storbarnsförälder

Emer is the peacefullest, snuggliest, snooziest baba that ever lived. Except for the bit in the evenings. Today she started by spitting up a huge amount on the bus home from ERAPA, at about 5 pm, and since then she's blurped a few more times, nasty sticky white gooey blurp.

She's not happy. And every moan and whimper grates on my nerves like a spoon in a badly glazed teacup. Rob is holding her, because one reason she's so lovely during the day is that I carry her in the sling everywhere; it's the only way to cope with Linnea around, really. (2-4 hours of slinging is normal now, in the ring sling, and I even sussed feeding her in the sling the other day, and I can replicate it at will. I slide her sideways and do it rugby-hold).

Rob tried walking her in the garden, which helped until the novelty wore off. Now he's holding her in the library with BBC Radio 3 on.

The day went badly; Rob woke on time, went downstairs with Linnea (who had wanted a feed from me at 6:30-ish), and then went back to sleep for two hours. So she didn't get a proper breakfast, and I ended up lying stuck in bed because I'm not very mobile when lying down yet; my hips still stick at me, and I assumed that he must be having some sort of important Linnea-crisis because normally he'd come back upstairs after he gave Linnea her breakfast and I gave Emer hers.

Anyway, eventually I managed to roll onto my side and get out of bed and made everyone eat toast, and we got out to the bus. Bus trips with a Rob who keeps zoning out are interesting too; we missed stops a few times and stuff like that. But we got to ERAPA in the end and it was pleasant; I walked around holding Emer, and sat and drank tea, and met people (*wave*), and talked obstetrics, and Rob followed Linnea around a bit, and sat around, and had a nap on the grass.

Linnea didn't like her packed lunch - nor did I, most of it was quite unlike what we'd normally pack, but fridge-pickings were apparently slim - so she had a sort of mini-series of mini-tantrums on the way home. I did get her to eat some more from the lunchbox, which helped, and then she fell asleep on the bus. She also ate a reasonable dinner, though not as good a one as I would expect her to normally. I know she's going to wake for a night feed tonight. She's going to be hungry.

So Emer has a tummyache and Linnea will be hungry. It's going to be another long night.

Tomorrow I hope to send Rob and Linnea to the allotment in the morning, and then when the library opens we can all four go there to do a book swap. Rob needs to put a new lock on the shed on the allotment, and maybe remove the old one if he has time. A lot will depend on how cooperative Linnea is being, which is why it has to happen in the morning.

We had so much unaccustomed rain that we ended up using disposables all day today. Bah.

I'm trying to learn to wear Emer in the hugabub. I think the problem is that I'm not tying it tight enough; she won't sit high on my torso in it. So far, I've tightened it every single time I took her out today, and I'm not taking the sling off - she's currently asleep upstairs in the moses basket - until I've achieved a tight enough tie to hold her in the right position. She's light enough that it's ok if she's not quite right first off; I can tote her around as long as she's comfy, and it doesn't matter so much that it would be awful if she weighed another 3lb.

So far today I've had breakfast, washed, dressed, done my hair and teeth, cleared the dining table, filled and run the dishwasher, hung a load of laundry and a load of nappies on the indoor drying rails (I can't really stretch to the outdoor line with any confidence), folded another load of laundry wet so's it doesn't dry crumply, sorted dry laundry into piles by owner (but not put it away; Emer's asleep in there!), cleared one and a half kitchen counters, put the magimix bowl to soak (encrusted banana cake mix - need to work on that recipe; cakes were incredibly dense and flat), took a phonecall from someone who hadn't been informed of Emer's birth (oops), found the cordless phone, fed Linnea her snack, and read some of another Adriana Trigiani, which are incredibly easy and lightweight and not too funny. I'd love to read the new Bryson, and we have some Fforde waiting for me, but I can't laugh too much yet. A little giggle is fine. I can get away with a chortle. Up to three chuckles don't strain the stitches. But side-splitting isn't amusing when it feels literal.

In other news, I seem to have lost the ability to make usericons out of lj pics photos. Huh?

There's yet another study showing that cloth nappies are no better for the environment than disposables. And yet again, the sample size for cloth nappies is about a tenth the size of the disposable users. Alarmingly, within that sample, they only used terry nappy users, which was a tenth of that again - so while they used 2,000 disposable users, they used only 32 terry nappy users for most of the survey.

They keep talking about "the energy used to wash and dry the nappies" but I know no-one who habitually tumble-dries cloth nappies, especially terries, because it takes too bloody long. Most people line-dry them whereever possible, and many people hang them in the house on radiators or similar during the winter.

They mention the energy used transporting the cotton to manufacture the cloth nappies, but not the energy used to drive the petrol-guzzling car to the shop every week or fortnight to buy new disposables.

The study only covered first-child environment costs, ignoring the fact that cloth nappies can be reused by second or subsequent children.

It assumed washing at 90 degrees C which isn't reocmmended by any of the re-usable nappies I've seen; 60C is the usual. And it assumed that you soak your nappies in a strong bleach solution prior to washing them. That's a bit crazy. Most people dry-pail because it's less hassle.

And there was no mention of the lock-away core in the centre of disposables, the bit that gives off that weird sickly smell when it's wet, the bit that gives nappy rash to Linnea as soon as she uses a disposable.

Unless they were only studying eco-friendly disposables, the biodegradable ones, because they are actually not half bad and I can see how they'd be environmentally comparable to cloth nappies regularly bleached and washed at 90 degrees and tumble-dried. We use them ourselves with no qualms whatsoever.

I could also rant about the habit many folks have of encasing their plastic-coated raw-sewage-containing disposable nappies in scented plastic nappy bags before putting the nappy bag in a plastic bin-liner and sending the whole lot to landfill. But I won't. I'll just, you know, mention it. Because cloth nappy users send all the sewage to the sewage treatment systems. Not plastic-encased in a landfill.