Ana's gate. Tonight I put the kettle on for peppermint tea and tried to forget about the shoe-pepper threat. I turned around to get a teabag and nearly dropped my mug in fright. There stood Ana in the middle of the kitchen floor, grinning cheekily with her plastic Halloween pumpkin in one hand. 'Hi', she said with menace. Then she turned and slunk silently back up the stairs to her room. I followed and shut the gate tight.

Ana doesn't fully understand Halloween yet, but her prankster instinct has been on override for weeks. This year she will trick-or-treat, rather appropriately, as a crocodile.

It's a trick

My good childhood friend, OneArmGirl, has just reminded me of our childhood candy-missions. A lovely French lady down the street (our neighborhood's sole European representative) used to call us 'the Halloweeners'. The thing I really loved about Halloweening (and can only admit to now as an adult) was that on one trusty October night every year, us big kids got to re-enact the magic of being little. Candy was the excuse for all the dressing up and childish larking about. It was the act itself that was magical--heading out into the wood-smoky darkness, painted faces pressed against the cold car windows, wide-eyes focused on distant candy-beacon porch-lights in the black rural night, bright and remote as the stars.

I find that one side-effect of having kids is that my brain likes to revive dusty childhood memories like this from the mental attic and replay them to a sentimental score on my internal nostalgia-projector. For me, the season of 'pumpkins ripening toward the knife' (Ray Bradbury) has been one of birth, death, upheaval, love and migration. The stuff of life, good and bad. Certainly no shortage of memories to mull over as the light closes in for winter.

Viva Chile!

"In the toughest times I thanked God I had a daughter." From Jimmy Sanchez, one of the 33 returned to the free air and the arms of daughters. Felicidades.

Parlez-vous Baby Esperanto?

I lied about byebye. It isn't Ali's first word, it's her first word in English. Pre-byebye she had many words, but what she meant by them only meant something to her, because pre-byebye she spoke Babish.

In the baby-tongue, Ali can opaquely discuss all things mysterious. My research indicates that each Babisher is assigned an individual dialect at birth—unique, like a fingerprint or a social security number. This dialect is super-indecipherable to tall people, and also mostly unintelligible to other babies.

Babish is the loneliest of languages; a means of burping loudly and giggling madly to oneself (and perhaps also the Invisible Clown, if his is indeed out there and listening). Being baffling is initially quite fun but quickly grows old. Ultimately a Babisher must learn English, or whatever the mama-tongue is, to communicate anything more sophisticated than hungry, sleepy, change me, cuddle me, burp me, play with me, ME ME ME (a non-exhaustive list of things that can be communicated by screaming and flailing about).

Living with a native Babisher has taught me a few things. For instance in Ali's dialect the most important word is 'ko'. Not 'coo', mind you. Ali regularly points at items, looks very serious and says 'ko'. She utters it with joy, surprise, rage and 200,000 other emotions. I've overheated my brain trying to figure it out. The best I can do is toodle around with Ali, point to an item and ask if it is ko. She ponders the question, then extends her pointer finger (she has just entered the pointy phase—more on this later) and gives the solemn ko-blessing. Or, she looks at me like I'm a nutter and blinks to indicate 'not ko'.

From left to right: ko, ko, not ko. 

As for Ana, the acquisition of powerful words like 'no' and 'why' pretty much wiped out her interest in the Babish. Once upon a time she too had a special item-identification word akin to ko. It was pronounced 'DAT!'. For many months DAT! was absolutely everywhere and I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

A few whispers of the baby-tongue linger in Ana. For instance, sometimes she develops Babish-ears and can't hear a word of English from Mama or Papa. When she gets excited and isn't thinking before she speaks, little Babish phrases pop out. She is prone to laugh-shouting 'ning-a-ning-a-ning-a-niiiiiiiiiiiii! Fas-did-a-eeyiiiiiiiiiiii!'while running in circles and getting dizzy. When she bounces up and down on a forbidden item in muddy shoes, such as a friend's expensive new white sofa for instance, she stacatos: 'hothothot hothothot!' in triplicate bursts.

