I have started to hold my breath more
since I became a mother.
I hold my breath when I lay my sleeping
baby down in the cradle. Please, please let him stay asleep.
I hold my breath when my husband plays
with the baby, swinging him up in the air. He is careful and they
both laugh, but still.
I hold my breath at every routine
health checkup until the doctor finishes examining my son and smiles
his approval at me.
I hold my breath when he is asleep and
I am in another room and think I hear him cry. Sometimes I'm right,
and sometimes I'm just imagining it, but the only way to find out is
to hold my breath and listen.
And sometimes I do that thing that
parents do, when we stand over our sleeping children and hold our
breath, and listen to them breathe.
I remember, as a teenager, watching a
television show with my mother. It was called "Who Lives In A
House Like This?" and the show's host would poke around a
celebrity's home and then invite a panel to guess who the celebrity
was. You could usually get quite a lot of information about the
house's inhabitants from the interior, including their ages.
In our flat, it is abundantly clear
that one of the people who lives here is a baby.
The baby furniture is a dead giveaway
of course - the garish play gym in the corner of the living room, the
playpen in the dining room, the heirloom cradle in the bedroom that
was designed and built by my father. But there's more to it than that
- it's as though a layer of small items has been laid over our house,
a veritable patina of babyness.
There are clean bottles lined up by the
kettle, dirty ones clustered by the sink. If you were to open the
microwave, you would find the sterilizer that has taken up
semi-permanent residence within.
The clothes horse in the boxroom is
strewn with white babygros, blue muslin squares, pastel flannel
blankets. Our own clothes are relegated to drip-drying on hangers
because there just isn't room for them any more. I congratulate
myself on my decision to forgo the environmentally-friendly but
washing-intensive cloth nappies.
Our bedroom chest of drawers is piled
with clothes that are too big for the baby yet, but I haven't found a
place to store them. A box nearby is full of tiny clothes that he has
already outgrown, and I will vacuum-pack them and store them for
future siblings or cousins. Some day.
My husband's side of the bed is
littered with very small clothes that smell of sunshine, dumped there
this morning when I needed the clothesbasket for a load of towels. At
the rate this child goes through clothes, sometimes there doesn't
seem to be much point in putting them back in the drawers...
Right now the bathroom looks like a
bomb exploded in it - the aftermath of the nightly bath. The plastic
bathtub is lying on the floor instead of on top of the
washing-machine where it belongs, because after serving as a
bath-stand, the washine-machine must then do double duty as a
changing table, since I am loath to take my naked baby out of the
nice warm bathroom and into the cold dining-room where the official
changing table resides.
There are dirty baby clothes on the
floor where I dropped them next to the used nappy, and both of the
other available surfaces contain the clean clothes that I changed my
mind about putting on him. The baby soap bottle is on the shelf over
the sink, and the bath thermometer in the form of a purple octopus is
sitting on the toilet cistern, although there is a place for both of
them in the box of baby bath stuff - also currently on the floor.
There is a small, wet, green towel on the box. One corner of it has
been sewn into a hood, decorated to look like a monster's head. There
are few things cuter than a freshly-bathed baby boy wearing a green
monster hood.
The rest of the bathroom floor is taken up by a baby
bouncer, that boon of parents and a great help when one is attempting
to bathe and change a baby single-handedly. As with so many other
daily tasks, I managed to accomplish bathtime, but at the end of it I
had an armful of baby demanding that I do something else other than
tidy up. I will sort this all out first thing tomorrow, if for no
other reason than it is currently impossible to get to the shower.
Our study is in the process of being
transformed into the baby's room - a project we have deferred since
he will be sleeping in the cradle in our room for a few more months.
Even so, once again it is clear that a baby is in residence. The
dresser boasts a row of baby books, the genesis of a nursery library,
while inside it are boxes of shoes and toys, waiting for him to be
old enough for them. Our computer and desk are still in there, beside
the dresser. The back of the desk holds a row of books on
ethnography, but the rest of the desk features a tube of teething
gel, a cloth baby book, and a brightly-coloured teether toy, too new
to show any signs of wear from being enthusiastically gummed all day.
The desk also features two baby items
that are often to be found on my bedside table, on the living room
coffee table, and indeed on any flat surface in our home - a bowl of
water (for cooling down bottles) and large muslin square (used for
wiping up spit-up and dribble).
