Julie's Boggle

It’s been obvious that we were coming to the end of Jonathan’s days in his Moses basket since September already. Young Jon was getting to be quite a solid little chap and as we moved into his 19th week, his borrowed bed was becoming very cosy indeed…

Can you believe how much he’s filled out?

Handily, we had some friends who were happy to donate us their unwanted cot. So all that remained was for us to obtain a new mattress for it (a proper sprung one is not a cheap purchase!) and the requisite bedding. Then assemble the cot and rearrange his bedroom.

The cot does consume a fair bit more space than the dinky Moses basket arrangement, but in anticipation of this (and to give me PC access while Jon sleeps), my desk and computer had already had their transfer into the hallway with the completion of the shed project.

Fortunately Jon didn’t take too much adjusting to the new dimensions of his bed, and we’re really enjoying having the extra space so we can fit toys in with him to make bedtimes a little more appealing!

I have to wonder sometimes if I’m not losing my edge with all the baby-related stuff that has replaced my day-to-day working existence. Sure, I pit my wits against some of my smartest friends in daily Scrabble battles on Facebook — but is this really enough?

This doubt surfaced yesterday as I was leaving our church’s Moms-and-Tots group with Jonathan. I looked up and across the road and there was a chap that I knew from work. He was walking quite briskly in our direction but clearly not going to spot us if I didn’t call out.

I moved towards the edge of the pavement and drew breath to call out to him. But oh dear, what was his name?! Um, Richard… No, that wasn’t right. R-something… Randy? No, definitely not. I could picture him holding forth in meetings, leaning on my desk partition and talking to me, but – argh! – still not remember his name!

He was already past us now and striding quickly away. My moment was passing rapidly and with a sigh, I crossed the road and walked off in the other direction. One backward glance revealed him quite far away now and I turned the corner into our street. Ruben! That was it! But too late.

Ah well, he probably didn’t have time to talk anyway…

After the previous post, there were some people who came back and said “So what’s wrong with the old shed? It looks fine.” The above photos illustrate the point, rather well I think, that, close up, the old shed was Tired.

We also had a small rodent that had taken up residence, subsisting on the seeds I kept in there for the garden birds. In short, the shed was not (and had not been for a long time) a great place to store anything we cared about.

So moving swiftly on, the old shed was flattened in under 10 minutes by our hired handyman and his happy helper. He then proceeded to pour the concrete base for the new shed and assemble the rather complicated replacement shed we’d bought.

Unfortunately in practice, the “Grosfillex Utility 3 Plastic Shed” turned out to be a lot less stable than it looked on the website we ordered it from. The presentation was great, but the product definitely doesn’t warrant the extortionate price they charge for it. For the rigidity it offers, I would have thought it should be half the price.

On the plus side, it does look very pretty. So lets hope it doesn’t have to withstand any gale force winds in its current location!

…

That was the end of part II which we actually reached just before our holiday to SA.

Part III was transferring various effects into the new shed (all done while Jon and I were in SA, thank you Tom ), and getting rid of the old one’s remains!

We were originally quoted £150 for this operation, so it was a very happy coincidence that I thought to ask our local council if they would do it for us. They would only pick it up from the pavement (so Tom and I had the task of lugging the sections through the house to the front), but they only wanted £31 (woo-hoo!) to do the rest, which seemed a much fairer deal all round.

Sings merrily, “Ding-dong, the shed is gone…”

Jonathan is going through a delightful phase at the moment — he’s discovered his tongue.

So whenever he’s playing with something (often his fingers — fun and easily accessible toys ), out it comes.

He hasn’t progressed to automatically putting everything into his mouth yet, although we have a feeling that the little pink tongue, tasting the air, is the preliminary step signalling that this is something he would very much like to do!

Right now, he’ll lick / taste things if they’re close enough to his mouth, and he’ll grasp at objects that are within easy reach, but the final step of transporting said object to his mouth isn’t quite there yet…

I just love the mischievous look it gives him.

