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!

She's Here!

After my last whinging blog post, I decided too get over myself and made lots of plans for the week with friends along the lines of "Assuming I'm not otherwise occupied by then, would you like to meet up?" and the last few days of pregnancy were actually quite nice despite the effect of hormones which I'm sure were to blame for making me grumpy.

Then, with perfect timing, another series of contractions started just as I was putting SCT to bed. I kept an eye on the timings while reading her bedtime story,  UFM came home from work, and as soon as SCT fell asleep we made our way to the hospital.

Everyone tells you that second babies often come more quickly, so I was fearing a fast and dramatic birth, but in fact this labour was if anything slightly longer than the first. But although I wouldn't go so far as to say it was pleasant (and having resisted an epidural for as long as possible, I'm in awe of anyone who gives birth without one) everything went as well as could be expected and we were enjoying newborn cuddles by the middle of the morning.

SCT has been to meet her little sister. She looked at her, said, "Fait dodo," very matter-of-factly, then got busy climbing on the hospital furniture and playing with the controls on the bed.

So all is well chez nous for the moment!

Why Are We Waiting ...

... this is so frustrating!

If I were in the UK, today would be my due date. Because in France le terme is counted as 41 weeks, here I still have another 7 days to go, but none of that really matters because I feel as if my body has seriously tricked me at the end of this pregnancy. With SCT, I had a lovely second trimester, then felt progressively more tired throughout the third. During the 39th week I had a few signs that her arrival might be imminent (with hindsight - I didn't recognise them all at the time). I was due to be induced at 39 weeks so I didn't stress too much about when she might arrive, then on the due date, we went to the hospital, my contractions started and she was born the same day.

This time around, I started to feel as if things might be happening just before 38 weeks too and was expecting Baby 2 to arrive around the same time as SCT. Then at 38 weeks I had an episode of really strong contractions and started to think we might need to go to the hospital. (This would have been very inconvenient, as SCT was ill at the time.) Then nothing.

Then I had a day when I felt full of energy and ready to go, just like the day before SCT was born.

Then nothing.

And the pattern has continued for 2 weeks now - a few signs and symptoms that just disappear as soon as I start to think it really could be now. It's driving me nuts, because I don't want to make too many plans, and also, I'm just tired enough to not really have the energy to do much, but not so tired that I'm not frustrated by just waiting for the time to pass.

At the beginning it was made worse by the fact that all the symptom spotting and planning was kind of necessary, as we had to make sure everything was in place for SCT if UFM and I needed to leave, but now my mum is here to look after her and we're all organised, so there's nothing to worry about.

On the plus side:
- it's been lovely having a bit of extra time to spend 1:1 with SCT on the days when she's been at home with me
- I've been able to make the most of my mum's visit. If the baby had decided to come straight after she arrived, I'd have spent 4 days at the hospital while she was back at home with SCT and UFM.
- We've had time to move SCT into her new bedroom, so everybody is now sleeping in the right place for when Baby 2 arrives and needs to be in our room.
- The midwife who did my ante-natal classes recommended making a little book for SCT explaining what will happen when the baby is born, to be read to her after I leave for the hospital. I'm really pleased I actually had time to do this, because leaving her behind is the thing I'm looking forward to the least about Baby 2's arrival.

Well, that and going through childbirth again, I suppose!

Bicultural Aspects of Child Rearing

Last night we had the somewhat stressful experience of taking SCT to the paediatric emergency unit after an episode of intestinal flu left her dehydrated. After the drama of deciding at 9pm that this situation really did merit emergency treatment and the drive in the dark to the hospital, we sat in the waiting room and watched as other children were called up to register to be seen.

Each time they were handed a small thermometer and disappeared into the toilets.

UFM, who had twigged more quickly than I did, turned to me with fear in his eyes and said, "What do we do if they ask us to take her rectal temperature?" (At home we have an electronic thermometer that we use in SCT's ears. We've only once been asked by a doctor if we've taken her temperature in  the "correct" (because apparently more accurate) way.)

