Silent Sunday

In praise of distant friends

Yesterday, The Boy, The Baby and I got together with my three best friends from school. One of these lovely girls has a son, Luke, who is the same age as The Boy, and despite the fact that it’s a year since they saw each other, they had an absolute ball playing together. It’s one of those friendships where it doesn’t matter that they don’t often get to spend time together; when they do, it’s like they’ve never been apart.

And it’s much like that for me and my friends. We’ve all known each other since the age of 11, when we were thrown together in the same tutor group at secondary school, all shiny shoes and sparkling new uniform. Jill and Ali had been to primary school together, and I vaguely knew Lou through orchestra, but I don’t remember how or why we ended up becoming a unit of four. Were we all seated together at the same table, or did we seek each other out as like-minded people? I honestly have no idea, but the friendship that we formed during those first weeks of high school has endured.

During our teenage years, we shared all the usual rites of passage. We were each other’s first drinking buddies, went on church camp together, whispered about boys and sobbed on each other’s shoulders when those oh-so-important first flings didn’t work out. We had wild parties when our parents were on holiday, glammed up for the sixth form ball, plastered ourselves in black make-up during our goth phase and toasted each other with perry when we passed our GCSEs.

Then our lives went different ways. We all went off to university, but in four different directions. And we’ve never really gone back. Jill and Lou qualified as teachers, Ali as a nurse, and me as a journalist. Lou spent a year in Cambodia. Jill and I coincidentally spent a year living within a few miles of each other – 100 miles from where we grew up – but then she moved back nearer home. Christmas Eve, when we’d all ‘go home’ and gather in the local Wetherspoons before heading off to The Pig – the indie club we’d been going to since we were rather younger than we should have been – became the glue that held us together.

It’s now 21 years since Jill, Ali, Lou and I first met. Twenty-one years. Between us, we’ve shared three weddings and one incredibly sad funeral, and have produced two five-year-olds, two toddlers, two babies and one bump. It’s hard to think back to a time when we were brand new Year Sevens with our neatly pressed uniforms and neatly sharpened pencils. Our lives have all taken very different courses, and we routinely go 12 months without seeing each other, but whenever we do, it’s like no time at all has elapsed. We all have newer friends who we see more often and, no doubt, confide in more regularly, but the four of us have shared so many experiences – happy, sad, downright heartbreaking – that we’ll always have a special bond.

So when I saw Luke and The Boy playing happily together with no regard for the year that has elapsed since they last played, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Because a true friendship doesn’t depend on daily phone calls or weekly get-togethers; it’s something that can spring back to life despite 12 months of neglect, and be just as good as it ever was. Wherever our lives take us, we’ll always have those shared experiences, and we’ll always – I hope – be able to turn to each other in both happy and sad times.

Here’s to you, my lovelies, and to another 21 years of friendship – at least.

On finishing Reception

At 1.15pm today, The Boy will officially finish his Reception year. And what a year it’s been.

Looking back over his work from the past three terms, it’s amazing to see how far he’s come. Back in September, his writing was pretty much indecipherable, and likewise his pictures. He was just beginning to read, but had no belief in his abilities and would give up within seconds, saying he couldn’t do it. He could count reasonably well, but still had to be reminded what number came after 59, and while he has always had lots of energy, he lacked physical confidence and would panic if he went too high on the climbing frame.

Ten months on, The Boy is a different child. Over the past three terms, he has grown and changed so much. Now he can read more or less anything you put in front of him, and can have a good stab at writing most things, too, if you ignore the suspect spelling (bonus points for figuring out what ‘disighdid’ is meant to mean). He can count upwards and downwards in twos, and do simple sums. He’s been on his first school trip and played the lead role in the nativity play. He’s found his feet physically, too: he’ll never be the sporty type, but now he’ll climb the rigging in the park right to the very top, can cycle without stabilisers, and – shock, horror – even won the obstacle race on Sports Day.

The Boy has also done a lot of growing up outside the classroom. Not all of this is good. Whereas during his nursery year, he spent most of his time playing Mums and Dads with the girls, he’s now All Boy. Playground games seem to revolve around armies, jails and baddies, and I have to throw away at least two indelibly mud-stained t-shirts a week. And at the grand old age of five and three quarters, he’s already working on his teenage attitude. His name has appeared ‘on the white board’ at school on more than one occasion (usually for talking too much), and when asked to tidy up his sprawling Lego game, his stock responses are either, ‘You do it,’ or ‘It’s not fair.’

