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.