T minus 12 days and counting

It's T minus 12 days until D-Day so by rights I should be nesting at the moment. But there is still too much to do. My blankets aren't washed, my meals aren't in the freezer (with the exception of two trays of cabbage, which won't get us very far) and I am barely a quarter of the way through the teddy bear that I started knitting over Christmas. So there will be no warmth, no nourishment, and no comfort for this unborn baby. I am destined to be a bad mother.

This is uncharacteristic of me, as my family will testify. Second only to my sister, Helen, who invented the word organisation and from whom I learned all the tools of my trade, I am usually the most over-prepared member of the family. But back in the days when I didn't have two sacks of potatoes inside me and the associated problems with bending/sitting/sleeping/eating, I agreed to do a whole lot of work for various people, with an end-of-January deadline. It wasn't my smartest move, but then I could have got this aforementioned work out of the way in November or December, but at that point I was too busy making my bunting and sewing curtains and shopping for tiny socks for tiny feet.

Part of me is glad that I've had lots to keep me occupied over the last few weeks, as it has kept me from noticing that I've grown to the size of a small house (although the small person inside has not let me forget that it is having a party in there).

A small house

Sitting down and writing every day also appears to have saved me from the dreaded Baby Brain - although my French teacher might argue with that statement. Yesterday's lesson went something like: 'Je... je pense que... er.. pardon, j'ai oubliée le mot pour...' At which I received sympathetic looks but little in the way of actual help. I think this might be the time to bow out gracefully from the French tuition.

It looks like I might also need to prepare myself for an early delivery, if the recent spate of births is anything to go by. Last week, two of my friends gave birth a week early, both on the same day in the same hospital in adjacent rooms. It made visiting them very simple. And yesterday, another friend gave birth - this time, just a few days early. I thought first babies were supposed to be late? Certainly that's what I've been counting on; hence the unwashed blankets, unfinished teddy and uncooked meals.

So wish me luck, because the next update may well be in the form of a birth announcement. And if you're interested to know what has been keeping me so busy these last few weeks, I've been writing programme notes for some upcoming concerts with some truly wonderful orchestras. I will be too busy changing nappies to attend them, but if any of them are taking place near you, you would do well to check them out:

Britten Sinfonia: Baltic Nights with Alina Ibragimova
London Sinfonietta: Stravinsky's Renard
Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Britten 100 Series

There's more to babies than poo, milk and vomit

One of Andy's main concerns about having a baby is that it will be boring. That and the fact that he'll no longer be able to climb/ski/mountain bike whenever and wherever he wants to, and will feel tied to this dribbling, uncommunicative creature that has no control over its bowels (the baby that is, not me). I refer you back to his response to the question of what the future holds in our antenatal class: 'Poo. Milk. Vomit.'

Fortunately, we have nice friends who kindly obliged by coming to stay with us for a few days at the beginning of January, bringing their two children to show Andy that alongside the poo, milk and vomit (of which, yes, it turns out there is quite a bit), there is also occasional fun to be had. The Jeens family (Henry, Lisa, Olivia and Alex) came to stay with us on their way back from London to Singapore, where they've been living for the past few years. Like us, they have a fairly positive, go-for-it attitude to life - get on with it, bundle the kids along with you, and you can more or less do the same things as before, give or take the odd bit of extra childproof logistics. Olivia was flown halfway around the world to a wedding when she was just a couple of weeks old and both kids seem pretty unfazed by the whole travelling thing.

Having previously thought that boys were the preferred child option (you get to tick a box, right?), Andy was nicely persuaded by Olivia that girls aren't too bad either. It helps that's she's extremely cute (she gets it from her godmother.... that's me):

And the fact that she wanted Andy to teach her to play the drums - and that she has great rhythm - definitely helped her earn extra brownie points. Here she is having her very first drum lesson (Andy will love me for posting this fetching picture of him in his dressing gown):

But Alex isn't too shabby either, and his gruffalo costume helped to make up for the fact that he doesn't quite have the same level of chat as Olivia yet. That said, I'd like to stake a claim for him saying his first word, 'cat', while he stayed with us and trailed Bella around the house, never quite managing to catch up with her.

So what else did we learn from our child-orientation lessons? We learned that you can't always rely on them to be an alarm clock, that some children will sleep for 12 hours straight and, on occasion, will have to be woken up by their parents at 9.30am because everyone else is awake and they aren't. I understand that's the majority of children, right? And that it starts more or less from birth...? We learned that some nine month olds have a surprisingly large capacity for peas. And we learned that no matter what programme is playing on Cbeebies at the time, no matter how apparently dull and poorly-made, children will fall into some kind of mesmerised trance while watching it. That, and the fact that you can never watch too many episodes of Alphablocks (although we knew that part already).

