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.