This has been a big year for The Boy. Not only has he had to get used to full-time school, but he’s also had to adjust to the arrival of his baby sister. It could quite easily have been unsettling, even traumatic, for him after five years of being an only child, but I couldn’t be more proud of how he’s coped. Five months into life as a big brother, it’s as if The Baby has always been here. We’ve had no jealousy, no tearful tantrums, no furtive pokes or pinches; on the contrary, he adores her. When he comes into our bed in the morning, he jostles me out of the way so he can sit next to her, and when I see him snuggling up with her, reading her a story, it melts my heart.

So, in two hours time, I’ll be collecting The Boy (and a huge pile of pictures, paintings and models, no doubt) from the Reception classroom for the last time. How will I feel, I wonder? Although he’s had a great year academically, I get the feeling that his teacher has never warmed to him. I’m looking forward to Year One and seeing how he gets on with a new teacher and a new, more structured school day, but nevertheless, I suspect I’ll feel quite emotional when I pick him up today. From September, he won’t be one of the little ones any more. I won’t be able to take him into his classroom, or collect him from there at the end of the day. It’ll just be a quick kiss at the door (if I’m lucky), then off he’ll go. It’s yet another indication of how quickly he’s growing up.

But while a part of me is sad at how quickly The Boy’s childhood is flying by, it’s wonderful to see him blossoming into a clever, confident and charismatic little person, full of curiosity and enthusiasm. Where his future will take him, who knows, but whatever he does, I’ll be right there beside him, cheering him on.

Happy holidays, poppet: I’m so proud of all you’ve achieved.

Who has it hardest?

I am sulking.

I’m sulking because for the umpteenth time this month, hubby is working on a Saturday. He left home at 8.30am and, if I’m lucky, might just see the children before bedtime – but it’s not guaranteed. The other Sunday his, ‘I should be home by 3pm’ ended with him not rocking up until 9pm that night. On a Sunday, for goodness sake. He’s also staying away for three nights next week, conveniently missing the first three days of the school holidays and our ninth wedding anniversary.

This is, fortunately, an unusual situation for us. Hubby’s job is (generally) office hours only, and he rarely misses bath and bedtime. But at the moment a planning application that he has been working on for the past seven years is reaching its climax, and it’s intense.

The thing is, being at home with two children is also intense. Especially when I’m trying to work as well. Being a freelancer has its merits, but it also means I was back ‘at work’ just 10 days after giving birth to The Baby, and have to try to fit my deadlines in around her (pitiful) sleep. More often than not, that means working from the minute the children are in bed until 10.30pm or beyond.

The main topic of conversation in our house at the moment – other than The Baby’s sleep, or lack of – is who has it hardest. Don’t get me wrong; I know hubby is under massive stress and would much rather spend his weekends at home than in the office. But whereas he can jump in the car and go without a second thought, I can’t. One of us has to look after the kids, and by default, that’s me. And when he’s away at the weekend, I get precisely no work done. Yes, The Baby still naps, but have you ever tried writing an article on innovations in joint replacement surgery while a five-year-old plays a very noisy game of army aircraft around you?

It’s wrong to be resentful, I know, but I can’t help feeling just slightly bitter and twisted. Every time hubby swans off to work at the weekend without a second thought for my deadlines, the implication is that his job is more important than mine. In fairness, I guess it is; after all, he’s influencing the country’s future housing plans while I’m just providing magazine fodder – and, of course, he has a boss to answer to. But if I miss a deadline, you can bet your bottom dollar that the editor will think twice about commissioning me in future, and although my income is roughly half of hubby’s salary, we need that bit of extra money to keep afloat.

I know I have it easy, really. I know plenty of people whose other halves work away for weeks at a time, and a few single mums too, and I have the utmost respect for them. In comparison, I have no right to complain. But I’m staring down the barrel of the school holidays with a list of deadlines as long as my arm, and every hubby-free Saturday piles the pressure on a bit more.

