Olulabelle

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On what the baby can say

The baby can now say many words and so has decided that sentences are the only way forward. His version of a sentence needs some slight rearrangement ("Cup all gone, more cup?") but on the whole he's doing very well with the whole speaking thing.

Given that he's only 18 months I think that being able to say, "My Daddy a man." is a grand achievement.

In other news he has become obsessed with Nee-naws and wakes up first thing in the morning saying, "Nee naw? Nee naw?" because he once saw one go up the road out of his bedroom window first thing in the morning and now thinks this should be a regular occurrence.

He also sits in the car whispering, "Nee naw, Nee NAW, NEE NAW." over and over again like a little mantra, as if saying it repeatedly will somehow attract them to him; The mating call of an emergency vehicle.

A really cool woman that I know slightly via the internet (and who also loves roller derby) divides her life up into segements. She has work, play, hobby and pastime. Within those categories she places all the things she does; roller derby comes under play, work is office but also laundry, pastime is watching lost. So that's very organised, but she also says that she has whittled her life right down to the things she likes doing best. Because perhaps in the past she had things like 'quilting' and theatre production' in her hobbies, now she just has 'writing'. She says that life is hard enough concentrating on the main things you do, without having all the other little categories all adding up and wanting input from you.

She has taken this idea of division of time to the extreme level, with weekly charts divided up into time groups and even pre-planned menus.

I don't think I could do that; for one, she doesn't have kids. But I'm thinking that in the main it's an excellent system. I might try it.

Flying a Kite by Rebecca Elsom

It seems to me the kite
Has all the fun,
The view,
The weightlessness
The wind,
Ecstatic shudders,
Tail streaming out,
The urging higher,
The exhilarating dives,
And me down here,
Left holding the string.

The Early Learning Centre have recently introduced a policy of gender branding the packaging and the colour of their toys, producing things in two colour waves, pink (for the girls) and blue (for the boys).

I am supporting the Pink Stinks campaign group http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/ in their boycott of the Early Learning Centre and I am posting my intial letter to the company here:

Dear Customer Services,

I have long shopped at ELC but I am writing to tell you that I am now boycotting your stores. I strongly object to your recently introduced gender branding, something which I feel is a step back and completely unnecessary. By presenting yourself as a bastion of education and play learning, you have a duty to children to present positive gender role models. This would obviously present itself as non-gender-specific branding for toys. The ELC has a very specific and easily recognisable colour palette. Toys should be packaged within the colour palette of the shop, not in the gender colour deemed 'suitable' by some unknown designer or branding advisor.

There are many shops in the UK who have a practice of gender colour branding, but none of those shops are presenting themselves as centres of excellence for play education.

I would like the ELC to rethink its branding policy. I would like a reply explaining why the ELC has recently chosen to incorporate gender branding, specifically the recent pink and blue run-out . I would like a statement from the company on it's policy of gender branding of toys and why it has decided now is the time to introduce this strange demarkation of toys.

I am supporting the campaign group Pink Stinks in their boycott of ELC and I shall be advising my many playgroup friends to do the same.

I do look forward to hearing from you, as soon as possible,

Kind regards

etc,etc.

I don't of course expect this to be the end of the conversation, I fully intend to continue correspondence with them; I expect the immediate reply will be that their market research shows the majority of their customers support gender branding and I am looking forward to receiving that letter!

The baby has decided that crawling and walking are not worth learning and that movement by Mummy is the way forward. He has taken to waving his arms in the air and pointing at me until I pick him up and then pointing imperiously towards the way he wants to go and saying, 'Dat!' in a commanding voice. This is often accompanied by kicking of his legs on my hips, much like you would get a horse to move forward.

I have become the Mummy Horse.

On the dire thing that is Secondary School Transfer.

Lately we've been navigating the murky waters of lake 'School Applications', something which has not been pleasant. We have planned and tested and practiced and crossed our fingers but all our scheming has not worked and it appears we have now sprung a leak and are rapidly sinking into the mire.

This manifests itself in the form of living six metres out of the catchment area for the nearest good school, despite being comfortably within in for the four previous years.

Six metres is very frustrating. It means that if we stand at the bottom of our garden we are probably still in the catchment area and Harry would now have a place. I have considered pitching a tent for Harry to live in, and then appealing.

