Summer's O-V-A-H

The school holidays are O-V-A-H, as in over. To be honest, I was over them two hours after they started and we had nothing to look forward to but eight weeks of predicted rain, an imminent new baby, and grumpy, terribly bored children and no prospect of a summer holiday – bar an overnight stay in Altnagelvin Hospital’s maternity hotel and spa – looming on the horizon.
The kids have been looking forward to heading back to the classroom much in the same way as people look forward to sticking forks in their eyes. For me the end of the school holidays heralds a return to normality, a return to nice, comforting routine, a return to having half as many kids making half as many demands for a precious few hours. I also love, of course, that my kids can return to be being wonderfully edumacated once more. I love that they are getting a chance to learn to do stuff gooder – like fighting over wrestling cards and sticking dangerously sharpened pencils into their classmate’s legs.
The boys often have to write a summer diary for their teachers, detailing what they did, where they went, who was there, how darn exciting it all was. All with pictures and postcards to illustrate.
Other kids in the class will no doubt have their pages filled with fantastic stories of adventurous holidays in the sun, pictures of themselves with Mickey Mouse, postcards from far away places. My boys will be able to fill an A4 page with their adventures. I dare say it’ll go something like this…
‘We stayed in the house watching miserably from the living room window while the rain lashed the pavement. The most exciting place we visited was Sainsbury’s on a Saturday and it was incredibly, incredibly boring. It rained there too. The Playstation was our only salvation. Our mother got very fat and very grumpy as the holidays progressed. The blasted woman went to hospital and came home with a very noisy little person who kept us awake all night, adding (if humanly possible) to our misery. We had a rubbish summer, and if we are honest with ourselves, we are glad it’s all over.’
Due to the fact that I have just had a baby my brain is unable to function fully. I’m not firing on all cylinders so to speak. Sleep deprivation and pure hope had led me into the false belief that I had enough school uniforms to see us into Christmas at least. These uniforms are washed, ironed and folded neatly in the lad’s wardrobes. It never thought to me that the boys might have grown over the summer. You see I thought, like plants, kids needed actual sunshine to grow and that our horrendous Irish summers might stunt their growth thus eliminating my need to go and spend a fortune on grey school trousers they’ll put the knees out of within a week.
Alas, no, my theory on the sunshine links to stunted growth were drastically wrong and
those boys have shot up despite the weather. The oldest boy has outgrown his and needs new ones, the middle boy has outgrown his, but not grown enough to fit the oldest boys hand-me-downs. So it’s a new kit all round.
Looking for grey school trousers two days before school actually starts is much akin to seeking out the lost secrets of the Knights Templar – as in impossible. All those ‘Super-organised mammies’ must have bought up all supplies in July making the rest of us ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ mammies look really, really bad.
Yeah, thanks for that.
My boys will be sporting a new range of school wear this season. I’ll be calling my creation the ‘uber-improvised uniform’. The middle child (he whose hand me down trousers are too long) will have specially designed frayed hems. I will achieve this look by taking a pair of nearly blunt scissors and walloping off about 4cms from the legs.
My oldest boy will be sporting a fashion which has been prevalent on the Paris catwalks this season. His hems will be ‘designer extended’. To achieve this, slightly trickier look, I will be roughly sewing on the material I removed from the middle boy’s trousers to his. Bob’s your uncle, the job’s a good’un.
You mark my words; this new trend will certainly take off. Come October you’ll all be doing it.

Watch out Tina Turner....