I feel for the children, too, particularly The Boy, who keeps asking why Daddy is going to work at the weekend *again.*

Still, the end is in sight, or so I’m told. After next week, hubby should return to his normal hours until September, at least. And the reality of a hubby-free day is never as bad as I expect it to be. The Boy has spent all morning playing Lego, doing sticker books and reading, and The Baby has kicked about on her playmat between sleeps. It’s a pretty chilled-out Saturday, really, and while I’ll have to work this evening to make up for lost time, I’d much rather be here, curled up on the sofa listening to The Boy reading Bug Buddies and giggling about the dung beetle (‘He eats poo!’) than stuck in the office preparing for what is, by all accounts, likely to be the most stressful week of hubby’s working life to date, where he faces seven years of work being ripped to shreds by the opposition’s QC at a planning enquiry.

Perhaps I do have it easier, after all.

Sleep is for the weak

Whoever coined the expression ‘sleeping like a baby’ clearly didn’t have much experience with children. Or at least they didn’t have much experience with *my* children. When I was pregnant with The Baby, I assumed I’d get another bad sleeper, but I also assumed that she couldn’t be much worse than The Boy. Turns out I was wrong.

Last night, for example, went something like this.

At 7pm, The Baby went to bed after a nice long feed.

At 10.20pm, she started snuffling about. This is actually not bad for her; often, her first waking is around 9.30pm.

At 10.23pm, I plugged the dummy in.

At 10.25pm, I plugged the dummy in again.

At 10.30pm, I fed her.

At 1am, she woke again. Repeat as above.

At 2.53am, she woke again. I lay there ignoring her until the rustling and grunting turned into, ‘Hello, I’m wide awake’ cooing.

At 3am, I fed her again and put her back to bed.

At 3.15am, she started cooing again, so I fed her some more and put her back to bed.

At 3.50am, she cooed a bit more, so I fed her for the third time in an hour.

At 4.06am, I put her back to bed. She finally seemed to be asleep, so I lay there awake, hardly daring to breathe in case I disturbed her.

At 5.07am, just as I’d dropped back off, she started thrashing around so I plugged the dummy in.

At 6.04am, she thrashed a bit more. Sensing imminent waking, I put her in my bed, where she did indeed sleep like the proverbial baby for the next hour until the alarm went off and I woke from a restless doze with a pounding headache, gritty eyes and a stiff neck.

That’s pretty much an average night around here.

They say that sleep deprivation is a form of torture. If that’s the case, I think I’d cope rather well at Guantanamo Bay. Okay, by mid-afternoon – just about the time that I have to collect The Boy from school – few things seem more appealing than retreating to my bed for a siesta, but on the whole, I seem to be holding it together. It helps that The Baby is so easy during daylight hours; no doubt my patience would be hanging by a thread if I also had to put up with her screaming all day long. But given how much I love sleep, I’m surprised by how little I can manage on.

I have no idea why The Baby’s sleep is so bad. The Boy was fairly terrible, too, but he had undiagnosed reflux and screamed day *and* night. The Baby also has reflux, but she’s been on medication since she was six weeks old, and it seems to be keeping it under control. During the day, she is the happiest, most contented baby ever. So why won’t she sleep?

The irony is that at first, The Baby wasn’t too bad a sleeper, and would do at least one stretch of five or six (or even seven) hours at night. When she was only nine weeks old, hubby and I went out for the evening, safe in the knowledge that as long as we were home by 11.30pm, she’d be okay. There is absolutely no way I’d get away with that now. In fact, I’m going out tonight, and fully expect a phone call from hubby at 9.30pm.

I’m not unrealistic about these things. The Baby is exclusively breastfed, so I know she’s not going to sleep as soundly as a bottle-fed baby. I’m not asking her to sleep through the night. I don’t mind feeding her twice, even three times, as long as she sleeps between those feeds. But at five months old, her sleep is worse than a newborn’s. I can’t help but envy those mums whose babies spontaneously learn to sleep through with no stress or sleep training required.

As for how we solve the problem, well, who knows? When The Boy finally slept through at 12 months old, it was the result of Controlled Crying: a process that worked after just one night. But when The Baby wakes, she isn’t distressed – she’s just awake. If I leave her alone, she’ll chat away for an hour and a half or more before finally going back to sleep, having woken everyone else up in the process. How do you do Controlled Crying with a baby who doesn’t cry?