In the shopping centre near us, there are a number of less formal sellers who operate from stalls in the main concourse. In the past, I’ve made use of one of them that sold Mediterranean-type sweetmeats — baklava and the like — at quite reasonable prices, but that stall had since moved on.

Today though, I walked right past a new stall selling similar wares. I had one more brief stop to make and then it was home for a cup of coffee. One of these baklava-type things would go nicely I thought, making a U-turn.

After a couple of exchanges with the foreign-sounding girl on the stall, I figured out which one of her pastries I wanted to try. Not one of the variants I was familiar with, but it looked and sounded interesting. Then I picked another more common one to share with Tom.

The girl serving was very friendly, if not very articulate. She made counting motions over my two choices and it seemed that the one I’d chosen to share with Tom was going to be classed as two items. Fair enough, it was quite long. Then she said if I bought 4, I could have a fifth one for free. Hmm, well if I already had three by her accounting, then two more wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

After some hovering over the exotic-looking selection, I picked a further two items. “And one more!”, the girl said with a friendly smile. Oh, guess I didn’t understand her properly the first time. Very well, one more.

Then, after packing them all up into a nice little box, giving me an unsolicited sample of a piece of Turkish Delight, and some vaguely intelligible instructions on storage of my purchases (“never in the cold”), she breezily said “That’ll be ten pounds, please.”

What!? Ten pounds! For that little box? Too embarrassed now though to tell her that I didn’t want any of them at that price. :zipit: Handing over a £20 note: “Um, so, you said it was fifth one free… So that’s £2.50 each?”. “Yes, that’s correct.” Another bright smile as she whisked away my £20 and handed me a tenner. Ow.

Well, all I can say is that this will be the last time I buy from that particular stall… And I wouldn’t give much for their chances of survival in our shopping centre. Those prices belong in Knightsbridge not Shepherds Bush!

Jon’s stitches were removed on Wednesday in what I can only describe as an extremely fiddly operation!

The plan was to bring Jonathan in having not eaten for 3 hours (a precaution against him being sick while he’s too drowsy to deal with it), and sleepy, so that the sedative would have help in its work. Indeed.

An hour after the sedative had been given, they let me move on to feeding him to see if that would help. Problem was that while young Jon would not actually sleep, he was very dopey by that point and feeding just wasn’t happening…

So we moved onto the second dose of sedative. Which didn’t taste any better than the first one judging by the general choking and gagging that accompanied its passage down Jon’s throat. And finally he dropped off to sleep, all swaddled up on the table.

Then the tricky bit was extracting the dummy from his mouth and keeping him asleep while they shone a bright light on his face. Ah yes.

It did work up to a point and the trainee nurse who was helping Mel, the cleft-team nurse, very carefully cut the stitch on his nose and extracted the big foam plug that had been so annoying our Jon for the last 5 days. Great as this was, it was a step too far in the keeping him asleep mission, and he woke up.

Back to me being left alone with Jon again to try and get him back to sleep.

About two and a half hours after we’d started, Jonathan was finally, properly, asleep, but now in his pushchair and none of us wanted to experiment with getting him out of that while maintaining status quo. So I dismantled the top end of the pushchair, until it was just the backrest and the handles and Mel knelt on the floor beside it, armed with her ultra-fine tweezers, and scissors with the smallest blades I’ve ever seen.

Each stitch, of which there must have been about 8, had to be gripped carefully with the tweezers and then cut. And I lost count of the number of times Mel had just managed to get a grip on a hair-fine thread, only to have Jon feel the ticklish touch on his lip and thrash his head violently from side to side — in his sleep — so that she had to pull back hurriedly and start again.

Finally though, the last one was done and Mel clambered up off the floor with a palpable sigh of relief. What a performance, but definitely worth it — the stitches have kept it all together brilliantly and he’s healed up really well.