As it turns out we don't appear to be living in the right place for, in fact, any school; the upshot of which is that Harry has been offered a place in a single sex school three and a half miles away, one that is mainly populated by expelled boys and boys with 'special needs in learning'.

How they can justify sending him to a school three and a half miles away when he lived too far away from the one that was one and half baffles me.

There's also the fact that I am morally opposed to single sex education because why would you want a child not to learn how to communicate with one half of the population, especially during the five most formative years of his or her life?

So I am angry, and frankly he won't be attending the school he's been offered. The school we applied for is the one he should have a place at. The appeals process is difficult and frustrating but I don't see any other path. The appeals board told me that we have to show why an already oversubscribed school should take on my child, and that there have to be exceptional circumstances for this. Well, I think in Harry's case there are.

Queensbridge (the school of choice) is an up-and-coming school with a commitment to the Performing Arts, and over the last four years the Headmaster has completely turned it around. That's why suddenly everyone wants to go there. So we were in the catchment area when it was rubbish, but because it's based in between two very wealthy areas of Birmingham as it becomes better the catchment area shrinks and the kids in the less wealthy areas suffer.

And Harry has worked very hard in Primary school. He gets good marks, he gets privileges and rewards, he is a talented musician, playing guitar at grade three level and playing in the Birmingham Central Ensemble, and he sings in two choirs; the Selly Oak choir and the Birmingham Central Choir. He even campaigned to get bike racks put in the school and now lots of children cycle to school.

So I'm going to appeal on that basis. I'm going to say that the school should provide him with a place because he would be an asset to the school in every way and because his education will suffer if he doesn't get a place there.

And then we'll see.

And we'll cross our fingers because he's currently number five on the waiting list owing the frankly ridiculous six metre boundary, so that might change over the next few weeks. But if we don't get a place then I have no idea what we'll do.

The whole thing is utterly terrifying.

Governemntal Hypocrisy.

The government provides Healthy Start vouchers to the tune of £5 per week for the purchase of fruit and vegetables for my baby (or me and my baby when I am breastfeeding, which I still partly am because he's only six months old.) These vouchers are for anyone who is in receipt of Child Tax Credit only, and is on Jobseekers Allowance or Income Support and has an income of less than £15,000 per year.

I have an income of considerably less than £15,000 per year, but because I work and so receive nominal Working Tax Credit I am apparently not entitled to these vouchers.

If I gave up trying to provide my own income I would suddenly become eligible for the vouchers, even though I currently have a lower income than I would if I was not working.

How can this be ok? I asked the woman on the phone why and she said that the government probably thinks you have an income of more than £15,000 if you're on working tax credit.

Well I wish.

I'm so pissed off. The government spends it's whole time saying it wants people off benefit and then it penalises those who are on the lowest income of all - people like me, part time workers trying to bring up a family on an income of very low wages and working tax credit. I'd be better off on benefit; and I wonder how many millions of us are saying that on a regular basis?

I think I feel a letter coming on.

I've been blogging since 2002, I've amassed a good deal of writing but I've done it quietly and off the the side. I haven't been all big in the blog community and I haven't got a whole heap of regular readers. I haven't really cared about that till now, but recently people I know who've been blogging for a much shorter time than me have been all proactive and involved and now I feel like I've somehow failed myself.

I feel like I should have been twittering and I should have had a RSS feed and I shouldn't have been afraid to go to meets, and I feel like I want to be on the 50 best Brum bloggers list. Which I am currently not. I wish I wasn't so afraid of throwing myself into the middle of things but I am; I think people aren't going to like me and are somehow going to judge me for crap, nefarious reasons, which is an outrageous thing to think about other people, because why would they do that to me anymore than I think those sorts of things about them? (Which I don't, just to make that clear.)

So my New Years resolution is to fix up Olulabelle.com, make a whole new site with links and a feed and a regular section where I post. And I'm going to start off posting about jewellery, the baby and general everyday thoughts. It's a bizarre combination I know, but there you go. At least it will be something.

On deliberately making yourself sad.

Anyone who has broken up with someone, or who has experienced the death of a person they love knows very well how to do this. You play songs, very loudly, that make you cry, that have too much emotion attached to them, that take you to places you really shouldn't be. Often you do this when you've had too much to drink, which I have, and when you aren't actually keen to go to bed yet, which I'm not, for the principle reason that I have a vague hope the alcohol might go out of my system in time to feed the baby.

