Domestic achievements

Money: The remortgage has gone through ok. The credit card (which hasn't been cleared since the honeymoon) will be paid off by the end of the month. Our electricity consumption has dropped to "normal" levels since I started taking daily meter readings and monitoring how much various appliances use. We changed our mobile phone plan. We haven't succeeded in selling the excess furniture yet, and I haven't changed gas and electricity suppliers yet (it's cheapest to get gas from Southern Electric and electricity from British Gas, I believe).

Housework: The kitchen has been consistently clean and tidy more or less since we got back at the end of December. Rob replaced the broken toilet seat and I've also kept the bathroom clean and neat. The dining room is currently tidy, though there is a mountain of stuff on the end of the table. The library is as tidy as it can be given that we need another 3 meters of shelving. The master bedroom is tidy apart from a pile of stuff on the coffee table and a basket of Rob's Junk on Rob's side of the bed. The spare bedroom / my office has a clear floor (and two boxes of unshelved books, and the bed is covered in junk and my desk is half covered in junk). However, I've vacuumed upstairs and dusted downstairs, and I vacuumed the stairs, which I won't be doing any too often - the bump definitely gets in the way.

Home Improvements: We've designed the next lot of shelves which need to be built for the library, but we can't afford to build them just yet. I've arranged for a man to come about our two broken gas heaters tomorrow at 10:30; he will also safety check our other gas appliances, and maybe have a look at the boiler. A carpenter is coming tomorrow evening to look at the loft and give us a quote for the flooring we need; the joists need to be strengthened and we might need to have the insulation replaced as well. A loft conversion person is coming at 09:00 on Friday to measure up and give us a quote for the whole job - hopefully it'll be itemised; I'll see when he comes. We're leaving for the Netherlands at 10:30 on Friday, but I'm told it won't take long to measure and look. I'm assuming that they'll both give us written quotes; the amount of work and money involved makes me adamant that I want everything agreed in writing, and none of these "Oh, cash price..." deals. I want paperwork and bank-traceable cheques.

So all I've left to do, really, is... sell the furniture, speak to the insurers about reviewing our policies now that the mortgage has moved, speak to the solicitors about making our wills now that we're going to have a baby, change the gas and electricity suppliers, and finish this week's housework. Then I can go away for the weekend with a clear conscience.

No, I know I won't get the furniture sold this week.

What an Aquanatal Class is Really Like

Well, I arrive late, of course. That goes without saying. I walk out of the changing rooms into the main pool area, prepared to peer around until I decide in which of three possible pools the class is held... But that's not necessary, because there in front of me, like ducklings, is a straggly line of bulging ladies, each bearing a long, cylindrical, flexible polystyrene float (floats are available in pink, pale green, blue, and washed-out yellow; they all look as though they've been savaged by lions and have impressive chunks ripped out of them at intervals). I, with my qualifying bulge ahead of me, join them. The instructor gets me a float too.

We get into the pool. Nobody seems to be talking to anyone else, though people have formed little groups - I can tell that those two know each other, and those two, and those three. Surely antenatal classes are places where British reserve falls apart? Doesn't look like it. I decide against smiling nervously and saying hello; it might be considered rude.

The (male) (wearing shorts and trainers and a tshirt) (with bad teeth) instructor, whose name I don't know, instructs us to straddle our floats, so that we are sitting in the U as in a particularly supportive saddle, and scissor our legs. We bob, en masse, down the pool, heads and shoulders out of the water, the ends of the floats sticking up fore and aft - nape of neck and just under the chin, really. Most awkward. Bob, bob, bob. People crash into each other intermittently. That's fine too; we make polite British noises about it.

When we have mastered scissoring motions, we move on to running motions, and strong kicks, and frog kicks (ooooh, is my hip supposed to make that noise? It's probably just as well that I started now, rather than finding out in week 35 that my knees are this bad), and even some arms motions, though the arms motions are almost all kind of pointless. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I keep overtaking people.

15 minutes of continuously moving against the water is quite tiring.

So's the next 15 minutes. Ow. He's talking about calf muscles. I don't have any calf muscles. Ow.

Then we climb out. Gravity kicks back in; it's amazing how much support a swimming pool and a polystyrene u-bend can give you. I feel like someone has dropped a bowling ball into my abdominal cavity (well goodness me, would you look at that? I look like someone has dropped a bowling ball into my abdominal cavity! My stomach muscles are gone!) and my knees ache. We get into the shallower pool, and stand straight up at the sides (this is hip-deep for everyone else, and waist-deep for me), and stretch our right legs out in front of us, and balance our right feet on the float. I have to sink my float to achieve this, and even so the float digs into my ankle and gives me pins and needles. This had better be good for me. The instructor (whose name I still don't know) claims it's stretching our lower backs; it's definitely stretching my hamstring and calf and possibly my femur, too. Swap legs. How can I stand on a leg that's fizzing away madly with pins and needles? Never mind, never mind...

