Flat Update

We bought the flat.

In the last 24 hours before the signing date the bank managed to fit in one last act of idiocy when we were finally able to send back the last set of paperwork that would allow them to transfer the funds to the lawyer. They received it at 10 am that day and were supposed to send the payment immediately, but at the end of the afternoon Understanding Frenchman got a phone call from our adviser saying that he had omitted to sign one of the pages. Except that he had. The adviser sent him a scanned copy and there were our two signatures, clear as day on the page.

It turned out that what had happened was that, because my signature is basically just my name written in my normal handwriting and his is a bit more "signature"-like (although you can still see his last name clearly written if you look for more than about a second), someone had decided that I had written my name and then signed underneath and that he had forgotten to sign. (This despite the fact that both of our signatures also appeared on the front page of the document next to our typed names.) By the time they'd figured out the mistake, it was too late to send the payment.

However (with yet another reminder from both UFM and the lawyer the following morning) the bank did eventually transfer the money half an hour before we were due to sign. Paperwork dealt with and keys in hand, UFM went happily back to work while I returned home with the baby.

A few hours later there was another phonecall. This time it was the previous owners, to say that they had just been informed by the gardienne that water was coming through the ceiling from our flat into the flat below. Feeling like we were in some kind of sick reality TV show, UFM rushed off to the flat to see what had happened while I dashed to the insurance agency to confirm our policy starting that very day (Our super-cool baby was smart enough to stay asleep through all of this!). In the end it turned out that the flood was actually in the flat above and the water was running through our wall into the one below, so we ended up with more paperwork to sign and some extra repair work to do, but luckily no financial liability. Fingers crossed that our trials are now over and that in a few weeks we'll be enjoying our new abode!

Another Week Gone By

One thing they say about babies which is definitely true is that they make time go both fast and slowly at the same time. I was talking the other day about something which happened towards the end of my pregnancy and I couldn't believe that only a few weeks before we had yet to meet our little bundle of joy, yet there are times (mainly when I'm waiting for her to go to sleep) where I actually watch the clock because one minute feels like at least five or ten.

My parents came to visit last week, and while their main mission was obviously to spend time with their granddaughter, we tried to get out and about a bit more than I usually manage, including taking advantage of having extra pairs of hands to carry the buggy up and down the steps on the metro. We made it all the way to the Ile Saint Louis and sat on a bench in the sun eating ice cream from Berthillon. (Tip: there is always a huge queue at the actual shop in summer, but there is a little kiosk nearby where Mr Berthillon's sister sells the same ice cream.)

The weather has been so weird this spring and summer that it took us until last Sunday to have our first picnic in the park of the year, but now that the sun has come out (sort of - it rained today) we've got another two lined up for the 14 juillet long weekend.

One unfortunate development is that our super cool baby has been suffering from colic and instead of being chilled out 24 hours a day now has a couple of hours in the evening where she screams and screams and screams. I think this has something to do with the way my milk comes out when I'm feeding her, so I've been spending a fair bit of time online googling solutions (the science of lactation is an amazing thing) and the rest of the time wondering if it's better to just accept that babies cry (two hours a day is apparently very normal) and just keep giving her cuddles to help her through it.

Nonetheless, we still feel very lucky to have a healthy baby who otherwise eats well and sleeps enough for us both to get a reasonable amount of shut-eye (and for me to have time to scour the internet for colic remedies...), so as a way of showing my gratitude to the universe, I decided I wanted to donate milk to the Lactarium de l'Ile de France. The lactarium collects milk from donors and gives it to premature and ill babies who for one reason or another cannot have their own mothers' milk. After I sent an email asking for information, a very nice lady phoned me back and explained the whole procedure. We were about to arrange to have the equipment and paperwork delivered to my flat when she asked me if I was English, as she thought she recognised my accent. Sadly, she wasn't just making small talk: as with blood donation, people who were in the UK when mad cow disease was a problem are not allowed to donate milk in France, as there is a very tiny risk of spreading Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. I was really disappointed, as it seemed like such a great thing to do. I guess I'll just have to hope that some non-UK breastfeeding mother in Paris with enough milk, time and inclination will stumble across this and be in a position to take inspiration from my post!

My New Parisian Life

When you don't have kids (and especially when you're pregnant), people who do love to tell you how you cannot possibly ever be prepared for how much your life is going to change. They also use the word "overwhelming" a lot in relation to how you will feel both when you hold your newborn for the first time and when you're confronted with yet another explosive nappy change at 4am when you haven't had any sleep.

So I'm a little surprised to be reporting that I haven't found my experience of parenting to be particularly overwhelming or astonishing so far. (The exception to this might have been this morning on a crowded bus, when a rather large woman with a shopping trolley decided she had to push past me to grab a seat that was about to become free, meaning that I had to step off the bus to let other people get out, leaving the baby in the buggy on the bus without me. It took about a minute and the baby was almost a WHOLE METRE away from me with STRANGERS in between us. The tiger-mother fear and rage I felt was totally justified, obviously, and might be described as overwhelming.)

This is not to say that my baby daughter is not the most precious thing in the world to me, or that cleaning poo off the curtains in the wee small hours is easy*. It's just that, maybe thanks to all the warnings, being a parent does feel pretty much like what we signed up for.

And life has definitely changed. Gorgeous baby cuddles aside, one of the nicest things has been enjoying life in our little quartier of Paris. When it takes several hours to be ready to leave the house, and public transport is either inaccessible or carries the risk of incidents like the one above, it's just so much easier to stay local. And so, after 3 years of living here, I have finally got to chatting with the baker and the greengrocer and the pharmacist. (Especially the pharmacist. Having a baby in France involves lots of trips to the pharmacy.) An afternoon's outing might be a visit to the PMI (Protection maternelle et infantile), where the nice ladies offer you glasses of water and supply you with cushions while you feed your baby, or a walk around the park. We've even been to see an osteopath, which also felt terribly French, as it was basically an extra checkup to find out if anything might be wrong with the baby which would probably be deemed unnecessary in the UK but was actually incredibly helpful, as she gave me lots of tips about how to get her to sleep and feed better. All in all, I am enjoying the sense of integration, as well as my expanding baby-related French vocabulary!

I find it funny, too, how some aspects of life are so much more stressful, but often balanced out by how nice people are. This afternoon, for example. After the bus rage incident in the morning, I met a very old friend who was passing through Paris for coffee, then took another bus back home. By this point it was 3 hours since the baby had been fed and there was every risk that she was going to start screaming before we got back. It looked as if we were going to make it until the bus driver announced that the next stop would be the last one, when we weren't even nearly home. It turned out there was yet another manif and the streets were blocked, leaving me with pretty much no choice but to walk the 45 minutes back. And of course, five minutes later, the baby woke up, leaving me desperately looking for a park bench to stop and feed her on. Even after some milk, she was still cross (changing her nappy on a park bench was a step too far, and she was also suffering from indigestion.) But as I sat there desperately trying to strike a balance between soothing her and getting her home, the slightly threatening-looking young man with a very large dog on the next bench struck up a conversation on the causes of infant crying, asked her name and complimented us on how pretty it was. And somehow that made the world seem a better place again. 


*In a small Parisian flat, keeping the changing mat away from soft furnishings can be somewhat tricky.