The kraamvisite

You can vaguely describe Holland as the same as everywhere else, just with minute yet significant differences.

Almost in the same way that good looking celebrities have easily recognisable, yet frankly ugly siblings.

A case in point being that yesterday we had our first official kraamvisite.

A 'kraamvisite' is where people simply come to visit you and see the new baby, just like people do the entire world over and have done so for centuries.

The Dutch kraamvisite is slightly different, it is formal. Very formal. This is no drop-in-while-passing arrangement. Arranged strictly well in advance, a precise date and time agreed, and may the ghost of the little boy with his finger in the dyke haunt for eternity you should you serve anything other than the appropriate food and drinks to your guests.

Appropriate in this case being coffee strong enough to power a Prius, and ‘beschuit met muijses’, which are an inexplicable combination of toasted discs of bread covered in butter and sugared anise seed, pink or blue according to the genitalia of the person being celebrated.

Kraamvisites apply to acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours, and bizzarely your boss. Yesterday we played host to my boss.

What could possibly go wrong when two sleep deprived foreigners attempt to host an event of cultural significance for someone who has the power to remove their livelihood?

Theoretically, quite a lot.

One could ignore the traditions laid out above and serve stale chocolate chip cookies, with the pathetic reasoning that if they are good enough for one’s own dinner, they are good enough for the man who effectively puts them on the table.

One could choke said boss on appallingly made coffee, leaving him to pick cheap granules from between his teeth for hours afterwards.

One could have a baby on show who insisted on farting her way through the entire visit.

One could get said boss lost after begging a lift to the garage where the car that the boss pays for lay in a woeful state of repair due to negligence and therefore making him late home to his own wife and children.

One could be looking for a new job soon. Or host country.

Theoretically.

Excuse me Miss Paltrow

Last night was an odd one.

As Mango celebrated five weeks on this side of her mother’s vagina, I finally got to go out and officially ‘wet the baby’s head’.
As has become an irritating habit in pubs across the planet, I occasionally pull out my phone and check my email. You never know when that life changing piece of correspondence could hit your mailbox.

One such moment arose when my fellow quaffer went to relieve himself and I once again flipped the phone open and clicked on-line.

Through somewhat drunken eyes, to my pleasant surprise, I read the results that were coming in from the Irish Blog Awards in Galway. I had to check a couple of sources before I saw for sure that the blog had won the award of Best Personal Blog 2010.

Nuts. It’s mental, insane, but brilliant that Mango’s story gets an unexpected extra happy ending.

I want to thank Jo for standing in, collecting the pretty sexy looking award, and keeping it from ending up in some Galway dumpster. I’m glad someone familiar with the blog was able to pick it up and I can’t wait to get a look at the real thing.

Thanks to everyone that has read along the way, and to the organisers and judges for putting in all the the effort.

The award itself was sponsored by Microsoft Ireland’s Developer & Platform Group, and the full list of winners is available here. Congratulations to all the winners, and best of luck next time around to all those that didn’t make it.

How happy am I?

About this happy.

Pressing snooze

We were oh so very clever.

We had it all planned, were full of very grand notions, we knew how it would all work.

Pas de problème!

We were oh so very wrong.

Mango’s bedroom was to serve as the magic room. The place where she would be cleaned and changed and fed and made presentable once again to the world. This was also to be the case while she slept in our room.

The only impact on our bedtime routine would be the occasional whimper, from the child, not us, as she is whisked away to the magic room before silently being returned to join the blissfully sleeping parent. Our den of peace and tranquility and comfort should not face upheaval of any sort.

A couple of days short of 5 weeks and it is all arse over tit.

ET, being the lucky on-maternity-leave critter that she is, is champion of ‘the turnaround’.

The turnaround is the nappy change and feed that takes place in the dead of night. In the early days this involved a child roaring her head off, lights being switched on, kettles being boiled, drawers being open and shut, cold feet on hard floors, and a struggle to resettle the child when all the the various activities had been completed.

Now the turnaround is different. Now the turnaround is done in moments, stealth like actions carried out by a practically sleeping mammy beside a eyelid flickering daddy upon a snoozing child. The cost of such a change is high though. Gone are our fantasies of an undisturbed sleeping environment, and here to stay is a bed surrounded by nappies, wipes, bottles, bottle warmers, nappy bags, formula measures and a sweatshop worth of spit up cloths.

Everything is taken to bed with us. Where previously the only discomfort in the bed would have been a stray knee or wild elbow, we are now just as likely to have our slumber disrupted by rolling over on a formula scoop, or by the rustle of a plastic bag, or by the dripping of a cooling bottle on our pillow.

It’s like sleeping in a skip out the back of a baby shop. A duvet in a dumpster. One huge nest of humanity where everything and anything is within an arm’s reach.

But for now, she sleeps. So, pas de problème!