Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

I walked out of a shop the other day leaving the baby asleep in his buggy behind me.  As I strolled through the mall with four year old boy running ahead, a distressed shop assistant yelled from behind ‘but ma’am, you left your baby!’ Blushing, I retraced my steps to the store and retrieved the abandoned buggy before leaving, head held high, as if I knew exactly what I was doing.  The next time I went into the same shop the assistant amusingly reminded me ‘ Ha-ha! Remember ma’am, when you forgot your baby!  Ha-ha, very funny!’ Quite. But if that's bad, my sister is worse: she left her baby son asleep in the car in the car park of a shopping centre and it wasn’t until she was in a shoe shop trying shoes on her eldest son that she remembered him.   Dashing out, leaving her son behind in the shop, she retrieved the baby from the car, explaining on her return that somebody else had been looking after him. W...

Four weeks post-partum and I’ve been dismayed to discover that my seemingly miraculous recovery from wine-addiction was entirely fictitious, brought about solely from the pregnancy hormones swamping my body.  As the hormones slowly ebb, the love affair with the grape flows and I find myself once more enslaved to that glass or two each night as I settle down in front of House ; series 1 and 2 of which I recently downloaded and have been watching obsessively ever since (who would have thought Blackadder's Prince Thickie would make such a brilliant, curmudgeonly American MD?) As a result of my 3 episodes a night habit, I’ve become somewhat of an expert on diagnostic medicine and am prone to pronounce ‘it’s got to be lupus ’ every time someone in my house has a sniffle. On the positive side, my penchant for the hot chocolate and apple crumble served up in my local ‘Shakespeare’ cafe has subsided giving my girth a fighting chance of fitting into my newly acquired wardrobe this side ...

So we’re into the home stretch thank goodness. And with the end in sight it is normal for the heavily pregnant female to resort to ‘ nesting’ , an instinctual phenomena characterised by sudden spurts of cleaning and organising of her habitat in preparation for the new arrival. This manifestation is an early indication that labour is imminent. I have my own personally adapted version of this phenomenon. I call it ‘ hoarding ’ and it is characterised by the frantic buying of clothes that I can wear on the other side . I’ve been trawling the Boden sale all week filling my virtual trolly with gorgeous items that will hopefully goad me into actually fitting into them as soon as possible.  And last week I made a special trip to the Dubai Outlet mall with the pretense of treating the children to an hours play in the creche.  In reality I was on a mission to buy something gorgeous in Monsoon . It was disappointing to be honest but I still managed to...

'Ooh ma'am you mustn't eat so much, you're too fat!' said the thoughtful  and sensitive Filipina behind the counter in ' Splash' after I had revealed that I was three months pregnant.  'You are so big!' Quite. I knew this anyway, a glance in the mirror would've confirmed this assertion, but this comment left me in no doubt. This was further confirmed by the disasterous purchase of a 'pregnancy belt'.  For those who aren't in the know, these belts fit over your normal trousers, which can then be left unzipped, post-prandial style, and perfectly concealed beneath the belt.  The result should be a tailor-made type appearance as the trouser fit perfectly, all lumps and bumps hidden. Unfortunately for me I never got to wear the belt as trying to get my favourite trousers up past my knees turned out to be more challenging than anticipated. I’m only three months pregnant but within the space of 2 days I went from looking as if I'...

I knew something was up when I got my clothes back from the laundry and there was a newborn baby outfit among them.   A few weeks later I bought something in the chemist and the assistant threw a dozen baby’s bibs into the bag for free.   From that moment on I knew my days were numbered and that Demeter , the Greek goddess of fertility would claim me sooner or later. Yes dear reader, this mother of four is soon to become a mother of five. Coming from a long line of very fertile women (my sister has 8 children), fertility for me is not so much a blessing as an affliction.  I realise this isn't a popular statement to make, coming from a generation of women who were told that they had choices, one of which was to postpone childbirth until their thirties only to find that nature had played a cruel trick, that the thirty-something doesn't conceive as easily as the twenty-something.  My heart goes out to women who struggle to conceive; it is frustrating, dis...

I've had bloggers block.  I think my brain atrophied and died slightly over the festive season from the massive consumption of alcoholic beverages I consumed.  It's not my fault; Ireland was so cold that anything more ambitious than sitting in front of the fire in a pub drinking hot whiskeys seemed sheer madness.  My brain was further destroyed by the return trip from hell which featured an ill-advised stopover in Istanbul, something which I quickly told myself would be an experience when I saw the cost of the flights (half that of a direct flight).  The reality was something similar to childbirth in terms of the cyclical agony as the children ran the wrong way down the travelator in the departure lounge, over and over and over... Predictably our plane was delayed,  and so as everyone gathered around the departures screen anxiously scanning it for updates, we started pushing our way to the priority boarding point to avail of our right to board first since we...