Having four kids is tough going. Perhaps lack of sleep has rendered me super-paranoid but when they huddle in the corners of our house talking I imagine my children are not discussing Monster Trucks or Spiderman but are secretly scheming to create a synchronised timetable of parental torture.
I’m sure they have worked out a plan to ensure that every minute of every day and every night is consumed with some random demand or another.
I was at a birthday party at the weekend. Not your average one, mind, this one was for my grandmother, Susan Sweeney, who celebrated her 99th year on this planet surrounded by her family and friends. The party was held in the old folks home in Donegal and as a party piece she belted out the ‘Isle of Inisfree’ and another few numbers over a microphone, accompanied by a band. Tina Turner had better watch her back, I think a future in the entertainment industry beckons for my Granny.
I had the baby with me and a few of our family friends asked me how things were going. I whined for a bit about the hard work four kids can be, that I was knackered, blah, blah de whingey, and whiney blah.
One of the lovely ladies sat nodding sympathetically (hello there, Grace Gallen from Rathmullan). This was a woman had nine children, her sister had nine also. I felt like a bit of a wuss complaining about my mere four. Clearly they made women from much stronger stuff back in the day. These girls raised their kids, ran houses, tended to farms and businesses, cooked and cleaned and it never took a wrinkle out of them.
Here was me with half as many kids and not half as many woes, whinging about being run off my feet. We don’t know we’re living, to steal an old phrase.
Whenever I feel like our house resembles the monkey enclosure of the zoo rather than the peaceful haven of tranquillity I wish it was I head on over to the Discovery Health channel and laugh at those poor parents who have a few more kids than myself.
Jon and Kate plus eight have, you guessed it, eight kids – a set of twins and four-year-old sextuplets. They have to travel around in an actual minibus the same as we used to travel in for school trips.
Then there’s ‘19 Kids and Counting’ over on LivingTV. The Christian Duggans – Jim Bob and Michelle – are the proud parents of nine girls and 10 boys. What is amazing is that they all have a name beginning with the letter J and wear polo shirts every single day. TV is banned in their house – dear God why, I ask myself, Mister TV is the finest babysitter in town – and their teenagers abstain from most types of everything, including any physical contact except ‘Christian side hugging’.
What is more amazing is that their kids are incredibly well behaved. In fact I have stopped watching this programme in recent weeks due to the fact that my four children make a bigger din and a messier mess than all of their 19 kids put together.
I have since made a rule to watch programmes that make me feel better about my noisy, messy family and not worse. I don’t want to see mothers of eight wearing make-up and with proper, actually brushed hair. I do not find it entertaining to see a mother of 19 smiling and coping effortlessly while dishing up a healthy, nutritious dinner for 21 people. It just makes me feel bad about serving my kids beans and toast for the fourth day in a row.
I prefer to tune in to a programme that is more a reflection of my own family situation. So it’s back-to-back Simpsons from now on.

A family of six....

We are slowly getting used to being a family of six. The lads have welcomed their new baby sister into our home and our hearts with varying degrees of comedy and a few insults.
When the child arrived home from the hospital she was slightly jaundiced, as in a tad tan. Caolan looked at her slightly bewildered and asked if “she is from America?”
Daniel inspected his new sibling and commented that she had ‘hands like a witch’ and looked like a ‘boy with a dress on’.
After a few days as the baby’s features changed and she morphed from squishy-faced newborn to cutie pie, her brother Caolan said she looked like ‘an old granny who has forgotten to put in her teeth’.
Her youngest brother, he who has been replaced as the baby of the house, just huffs, administers the odd slap to his sleeping sister and tries to flush her blankets down the toilet.
I’ve found that my time is not my own these days. I’m feeding the baby myself, partaking in a bit of what the midwives call ‘demand feeding’, as in feeding the baby when she wants, not, say every four hours or so. Our child is very, very demanding, wanting fed approximately every 16 minutes. So I have to fit everything I want to do in those precious 16 minutes of ‘me time’.
I have become an expert on express cuisine, throwing together and serving up a family dinner in 13.5 minutes, leaving myself a leisurely two and a half minutes to eat and perhaps check the teletext news before the ravenous screaming demon lets up the pipes again demanding sustenance.
I can also shower in six minutes, get dressed in three, dry my hair in two, apply make up in four minutes and have a full minute all to myself to just stare meaningfully into space contemplating how to productively fill the next 16 minutes of ‘free time’ after the next feed.
I ventured out unexpectedly this week on a casual errand (I know I’m a maverick, but I haven’t been outside the front door in about five weeks) and leave the baby with her dad. He knew that there was no food available – as I am ultimately the sole provider of sustenance. He also knew about the whole 16-minute window thing. I promised him I wasn’t venturing a great distance, that I’d be there and back in 14 minutes, leaving us a full two minutes of breathing space that we could use to guffaw and chuckle at the old irrational panic he felt at being left alone with an eternally hungry newborn.
We synchronized watches and I set off at speed towards my destination. Due to traffic it took seven long minutes to reach where I was heading, two to run from the car, one to run back because I had forgotten my purse, 30 seconds to have a swift conversation with an old friend and another 2.5 to make my purchase and run back to the car. All this time I was calculating that I was leaving myself three minutes to make a seven minute journey, therefore leaving the husband a full four minutes to deal with a deranged, ravenous, irrational and inconsolable baby.
I had even set the alarm clock on my mobile to beep when my time ran to 15 minutes. And beep it did. Precisely 30 seconds after that beep the husband called to inform me that the baby was gearing up for a level seven hissy fit, then the child’s screaming drowned out his voice.
My return journey took a little longer than expected due to a hoax bomb alert – 20 minutes longer to be exact. Therefore I was away from home, and more importantly the baby, for a whopping 36 minutes. But I was kept fully informed of the situation through the medium of panicked shouting and very bad words from the husband and wailing shrills from the baby over the phone at intervals of approximately two minutes.
After 36 minutes I returned to the fold to find the husband had aged about 10 years, his eyes where bloodshot and there was sweat on his brow. His hearing hasn’t been the same since due to the high levels of wailing he endured.
It was not the relaxing break I had imagined, if truth be told. I doubt I’ll ever venture outdoors again. I imagine it will get better in, maybe, 18 years or so. I’ll hold out.

