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You are supposed to be job hunting at the moment but you are putting it off. Or rather Putting It Off, the capitals being entirely justified by the lengths to which you will go to avoid it.

This is partly because the wonderful world of state school teaching seems oddly uninterested in you. Surely they are not taking onto account such small matters as the fact that your degree was 15 years ago and you’ve been teaching the wrong subject ever since. So you have too much teaching and, worse, management experience for a newbie. And now you’ve also had a year off after completing your initial training.

Still, it’s a bit deflating.

But you could cope with the damage the ringing silence in the face of your application (sorry, ‘applications’)is doing to your ego, if it weren’t for the thrice dammed bleeping application forms.

Applying for state school teaching is, essentially, applying for the same job with the same employer. Over and over again.

Yet every single school has a different form.

You assume this is because they like to think that every school has slightly different needs and so requires slightly different information.

But they don’t. On the form, they ask for exactly the same information, albeit laid out in a slightly different way each time. Presumably to foil your attempts to cut and paste.

Admittedly this differs a bit from a standard CV in that they want full work histories (in reverse chronological order) for example. This is supposed to protect them from undesirable elements.

But the same effect, surely, could be gained by specifying what they want to see on a CV?

You do not consider the fact that some schools want the full addresses of the places you’ve worked and some don’t sufficient excuse for making you spend hours you don’t have wrestling with what are frequently very badly designed Word documents.

Particularly as they also want exceptionally long cover letters to accompany them, which is where the actual tailoring your presentation to the job part comes in.

Luckily, if you just ignore it for a few months more, the entire problem will become irrelevant as the new term will have started and that’s that career move up the swanny. Probably.

Anyway, you are feeling particularly impressed by Max of Celluloid Blonde, who has managed to find a job with a company called Murphy-Goode where the application process eschews pointless busywork in favour of making the candidates produce a video clip.

Which people then vote on. (That’s important).

Shockingly, this actually has some relevance to the position at hand.

Now there’s a company to work for. The fact it involves becoming intimately acquainted with a winery has nothing to do with it.

Anyway, since the company seems to have an original approach, it’s entirely appropriate that Max’s clip is the most original there. So watch the video, vote for it, and complete the email which makes the vote count. Do it soon, as they are about to cut the applicants down to the most popular 50.

And while there, admire the backing track, ‘cos it’s really cool.

First Birthday Cake

So there you are this morning spooning a breakfast of special, homemade muesli into the Star and listening to the radio.

The Chris Moyles show on Radio One.

Well, you refuse to listen to Radio Two, despite the fact that the actually play music you like. Music which you were a teenager with. Music that was too hip to be played on Radio One the first time round, at least until Tony Blair got elected and Brit Pop took over the world. Which you missed, having fled abroad a few years previously. It’s Radio Two. Radio Two. You may drink hot chocolate, wear fluffy slippers and go to bed at 10pm, but you don’t listen to Radio Two.

You also refuse to listen to Radio Three. Any more. You were starting to recognise the composers before the announcers announced it, and that was just too weird. And their idea of breakfast music is to play something particularly long and soothing and not you are rudely catapulted into the waking world by the Star bouncing up and down in his cot and beaming, you need something more cheerful to get you going. And coffee. 

So Radio Four at breakfast time was right out as soon as it became impossible for them to talk about anything except how truly madly deeply we are into recession, how we got there, who is to blame, how many people have lost their jobs today, how that compares to yesterday and tommorrow, why we should just kill ourselves now to put ourselves out of our pauper misery, and the weather.

Mind you, it’s probably been more upbeat since they have had a Proper Political Scandal to get their teeth into.

Of course, you do miss the shipping forecast and Farming Today, which immediately preceded it. And if you woke up early enough (before 5am), you got World News, which was a nostalgic trip to a time when you didn’t live in a parochial self obsessed backwater which manages to squeeze Forn News into two and a half seconds, and that only if something really really big has blown up (and a Brit broke a fingernail in the process). Although I hear that Iran has just accused the UK of being first among the venom dripping monsters circling the country ready to tear it apart, which you can’t help thinking must please the foreign office in the same sort of way that anyone languishing at the very bottom of the Eurovision results table has got to be particularly excited when they get any points, especially top marks.