We were fortunate to have some amazing weather while the Jeens were here, so we took the advice of our bank manager who, back in September, had told us that we simply must visit Yvoire and eat perch by the lake, and we took a day trip up Lac Leman. Yvoire is a tiny picture-perfect village that in summer must be heaving with tourists and locals, but in early January was more or less closed up, with the exception of one very nice hot chocolate spot and a strange shop selling models of fairies. We didn't manage to eat any perch, but the tiny harbour that looks out over Lake Geneva is one of the prettiest spots we've visited since coming here:

And even when deserted and closed up, the rustic old buildings and tiny streets rival Annecy in the charming stakes:

For Andy, there was an ulterior motive underlying our trip to Yvoire - it is very close to Thonon-les-Bains. Other than a quaint little funicular railway and a nice view over the lake, Thonon doesn't have much to recommend it (note how short the Wikipedia entry is) - except for the giant sprawling industrial estate which just happens to contain one of the biggest and best-equipped outdoors shops in the region. We spent three thrilling hours in said shop while Andy tried on ski touring boots and yesterday, which was Andy's birthday, he chose for his birthday treat to go back to the same shop and spend another three hours getting the boots fitted.

Skiing has been a little thin on the ground lately - quite literally - as it's been really quite warm for about a month now and even the mountains have had very little snow since early December. Fortunately, this didn't stop Olivia receiving her first ski lesson from a very proud Henry, nobly assisted by daddy-in-training, Andy:

All this go-for-it attitude has left Andy with the belief  that it's completely feasible for me to be skiing again by March. That we'll just station ourselves in a restaurant halfway up the mountain and alternate babycare duties every hour or so, while the other person skis. I'm less convinced. Right now, the prospect of 12 feeds a day, 10 nappy changes a day and occasional snatches of sleep somewhere in between times is weighing on my mind more heavily than pulling on my ski gear. Three weeks to go, folks.

40 years and two generations later...

In 1972, Andy's mum and dad came to Geneva during their first summer together and took a picture of themselves standing in front of the jet d'eau. They had just eaten the best ice cream that Andy's mum says she has ever tasted, sold from a little ice cream stall at the harbour. Unsurprisingly, the ice cream seller wasn't there when we revisited the spot on a cold December day 40 years later but the water was still being pumped 140 metres into the air, so we recreated the photo, and this time there were two more generations of Buckley present at the scene. I doubt they ever imagined during that summer of '72 that they would be standing there 40 years later with their son, his wife and a grandchild on the way. Andy and I will try and make a mental note to recreate the same scene in 2052...

Summer of 1972

December 2012

The next two generations...

Andy's parents' visit marked the first Christmas spent outside the UK for both of us. And very nice it was too. Since I'm now 35 weeks pregnant and not allowed to fly, we invited both sets of parents to stay with us in Logras for Christmas, with my parents here for Christmas itself and Andy's parents here for 27th-31st December. Christmas in France is not so different from Christmas back home really: people still feel compelled to cover their houses in flashing Christmas lights and to dangle an 'escaping' Father Christmas from their upstairs windows; in the shops on Christmas Eve it's every man for himself as trolleys are used as dangerous weapons and there is a frantic scrum for the best looking bits of smoked salmon and the last piece of Camembert; and on Christmas Day, unwilling family members (in this case, Andy) are still marched out for a 'refreshing' walk around the village in order to earn that second helping of Christmas pudding.

Just look at how much Andy is enjoying himself...

Except that Christmas pudding isn't on the menu here, as the French prefer a chocolate Yule log and, as I've mentioned before, dried fruits aren't terribly easy to come by. I also had a job sourcing cocktail sausages and streaky bacon for the pigs in blankets - I had to go to the British market for those - and I couldn't get hold of crackers anywhere. In lieu of crackers, my mum spent Christmas Eve fashioning rather fetching hats for us out of newspaper, decorated with bits of ribbon (she did a sterling job actually, and I'd like to see it become an annual tradition) and my dad insisted we all think up a bad joke to tell at the table. Mine went as follows: 'Knock knock. Who's there? Wayne. Wayne who? Wayne in a manger.' And mine wasn't the most groansome.

Here we are all lined up in front of the Christmas tree sporting our fetching newspaper hats and post-dinner Christmas bellies (mine was either a particularly large lunch or there is a baby in there):

Who took the photo? I hear you ask. The cat? No, this was one of those beautiful camera-timer moments, in which Andy and my dad spent a good quarter of an hour finding a suitable spot on which to balance the camera and creating several practice shots to get the angle just so. My award for favourite snapshot of the holidays goes to their first attempt at getting this right. Notice my dad's bolt upright stance: he is taking the job very seriously.

Sadly, the only ingredient our French Christmas was missing was a bit of the white stuff. When two feet of snow fell earlier in the month, I felt sure that we would be in for a white Christmas. But two days of heavy rain and some soaring temperatures banished all the snow from our garden, and it's been unseasonably warm ever since. But being only 20 minutes away from the nearest ski slopes, we decided to take the cable car up to the top to get some suitably snowy views. Sadly, they also serve beer and hot chocolate up there. What a shame.