Baby brain...

Our baby girl has been with us now for nearly three weeks. She has yet to master the whole sleeping a little at night thing, so therefore we’ve been partaking in a bit of extreme parenting – ie surviving on several short 10 minute bursts of sleep nightly and having to pretend to be fully functioning humans during daylight hours.
I had almost forgotten how crazy it was having a newborn around the house – you must realise that it has been a whole two years since we did this last – but we’re relishing fully all the severe sleep deprivation, the constant feeding, the soggy shoulders constantly covered in baby boke, the mountain of nappies, the hours of preparation it takes to actually leave the house, the grumpiness. Honestly we are.
The thing I don’t really relish about this new baby haze phase is the isolation. I don’t keep normal hours, not like other humans. These past few weeks I have become a nocturnal creature, up all night partying with our girl, sleeping till noon, well till 9.30am at least. Being up all night and sleeping all day was much more fun when I was 19.
The postwoman, bills in hand, is my only friend – and she, for some strange reason, is of the thinking that I’m a rather eccentric, scary haired lunatic who tries to strike up conversations about often random and bewildering topics just to talk to another grown up.
“What about that war in Iraq, eh?”
“Yes. The war, indeed. Here are some final demands and courts summons’ for your perusal.”
The husband is my only link with other human life outside my four walls. The poor man is bombarded with questions when he comes home of an evening.
“What news hath you of the outside world?” I demand.
“Nothing exciting,” he says. “I had quite a boring day, actually.”
“Tell me NEWS!” I scream.
“We need petrol in the car,” says he.
“You are joking,” says I. “Petrol? Jeez, Louise! That’s BRILLIANT!
“Yes, yes. Brilliant,” says he, backing away.
And although it sounds like a barrel of laughs, spending the daylight hours wearing night attire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – particularly when dapper business associates and posh neighbours show up at the front door while you’re kitted out in your terribly unflattering polka dotted pyjamas and vintage MC Hammer t-shirt circa 1985.
Having a newborn about the place is at times terrifying, no matter how many newborns you’ve encountered over the years. They are unpredictable and frankly, loose cannons at times.
I remember shortly after our eldest boy was born we had an incident of baby projectile vomiting. I never knew babies could puke great volumes of liquid vast distances and I’ll not lie to you, readers, I panicked. I called my parents in a state at 5.30am, not long after that I called the emergency doctor, getting the poor man out of bed to speed to our house. I had seen The Exorcist and while I waited for the doc I honestly toyed with the idea of bringing in the parish priest of Finaghy Road North, so that we could rule out demonic possession. In the end the bleary-eyed doctor prescribed more sleep and to go slightly easier on the old irrational panic to this new mother.
And fathers are by no means immune to the horrors which often accompany dealing with a newborn. When the husband was a brand new father he bravely volunteered to mind the boy while I had a bath. Five minutes later the man was practically banging down the bathroom door. I presumed that something awful had happened – like the husband’s hair was on fire, aliens were invading the earth or perhaps the child had combusted – swung open the door just in time to allow the husband access to the loo into which he was violently ill. Apparently changing the child’s dirty nappy had set off a catastrophic chain of vomit-related events.
This time around we know the score, we’ve been down this road before three times already. We’ve been there, done that and have literally got the soggy shouldered, boke backed t-shirts to prove it.

Sweet baby girl.....