While I was in the process of mentally
formulating this post, it occurred to me that there remained one
place in our flat that did not feature any babyness - the two
cupboards by the front door that we use to dump junkmail and bills
and bags and miscellaneous flotsam on.
But wait, I was wrong.
Sure enough, on one of the cupboards
there sits a tin of baby formula, a gift from Santa Claus, delivered
to my parents' house by that jolly old soul but not yet placed on the
shelf of the pantry where I keep the unopened formula, nappies and
baby wipes.
We hope that siblings will follow in
the coming years, which I imagine will lead to even more children's
stuff. I wonder how many times I will have to bite back a shout when
I tread, barefoot at midnight, on a stray piece of lego, or how many
times I will fish crayons from underneath various items of furniture.
It seems that a tidying-up policy, properly enforced, will be vital.
I surprisingly enjoy the feeling that
the baby has occupied, in some way, every room of the house. It is,
after all, a reflection of how our daily lives are now dominated by
his needs. Later I will probably feel the need to claw back some part
of the flat for myself, perhaps turn the master bedroom into a
child-free sanctuary once the baby is installed in his own bedroom,
but for now I am happy to see that we have assimilated this new
member of our family.
Happy blogiversary to Jacques over at J'accuse, who today is celebrating "7 years blogging so you won't have to".
I am pleased as punch to be joining the celebrations by contributing to Jacques' Festschrift, and look forward to reading what the rest of Ye Olde Tyme Maltese bloggers have written for the occasion.
Congratulations Jacques on 7 years of blogging, may there be many more.
The film Finding Neverland (Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Freddie Highmore) is the story of J. M. Barrie at the time of his life when he wrote the play Peter Pan.
Several gross liberties are taken, such as omitting one of the Llewelyn Davies boys (as well as their father), and presumably many of the details are fictional, but the broad sweep of the story is there.
There were two things I particularly liked about this film.
The first is Johnny Depp's Scottish accent, which I thought he carried off very well.
The second is the cinematography of the playacting scenes, switching back and forth between reality (six people in an English garden) and fantasy (pirates on a storm-tossed ship).
This film isn't a romantic comedy, but there is some romance, some comedy, and certainly plenty of imagination. I found it very entertaining (and cried buckets at the end).
Today was one of those rainy days in Malta where it rains and rains all day, and low-lying villages get flooded, and the Civil Protection Department tells the public to stay inside, and the occasional car gets swept away.
On the way home from work, my husband and I decided to eat supper at the airport. Right as he parked the car, the heavens opened AGAIN and the rain just bucketed down.
We waited a few minutes for a lull in the downpour, and then made a run for it, sprinting through puddles, dodging the big ones.
One mad dash later, we stumbled laughing into the entrance.
Then I noticed something odd; I wasn't out of breath.
OK, just a little bit.
I guess that learning how to run means that you can... well... run.
When someone makes a mistake because they didn't know any better, we call them, perhaps, naive.
When someone makes a mistake and they didn't know any better but <b>should</b> have, we call them ignorant.
Someone who makes a mistake and <b>did</b> know better, now that person we call an idiot.
And I, gentle reader, am an idiot.
On Saturday I ran longer than I ever have, much longer, TOO much longer. By Saturday evening, my left foot was killing me and I was barely able to walk on Sunday.
Now, in hindsight, I recall that runners are usually advised not to increase "long runs" by more than 10% each time. I knew this, having read it in various books and articles, but of course I was too much of genius to actually remember this salient piece of knowledge when I really needed it.
I missed my run today but at least my foot seems to be healing and hopefully I haven't done any real damage to it.
When I started this business of learning to run, I made this list:
Run for 30 minutes without stopping or walking
Run for 5km without stopping or walking
Run 5km in 30 minutes
Finish the half-marathon in under 3 hours
Today was my first real long run. The idea of a long run is that you do one, say, once a week, and the emphasis is on the time it takes, not on the speed. The point is to get your body used to staying on your feet for long periods of time, while you use your other training sessions to work on speed.
On Thursday I managed more than 20 minutes without stopping, so I decided that today I would try to achieve my first goal, which is to run for 30 minutes straight.
