Choosing a Bilingual Baby Name ...

... is hard!

UFM and I agree that we prefer a name which will be pronounced in a similar way by people who speak either language over a name which exists in both but is pronounced very differently. So Pierre, for example, would be fine, because English speakers know how to say it roughly in the French way, but Timothy would not, even though the very similar-looking Timothée exists in French.

We both like fairly classic names, especially for boys, but unfortunately many of them are ruled out by our first criterion. And there are an awful lot of boys' names where the French sounds or looks like a girl's name in English: Nicholas, Jean and Michael for example. Also, quite a lot of names which are just classic in French are posh classics in English - in UFM's family Charles and François were a plumber and an electrician, whereas in English they sound like aristocrats, which is not exactly the vibe that we're aiming for.

There are a lot of pitfalls to avoid too. I was never going to call my daughter Fanny, but UFM had to point out to me that Connor sounds a lot like connard and I only learned relatively recently that the first few letters of Fiona make a rude word in French. We met a little girl called Aliénor in the park the other day, and I thought her name was gorgeous until I realised that English-speaking kids would probably refer to her as "Extra-terrestrial".

Maybe everybody feels like this about their own children, but I'm also starting to think I am incredibly picky when it comes to names. There are some letters that I just don't like very much, like B and G, either because of the way they sound or how they look written down. Then there are the trends that make perfectly nice names sound annoying when you realise that in a class of children, they all sound a bit the same. For women my roughly my age in France this is the 3 syllables ending in IE trend represented by Virginie, Nathalie, Aurelie and Coralie , while in 2016 it seems to have been the letter L and ending in A - Léna, Lina, Lana, Luna, Lila, Lola and Lisa were all in the top 100 last year.

Finally, one really wants one's child's name to have a beautiful meaning or personal significance, all the while having no idea what kind of a person they will turn out to be and whether it will actually suit them.

I have been mulling all of the above over for months now. UFM thinks we should wait until after the next scan, when at least we'll know if we're having a boy or a girl and can rule out half the agonising!

If things have been quiet around here ...

... it might be because it's the rentrée and everyone is too busy taking work seriously to do fun and exciting things.

... it might be because taking a toddler to the park is often the highlight of our weekend

... it might be because we've moved to the suburbs and are in the process of becoming old and boring

But there's also a very exciting reason why evenings spent reading and watching TV, local walks and afternoon naps have taken precedence over novel and bloggable experiences:

We are expecting our second baby!

He or she is due in March, so having spent the summer feeling sick and exhausted, I'm finding it a bit easier to enjoy life now (at least up until about 9pm, when I fall asleep on the sofa). So far, I think the best thing about this being the second time around is looking forward to everything more: we know what to expect and, having survived the baby experience once, we're more confident that it will be OK this time around as well.

But if anyone has any tips for surviving sleepless nights with a newborn followed by manic days with a toddler, I'm all ears!

Chez M. le Président

Two weeks ago, we went on a visit to the president's house.

Admittedly, so did 20 000 other people, but it was still pretty cool.

It was the Journées du patrimoine, when important buildings all over France are open to the public. We had a friend of UFM's who had come all the way from Canada staying, which helped to motivate us to actually get out and do something. In previous years, we had visited the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate and survived the queues and the crowds (tip - visit at lunch time), so this time we decided to swing by the most popular building of all, the Elysée palace and see if we could face the experience.

We arrived at 10am and happily came across the priority queue for disabled people, pregnant women and people with small children. It didn't look too horrific, so we decided to take advantage of having SCB with us and make the effort.

Observing the crowds, a surprising number of heavily pregnant women seemed to have decided that seeing the president's official residence was an essential item on their "to do" list in the final weeks before the birth, along with the elderly and infirm and families like ours who were prepared to be optimistic about their toddlers' capacity for waiting patiently, and even in the "priority" queue, it took us two hours to reach the entrance to the garden.

Nevertheless, SCB was happy enough toddling up and down and smiling at elderly ladies, and we were pretty pleased with how things were gone as we passed through the final security check.

The view from the queue

...Only to discover that there was a further queue inside the garden where only those with actual medical needs were considered to be priority and escorted past the waiting hoards by the fire service. People like us who were only carrying 11 kilos of wriggly toddler on our backs (you had to leave buggies at the entrance, but I had luckily thought to pack the baby carrier ) had to wait patiently like everybody else.

That said, apart from one woman who kept harassing the poor junior fire service volunteers because she hadn't been allowed to skip ahead, everyone really was quite patient and the atmosphere was much nicer than you would expect among a bunch of Parisians who had been standing around for several hours.






Eventually, we shuffled our way in the door and the visit really began.

The first room was not at all what I was expecting:

Next to the giant swans, under a ceiling covered in what looked like geometric perspex icicles, was a beautifully set dining table. I can only imagine M. Macron eating here with a deeply ironic smile on his face, perhaps glancing across the table at Brigitte as if to say, "We've really made it now, haven't we, chérie?" 