I must just point out that I know this is wishful thinking. The baby is clearly just going to sleep very well this night.

Probably that makes me a bad mother.

So.

Playing sad songs.

In fact it's not so much making yourself be sad as allowing yourself to be sad. I think it's probably cathartic in many ways, actually.

The way I personally do it is to play songs that either remind me of being small, or play songs my Dad loved.

The best one for me is 'Dreamer' by Supertramp. When I hear this it makes me whirl around like a little girl in a party dress with a full skirt. And sing words like 'stupid' really loudly. Eternally, I will be six when I listen to this song and I cannot reframe it or move on and I don't really want to. I like the fact that I have a tool which takes me back to a place I can't go otherwise. You know, I don't often get to wear a party dress in my mind or in real life, so when I do I really relish it.

When you have your father near you are sometimes able to opt out of being grown-up. You can slip back into the child role, you can be the little girl who doesn't have to make decisions, or find the money, or fix it, or know things, because your Dad is the one that does that.

And that's why it's fabulous being six. Just for a little bit. Instead of being adult and sensible and Mummy, and 'in charge' and 'making the dinner' I get to shriek and dance and jump up and down and act a bit silly and twirl around and be someone's little girl with no responsibilities.

And when I do that I can really, properly remember my Dad.

On betrayal

This morning we went to the children's hospital because the baby has to have regular blood tests. He sat in the waiting room beaming at everyone and cooing and generally being charming and then we went into see the phlebotomist. In the children's hospital you have to follow footprints to either Room 1 or Room 2 when your turn comes for a blood test so we made our way to Room 2 following the prints to show the baby, because we've only ever been to Room 1 before.

Room 2 has minty green walls and a lovely smiling lady waiting for us at whom the baby promptly grins at and says, "Oooo-ah-o."

So we sit down and the baby continues his display of lovely smiles and babbly oo-aaahing and then the phlebotomist says, "Oh dear, please don't smile at me like that" and stabs him in the arm. At which point he gives her this shocked look so full of hurt that she is almost unable to draw the blood she needs, she feels so bad.

So the lovely smiley lady turned out to make horrible hurty pain and the baby learns in one tiny moment that actually it is possible to be betrayed.

This person is the reason I have not been blogging much over the last four months:



He is thirteeen weeks old, his name is Solomon and his nickname is Solly Boppit because he randomly waves his limbs in many different directions.

The other day he slept through the night for the first time and I got all complacent, but then last night I was woken up every three hours.

I am Lady Tired of Bedfordshire.

On clouds

Sometimes on occasional days when the Cumulus clouds were low on the horizon and the houses in front hid the place where they ended I used to pretend that I lived in a really mountainous place, like the Swiss Alps. I discovered that if you scrinched your eyes a little bit you could make the clouds become mountains and for a little while the place you live in suddenly because hugely exciting. I don't know why mountains made life appear to be so much more exciting. It's not that I ever really had a hankering to be Heidi or anything.

When I was a little girl I used to do this. Sometimes I still do.

Colour Theory for babies

I'm reading lots of papers about the theory of colour and the use of colour to stimulate psychologically helpful frames of mind because I'm about to paint the babies room.

A colour called Baker-Miller pink is used to paint holding cells and prisons because it allegedly surpresses violent and aggressive behaviour. Young children in New Zealand showed greater physical strngth and made more positive mood paintings after spending time in pink rooms compared to blue or grey ones. A high school in America found it's children had lower blood pressure in the afternoon if they had been studying in a yellow room.

It's all fascinating, but I am still no nearer to deciding what colour the baby would like. Interestingly babies respond best to black and white geometric patterns in their first few months, because their focusing muscles in their eyes don't work brilliantly so everything is a bit fussy.

I'd paint a big geometric pattern on the wall but at about age 16 my boyfriend at the time and I did that to his bedroom, in order to facilitate the ideal background for tripping, so it would be freaky in the extreme in the babies room.

What colour do you think I should choose?

I can't stop thinking about the dolphins at Percuil and what made them flee the deep water. I'm really sad about it.

