shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I tweeted about this last night but it's so rage-inducing that I think I might have to post about it too. Here's the text of the latest email from Bounty (these are weekly emails for "Your baby at n weeks", but after about the first 10 weeks they stopped being about baby's development and started being about why you need to start waxing your legs again... OK, so you can probably guess I'm not the target market for this stuff anyway, but here goes):

Eat, drink and be merry

This week, we're focussing on food.

You

We're talking about both you and your baby's tummies. So first, here are some superb tips on how you can get a yummy mummy tummy.

Your baby

We've got some great advice on how you can help your baby to eat sensibly and enjoy their food. But if your baby's refusing food, or eating less, the chances are that everything is absolutely fine and there's no need to be frustrated.

Your baby's first teeth are either here or well on the way. Which is perfect timing for their developing taste for lumpier food.

So we start with "Eat, drink and be merry" (yes, I know this is just a sub-editor's autocomplete tic from "Eat", but still: let's be happy about food), but immediately go on to "how you can get a yummy mummy tummy": that is, obsess about your figure. Bit of a contradiction here, maybe? OK, so they don't actually mention the d-word, but let's face it, if you tell people their figure is all wrong, they're likely to think about dieting.

Having tried to make mums feel bad about their figures, they then remind them that they're supposed to help their baby "eat sensibly" and "enjoy their food". Now, this may be a bit of a radical suggestion, but: maybe one way to help your baby eat sensibly and enjoy their food would be to eat sensibly yourself, enjoy your food yourself, and generally model sensible behaviour?

Now, in fairness to Bounty I should point out that while in my opinion they clearly imply dieting, they don't actually say anything about it: the "yummy mummy tummy" article is actually about muscle-toning exercises. So that's OK then, surely? I mean, doing your pelvic floor exercises is sensible, right? (At least, if you don't want to spend the rest of your life doing a little wee every time you cough, sneeze or laugh.) So here's the beginning of the article:

Exercise for new mums

Size zero A list mums may be all over the front pages, but in real life your tummy might not spring back to its pre-baby state easily.

However, the good news is you can get trim and toned without getting a personal trainer or going under the knife.

Fortunately, nature can be kind as well as miraculous, and your muscles will regain a lot of their tautness naturally, especially after your first baby and if you’re reasonably fit and a healthy weight. However, for the rest of us, a bit more effort may be required.

Targeted exercise is the only way to de-flab your abs without resorting to surgery (and better for you all round, not to mention a lot less painful and non-invasive).

There's a lot of subtle linguistic sleight of hand going on here, a sliding and eliding of subjects that I'm strugging to put my finger on. Let's see if I can pull it apart a bit.

So, we start off by invoking the "Size zero A list mums" and then pretending we're not talking about them at all; we're talking about "real life", where you can "get trim and toned without getting a personal trainer or going under the knife". These are things that the celeb mums might do, but because we've stopped talking about them by this time and started talking about "real life", they're presented as realistic options that "you" would have thought of already -- that is, options that you should have thought of already, because your body is All Wrong -- had Bounty not come along and told you the real solution.

Then we're told that "nature can be kind as well as miraculous, and your muscles will regain a lot of their tautness naturally" -- two references to nature, to make it clear that this is all nice stuff they're talking about -- "especially after your first baby and if you’re reasonably fit and a healthy weight. However, for the rest of us" -- because most of you aren't fit enough! And you're TOO FAT! -- "a bit more effort may be required." Just a bit more effort, that's all. What kind of lazy person wouldn't put in just a bit more effort (that's more than 'doing nothing because miraculous Mother Nature will sort it all out', I guess?) to look good?

"Targeted exercise is the only way to de-flab your abs without resorting to surgery (and better for you all round, not to mention a lot less painful and non-invasive)". Silly you for thinking about surgery! You were thinking about surgery, weren't you, because you're THAT UGLY. What? You hadn't even considered surgery? Oh dear. Well, don't worry, dear, you don't really need surgery. You just need to do "targeted exercise". That's not targeted at getting you healthy and active again, it's targeted at giving you a flat tummy. The sort of flat tummy that 17-year-old girls WHO HAVEN'T HAD BABIES have.