The rest of the palace was more in keeping with my expectations, although it was interesting in many of the rooms to see modern art and furnishings juxtaposed with much older décor.

There were a lot of chandeliers.

 One of the fun parts was an exhibition of all the gifts Macron has received since becoming president:

 I also liked the section with all the place settings and cutlery used for presidential dinners.  UFM and I are quite proud of the cutlery set we received as a wedding present which has two different sizes of knives and forks, but we're still missing elements such as the grape scissors:

We all agreed afterwards that we were glad we had made the effort to do the visit ... and also very glad that it's ticked off the list and we will never have to stand in the 3 hour queue again!

August

I thought I would write lots about what we did in August, because, unlike in July, we actually did plenty of interesting things. But it's now September, la rentrée has come around and I think I may have to resort to a quick summary of the highlights:

Grandparents Galore
My parents came to visit, then we went out to Brittany to see mamie and papy. SCB loved being pushed on the swings, going paddling, building sandcastles and generally being showered with attention, but unfortunately chose the only week in the year when we had unlimited babysitting on tap to become ridiculously clingy, howling and grabbing our legs whenever UFM or I tried to leave her alone with any of our parents. So there was no "us" time for us, but it was lovely to have everyone together. My mum impressed us all once again with her French conversational skills and papy taught everyone how to play palets, a Breton game where you throw round metal discs on to a board and aim to hit the target.

Beautiful Beaches
As usual, we tested the waters in both the north and the south of Brittany. We went to Carnac, which was beautiful but windy, and Saint Enogat, where, after a picnic and sandcastle-building with granny, SCB suddenly dashed off across the sand to the far-distant sea (the tide was very, very low) and had a wonderful time splashing about in the shallows.

Making a break for the sea

Magnificent Mountains
After Brittany, we spent two weeks in the Alps. Despite only having learned to walk eight weeks before, SCB took to scrambling up mountain paths with gusto. She didn't go very far ( a few hundred metres at a time) but she was happy to be carried by us the rest of the time, so although we were limited a bit by how far we were fit enough to carry her, we managed to do some proper mountain walks for the first time in almost two years.

Mini-Hiker

Our second week in the Alps was spent in Beaufort, the town north east of Albertville famous for one of the most delicious (and expensive!) cheeses in France. The whole area is ridiculously charming. Even the ski industry hasn't spoiled the little villages of delightful wooden chalets, all with flowers in window boxes on the balconies. Even the cows whose milk is used to make Beaufort cheese are more charming than other cows. When Understanding Frenchman told me that the illustrators of Heidi visited the area for inspiration instead of going to Switzerland, I wasn't at all surprised. In practical terms, it was also a good place for us to be, as you can drive fairly high up into the mountains and there are plenty of accessible walks. On the days when we didn't have the energy to hike, we also appreciated the outdoor swimming pool and enjoyed wandering around the village eating artisanal ice cream.

Beaufort

Faithful Friends
After all that fun, we might have been a bit sad to come back to la région parisienne, but luckily two very good friends came to stay for the last couple of days of the holidays.We've always liked having visitors, but since travel has become more complicated for us since the arrival of SCB, we appreciate people coming to see us even more. Having guests was also a good motivation to head into Paris and generally make the most of our last few days of freedom. I was sorry to see them go, but the gourmet delicacies that they brought from their home town of Birmingham (i.e. an enormous bag of Cadbury's chocolate) has been helping to lessen the pain of the rentrée and has been much appreciated!

 

Busy / Not Busy

July was a bit of a strange month in our house. I was on holiday for most of it, while UFM was working, and I was really looking forward to having plenty of time with SCB and getting out and about lots.

In the end, it wasn't quite like that. While SCB has basically been sleeping through the night for a while now, she went through a phase of waking up ridiculously early and refusing to go back to sleep even although she was clearly tired. At the same time I had a period of insomnia which meant that I ended up planning most of the day around her having naps in her cot so that I could go to sleep at the same time. So we didn't go on nearly as many exciting trips as I'd planned.

(Incidentally, we have since solved the early waking, along with her reluctance to go to bed at night, by cutting out her morning nap and putting her to bed later. Contrary to what the sleep "experts" of the internet will tell you, poor sleep routines can actually be due to undertiredness as well as too little sleep!)

We did manage a few outings into Paris, though, made easier by the acquisition of a new, super light buggy that you can use from newborn, fold with one hand, lift with one finger and push through the barriers on the metro. Any trip out now has to involve safe opportunities to for SCB to practise walking, so we had lunch at the Musée du Quai Branly, which has a lovely, quiet garden that feels a bit like one of Paris' undiscovered secrets despite being only a few hundred metres from the Eiffel tower. A friend and I also met up at the Natural History museum and spent an hour or so strolling through the course of evolution and marvelling at the length of a narwhal's tooth before letting SCB loose in the Jardin des Plantes. We watched the planes flying overhead for the military parade on the 14th July from a friend's balcony, and I even managed to do a little bit of successful sales shopping and spend a voucher I had for Galeries Lafayette before it expired. After our shopping trip, SCB needed to stretch her legs, so we went to the park at Trinité d'Estienne d'Orves, where she toddled around distributing smiles to old ladies, other children and the dodgy blokes smoking joints in secluded corners alike. (Ironically these guys are a lot less scary when you have a small child with you than when you're a woman alone.)

