I have two part time jobs, the first is selling veg at the market where the Moo Boy comes along for a ride in his sling and charms the customers. The second is slightly more complicated and requires me to have a brain and stop thinking about the baby for one afternoon a week. It’s the second one that has got me worried and tearful. I know I have a brain somewhere, it’s just that it is taken up with information about breastfeeding or the merits of real nappies and anything that isn’t baby related has a very small space in my head. I am worried that people will notice immediately that I am faking it, and that I really do not know what I am talking about. However, I need the money and it will probably be good for me to not be a mum for a few hours a week. I could get childcare with the job but we have had loads of trouble getting the Moo interested in a bottle of expressed milk. Getting the milk out of me is no problem, getting it into the baby is almost impossible. The most success has been with his dad pouring it into his mouth from a sippy cup but we can’t expect a crèche worker to do that so his dad is looking after him while I work.
It’s been a month of small traumas. The first was at the St Johns Ambulances excellent first aid course for babies and children. All was fine until, with no warning whatsoever, the instructor ripped the face off the child torso model thing and passed us all our own rubber faces so we could have a go. I was jittery anyway with all the talk about accidents that could happen to my baby, and the sight of the faceless torso just about had me gibbering under the table. Second neurotic trauma was what I dramatically refer to as ‘the drowning of the baby’. We have been going to Water Babies a course of swimming sessions designed especially for small babies. There is lots of singing and splashing and you have to dunk your baby under the water. Typically, mine is the only one that holds his breath for so long he goes red. Apparently this is fine but I was the only mother shrieking at the instructor ‘is he ok? look at his colour!’ He is perfectly ok, he loves the water and bath times are really active now with him splashing and kicking very happily. I really am far too neurotic for this mothering lark. I think I may be less of a nervous wreck if I actually could get some sleep. Moo dropped his 2 am feed for a few weeks so we got 6 hours sleep in a row, but now he is having a combination teeth and growth spurt thing that means feeding him every 2 hours during the night. I am knackered.
Trauma 3 is my hair falling out, supposedly it’s the hair that I didn’t shed when I was pregnant but I’d rather it stayed on my head.
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