So it's a funny definition of "good news" they're using here: as far as I can work out the "good news" is that you need to be "trim and toned" (why?), you need to "de-flab your abs" (why?), but it's OK, you don't need to have surgery (surgery! for fuck's sake!) to get there. Well, hurrah! Break out the bunting!

Even worse, look at the comments on that article: people are going to Bounty for medical advice:

"Whens the best time to start doing sit ups after giving birth? I'm confused because my family and friends are telling me different things! One told me you can do sit ups more or less straight away and another told me not until six months as your stomach muscle don't recover from pregnancy till then. Any one got any tips? xx"

"how do i tone my belly after having an emergency c section...? Or atually when can i start toning after an emergency c section? I had my baby son 13 weeks ago. Please advise needed........ xx"

"Anyone got advice on how soon after the birth I can return to running and / or circuit training? I ran up to 12 weeks pregnant and did body pump and walked for up to an hour right up to the birth. I have had episiotomy and stiches which seem to be healing well. I am also breastfeeding."

It's frankly terrifying that people are trusting Bounty -- who exist solely to sell shitloads of plastic tat to mums by making them feel guilty, by making them feel that if they don't buy all the plastic tat then they JUST DON'T LOVE THEIR BABIES ENOUGH -- with questions like these, rather than asking e.g. the NHS. Ask your health visitor, ask your doctor; even ask your mum or your friends -- at least if they're wrong they'll probably be innocently wrong rather than trying to sell you dieting aids or exercise equipment.

You might well ask me "why did you sign up for these emails then, you silly moo?" Yes, you might well ask. I signed up with Bounty for the packs of freebies and the special offers, because I STUPIDLY FORGOT that free stuff which wastes your time and makes you angry is NOT ACTUALLY FREE. While we're on the subject of those freebie packs, let's remember that Bounty have somehow wangled it so that Important Government Information on how to claim your Child Benefit is stuffed in the pack of advertising and marketing samples that they give you when you're IN HOSPITAL, ie probably still woozy from being stuffed full of drugs and confused from being SHUNTED AROUND LIKE A PIECE OF MEAT, and therefore not in the best frame of mind to go through a bagful of rubbish and filter out the Important Government Information; but obviously it's as important for women to be aggressively marketed at by the makers of unsustainable disposable rubbish as it is for them to collect the benefits to which they're entitled. Yes.

Oh, the Bounty freeby pack also included a can of DIET COKE. I thought this was nothing do with mums/babies but now I realise OH WAIT they mean you can have caffeine again but YOU'RE FAT! GO ON A DIET EVEN THOUGH YOU JUST GAVE BIRTH 2 HOURS AGO!

If I'd seen this stuff before giving birth I'd have pushed that baby out in 10 minutes flat, with no drugs except RAGE.

Sorry about all the CAPITAL LETTERS. I blame coffee, lack of sleep, and Caitlin Moran.

In the interests of recording the positive stuff (as well as all the sleep-related wailing that those of you who follow me on Twitter will have seen):

* Img slept for a four-hour stretch at the beginning of the night on both Monday night & Tuesday night (and each time went back to sleep fairly easily after that waking and the subsequent wakings)! Four hours' sleep in one go! Two nights running! I was feeling almost human! (Though last night was another scratchy one, bah.)

* She can now crawl backwards a bit (and roll a lot). :-) She seems to be very close to crawling forwards -- she gets her legs in the right positions and everything, and occasionally even seems to lurch forwards a bit, but she's not quite got it coordinated yet. She can also stand up if she's holding on to furniture, and 'walk' if I hold her hands -- she really seems to enjoy that, and tries to stand/walk at every available opportunity; I guess she may yet skip crawling altogether!

