Category Archive

64 days… and counting…

All of the above have particular yet indefinable aromas. All of the above were recalled today when our post/maintenance man (and general Doer of Stuff) applied a bit of WD40 to the office shredder, in an ailing attempt to stave off its inevitable demise… “bits of wood” was more of a secondary association… and all of these things (sheds, bikes, bits of wood, WD40 (but not usually office shredders)) are generally associated with grandad-ness. That is, grandads of my time… grandads of twenty years ago and more… which does, of course, include my grandad, in the days of my youth.

Other grandad-y things are woodworking, strong tea and whistling – incessant tuneless whistling directly outside my bedroom window, which happened to look directly out onto the conservatory/workshop/dog-run… many a homework session was disrupted by many infuriating tuneless minutes of the Grandad Whistle! Dear of him…

I speak of grandads “of old”… of the aforementioned two or more decades ago… but have all grandads been the same going back to the dawn of time, and will it always be so into the infinite reaches of the future? Perhaps, in some respects, they have and it will. Only once “bikes” were “flint axes,” and in the future “bits of wood” will be “stabilised portions of reformed spacetime substrate”… or something.

The Tuneless Grandad Whistle, however, will live forever!

66 days… and counting…

It’s funny how the human psyche works…

 On the Saturday morning just gone, I was speaking to Jo about how I’m not one of those naturally happy people… and about how I want our child to look at me and think that I’m not just a good dad, but a happy dad… and then, I think I can assuredly say that, for the rest of the weekend, I was, for most of the time, happy.

 I could go into the various things that we did – that we had a generally pretty “chilled out” weekend, that we played quite a bit of The Sims (see post on my other blog), etc – but I truly believe that just saying I wanted to be happier… made me happier! I didn’t actively make some sort of Positive Affirmation, offer up some kind of prayer or whatever, but I simply – almost unconsciously – sent the thoughts into the universe…

 Et voila!

 I do have a tendency to worry, to over-analyse and to think rather too much about all the troublesome things which might happen, and so on and so forth… and for this reason, I don’t want to say too much more, in an effort to prevent lapsing into a loop of worrisome self-analysis. I will, however, just say this…

 Worry is about the future.

 Happiness is about the present.

 I can be a happy dad if I choose to be happy one day at a time.

Last night I dreamt I had kids – a girl and a boy of about thirteen/fourteen and another girl of about six… I don’t recall their names… I can’t remember much of the details of the dream, but when I woke I missed them – my children… my dream children. Such an odd sensation. I felt so… parental… so protective of these children I’ve not actually had… not in this lifetime… not yet…

Is the universe sending me some sort of message? A foretelling of things to come? Or snapshots of an alternative timeline where Jo and I had kids shortly after we got together? I did feel the age I am now in the dream, so maybe the latter… and, as much as one is able to accurately recall, to pin down, to categorise, the fleeting, ephemeral emotions of one’s unconscious meanderings, I did feel like they were my kids… but not my kids. Like this was a test, a kind of sojourn into what it would be like to be a parent…

It felt good!

I felt proud – in my dream… overflowing with love… like I would do anything to protect these beautiful children of mine…

Thank you, universe…

I’m looking forward to the future…

I don’t know how I will feel when I am immersed in it all – when I am plunged, during those first few weeks, into this strange new world of sleepless nights and nappies, and… sleepless nights and nappies… but… there are some rather surprising things I am looking forward to! Such as… (the changing of) nappies! Now don’t explode with laughter, all you parents out there, all you people who have already been through it all, once, twice, many times before – don’t guffaw and chuckle and say out loud to this here page, “Oh you just wait and see, my friend! You just wait and see, you over-optimistic dad-to-be, when you first experience the nauseating horror of stumbling around in those hours of the morning you didn’t even know existed, and it feels like your whole world is poo and stink and noise, and you feel like you will never ever get any kind of a semblance of a ‘normal’ life back again”…

Yes, yes, I know all that…

(Well, in theory)

I know at times I will feel so immensely tired, stressed, depressed, traumatised, horrified and wondering whether we’ve just made some huge mistake… but for now… when I remove myself from the practicalities, from thinking too much about it… there is a part of me that is actually looking forward to… changing nappies!

