Baby clothes! And baby art.

This week's post brought a parcel addressed to "The Resident, Ailbhe Leamy, XX Streetname" etc. I opened it, reasoning that opening other people's post isn't rude if one is actually a host animal. It contained a beautiful handpainted infant bodysuit/vest/onesie [pick dialect] from radegund and the Oyster - and another piece of transport artwork to go with the trike drawing he did some time ago. This one is a boat with four people in it. I'm beginning to suspect parental assistance, except that I know Radz. The boat is a wedge-shape, and there are four distinct and discrete oval people sitting in it, going somewhere.

Linnea could see the boat and count the people. That's how obvious it was.

The garment is so gorgeous it may have to be the Official Coming Home Outfit, or possibly Baby's First Figleaf. I may frame it. I have yet to decide.

(Last night I dreamed that I was giving birth and asked people to call an ambulance, but they were too busy and had more important domestic tasks to attend to. It was ok, though, because the baby was dead anyway, so the ambulance wouldn't have made any difference. I knew I'd been feeling not-listened-to and dismissed lately, but that's a bit severe, even for my subconscious.)

Pee and chlorine

We went to Coral Reef leisure pool today, to give Linnea a treat (memo to self: nothing involving 20-30 minutes each way by car is a treat for a child prone to carsickness, really). We did have a fabulous time; the little outdoor section was open, and it's much quieter out there without the echoes and the music.

However, a child-focussed pool like that has about six times as much pee in it as other pools, and therefore about seventeen times as much chlorine (numbers pulled from a cloud, not actual statistics). So my vaginal vestibulitis is not a happy inflammation right now. Burn, baby, burn, as the cool kids say.

The changing rooms were cleaner than the other theme pool we go to, the local one, Rivermead. But that has the filthiest changing facilities I've ever seen; it seems to be populated mainly by people who have just come off a muddy football pitch and then had a pee, judging by the state of the floors after about noon on a weekend. It's really very unpleasant; I wish they'd enforce a No Outdoor Shoes In The Changing Rooms rule or something.

The pool in Hemse, Gotland, on the other hand, has always had pristine changing rooms when we went, often with completely dry floors. Very pleasant. I heard on BBC Radio 4 recently an item about chlorine in public pools - apparently British pools need more chlorine than continental ones because it's not usual to shower and use the toilet before entering the pool. I know that most people using the pools I've used in England and, for that matter, in Ireland, do not shower before entering, so it seems quite plausible to me.

Once a year, whether we need to or not, we western Europeans. Heh.