Moolies

Royal Festival Hall afternoon

An impressionistic version will have to suffice since any social occasion involving and including Nora consists of spending at leasy 60% of your time looking after said person (the overlapping 10% is the bit where you're looking around and hoping that everyone is where they really ought to be).

Nora climbing up the wide, flat marble steps from the bowl area behind the bar... then sliding down them on her tummy, only looking behind near the bottom (needles to say, I'm there holding my hand in appropriately "don't you dare smack your head on the floor, you nut", type places)...

Realised that she gets shy at home with new people. Here, she was happy to be held by anyone as long as one of us was around.

Spending the afternoon having anything approaching 1-20 word conversations with most people in the room but managing a relatively reasonable two way discusion with Quinn. About babies, naturally.

Suddenly finding myself eating bagels and cream cheese.

Nora not sleeping in her trolly, poor love and getting very upset with us for trying to make her lie down (I'm sorry, darling). This was screamingly unusual and I hope to god she will go to sleep in her trolley next time around, otherwise, we're buggered!

I just remembered one other thing. Nora at full height is approx 1 inch smaller that Ada, who is coming up to her second birthday, and is *not* small. We really have to measure her, she hasn't been measured since she was eight months.

And and aaaaand a lovely afternoon had by all. Hooray!

Eye eye

Nora loves scrumbling about on our bed, which of course offers king size roly-poly and falling over on your bum type activities. And it transpires, the opportunity to plunge your hand in to the corner of mummy's glasses thus giving, not exactly a black eye, but one deeply swollen, bloodshot corner which is keeping me awake up at night.

Ow.

Bop!

The noise I make when I take Noodle's sleeping dummy out of her mouth of a morning.

"Bopffh!"
... she says back to me this morning.

Bop!
"Bopffh!"

Let's turn the light on. Ok, 1, 2, 3...

"Bopffh!"

I love that girl.

When you are fourteen, and a friend has forwarded you this entry, sniggering, you must imagine a time when cuddling your friends Hartley, Rabbit, Hotey and baby teddy were as important to you as hugging mummy when you woke in the mornings. When we would play "What noise does a lion make?"

"Hrrrrr", you say.

What noise does a duck make?

"Ouah, ouah"

What noise..... does a monkey make!

"oooh ooh" (bouncing up and down)

What noise does a crocodile make?

"Aaaaccchhhhh"

As for me, it's like some sort of heavenly version of crack. I am compelled and addicted.

Crumbly

My God, I'm entirely and absolutely exhausted. Also have an ear infection brewing, which suggests that three weeks of working late at night nearly every night has not done me much good.

Bah.

This is what it's like

22.47. Just finished my work. Wanted to let you know that I didn't see nora tonight. That's the second time in two weeks that has happened.

I suppose this is the kind of thing that plagues many thousands of parents worldwide, but it still doesn't seem right. I demand the right to put my kid to bed, I'm her mother, fer Gad's sake!

But more to the point, I'm her parent, and parents have to work for a living, unless they gain money by the nefarious means of genes or luck of the draw.

The one good thing is that I have absolute confidence that it makes no difference to her feelings toward me. Having said that however, I don't think I could live with myself if I worked Fridays. I crave her like a drug. The smell of her is surely some kind of parental opiate. She's such a wonderful person, any time away from her is scarring.

Ach well, as I said earlier today by way of making it flippant: Such Is Life.

I would say something about an online presence of old, Mr Justin Hall. Strangely, I made contact with another person, linked to Justin - Carl Steadman only last week. Seems like both of them have been or are going through the mill. We certainly lead a fucked up kind of life these days. Affluent westerners with nothing better to do than to splurge in to keyboards rather than talk to our compadres or families about life. I include myself in that broad and crashing overview to an extent. Thank goodness I stopped, made myself a few rules and then started again sensibly, years later, at a point when I actually had something to write about, and whilst there are *far* more important things in my life (see above). (That's a big point for me. I could stop this tomorrow and it wouldn't make that much difference to my life. She says, her hands shaking at the keyboard). Not that the Steadperson's difficulties are really entirely internet related (although I don't think I'd be wrong if I said they did have some influence).

Anyway, in this time of need, even bearing in mind unimaginable grief in recent times - individual people still feel bad, wherever they are. So Get Well Soon, Justin.

66 year old becomes a mother

66 year old becomes a mother

Having a young child gives you strong opinions on motherhood and child / womb / life type issues.

It's a bit like surfing a wave you didn't realise you were on. Woah, my gut feeling about right-to-an-abortion is really flailing now I know just how alive that baby is in the womb, (etc. FTR - regardless of how personally upset by the concept of abortions I am now, I would walk the streets with placards if ever the pro-lifers started getting the upper hand in the UK).