Yes, I can’t deny it! It’s there! How will I “perform” at this menial, smelly, thankless task? How will I rise to this challenge?

And furthermore…

How will I “perform” at getting my baby to sleep? And getting them to eat? And bathing them? And helping them to release their first smile, their first laugh, take their first step, utter their first word?

God, I’m terrified… but God, I’m excited!

Oh and…

Getting my hands on that stylish, three-wheeled, hi-tech pram we’ve got our eyes on, wheeling it along those country paths and cornering like a demon!

Raymond made a good point this morning. By which I mean to say, Raymond Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond. He complained about how much homework his kids got. Raymond being Raymond, his primary complaint was with having to help his kids with so much homework, but he did, in the end, step up to the plate (as it were) and express, at a parents and teachers meeting, that he thought that having so much work to do was likely to make the kids lose the joy of learning and left little room for “mere” curiosity… Actually that’s not quite what he said, but it’s kind of what was implied… more or less…

Anyway, my point is…

I am admittedly not yet in a position to be able to judge whether or not children are getting an inordinate amount of homework, and programmes like Everybody Loves Raymond obviously give an American perspective (and being what one might classify as a “light-hearted sitcom,” not necessarily a particularly accurate one), but… there is no doubt that Western society is more goal and target focused these days… and inevitably this has trickled down into education (which, by the way, I have some indirect experience of, having a dad who is, as it were, in the business of educating)… and while we are meeting goals and targets and “fulfilling the curriculum”… where is the curiosity? Where is the exploration and play? In the midst of all the doing… where is the thinking and the wondering?

And I’m not just talking about schools, by the way.

Just bought a baby gym, a baby bath and a bouncing/vibrating cradle, all for about £8!

Do you think we’re paying too much for things?

“…sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast…”
(The White Queen, Alice Through the Looking Glass)

Children don’t believe in something because it makes sense. They don’t believe in something because they have done a scientific analysis of the facts and deduced that it is likely to be true. They believe in something because they believe in it. They believe in something because they want to believe in it… because no one has given them a good enough reason why it isn’t true. Which seems fair enough to me. Is there really any difference between believing in God and believing in fairies? Or Father Christmas? Or magic?

Children have a pretty good idea about faith. Priests and vicars and rabbis and so on spend their whole lives trying to explain to grown-ups what it means to have it and what to do if you lose it… but why not just ask a child?

Scientific implausibility is no barrier to a child’s view on the world. Even if there is the remotest chance that something is true… then why not believe it is true? Who’s to tell you that you are definitely, incontrovertibly wrong?

With a child on the way, maybe I should start thinking more like one…

So with that in mind…

What can I believe today?

A few weeks ago, thinking perhaps I ought to start reading a bit about this whole parenting lark, I picked up a book on establishing a good sleeping routine for your child. It seemed straightforward and easy to read, so I thought it would be worth giving it a go - you never know, I thought, I might actually learn something useful. I determined, however, that I would read it alongside the latest Stephen Baxter or whatever, so I didn’t feel like I was back at uni doing the Childhood Development module of my Psychology degree… but flip me if it wasn’t as dry as a Rich Tea biscuit which had had all the moisture sucked out of it by some kind of moisture-draining vampire! Not surprisingly then, I only managed to get through a dozen or so pages before I was utterly overwhelmed by the book’s brain-desiccating properties. I gave up. And I vowed henceforth that I wasn’t going to read another book on parenting unless it was fun and entertaining, as well as educational. I mean, parenting is meant to be a joy, not just a scientific experiment, right?

Then I spotted Stephen Giles’ book at the library, on a tableful of other books on parenting and things. I was taken in by its witty title, the snappy little semi-rhyming sub-heading (”From nappy mess to happiness in one year”) and its humorous cover pic of the eyes of a befuddled dad (presumably those of Giles) peering over a smiling, gurgling (so it appeared) baby… not to mention the fact that it was just over a hundred pages long… That’s the book on parenting for me! - I thought; so I checked it out and started to consume its wise and witty words straightaway.

