Lucky charms

We’ve had it easy in a way, ET and I.

We are relatively young, we were 'only' trying to conceive for a couple of years, and we never had to face a loss. I know many who read here from time to time who have faced much harder times, and many still do.

One such couple is Judith and Bruce.

In October 2008, I got an email from Judith just saying 'hello'. By that point, Judith and her husband Bruce had already been trying to have a child for 6 years. Conceiving wasn’t an issue, over the years they conceived, and lost, 4 children. All of them before 8 weeks.

From then on we chatted regularly, keeping each other informed of each appointments, results, and the failures. Early last year Judith told me that they had decided to give it one more try. Almost 40, and after so many years on the rollercoaster, enough had become enough.

Her last attempt would be via an IUI, as soon as she could get clearance to go ahead with it. Her last ‘old fashioned’ cycle ended in failure on the same day that ours did, and she started the monitoring for follicle development before IUI at the same time we did.

In a remarkable act of cyber menstrual synchronisation , after months of her and I chatting, Judith and ET both had their IUIs on the same day, barely 25 miles apart. After more than one heart in mouth moment, she was able to confirm that she too was pregnant.

Just like us, their expected due date was the 17th February, 2010.

From that point on I dreaded seeing emails from Judith hit my inbox. With her history of early losses the odds were against her, and I truly had no idea what I would be able to say to her if this child were to not make it, their fifth. At a loss for something constructive to say, I told her we could be each other’s lucky charms.

Every second day she gave me updates, and 2 weeks became 4, which became 6, and 8, and 12. Her cautiousness and doubt eventually gave way to excitement. 20, then 30 weeks passed as did her 40th birthday, and I last heard from Judith at 39 weeks and 4 days.

While ET and I flopped around the house, one of us metaphorically and the other physically bursting at the seams in anticipation and irritation, Judith and Bruce were getting used to life with their baby boy, who is now home with his mam and dad, and thriving.

For the two of them as a couple, the three of them as a new family, and anyone who might be buoyed by their story and outcome, I simply could not be happier.

For the tiniest rocker in Holland:

Injury-time

She was kidding, surely.

A little obstetric humour to lighten the mood perhaps, considering she had just been poking around the opening of ET’s obstreperous cervix like a drunk driver attempting to touch the tip of his nose.

No. Alas, no.

‘You are zero centimetres dilated.’

'Zero' is not Dutch for 8. Or for 6, or for 2 for that matter. It’s Dutch for zero.

In theory, the 40 weeks being up and Fatso Mango not budging wouldn’t be a very big deal if it wasn’t for the small matter that Fatso Mango is, well, a fatso. To be more accurate, Fatso Mango being a fatso in itself isn’t the issue, but when it’s combined with the fact that Fatso Mango’s Mammy is only a wee thing it does turn a smidge more problematic.

I’m not one to cause alarm, but the obstetrician couldn’t find the child’s legs on the ultrasound today and we believe that the baby has eaten them for nourishment.

Eaten its own legs so it has, the hungry parasitic savage.

Add that to the fact that I'm not sure if a number on the report we have is the estimated birth weight in grams or the doctor's mobile phone number, and it’s got to come out soon, for everyone’s well being.

40 weeks are up. It’s like joining all the dots, stepping back to admire, and still not having a notion what the picture is.

Idle threats to smoke Fatso Mango out have turned into solid arrangements.

The countdown is on; you have 5 days to make your move.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Bravo Zulu Fatso Mango

Tensions are running high here on Walton’s mountain.

In fairness, there isn’t a mountain within 300 miles of us and we are about 2 good days of rain away from needing canoes, but the brain is feeble today and misplaced topographical parallels are all I can muster.

Not content with forcing me into having to put on its mother’s shoes and socks, this child also seems intent on making her walk like a wardrobe being pushed up a hill. This, it transpires, is due to the fact it’s bloody massive.

That’s the midwife’s official view anyway, which she shared with us today while running through the measurements from last week’s scan.

An average head, colossal belly, and tiny legs. Yes indeed, the universe is getting its own back on me, and I’m going to be raising someone that looks like Jabba the hutt.

