The redundant buggy

It is January, we’ve returned from our New Year holidays in Ceredigion where the beaches are yellow and the sea is green, and I dream of sailing away on misty pirate ships into the ocean to have an adventure with Jack, red-cheeked Rose and stubble cheeked Stu to find the elusive flumflum tree, (those Julia Donaldson books are having an effect on me), and now we’re back to normality.

I’ve recently demoted the buggy from its home in the car boot to under the trampoline in the garden, where it is sitting in silent wait of when it will be next summoned. It’s not been used in about a month, and it seems to signify a new growing stage with Mole and Hedgehog. It caused me to pause and reflect on how far we have come with them.

I did not expect to be growing out of the buggy phase of life so quickly, they are still only four and two after all. I got this double buggy for £45 on Gumtree, and we’ve certainly got our use out of it. It compares quite tellingly with our first £350 buggy purchased new when Mole was expected, and that was considered cheap among my peers. How the ideals and the standards drop. By the time the second one is born, a basic buggy that does the job looks much more appealing than a swanky buggy with the price tag of a small car.

I think a lot of the buggy redundancy has to do with the fact that we now live in the country, where one tends to drive directly from one’s front door to the destination, without much walking in between. The walkable options from our house include Mole’s preschool, the swings, the co-op, the post office, the chemist and the fish & chip shop. That’s about it. Since August we’ve been using the bike and cart for these things, which I guess has ousted the purpose of the buggy.

But the big realisation point came when we took a trip to Ceredigion in October half term, by train, carrying the buggy with us. I thought it was going to be one of those trains with sliding double doors and easy access for buggies. It wasn’t. The train had narrow doors up steep steps from the platform, that obliged the buggy to be folded down. This meant three separate trips onto the train with 1 – children, 2 – bags, 3 – buggy, trying not to lose any of them, and feeling not a little bit stressed in the process. We didn’t use the buggy once during our whole time in Wales.

Along with the buggy and the sling are being used much less, (signalling the fact that Mole and Hedgehog are using their feet more), there are new things that are moving in. Dens in the living room, hide and seek, jigsaw puzzles, painting, helping with cooking, running little errands for me around the house, looking after each other (when they’re not hitting each other), and playing TOGETHER in their room for half an hour without missing me, are all new features in my life that are making things slowly but surely easier, and more entertaining.

Today for example, Hedgehog was quite unwell. She had been up for most of the night vomiting, and spent most of the day dosed on calpol and sleeping. Mole’s response was to spend the morning making Hedgehog a get well card, thoughtfully hanging the card on the bunk bed ladder rungs by Hedgehog’s head, before going up to feed her some ‘medicine’. She was happily occupied with this while I did some laptop work and drank my tea. This is not something that would have happened a year ago.

Thinking back to the intense first year with a one year old Mole and a new born Hedgehog, there were a fair few breakdown moments.

There was the time that I walked out one morning, two weeks after Hedgehog was born, with sleep depraved tears, pushed over the edge because there was no food in the house for breakfast, (no-one had gone grocery shopping for a week), leaving Mr M&H to take the day off work and stay home while I wondered the fields, staring at the clouds and howling “why? why?”, before having a nice sleep under a chestnut tree, and returning home just in time for the next feed.

There was the time when I thought that my body and my life would never be my own again, and Mr M&H’s snoring was the last straw that sent me driving away in the middle of the night thinking “screw them”, to turn up an hour away on Granny Purple Hair’s sofa. (Again, lack of proper sleep, food and a good support system were the prime culprits).

There was the immense relief I felt when Granny Purple Hair’s car disappeared round the corner with Mole and Hedgehog in it, to be looked after while Mr M&H and I embarked on a twosome holiday, after Hedgehog’s first year. I wondered into the garden, sat down in a deckchair and poured myself a glass of wine. The silence and the peace was golden.

These days things do not reach such crisis points, there are different challenges, they have different needs, and I’m slowly carving out the space for myself again. I value my weekend runs, for the freedom and the solace they bring. I’ve started doing evening shopping trips to Primark (having discovered they are open late). I’m thinking of doing a day trip to London once a month to trawl round the art galleries, something I used to love and haven’t done in about four years. I’m eyeing up the evening spa sessions at the Centreparcs down the road from us.

In short, if there are any new years resolutions to be had, I think mine is to allow myself a little more breathing space, and to re-connect with the world outside of Mole and Hedgehog.

In terms of the spa sessions, I’ve had a few practice runs in our bathroom using my beautiful Christmas present bath bombs that make the whole room smell amazing. The trouble with the bathroom is that Mole and Hedgehog have the power to infiltrate it, which they frequently do.

Last week I caught Mole standing on the toilet seat to reach the beloved bath bombs, lifting and sniffing each one in turn, before turning to me and saying levelly “I want to purple one”. “Okay fine, you can have the purple one” I bargain with her, “But the rest are mine”. She is satisfied with this response, and shimmies out of the bathroom with a sinister grin, her eyes fixed on me. A couple of nights later I take a candlelit bath with the door locked, and without thinking I use the purple one.

I can hear little voices outside the door. “Mummy, what are you doing?”, “Mummy can I come in?”, “Mummy, what colour bath bomb are you using?”. Shit. I stay silent and pray that they go away. In the end Mr M&H puts them back to bed to cries of anguish that pull on my heart strings. Even a private bath is riddled with guilt. I wash all trace of the purple colour away but Mole has not forgotten. In the morning she is straight into the bathroom like a whippet, inspecting the bath bomb box. “Mummy, where is the purple one?” she demands suspiciously. I feel like a cheating pupil summoned to the head teacher’s office.

By the time she has finished howling into the carpet in her spread eagle position, mourning the loss of the purple one and branding mummy as a traitor for ever more, it is nearly time to leave for playgroup.

“Never mind sweetie, would you like an iced bun to eat in the car?” I say. She brightens immediately. “Yes please mummy”. She skips down the stairs and out of the front door, trusting and devoted to the last.

All is forgiven.