In accordance with my aforementioned vow, You’re the Daddy was, from the off, primarily entertaining. Giles’ voice is similar to another favoured non-fiction author of mine, Danny Wallace - so it was a bit like reading another book by Danny Wallace, which just happened to be about surviving the first twelve months of fatherhood. It was chatty, informal, anecdotal, and although, in the spirit of honesty and frankness, Giles speaks about the frustrating, stressful and downright horrifying aspects of being a new dad, amidst his relating of its incomparable joys, there is nothing in what he says or the way he says it that led me down the path of o-my-god-what-have-we-done-we’ve-made-a-terrible-mistake… and things. In fact… as my reading of the book progressed, there were times when I just wanted to say to the author, “Just quit your moaning and get on with it!”

Now obviously I’m not a parent yet, and every parent that has ever existed would probably say to me that I can’t possibly know what it will be like until I start travelling down that path, but there are aspects of this book that have been oddly reassuring in perhaps unintentional ways. I mean, I know I’m a bit odd and deal with some parts of life (alright, probably most parts) a bit (or maybe a lot) differently to other folk, so I don’t want to be too harsh on the man, but just by way of a few examples…

1. EARNING A LIVING… Stephen Giles works from home, as a writer, and frequently speaks of finding it immensely difficult to establish a working routine around the baby… but if one is fortunate enough to be in this kind of position, doesn’t it make sense to learn to be flexible and adaptable, to work when the baby is asleep, and to not expect the baby to sleep at specific times of the day and only work during these times?

2. FAMILY… I know I see my family relatively rarely, but Giles & Co seem to experience (endure!) an inordinate amount of family visits in the first year of the baby’s life - visiting and being visited - to which I’d be tempted just to say… keep the rellies away! Obviously family are important and people will want to visit, but for at least the first few months, it seems to me that parents/baby need to be established as the number one priority.

3. DAY TRIPS… Giles seems a little obsessed with taking the baby out on trips to the park, heritage sites, bookshops (bookshops!), etc… which is all well and good, but they rarely seem to have the desired result… and he seems to constantly forget to pack essentials, like nappies… to which I might say… do months-old babies really care about castles, ducks and bookshelves? Wouldn’t they be equally/more happy sitting on a blanket in the garden, playing with colourful toys and listening to music?

There are other similar things, but like I said, I don’t want to be too harsh on the man… and I am a bit different… I’ve never had as much of a need for sociability as most other people… I don’t see my family that much (which I think ties in with the sociability thing)… and although I don’t work from home, I have a bit of a - *ahem* - “different” attitude to work (ambition? Missing the “cut and thrust” of the office? Does not compute…)… so like I said, this book has been reassuring in ways it probably didn’t intend - I can’t imagine worrying or fretting about some of the things Stephen Giles worried and fretted about; and I can’t imagine some of his issues being issues for me at all… which can only be a good thing!

Every now and then, something happens or one or both of us will do something, which makes it hit home what we’re doing…

Yesterday that thing was us putting a pack of nappies in Jo’s hospital bag…

We’re having a baby!

Cripes!

Strewth!

And all that kind of stuff…

By way of a follow-up to my previous piece, I would just like to do a list of what hasn’t changed. To whit…

We still read books.

Anything else?

It has just occurred to me how different the world will be for my child to what it was when I was a child. Thirty-five years different. Thirty-five years. What do we have now that we didn’t have then?…

PlayStation (1, 2 and 3), big flatscreen TV’s, DVD’s, home computers, mobile phones, the Internet, MP3 players, digital photography, hard-disk recorders, Freeview, cBBC/cITV, central locking cars, Nintendo, Microsoft, Rockstar, Crystal Dynamics, EA Games, Lara Croft, Brad’n’Angelina, Pixar, laser printers, MySpace, Facebook, Channel 4, Channel 5, CGI, spray oil, broadband, quilted toilet tissue, Botox, budget airlines, The War on Terror, Neighbours, Eastenders, Hollyoakes, Cheestring, Nuts, Stuff, Loaded, speed cameras, microwave ovens, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, caffeine-free Coke, Everybody Loves Raymond, Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, bagless vacuum cleaners, Google Earth, sat-navs, Bon Jovi, Eminem, Girls Aloud and Marmite-flavour crisps.