In what was probably not my proudest moment as either a mother or a loyal wife, I replied, "This is your culture. You'll have to do it."

And he did ... this time round. I have a nasty feeling, though, that this is a skill I am going to have to learn.

Pregnancy 1 vs Pregnancy 2

My own gloomy Eiffel Tower shot.

A few weeks ago I read an article, illustrated by a very gloomy picture of the Eiffel Tower, about how this winter has been one of the darkest ever on record in northern Europe, with Paris experiencing only ten hours of sunlight in the first half of January, compared to an average of 63 hours.

Suddenly, I understood why it has been so hard to get out of bed in the mornings. I don't think I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder or anything, but I suspect a difference as extreme as that must have an impact on most people.

I was also quite relieved. Any time I've mentioned feeling more tired during this pregnancy than the last one, people have said it's because I also have a toddler to look after, which wasn't exactly boding well for how things will go after baby number 2 is born.

Plus, my gut feeling was that it wasn't true. Physically, this pregnancy has been very similar to the last one, and while it's true that running around after SCT isn't exactly restful, in other ways life has become easier (not spending 2.5 hours per day commuting being one of the best examples).

It's been fun, however, to compare the two experiences in other ways.

Armed with my knowledge from last time, I found it easier to organise my medical care. For the first six months I saw a sage-femme libérale, and for the rest I got signed up easily at a maternity hospital with a very similar ethos to the one I went to in Paris. All the staff I've encountered so far have been lovely, and they don't seem to as overwhelmed with patient numbers and administrative issues, so everything is going smoothly so far.

Being busy with other things, I've probably spent less time thinking about the actual pregnancy, reading about every step of the baby's development and watching my bump move. This baby hasn't been neglected though: knowing what it was like the first time round has given me a more concrete idea of things to look forward to, and I'm actually finding it easier to be excited.

Then of course, there's the small matter of getting the baby out of there and into the world. I can't say that's something I'm looking forward to, but at least I have a better idea of what to expect and how to manage it all. They say that second births are generally easier, so fingers crossed I'm not going to be the exception to that rule!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

An Everyday Day

A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and notified my employers that I will be returning to work in January. Given that it's now nearly the end of November, and that two weeks of December will be filled with festivities, it suddenly seems as if there's not an lot of "normal" time left of my parental leave. I want to remember what this period of our lives was like, so I've been trying for ages to write a post detailing what happens in an ordinary day. But each time either something happens which makes the day less "ordinary" or I end up running out of time to finish the post, then I forget what we actually did. So here I am trying again, and hoping that today will be the day that it actually gets published!

10am: SCB woke up at 8 this morning, which is much more civilised than the 6am starts she was imposing on us for a while. She's been waking a lot in the night recently, often 3 times between 7pm and 6am, due to teething, the cold or some other unidentified only-baby-knows-why reason, so a little lie in was a relief! I fed and changed her, then she played on her playmat while I ate breakfast, then sat outside the bathroom door on her bouncy chair while I had a shower. I dressed her, and by 9:15ish she was already starting to get a bit grumpy, so she had some more milk, then I put her in her cot for a nap. (I still find it weird that it's normal for babies to need a nap so soon after they get up in the morning, but SCB rarely lasts longer than 2 hours before the eye-rubbing and the grizzling starts.) Some days she settles happily with very little fuss but today she cried a fair bit and it took a couple of attempts before she settled.  I should be using this time to clean the kitchen and do some childcare related paperwork, but as usual I'm having an indulgent bit of internet time first. Often we have an activity planned (physiotherapy for me, baby group, shopping trip, meeting a friend in Paris for coffee), but there's nothing in the diary today, so I'll be making it up as I go along.