Playing in the sandpit at the park

Written down like that, it seems like quite a lot, but at the time it felt as though I spent most of July in a state of lethargy, interspersed with many, many trips to the local park. Which wasn't a horrible way to spend the holidays, but I'm glad the UFM is now off work as well, we've escaped from Paris and August is shaping up to be a bit more exciting!

All Sorts of Bidets

Having a small child in the house has introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of French nursery rhymes. In English, I've so far avoided the ones about about cutting the tails off visually impaired rodents and dying of the plague, but SCB was given a musical book of French children's songs which included this little gem:

A cheval sur mon bidet,
Quand il trotte il fait des pets,
Au pas, au pas, au pas,
Au trot, au trot, au trot,
Au galop, au galop, au galop!

Il a tant galopé
Qu'il est tombé sur le nez!

For which a rough translation would be:

Riding on my little horse/bidet,
When he trots he farts,
Walking, walking, walking,
Trotting, trotting, trotting,
Galloping, galloping, galloping,

He galloped so much
He fell down on his nose!

Intrigued by the scatological references, I did a quick search on Wordreference.com and discovered that bidet is an old-fashioned word for a horse. There is even a whole discussion thread related to whether the bathroom furnishing is named because of the position one adopts when using it, and whether the wordplay was intentional when the song was invented. 

I'm not sure how I feel about singing along with that one now!

Feeding Baby the French Way (Part 2)

When we started weaning SCB onto solid foods, I felt a little bit conflicted about the French nutrition guidelines for babies. I like their structure, their emphasis on introducing lots of different flavours, and the fact that the recommend foods are very gentle on tiny, developing digestive systems. On the negative side, there is very little emphasis given to finger foods and babies learning to chew and, more worryingly from our point of view, the advice seems to be very based on the needs of formula-fed babies, with little attention paid to those who might still be breast fed beyond the first few months.

Fast-forward six months, though,and most of that is behind us. SCB is eating a wide variety of things from all the food groups, 3 meals a day, and all sorts of textures. Aside from teaching her to use a knife and fork, and to say, "Pass the butter, please," and, "May I leave the table?" it would be tempting to believe that our work here was done.

The awesome thing about France, though, is that educating your child about food doesn't stop at making sure they'll happily eat green beans and broccoli. The emphasis on learning about different tastes continues all through early childhood. I remember being massively impressed when I visited a friend and her toddler many years ago and the little one had rabbit stew followed by a wedge of camembert for lunch. (This article (in French) explains why providing a "meticulous selection of good cheeses" is a good way to "awaken" baby's sense of taste.)

I was similarly stunned last week when I went to pick SCB up from the nanny and she announced that she had fed the babies liver for lunch. I think I have eaten liver once in my life, and the nanny admitted that she doesn't like it or cook it at home either, but we both agreed that it was important for SCB to have some so that she doesn't grow up being as fussy as us!

Recently we have mostly been ...

Walking in the park. The weather has been gorgeous and SCB's favourite thing to do at the moment is to toddle along holding our hands. At the moment she seems more interested in speed than balance  literally almost trying to run before she can walk!) though, so we might have to wait a bit longer for her first independent steps.

Walking on the beach. SCB has also been eating sand, getting covered in sand and destroying the sandcastles we lovingly built for her. Our parenting lesson of the month has been learning to always apply suncream before we get to the beach in order to have a slightly less sticky, sandy baby.

Visiting mamie and papy. Heading out to Brittany has been an easy getaway for us to make the most of all the long weekends recently. Highlights from our recent trips have included watching baby swallows learning to fly in the barn , the first barbecue of the year, and plenty of goes on the swing in the garden and even a little pony ride for SCB. Last Saturday we visited the town of Arradon and went to a little hidden beach (sort of - it might just have been empty because it was cold).

Going to a Norman-Breton wedding ( and yes, the jokes about Mont St Michel were flying).  This was actually the first French-French wedding I had ever been to in France and it followed a fairly traditional format. The only unusual thing was that the church service came first. It's illegal in France to have a church wedding before you're officially married at the mairie (religious ceremonies are not recognised by the state), but because this was the groom's second marriage, the church service was a blessing and not a full wedding mass. It went on for about an hour but I couldn't tell you much about what was said because although SCB was extremely well behaved, making sure she wasn't getting up to mischief took up most of our attention.  We were a bit worried about how the evening would go, as French weddings go on for a long time and even the dinner often doesn't finish until after midnight. We had visions of taking shifts to sit hungrily with her in a darkened room at the gîte, but in the end she sat in her buggy throughout most of the meal then calmly fell asleep about 11, only waking when they turned the music up at about 1am, at which point we decided to quit while we were ahead and all went to bed.