Blimey!

Whilst growing up in Shropshire, one of my greatest pleasures was walking through woods breaking sticks. This usually involved hitting them against things, such as trees, so that the bit that broke off would go flying in a random direction, said direction often being towards mine or someone else’s head… but hey, you’ve gotta take some risks in life, right? This particular childish pleasure recently came back to me, as I walked along a nearby country path, which was strewn with sticks and twigs of various sizes, which were the fallout of the recent storms. I had the almost overwhelming urge to pick up a stick and thwack it against something. Almost overwhelming. This urge was curtailed by thoughts of a grown-up nature along the lines of…

Don’t be so destructive

…and suchlike. I mean, I didn’t think these actual words, but the essence was there.

This recollection now leads me to wonder… when did I stop wanting to hit things with sticks? Or rather, when did I stop allowing myself to fulfil the desire to hit things with sticks, to break sticks, and to risk having the bits thwack myself or a nearby unsuspecting personage on the head? I suppose I could say I now have a stronger conscience… I am aware of how much pain a flying bit of wood can cause a person, and – oddly enough – I don’t want to be responsible for inflicting that pain on others… or for that matter, on myself (does one fear this kind of physical pain less as a child?). That’s not to say, by the way, that I ever recall causing an injury to a passing stranger, by way of my stick-breaking antics, but I think as an adult, one is perhaps more aware of the potential consequences of one’s actions… at least it feels like this is the case…

So like I said, it could be a matter of conscience… or it could be a matter of consciousness. By which I mean to say, a greater self-awareness. Not wanting to be seen to be doing something that is not socially acceptable. As an adult, I think it would be fair to say that running (or even walking) around hitting things with sticks is not generally perceived as being a socially acceptable activity. It is not what grown-ups do. But what about grown-ups with kids? What about dads?

For too long now, this urge has lain unfulfilled… For too long, I have seen a stick, passed by that stick, and the stick has remained intact, unbroken, perhaps merely gently kicked or trodden upon, inciting a tiny secret smile if/when it breaks, as I then continue on my way to responsibility, self-awareness and adultness. Too long have I been denied these simple childish pleasures, for fear of being seen as… well… childish…

Well no more! Time to update the list…

Things to Look Forward to About Being a Dad… Category: Reliving My Own Childhood…

You wouldn’t think Everybody Loves Raymond would be a good source of parenting wisdom. I was most fortunate, however, in catching this morning’s episode (sadly I normally have to leave the house too early to partake of this wonderfully witty slice of American sitcommery), which was… as it happens… just that! A good source of parenting wisdom, that is.

It started with the eponymous Raymond boasting to his friends that he could get away with calling his wife anything, as long as he did so in a cutesy tone of voice… his friends then challenged him to see how far he could push it… he got away with “Blubberhead” and “Fatlegs”… he almost got away with “Smelly Tramp”… almost, but not quite… This led to his wife telling him how immature he was, and how, for example, when their daughter had asked them how babies come about, he had left the room in a fit of sneezes. He didn’t take kindly to this accusation and said that he would, therefore, do “the sex talk” with his daughter… so he went into his daughter’s bedroom, armed with a handful of textbooks… started to tell her about when a man and a woman love each other, get married, decide to have a baby, etc… at which his daughter said…

“Yes, I know something happens… but why?”

Raymond left the room in a fit of sneezes.

This was shortly followed by members of Raymond’s family offering him advice of various levels of usefulness (ranging, one could say, from “totally useless” to “mostly useless”), which amounted to attempts at answering the question…

What is the meaning of life?

Raymond even left a message on the local priest’s ansaphone, asking him if he could get back to them a.s.a.p. with an answer to this question.