Babish is fascinating, fleeting and ultimately supplanted by the accidental swearing stage. Which is replaced by the purposeful swearing stage, otherwise known as adolescence, otherwise known as why Mama is developing Babish-ears for adults and constructing a fully-stocked underground bomb-shelter. Years away I know, but the inheritance of George Carlin and Lenny Bruce is inevitable.

Viva Carnival!

Mama is terribly excited to have taken part in her first-ever British Mummy Bloggers Carnival, hosted over at Diary of a (not so) single mum. Please have a look.

Mattresside

Ali's first word is 'byebye'. It is her new response to anything and everything. Not yet a year old and already versed in the transitory nature of life.

Ali is petite for her age and wise beyond her years. She is just the sort of baby that sweet grannies on the street like to 'coocheecoo' (although Bog Standard Gran has learned her lesson with Ana). A typical encounter goes something like this: BS Gran says 'Hello poppet'. Ali crinkles her tiny brow, eyes brimming with a vast knowledge of life, the universe and everything. In this moment she reminds me of Odin, listening intently to ravens as they whisper about the end of the world. Solemnly, earnestly she utters it: 'byebye'. Gran giggles like a child, then totters away, her day made by this chance encounter with Chaos.

The raven quoth 'byebye' evermore.

There is something about earnestness in children that makes grownups bust up laughing. In my past life as a short person this used to drive me nuts, because like Ali I had concerns before I had the words to articulate them--concerns that I wanted people to take seriously. But the more serious I got, the more tall people laughed. Odd. As a serious tall person nobody finds me funny anymore.

Speaking of funny, something I really don't find humorous these days is pediatric insomnia. Every night I turn out the light and count fibs like sheep so my brain can drift off: tonight she will sleep, tonight I will sleep, tomorrow I will feel rested, tomorrow I will only drink one container ship of coffee to function, tomorrow Ana won't wear me out like a treadmill, tomorrow when my head hits this pillow and my body hits this mattress I will not crash like a beat-up old truck zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I wake at eleven to byebye tapping at my chamber door. Then one. Then four. Why do my ears hear her every byebye? Why does my baby wake up all night? Nobody knows, certainly not her. By six her good morning byebye seems less out of place.

To everything a season. This shall pass. I know that I will miss these younger days when she and I are both older and better-rested. Speaking of which, Ali has sprung from her nap and is calling for Mama. So byebye for now.

Food-flinging and other sports

I first met A&E Mum in antenatal class, just two in a clutch of beached planets who gathered once per week to pine after our toes and look earnest about pain relief options like breathing and essential oils. In spite of some childish pre-term mockery from both of us, we both went on to deliver two kids apiece au naturel using—have to admit it though it pains me—only breathing and essential oils. Okay, so by breathing I mean two tanks of Entonox.

A&E is a fabulous cook. Our firstborn had some raucous food-fights together in our early motherhood days. I've been fondly remembering our wall-painting sessions as I dust off Ana's old plastic riot-eating gear—suction bowls, sporks and the like—for Ali to lob at me shot put-style. Although I am still recovering from the trauma of food-flinging round one, I am already knee-deep in the goopy trenches of round two.

World champion food-flinger sets new messiness record.

As a native of my adopted homeland, A&E has been able to enlighten me on certain things. For instance, Welsh rarebit is as close to heaven as cheesy bread can possibly get. A dummy is silicone teat, not an indictment of a baby's shape-sorting ability. A tea cozy is...apparently a useful thing and not at all silly...actually I'm still researching this last one. But that aside, A&E is a fount of wisdom on many fronts, not just on culinary issues.

Which brings me to the previous post on safety burb hazards. In response A&E Mum directed me to a disclaimer she came across while hunting out a kids party venue—a fascinating scrap of fine print forbidding certain activities on the premises, and apparently written by somebody who has difficulty sharing toys. The blacklist ranges from yoga to freemasonry and everything in between. Of course venues are free to set their own rules and people can go elsewhere if they find those rules bonkers.