Until it turns out that there was some horrible error and everybody in Turkey thought they were voting for Greece instead.

Anyway, the Chris Moyles show lives to be cheerfully, mindlessly, superficially, entertainingly not stuffy, not tasteful, nor depressing. You started listening to it ever since you saw John Humphrys trashing it on some late night game show and you haven’t looked back. They even have a jolly theme tune to help you make it through until the caffeine starts working.

It does help that motherhood has built walls of steel around your psyche so that you are capable of remaining largely impervious to annoying dittys repeated over and over and over again, although if they had played That Song About How Crap Her Boyfriend Is In Bed by Lily Allen one more time, B’s prised technics may not be in the pristine condition they are today. Luckily she seems to have been bumped off the playlist for now, hopefully forever.

Anyway.

Today they were having a competition. They ask a question. Listeners text in. The presenter with the most number of tests wins.

Well, I did say it was superficial.

One of the questions was ‘What is your Mum’s name?’

‘Your Mum’s name is Mummy, isn’t it Star?’ you chatter happily. ‘Mum. Mum. Mummymummymummymummymummy. Mama. Mama. Maaammmaaa. Mamamamamamamama. MAMA!’

And the Star said, ‘Mama.’

He did. He really did.

You texted the show, but they didn’t read it out.

On Baby Bliss.

The other particularly helpful baby book Best Friend gave you was supposed to be an antidote to Gina Ford’s regimentation being the key to happiness. Harvey “I’m a doctor donchaknow” Karp’s Baby Bliss.

babybliss

Unlike Ms Ford’s stick to the schedule first and think later approach, Dr Karp has a Theory about the first three months of a baby’s life. And this Theory leads him to make certain recommendations about the Best Way to calm that crying newborn.

Now, you are generally suspicious of people with Theories. Especially Theories which lead to statements about the Best Way to do things. That sort of thinking has been behind claims that it is impossible to learn a foreign language unless one is simultaneously listening to a piece of music by Bach.* That one can only learn a foreign language if it is presented as a command, which one then follows.** That a teacher should rarely, if at all, speak, but instead should point to a large colourful chart representing different phonemes.***

Dr Karp’s Theory is that human babies are born three months too soon. Because their big brains need big heads but big heads wouldn’t make it through the pelvises of human mothers and so evolution has selected for, essentially, a species of preemies. For babies to be contented and comforted in those first three months then, they need to be made to feel as though they are still happily swimming about in the womb.

Apart from the truth universally, you gather, acknowledged that babies do suddenly switch on at around 12 weeks, he brings to the table the evidence of the helplessness that human babies display at birth compared to other animals.

You had to go away and have a cup of tea when you read that. Because otherwise you would have found yourself pointing out that even you, the 8 month pregnant ignoramus that you were, knew that babies rarely walked, or even flew, within minutes or even weeks of attaining their three month birthday. Hunting and killing are also, you rather assumed, a way off too.

The idea that recreating womblike conditions might help calm a newborn had a certain amount of common sense appeal, though.

And at three o’clock in the morning, when it is your third day at home and your husband is snoring away in the living room and the Star is fussing and fuming and refusing to go back to sleep, you will try anything, and that is when you turned to the practical help section of the book.

The Baby Bliss Method, then, consists of following the 5 Ss:

1. Swaddling, much to your six months pregnant surprise. “My MiL,” you said, gloomily “is probably going to insist on doing dreadful 19thCentury things to the baby. Like swaddling.” “Oh,” said Best Friend, “actually, swaddling is really in again now.”

And to be fair, MiL has been discovered to be a fount of extremely helpful and not at all archaic wisdom throughout the last 12 months. Or she has bitten her tongue right off while watching you manhandle the infant. Sometimes, probably, both. Which shows what you know.

Anyway, you swaddled the Star right up until he was six months in increasingly large cotton sheet type cloths. Theoretically, six months was a bit long, especially as he was well capable of unswaddling himself in the middle of the night at that point. Still, since when you tried not swaddling him, or swaddling him under the arms (which rather defeats the object of the exercise, you would have thought), he would wake up again half an hour later, you decided to go with the flow.

2. Side (or Stomach). Obviously putting babies to sleep in this position is a big no no, but carrying them around face down while trying to get them to stop grizzling is another matter.