Ultimately, in the tradition of every American sitcom that has ever graced a TV screen (although, to its credit, less so with Everybody Loves Raymond), Raymond and his wife came up with an answer along the lines of “we are here to help each other,” which they promptly went up to expound to their daughter, who, it so happened, appeared to have forgotten all about the question and was rolling around on the floor laughing with her two younger brothers. Raymond + wife looked at each other and smiled in a…

That is the meaning of life

…kind of a way.

Poignant!

And, it has to be said, highly suggestive of the Zen philosophy that Zen cannot be spoken of. Therefore implying (I would say) that the meaning of life cannot be spoken of – it can only be experienced.

But how do you explain that to a child? Without, like, “speaking of it”? And suchlike?

I’ll come back to you on that one…

While the “missus” was in the bath and I was idly playing Meteos on my mobile phone, I got to thinking about what I was looking forward to. About being a dad, I mean. As often happens when my thoughts wander in this general direction, Christmas came to mind.

Now as an adult – one who is more than a couple of years into his adulthood – I think it is fair to say that Christmas doesn’t quite mean what it used to. Short of actually being a humbug-uttering Scrooge-alike, for various complicated (and perhaps not so complicated) reasons which I don’t fancy going into at the present, Christmas has become a time of the year which I don’t actually dread, but which I don’t look forward to in the same way that I used to… say, twenty and more years ago – in my mid-teens and earlier. I do, however, have exceedingly fond memories, through my childhood, of the almost overwhelmingly exciting, sleep-inhibiting build-up to the twenty-fifth of December, the sparkling, thrilling joy of opening presents, and doing such things as helping to decorate the tree, helping to wrap presents, constructing cards out of glitter, glue, glitter-glue and all manner of cut-out-able and stick-down-able things, and… an activity which became something of a tradition for a number of years (if you ask me how many years, I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you – it might have been only two)… sitting down with mum, at a table, drawing a big Christmas tree on a big piece of paper, and “decorating” it by sticking all manner of things to it – cut-out coloured paper shapes, yet more glitter, bits of cotton wool and whatever else we could think of. I can’t, for the life of me, remember what we did with these paper Christmas trees… did we stick them up on the wall somewhere? Well it was the process that mattered.

So I am looking forward to Christmases with my child… replicating some of the above… and… well… to be honest, I don’t really know… I’m not really sure, when I think about it, quite why I am so looking forwarded to Christmases with my son or daughter. I started to think about this while playing Meteos… to analyse it, to question it, to try and make sense of it… as is so often my approach to things… which is handy when trying to come up with things to say on my blogs, but… is it really appropriate here?

I decided to stop thinking… stop analysing… stop rationalising…

Just look forward… blindly… unthinkingly…

Like a child would look forward…

Like a child would look forward to Christmas.

Another landmark has occurred… our first washing-lineful of babyclothes! What a strange and poignant sight…

By way of a little background info, we found a new carboot sale yesterday, just outside Hartlebury, at which we (by which I mean largely Jo) foraged for and acquired our most substantial cache of babythings yet – mainly clothes, mainly barely worn, mainly of pretty decent quality… and mainly a measly 10p an item! My personal contribution to the foraging was the pulling out of a bib with two grinning giraffes on it (with the words, “two very tall giraffe” (no letter “s,” for some reason)), an item which Jo informed me was a “bolero” (but which I only knew as a “cute little red velvety open-jacket-type-thing with little roses where buttons might otherwise be”), a very stylish Winnie-the-Pooh dressing gown… and, joy of joys, an immensely cute, cuddly (but admittedly a little grubby round the edges (and in the middle)) E.T! For only 10p! What an iconic and immensely must-have-able blast from my own childhood! One which Jo just thought was ugly and a little scary (and did I mention grubby?), but which there was no question of us not buying, especially for only 10p, and especially after I had demanded that the stall-holder sneak it into the bag with all the other stuff…

Anyway, in addition to the above, Jo, in the manner of an expert spelunker/archaeologist, donned her safety specs, brandished her crampons and plunged fearlessly into the biggest mountain of babystuff you ever did see… thus extracting uncountable bagsful of hats, booties, babygrows, shoes, bibs, shorts, leggings, pants, cuddly toys, bottles, jackets, an interactive Fisher Price talking-book-type-oojit, and… erm… many other things, whose specific nature I presently fail to recall.

