The time when I 'get things done' is confined to the short time after we've come in from a walk or a car journey and Alec is still sleeping in his pram/car seat, unaware that we've returned home. If you could see me in that short window of time, you'd watch me running around the house like a bit of a maniac, frantically doing the dishes, putting on a load of washing, making all those phone calls I need to make and typing a few two-handed emails (consider yourself lucky if you receive one of these). Then Alec starts to stir, realising that he's no longer where he thought he was, and I find myself calling out 'Five more minutes please Alec!' to a 5-week old who hasn't exactly mastered the English language yet. It turns out that, actually, washing up can be done twice as fast as you previously thought possible.
But there are some tools of the trade, which help us bypass these manic moments. I give you Exhibit A: The Sling.
The sling is the hands-free approach to parenting. Two-handed emails, dinner preparations, tidying... All are possible once the baby is wrapped up all cosy in the sling. On Sunday, we did our first sling walk along to the gorge at Bellegarde that we last visited in September, and Alec slept happily through the whole thing, blissfully unaware - or perhaps even rudely oblivious - to the dramatic scenery. On Friday I even hoovered and mopped the house while Alec slept peacefully. In fact, he enjoys the noise: when I unplugged the hoover to take it upstairs, he woke up. As I type this, Alec is happily cosied up in the sling with Andy, allowing both of us to multitask. Although sometimes his approach to multitasking simply means cuddling both of our 'children' at once:
And so onto Exhibit B: The Bouncy Chair.
A new member of our household, the bouncy chair doesn't have the longevity of the sling - allowing us only around 20 minutes of hands-free time, as opposed to the couple of hours or so that the sling can provide - but it does have a musical owl and a vibration setting that seems - rather than to soothe him, as the manufacturers apparently intended - to perplex him for just long enough to allow me to make the dinner.
Exhibit C (otherwise known as Andy), although extremely useful, is sadly only available between the hours of 7pm and 9am, and spends much of these hours on standby mode (asleep).
Unfortunately, my new-found two-handedness has received a setback today with a diagnosis of tendonitis from the doctor. Sad face. I woke up with a sore wrist for no apparent reason about a month before Alec was born and simply assumed I'd slept on it in an awkward position and it would go away. All the painkillers in hospital also allowed me to forget about it for a while, but in the last two weeks it's become intolerable. This morning I couldn't even put my socks on, as any movement of my thumb caused excruciating pain to shoot down my arm. So here I am, with a vice-like splint on my left wrist that I have to wear 24/7 until it improves, attempting to type with two hands but instead more or less reduced to the same one-handedness of our pre-sling days. Time to download the dictation app I think.