3. Ssssshhhhhhh. The trick here is to be unafraid in public places of looking a bit of an idiot. Because in following this one you did find yourself sitting on the bus with your lips right against the Star’s ear hissing loudly and constantly at him until he stopped whimpering.

Worked like a dream every single time though.

You also had a radio detuned to produce white noise, which played, much to B’s dismay, through the night. Tailor made white noise machines do exist, apparently, as do CDs which produce vacuum cleaner sounds, whale music and back to the womb special effects. Still, you were happy with the radio, although the frequency you had it on did tend to occasionally pick up the transmissions made by the helicopter pilots to the helipad round the corner, which is an interesting way to be woken up at 6am.

Actually, you ran this one for about six months too. The thing is, while the Star no longer needed the reassurance, you do live in a big city and you rather suspected that the white noise drowned out the other noises of late night partying, ambulance sirens, fireworks, drunks stumbling home at 12pm, the downstairs neighbour and his hound of the Baskerville, fire engine sirens, the boys playing cricket in the street in the late afternoon and the others racing the mopeds later on, police sirens and the occasional scream as another teen got stabbed.

4. Swinging. Or jiggling. Why babies cannot be soothed from a comfortable sitting position has always been beyond you.

5. Sucking. Actually, you’d forgotten this one, because you never did like the idea of using a dummy. The Star was a very sucky little baby though. When he wasn’t spending hours and hours and hours nuzzling your breasts, he was making his own arrangements and actually giving himself bruises by latching on to his arms for comfort. Freaked the hell out of you when purple marks appeared until you caught him giving lovebites you your husband (the non milk filled parental unit).

Perhaps, with hindsight, a dummy would have been better.

To be fair, the Star was never a particularly difficult or colicky baby, and perhaps all of these little tricks were just the boost your confidence needed to feel in control, and everybody knows how well dumb animals respond to people who project an aura of authority.

But you don’t know where you’d have been without the book. You suspect it would have been a gibbering heap sucking its thumb in the corner.

 

* Suggestopedia. Bach, or at least some Bach, has the same rhythm as your heartbeat, you see.

** Total Physical Response. Which is OK for imperatives like ‘Stand up’ or ‘Sit down’ but does present some challenges, you’d imagine, when it is time to fool around with the third conditional.

*** The Silent Way. Of course, this was how you were introduced to cuisenaire rods. You adore cuisenaire rods.

On Eminem.

 

When you crawl through the door,

It is clear to Mummy,

You’re the one she adores,

The one she wants to see.

(Rock) Star, Mummy really loves you.

(Rock) Star, Papa loves you too.

We’re the ones who made you.

About halfway through the results marathon for the Eurovision contest, Graham Norton, the UK’s new host for the event after Terry Wogan flounced off the show in disgust at the way that in 2008 the UK had come bottom again whilst the Eastern Europeans (and Finland) were having a run of good luck, mistily declared that this year, at least, political voting was dead, and people were just voting for the songs they liked.

The fact that Cyprus, as ever, voted for Greece, the Scandies voted for each other again, Ukraine gave another 12 points to Russia, Poland shunned Turkey, and nobody voted for Germany or France seemed to pass him by.

But then this year the UK came 5th instead of the more customary last.

Of course, our traditionally poor showing clearly had nothing at all to do with the fact that instead of sending someone famous or rapidly becoming so after heavy exposure on all the relevant airwaves of their own and all the neighbouring countries, with a song which someone had clearly taken some effort over, and preferably a few well known backing ice skaters thrown in for free, Britain would invariably turn up having studiously ignored the existance of Europe let alone Eurovision for the entirity of the previous year with either a complete unknown, someone who managed to sing off key for half the performance, a tongue in cheek song so bad it was not funny, or, mostly, all three.

Funnily enough, this year, the year we came 5th, Britain not only got Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the ditty but also to appear in the stage with the singer who, whilst still a complete nobody, was at least someone who could actually carry a tune. Quite well.

Shame that tune was all introduction and no resolution (and a bit of a dirge to boot). ‘It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here! It’s my time! I’m here! I’ve earned the right to be here!’

Ordinarily you are all for repetition in Eurovision tunes. But after the fifty first chorus with no discernable verse in sight you were starting to get a bit frustrated. You wanted to know what she might be considering doing now she was there, in her time, after having earned the right to be there.