As The Baby approaches six months, I’m clinging to the hope that one of her upcoming milestones – whether it be starting solids or moving to her own room – will improve her sleep. I suspect I’m clutching at straws. I suspect that by her first (second? Third?) birthday, I’ll still be mainlining caffeine and bulk-buying Touche Eclat to hide my under-eye bags. But while right now, I’d sell a kidney in exchange for three hours’ unbroken sleep, it’s hard to be cross with my little bed invader when I wake in the morning to her gurgling and gently patting my cheek. It’s a good job she’s cute!

Where do babies come from?

One of the downsides of having a big age gap between your children is that your firstborn child is, shall we say, rather inquisitive about the biological process that resulted in his sibling. Today was a case in point. I was just about to take the recycling out when The Boy, a propos of nothing, piped up. ‘Mummy,’ he asked, ‘how did you know that there was a baby growing in your tummy?’

I spent, oooh, all of about half a second wondering whether to give him a factual explanation, then thought better of it. Instead, I went for the easy option. ‘Well, my tummy started getting big,’ I told him.

Phew, I thought. That wasn’t too painful.

Ha!

The Boy is, we’re sure, destined for a career in law. At the age of five, his cross-examination skills are second to none, so I should have known better than to think he’d accept such a facile answer. ‘But didn’t you just think you’d been eating too much?’ he countered. And before I knew it, I’d launched into an explanation of how, when you’re pregnant, the baby makes chemicals in your body that come out in your wee, and when you wee on a stick, some more chemicals change colour to tell you that there’s a baby on the way. I’d even promised to show him the aforementioned stick, still hanging around in the bathroom cabinet.

Such is life in our household. All kids like to ask questions, but The Boy *really* likes to ask questions. Worse still, he knows all too well when you’re fobbing him off.

Back when he was a baby, I remember hubby being adamant that he would always endeavour to give The Boy proper answers to his questions. His father is a scientist, and he himself grew up with his nose in an encyclopaedia, so he’s always put a high price on general knowledge. But even he wasn’t prepared for The Boy’s relentless interrogation skills. Where does water come from? Why is it dark in space? How does gravity work? Does God have a very deep voice? Why are some people born with only one arm? (Thanks, Ceri from CBeebies). Can they be born with only one eye? What about with no tummy?

To give him his due, hubby does his best to answer all these questions and more. Me? Well, I tend to resort to the stock answer of, ‘I don’t know; ask Daddy.’ Yes, it’s a cop-out, but hey, I’m not the one who promised to always give sensible answers.

The whole baby-making thing seems to be at the front of The Boy’s mind at the moment. Today, aside from his pregnancy test questioning, he has asked me why I had to go into hospital after The Baby was born (I had her at home, but had a third-degree tear that needed stitching), and why it hurts when a baby comes out (I likened it to trying to do a great big poo). The more questions he asks, the harder I find it to know how much information is appropriate. He’s a bright little boy, and can tell when we’re fudging it, but equally, he’s *five*. He doesn’t need to know the ins and outs (sorry!) of reproduction yet. And he certainly doesn’t need to be the one who then takes it upon himself to enlighten his classmates.

So, while we’re doing our best to answer all those tricky questions about gravity, theology and outer space, for now, I’m drawing the line at explaining just how his little sister came to be. ‘We asked God for a baby, and He decided we could have one,’ I’ve told him. It’s true, more or less.

And if all else fails, we’ll resort to the default answer of parents the world over: ‘Because we said so, okay?’

Breastfeeding: well done me?

Yesterday, The Baby had her third set of immunisations. While we were there, the nurse asked me how I was feeding her. Presumably, this is the oh-so-scientific method of data collection on which national feeding statistics are based. Anyway, I told her that I was exclusively breastfeeding. ‘Oh, well done you,’ replied Sister.

She was the third person this week to congratulate me on still breastfeeding. And every time someone tells me how well I’m doing, I feel a bit of a fraud. Because I’m one of the lucky few who find breastfeeding a walk in the park.