I spent all my summers at my Grandparents house as a child, very near to the Percuil river in a little village called Treverva. I know the area where they were stranded really well. I don't know why that makes things worse, but it really does.

I'm angry with the navy because I think things are pointing towards it being their fault. If there were live firing exercises, which it appears there were, it's no wonder the dolphins freaked and swam inland. Seventy dolphins don't just decide to go into low waters for no reason whatsoever.

There's some vague talk of a killer whale scaring them, but I just don't believe that. Although killer whales are predators of dolphins they don't scare a whole pod of seventy. I feel sure it has something to do with the naval exercises in Falmouth harbour.

I don't see why we have to have submarine exercises in the first place. Quite frankly I'd rather we had safe dolphins.

On words being twisted.

A long time ago women used to be attended in birth by a group of close women friends called God-sibbs, sometimes translated as 'sisters of God'.

Apparently, this gathering of women to give birth and assist each other has been distorted in the lens of time and became the root of the word 'gossip'.

I feel cross that such a lovely thing has been so distorted.

For crying out loud stop talking about babies Lula.

I think I need to make little cards for everyone exempting them from having to listen to me boring on and on about babies. I think I might start to lose friends. I'm starting to bore myself.

But the thing is, when you're this big, all you really can think about is how moving around is much more of a hassle than it should be, you're knackered all the time, you hurt - Oh the list is endless.

And then there is the whole birth thing - don't even get me started on the birth thing unless you have a tissue handy, I get so angry and ranty and tearful. It is frustrating ands annoying that the western world seems to treat birth as if it is a difficult, medical issue that always goes wrong and is fraught with problems. It is hard to believe that women have been having babies since time immemorial when the thought of a big baby sends the whole medical world into a big spasm of panic. Oh my god, the baby is a bit on the large size, no birthing centre for this mother.

In this country it is the law that a woman can demand to have her baby anywhere she likes and a midwife must attend. I could demand to have my baby in a phone box if I felt like it. But apparently I can't have my baby in the birthing centre, because my baby doesn't fit into their statistical average measurements. Because my baby is big I have two choices, have it in the delivery suite and labour on the labour ward, or have it at home.

But wait...I wanted to go to the birthing centre because it is 'halfway' between home and hospital. It is reassuringly still a little bit medical, but mostly comforting and relaxing. How can it possibly be safer for me to have my baby at home? Of course if you ask western medicine they'll say it isn't, some hospitals still call home birth 'child abuse' but they have to let me if I want to.

And I think I do want to.

I cenrtainly do not want to labour on a ward full of other labouring women, feeling like I'm ill in hopsital and then get shifted to a delivery suite where they are hurrying you up and timing you and monitoring the baby constantly. Statistically women are much more likely to have interventions (forceps, episiotomies, etc) in hospital than they do at home. At least at home you can take your own time and manage as you see fit your own pain, there is no-one pressuring you to be quieter, to have an epidural.

That said, two of my friends have had hosptial births and caesareans which went really well for them. Oh, it's so confusing.

So there's the thing.

I'm open to opinion and discussion on it.

Amazement.



This is a 4D scan of our 31 week old baby inside me. A lovely friend used up some favours and arranged for us to have a scan for free (they usually cost about £300 and people who have their babies privately have them done).

Isn't it just totally gobsmacking?

Hey, Dollface.

This is a Bratz doll:



And she looks like she's had very bad cosmetic surgery. Dolls for children generally have idealised faces - pert noses, big eyes, the stereotype of perfect beauty. But how can bad cosmetic surgery have become the idea of perfection? Am I just being old and crabby and not seeing the inner beauty of having oversized blown up lips or something?

I've currently got one male child and one baby of unknown gender in my belly. It could be a girl and if it is I really don't want dolls like this to be a part of her life. But then as a parent you're faced with the difficult decision. Do you be the unkind Mum, the one who says no to the toys all the other kids have got, or do you allow your female child to be indoctrinated from a very early age into the fine art of the female form Hollywood stylee?

Hamleys has recently been shown up for dividing it's toys into gender stereotypes - pink and baby dolls for girls, Dr Who for boys. Female children are given really dull toy choices; kitchens and pretend cashiers tills and dolls that wee themselves whereas the boys are presented with toys that make them think and become spacially aware; geomag, lego, meccano. I know boys toys are stereotyped too - macho fighting characters and guns and such but I think that the lack of imagination, the belief that all the girls will need to aspire to is looking beautiful, having babies and working in a shop really should have been long gone from the toy industry. But instead of getting better, it appears to be getting worse.