More importantly, though, the British team had actually bothered to do some promotion beforehand. They had toured Eastern Europe. They had braved the Balkans. They had even touched base in Malta. People had heard the song in advance. They had admired the singing voice of the vocalist. They knew Andrew Lloyd Webber was coming. They had been told who he was.

What the UK got this year, then, was a pat on the head for finally agreeing to play the game like a good girl rather than stand in the corner and sulk because no one was letting her just win.

Although, damn, but the Norwegian entry was a good one. Perhaps people were simply bowled over by its sheer brilliance.

On the other hand, perhaps it is a good thing that Mr Norton didn’t seem to have twigged to the fact that the Norwegian singer is, originally, a Russian speaking Belarussian.

You are not sure you could have stomached another tantrum.

On Gina Ford.

Having been very uncharitable towards Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s Book, you feel you should point out the childcare manuals you wouldn’t be without.

It should come as no surprise that you hadn’t heard of Gina Ford before your pregnancy. Or, indeed, up until about seven months into your pregnancy, which was when Best Friend gave you the (New) Contented Little Baby Book.

The Contented Little Baby Book

Ms Ford, you gather, excites a bit of controversy. The woman advocates routines with a capital R and this upsets as many people as it pleases.

You appreciate that the image of a small carefree baby being ruthlessly dumped, uncomprehending, in its cot and left to scream by a starchily grim Victorian battle-axe because the timetable says that it’s naptime is rather alarming and probably everyone’s natural reaction to the idea. 

But the usefulness of a book of routines for someone who has no idea how babies work should not be underestimated. Who knew that after having woken up at 7am after a 12 hour sleep (with pauses for night feeding, of course) that a new born might need a nap as early as 9am?

‘Good grief,’ you said to B in slightly alarmed surprise after a preliminary browse. ‘It says here that I’ll be feeding the Star 7 times a day. And it takes up to 45 minutes a go. That means I’ll spend… a lot of time just feeding.’

Although it was the way she’d added things like washing up and time to drink a glass of water to the schedule that really brought home to you what having a newborn might entail.

Also, the routines are not exactly arbitrary. The Star took to Gina’s timetable like a duck to water. It wasn’t so much forcing the bugger to comply as enthusiastically encouraging his own inclinations. Or at least the inclinations he would have had were you not forced to trample all over them in order to add in all the extra feeding you were trying to do in order to compensate for you failure to produce enough milk. 7 feeds a day? A distant dream.

You did settle into an eat/sleep pattern of sorts. And grimly hung on until you were able to joyfully greet the advent of weaning. Sustenance was coming from a more reliable and bounteous source than your breasts, you could finally achieve a more user friendly shape to your days.

Even so, once you had established your schedule, you found that you could easily ignore it now and again. Just so long as on balance he followed it more often than not and you rarely messed with his head on consecutive days.

Sadly it looks as though your comfortably ordered days are coming to an end. The Star is ten months now and likes a bit more going on in his life than a trot round the park at 4pm every day. You are flinging yourself into a maelstrom of activities, which have a different starting times which, oddly enough, are only universal in their total inconvenience in relation to his established nap times. Luckily he’s sleeping less anyway. There’s the incontrovertible fact that he’s getting older. And one good effect of the shift back to British Summer Time is the discovery that the Star has been running on that all along. He now stubbornly wakes up at 6am, ignoring the fact that from his point of view he also goes to bed an hour earlier than he was used to.

This is astonishingly disconcerting for you.

I suppose the truth of it is that a baby timetable suits the sort of people who are routinised themselves [check]. It also helps mothers who are feeling rather overwhelmed by the whole experience get a handle on things [check]. And for the control freaks among us… [check check check].

The dilemma of not particularly maternal women in their 30s who find that the whole biological clock thing is not a myth and has just caused them to throw a lifetime’s aversion to bodily fluids to the winds and get pregnant is that, frankly, they barely know which end of the baby is up, let alone how to deal with them on a hour to hour basis.

Luckily, you were not the first person you know to have a baby.