So what is the gut reaction to a 66 year old woman giving birth, when I'm in the fortunate position of having given birth myself? From my glass house, I would say that we have to accept that motherhood is not a right, it's a happy accident. There are alternatives available such as adoption, surrogate motherhood, etc. I feel very angry with this woman for almost bringing to term 2 children only to have one of them die and the other have to be removed prematurely. It can be stated therefore that Bogdan Marinescu was entirely wrong. She was in no fit state to carry a pregnancy. So, she has been unfair, and the hospital was ethically wrong to accept her as a case, regardless of how much she paid for the service.

That's without even touching her age. It seems to me that her age is the deciding factor, and we must have some sort of worldwide medical agreement on a stopping date for these fertility treatments. Just because they can, doesn't mean they should. I would argue that this young girl will be in no position to deal with the increasing decrepitude of her mother, and it is fundamentally unfair to expect a (stopping myself from swearing here) ten year old girl to deal with the increasing likelihood of the death of her parent - most particularly since it is a situation that has been deliberately engineered.

Perhaps there should be a cut off point such as: that at the average time of death for women within the country of origin, the child will be 25+. Obviously it doesn't take in to consideration "acts of god" (or acts of cancer, blood clot, etc) but at least it's a benchmark.

Meanwhile, I can't help but feel quite sorry for this kid.

1 small step for a Noodle

McK swears she took a step at nursery, and yesterday, she held on to the tip of my finger and very deliberately took a step then clumped down on her bum. Today in the hallway, she was doing her "look at me standing up" grinning madly and swaying backwards and forwards in the wind routine, and she lifted her foot and quickly moved it forward about half a centimetre.

A very small step for a Noo. I think we'll count that as training, rather than the real deal. Meanwhile, Nora has had a lovely couple of days, seeing Grandad John yesterday and Granny Tod today, and she ate like a horse earlier with some help, despite at least wanting to fling half her food around the room (there is improvement and frustration there - a) at least she now licks her hands b) It's much more of a habit than picking up the spoon and using that.

I'm not really sure what to do about it, because I don't want to discourage her playing with her food (*any* action to do with food which is not inherantly negative is ok in my book) so at present, I'm either completely ignoring the flinging, or looking away and looking bored, but praising her using the spoon to the skies.

given my waistline expansion over the years, I find it incomprehensible that she is so completly immune to the ideas within the realms of hunger = food = nice.

Any thoughts most welcome.

Anyway, back to the positive stuff. She spent most of today laughing. She sounds like Sid James.

..and she gets her Dr Zeuss books next week, which I confidently assort she will *love*.

So tired

I had a pig of a week at work. Working until 11.30 one night, then 9.30 the next then 1am the next. Consequently I'm exhausted but also too frazzled to sleep properly.

Arse.

Springer protest musings

So one Christian group posted up the BBC2 controller's address and phone number, and FaxyourMP was bombarded, as were the BBC complaint email addresses with organised, duplicate messages.

The same tactics used by pro-and-anti hunt campaigners, and anti-vivisectionists (in terms of publishing addresses). What I find so interesting about this is that we seem to have now officially entered in to a new era of protest, where mass protest in that form is almost routinely ignored. Well,, apart from the added security guards. It reminds me also of the unbelievably crass decision Whitehall took that the huge number of protests over the national identity cards issue that were supported into being through Stand were treated as a *single* submission in the pre-act debate.

So we are in a subtle historical period where we are *just* still at a point where internet communication can be portayed as valueless or of little value to organisations, but at the same time, small pressure groups' use of the internet for protest is becoming more widespread and sophisticated. If those 50,000 Jerry springer protests had all been to OfCom in the form of letters, all written individually, I wonder whether the BBC would have stuck to its guns.

I do agree with Stu though. The way they marketed it was bonkers. They courted controversy and got it in spades, at a time when there is still ongoing debate re: funding / the licence fee etc. I don't think they were doing themselves any favours.

Now you'll have to excuse me because it's just gone 10am, which means my beloved daughter is about to have her MMR, and so I must feel deep empathy long distance.

Jerry Springer lyrics

Far be it from me to criticise such a fantastic achievement (and it really, continues to be really superb. David Soul was great! It's still like something from some kind of alternative dimension, somehow), but having now witnessed the spectacle three times, some things begin to stand out in particular.

At a point, Jerry is "invited" to go to hell to front a show debating the fall of man / Satan's fall from heaven / etc. So the song is a bombastic little couple of minutes along the lines of: "(Gotta go down) "X" man (Gotta go down), "Y" man (Gotta go down). One line a few different types of "man" in goes "The Piltdown man / Gotta go down" - funny... then it goes "The blah blah man / Gotta go down".

What?

The Blah blah man? Who is that exactly? I think I know who it is. It's the "What the fuck are we going to complete this section with?" man. Heh.