Finally we get to relax, float about aimlessly, and crash into each other some more. I've managed to speak to someone - I said "This is very silly. Imagine what an anthropologist would make of it?" as we bobbed on our floats from one end of the pool to the other (she laughed, but I couldn't tell whether it was a "what a nutter!" laugh or a "what a wit!" laugh), and I said "oops, sorry," a couple of times as I crashed into people. I can tell I'm destined to be a socialite, flitting to mother and baby groups, after-playschool knitting marathons, that kind of thing.

I made the serious mistake of thanking the instructor on the way out. No-one else did. Have I ostracised myself forever?

Heavily pregnant British ladies are just as modest in communal showers as ordinary British ladies, by the way. And some of them managed to go through the whole class and shower without getting their hair or makeup wet.

After class, I felt revitalised and rejuvenated, and I made lots of necessary phonecalls before I keeled over and slept on the sofa for two hours. I'll go again next week; it's probably good for me.

I Entered the Dark Side... And It Was Good

Every Wednesday evening, if it's not too cold or scary out, and the class is open, Rob and I go to a ballroom dancing class. The past couple of times we've taken the bus instead of walking in, because it's a 20-minute walk when I'm not pregnant, and 30 minutes now, and the walk leaves me too breathless to dance for an hour. Also, I dislike arriving sweaty and feeling as though I've had my day's quota of aerobic exercise; that's my main excuse for paying for dancing, after all.

After dancing, to fortify me for the long, arduous trek home, which also takes 20-30 minutes depending on stage of gestation, we regularly find somewhere to drink hot chocolate, in a lovely sharing, caring togetherness experience. This is great, because we never communicate otherwise if we can help it; we work (he at geeky paid things, me at housey unpaid things), cook, and discuss practical DIY or financial matters. Oh, and lately I prance about going "Baby baby baby baby BABY baby baby!" and he says "Yes, your baby!" and I say "Mine! Hahahahaha! Nothing to do with you, alll mine!" and then he brings me tea and toast and I fall on it like a herd of locusts, only locusts don't drink tea and toast.

So we have this important us-time every week where we get to remember why we like living together and doing DIY together and cataloging books together (that was an American spelling, wasn't it, I know it was). We started off drinking hot chocolate in the locally-owned cafe attached to a very old local hotel (well, moderately old - about 250 years or so). But they closed that restaurant for refurbishment. So the next place we found was a Pizza Hut, and they also served hot chocolate, and the first few times we went there was a wonderful waitress who remembered us - and what we preferred to order - and served smilingly and promptly and she had clean fingernails and didn't mess with her hair, either. Then the Pizza Hut announced that it was moving, but we didn't mind because it was Christmas break.

Today was the first lesson after Christmas ended. After the lesson, we walked through the Riverside bit of the Oracle (sometimes, British towns pretend to be continental and cosmopolitan; they get it almost right, apart from the fact that everywhere in the area is selling exactly the same stuff as everywhere else and they are all owned by international chain franchisey people). We discovered that finally, It Has Come To Reading! (That's Reading, England).

Yes, folks, today I went to Starbucks.

I have purchased takeaway coffee from Starbucks stands in train stations before now, I concede, but I don't believe I ever actually walked into one and sat down before. It was quite nice. The tables had chess board patterns on, which is always useful, and the hot chocolate was no worse than what comes out of machines in every cafe in Reading (the important thing is to remember not to get whipped cream; it's sweetened, has added vanilla, and comes out of an aerosol can. Yes, it came from a cow, but the cow sure as hell wouldn't recognise it now). The music was better than in either Costa coffee or Coffee Republic, and the food available appeared to be identical - hummous and tuna sandwiches on tomato bread, chicken caesar wraps with oregano, toasted paninis, double fudge superchoc extra sugar brownies, and, of course, blueberry muffins. None of these places ever do a plain ordinary sandwich on plain ordinary bread; the closest you can get is Free Range Egg and Cress with Baby Spinach on Malted Wholegrain Superthick Sliced Loaf, Low-Fat Mayo and Fresh-ground Black Pepper, or similar.

So yeah. Starbucks is going to take over the world, but the only places in Reading it'll put out of business are identical already. They've already driven out any independent houses of excellence.

There's precious little decent coffee available in the average UK high street anyway.

(Hum. I am becoming Opinionated again. I must have been reading Bryson).