Baby rage

From today's Irish Times.

A five-week-old baby boy is threatening to sue his father after discovering that he is going bald. Baby 'J' from Co. Wicklow who has asked that his full identity not be revealed, said that he was “totally shocked and devastated” when he spotted himself in the bathroom mirror as he was being burped by his mother after his mid-day feed.

"I'm gutted. I had just finished the last of my grub and was dozing off on your woman's shoulder when I caught a glimpse of myself. I have lost at least 30 percent of my hair in the last two days! By all accounts this is only going to get worse and I've been warned that I am likely to be totally bald by the time I'm seven weeks old." Baby 'J' who was close to tears throughout the interview, carried on to say " I’ve since heard of something called Male Pattern baldness which I’m told I could have ‘cos apparently the old man has it. I’m actually livid really. I mean, there’s was loads of supposedly ‘expert’ health professionals hanging around the hospital when we were born (Baby ‘J’ has a twin sister) and not one of them warned us about this and the old man was kissing and cuddling me and didn’t mention a thing either” At this point The Irish Times had to curtail the interview as baby ‘J’ became so distressed that he soiled his nappy right through to his babygrow and had to be taken away for a bath.

A close friend of the family described baby ‘J’s’ father as “A very nice bloke really but bald as a coot.” The baby's father could not be contacted and at the time of going to press was believed to have gone into hiding.

Me! Me! I know the answer Sir.

This evening I filled out application forms for a school for The Little Boy and The Little Girl. They are four weeks old. If their applications are successful they will attend their first year in this particular school in 2022. I am gone Mad. The world is gone Mad. Someone pass me a bottle of gin.

And on the twenty eighth day...

I actually got some gardening done today. It is the first time I have done any gardening for two years. Last year I moved house and was working and then too busy being pregnant and sick and huge and the year before my mother was sick. So today I dug up one of my big primrose plants and divided it into five small primrose plants. For a brief moment I felt like Jesus who did a similar thing once with a loaf of bread and a haddock although he probably didn’t use a spade and didn’t suffer lower back pain as a result of his efforts. It’s not easy being me. It probably wasn’t easy being Jesus either.

One lump or two?

The district nurse came today but I was prepared. The house was clean as were the babies. I wanted no chance of clandestine phone calls to social services of a ‘mother not coping’ nature.

She took lots of notes and weighed the babies and we then spent a rather lovely ten minutes discussing the consistency of their poo. The little girl obliged by actually pooing in front of us so we could coo over her sample. I was so thrilled with her cleverness that what stopped me from dipping my fingers into it I do not know - perhaps somewhere deep in my mind it occurred to me that if I actually did that in front of a real live sane person I would soon find myself carried off by white-coated heavily built Bulgarian psychiatric aides so I kept my fingers to myself. I then noticed the living room rug upon which was seated said nurse. It was covered in dog hairs. Why hadn’t I hoovered the rug? What was I thinking? Was I mad? I’m sure somewhere in some book it says that dog hairs can kill newborn babies.

But she made no comment and we parted with smiles and many congratulations on the two lovely lumps I had produced. Only as she was walking away and I madly waving goodbye did I realise that I was still wearing my pyjama top and had neglected to put on a bra. I can only assume that she must be used to visiting new mothers who think they are managing just perfectly well but really are quite bonkers.

A good idea at the time

It was going to be easy. Okay, there were two new babies to contend with but we had live-in help for the first eight weeks so really, how hard was it going to be to do an itty bitty blog every day? A frank and humorous account of life as a forty something year old with newborn twins?

The babies are almost four weeks old and this is my first post - that's how easy and already as I type I'm racing against time - I'm sure I can hear one of them crying - or is it both of them? It's feeding time...didn't we just feed them? It's all so confusing except that it's all so simple. Two babies means 6 feeds each a day with each feed taking maybe 40 minutes so that’s 240 minutes per baby which is 4 hours solid feeding so multiply that by 2 cos they don't always eat at the same time so lets round that off at say, 7 hours constant feeding and oh well then you need to allow time for burping after each feed -the DAMN BURPING - why hasn’t someone invented the burpometer or the iburp - a beautiful ergo dynamic device for hands free burping thus giving the long-suffering burp giver (or givers in this case) time to have several large G and T’s on the deck?

The iburp. I'm going to patent that name tonight right after the next feed and if not after that one then definitely the one after and if not that one-