The upside of growing a monstrous all consuming savage is that they won’t let it get too big without smoking it out. Apparently if it reaches the size of a hotel mini-bar it’s quite difficult to remove through a vaginal passage. Who knew?

Add to all this the fact that concerns that have been voiced over our ability to appropriately name the kid, and it’s feared we will call it after a fruit, or a celebrity, or a celebrity fruit. Therefore we’ve decided to embrace a new name for the belly dweller.

Mango. Fatso Mango.

So you, you umbilical bungee jumping big lipped bugger, this is a warning to you. Make an appearance soon Fatso Mango or we’re coming in there to get you out.

Over and out.

Soon

This thing takes an age to boil.

I sit at the table and lift my exposed legs and bare feet an inch or two up off the cool kitchen floor. Through the glass to my left the sky displays schizophrenic tendencies, clear, sharp and deathly still behind dark laden patches of cloud, in a hurry to somewhere else.

The creaks above my head tell me your mother is stirring. Your restlessness initiating hers for what feels like the thousandth night in succession. Falling in and out of half sleeps, dreaming faceless half dreams of catching, falling, and reaching.

On the other side of the street, few lights burn bright. They’re the evidence of absence of rest, telling tales about a long day not yet at an end, or perhaps one prematurely begun. Some night soon, while we wait for rest to come to you, I will point out those lights and I will tell you their tales.

The impatient clouds unwittingly animate the floor. Midnight blue shadow projections converge and diverge in perpetual motion and silence. Tilting my head, I see rabbits there, but then again in my weary adult mind I always do. Some night soon, we will sit here together, and you can point out the lions and tigers that you see, you can tell me their tales.

Maybe then I will be able to see them too.

Hundreds, even thousands of miles away, others are sitting in their own late night kitchens, waiting for their own kettles to boil. I imagine aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and friends you couldn’t even begin to count have all sat a while, staring into blue gas flames. They are briefly reminded of you, and by the light of open fridge doors they wonder if it is almost time.

The idea of your arrival being impatiently awaited on distant shores makes me smile, a concept sickeningly over-poetic in terminology, yet still incompetently insufficient.

Against the sound of more unrest from above, I myself wonder if it is almost time, I rise and return the unused mug to its place on the shelf.

I turn the dial, vanishing the blue flame. It takes an age to boil.

Heavy with sleep now, I can wait. Until tomorrow.

Step away from the vehicle

With hindsight, not keeping it in the boot of the car is quite a wise move.

I can only imagine the bewildered looks and cautious questioning I would be on the receiving end of should it be exposed.

It wouldn’t take much more than a fender bender or a heavy accelerator foot for a member of my host Queen’s police force to be rummaging through the contents of my boot.

I envisage holster clips being released and faces turning solemn as the bag is opened and its contents removed, item by item.

Baby clothes. Several pairs of underwear. Pajamas. A bag of sucky sweets. A prepaid mobile phone. Not to mention the digital camera.

The absence of a roll of duct tape is all that would save me from spending my child’s first hours in police custody whilst they verified that it isn’t actually a kiddie fiddler’s starter kit, but is in fact nothing more sinister than the famed hospital bag.

Packed and ready to go, like my sanity.

1 week, 2 days.

Pucker up

Midwives are magic Zen masters.

They exude an air of calm and leave you treats of mental time to spare.

So when one sees a midwife spring into huffy action making speedy appointments on your behalf, using phrases like ‘low fluid’ and ‘handing you over to the gynaecologist’, your heart beats that little bit less comfortably and the time to spare evaporates.

Yesterdays midwife visit was one such moment. ET is big and round, and only getting bigger and rounder. In an attempt to measure the baby the midwife had doubts over the level of amniotic fluid she could feel and thought it better to arrange an ultrasound to be on the safe side.

So there we found ourselves once again staring up at a grainy screen having unidentifiable body parts pointed out to us against a whooshy soundtrack. It transpires that all is well and the midwife’s caution was just her being thorough.

She was right on one point; it’s a big ‘un. Quite an odd shaped big ‘un by all accounts. With short wee legs, and a small head, it still manages to weigh more even now than most newborns do thanks to a ginormous belly.