I really, really don't think little girls should be given dolls which look nothing like any kind of realistic female, let alone ones which wear kinky sexy clothes as a matter of routine. I know that when I was a little girl we had Sindy and Barbie - dolls with very long legs and tiny waists, and tiny noses and huge eyes.



But Sindy dolls still look childlike, especially when you look at them with an adult eye. In fact in finding that picture I am quite surprised at how childish her face is. I remembered her to be more 'adult' more elegant and beautiful. No Bratz doll these days would have the same cute chubbiness.

Barbie, whilst also looking very doll-like has, redeemingly, at least had several careers including:

Astronaut, Doctor, Dentist, Aerobics Instructor, Fire Fighter, Athlete, Police Woman, Scientist, Business Woman, Flight Attendant, Teacher, Tap Dancer, Soldier.

If the Bratz dolls had done these things they might not be so bad, but the Bratz dolls are flower girlz and movie starz and pop divaz and pixiez. They like slumber parties.

So they look like pornographically stylised versions of women and they spend their time doing glitzy fame jobs with no real substance, or being fairies.

They annoy me.

Badly.

On not saying, "Hurry Up" all the time.

When I was a little girl my Mum always used to say, "You've got two speeds, slow and stop." But I remember dashing about everywhere, always in a hurry.

Now I find myself chivvying TLB along, "Come on, hurry up, get a move on."

I know children have a tendency to dawdle and daydream, to stare out the window when they should be getting dressed but I don't think they're that different to adults.

I think the difference is that adults monitor children. They're constantly waiting for them, telling them what to do. Nobody monitors adults.

Nobody is waiting for me to hurry up and get in the car, I make the decision about how long it takes me to do a thing. But children don't get to do anything for themselves. "Go and have a bath and hurry up, make it a business bath, not a play bath." "Eat your dinner quickly", "Get dressed, you'll be late for school".

They never get to do anything at their own speed.

I suppose it could just be me, being impatient, but I hear it everyday in the street, in the playground and it can't be that all children are inherently slow.

It must be us with an eye to our watches thinking they're slow when in fact they probably don't take any longer than we do.

Apart, of course, from when they have to get up in the morning. Or clean their teeth. Or finsh their dinner. Etc, etc, ad finitum.

I don't understand how Easter works. Why do the dates keep changing? I think there is a person in an office somewhere, sticking a pin in a calendar with their eyes shut, going, "I would like Easter to be now".

Labels: confusion, Easter

On why it is not OK to look pregnant when you are pregnant.

I have discovered that the perception of feminine bodily perfection covers many stages of a woman's life and is not just limited to the youthful female form.

Pregnancy, it seems, does not escape judgement. A pregnant woman should apparently put on very litte weight, carry her bump high, appear almost unpregnant from the back and have many people say how compact and neat her pregnancy is.

For me and the throngs of women I see at the maternity hospital, this is bad news. Our general weight gain and roundness and the fact that we actually look like we are pregnant seems apparently to count against us.

But I don't want to look like I'm not pregnant. I am pregnant! I have put on a bit of weight, some of my weight has moved around but I'm building a baby! I don't want to be compared to anyone with regard to the shape of my body, and especially not to naturally thin women who carry their baby in a neat rugby ball stuffed up their jumper (although this, for info, is apparently the definition of pregnancy perfection).

The zeitgeist seems to be small bumps. It's all 'Sporty Mum's! Women who run marathons right up until they're 10cm dilated! Wear your old clothes all the way through your pregnancy!' No celebration of normality, no deference to the complicated business of what's going on inside, it's all about how we look on the outside. I don't understand the seemingly constant desire to minimise the size of women; the definition of perfection is getting smaller and smaller. It really feels like the ideal would be for us all to be tiny little Alices in a world full of tall and manly men.

It's not just the media either. A colleague at work is five months pregnant but has lost a stone in weight because she's been so ill with morning sickness. Another colleague said to me, "Doesn't she look fabulous? You'd hardly know she was five months pregnant. She's carrying the baby really neatly!" Neatly! But she lost a stone in weight from being unable to hold down food, at a time in her life when the food you eat is even more vital than usual. That is not fabulous.

