So there I was having a chat with my friend Katy about how the CERN Women's Club runs the toddlers group, and that the toddlers group itself is mostly populated by mothers rather than fathers, and so wouldn't it make sense to have a female 'father' Christmas. Indeed it would, I agreed, what a nice thought. A couple of weeks later, at 11am on a Tuesday morning, I find myself waltzing into the Toddlers Christmas party, belly hanging over the belt of my Santa outfit, merrily crying out "Ho ho ho, I'm Mary Christmas!" The parents all laughed, the children looked confused. Where was the man with the big white beard? I then launched into a long-winded explanation about how my husband, Father Christmas, was very busy in the workshop with the elves at the moment and so he'd asked me to come along on his behalf. Not quite the strike for feminism with which the whole idea began. Nevertheless, I took my role very seriously and assumed the over-enthusiastic, smiling guise of a children's entertainer, promising a fun morning of singing and presents to go along with the sugary snacks. Becoming increasingly confident, after we sang Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer I ad-libbed, swerving off into a story about how Rudloph, too, was busy resting in his stable at the moment, preparing for his big night on Christmas Eve. Why had I never done this before, I'm a natural!
Fortunately, none of the children cried and once I'd remembered that it is obligatory to have your photo taken with Father Christmas - and so, too, with Mary Christmas it seems - I dutifully re-attached my jolly smile and posed with a whole swarm of bewildered small children. I was, I am assured, the best 'Father Christmas' they've ever had. Apparently the man with a beard thing doesn't usually go down well with small children, who have been warned to stay away from strange men, and in any case they usually just turn up, say Ho Ho Ho and leave. My stories and songs were a winner. Take that feminism!
In other news, but still along the 'look how great I am' train of thought, I have had my second sewing machine adventure. Keen to install some kind of curtains in the baby's room, but without any curtain pole or curtain-holding fixture, I came up with the rather ingenious (if I do say so myself) solution of using velcro strips to attach some homemade curtains to the windows. When I say curtains, I really mean two sheets of fabric sewn together, but nevertheless I'm quite chuffed with the result. Even more so, because I didn't buy any new material for them - I happened to have precisely the correct amount of material left over from my aforementioned failed cushion cover (see the bunting blog) to fit the windows, with even a little spare to make a couple of ties.
As baby preparations go, making curtains should be quite low on the list of priorities and hardly counts as one of the essentials, but it makes a welcome distraction from the actual decision-making priorities. Such as, what to call the baby if it turns out to be a boy. At the moment, we don't have a name for it. We've read the book twice and there are officially no boys names out there that we both like. Andy suggests we adopt a numbering system, starting with Zero, because, quote, "in C-like programming languages, array indexing starts at zero and this means blah blah......" Something or other about neat sequencing...
We may not have a name for it, but we do now know what happens during the birth. We've now had 3 of our 5 antenatal classes and the very calm lady who refuses to answer our incessant questions about how much pain there is with "none at all really, it's a walk in the park", tells us that "you should enjoy the contractions, just go with it". She has also shown us a knitted womb and doll baby complete with a knitted umbilical cord, played us some tranquil 'hypnobirthing' CDs and asked us to write down our perceptions of what it means to have a baby. I wrote: "A big adventure!" Andy wrote: "Poo. Milk. Vomit."
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