We are basically breeding a Jerry Springer guest. A short arsed fatty. At least we will save on the cost of a paternity test.

As we left she semi-jokingly commented that it could easily arrive tonight.

That remains to be seen, but in the meantime this isn’t a bad sight to tide us over.

1 week, 6 days.

Turning you off your cereal

I'm impotent. Or maybe omnipotent. Or omnipresent perhaps, I forget.

Some one of those anyway, but basically I'm in many places today. Here, and somewhere deep in the bowels of today's Irish Times health section.

Early last year they featured an article about our attempts to conceive, and today they ran a short catch-up piece for the sane people with jobs who don’t read here every day.

Complete with picture that makes me look like an anaemic wino with a glandular problem, and a title that will nauseate many, today's article can be found here.

For the lazy among us, the original feature was run last March and a follow up based on the reaction it generated ran a few days later.

As you were.

Far more entertaining are the guesses being placed here. Go on, give it a shot.

The klossen

They were bloody heavy.

I carefully picked my step across the car park, sadistically enjoying each fresh crunch of snow under my feet while fearing the inevitable slip that would send me arse over tit. Any comfort that the close proximity of the hospital brought was overshadowed by the public nature any fall would now take, not to mention the severe battering I would undoubtedly suffer under the weight of my cargo.

They really were bloody heavy.

As the fall never came, I bundled the contents of my embarrassingly aching arms into the back of the car, and just 14 hours later I’d completed the 15 minute drive home through the snow.

Upstairs, I pulled them apart and arranged them out on the floor.

The 'klossen'.

There were 6 of them. 10 inches tall, grey rod iron, like miniature Eiffel towers.

One by one I slid them into position, and corner by corner I lifted our bed a foot off the ground and aligned the klossen underneath the legs.

Ironically, the act of installing them so that the kraamzorg doesn't damage her back while looking after ET has probably ensured another 18 months at our friendly neighbourhood chiropractor for me. Beds are heavy.

So now the silly turns to absurd, and the 5 foot tall incubator living with me has to use a plastic step to get in and out of bed. I’m just waiting to be awoken by the sound of her smashing her face off the radiator on the way to the bathroom at 4am.

Not one to be bogged down by minor negatives like nocturnal head injuries, there are upsides. I finally have the top bunk that I always wanted, and my bedroom is home to the coolest fort ever.

2 weeks, 2 days.

Wednesday next we have a midwife visit where she might reveal great mysteries, or maybe not, so until then you can get your guesses in here.

Footsoldiers

I’m on hoof duty.

Another seldom spoken of characteristic of late pregnancy is the inability to remove one’s own footwear. Several times a day I have a heel thumped onto my thigh with the command to ‘take it off’.

Thankfully, this week’s beauty parlour session included a pedicure, so the trotters that I am faced with the task of undressing are fine specimens. I suspect the pedicure was only thrown in to distract ET while the landscaping crew were changing shift, but I’ll take all the help I can get.

This role has enlightened me, made me wiser. I understand now that the term ‘barefoot and pregnant’ is not an indication of status, but rather an sign that the lady in question couldn’t convince anyone to drop to their knees at the flash of a hoof.

The putting on and removal of socks, slippers, and shoes all fall under my remit, none are tasks to be taken lightly. Pitfalls are many, and traps are easy to plunge into. You pull from the band, not from the toe. Socks must be ‘unrolled’ onto the feet of the fire breathing incubator. Any other method risks the unseemly catching of cotton and toenail, and guarantees your head will be slammed against the side of the desk.

The symbolism of the stance that is taken to perform these duties is not lost on me. Man taking position at a pregnant woman’s feet, adoring, serving, and obeying, but mostly terrified of getting a flat heeled shoe to the temple.

This little piggy patrolman fears for his well being.

2 weeks, 6 days.

Quick, time is ticking, if you haven't pinned your pink or blues to the mast, do so here.

Foliage

Over the past few years, ET has become accustomed to being, let’s say, ‘looked at’ quite a lot.