12:30pm: After blogging, I tried to fill in some paperwork for the CAF but couldn't finish it because I didn't have all the information I needed. (Unlike other several other administrative services, which have been made significantly more user-friendly over the past few years, the CAF is still stuck firmly in the byzantine era of French bureaucracy. The joys.) I washed some dishes and was just settling down to figuring out my Christmas shopping list when SCB woke up. We got as far as the changing table before a serious teething crisis kicked in, so the next hour was filled with trying to dress her and me and administer Doliprane while all the time she would only stop screaming if I held her in my arms and walked around. The medicine seems to have taken effect now though, and she's playing happily on her playmat while I cook up a chicken curry for lunch.

4pm: The Doliprane effect lasted for about an hour, then poor SCB was once again screaming in pain. Luckily, I was dressed by this point though, so was able to go for the standard emergency response of putting her in the sling and going out for a walk, and she fell asleep almost immediately. I started off with a trip to the toy shop, where I bought my nephew's Christmas present (which was always going to be the easiest one to find!). Then we went for a stroll around the park and sat on a bench to admire the view. It 's a gorgeous, cold, sunny day today, with nature on the cusp between autumn and winter, so we were able to enjoy being out for a couple of hours. The cold air seems to have finally cleared out my sinuses, so I'm celebrating the return of my sense of taste with a cup of coffee and some Christmas gingerbread biscuits from Lidl - completely justified given that it's now the start of December (and let's not talk about that fact that I'd actually already eaten half of them before the end of November!).

Christmassy-looking berries in the park

Mummy feet and baby feet in the park. I usually think festive-themed clothing is totally naff but I found these booties in a bag of second-hand stuff we were given and I think I might have to make an exception for baby clothes!

8pm: SCB had one last bout of teething pain at around 5pm which required lots of rocking and soothing and finally resulted in her falling asleep in my arms. I wasn't going to take the risk of moving her to her cot, so that turned in to an hour or so of one-handed internet surfing time for me :-) When she woke up, it was bath time and she suddenly cheered up. I always lie her on her changing mat on the floor while I run the bath, and tonight she entertained me greatly by moving herself off the top end of the mat (lying on her back, but head first) by pushing with her feet. Unfortunately she didn't quite manage to repeat the stunt when I rushed to get my phone and film her, but I did get some sweet videos of her doing gymnastic poses and sucking her own toes. After bath time, she had more milk and, to my surprise, given the long nap at 5 and the teething, fell asleep fairly quickly afterwards. Fingers crossed we're in for a good night!

Liberté, Egalité (Baby)

Yesterday afternoon at 16:34, women in France staged a walkout from work to highlight the fact that, due to the gender pay gap, for the rest of 2016, French women will effectively be working for free. And France is not the worst offender, with a pay gap which is actually below the EU average and significantly less than in the UK or Germany.

Equality between the sexes is a subject which has been on my mind a lot recently, particularly as I am currently taking parental leave and being paid precisely nothing at all.

"On paper" I really have nothing to complain about. Compared to many other countries, France offers a lot of options in terms of balancing career and family. I had 16 weeks of maternity leave on full pay, and Understanding Frenchman and I both have the right to take time off work or work part time right up until our daughter is three, when she will be starting school. And while the state handouts are not as generous as they used to be for parents taking time off, there is quite a lot of financial and structural support for childcare, making going back to work a relatively easy and financially viable decision. The liberté of choice is there.

On a personal level, I'm also happy to be spending time at home with our baby. It has its lonely and difficult moments, but generally I enjoy our days together and I appreciate having the flexibility to take things as they come. I would have found it very hard to leave her when she was 3 months old, but by the time I do go back to work, I think we'll both be ready for a bit more variety and stimulation. I don't even really mind doing the lion's share of the housework, given that I have the time (and also have to live with the consequences of not doing it all day every day). It seems only fair that when UFM comes home from a long day or week at work, he should spend time with the baby rather than mopping the kitchen floor.

