Sometimes my girl is such a boy

Hello and welcome back. Sorry for the prolonged absence but I have been very busy in a complicated and deadly serious dance of mothering and counter-mothering; all well oiled by endless cups of tea. I sometimes feel I am stuck in a modern version of the Mad Tea Party: the conversations around here tend to bounce along in the same way as the March Hare and the Hatter's (Anna, I suppose, is the Dormouse, without all the pinching and tea-dunking). Although unlike Alice, I haven’t just wandered in accidentally. Being a member of the original line up I have to claim equal responsibility for the machinations of the whole complicated business. That really sucks, because there is not much I like better than to be able to say that something was someone else's fault.

I have also been spending far too much energy being vile to everyone around me. I am more irritable now than I ever was at the height of my hormonal carnival of a pregnancy, so I think the sooner I find some little home of my own to live in the better everyone’s lives will be.

Anna quite likes it here. If she is aware of the maelstrom of obsessive caring raging around her, then she is not letting on. It’s hardly surprising she is enjoying herself; there are now two people close at hand to adore her, and one of them never fails to coo and cluck over every little thing she does, which is obviously a nice surprise for her. I’m expecting her to be totally ruined by the time we leave.

On occasions, I am convinced that Anna is an absolute child prodigy, and I spend many a happy hour imagining the unimaginable wealth that will surely come my way when she bursts on to the world with her genius. At other times, she reminds me that she is a perfectly ordinary baby who is not yet in full control of all her mental faculties and quite possibly will put off staging a take-over bid for some time.

Like in the bath the other night. My mother has what is called a Roman Bath (which as far as I can see is a fancy way of saying they’ve built a little wall along the open side of the shower recess and laid tiles everywhere). The bath taps and the spout stick out along one side of the wall at about perfect head height for Anna, and on this particular Bart Simpson moment she’d manoeuvred herself so that she was leaning against the wall with her head between one tap and the spout. By turning her head very slightly from side to side, (it was a comfy fit) she could see first tap, then spout, then tap, etcetera etcetera. I could tell by the grin on her face that this is what passes for thrilling entertainment for a young ‘un. Then she tipped her head slightly from side to side, and oh, the thrill! when she felt the corresponding rubs of tap and spout on her little bonce. Then – in what I can only describe, very lovingly, as an act of pure and mindless stupidity – right before my incredulous eyes she banged her head very deliberately, first one side, then the other, on the two very hard objects on either side of her. In case I am not making myself clear: the two very hard objects that not a minute earlier she'd been looking at and had then carefully tested, with her own head, for solidity.

Amongst all the ensuing wailing and the soothing and the cuddles and the ‘there theres’, I knew I was faking it. I’m sorry, Chicky, but love you as I do, it is just not possible for me to muster up any sympathy for that sort of behaviour.