* She seems to be picking up bits of baby sign language (we are trying to do some of this, & I'm going to Sing & Sign classes with her): she makes the 'milk' sign occasionally (though a bit randomly, not always sure it means what it looks like it means) and she has twice now made the 'more' sign when it's been cold-ish & I've been changing her (I guess this could mean 'more clothes'? -- she stops when she's got all her clothes on, anyway!). This seems like quite a complicated concept so I suspect it may just be coincidence, but at least I know she can definitely do the necessary hand-movements.

* She is 'talking' ALL THE TIME. Currently it's "na na NA NA NA na na na na na NA NA na na NA NA NA" (which is lovely right up to the point where it gets a bit wearing...) but we have also had entire days of "da da da da da", the occasional "ma ma ma", and several days of nothing but blowing raspberries. Occasionally we get much more complicated bits of syllables, so much so that it feels like she's said a real sentence and I've just not quite heard it clearly.

* She managed without me (with addedentry) fairly happily for a whole working day last Thursday when I went into work for one of my 'Keeping In Touch days' (for the annual Staff Day -- a chance to catch up with what everybody's doing -- and a team meeting; no proper work as such but it was really good to feel like I was starting to get involved again).

* She is eating EVERYTHING. Food is ace, isn't it? addedentry points out that it's amazing that she knows what is food & what isn't, given that food comes in so many weird and wonderful forms. (OK, she does chew things that aren't food as well, like books and clothes and my fingers and, well, anything.) She can pick up tiny things like blueberries and peas now, and if she's hungry she'll pick up every last crumb or grain off the plate.

* She can give me a kiss! If I say "big kiss" and give her a kiss, then say "kiss for mummy?" she kisses me on the cheek! Well... she sort of opens her mouth and tries to eat the side of my face. It's unbelievably cute, anyway. :-D

* She is ASLEEP RIGHT NOW in her buggy having her MORNING NAP and I have both hands free. \o/

Happy new year, friendslist! I'm sorry I completely failed to do an LJ Christmas card this year. I didn't even manage to use my LJ Christmas icon. Here's a belated Christmas photo (yes, I know it's after Twelfth Night):



I'm sorry I've also failed to send 'thank you' notes to all the people who gave us lovely presents. I will say a big THANK YOU now & I will try to email you all soon.

We spent Christmas itself and a couple of days either side with my parents in Leicestershire (including a day trip up to Bramhall to see my grandma), and then spent a few days after Christmas with addedentry's parents in Bristol. Img was mostly fairly well-behaved but was obviously getting more and more twitchy with all the new places and people and changes to her routine (such as it is -- we're not very good at routines at the best of times) so we were glad to get back to Oxford just before New Year. We didn't exactly stay up to see the New Year in, but Img did wake us up at about 12:05 (possibly having been woken up herself by the fireworks outside). Seemed a bit daft saying "Happy New Year" to someone who hadn't even been alive a whole year yet, but she didn't mind.

Obviously Img didn't really know about Christmas, either, but she seemed to enjoy trying to eat lots of wrapping paper or rip it to shreds; she also got some lovely new toys which she obviously likes -- the bright-coloured stacking cups are fun to knock over (and bang against each other), and she also seemed surprisingly keen on a big floppy doll (I didn't think they got into dolls until later). She also enjoyed the food at Christmas, which may have played a part in the fact that she managed to gain 2lb between mid-November and January. :-)

I don't have any New Year's resolutions this year; there are things I'd like to do before I go back to work in March, and things I'd like to do at some point this year, and things I'd like to do some day in the future; but at the moment I'm really just concentrating on surviving from day to day (or maybe week to week). I'm still finding it really difficult (as anybody who follows me on Twitter will know) because of the sleep -- or rather the lack of it -- and while I think some things will get easier, other things will surely get harder to make up for it. I can't remember if I made resolutions last year either, but I don't want to look back at them because I suspect I won't have succeeded in any of them. I did, however, manage to keep reading lots of books, which is practically the only resolution I've kept for long enough for it to become a habit.

I hope you all had lovely Christmases and I hope 2012 is shaping up well for you so far.

