18/11/2007

Three things:

I felt kind of ashamed of how bitter I felt earlier this week. We met up with one of the mothers from our original 'New Parents Group' Organised by the Early Childhood Health Centre. She has just had her second baby so she had one little girl who is 18 months old (in daycare when we met up) and one 10 day old baby girl. She was telling us how easy her second baby was, how the little girl just slept for three hours at a time and how easy it was for her to go to the gym because…. At that point there was the sound of our collective jaws dropping because not only was this woman out in public, wearing proper clothes and makeup, at ten days post-partum but, just like with her first baby, she had ALREADY BEEN BACK TO THE GYM (after a vaginal delivery). I think all of us felt a strange mixture of jealousy, bitterness and a strange smugness. I'm not sure where the smugness came from, perhaps we felt like she was missing some parenting rite of passage? Maybe it was like that wistful feeling you get when you feel that 'kids these days' have it so much easier with their mobile phones and internet and never having to walk to school in the snow, up hill, both ways…..


I also discovered something much nicer, yet possibly also more scary. Asher is a water baby! A few of us went to the beach on Friday afternoon and the kids were pottering about playing in the sand and we were sitting on our rug chatting and watching them. Asher and one of his best little mates started to head toward the water and as I was starting to get up to follow the other mum told me that her little boy always stopped at the very edge so I paused and watched as Asher, ignoring the other little guy who did stop kept walking into the warm calm water until a tiny wave and the uneven sand conspired to trip him and he landed on all fours. I was racing the few metres down the beach by this point to rescue my 'little darling' who was completely calm and desperate to get back in the water when I hauled him out (hey, I thought he was going to need me to comfort him). Anyhow, he spent the next hour naked just walking around in the shallows holding my hand, pointing to and exclaiming over the water, the sand, twigs and leaves, litter, our shadows, lumps and dips in the sand and our own toes, under water and half buried in sand. It was absolutely delightful and he sleep like a log afterwards, but his complete lack of fear means that I am going to have to be beyond hyper vigilant over summer when we are anywhere near water. I might try him out in our pool tomorrow (our block of apartments has a pool - photos later, when I have a camera).


In other news - our outdoor table was delivered today. Apart from our qualms about the likelihood of it being made of Indonesian rainforest, we really love it. It will easily seat eight, the chairs are pretty comfy and its raw teak and smells just wonderful. Thank goodness we can eat outside now (the old table was plastic, and it's legs were so dodgy it would wobble every time you tried to use cutlery. Happiness! (Except no photos because I still don't have a Camera. I want a point-and-shoot digital for less that AUD$700 which gives me really good image quality, minimal lag between pressing the shutter button and the picture being taken, the ability to use manual controls and a decent optical zoom - any ideas?)

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