I think that women are judged physically at every point in their lives; as children we are picked (or not picked) to be May Queens, teenagers think size zero is the height of aspiration, the twenty somethings try diet after diet and are encouraged to eat cereal instead of lunch in order to drop a dress size. Shouldn't pregnancy be the one time when this pressure stops? Is not even pregnancy sacred?

Weight gain in pregancy has to do with many things like having some reserves for breastfeeding. It's normal and natural and it makes me really sad to be part of a society where it feels like women may not even bloom during pregancy. The ideal pregancy shouldn't be anything. It shouldn't be tiny, thin women with bumps on their fronts, looking as much like they're not pregnant as is humanly possible, it should just be women, being pregnant in their own way and shape carrying their babies to term in the way that their body chooses.

Labels: body size, pregnancy, pregnant, shape, women

The Lure of Money.

I grew up with very little money. We skimped to buy things, we had second hard clothes, we didn't have fancy holidays. I had dinner tickets and vouchers from the government for school clothes. I was envious of the children who had money, of the ones who lived in fancy old houses with big gardens, even envious of the ones whose parents were probably only on average incomes because to me as a child that seemed like a lot.

But I wasn't unhappy. I still did interesting things, and I got presents and we had fun and sometimes went on trips as a family. I didn't equate a lack of money with a lack of happiness, I just wished I lived in a nicer house and my Mum didn't have to get upset about bills and court orders, and charges from the bank.

Now I'm an adult I've seen both sides of the coin. For a brief period I've lived with money; not having to add up the shopping in the supermarket, not checking the price of things before you buy them, shopping in Waitrose. And I've lived through periods of extreme poverty; being thousands of pounds in debt, being on the dole with all the money gone and no access to any more, scrabbling in the bottom of handbags to cobble together enough change to buy a loaf of bread from the local corner shop.

Of course when I haven't got money I wish I had some, but I very rarely wish I had heaps. I don't dream of winning the lottery and having millions. I dream of being able to afford a little house in the country and some chickens.

I think my goals are realistic. And more importantly, I have have come to realise that I am very lucky to have, as a reference for normality, the feeling of living with a distinct lack of money.

What I have learned is that money is something that is nice to have, but one doesn't always have it.

The other side to that is to live with money. There are people I know who have grown up in very wealthy circumstances. The sorts of people whose fathers had top jobs and they lived in classy, elegant parts of London. There was not scrimping in their houses, and never doing without. They had lovely holidays and learnt how to ski and surf and travelled all over the world as part of their everyday existence. And of course as expected they went on to run succesful businesses and to continue to be the sorts of people who accumulate money.

But I have noticed something. I have noticed that sometimes that wealth is taken away from them; their businesses fail or they make some bad financial decisions and suddenly they find themselves at the bottom of the pile, struggling to find the cost of a pint of milk, borrowing from friends, having people bail them out.

And they can't handle it at all. The lack of money, for someone who has always had money and has never thought about it, becomes a huge impossible hurdle and they will do almost anthing to try and rectify the situation.

I have seen people move in with people they don't really like or take highly paid jobs that they utterly hate and that wear them out and wear them down. They convince themselves that this is the solution because the lure of money, the fear of being poor for them is so strong it overides everything else in their lives.

So they end up with money again. Given the choice between a highly paid job that doesn't suit them or a job with a tiny salary that would delight their heart they always chose the money. They choose to live with people who do not make them happy but who are rich, rather than having to count the pennies with someone who would probably end up thrilling them.

And I look at those choices they make and I feel really glad to have lived the way I have, to have wanted for things and to have known what it is like not to be able to afford washing powder and to have to use washing up liquid instead to wash my socks. Because now I have one thing that people who have grown up with wealth don't have and will never be able to get:

I have the the knowledge that is possible to lead a wonderful, full and happy life with very little money, because I have done so.

And it is.

Labels: love, lure, lust, money

My life has become a series of mad appointments happening one after another with very little time to breathe in between.

And I've been gassing on LJ.

But new year, new people, new resolution to keep up with writing here.

I have a lot of things I want to write about. I just don't know what the point of this blog is anymore. Is it just reportage or is it for more creative writing?