100 Apples

It's always nice when you have a pet theory about something and science proves it to be true.

It's even more interesting when you have a pet theory about something and science proves that it extends beyond what you had even considered.

When people talk about French paradoxes, one that comes up often is the fact that a country with such an abundance of delicious food (and such an obsession with talking about it) manages to have some of the lowest levels of overweight and obesity in Europe. My pet theory about why this works is that when food tastes good, you don't have to eat as much of it to feel satisfied. (Had I been Mireille Giuliano, I could have made a fortune telling everyone that the key to being slim is to replace Dairy Milk with champagne and oysters, but unfortunately I'm too much of a realist. She also got there first.)

Recently, a few items in the media have caught my eye because research suggests that it goes much further than this: studies have found that the varieties of fruit and vegetables we eat today are much lower in nutrients than those grown in a few decades ago, and it may be that we are eating too many calories because our bodies are craving the vitamins and minerals that they need. This article claims, for example, that a 1950s apple had 100 times more vitamin C than the apples we eat today.

The Obs article cites mainly British, Canadian and American research but there was a programme on France 5 recently (which sadly I can't find on replay anymore) about the work that the French Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique is doing in this area giving much more detail. Both suggest that organic produce is generally better, but the problems of selective breeding, poor soils and increasingly intensive production, even on organic farms, remain.

While the fact that French studies have similar findings to the others shows that France is not immune to this problem, I wonder if the fact that it is still possible here to find many different varieties of fruit and vegetables, often locally produced, means that it might not be quite so bad as elsewhere. And perhaps the national obsession with high-quality food means that France can lead the way in looking for solutions. I'm interested to see what will happen next.

A Fortnight of Firsts

"Just think," UFM said to SCB as we sat on the runway with the engines of the plane starting to throb, "you're nine months old and you're going to fly for the first time. When I did that, I was 25 years old!"

I was a bit nervous about our first experience of taking a baby on a plane, but in fact everything went very smoothly. SCB was not keen on sitting still on my lap at first, but having scarcely napped all day, cried for a couple of minutes after take off and then fell asleep for most of the rest of the flight.

And so our first trip to Scotland as a family of three got off to a good start. Slightly less good was the fact that SCB was carsick four times on the 45 minute drive from the airport to my parents' house - clearly we were being optimistic about the fact that this might have improved since the last time. As a result, we weren't as adventurous about going on lots of trips as we might have been, but the last ten days have nevertheless been packed with other fun "firsts".

We had lunch in Edinburgh with my best friend from university and her baby, who I had never met. We chose the Morningside area, as it's yummy-mummy-ville and therefore full of nice cafés for mums and babies who lunch - the place we chose even had babyfood pouches on the menu, as well as numerous highchairs available. Taking advantage of having a ratio of three devoted adults to one baby, we took SCB swimming for the first time, which she absolutely loved. She also had her first ever play in a swing park and adored the swings (possibly surprising, given the aforementioned carsickness!).

Over the weekend, we ticked off another country, with a trip over the border to the Northumberland coast in the north-east of England. I had been when I was little but didn't have many memories of the area, and I was surprised by both how rural and how beautiful it was. There are lots of long, sandy beaches and historic castles. We were lucky that the sun shone the whole time we were there, so SCB had both her first picnic and her first paddle in the sea ... wrapped up in a warm coat in true British style!

And, for the first time in a long time, I'm feeling quite reluctant to go back to France tomorrow. Normally I enjoy seeing friends and family and reconnecting with home but I'm usually equally happy to get back to my "real" life on the other side of the Channel. This time, despite the fact that I'm very happy with my French life at the moment, I have this feeling that everything from spending time with friends to getting out of the house when you live in a third floor flat with no lift, is so much more effort. Hopefully some nice sunny weather and the prospect of lots of lovely bank holidays will be enough to change my mind when we get back!

Feeding a Baby the French Way (sort of )

Since the French are often held to be the world experts on eating well (and according to some, also on bringing up children!), I was interested to see what the advice would be when we moved SCB on to solid foods.

Confusing, would appear to be the answer.

To be fair, the guidelines in the carnet de santé are fairly straightforward. Fruit, vegetables and meat can be given from 4 months and should definitely be given from 6 months. Most cereals can and should be given from 8 months. (The exception is baby rice, which is possible from 4 months but never actually recommended.) For most things, there should be a gradual progression from purée to lumpier textures and then solid pieces.

Go beyond the carnet de santé, however, and the simplicity stops. My GP, despite the fact that SCB didn't start solids until nearly 6 months old, said that she should have a month of nothing but vegetables, followed by a month of nothing but fruit, then a little bit of meat, and finally carbohydrates. When I asked about quantities, he said, "Oh, just use the jars. They're very good." Laurence Pernoud, meanwhile, keeps suggesting putting baby rice and even purée into bottles of formula. From other research I knew that the most important nutrients to introduce for exclusively breastfed babies were zinc and iron, while baby rice is mostly full of empty calories and apparently arsenic too, so I wasn't too keen to follow either of their advice!

