So here goes nothing. Or everything. My first blog.
Trotters, Wine & Tripe will be platform for ranting about poor quality food and raving about trotters and tripe plus other goodies. Don’t worry, I have just fallen in love with offal (sounds like ‘awful’) but other ‘mainstream’ food will definitely be featured. But you can be assured that I will digress on to other rants about politics and the economic woes that have befallen the credit markets.
Why have I chosen today to start a blog? My son, Jonny, turns one year old today. I can’t believe that 12 months ago today, I was laid up in at St. Thomas’ hospital neo natal ward, holding precious little Jonny. The epidural was starting to wear off and I dared not sleep, listening to Jonny breathe in the dark. There were moments of silence in the ward, but only for minutes before the babies started their chorus of crying. It was surreal. Crying in concert, they sounded like cats wailing in a cattery. One could easily go mad in this ward, I thought. And indeed, the staff there could be on anti depressants. The beautiful and beastly NHS. You can’t love it without hating it. So after traumatising me for over 76 hours and unsuccessfully trying to induce delivery leading to an emergency Caesarean operation, one of the surgeons visited me 8 hours later saying ‘you can still have a vaginal birth next time’. Right, I seethed inwardly. There ain’t no next time, I thought. Next time NHS is giving me a planned Caesarean op, doc. But I smiled instead. Hormones, it was stopping me from speaking my real mind. And these hormones plagued me for the next nine months or so, which was nine months too long.
Alright, so Jonny wasn’t so’ little’ as the rest. Everyone who saw him gasped at his size. Not that he was porker by any standard. He had long skinny legs and weighed 8 pounds 4 ounces or 3.7 kg in Euroland. But measured 58cm. That is nearly two feet long. Across my bed in the hospital, there was a mother with her baby who weighed 10 pounds plus. And he was shorter than Jonny. He was also stuck in transit necessitating one or two intervention type procedures or the more graphic ‘forceps delivery’. Nice. Ouch.
From day two, I realised, walking around the neo natal floor that all the other babies looked, well, small in comparison with Jonny. As one maternity nurse put it, he stayed two months longer in me, and another just gasped and said she had never seen a newborn so big. Even my father was surprised, noting that Jonny was able to lift his head on day one, when apparently babies only do that age two months. And when I finally managed to attend a ‘breast feeding’ workshop during my three-day stay there, with the other newborns, it hit me. My baby is physically advanced!
And he continued at the same speed, although I wished he would slow down for us to savour him as a ‘baby’. At 10 weeks, he repeated ‘mama’ and ‘dada’. This made me nearly fall off my bed at 5.30am. He usually practices his vocal chords early in the morning, and has been doing so since he was 7 weeks old.
After sitting up at five months, he crawled at seven. And crawling at seven months just made one of the moms at Tinpan Annie nearly weep, not to mention standing at 7 months and cruising furniture at eight months. At 11 months, he started walking. Clearly, to him walking is just too boring. He wants to run.
Trotters, Wine & Tripe 