As embarrassing as such events always were, she has always been brave and willing, not to mention she always ensured everything was well maintained.

Of course, as they are wont to do, time and circumstance take their toll.

Keeping things in order down there while heavily pregnant seems to be about as easy as trimming the fringe on an nervous monkey while blindfolded.

As a result, nature has taken its course, and reclaimed the territory previously tamed by the hand of man. This in itself isn’t an issue, it’s a matter of personal taste even, it can be worn as a symbol of one’s German-ness, or as a badge to signify membership of the 1970’s pornographic motion picture society fan club.

What is an issue of course, is modesty. Not to mention the fact the poor child would be in serious danger of strangulation when it pokes its wee head through my wife’s great life-giving portal. We’d need a team of Australian bush firefighters in the delivery room to clear the child a path to safety.

So, partly because I am the greatest spouse that ever existed, and partly because she ordered me to, I gifted her a session at her favourite massage, beauty and Enya’s-greatest-hits-playing parlour.

There she would avail of the ‘Mama Massage’ for women about to blow, something not to be confused with the ‘Big Mama Massage’ available up the road in Amsterdam for men about to blow. More importantly, the session is to include a certain amount of personal foliage landscaping, where the good ladies of the establishment in question would don protective eyewear, then hack and battle their way through the excess undergrowth of the most Amazonian of undercarriages.

I was admiring this mental image, as you do, when another one bossed its way into my frontal lobe. What would the scene be like, if my heavily pregnant and amnioticly blessed wife’s waters should break right there and then?

Some poor beauty college graduate, herself wearing only the finest of cosmetics, would be half way through her masterpiece, sawing and waxing, hacking and trimming, when all of a sudden she gets a face full of foetaljuice.

Assuming she knows how to swim, would she finish the job? Would the gift voucher remain valid? Would the half cleared emergency exit be deemed a fire hazard and force the hospital to opt for a C-section?

Would this child ever just get out here already?

3 weeks, 2 days.

Join the masses of the weird and wonderful, if you haven't pinned your pink or blues to the mast, do so here.

Pool party

It is time.

No, not for her crotch to explode and spray human shrapnel everywhere, but it’s time for a pool.

A pool which will decide who is the wisest amongst us all. You tell me how you think things will pan out, and I’ll eventually tell you who the smartest bugger in town is. Maybe.

Today is 3 weeks and 5 days to the official due date of February 17th. ET is five feet tall. The baby has measured ahead ever so slightly on in all areas so far except for leg length. As for possible inducing or delaying factors; she occasionally eats Thai or Indian, doesn’t often stand on her head, and any sexual advances on my part would certainly be greeted by the blow of a bedside lamp to the jugular.

The bump is very much concentrated around her, er, belly.

That should be more than enough for you to go on, a complicated system of weighted scoring and points allocation will be applied to the values you assign to each of the following.

Gender:
Date of Birth:
Time of Birth:
Weight:
Length:

Stick them in the comments, and the winner will win my everlasting respect and the envy of all useless guessers everywhere.

You have, let's say, 1 week-ish , go on, go.

Commie bastards

Today’s word of the day is; Kraamzorg.

It’s not a planet from an episode of Battlestar Gallactica that you missed.

Neither is it the battle cry of a borderline extinct sub-Saharan tribe of bushmen warriors, nor is it a brand of industrial weed killer.

I can’t guarantee you that it will never be the name of a Geldof child, but I can tell you what it is in the here and now.

Kraamzorg is the Dutch system of after-birth care for mother and child.

It begins when the mother and child return home after the birth. A nurse comes to your house daily for a week or so, to tend to the recovering mother, help with every single aspect of the first days with a new baby, perform light housework of cooking, cleaning , & laundry, and if necessary, tend to other children in the home.

When you return home with your bundle of joy or red faced screaming rage, give them a call, and a nurse will be on your doorstep, in your kitchen, wiping your new child’s arse, and peering between your wife’s legs –all within an hour.

The cost of the care in an average case(49 hours) is over two thousand euro, with even the most basic of insurance cover paying more than 90% of that. This means that the actual cost of a week’s care and guidance to new parents would be somewhere between one and two hundred euro.