So the problem is not that childcare is currently my full-time job. What frustrates me and gets my feminist hackles up is when looking after the baby turns in to my all-time job. And by that I mean the times when, even when both of us are there, UFM gets on with other things without a second thought and I am left, literally, holding the baby.

It's not that my husband is sexist. Pre-baby, we had a wonderfully balanced relationship where housework was mostly shared out according to who hated doing what the least and he was actually better at some typically "female" things, like remembering birthdays, than me. And since the baby was born, he's been a caring and involved dad who can do all aspects of childcare apart from breastfeeding just as well as I can.

So how did we get into this situation where looking after the baby is, by default, only my job?

Feeding is the most obvious practical element. SCB considers expressed milk in a bottle as the equivalent of serving vintage Moet in a plastic cup and reacts with fervent Gallic protest, meaning that if I do want to go out without her, I have to plan it into a three-hour window of freedom and/or hope that she doesn't wake up before she's expected to. And when you're keeping track of feeding, you tend to keep track of naps and nappy changes as well, which leads to also being the person who is keeping tabs on her exact position on the living room floor and whether she is about to suffocate on a cuddly blanket.

A long working hours culture is another one. UFM leaves the house at 8am every morning and returns at 8pm. This corresponds almost perfectly to SCB's waking hours, meaning that even just having bathtime with daddy is tricky on weeknights. As a result, he is less tuned in to her routine and the cues that certain things need to happen, meaning that he does sometimes depend on me to tell him what needs to be done.

With the move and all the work we've had to do on our flat, we've also been forced recently to adopt a largely divide and conquer approach to getting things done. And dividing according to stereotypical gender roles is often the most efficient approach, even if it isn't the most fair.

Finally, I am to some extent my own worst enemy, partly because I like looking after SCB and partly because I find it hard to relinquish control. I know that I don't need to be checking up on everything that UFM does as a dad, but if I hang around or offer suggestions, it definitely looks that way, and I'm so much in the habit of monitoring everything in my own head all week that it's difficult to stop at weekends!

What is the solution? In an ideal world, I think both of us would work part time and each have days in the week when we would be solely responsible for childcare. Unfortunately, while this is technically possible, society is not yet really in sync with the rules and, in my husband's job, it would not be easy to do. (This is partly a sexism thing, but even if he were female, I think he'd be expected to make use of some of that wonderfully available childcare rather than take long-term parental leave.)

Instead, we are trying to make weekend childcare his responsibility. It doesn't mean that he has to do everything, just that it is his job for planning what needs to be done. At the moment, that tends to work on Saturday mornings, while by Sunday afternoon we're more in a sharing situation, but it's a step in the right direction, and I definitely feel more positive about our division of labour by the end of the weekend than I usually do at the end of a long week!

What about everyone else? Any tips for correcting inequality, whether it's in childcare, in your relationships or at work? (And if you know how to get a baby to take an occasional bottle without giving up on breastfeeding, I'm all ears for advice on that too!)
 

Recently we have mostly been ...

Charming grandparents (SCB): my parents came to visit last week, followed in close succession (as in, four hours to change the beds and do the hoovering) by my in-laws. SCB has been enjoying lots of attention and cuddles and I suspect is feeling quite disappointed now everybody is gone and she's stuck with me all day.

Administering Doliprane (Me): SCB has also been getting majorly into teething over the past week, although we have yet to see a tooth. Cue interrupted sleep and lots of crying. At one point, our upstairs neighbour knocked on the door because she'd heard all the screaming and wanted to check if I needed a hand, and I had explain that my parents were here but even with three supposedly competent adults, we couldn't calm the poor baby down. She reappeared an hour or so later with a plate of American desserts (they are from the US) to keep us going, so I need to invite her back at some point for cuddles with a hopefully calmer baby! It took a day or so for us to work out that the screaming was almost entirely teeth-related and give in to administering regular doses of the sticky pink syrup. I don't particularly like giving SCB lots of medicine but whoever coined the phrase "mother nature knows best" clearly wasn't thinking about how humans acquire their first teeth.