In the UK, the NHS advice is to begin solids when the baby shows certain signs of readiness which generally appear around six months. There is less emphasis on the order, although it is suggested to start with fruit and vegetables, and giving finger foods early on is recommended. Baby Led Weaning is also very popular. In France BLW (DME, la diversification menée par l'enfant) is almost unheard of - the only time I ever heard it mentioned was at meetings of La Leche League, and even there it wasn't common.

In the end, we did a mixture of what the carnet de santé recommends along with some finger foods as per the NHS advice. We were a bit more lax about the order we introduced things, but with hindsight I'm not sure that was a good idea, as I suspect some of the terrible nights we had in the 7th month were due to poor digestion. At the same time, SCB was clearly hungry for solid food by this point, so I'm glad we didn't try to feed her on nothing but fruit and vegetable purée for two months! I've read elsewhere that the World Health Organisation recommendation to breastfeed exclusively for six months is largely due to the risk of food poisoning in developing countries, and that introducing certain foods before that can reduce the risk of allergies, so perhaps the answer is to start a little earlier, but with smaller quantities. Unfortunately, whatever country you're in, it seems that nobody is totally sure what's correct (or if they are, they're probably being contradicted by official advice from elsewhere), so it's very hard to know.

Three months on, however, we have settled into a nice little routine. SCB has cereal and fruit for breakfast, then mashed up vegetables, carbohydrate and protein for lunch. With the nanny, she has some yoghurt because she isn't having as much milk. She has more fruit in the afternoon, then dinner is a bit more random, as it depends how hungry or tired she is whether she'll eat much or not. I liked the idea of BLW/finger foods, but I find if she does nothing but feed herself for a meal, she'll eat very little and most of it will end up on the floor, so we tend to give her bits and pieces to munch before or alongside the spoon feeding.

I guess only time will tell whether she ends up needing to drink Perrier after meals to help her digestion like a true French person or whether she'll have British-style insides that can stomach a big fry-up for breakfast ...

(Just in case you missed the link earlier, the Science of Mom blog has lots of interesting reading about studies relating to infant nutrition and other aspects of parenting.)

Recently we have mostly been ...

Enjoying the springtime. The flowers are out, the blossom is on the trees and it's daylight in the mornings, meaning that I can now take the scenic route to work and breathe in less exhaust fumes. My new routine is super-healthy, as I'm fitting in an hour of walking every day. It makes a nice change from spending hours on the RER.

Getting more sleep. SCB is now on three meals a day and is doing much better at night, so juggling work, sleep and looking after her is much easier than it was a month or so ago. She's started to pull herself up on the furniture and wants to walk, though, so keeping up with her is becoming another form of daily exercise for us!

Worrying about politics. Between Brexit and the upcoming presidential elections, there's a lot of significant change going on, and it doesn't feel like a good time to be an international family. While we're happy in France at the moment, UFM and I have always agreed that living in the UK would be an option for us in the future, and Brexit could make that much more difficult. SCB and I, as British citizens could move there whenever we wanted to, but to bring a foreign spouse, you have to prove that you can support them with a minimum income of more than £18 000, so if UFM was to come with us, one or both of us would need to find jobs before we arrived. It makes me so angry that Brexiters claim to be making life better for British people, when in fact for many of us, significant rights will potentially be eroded. And if Le Pen gets her way in France, similar things could happen here.

I'm very admiring of some of my American friends who since Trump's election have become extremely politically active and are fighting hard against every policy they disagree with, but, not living in my home country and having limited voting rights in France, I'm still looking for ways to take similar action myself. In the meantime, here's hoping that the French make better choices than the British did come April!

Parisian Public Transport with a Baby

When we lived in the centre of Paris, I quickly figured out that the easiest way to get around with a baby was to use a sling or baby carrier. Shops are narrow, pavements are busy, and accessing the metro almost always requires you to go up or down some stairs. Any time I took the pram, I felt encumbered and awkward, while with the carrier, I was light of foot and free, with the added bonus of permanent baby cuddles, better baby napping and no screaming fits on public transport.

SCB is bigger now though, and too heavy to carry for long on my front. Our Manduca carrier can also be used on your back, but it's not as good for napping because the baby's head isn't supported, so we now use the buggy more of the time.

It's been quite a learning experience. Our buggy is fairly lightweight, but it's not tiny, as we bought it when SCB was 3 months old and still needed one with a lying down position. (Tiny lie-flat buggies do exist, but they cost a LOT of money. With hindsight, if we were still living in Paris, I would say it would be a worthwhile investment though.) I can carry buggy + baby up a flight of stairs if needed, but together they weigh 16 kilos, so I would rather not! The buggy won't fit through the standard entrances in the metro, and as SCB can't stand by herself yet, I can't really take her out, fold the buggy and get us all through. It is possible to put in on an escalator, but you're not supposed to, and it never feels very safe.