To put this in perspective, when I started training 2 months ago, I could just about manage 60 seconds.
So this morning I headed off to the airport because I want a nice straight shot for long runs, without all the business of crossing side streets that is the nightmare of running in the middle of a village. Having learnt my lesson from that session with my sister where we ended up in the maze-like back streets of Ħal-Safi, today I went to the North side of the airstrip, and planned to run east along it, and then back again.
I steeled my nerves against the fear of failure, strapped on my backpack, and started jogging.
This was the first time that I could look ahead and see a straight path ahead of me. Usually I run around my neighbourhood, which is your typical Maltese village with nary a straight stretch. The long, straight path looked rather daunting, actually, but on the plus side it has two slight hills, so I could never see more than about a kilometre ahead.
Turns out that it is about two kilometres down the north side of the airstrip, then the path turns south along the short end of the strip, but very soon presents the aspiring runner with a rather steep hill.
Not wanting to push my luck, I turned back at the bottom of the hill. Hill climbs can wait.
My first kilometre went by at a 9:30 minute pace, which was better than I had expected, but then I began to slow by about 10 seconds each km.
I reckoned that it would take me around 3 and a half kilometres to reach 30 minutes of running, and by the end of the second km I was feeling pretty good.
That's when I began entertaining thoughts of pushing through to my second goal... the 5k.
So I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, and the narrator in my Runkeeper smartphone app kept on informing me as I hit one km after the other, mostly to a background of hiphop mashups on my playlist (with the odd musical theatre number thrown in).
Finally, I heard the words "Distance... five... kilometres" and I felt so thrilled! I kept going for a little longer, though, because I'd walked a little after I started the app, and I wanted to make sure I really did run for 5k...
At 5.2k and 51 minutes, I stopped the app, and slowed to a walk. My legs immediately felt like jelly and I almost fell over (a very bad thing, given that I was on the hard shoulder by this time, in the cycle lane, with cars whizzing by a couple of feet away from me).
I staggered off the road to safety, sat down on a low wall, drank the rest of my water, and held a little victory party for myself. I immediately received a congratulatory email, which really made me smile - my Runkeeper account is integrated with my Foursquare and Fleetly accounts, so I received a badge from Foursquare and a medal from Fleetly:
My pace was very slow - 10 minutes per km is a brisk walk really, as well as a slow jog - but today was all about slow and long. That's what I'm aiming for anyway, to be able to go for long distances. Time is only an issue because races have cut-offs, and if you don't make the cut-off then at best you don't get the pretty medal, and at worst you get picked up by the rescue vehicle and not allowed to finish at all.
So my next step is to start doing some speed work as part of my training, mostly by doing intervals. To finish the half-marathon within the cut-off of 3 hours, I need to be able to reach an overall pace of 8:30 minutes.
I'm considering throwing out my third goal, which is to combine the first two by running 5k in 30 minutes, mostly because I'm not training for a 5k, but for 21k. Maybe I'll set some other intermediate goals instead.
For now, I am celebrating my achievements and looking forward to going longer and faster.
This morning I found it harder than usual to get out of bed. A lateish bedtime last night and a for-no-reason 4am wake-up left me groggy and tired.
When the alarm went off at 5am, the temptation to skip my running session and use the extra time for a nap was strong. Very strong.
But I finally managed to drag myself out of bed because I had made a deal with myself - that even on those days when I skip runs (say, due to heavy rain), I will still put on my running clobber and spend half-an-hour on the elliptical machine instead.
Once I was up, the prospect of a run began to sound better. It had been five days since my last proper run - my weekend long run with my sister was more like a long walk - and my legs wanted some exercise.
By the time I left the house, I was running late, too late for my usual 35-minute route, but I decided to go anyway and take a shortcut to reduce the distance and therefore the time. Better a short run than no run at all.
I'm so glad I went, it was one of my best sessions so far.
After a 3-minute walk, I jogged for 15 minutes without stopping, and it was a decent jog, not the same-speed-as-walking jog.
Oh yeah baby.
I couldn't find my mp3 player as I left the house, so I plugged my earbuds into my phone instead.
The media player was set to 'repeat this track' and I couldn't figure out how to undo this, so I listened to Coldplay's Viva la Vida several times in a row.