Best Friend had that privilege, and you have benefited hugely from her thorough research into the business, the fact that all the people she knows seem to have followed her lead in the last four years (Happy Birthday Best Friend’s Adorable Little Girl), as well as the huge store of baby accessories she has in her loft. Or had, you should say, as now you are borrowing most of them.

In particular she supplied you with books. Most of which have been extremely useful. You’ll get to them later.

However.

You found yourself supremely irritated with Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s account of her first year with her two eldest girls.*

Jamie Oliver's Wife's Book

To start with she is one of these women who can barely manage the mildest winge about the difficulties of baby care and instead spends most of her time warbling on about the joys of motherhood. Despite the fact that her children have less than a year’s gap between them.

This made you feel old. Under 25 year old mothers really are obnoxiously energetic.

The fact that it was appallingly badly written might have had something to do with it, too. You wish the editor had had a firmer hand with the exclamation marks in particular. And it has certainly cured you of ever again contemplating using ellipsis as a method of punctuation.

The effect of the bad writing though is mainly to make any and all incidents seem irritatingly trivial. There she is describing what you assume was actually a pretty desperate episode involving mastitis and while she was presumably actually writhing on the bathroom floor suffering untold agonies for the umptieth day, all you could think is: visit the doctor already. Or rather: Oh!! My!! God!!! Visit the doctor already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And she has PCOS. She responded well to clomid, however, and got pregnant first cycle. Which made you feel uncharitable on behalf of other less fortunate people with infertility problems. Especially when she then promptly got pregnant again about two and a half minutes after giving birth. Without really giving any indication that she knows how lucky she is*.

The entire book is also an infuriating tribute to just how easy parenting is when you can just throw money at it. Don’t get me wrong, Jamie Oliver’s Wife is a hands on mother. But what did she do when Daughter was refusing to sleep at night? She hired a night nanny and presumably retired to the spare room for a couple of weeks**. I rest my case.

Mostly, though, you found yourself profoundly disturbed that Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s entire raison d’etre was to be a wife and mother.

Why this is, you can’t quite put your finger on.

It’s not like you have anything against stay at home mothers. You are a stay at home mother. You would quite like to continue being a stay at home mother if the truth were told.

But you’ve done other things. Being a wife and mother is a part of who you are not the entire package. To have no other ambition, to have no other experience of life after so many have struggled for so long so that she could… (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????!!!!!???????)

It just seems wrong.

On the other hand, given that what 30 year old mothers most struggle with is the way that self gets subsumed into the endless demanding drudgery that 50% of baby care seems to consist of, perhaps Jamie Oliver’s Wife might have the right idea after all.

Except that most of all she just sounds monumentally tedious. 

 

*Which, by the way, you understand Best Friend had foisted on her as a gift originally.

 **Charitably, that could be the result of the awful style.

***Of course, this might explain the tremendous amount of energy too.

On growing pains.

The Star disgraced himself at the library singing group this week.

He didn’t projectile vomit all over the carpet while you were slightly too energetically flinging him back and forth during a spirited rendition of ‘Row row row your boat’. He did that aged 4 months.

He didn’t make a beeline for the nearest person with interesting shoes and start worrying their shoelaces. Although he usually does.

He did attack another child.

There she was, this pretty two year old, innocently crawling around pretending to be a dog, when she comes face to face with the Star.

Who looks at her interestedly and reaches out a hand to see if she will disappear if he pokes her. Hasn’t happened yet, but hey, he only has 10 months of experience to go on.

She is a bit startled and sits up on her haunches. The Star does the same. They study each other.

And then the Star launches himself at her, grabbing a big fistful of hair on either side of her face so that he can pull himself closer and bite her cheek.

She lets out a bit of a squeak and falls over, taking the Star with her.

He ends up wrapped around the toddler with his thoroughly tangled in her long blond hair as he determinedly tries to nibble on her ears.

The thing is, you think he was trying to kiss her. At least that’s what you tell yourself he’s doing when he does it to you.

It’s jolly painful though.

Once the Tardis turned up near where you worked.

the Tardis

You tried the door. It was locked.

But you didn’t speak to anyone about it for weeks.

At the time you told yourself it was in case it suddenly disappeared again.

But in reality what you were worried about is that it wouldn’t.

And you didn’t want to forgo the delicious shiver of anticipation you got at you neared the spot where it might (not) be.

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