So here is what I've learned about Parisian public transport when you need to bring your wheels:

- 90% of the RER A and B are pushchair and wheelchair accessible, with lifts from street to platform level and wide gates in the stations. You have to know where to find the lifts though - at La Défense, for example, you practically have to walk off the platform and into the tunnel, following a very discreet sign. Also, the lifts are frequently under maintenance, and there is only one at each station.

- The metro is very hit or miss. As well as surprising mini flights of stairs even in stations which have some lifts, there are lines where some stations have wide gates and others don't. Only the line 14, as far as I know, is completely accessible.

- Most (maybe all) buses have a buggy space next to the wheelchair area. This works well as long as there isn't another buggy already occupying the place (which there might well be, as none of them are on the metro!). Also, these spaces aren't big enough for some prams, as I found out to my cost early in my career as a Parisian maman , when I attempted an unplanned bus journey with a Maxi-Cosy car seat attachment.

- The tramway is by far the easiest form of transport to use, as everything is at street level and there's loads of space in the carriages. It's great if you need to go somewhere around the edges of the city.

So, it can all be a bit unpredictable. Every time I go into the city centre now, I think about people in wheelchairs and how on earth they cope. If everything worked the way it was supposed to, you could probably plan a way of getting most places, but I don't know what would happen if you got off the train at a station only to find that the lift was out of order. I believe there is an interphone system that people in wheelchairs can use to ask for help - I really hope it works! (There is more information about public transport for wheelchair users here.)

On the plus side, in my experience, people are really nice about offering to help you. The other week I was at Nation and all the lifts AND the escalators were closed, but a nice man waited at every flight of stairs between street level and the RER platform to give me a hand.

Positivity

A few weeks ago, we went through a phase which was really hard. While in theory I was feeling good about being back at work and also having time at home with SCB, in practice I was exhausted. For long and complicated reasons, the days I was working, SCB was waking up multiple times in the night, then the weekend would roll around, UFM and I would spend it both being tired and grumpy, then just when we started to settle into a normal routine, it was time for me to go to work again and the whole thing would start all over again.

Luckily, I then had a few days off. Luckily, the sun then came out and we went for some nice long walks with the buggy. And on one of these walks, I realised that obsessing about sleep and feeding routines was taking up far too much of my thoughts when there were so many things I should have been enjoying. I made a point, when people asked how SCB was doing, of talking about the super-speedy commando crawling, and her big smiles when she comes and finds you in another room all by herself, and about the fact that she now says "Ma-ma-ma" and "Da-da-da", and when she is particularly satisfied with something she's doing, "Ah-boo!"

I stopped mentioning the lack of sleep.

And suddenly, everything just seemed to click into place. She started eating three meals a day. We would hear her beginning to wake in her cot in the night, then she would just go back to sleep. One morning, we all had a lie-in until 9 o'clock. UFM and I had the energy to talk to each other again.

I'm not such a believer in the power of positive thinking that I would claim that a simple change of mindset could cause all this, but it does go to show that with babies, it's often best just to roll with a situation, because everything will sort itself out in the end.

Ah-boo!

In which I suspect I give my non-Frenchness away once again

It's one of the classic lessons to be learned when you move to France from less stylish lands: you never ever leave the house looking scruffy, not even just to pop out to the bakery for your Sunday morning baguette. (As Sarah Turnbull's partner explains to her in Almost French, "It is not nice for the baker" to see you looking a mess.) In my previous life, I would never have gone so far as to leave the house in my pyjamas (that is not nice for my pyjamas, which are supposed to stay clean)  but I would definitely have nipped to the shops in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie if that was the quickest thing to put on.

One way of avoiding going to the shops at all, of course, is to have your shopping delivered, which is a particularly essential service when you have a baby and no car. In fact, when you're at home with a baby all day and just getting out of the house is a huge mission, somebody coming to refill your kitchen cupboards with no effort whatsoever on your part feels almost like a special treat and you forget that you paid with it all on your credit card the day before.

We normally get our deliveries from Auchan. They usually have slots available soon after you place the order and unless it's an evening slot, they tend to arrive at the beginning rather than the end, so you aren't left waiting for ages. They have a reasonable range of products (although not nearly as much as you would find in the actual shop), including the brand of  (more) environmentally friendly nappies that we like. If you buy five baby products, the delivery is free if you enter the code POUR_MON_BEBE, and they also do free delivery for pregnant women. Auchan used to deliver in cardboard boxes which you could either recycle yourself or send back with the delivery people for them to recycle, but they've recently switched to plastic bags. These are also supposedly recyclable, but nowhere I've ever lived in France accepts plastic bags for recycling, so I suspect a lot end up in the normal rubbish. Another drawback is that if you do your shopping at popular times, they tend to run out of certain products.

We've also tried using Carrefour a few times, but despite the fact that this is my favourite supermarket when I go to the shop myself, I've never got on with them for deliveries. You usually have to wait several days for a slot, and the last time I had to contact customer services after they sent us meat that was about to go out of date, they took weeks to get back to me.

