Today I published the 1000th poem on Clock. It is also my first day off work, although I’m not technically on maternity leave until next week; this week is just ordinary holiday. Amounts to the same thing, though: alarm goes at Pete time instead of Karen time (i.e. half an hour later) and I daydream for a while about having a long lie in, until such time as I become overwhelmed by hunger, which forces me downstairs before he has even left the house. I have a list of things to do for every day this week, and progress so far has been good.
And here’s a top tip for the very pregnant, about raspberry leaf tea:
Raspberry leaf tea is very unpleasant stuff. You can get it in teabag form from health food stores, but this isn’t particularly strong, so you’re drinking that nasty liquid for nothing. Neals Yard sells a tincture, for £4.75, which granted is a lot more expensive than the tea, but not a lot in the scheme of things. You add about 30 drops to a small amount of water and knock it back – yay, no mug of filthy tea to drink! The tincture is much more powerful than the tea, too. NOT recommended before about 35 weeks, though.
Pete’s mum came to stay the night on Saturday, and we took her to Guildford to do some shopping. She scoured the place for a particular baby beaker made by Heinz, which she insists we will need immediately. She also had a lovely time in [Grand]Mothercare, purchasing a mountain of cotton wool, of which we can’t possibly have enough; and found the perfect changing mat at The White Company. Then she informed me that my constant hunger was just greed, and told Pete off for stealing the neighbours’ water, so we sent her to bed without any supper.
You should have said – I’ve got bags and bags of cotton wool that I bought when M was born. We used some but not the hundreweight I had been led to expect. I could have posted it!
How exactly is your hungry greed?