Damn you socialist communist sympathising bastards for robbing us of the freedom to pay through the anus for quality health services and just providing it for us. Damn you to hell.

All this was relayed to us last Monday when the Kraamzorg came to our house to get introduced. She sat at our kitchen table gulping coffee and walking us through all the details. Being a firm believer in the adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, I waited for the downside to come.

It came.

It seems our bed is too low.

In order for the nurse to carry out her duties, she needs the bed to be about 70 cm high. All manner of tricks were devised to avoid having to do it but there is no escaping the fact we need to find an extra 30cm of bed height from somewhere.

It was then that she gave us the details of where we could get the ‘klossen’ (bed raisers) for free.

Damn you backward universal health care system for thinking of everything, robbing us of the freedom to freak out over every detail. Damn you to hell.

4 weeks exactly.

Life of luxury

Other than the emergence of a snubby nose or chubby fist from her nether regions, ET has experienced one of the last big signs that the time is nigh.

Maternity leave.

No more alarms, no more waddling across snowy car parks, and no more trying to work out how to reach a keyboard that is distanced from your wee fingertips by the length of the gut projecting out of you.

Until sometime in July at least.

She’s now a lady of leisure, and can focus on a little baking, some pottering, but mostly embroidery. Or watching repeats of Law & Order, whichever suits.

The greatest little recognised advantage of maternity leave is of course, post. No longer will I have to spend evenings trawling up and down the street trying with a postman’s illegible note trying to find the parcel that he dropped off with some random neighbour, our post shall be delivered.

The downside of this is a tad more practical. Up to now she has been drinking tea, using toilet paper, and consuming electricity all at the expense of her employer, but now her Cleopatrian lounging will thrust us into financial disaster with soaring toilet paper bills and tea-bag shortages.

Maternity leave, another one of life’s ill thought through concepts.

Big head

Bless her.

My poor wife has been in denial for quite a while.

For months ET has been emphatic about how this child will be small. She herself is petite, and I’m rarely in danger of obtaining head injuries in doorways. Regardless of how rounder and fuller she became, she seemed insistent that the child would be a tidy target 6lbs.

Big enough to be healthy, small enough not to dislocate a pelvis or shatter a hip.

The wise head that I am, I’ve been reinforcing the idea that the kid will be significantly more than 6lbs, a view she refused to entertain, regardless of the evidence that was, quite literally, in front of her.

Last Tuesday, the midwife put paid to her fanciful notion of birthing an elfin child of some sort and informed us that the bellydweller is heading for an above average size.

Holding in the giggles, I converted her 3500 gram estimate to a delightful 7lbs and 11 ounces. I believe she also said that the child already has teeth and pointy elbows, although I may have misunderstood that bit. Or imagined it. Or made it up entirely.

Either way, it seems my dear wife’s love tunnel will be accommodating the transport of her 6lb baby as expected, just with 33% extra free.

The good news for her is that it has just 4 weeks and 6 days left to grow. . .

Geboortekaartjes

On Saturday, bundled up from head to toe, we slowly and stiffly trudged into town like a couple of spinal injury victims. Our goal was as simple as it was significant; integration, conformity, and keeping up with the Van Der Joneses.

One of the nicer Dutch customs surrounding babies, albeit a relatively recently developed one, is ‘geboortekaartjes’ – birth cards.

Geboortekaartjes are cards sent to family, friends, colleagues, and pretty much anyone else you feel the urge to nauseate to announce the eviction of the wife squatter. They will have an original and unique cutesy design, carefully chosen from a limited selection of predefined original and unique cutesy designs.

Usually, geboortekaartjes display all the relevant details of the vagina wrecker’s arrival; date & time, weight & length in indecipherable mainland Europe metric measurements, total number of stitches required, and of course its name.

Its name.

There and then, looking around us, with an almost embarrassed whisper, we committed the bellydewller’s name to print. Or a print-person at least. ET said the child-to-be’s name-to-be to the thankfully-very-good-at-written-English lady, and she repeated the name-to-be back to us.

