On the 21st, Terry's sister and her family came over an hour earlier than expected, as we were finishing lunch and trying to coax 'just a little more, please' into Babs. They were invited 'after lunch', but when I asked if they'd eaten (stupid, stupid me) R said no and threw me into panic, since we had nothing in. They ignored the mince pies I put in front of them as we all had tea, and I finally cornered Terry in the kitchen and hissed at him to address the lunch situation. Thank god, we had bread in because F&M had stayed over and so Terry had been out for bread for breakfast. Sister agreed to sandwiches but for someone so direct was bizarrely vague about what she wanted, then laboriously picked out all the cheese in her cheese sarnie; niece didn't like any of the options I ran through, so sister told us she'd be happy with bread and butter. Well, sorry, but no-one comes to my house and has only b&b and water. Fortunately she does eat tuna and sweetcorn, so we rustled up a sarnie for her too and while they ate 3pm lunch I tried not to feel uncomfortable about our apparent rubbish hospitality. Babs handled all the passing and the prodding very well but was very happy to go off for an afternoon nap. Although the conversation was fluent (sister is very talkative, unlike father), it was still a taxing afternoon and I was very relieved when they left.
On Christmas eve we took the baby to be weighed, because I was convinced she'd been eating better and must surely have put on more in these three weeks than the pitiful 100 grams in the fortnight before. Well, my mistake: no weight gain whatsoever. So our 10 minute pop was an hour long visit, as they made us see yet another health visitor to tell me something different from the health visitor before. (Conclusion: lack of continuity means lack of tailored and meaningful advice. No single health professional has a real grasp of our habits, routine, or my efforts to get more food into the baby; since they don't read each others' entries in my hand-held notes they don't even get to build up a picture that way. They recommend vitamins almost every time I visit, as though lack of weight gain equals lack of nutrients. She'll eat broccoli for breakfast, for Christ's sake, and she eats better than we do.) To be fair, we did get some reasonable tips: give water when she wakes up at night to reduce the reward and feed her from our plates so she'll eat more, but they did nothing to stop me worrying, in fact they probably made me worry more.
Mummy arrived in the afternoon with fish pie for supper. After a smoked salmon and bagel breakfast we opened pressies on Christmas day until Babs was overwhelmed enough for us to decide to hold stuff back for boxing day, and then we cooked. Terry pulled off a yummy and seriously meaty meat-free stuffed cabbage with mushrooms and chestnuts. I wished I hadn't decided lunch would be at tea-time and was a bit stroppy by the time we sat down at 5 o'clock when I should have been on the sofa for two hours already; the same old bloody red wine/onion gravy was a bit disappointing given it was a special occasion and the potatoes were just a touch too floury to be brilliantly crisp roasties. But, in our usually meat-free household, we had fantastic pigs in blankets - Waitrose perfectly seasoned and traceable pork chipolatas wrapped in their similarly traceable streaky bacon - and Crocker-tastic stuffing balls: seasoned pork sausagemeat combined with the fantastically packaged Kraft (R) Stove Top Stuffing Mix from - where else? - me dad's house! Feeel the quality.
On Boxing day mum and I spent the morning making feta filo parcels (surprisingly easy), vegan sausage rolls and hot spiced nuts, then we all went to join Flesh and M and their families at their house, which meant more pass the baby and yet more confusion for poor Babs. She did a very good job of holding it together while being thrown around by over-enthusiastic wannabe grandparents and had a nap with her new alligator on Flesh's bed.
Meanwhile we got to try the infamous vegan cheesecake, which was good but very sharp; M's dad made me laugh and laugh as usual (makes me feel like a young child and he's the funny uncle); M's granny was good value as only deaf and slightly batty old folk can be; and we got to make off with some decent leftovers for supper. Perfect.
So that was baby's first Christmas. Hopefully next year we'll get Terry's dad as well as my mum, and maybe uncle monkey & mj might make it too. That way it won't pass without incident, I'll get to revert to tradition and cry on Christmas day, and we'll get some decent - turkey - gravy.
3 comments:
no mention of the hard work that went into making the lasagne i see. Very disappointing but nice mince pies.
OMG I'm so sorry! My memory is so completely shot to bits by motherhood (more the lack of structure to weeks and absence of temporal signposting of the kind you get in a working week than complete obsession with baby and weird hormonal nonsense, thank you); I don't make connections between events any more. I'm sorry, the lasagne was delish, the help much appreciated and the glory shared, promise. x
i now feel guilty as it was meant to be a pithy comment more than owt else. no apologies required honestly. xx
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