This week, Auchan were switching over to a new version of their site and I only discovered after I had spent 45 minutes filling the basket on the old site that I wasn't going to be able to pay for it or transfer it to the new site, so I took the huff and did my shopping at Super U instead. They appeared to have a good range of products, but when the shopping actually arrived, there were a lot of substitutions and omissions. Super U did well on eco-friendly packaging, with everything delivered in strong paper bags, and even the fruit coming in those biodegradable plastic ones. (They don't do eco nappies though.) Another plus was that the shopping arrived sharply at the beginning of the eight o'clock delivery slot.

This meant, however, that we were up but not actually dressed when the buzzer sounded. I wonder how much of a cultural faux pas it is to let the supermarket delivery man see you in your pyjamas?

Experiences of Breastfeeding Part 2

This morning, I took SCB to the doctor for her monthly checkup. As usual, he started off by asking me about feeding and I explained that she is still breastfed as well as now having her solid foods.

And, as usual, he went on to tell me exactly how many millilitres of milk she should be having and in what size of bottles throughout the day.

This has been going on since we started seeing this doctor in September. He's friendly, he's well-qualified and his surgery is just around the corner from where we live, which is why I keep going there. He's also never been anything but positive about the fact that I'm still breastfeeding. But after every appointment, I leave feeling as if we have a massive communication problem. It's as if the information I'm giving him is so far from what he's expecting that it just doesn't compute, so he gives out whatever advice he had prepared in his head anyway.

I was even more conscious of the gap between his advice and reality this time around, as I had been sitting in the waiting room reading a leaflet about sleep which claimed that "after the age of 3 months, babies do not need to eat at night". This may or may not be true for formula-fed babies, but for breastfed babies it's terrible advice. Not only is night feeding totally normal and often necessary, breastmilk contains substances which help the baby to sleep, while the act of nursing releases hormones which make the mother feel drowsy too. Studies have even shown that breastfeeding mothers actually get more sleep than formula-feeding parents because, although they are woken more often, they also get back to sleep more quickly.

A big part of me feels that all of this is very wrong. I should be able to get advice from my GP on how best to feed my baby in the biologically normal way.  Public health advice should support breastfeeding, not sabotage it, as the sleep leaflet was likely to do.

But I guess on the other hand, the vast majority of women are winding down breastfeeding by 3 months and would like their babies to sleep through the night as they are often going back to work, so perhaps the numbers affected by this are very small. Nobody has ever said anything negative to me about the fact that SCB is still nursing at 8 months old, but people are surprised and usually ask if it's not too tiring. (Answer: yes, I'm tired, but not because of making milk!)

It's an interesting contrast with the UK though, where despite the fact that most people are giving at least some bottles by 3 months and certainly by 6, healthcare workers are not even allowed to give advice on bottle feeding as it's seen as promotion of formula milk.

Luckily, I have enough confidence about what I'm doing that I mostly just ignore the GP's advice. I've got lots of friends to share experiences, I've joined some groups, both French and Anglophone, which provide support and there's a whole internet of information out there. I just hope other mothers who want to breastfeed for longer manage to do the same, because being different in France is never easy!

Thoughts on Going Back to Work

I wrote a while back about how much I appreciate the fact that France offers lots of options in terms of going back to work (or not) after having a baby.In the UK, maternity leave and pay is structured in a way that means most people take at least 6 months and often a year after the birth of the baby. In France, by contrast, most of our friends returned to work after between 4 and 7 months. In my job, though, nobody would have batted an eyelid if I'd taken a year, so it really did come down to what we wanted and what we could afford, and in the end I opted to work 3 days per week, which will continue at least until SCB is one, when we'll re-evaluate the situation.

While there have been some practical issues relating to the childcare, so far I'm happy that we've made the right decision. SCB seems to really like the nanny and I think it's good for her to spend time with other children rather than being at home with just me all day. I found the build up to leaving her with someone else hard and was having crazy dreams about being separated from her in bizarre circumstances for about a week before it actually happened, but in reality it was fine.

On the work side, I've been busy, busy, busy, but almost entirely in a good way. I was a bit scared I might have lost my professional touch after eight months of absence, so it was satisfying to find that I could more or less just pick up where I left, with an extra layer of efficiency driven by the need to be out the door promptly in the evening.

The best thing, though, has been having so many things to look forward to in the week. While I enjoyed being full-time at home with SCB, every day was very same-y. I used to look forward to UFM coming home, then feel vaguely disappointed that I had so little to say to him about what we'd been doing, or look forward to the weekends only to discover that they were just as tiring as the weekdays. Now when I'm at home I look forward to the company and stimulation of being at work. When I'm at work I look forward to having accomplished what I need to do in the day, then picking up SCB and spending time with her in the evenings. I look forward to Friday because I can relax after a busy week. I look forward to spending time as a family at the weekend, or taking advantage of UFM being around to go out and do things by myself. And then I look forward to the days that SCB and I have with just the two of us, enjoying being at home or going on little outings together.

Finally, I look forward to going to bed in the evening and having a good night's sleep. Currently, that's the only hope that is consistently disappointed!