The car boot (by which I mean our car boot) was veritably heaving with the aforementioned. We did, however, later notice that a few of the clothes whiffed a bit of cigarette smoke. Since neither of us are smokers and are therefore sensitive to such things, said items went straight into the washing machine and then straight onto the line, to hopefully become infused with the delightful aromas of nature, thus replacing the less-than-delightful aroma of nicotine. Which brings me back to the original subject of this piece…

The Monumental Significance of Washing Lines!

I mean…

It’s one thing to have them all tucked away in the “nursery,” along with the toys and the stock-pile of nappies, wipes and other accoutrements, but seeing all these tiny white clothes and things out on the line… that’s like we’re real parents! It’s like we’re declaring and blatantly displaying our pending parenthood in public! Okay, so everyone who we know now knows we are having a baby, but I’m talking about the wider public… people who just happen to be walking by and spot our babyclothes on the line and make all sorts of instantaneous presumptions based on what they have seen…

The people who live in that house are parents… they have a baby… they have just washed their baby’s clothes and are hanging them on the line to dry…

Cripes! I think I’ll have a sit down… and another cup of tea…

And think about why a washing line seems like more of a public declaration of parenthood than a blog… :-/

The following is a response to a comment on my previous piece, The Future of the Past, from a fellow blogger known as Free to think, free to believe…

———-

I certainly hope we will give our child “a good well-balanced home”… One always harbours fears that things won’t be as one wishes them to be, but I believe my other half and I have the ability, collective experience, etc, to be able to do so.

On the concept of “Happy Vs Unhappy Childhood”… I’m not sure I don’t “have that shadow”! I do have plenty of memories that I look back upon fondly, but are they seen through the eyewear of rosy hue that one acquires in one’s mid-thirties, as a sixty-year-old (or sixty-five – I can’t quite remember these days) acquires a bus pass? I don’t think it would be right to say I had an “unhappy” childhood, but I certainly have recollections of often being “troubled,” of worrying and fretting about things a lot – possibly more than the average child… I think I experienced a fair amount of existential angst during my early/mid-teenage years (but doesn’t everyone?)…

When I have these “bursts of nostalgia,” they are rarely particularly tangible… which is why I don’t go into detail herewith on the specific nature of such! They are flashes of imagery, sounds, smells and the associated emotions… recently these flashes have occurred more frequently and they are likely to occur in clusters rather than individually… and although they are “happy” memories, it is often, in some sense of the word, painful to recall them… I’m not entirely sure why… I suppose it is yearning for the kinds of things one felt as a child, which one can never truly feel as an adult… a particular intensity of wonder, of excitement, of strong and unwavering (more or less) belief in “other” (Father Christmas, angels, fairies, God, aliens, magic or whatever) – I do still believe in things as an adult, but as a child there was less doubt, less questioning… and perhaps less fear?

I have started attempting, rather than avoiding these painful bursts of nostalgia, to confront them, wallow in them, dig deeply into them and derive actual pleasure from them… It’s starting to work! I’ve been writing down some of these flashes of memory (which I may at least partially publish herewith at some point)… and I’ve started sharing some of them with my brother and the mother-to-be-of-my-child… My aim is to start to convince myself that I can feel the kinds of things I felt as a child – why the heck not?! I am an adult, I have adult responsibilities and all that kind of gubbins (and one more “responsibility” to shortly add to that list!)… I can’t literally re-live my childhood… but why can’t I concurrently live as a child and as an adult?

