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On motherhood and...Five things I learned in five days


  1. Babies have much in common with Gillian McKeith. They desperately want to monitor everything you eat or drink as it happens, and will use a magic sixth sense to ensure their involvement in all your meals, even if they have to wake up to do so. The hotter or more liquid the food/drink, the more urgent their desire to watch you consume it. From your lap. With their face as close as possible to yours.
  2. The baby’s favourite thing to do at the moment is to stare at a poorly-executed spiral drawn on a bit of paper and then giggle at it. Either she is going to prove very easy to entertain, or a career in hypnosis beckons for me.
  3. Speaking of hypnosis, I sang ‘What a Wonderful World’ to the baby on such a long loop the other day that I fell into a kind of trance, and then I saw her little sleeping face in the mirror and burst into tears with the emotion of it all. I don’t even really know any lyrics past the first verse. It was just me, shuffling round the living room, crying and mumbling ‘the colours of the rainbow, do do be do be do’ like a loon.
  4. A baby smiling at you with full, unabashed, open-mouthed glee is the most overwhelmingly gorgeous thing in the world.
  5. But if it’s all just too gorgeous, try putting said baby in a sling with a low-cut top on underneath. She will sleep beautifully nestled against your ginormous bosom, but the environment created within will become so extraordinarily warm that she will emerge with a face like a furious beetroot and a half-closed eye. She might even have a nice crease across her cheek where she rested against a seam for an hour, if you’re lucky, in which case she will look like a pirate as well as a beetroot. Not a combination typically found on greetings cards, but it has its own charm.


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