This comment on a parenting web forum is an example of one of the reasons why I avoid parenting web forums:

"hi ya i had this with my lo she 9 months and she been theething like made i asked my h/v and she said stop all fresh juice only give her diluted juice but must be suger free, dont purt any her foumla milk in her foods only fresh milk and dont give her so much paracentmol coz that could cause it too
and i done so and its worked its better all round now which is nice."

It's not that I think being able to write is necessarily correlated with quality of parenting; it's just that I find it hard to wade through posts with lousy spelling and no punctuation. It slows down my reading and that frustrates me - especially when time is such a scarce resource.

I say "parenting", there, but I don't think I've ever seen a man make a post (or comment) on a baby/child forum; they're always pitched at "mums", and to read some of them you'd think "dads" were a different species entirely. That's another reason why I mostly avoid parenting web forums: I am sick and tired of the "lol men just wudnt understnad" attitude. My daughter has two parents. OK, there is currently one thing that only I can do for her (since addedentry steadfastly refuses to lactate) -- and at the moment I'm just spending more time with her than he is, because that's the way our jobs worked out -- but everything else is as much an issue for him as it is for me.

The other reason why I mostly avoid parenting web forums is the fact that they're nearly always anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-knowledge: they're an arena where perceived experience ("well it worked for me") trumps everything, and so-called experts are not to be trusted because they're always changing their minds (that is, they change their guidelines on best practice in response to new research... shocking behaviour!). I know that there are some areas of parenting where science can't give you the answers; I know that there are areas where there probably isn't enough research to be able to pronounce definitively. But there are also lots of areas -- particularly in medicine -- where there is considerable knowledge, and I'd rather talk to a health professional than ask a randomly chosen person on the internet what their opinion is. That's not to say that health professionals are infallible, or even that different health visitors, GPs etc will offer the same advice. But even if I accepted that experience trumped everything, I'd rather go to someone who has experience of dealing with thousands of children, not just one or two!

Anyway, time to stop ranting before Img wakes up. :-)

ETA: Since everybody seems to be namechecking mumsnet, I should in fairness point out that the example comment above is not from mumsnet!

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A quick update on the bike: I went to look at it last night. There was more rust than was obvious from the photos on the bits of metal holding the box on to the bike; and the brakes weren't very good, though may have just needed tightening somehow -- they were hub brakes, despite what htfb thought from the photo (the thing that looks like a brake is actually an immobiliser lock). Hub gears too, at least, I couldn't see any external gear-like-stuff. Overall, there was just too much "would probably need a bit of fixing" about it, though.

Also, I did have a go at riding it, and, yikes, that would need a lot of practice. It actually felt more unsettling than the trick bicycle with backwards steering that I tried to ride in Dublin (pay a couple of euros to try riding, win 10 euros if you can cycle across the line about 3 yards away... nobody manages more than about 2 feet) -- everything seemed to pivot in the wrong places, and I felt like I was going to fall off any minute. Terrifying!

So, no, I won't be bidding on it, but it was interesting to have a (very brief) go at riding it. I think I will try to get to Cambridge at some point & talk to the Hope St bike folk (and say hello to all you nice people in Cambridge!) but that probably won't be for another month at least.

Thanks again to everyone who offered advice!

I don't know why I feel I ought to say something about the riots -- I haven't been affected by them & I don't have any dazzling personal insights. However, I thought I'd share some of the things I've read that have been thought-provoking and not angry-making (if you're on Twitter you've probably already seen most if not all of these).

NB I am not saying that I agree with everything they're saying, or that I think any of these people have "the answer", or that this list is an exhaustive collection of everything that's worth reading on the subject; just that these articles are well-written and interesting:

• rosamicula writes as a Tory and a teacher: most of the kids are alright


• Mary Riddell in the Daily Telegraph doesn't take the political stance you'd expect from the DT: London riots: the underclass lashes out


• David Allen Green in the New Statesman writes about lawlessness: Don't Panic: the riots and the rule of law


• Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review writes about the breaking of the social contract: The Great Splintering


• Anne Applebaum in Slate gives an American perspective: Riots for Rioting's Sake: Why are Britons smashing shops and burning buses?


