Baby's age: -81 days

For the first time, last night, he had hiccups. I’m glad I have already read that hiccups are not particularly distressing while you’re still in the womb, because although they feel like tiny little bumps, they went on for quite a long time.

This bump is getting enormous. Pete refers to the baby as The Hippo, because I am so fat. I met another pregnant woman at the swimming pool, and judged her bump to be the same as mine. Then she told me she only had two weeks to go. I invested in some support bras, and found that my band size has gone up FOUR INCHES from my pre-pregnancy size; the nice lady in Mothercare informed me that it would certainly go up again, so there was no point in buying nursing bras yet.

The kicking is also getting more forceful, and I think I have to start counting them soon, but honestly, there are too many to count! Last weekend we were in the cinema, and I think perhaps in response to the loud volume, he jigged and boxed through the entire film. I felt bruised by the time we left.

Tomorrow we have our first ante-natal class. I’m really hoping they don’t show any videos of people giving birth. Ugh!

I still think he’s lovely.

Baby's age: -88 days

I have so much annual leave to use up before starting maternity leave at the end of May, that I can afford to take every Friday off work. This will also be useful when arguing the case for working part time, as I will have been working a four day week since the end of January, and my current projects include making everything more efficient so that it takes even less time.

Having a day off every week is rather nice. It means I can collect parcels from the post office, which came in very handy today, as there were four: * A lightweight summer grobag from ebay; * 50g sparkly black chenille knitting yarn, also via ebay. No, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it; * A very small pair of blue trousers, from Hg; * Several very small blue outfits and a book, from Lisa

This was rather like having a birthday, even if I did actually pay for most of it. In the celebratory spirit, I then went to the wool shop and accidentally bought some wool, which I also don’t have any plans for. It was just nice. I tried to avoid the wool shop for this very reason, but it just happened. I’m sure it will come in handy for something.

Then I had lunch (a bacon, red leicester, and bbq sauce toastie) with a friend, and spent an hour talking about babies. She has spent a year trying to have a baby, but she generously still doesn’t mind spending an hour getting excited about mine. This must surely be the sign of a very good friend.

Then I remembered to send a mother’s day card. Thank goodness.

Whatever way I look at it, the imminent takeover of The Body Shop by L’Oreal doesn’t seem like a good thing. L’Oreal is 26% owned by Nestle, the UK’s most boycotted company. Of course, you should make up your own mind, so there are lots of links below; meanwhile I will tell you a story.

I found out about this from a Yahoo! group related to pregnancy. Their beef with it, inevitably, is that whole baby milk thing:

Nestlé is the target of a boycott in 20 countries because it aggressively markets baby foods, breaking World Health Assembly marketing requirements and contributing to the death and suffering of infants around the world.

The World Health Organisation estimates that some 1.5 million children die each year because they are not adequately breastfed, and Nestle has to take some responsibility for this. The Yahoo! group urged members to email The Body Shop, expressing their concern.

I cross-posted this to a Corporate Social Responsibility group that I also belong to, and was immediately flamed, with the following argument:

Maybe The Body Shop will have a positive influence on L’Oreal…especially if the buying public congratulates L’Oreal for being such an enlightened company that they have chosen to buy one of the world’s premier socially responsible companies. This is the “people behave the way we expect them to behave” theory of human development applied to the world of corporation development.

My experience of corporate ethics as that corporations are even more likely to behave in an unethical way than individuals are. The Body Shop is a very small fish in the Nestle pond now; their ethical arm, if you will. As L’Oréal chief executive, Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones says:

We have always had great respect for the Body Shop’s success and for its strong identity and values created by its outstanding founder, Dame Anita Roddick. A partnership between our companies makes perfect sense. Combining L’Oréal’s expertise and knowledge of international markets with the Body Shop’s distinct culture and values will benefit both companies.

No kidding? Want to improve your ethical standing? Just buy a company that already has a good reputation, and hope that some of the glitter from their halo will rub off on you. This is nothing but cherry-flavoured lipgloss.

The other big objection is to L’Oreal’s record for animal testing. While they claim that the products themselves are not tested on animals, the ingredients that go into them are.

L’Oreal receives a worst rating from Ethical Consumer for its animal testing policy, and also has had boycott calls against it for testing its cosmetic products on animals. And while the Body Shop has always considered natural ingredients as important, L’Oreal is criticised by environmental campaigners for including harmful pollutants and worrying chemicals in its cosmetics.

Naturewatch are asking supporters to “take a leaf out of Anita Roddick’s book and, to quote directly from the Body Shop website, ‘boycott cosmetic companies that continue to test on animals.’”