Both of my two have been good little feeders from day one. I breastfed The Boy until 20 months, and am five months into breastfeeding The Baby, and I’ve hardly had a moment’s trouble with either of them. Okay, so the first few weeks were painful at times as the babies learnt to latch on, and no one can fully prepare you for how draining those early cluster feeds can be. But after the first month or so, it was a breeze. At the risk of tempting fate, I’ve never had mastitis, never suffered with thrush, or with bleeding or cracked nipples. The Boy became an extremely efficient feeder, getting the job done in five minutes or so, and The Baby has followed in his footsteps.

Bottle-feeding, on the other hand, has always looked like an almighty faff to me. I’m a fundamentally lazy person, and the thought of adding another element of domestic drudgery to my life leaves me cold. Washing bottles, sterilising them, preparing feeds… No thanks. On top of that, there have been several occasions when The Boy has had to have dry cereal for breakfast because I’ve run out of both milk and bread, so knowing me, I’d forget to buy formula and end up doing a high-speed dash to the nearest 24-hour Tesco in the middle of the night.

I’ve always believed that breast is best, and wanted to give it a good go with both babies, but I’m not militant about breastfeeding. The only reason I continued so long with The Boy was because it was so easy, for both of us. A lot easier than it would have been to wean him off the boob and switch to bottles. Yes, that’ll be my lazy side shining through again. So it always strikes me as odd that people congratulate me for doing something that is, essentially, sloth.

Oh, but it must be hard work at night, they always say. Neither of my two have been good sleepers; The Boy was a year old before he slept through, and The Baby still has at least two (and, at her worst, five) feeds a night. But I don’t honestly believe that a bottle would make a blind bit of difference. And as for hubby doing some of the night feeds? Well, he’s a great dad, but he’s not the sort to be hands-on with feeding, especially in the small hours. I could give The Baby a bottle, yes, but I’d be the one getting up, going downstairs, heating up a bottle while trying to stop the cat escaping from the kitchen and making a break for our bed, going back upstairs, feeding The Baby, winding her… You get the picture. Whereas at the moment, all I have to do is lean over, extract her from her crib and give her a boob. I barely even wake to feed her, to the extent that I often have no recollection of putting her back to bed.

Don’t get me wrong; I know that for a lot of people, breastfeeding involves a heroic effort. I know mums who have struggled to get premature babies to breastfeed, mums who have expressed for months so their babies could have breastmilk even though they wouldn’t take the boob, mums who have breastfed twins, mums who have battled through recurrent bouts of mastitis. I have the utmost respect for these people; who knows whether I’d have had their fortitude in similar circumstances?

But for me, breastfeeding isn’t an amazing achievement, or something that I should be praised for. I love doing it, and hope I can feed The Baby for as long as I fed The Boy, but for me, it’s a parenting shortcut, not a superhuman feat. I get to sit down and put my feet up every couple of hours while The Baby does her stuff – where’s the effort in that?

(Step) family values

The other day, we were watching a DVD where one of the characters was a wicked stepmother, when The Boy piped up, ‘What’s a stepmother?’ It was one of those questions I’d been dreading, although I always knew it would come up one day. You see, The Boy is part of a step-family – not that he knows it yet.

I was only The Boy’s age when my parents got divorced. Looking back now, I realise what a struggle it must have been for my mum, raising two children on her own, and with very little money to do it on. But my younger brother and I were perfectly happy. We had a doting mum and adoring grandparents living nearby, and while our Christmas presents might have been second-hand (notably the Barbie camper van that was my pride and joy), we definitely weren’t lacking when it came to love and security.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my mum remarried. My new stepfather was a single dad to Steph, a girl who I went to school with, an academic year above me but only six months older. When Steph and I bumped into each other at the swimming pool, we were totally unaware of the sparks that must have been flying between my mum and her dad. But something must have clicked between them that day, because in January 1987, the two of them tied the knot. It was a low-key affair at the local registry office, and Steph and I were dispatched back to school afterwards, where we stood up in assembly, holding hands, and announced to the school, ‘We’re sisters now.’

I was only seven when my mum remarried, and while my real father was always very good at fulfilling his legal and moral duties towards my brother and I, my stepfather was the man who I knew as Dad. It never seemed odd to call him that. We had – and still have – what I consider to be a very natural father-daughter relationship, and when I got married, it was he who walked me down the aisle and made the Father of the Bride’s speech. I never think of him as my stepfather, and he’s certainly never treated me any differently from his own daughter.