Bedroom hopping (but not in that sense) (all 3 of us): the reason UFM's parents came to visit was to help us decorate what will eventually be our bedroom, which when we moved in was entirely covered in old-lady wallpaper.

Yes, even the undersides of the shelves in the cupboard.

New paintwork

The new colour was supposed to be cream, but as the paint was bought by UFM and his dad, and my father-in-law is colour blind and UFM didn't realise that the colour would come out much stronger on 4 walls than on the sample sheet, it's actually pale grey, so what you can see in the second photo is my attempts to find a new colour scheme. The logistics of having various people sleeping the the right beds and working around the decorating meant that we ended up sleeping in all 3 of the bedrooms in the flat, including the one where chunks of paint have been falling off the ceiling ever since the flood, but we're back to normal now.

Admiring the autumn colours: all four grandparents needed to be introduced to the walks in our new area. There have been some lovely sunny days and the leaves this year have been beautiful, so it was nice being out and about.

Admin, admin, admin: between the baby, the move, the flood and our endlessly-incompetent bank, we seem to have endless paperwork to do, and now that all the visitors have gone, there's no excuse for not tackling it. Which is why I'm sitting here blogging, of course.

Sologne and Thanks for all the Fish*

*Actually, there are no fish in this blog post. Nor will you find the meaning of life, the universe and everything. But my friend made the joke and I thought it was funny.

La Sologne is the area of France south of Orléans where we went with some friends for our first ever weekend away with baby. It's covered with forest and lakes, which meant that it was beautiful in the autumn with the leaves just starting to change colour. It's almost completely flat, which made it an easy place to go for walks even with an increasingly heavy baby. It's filled with deer, wild boar, and the people who hunt them, which made for an exciting half hour or so when we took the wrong path in the forest and found ourselves in an area where people had clearly been shooting extremely recently!

The reason that the Sologne is so wild is that the ground is very wet and therefore presumably difficult to cultivate, so there isn't much agriculture. Lots of people had lovely big vegetable gardens and orchards though, so growing things on a small scale seemed to be easier. The villages were very pretty, with mainly timber and brick houses, while every so often in the forest we would pass an enormous château, usually with its own lake. (Passing the estate agent's window, we were tempted by a more reasonable few hectares of land complete with not one, but two lakes and a wooden cabin.) Sadly, although there were plenty of hiking trails, most of the lakes were fenced off in people's private property, but we were able to admire a few nonetheless.

Supercool Baby enjoyed her first hiking trip, doing lots of sleeping in the sling then waking up to admire the light dancing between the leaves when we stopped for lunch and laid her down in the grass. I think it did both me and Understanding Frenchman good too, to get away and do something we've always enjoyed, surrounded by good company, and just be able to bring the baby along. And after all the fresh air, she settled down quickly to sleep in the evenings and we could have fun cooking up a big meal and eating with our friends. Hopefully it's an experience we'll be able to repeat a few times before she gets too heavy to carry at all!

Areu, areu

"Areu" is one of the few words that I learned through doing crosswords in French. I've been attempting for years to learn to do mots fléchés, which are more or less the equivalent of a quick (non-cryptic) crossword, although I believe the most accurate translation is actually "arrow words". In that time I have progressed from Level 1 to almost being able to do Level 2. (I was delighted when I learned that there was also a Level 1-2 category because it made me feel that I had made more progress!) As it turns out, doing synonym crosswords is a fairly useless way of learning vocabulary because you encounter the words entirely out of context and, if you cheat by looking at the answers often enough, you can learn that two words are synonyms of each other without actually knowing what either of them means.

Anyway, it turns out that even learning the word areu from the crosswords was a bit pointless, because my daughter probably says it to me a few hundred times every day. The best English translation of it is probably "goo-goo, ga-ga", but that is nothing like as onomatopoeic as the French word for that cooing noise that babies make when they're happy.