I have always had a Peter Pan hue to my beliefs – on how one should live one’s life, how one should relate to others, etc… Maybe it’s time to rejuvenate these beliefs! I am thinking/hoping myself and my child can help each other with this…

Last night I had an intense burst of nostalgia. I don’t know what set it off, but at its core was the theme, Christmas at the Family Home. Memories being what they are – i.e. slippery little beggars – the central core was maintained, but there were also a number of offshoots and tangents of varying degrees of relatedness and specificity. Like I said, though, the central core was maintained – The Family Home… that being the house in Church Stretton shared by myself (between the ages of 11-18), my two years older brother, my parents and, for a few years, my Nana and Grandad (in, it has to be said, a rather palatial “granny flat,” which was a conversion of the spacious attic).

The intensity of such a nostalgic burst, I think – the poignancy – is heightened by the fact that I know I will never truly be able to re-create such memories. I mean, I never would have been able to anyway, really, what with people getting older and things, but the fact of my parents’ divorce a few years back (I don’t know exactly how long ago – it’s all gone a bit blurry) and that none of my family now reside at that particular house, render such a task unlikely to the point of near-as-dammit impossible.

I recently spoke about the fact that my feelings of nostalgia and yearnings to re-live my childhood have stepped up a notch or twelve since becoming aware of my pending parenthood*. However, not only have they stepped up in terms of frequency of occurrence, but they also nowadays tend to be accompanied by an additional thought… or rather a question…

How can I create happy childhood memories for my own child?

Obviously I want my child to be happy throughout all of his or her life, but I also want my son or daughter to be able to look back at their childhood and smile… to look back on their formative years fondly… and then to wish to create happy childhood memories for their own child… children… grandchildren… etc.

Am I thinking too far ahead, do you think?

———-

* See my very first piece of this blog: Stirring Things Up.

Okay, let’s talk about the fears…

What sort of world are we bringing a child into?
What if my child doesn’t like me?
How do I keep my child safe?
What if I can’t afford to give him/her everything he/she wants/needs?
Will he/she be happy, clever, “well-balanced” (whatever that means), etc?

I think that’ll do for now.

I’ve been thinking about how expensive it is to raise kids. Well… how expensive people say it is. I’m sure they’re right. I mean, I’m sure it can be ridiculously, horribly expensive. It’s a fear. It’s a worry. However…

Before the prospect of parenthood came into my life, I’d been engaged in a lengthy process of dealing with, accepting and then actually welcoming thrift. Financial… um… carefulness… has been necessary, for a number of reasons, for myself and my partner - now the mother-to-be of my child - for, I think it would be fair to say, most of our mutual lives. We have learned strategies of dealing with the tightness of purse strings, of reducing our outgoings, of consolidating and managing debts, or prioritising our needs versus our wants, such that we always and constantly (more or less) discuss and deliberate over pretty much every purchase, applying numerous types of (mostly “on the fly”) cost versus benefit ratios… and things of that nature.

We love a good bargain - hunting them down can be a thrill! We seek out the local charity shops when we find a new town, as Indiana Jones or Lara Croft might seek out a hidden cavern or a lost tomb, to plunder for mysterious and forgotten treasures. Only yesterday, the missus found four lovely, barely worn baby tops for the paltry sum of £1… and the other day, on eBay, she bought a good-as-new singing/speaking rocking horse for £4.53 and a nappy wrapper bin for 99p - the joy and the bargain-y-ness of it all! And that’s not even to mention the wonderful no-money-at-all-ness of the things we have got from Freecycle, gifts from rellies, etc…

Thrift is such fun!

I am aware, however, that children want things. They need things. I was one once (a child, that is) - I was probably as want-y and need-y as anyone. Toys, clothes, nappies, school trips, various lotions and wipes and what-have-yous for babies; and it seems that nowadays (and God knows what it’s going to be like in a few years), a desktop computer, a laptop and a super-advanced mobile phone are absolute necessities for children of school-age…

But…

And this is a very big “but,” which I will cling onto with hope and determination for as long as I can cling onto it…

I know that I have myself, since entering adulthood, learned some highly valuable, life-enhancing lessons about the value of things, the joy that can be felt in not-wanting, in not-desiring, in living without surplus and in enjoying/appreciating less rather than bowing to the relentless pressure of peers and advertising and convincing yourself you want more and more and more… in being mindful… in enjoying the seeking at least as much as the finding&