The first time we’ve heard the baby’s name being said by someone else, and it sounds pretty nifty.

Design and text agreed, deposit paid (presumably in case we change our minds about having the child after all), and having received very James Bond-like instructions on how to arrange the finalisation of the order and pick-up after the birth, we wrapped up once again and shuffled off into the afternoon snowfall like we were headed for rehab.

ET, myself, and baby *****....

January 5, 2010, 7:17pm

It was around a quarter past seven yesterday evening when we hurried to the hospital.

Within an hour of arriving, we were in a delivery room. More than six weeks before we expected to be.

I could only stand beside the still empty Perspex baby cot and watch, as the assistant peeled the wrapping from various rubber tubing, plastic bits and pieces, and rolled a set of scissor-like instruments out onto the bed.

ET grimaced as it was explained what they would be used for, all the while hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

We were nervous, more nervous than we had been since the IUI itself. Nervous, and excited.

Just like the 10 other couples beside us.

The expectation was almost tangible among the parents-to-be at the hospital’s open night last night.

Met with tea & coffee, we listened to a handful of speakers talk us through how the hospital runs their obstetrics department. Relaxed and efficient is the only way I can describe it.

Now, I’m not the one about to have my crotch mutate in such a way as to facilitate the emergence of another human from my gut, but if I was, I’d be very happy about doing it there.

They were clear and concise about when to call, where to park, the fact you can have free lemonade but not cola, and having an epidural can delay your going home by an hour or two.

There are 5 fully equipped private delivery rooms with all the trimmings, TV and music, baths and showers to help with the pain management, and drugs on tap should they be required. ET can even have some if she wants.

They spoke about the practicalities of getting there, various pain reliefs, they had a lactation specialist there to support with and advise on breastfeeding, they even show you how to install the bloody car seat.

With every convenience on hand, the focus was still on letting it be as natural an event as it can be, with a very real possibility that we will end up with a baby without having seen an actual doctor since just after the IUI.

They were confident and relaxed, and best of all, contagious.

6 weeks exactly.

Spring clean

It’s a lovely round number, 2010.

Neat and tidy, not missing any bits like 2009 and without the scraggly unwanted bits we’ll have with 2011.

It crept in nice and quietly, sneaking in hidden amongst the debris of Christmas, and before we saw it, it had settled on the sofa with its feet up on the table.

3 days in and we are about to return to work after the holiday. Normally the last day before going back to work is reminiscent of Sunday evenings when we were at school, watching the evening get darker and listening with dread as every theme tune on television counted down the minutes to bedtime and a new school week.

Not this time.

Today, and tomorrow, and the whole week, will be another cross on the calendar, another day closer.

I feel like channeling the great George W. by saying 'bring them on!'.

Upstairs in the attic, two clothes horses are covered with freshly washed and drying clothes. Tiny clothes. Vests, t-shirts, hats, pants, suits, and jackets, that all seem like they should be adorning a cabbage patch kid, not a human.

The socks are so small they have to be carefully balanced on the rails. Sneeze and you would knock them off. I did.

Tomorrow is the first Monday of the New Year, and all the hustle starts again, but for now it’s completely silent and our child’s laundry is hanging up to dry.

6 weeks, 2 days.

I blame Disney

‘Cheeky little monkey’ rings out quite often in the homes of the pregnant.

Or at least it does if our home is anything to go by.

We’ve projected a playful persona upon this child. A mischievous wee bugger, scurrying from one side of the belly to the other, delightfully lodging its feet between the ribs of its host, happily toying with the idea of snapping a couple.

Every kick is interpreted as a spirited wink to the outside world, each head butt to the cervical canal a merry nod of its cap in our direction, and all occurrences of an internal organ being trod on is merely an impish wave.

We’ve mentally made this child into a rogue. A scut. A tease. Everyone does, while of course this could be complete and utter nonsense.

What if digging a heel into a bladder is the kid telling us to stop singing, or each head-first dive for the emergency exit is its way of telling us that there is a dreadful smell in there, or each fist pumped into the uterine wall is a demand for the immediate removal of Mugabe.