Survival

Just over a week ago, I blogged about how I hoped the beginning of 2017 might present us with some enjoyable survival challenges.

Hollow laugh.

The past week has definitely been a challenge. I think we've survived OK. But it certainly wasn't enjoyable.

On the Friday SCB caught her first stomach bug from one of the other children the nanny looks after and began the day by being sick all over both of us, and the sofa, just as we were about to leave the house. On Friday night, UFM, who had been up since 5am, was delayed for four hours coming home from Brussels after a Thalys train caught fire. On Saturday, SCB was getting better, but I caught the stomach bug and spent the whole night throwing up and most of Sunday doing very little other than lying around the house groaning. Being sick and dehydrated messed with my milk supply, meaning I started the week with a very grumpy, hungry baby who eventually decided that the solution was to cluster feed ALL NIGHT just before my toughest day at work, then refused to eat anything or sleep at all all day with the nanny.

One week later, I feel as if we have finally come out of the tunnel and are starting to feel normal again.

The funny thing is, having made it through the whole painful episode has been kind of motivating. Having experienced what only just managing feels like, I'm now looking forward to doing things better this week. I'm actually happy to be spending time this weekend tidying the house. I'm going to shop for and cook some healthy food so that I can stop staggering in from work and filling up on the Christmas chocolates because they're the first thing I can get my hands on to eat. I might even find the time to plant the bulbs I bought back in November in the hope that it's not too late for them to flower this spring.

We'll see how much of that actually happens ...

They Grow Up So Fast

When you're a kid, it's so annoying the way adults comment every time they see you on how much you've grown.

Then you become an adult yourself and you find yourself being that annoying grown-up saying it to other people's children.

Then if you become a parent yourself, you start thinking it about your own baby EVERY SINGLE DAY (or so it seems).

SCB turned 6 months old just before Christmas and I can't believe all the changes that have happened in the last few weeks. In a funny way, I found 3-6 months harder than when she was just a tiny newborn, partly because, after a lovely summer, I was alone with her a lot but mostly because, having been a chilled-out champion sleeper, she started teething and being hungry in the middle of the night as she went through a massive growth spurt. While she certainly woke more in the night during the first few weeks of her life, at least at that point she was steadily improving rather than going backwards!

It all happens for a reason, though, and there have been lots of fun developments to make up for the lost sleep. SCB started rolling quite early, then got distracted by her sore gums for weeks, then learned to move around by pushing herself in reverse across the parquet floors of our flat. I would leave her on her playmat and come back to find that she'd backed herself into a corner and was crying to be rescued. She can also now sit up by herself, although she occasionally topples over and bashes her head if not closely supervised. Her absolute favourite thing, though, is standing up (with help) and pretending to walk. Papi discovered a baby walker in the attic, so she spent Christmas speeding around on that and having a great time, but I'm kind of relieved that we haven't it back to Paris with us as it makes her suddenly extremely (and somewhat unnaturally!) mobile.

SCB has been making a wide range of noises for quite a while now, but the major difference recently is how clearly she seems to know what she wants and a developing ability to express her preferences. It's fun watching her personality starting to emerge, and, if one of her character traits is stubbornness, well, as my mother-in-law would say, "les chiens ne font pas des chats"! Luckily she is also very friendly and loves looking at new faces and charming strangers on public transport with her cheeky smile.

Finally, after two months of teething, SCB now  has two little teeth in her bottom gums. I was ridiculously excited when I saw them, partly because it confirmed that really was what all the fuss had been about and partly because I was hoping we'd finally all be getting more sleep and enduring less screaming. Unfortunately, the next lot seem to already be on the way because that hasn't really happened. I actually Googled "how bad can teething be" to check that we weren't horribly mistaken about the cause of her distress and the internet has confirmed that yes, it really can be this awful. On the plus side, now she is 6 months old, we can give her both paracetamol and ibuprofen, but it seems a bit wrong to be happy about that!

Hello 2017 ...

... and a happy new year to all my readers!

We spent Hogmanay and new year in a gîte in Brittany with my brother, his wife and my little nephew, with an old friend of UFM's joining us for dinner on the 31st. We didn't do a massive amount over the 5 days we were there as just getting out of the house took a fair bit of organisation with two babies to work around, but we did have a good time eating, drinking and catching up.

For our traditional seaside walk, we went to the coast at St Brieuc. There were no massive waves this year, as the tide was right out and the sea far away in the distance, but it was a lovely cold, clear day with sunlight shining off the wet sand and the rock pools.

When my sister-in-law asked over dinner whether we were making any new year resolutions for 2017, I replied "survival" - and only half in jest. This week SCB is doing her adaptation with the nanny and we're all going to have to start adapting to me being back at work. I'm a bit apprehensive about the organisational side of things but I think SCB will enjoy being with the other children the nanny looks after and I feel pretty good about getting back to doing a job I love. So 2017 will indeed be about surviving, but hopefully in a "rising to the challenge" rather than an "only just coping" sort of way.

I hope it's a good one for you too!