Category: Notes and Confessions
-
Day 4: The Happiness Project
One of the things that I hadn’t entirely realized before having Thwacky was how much arm-time babies (or at least this one) require. Not a difficult or unpleasant time, but a lot of it nevertheless. My parents arrived when he was a month old, at a time when he was nursing pretty much constantly…
-
Day 3: The Happiness Project
Today we made the mildly epic drive down to Gatwick to see my parents off. They’ve been staying with us for a month, wrangling the Thwack so I could have my hands free to make muffins and bread and all those therapeutic carbohydrates, or do the dishes, or go to the dentist or visit the link,…
-
Day 2: The Happiness Project
It’s Day 2 of my attempt to find something that makes me happy for 100 consecutive days. Today was a bit easier than yesterday to find something suitably happifying. The sun was shining and the tree blossoms were perfumed and billowy rather than sodden and thudding to the ground in sad clumps. We went…
-
Day 1: The Happiness Project
It’s a cruddy, grey day today, with heavy white skies hovering low. Everything out there is sodden; the roof tiles on the houses opposite are matte silver with rain. The blossoms on the big tree in the back yard are falling to the ground, saturated. I’m shimmering with exhaustion after another sleepless night with…
-
More Things That Are Ridiculously Easier in Your Own Language: Food!
The other day, we decided to order dinner in from a kebab shop in our neighbourhood here in Leicester. The menu was online, but it wasn’t linked to any of those nifty websites that also let you place your order and pay in advance. I’d have to call the kebab shop directly. And, like,…
-
Two and a Half Weeks: Notes on Memory, Stasis, Change and a Rather New Baby
About 18 days ago, I had a baby. This one. Oscar was one week overcooked and propelled himself out of me in barely two hours, emerging with a full head of mod hair, complete with side burns and enough hair over the hypothetical collar to get him kicked out of several elite schools. He looks…
-
Well, That Was Certainly Interesting: Brief Notes on Having Just Spawned a Baby
Last Wednesday, I did something I’d never done before, in a way that went in a totally different way to how I had roughly planned it. Kind of like blindly climbing Mt Bromo in Indonesia at dawn, with the thick sulphur mists obscuring everything until you’re right at the lip of the volcano, or maybe…
-
Waiting For Godot (or a Baby): Notes on Identity, Change and Public Presentation
Any day now, I’m going to have a baby. Like, an actual baby that I get to keep indefinitely. Which is, admittedly, an awfully long time. I still haven’t wrapped my head completely around this concept, even though I’ve been quite pregnant for many wine-deprived and sushi-less months now. Little Thwacky McKickerson, currently 2…
-
Things That Are Absurdly Easy in a Country Where You Speak the Language: Haircuts!
Welcome to the beginning of what will probably be an ongoing new series. I’ve been really, really bad at writing this season. Partly because I’ve been so busy setting up house in a whole ‘nother country (and buying the same freaking things from IKEA that I’d bought in 4 other countries before and left behind…
-
Ch-ch-ch-changes: In Which I Attempt to Talk Coherently About This Past Year
I wrote a paltry 22 posts here in 2013, just under two per month. Some months far quieter than others. Most of them somehow ended up hovering around the thousand word mark, which I’ve been told is way more than people want to process when reading online. This was, however, a year that refused…
-
I Want to be Sedated: Adventures in Getting my Act Together in Leicester
People, my mind is muddled like a big ball of muddled things all muddled together with a muddling pestle. I’ve been trying to get my act together to write all of the posts that this particular point in time deserves. Of these, there are many. Changes of all sorts are afoot. Interesting, strange, complex changes.…
-
On Existential Migration, Home, Leaving, and Scaring Yourself Silly
One day, not so long ago, when we were still in the exhausting throes of impenetrable visa applications and living out of two battered China Post boxes, partly in my parents’ basement and partly in the little house in the big woods where I grew up (the one heated only by a cast iron wood…