Two More Weeks

The time is just flying by! And while there have been some crazy moments, there have been lots of great ones too.

One of the best things is that the sun has come out. I feel a bit guilty about enjoying climate-change summer temperatures in April, but it has been so good to finally spend time outside after a long winter of hibernation. After I hurt my back doing too much carrying, I decided to invest in a double buggy, and although I think the woman who sold it to me on Le Bon Coin ripped me off slightly, it already feels like money well spent. With everybody strapped in safely, the baby being rocked to sleep by the movement and the toddler riding high up front with a smile on her face, it has saved my sanity on several occasions and allows me to save the sling for using around the house. (Baby 2 has a bit of colic and likes to sleep as close to me as possible, so she has been spending so much time in the sling that I think her blog nickname will be Kangaroo Baby.)


Just as the weather got warmer, my brother came to visit and we had a lovely day in Paris, mostly just strolling along the sunshine and having lunch in the Marais with Kangaroo Baby asleep in the buggy. We also went for a walk in the forest and (possibly as karmic revenge for feeling good about global warming) I got my first mosquito bite of the year.

Paris in the Spring

 UFM and I have also at last got around to exploring a bit further afield. Where we live is very much the Parisian suburbs, but if you go further out, you find yourself in what feels like proper countryside. Recently we have been exploring Les Yvelines, France's biggest département.One Sunday, we went to the Ferme de Gally, where you can pick your own fruit, vegetables and flowers, buy produce in the shop and visit the educational farm. The only things which were in season for picking were spinach and tulips, and as we didn't particularly want either, we focused on taking SCT to look at all the animals. In typical toddler fashion, she enjoyed looking at the ducks, pigs, goats and chickens for a little while, then became much more interested in playing with the gates, picking daisies and sitting down on every log, rock or wooden bar she set eyes on, but UFM and I felt proud that we had finally taken her somewhere interesting and done something a bit different with our day. (We also entertained ourselves by looking at all the families who looked as though they had decided to visit the farm straight after Sunday Mass - I'm sure there were more girls in pretty dresses than welly boots. But then, as UFM pointed out, proper rural people don't have to visit educational farms!)

Ducklings!

Inspired by our success, the following weekend we went to Dampierre-en-Yvelines, hoping to stroll around the lake and the château gardens. This trip was nearly a failure, as the château turned out to be closed, meaning there was no access from the village to the lake or even the forest beyond that would have been feasible for us, but luckily we saw a sign for the Château de Breteuil and went there instead.The main attraction for us here was a series of animated tableaux telling the stories of Charles Perrault, who turned folk tales into some of the first fairytales. The tableaux are housed in the outbuildings of the château, so you walk around the gardens visiting each one. Most are animated waxworks with sound and lighting, and there are some videos as well. SCT was a little bit too young to understand everything, but she still enjoyed looking and talked about the things she had seen when we got back in the evening. The gardens were also gorgeous in the bright sunshine, and if everyone hadn't been feeling a bit tired by then, we would probably have lingered for longer.

It's a big effort to get everybody organised and out of the house at the weekend (so much so that sometimes we don't decide where we're actually going until everything is packed up and ready) but it feels great to get out and about. Doing fun things with all four of us together makes up for the fraught moments when the house is a mess, everyone is tired and several people are crying at once (and yes, sometimes it has been more than just the two girls ... ). There are a few long weekends coming up and UFM has booked his leave for the summer, so next up is planning some summer holidays!

Two Weeks with Two Under Two

It's been all right so far.

Probably much aided by the fact that Baby #2 will sleep at night for four hours at a stretch, and that SCT goes to the crèche 3 days a week. Thank you France and your affordable childcare, because the days when I have two at home are full-on to say the least.

Yesterday, for example, we went to the park. I drove there, because SCT wants to take her bike everywhere and I can't manage the two of them plus the bike out in the street. (Also, she loves the bike but gets tired of actually riding it very quickly!) It took us two hours to get everyone up, fed and dressed, then I put the baby in the sling and the nappies and changes of clothes in a rucksack,convinced SCT that I couldn't carry her down the stairs, so she would have to walk, collected the bike, loaded everything into the car and off we went. When we arrived, it was the whole process in reverse - baby in sling, jacket on over baby, bike out of the boot, toddler out of the car, bike helmet on toddler, convince the toddler to walk and haul everything across the road to the park.

We had a lovely morning and got back just as the baby was starting to get cross about having her nap continually interrupted to transfer between the sling and the car seat (I stopped off to post a parcel on the way home, so we'd done it seven times in total). I attempted to feed the baby but she'd decided to go to sleep again so I popped her in her Moses basket and started to cook lunch, at which point I was starting to feel that I was winning at parenting. SCT had taken her trousers off, as they were muddy from the park, and was running around in her vest and bike helmet. I could see that her nappy was starting to look a little bit saggy, but figured it could wait a little longer.

Then, just as lunch starting to simmer away, I heard an "Uh-oh" from SCT and turned round to see a little puddle on the floor with one of her feet (still in socks) in it, and a big wet patch on her vest. It turned out that the nappy wasn't saggy because it was getting full, it was saggy because it had come unstuck.

At which point the baby woke up and decided she was hungry after all. You never win at parenting for long.

But by mid-afternoon, they were both asleep and I was catching up with admin one-handed on the computer and eating chocolate as the baby snored in my arms, and everything was under control again ... for a while.

So far, things have gone pretty much as I expected, apart from the fact that the baby's wonderful sleep only happens if she is right next to me - put her in the Moses basket, even right next to us, and she will wake up every half hour. This is fine at night, as we just have her in our bed (I'll happily make a rod for my own back if it means I only get woken up once in eight hours), but in the daytime, my only option is to put her in the sling if I want to get anything else done at all. And while I have no objection to this in principle (it was always part of the survival plan), I hadn't reckoned on just how tiring it is to carry a baby, even one which only weighs 3.5 kg, around all the time while simultaneously looking after a toddler who still needs lifted into her highchair, her cot, her car seat and all the play equipment in the park, as well as removed from places like kitchen cupboards and prevented from playing "going for a pipi" (basically flushing the toilet) multiple times a day. Especially when your stomach muscles are a round wobbly blob after nine months of pregnancy and your back hasn't quite recovered from giving birth yet.

Luckily, UFM has taken a few days off work (thank you France and your generous holiday allowance) so I'll only be carrying around one of them at a time for the next little while!