Other leaves in that book refer to making poverty history, which doesn’t seem to be high on the Nestle agenda. Unless they’re talking about their own poverty.

1. The Dying of Delight “Briefly describe an aspect of your life for which ‘The Dying Of Delight’ would be an apt title.�

Delight is knowing that you finally got it right. You finally met the person who you are simply meant to belong to, and everything about the relationship is easy and beautiful, and for once you can see exactly where you’re going, but you know you don’t have to look, because it will all just fall into place. Delight is the warmth of the perfect touch and the light in someone’s eyes when you wake up beside them every day and they smile at you. Delight is the utter security of knowing that you both feel the same way, so there is never going to be anything to worry about; your happily-ever-after is guaranteed. Delight is a general lack of irritating habits, rarely having to compromise, and money worries being limited to whether you can afford to go into London this weekend, rather than can you pay the mortgage this month. Delight is not being deliberately excluded from certain elements of their life, and knowing deep down why you are excluded. Delight is the innocent lack of suspicion. Delight is a relationship so strong that even a shot through its heart can heal, because you both want it to; but the dying of delight is the scar of knowing that it will never be that innocent again.

2. They F*** You Up “Pick another book whose title has some resonance in your life, and write a little about it.�

Obviously it’s the Larkin poem that resonates. Everyone’s parents fuck them up to some extent, and I’m not claiming to be particularly disadvantage or special in anyway. Perhaps it’s my own impending state of parenthood that makes me more and more aware of the fucked up individuals that my own parents are; their humanity, if you will. I don’t feel that I understand them much better as an adult than I did as a child, but I do feel like I’ve learned a thing or two about how not to behave, from them. The problem is that when you witness your parents behaving badly, it’s very hard to let them know that you don’t approve. I’ve said before that I would like to be the first generation of my family who can hug and tell my offspring that I love them, without making everyone concerned feel uncomfortable; in the same way, I hope that the communication between me and my child will be open and respectful enough for us to talk about how we feel and why we feel it. Meanwhile, I have to find a way to stand up to my parents and in-laws when I disagree with their advice, baby-sitting style, and so on; or they undermine my efforts to be a wholesome hippy mother with the re-useable nappies and the Absolute Ban on formula milk.

3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time “Write one more short personal piece – one which matches the book title chosen (in part 2) by the person who tagged you.â€?

I could match the book itself by talking about Aspergers Syndrome far more easily than I can match the title; I hope I haven’t played such a mean trick on any of my taggees!

I’m a cat person, and nothing on earth would persuade me to own a dog; if I want to go for walks, I can manage that by myself. I did have a dog once, but he was different, because he was my dog even before my brother was born, so the fact that he stunk and was stupid didn’t bother me at all. I had to walk Mickey once a day, down to the beach, and let him off the lead so he could chase the birds and do his business. I was only exempt from this chore for the short period when my mum took it upon herself to walk him instead. With hindsight (see both pieces above), I understand that she was going for walks in order to meet someone; this was also around the time that our telephone was “malfunctioning” – all those calls where no-one was there when you answered the phone. At the time, I assumed that everyone else was as blind to it as I was, but as a grown-up, I know that Dad must have understood exactly what was going on. Mum probably tried to prepare him for it, and he would have seen straight through her, but tried to deny it and tried to find a way they could work through it, and begged her to go to marriage counselling with him; and she would have refused because she didn’t want to fix it, she wanted out… at least, that’s how it all happened to me, on both sides of the coin. Except that I didn’t have a dog.

4. The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason “Take your favourite little-known book and plug it to your readers. Authors need incomes, and word of mouth is one of the best ways to sell books.�

I don’t know anything about this author or his book, including how well known he/it is, but it is the best thing I have read lately, and I would recommend it as a gentle but rather beautiful read about a man who travels to Burma in order to tune a piano for an important army surgeon. It will one day be made into one of those films where nothing much seems to happen, but the scenery will be beautifully shot, and you will leave the cinema feeling both sad and happy, and slightly shocked by the ending.

5. Sit back and marvel at the magnificence of this meme.

This original and thought-provoking meme was brought to you, via Gordon, from the sneaky marketing ploy known as Boob Pencil. Only kidding, Clare. Anna lent me her copy; sorry, but you should know how important recycling is to me!

6.Tag five people with this meme

With slightly embarrassed apologies; I know people are supposed to hate memes. Shan’t be offended if you don’t pick it up, but I’m tagging you: Anna, for lending me the book;
Krissa, who writes about books anyway, so she might do it without even noticing;
Pix, but not until she subdues the dragon;
Lisa, who actually belongs to a book club; and
qB, who may never have sunk so low as to take part in a meme, but there’s always a first time.