What if the child is a disgruntled old thing? A grump in a bump. A foetal Victor (or Victoria) Meldrew, constantly displeased with everything around it.

Simply put, we don’t know what it’s thinking, or what its bursts of activity mean. What we interpret as a pixie-like dance with an umbilical chord along to the top 40 chart countdown may in fact be the child freaking out, swinging its lifeline around its head in uncontrollable rage, like a nine iron in the paws of a pro golfer’s discontented spouse.

What makes us force a happy personality on a human who dines on their own urine and whose greatest ability is jabbing itself in the face with a fist it doesn’t know it has?

I believe we are extremely lucky that babies can’t talk, otherwise we’d be witnessing a barrage of abuse in delivery rooms and birthing centres the entire world over. We’d be inundated with complaints of being poked and pushed and prodded into uncomfortable places, being ridiculed over the weight it was carrying, cramped conditions, dreadful food, hideously uncomfortable journeys, late arrivals, and reaching the other side without a stitch of clothing.

They would reveal to us the horrifying truth that pregnancy and birth is in fact a service provided by Ryanair, a fact that we as a civilisation are just not ready to cope with.

Because

I’m sitting here on Christmas Eve and I’m of the opinion I may be going just ever so slightly mad.

It’s not because I take my own life into my hands anytime I step outside the door, the 3 inches of ice up and down our road testing my already dubiously misaligned centre of gravity. Cranial blood on fresh snow is a tremendous sight.

It’s not because people have gone demented. Even though there’s no milk in the supermarket, the vegetable aisle is a fire hazard, and I saw an old woman bludgeon a teenage boy to death for the last six pack of Heineken. The shops do open again on Saturday, right?

It’s not because I’m twice as drunk as I ever am because my biblically pregnant other half is sipping horse chestnut juice or some such, leaving me to ‘waste not, want not’ and finish every bottle that gets opened. Those nightclub sized bottles of gin were a bad idea.

It’s not because I’ve noticed that I have a bigger gut, more stretch marks and higher blood pressure than the aforementioned human incubator, meaning that either they squirted that wallpaper paste into the wrong half of this couple or I need to eat a vegetable occasionally.

It’s not because I can’t come up with a second verse to the ‘night before Christmas’ beyond:

It was the night before Christmas, when all through the house

The foetus was kicking, trying hard to get out’

Creativity is dead, I can live with that.

It’s because now, today, on Christmas Eve we are just 7 weeks and 6 days away.

7 weeks, 6 days.

Fa la la la lah, la la la laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

Was Madonna Dutch?

There are going to be a couple of interesting hurdles to navigate in bringing a child into this very below sea-level of worlds that is Holland.

The language itself doesn’t bother me, learning how to say ‘go ask your mother’ in Dutch should save most of my blushes, while proclaiming ignorance of what is being said will spare the remainder.

The food may even turn out to be an interesting experiment; the Dutch are a giant race, every single one of them directly descended from Gulliver. What better way is there to settle the nature versus nurture argument than by feeding the child of two vertically challenged individuals Dutch food and see if we grow a six-footer? I’ll see it as a challenge.

The traditions are different, but we can adjust. While the rest of the world’s children are preparing for Santa Claus this week, the great Dutch gift giver has been and gone since early December.

Sinterklaas is an elderly Bishop who sails into Holland on a barge from Spain, helped by a crew of black slaves, all named Piet. He fills the kid’s shoes with presents and quickly buggers off again after a few songs have been sung. If the kids don’t behave during the year, the bishop then kidnaps them and takes them away on his barge. We can probably come to see this child trafficking by the clergy as perfectly acceptable, we are Irish after all.

There is one thing I will truly struggle with. One thing that grates at the back of my brain, one thing that send shivers down my spine, one thing that makes me want to read another Tiger Woods story for a pleasant distraction, and that is what Dutch children call their fathers:

‘Papa’.

I have no desire to live in Walnut Grove, nor to be addressed like an aging Smurf, and certainly not to be brow beaten by a teenage Madonna.

I can be a lot of things, within a conservative and low achieving margin, but ‘Papa’ can’t be one of them.

Time to move.