All this is entirely lost on The Boy. As far as he’s concerned, my mum is his Grandma, and my step-dad is his Grampy. We still see my birth father (who I have always called by his first name, even as a child), albeit infrequently, as he lives a five-hour drive away, but The Boy calls him – of his own volition – Uncle Geoff, and has no idea that he’s actually his grandfather.

So, when The Boy asked me to explain what a stepmother was, my first instinct was to dodge the question. He’s a tireless questioner, my boy, and I knew that once we got started, he’d keep on and on until he’d extracted the precise ins and outs of our family history from me.

I was hoping that he’d forget all about my promise to explain later, but of course he didn’t. So I launched into a (hopefully) simple explanation. ‘Sometimes, if a man and a lady stop loving each other, they decide not to be married any more,’ I offered. ‘Then if the man marries another lady, she becomes his children’s stepmother. She’s like their mummy and helps to look after them, but they still have a real mummy as well.’

I was beginning to confuse myself, so I stopped, and held my breath in anticipation of the next question. Surely he was going to ask if anyone he knew had a stepmother; would this be the right time to explain that actually, Grandma wasn’t Aunty Steph’s real mum? Was he, at five, old enough to hear the truth? Would he fly into a panic that hubby and I were on the verge of divorce every time we had cross words?

Sure enough, the next question followed swiftly. ‘Are stepmothers always nasty?’ he asked. (Perhaps I should refer that question to Aunty Steph!). I reassured him that no, in real life, stepmothers are usually very kind, but in stories they are sometimes nasty. And then, miracle of miracles, he let it drop. Thank goodness.

I’ve no doubt that I won’t be able to evade this subject for ever. Recently, I mentioned to a friend that we were going to stay with my (real) dad during the summer. The Boy leapt on it. ‘Who’s your dad?’ he asked accusingly. I brushed it off (no, no, I made a mistake, I meant Uncle Geoff) and he didn’t mention it again, but one of these days he’s going to have to hear the truth.

But not just yet. Mum and (step) Dad will be celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary next January; theirs is one of the most stable and loving marriages I’ve ever seen. And when The Boy is rolling on the floor laughing at one of Grampy’s silly jokes, no one would ever guess that there’s no blood link between them. I consider myself lucky to have spent the majority of my childhood in a happy and secure two-parent family, and for now, I’m quite content to let The Boy think that his grampy is my real dad. Genetically, my children may have no relationship with him, but he’s the one who raised me as a child and supports me as an adult; I think he’s earned the privilege of being their grandfather.

Bother, bother, bother that cat

I’ve always been a cat-lover. My very first feline friend was Mini – a beautiful black moggy who was already a well-established member of the family when I was born. As I grew up, she and I became the best of friends. She’d sleep in my bed if she could get away with it, and if not, she’d curl up inside my Barbie dolls’ four-poster bed. I was 13 when she died, and felt like I’d lost a sibling.

Mini was replaced by Velvet, another beautiful black moggy. As a young cat, Velvet lost at least two of her nine lives in quick succession, firstly when she snuck into a tradesman’s van and was driven off, and then when she was run over, breaking her pelvis and her tail. Miraculously, after several tortuous weeks shut in a cardboard box to keep her immobile, she made a full recovery, albeit with a new identity as a Manx cat.

Velvet is now fast approaching her 20th birthday. She’s deaf as a post and walks with a drunken list, but shows no signs of retiring to the big cat bed in the sky.

Having grown up with cats, I’ve always wanted one of my own. To me, a house doesn’t feel like a home without a resident moggy. Problem is, hubby is allergic to them. So while every now and then, I’d optimistically ask if we could get a kitten, I was resigned to a cat-free existence, making do instead with tempting the neighbours’ cats into our garden with scraps of ham.

