And the little one said, roll over, roll over!!

And the little one said, roll over, roll over!!

Thursday 25 February 2010

I’d like to meet that little one, and have a few stern words with them about having stolen my son and replaced him with a landed fish.

It’s a bit like watching a real drunk relative trying to break dance at a wedding, except small boy has the added disadvantage of have zero patience with life. He’s inherited that trait from both of us, but has spent the last 14 weeks taking it to a whole new level and frankly, the noise that comes from those lungs when he realises that he’s bitten off more than he can chew in the mobility department is worse than a hundred sets of nails down a hundred blackboards. 

If there were a choice between two rooms, one with Alfie throwing an “I’m stuck on my stomach and I’m not happy” ab dab, and the other with the Blackboard Orchestra, I’d be elbowing my way to the front of the latter and preparing to shout a hearty Bravo!!

I can’t even massage him any more without keeping one hand permanently round an ankle while I refer to the next diagram, otherwise I tend to put my hand absentmindedly where his legs used to be and find myself rubbing a handful of sheepskin rug.

Right now I am just grateful that we thought to invest in baby gates. I consider it money well spent because while Alfie currently shares the same design flaw as a Dalek in that he can’t do stairs, I’m betting the farm that he’s going to be doing laps within the next 2 months.

While I’m on here, I thought I would mention an upcoming event called the Reclaim Birth rally. It’s being held on 7th March and aims to march through London to present a petition about the closure of the Albany Midwives.

For anyone asking what the hell the Albany midwives have to do with them, and why should they give up their Sunday lunchtime to walk through the centre of town, here’s a quick reason:

The Reclaim Birth campaign is working to improve the standard of midwife services in the whole of the country - for everyone. The Albany Midwives are a London based group who, quite frankly, were a shining light in an otherwise bleak landscape of NHS maternity care providing a high rate of homebirth and personal care on a level that most other units can only dream about. They have been closed down for reasons not entirely clear but which have been described as a “contract dispute”.

If you still don’t get why this matters then look over the pond to where homebirth is illegal in some states, and where VBAC is illegal in many more. You have a growing number of women crossing state lines to achieve the birth they deserve, and more still having freebirths (where they birth at home without ANY midwife care) because they don’t want to be a part of a machine that treats birth like a medical emergency.

This campaign is about securing the services we already have, and improving them. It is also about saying no to a world where there is no choice to how you bring your child into the world.

Plus it’s a good opportunity to spend the day in town and follow an hour of righteous indignation with some good old fashioned duck feeding.