But the pesky thing wouldn't leave my mind. Because one detail had slipped through my eye and lodged in a nether-corner of my brain where it's been sat down every since, sipping a cuppa and demanding further explanation. Here's what got stuck: the venue forbids circle dancing. Really? Why? What is circle dancing exactly? Like ring around the rosies, but evil? Like line dancing but circular, so even more annoying? Is it contagious? Should I be worried that my snowflakes are at risk from a new elfin safety issue?!

I am hoping that, as in the past with tea cozies, A&E Mum can enlighten me on this. Till then, visions of toddlers reenacting The Wicker Man will dance through my head.

Translation hazard!

Ana, harbinger of destruction, needed a garden swing like a hamster needs a hamster wheel. So I ordered one online without putting much thought into it. Upon arrival I discovered that my hastily-selected swing was an import from Molvania. This was apparent from the safety instructions, clearly a collaboration between Babel Fish and Borat. Here's an excerpt:

Warning! Adult assembly request. Adult supervision required at all limes when using this product. Suitable for children aged. DO NOT loosen the rope, otherwise the seal will fall and cause injury. DO NOT allow children 10 get off the swing when it is stilt moving. This item is for Family donestic use only. Avoid swinging empty swings. Try and orientate swing to avoid swinging directly into sun.

No kidding--printed right there on the box.

Now I'm an imaginative speller and a monoglot, so I can't have too much fun with this--glasspots in kettlehouses shouldn't lob seals, etc. And whereas elfin-safety glop is usually so tedious, I enjoyed this and must salute the person responsible. Humour is the only glue holding the various bits of my sleepy brain together right now. So I wonder, legal disclaimery aside, if there is so little actual information contained in kiddie safety warnings that they can be written in Mad Libs, why not hire comedians for the job? Or if comedians are too expensive and expletive-laden, perhaps the introduction of a standard label would both warn parents and eliminate future translation hazards. I reckon this would cover the bases:

You know this stuff like the back of Junior's cute widdle hand and it's pretty condescending of me, a mere safety label, to regurgitate it back to you in small words, but frankly you're so tired right now that you can't remember your own name, and you're too embarrassed to ask your spouse for clarification, so read on. Your snowflake is currently attempting serious self-injury and permanent world-damage on a vast scale and in five ways that you haven't thought of. So keep your eyes on Bambina until your vision goes all wonky and you get pinging dots across it diagonally (no this is not normal, if you mention it to other people, they will give you spare change for a sandwich). And don't even think about having any hobbies or sitting down because all that nonsense is for grownups, a group from which you are hereby quarantined. If you and Angel survive the first three years it will be a small miracle and you will receive a complimentary Molvanian cake and two free psychotherapy sessions with a seal of your choice. Now go play with this toy and stop reading this rubbish. Your name is Fred.

Silliness aside, I really wasn't sure how to interpret these instructions. So in the interest of elfin-safety, I let Creepy Dog (still surviving) have the first swing. No injuries to note. 'You're funny!' implied approval to my ears. Guinea pig test done, over to Monster Dog.

Here comes the sun dog.

Fearless-pirate Ana and wise-sage Ali both make me wonder what part of childhood is supposed to be healthy or safe. I hate to indulge Ali's paranoia but I'm inclined to agree with her--the tall world handles short people with kid gloves, only to shove them off the deep end and into life one day. Life being that eternally rough thing that adults never get a comfortable grip on.

As I write this, I hear Ana's whoops of delight from the garden as she swings directly into the sun. How it should be. I give the swing three Molvanian thumbs up.

Jekyll Baby, Darth Baby

Ali is mysterious. I ask her what her motive is every day. She considers the question by frowning and breathing heavily, so I call her Darth Baby. Darth pretends to follow external stimulus to indulge me. But in reality she is governed by a complex internal whirlwind.

Newborn Darth cried for hours. She writhed as if in the vice-grip of some malicious invisible monster. Then as quickly as it started, the invisible monster wandered off, and Ali was content again. Thankfully, the monster morphed into a clown after the early months. Now he hides behind the sofa (everything does) and under ever-present piles of laundry, whispering raucous jokes about tall people to earn hysterical snorting laughter from his very short audience of one.