But when The Boy started to ask for a cat, hubby began to waver. Gradually, his response changed from an outright ‘no’ to a ‘we’ll see.’ Seeing a chink in his armour, I seized my chance. I’d heard that people with allergies desensitise to their own cats, I told him. And given that The Boy didn’t (at that stage) have a sibling, he really should be allowed a pet…

I can’t quite remember the point at which he caved in, but somewhere around Christmas 2009, hubby agreed that we could get a cat. Or at least we could try to get a cat. If his allergies became too bad, he said, the cat would have to go back. Either that, I reasoned, or hubby could move into the shed…

So, in January 2010, we were joined by Poppy: a white and tabby moggy from the local Cats Protection. We were assured that she was good with children, and certainly, when we were introduced, she went half-wild with excitement, rolling over and over to invite The Boy to tickle her tummy. We had our home visit, during which I crossed my fingers behind my back when asked if anyone in the family had allergies, and a few days later, on a snowy winter day, we brought our new baby home.

At first, hubby’s allergies didn’t seem too bad, but before long, he was getting more wheezy by the day. Three weeks later, even I was on the verge of conceding that the cat would have to go back. But just as I was steeling myself to break the news to The Boy, that famous desensitisation happened, and the sneezing and wheezing subsided. Poppy could stay.

The Boy was, from day one, besotted with Poppy. We bought one of those fishing rod-type cat toys, and he would run round and round in circles with the cat sprinting after him at full pelt until she rolled head-over-heels and The Boy literally fell over laughing. She slept on his bed all day, and when spring came, they’d sit together in The Boy’s play tunnel in the garden. He loved being with her, and equally, loved shouting at her; she provided the chance to lord it over someone at last.

Even hubby mellowed. He moaned about ‘that bloody cat’ to anyone who would listen and blamed her for the worsening of his asthma, but come the evening, she was always to be found curled up on his lap while he watched TV. ‘Well, I can’t move her,’ he’d say…

But while I’d been desperate for a cat, I didn’t feel the bond with Poppy that I’d had with my childhood moggies. It wasn’t anything to do with her domestic misdemeanours (a ripped lampshade here; a broken vase there, not to mention the endless cleaning-up of muddy pawprints and clumps of fur) or her unsavoury outdoor pursuits (on a good day, we’d get a rodent or two; on a bad day, it would be a woodpecker or even a squirrel, all laid lovingly on the back doormat). The cat and I just hadn’t clicked.

My apathy towards her took another step towards antipathy once The Baby was born. Poppy has always been very demonstrative in her affection for us, but faced with a new member of the household, she became more needy than ever. If I was feeding The Baby, the cat would literally try to muscle her off my lap. If I was trying to get an early night, the cat would come up, miaow until I let her *into* the bed with me, and then proceed to pummel me with her needle-sharp claws. And I’ve lost count of how many times she’s woken The Baby by coming into the room yowling when I’m trying to settle her to sleep. In my hormonal, sleep-deprived state, I began to understand how people end up abusing their pets: I was one step away from booting the wretched animal into orbit.

But then, this weekend, we noticed that Poppy wasn’t her usual self. Normally, she walks around the house miaowing constantly, flops over to proffer her tummy for stroking at every opportunity, and leaps onto a lap as soon as you sit down, so we knew something was wrong when she didn’t move from her bed all Saturday. ‘She’s probably just eaten a dodgy rat,’ hubby said. But Sunday came, and she was still just as lethargic. Not only did she have none of her usual joie de vivre, but she seemed to have visibly shrunk. It looked like a visit to the vet would be in order on Monday morning.

Then hubby came up to bed last night and said he’d left Poppy asleep on the sofa. Usually, we shut her in the kitchen overnight, but according to him – the resident cat-hater – she’d looked so poorly he didn’t want to move her. I fell asleep half-expecting to wake to find a dead cat by morning. How on earth would we break the news to The Boy?

I needn’t have worried. At 4.30am, I was woken not by the baby for once, but by the familiar ‘miaow, miaow, miaow, thump’ of Poppy coming into our room and leaping onto the bed. Clearly, she’d slept off the dodgy rat, and was now a picture of health. And although I kicked hubby out of bed to dispatch the cat swiftly back to the kitchen, I felt a huge surge of relief that Poppy was better again, and not just for The Boy’s sake. You see, despite the muddy footprints, the constant moulting (never buy a monochrome cat; they shed black fur on white clothes, and white fur on black) and the little gifts left on the doormat, having a cat makes me feel like we’re a proper family.