Ladies and gentlemen, I present our precious baby girl Maoliosa Grace O’Neill. She was born on Wednesday July 21st, weighing 9lbs 10 oz and is healthy and happy and a total doll.
In the end I didn’t have to be induced, thank goodness. I was already a few days late when labour started. I dread to think what weight the child would have been if left for 10 more days. I dare say I’d have made the front page of the Irish News with the north’s first 18lb baby.
Fourth time around labour wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’m sure any expectant mother, whether it’s your first or your tenth baby, gets somewhat anxious when it comes to the birth. Me particularly as things seem to happen rather quickly.
My first son was almost born in the corridor of the Royal in Belfast. I remember walking to the nurse’s station and informing the girls there that I thought the baby might be arriving in a relatively short space of time. They were watching Coronation Street, the one where Gayle’s evil husband drives the family’s people carrier into the river. I was told to go back to bed that I wouldn’t be having a baby until morning, presumably until the whole Coronation Street drama died down. I assumed that me being new at this game, them being skilled and experienced midwives that they knew the score. Perhaps I am a unique case, but ten minutes later I was being propelled down the corridor at approx 60mph to the delivery suite where the boy was born seconds later.
The second boy was almost born in the construction site of the newly built south wing of Altnagelvin Hospital after the husband got us completely lost on the way to labour and delivery (there’s a lot to be said for dummy runs and planning your route to the maternity ward). The husband thought that on this occasion he might have to deliver the baby with the help of several dungareed construction workers.
When my third son was born the hospital sent me home informing me that, you’ve guessed it, there was to be no baby till morning. An hour later the husband was making a frantic dash across the bridge to the hospital, honestly believing, yet once more, that he was going to have to deliver the child himself.
This time around when I presented at the hospital on the Wednesday morning and the midwife told me no baby till much, much later I asked, even for the sake of the husband’s sanity and nerves that they keep me in for even a few hours. Since I had a ‘history’ of express deliveries they fortunately agreed to keep me there.
The midwives told me that I was nowhere near even established labour and to take a walk around the hospital, in my night attire, in the hope that the walking and the shame of dandering around in my nightie (perhaps even encountering a few dignatories and news crews opening a fancy new wing) might get the ball rolling.
One minute the husband and I were strolling leisurely around the new hospital admiring the artwork and taking bets on what time the baby would arrive, the next ‘hell on wheels, the baby’s coming’.
I had made plans for a lovely water birth, whale sounds, hippy chanting and incense. Truth was, the midwives hadn’t even time to fill the birthing pool.
Our beautiful baby girl arrived safely at 4.23pm in the wonderful new midwife led unit at Altnagelvin Hospital to the sound of bath water running. Thanks to Midwife Claire Lynch and trainee midwives Kate and Claire, all went beautifully.
She’s been in our lives now for a week and it seems like she’s always been here. She’s a real blessing. Although we’re getting no sleep and can barely manage to string a sentence together she has brought even more sunshine to our house.
I had always wanted a daughter. My Mum and me have a special relationship – she’s truly my best friend – I always wished for a daughter so I could mirror that closeness in my own later years.
I discovered I was pregnant the week my father died last year. I can’t help but think that once my father reached heaven, he had words with the big man up above and sent me my baby girl. Thanks Daddy.

Still pregnant......

I have been pregnant now for 156 weeks. Yes, that’s right, three years. Well it certainly feels that way and with an induction date (tomorrow at 2pm if you’re the praying, lighting blessed candle type of person) looming I will try anything, ANYTHING, to get this baby to arrive au naturale.
This week I’ve taken advice from friends, family, people in shop queues and Facebook pals on the best ways to induce labour. Some of my fellow pregnant ladies will be well aware of the usual, desperate measure labour triggers, but I have to say if laughter and total bewilderment brought on contractions I’d have had this baby two weeks ago, so strange were some of the suggestions.
A friend of mine swears that watching Jaws II brought on her labour both times. Not Jaws I or Jaws III mind, it has to be Jaws II. She went into labour an hour after watching the film with both her sons. Another friend swears by Father Ted, she laughed so much her waters broke.
Another friend advised me that cutting the front lawn in terribly unflattering and ill-fitting swimming attire brought on labour with her daughter with hours. Another friend advised me to plan something important. When she organised her brother’s surprise 40th birthday party celebrations, she took off to the hospital 10 minutes before the party started and her brother shared her new son’s birthdates.
My sister cried so inconsolably with happiness when Peter Andre got to number one with his relaunched Mysterious Girl single that she had her second son that night.
Swinging on the swings at the park seems to have a good success rate, as does impersonating a horse (as in galloping in a horsey-type fashion down a preferably bumpy road), salsa dancing while eating hot curry, a good old-fashioned pray and getting a fright.
At this stage in the game all of those suggestions seem like a little too much hard work. Praying seems to be the less strenuous of them, and the good Lord knows I’ve been on the line with him many, many times in the last few days but unfortunately my begging prayers and promises to actually go to mass (not just lazily contemplate it) EVERY Sunday for the rest of my life have been thus far ignored.
Back in the day, when a pregnant native American woman was near term and showed no sign of going into labour, tribe members would tie her to a rock in an open field and stage a mock ‘attack,’ pulling up their horses only at the very last minute, in hopes of inducing labour. The Pilgrims, for their part, would stand women whose babies were late against a pole, strap them to it, and shake it about a bit hoping to shake that baby loose. Hey, they’re unconventional but I’ve contemplated jogging on the beach while eating fresh pineapple and even bungee jumping. I’ll give anything a go once.
As you read this I’ve sent my husband out to the darkest depths of the garden shed to fetch the car jump leads. It got our old 1997 Astra back on the road when it broke down on the Glenshane Pass, it’s bound to work on this baby.
Wish us luck.