Quickenings, tummy butterflies that crescendo to ninja rib-kicks, were my first hint of Ali's nature, coming at all hours and in different rhythms. Belly goop-wielding sonographers gave me my second hint. Their scans indicated that Ali was possibly a rare breed of deep-sea fish with ear-grabbing tendencies (recessive trait) and hiccups.

Ali shed amphibiousness for Winston Churchill (a look commonly known by birth mothers as 'the most beautiful thing I have ever seen', and by birth fathers as 'where's the baby, and what's that bald alien-vole doing here?') This rapidly melted into soft cherub, before shedding like snakeskin into something else, again and again.

Ali's first smiles ghosted across her face like pure fleeting magic. Her digestive system was infinitely baffling ('Honey, is it supposed to be black? Oh wait, now it's yellow...') Her initial exhaustion following birth gave way to stubborn insomnia.

After a month or so, she commenced desperate unicycling while attempting to focus her wibily-eyes on anything at all. With crawling came such dedicated floor-slurping that I can only assume babies are paid on commission per chokable. Now she cruises, mostly as an excuse to bash her head on things and fall over. What motivates all this self-destruction is beyond me. Time and again I ask, but she stays mum.
 
Ali's mood swings are probably her greatest mystery. Even now, long after the trauma and exhaustion of the invisible-monster early days, Ali transitions from beaming joy to pouring misery in no time. Sometimes her funks have a basis in this world: fatigue, hunger, frustration. Mostly they don't.

Slobber through the looking glass.

Ali has two hobbies. The first is discussing current events with her reflection. Her reflection is a bit of a surly jerk though, so these conversations inevitably end in bouts of vigorous head-shaking. Her second passtime is playing a combined hide and seek/peekaboo from her play tent. She has a longer attention span for this game than I do, but due to mama brain syndrome (to be discussed in detail later), this isn't saying much.

This afternoon, she chased the invisible clown all over the house, giggling madly some terribly rude joke that only she could hear. Then the clown went off shift, so Ali and I played tent hide and seekaboo until I felt my mind wandering...CRASH! Without warning, Ana barrelled into the tent like a Monster Dog in a china shop. Before I could caution her to calm down and avoid squishing her baby sister, Ali suddenly, accidentally, got the upper hand: a fistful of her sister's hair. Temporarily Genghis Khan, Ali released a piercing war cry, then collapsed in a fit of maniacal baby giggles. In that moment the invisible clown was made very proud. Ana wriggled free and ran off screeching 'MY, MY, MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!'

What a profound change babies undergo when they become kids. Ana has only the faint memory of mystery about her, although I know that she too was once baffling. Her own motives have become easier to suss (generally world domination, but more on this later).

The whole sisterly interaction took less than three minutes.Perhaps more flummoxing than any of Ali's mysterious moods, is the eternal disconnect between the planet Ali lives on, and the galaxy Ana inhabits.

Farewell summertime nest

The world outside turned golden this week. The temperature dropped and wind-rustled leaves took on a tell-tale brittle note. Summer is collapsing into autumn. It caught me by surprise again. Every summer seems eternal, even though I'm old enough to know better by now.

Which reminds me of Ray Bradbury, a hero of mine, who turned 90 at the end of August. 'Dandelion Wine' is a book about how kids experience summertime as the great magical forever. There are a thousand perfect summer moments in it, including one about fire balloons in the 1974 introduction he added to original 1957 book.

Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-and-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and  fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself....My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. 

Seasonally, 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' follows 'Dandelion Wine'. Although principally concerned with autumnal menace, it also happens to contain one of my favourite passages on motherhood: 'They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?' 

Warmth passing.

Sunlight is starting to wane. Fun fairs are setting up across England, in all their weird kitschy glory. Just over the horizon, bonfires burn. Soon firecrackers will wake my children at night. 


I've spent the past few golden afternoons knitting together unrelated passages from the books of summer, and searching out pint-sized jumpers that were lightly cast aside by my autumn babies in the innocence and optimism of last spring. These items nest not in time, but usually behind the sofa.