With two children to lavish my affection on, I’m not sure I’ll ever  love Poppy as much as I loved my Mini cat, or indeed the tail-less Velvet, but she’s quite nice, really. She’s currently outside in her favourite spot on the roof of the summerhouse, and although I’ll curse her when she comes in and drops fur all over the newly-Hoovered carpet, she’s part of the family now. I suppose she can stay.

Speccy four-eyes

The Boy has, as of today, joined the nation’s league of glasses wearers. Bad mummy that I am, I had no idea that there was anything wrong with his eyesight until a routine school health check picked up that he’d difficulties with the sight test. I was dismissive, to be honest. Okay, so he stands too close to the TV (what child doesn’t?) but equally, he has no problem reading road signs as we drive past or spotting planes in the sky. And while hubby and I both have less-than-perfect vision, neither of us had glasses as young children. I got my first pair at about 13, while hubby was approaching his thirties before he needed them.

When we got the letter telling us that The Boy had failed his test and would be referred for further testing, neither of us gave it much thought. We both surmised that he probably got bored halfway through – he’s not renowned for his attention span, our boy – and fudged it, just so he could get back to playing. Hubby was most insistent that there was nothing wrong, and spent the next few weeks conducting his own at-home sight tests. ‘Can you read the name of this Chuggington episode? What about the words on the back of the Tesco delivery van?’ He concluded that there was nothing wrong with The Boy’s eyes.

Still, I thought I’d better take him for the follow-up test, just in case. I fully expected to be told that his sight was fine, but no. It turns out that he has significant astigmatism in both eyes – and we’d never even noticed. Slapped wrists all round.

So, The Boy would need glasses. I felt a weird stab of regret when we were told. Ridiculous, really, when you think about the hundreds and thousands of children affected by serious illness or disability, but I couldn’t help it. He’s such a gorgeous little thing (yes, yes, I’m biased) with the most beautiful big brown eyes. Eyes that would now be hidden behind a pair of specs. And I still have memories of my time at primary school, where the kids with glasses were seen as geeky, nerdy or just plain weird.

Hubby seemed even more disappointed than me. Actually, no, scrap that. He was just in denial. A third eye test was required to determine The Boy’s exact prescription, and even after that, he was constantly getting him to read small and distant shop hoardings and road signs to prove that his sight couldn’t be *that* bad.

Needless to say, I didn’t say any of this to The Boy. Once we had his prescription, we went straight to Specsavers to choose him a pair of glasses, and began the process of making specs seem cool. The choice was limited – I vetoed anything with a cartoon character on the spot – but we settled on a pair of simple black wire frames that suited his little face. I lavished him with compliments about how grown-up, smart and clever he looked, and made a Big Thing of the fact that he’d be the first in his class to wear glasses. By the time we went to collect them, this afternoon, he was positively leaping up and down with excitement.

And me? Well. My initial reaction was relief. In the flesh, The Boy’s glasses actually look quite nice on him. They’re not too obtrusive and fit his face well. But then I tried to take a photo of him to email to his grandparents. Getting The Boy to hold a natural expression for a snap is next to impossible; he always does this weird, fake, tight-lipped smile. And combined with the glasses, he just looked – I hate to say it – geeky. He looked like the bespectacled boy in my primary school class who everyone teased. It’s an awful thing for a mummy to say, but he didn’t look cute any more (sorry, Boy).

Of course, we’ll get used to his new look. We’re planning to get some professional family photos taken in the not-too-distant future, and by then, no doubt, we’ll be so accustomed to The Boy’s glasses that we won’t even notice them. Putting them on in the morning will become second nature to him, too, and if later in life he gets fed up of them, he’ll have the option of wearing contact lenses like me, or having laser surgery – something that his mummy is far too scared to contemplate.

While I’m being brutally honest, I’ll admit to hoping that The Baby isn’t similarly afflicted with dodgy eyes. I have a friend whose little girl wears glasses, and she hates them: after all, princesses don’t wear glasses. But while I still need time to adjust to my new-look Boy, I’m also counting my blessings. This week, my evening viewing has included Baby Hospital and the Sextuplets documentary, and in the light of those two programmes, my vanity by proxy seems rather silly. I have two beautiful, happy and healthy children. In the great scheme of things, who cares if they need glasses?