Unless, I've been wondering, it's particularly French babies who make the sound in this way. Perhaps it's being surrounded by all those rolling rrrs that makes them exercise their vocal cords like this.

I suspect probably not, but I do like my theory and I haven't spent enough time with other babies of this age to have any evidence to the contrary. Any thoughts?

My Experiences of Breastfeeding

When I was still in the early stages of pregnancy, I remember having an intense conversation with Understanding Frenchman one night about the fact that I wanted to breastfeed our baby and how worried I was that in France that might be a difficult thing to do. Among my family and friends it in the UK it is very much the norm, and when I was still living there, it was, as it is now, very much promoted as the healthiest option for mother and baby. In France, on the other hand, I could not recall ever having seen a woman breastfeeding. In addition the internet had led me to believe that I was living in a nation of bottle-feeders where the top priority for women was getting back to work fast and keeping their assets in shape for their husbands (or lovers, or whoever). And we all know that the internet is always right. Right?

Well, not really.

As I mentioned before, I gave birth in a "hôpital ami des bébés", so I was, as expected, well-supported there. To be honest, though, one of the most important aspects of the support was the fact that I was still in hospital on the third night when my milk came in and feeding really hurt, as is the norm in France. I was able to buzz for a friendly nurse who assured me that the pain was to be expected and would pass. (This is one of the many medical situations when all the information you receive beforehand talks about "some discomfort" when what they actually mean is that it can be agony.) Had I been already at home, which in the UK I probably would have been, it would have been a long wait until the next day to get expert advice.

Like many new mothers, I was also nervous about feeding in public. In both the British and French media, you can find stories about women who have been told not to feed their babies somewhere and it's caused a huge furore. When I read forums with people's everyday experiences however, most of the French mothers only had positive experiences to share. An interesting difference, I thought, was that the British websites were more militant about promoting right to breastfeed openly and anywhere, the French forums were more likely to contain tips about how to be discreet if you wanted to. While I don't think the militants are wrong, I found it easier to think about feeding my baby as something personal that I could just get on with in the way I felt comfortable than to consider it as a political act. Anyway, in my actual experience over the past three months, once I got over the initial awkwardness, it has been absolutely fine and I've never registered any sort of judgement other than smiles.

My experiences among family and friends have also been different to what I expected. It turns out that many French women, including a lot of our friends, do breast feed their babies, just not for very long, as there is a culture of going back to work quite early here. As a result you're less likely to see nursing in action, but that doesn't mean it's not encouraged. In UFM's family, most of the children were bottle fed, so I initially felt quite shy around them and tried to find quite corners every time the baby got hungry. That didn't last very long, however, as we kept ending up at random people's houses at unpredictable moments, and a hungry screaming baby is definitely more difficult to deal with than hitching up a t-shirt, so in the end I just went for it and nobody batted an eyelid. (The one exception was UFM's little nephews, aged 5 and 6, who were both fascinated by the process and insisted on coming to watch!)

Sadly, I've also learned along the way that in the UK, despite the promotion of breastfeeding to the point where many women experience it as pressure, the support once the baby is born is not necessarily all that wonderful and, despite the fact that maternity leave tends to be longer than in France, many mothers give up early on despite wanting to continue, so my vision of how things would have been over there was also somewhat rose-tinted in the beginning. The grass is not necessarily greener, and all that. I've also realised that the choice between breast and bottle is not always as straightforward as it is often presented to be, and that people make their decisions for any number of (valid) reasons, so I hope that nobody reading this post feels there is any judgement implied.

Source

As a result, I feel very grateful for the mostly positive experiences I've had so far, both practically and socially. And perhaps the one good thing to come out of the infamous burkini affair is that the prime minister himself has provided the perfect riposte for when anyone ever criticises mothers for getting their breasts out in public (even if his art history turned out to be incorrect). If Marianne can freely show her naked bosom to feed the people of La République, then so can we all!