• @pme200 writes about not calling the looters 'scum': SCUM


• Toby Young in the Daily Telegraph (again!) blames it on moral relativism... How did England's cities become engulfed in a Lord of the Flies nightmare?


• ... while Benji Lanyado blames boredom: An Epidemic of Boredom


• juggzy writes about actually listening to the rioters: 'We're getting our tax back'

Feel free to debate here but a) KEEP IT CIVIL, and b) bear in mind that I probably won't have enough free time (or free hands) to monitor the debate very closely, so please don't take silence as implying anything except being busy with a baby.

ETA: If I'd seen it before posting I would have also included Sunny Hundal's roundup of riots articles: Who's to blame for riots? Play the right-wing bingo!

Amazingly, Imogen slept for long enough that I was able to do this meme. From monkeyhands: ( five questions )

Imogen is 8 weeks old today. I thought I'd be posting a lot more here about what was happening day to day, but it's all been so difficult that I've not really managed to do very much except survive. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have seen more of the emotional rollercoaster in action (and I've been very grateful for both the personal support from individuals and the general trickle of human interaction that Twitter provides -- I'd have gone mad by now without it). addedentry has been wonderful (the role of Dad definitely suits him), and my mum has been an absolute lifesaver, staying over for days on end and helping us through the endless nights of inconsolable wailing (from not just baby but me as well).

It's amazing just how much Imogen's changed already in those 8 weeks. She's gone from being a very tiny waily animal (when she cried at first she looked just like a spider monkey) who did nothing but cry and feed and sleep and poo and wee, to being a tiny person with facial expressions (including smiles!) and quite a little vocabulary of noises. When she's not wailing and kicking and screaming, she's wonderfully cuddly; there are few things as lovely as letting her fall asleep in my arms. (Admittedly she still doesn't do very much. Everybody says this time is magical and I shouldn't wish it away, but I'm very much looking forward to a time when she can interact a bit more.)

There are loads of things I want to write about -- from specific things like breastfeeding (though Juliette has written an excellent post that says a lot of what I'd want to say) and nappies (honestly, what is all the fuss about?) to the more general issues of guilt, joy, tiredness, panic, confusion, and love -- but I'm too tired to put words into sentences. I'll write more when I'm next awake and have both my hands free. So, see you all some time in 2012...

( State of the bump )

So now I guess it's just a question of waiting (hopefully not too long). We'll let you all know when anything happens! (But no, I am not going to live-blog or live-tweet through labour/birth -- you wouldn't believe how many people have asked me...)

Ages ago I posted about things that needed fixing. Yesterday I finally finished fixing my suitcase (I've not exactly been very proactive about fixing it... I managed to saw the original rivets off a couple of months ago, and managed to find some screws a few weeks ago, and yesterday I finally got round to not only sawing up a small block of wood into two chunks into which the screws could go but also actually putting these elements together and finishing the job). So it's only taken me about four months to fix the damn thing, though I've used it in the meantime (it was fine as a suitcase, just didn't stand up properly). I'm really glad I've fixed it though: it only cost me £3.50 from a charity shop and I've now been using it for 4 and a half years so I think it's doing pretty well.

Last week addedentry's wardrobe fell apart (it was one of those cheap wood-frame-and-canvas-cover jobs, and the pole that holds the clothes was propped up on about 5mm of pine at each end, and basically the weight of clothes on it finally dragged it through that 5mm of wood), and yesterday we a) fixed the wardrobe (by turning the bit of wood with the support for the pole upside-down, so the pole's got a new bit of wood to rest on) and b) put up a metal clothes-rail by actually drilling into the actual wall. This is the first time we've actually drilled anything without help from proper grown-ups, and it hasn't fallen down yet, even with addedentry's clothes on it!

( boring rambling about rearranging the house, feel free to ignore )

Anyway, all I really wanted to say was that I was pleased that we'd finally got round to fixing some things and moving some furniture around and generally making the house a bit more manageable. And this whole burst of productivity seems to have been unlocked by getting the curtain rail up in our bedroom (that was the first thing on the list & I think it was causing us to put off doing everything else...), so we have timscience to thank! :-)