Incoming

So, yeah, a couple of posts back I alluded to the fact that V is pregnant again. Left it hanging there, actually, unmentioned since.

Part of this is natural hesitancy - you don't necessarily want to go enumerating unhatched chicks, so to speak, especially in the weird pseudopublic realm of the internet. I wouldn't want to have to explain it hadn't actually worked out on Facebook, leaving people no easy way to use their Like buttons.

The other part of it is being busy. This post is therefore All News, All the Time. Other than the first bit, obviously. And this bit, where I'm over-explaining it.

FAQ

How pregnant is V?

V is extremely pregnant. People keep stopping her in the street to tell her she is definitely carrying twins and wonder if she'd noticed. That, or they just can't squeeze past her, we aren't sure. Along with random joint aches, sleepless nights and savagely variable hormone levels, this means she is in a really super mood and would definitely like you to tease her mercilessly. After all, you don't really need both arms, do you?

When is it due, then?

The baby is due to arrive round the beginning of June, according to medical professionals, so not that long left to go.

However, V has a history of defying professional medical opinion, to the extend that any part of her medical history could be considered more like propaganda than factual reporting. This has included deciding on her own (new and more interesting) symptoms for illnesses and a marked immunity to advice. F was early, this new baby is already beyond huge, and it's not impossible it might turn up within the next month.

Does F know she's going to be a big sister?

Yes. She says hello to Mummy's Tummy in the morning and pats it cheerfully, in the manner of a medieval peasant touching a hunchback for luck. She is aware the baby will sleep in our room and sit in the new baby chair in the kitchen, but has been keen to stress that it will not get in her bed or be allowed to use her toys.

F has helped us pick baby names, by screwing her face up to our entire list of suggestions and shaking her head vigorously. "Well, what should we call it then?" we ask, and she shrugs and says "Baby" as though this were patently obvious to any but the most gurning simpleton. Similarly, the baby will be neither boy nor girl, "just a baby".

Are you all very excited?

Yes. Also quite stressed, occasionally in mild denial or frankly completely oblivious to what on earth the fuss is about. Second time in, there's been a marked drop in the levels of starry-eyed hope and a sharp increase in flashbacks to three am nappy changes. I can almost smell the meconium.

What are you doing to prepare for the new arrival?

Stressing, I just told you. Also buying things from Blocket (a second-hand site a bit like eBay), rooting around in the cellar for F's old clothes and wondering if vasectomies can be applied retrospectively.

What else is going on right now?

F has emerged from her Pippi Longstocking phase and is now into reading letters and making things with playdough. Mostly she makes caltrops, which (for those of you less au fait with fantasy wargear than I) are multi-spiked metal shards scattered on the ground and used to hobble charging cavalry. Playdoh is by far and away the most efficient material for the contruction of caltrops ever created by man. It also makes excellent, if rather eye-catching, patches for carpets, trousers, etc. Personally, I've gone off it.

V is somehow still working full time. I've passed another language exam and am now learning SAS-G, which is what six-to-ten year olds learn. At this rate, I'll be able to communicate at my mental age before the summer, because mentally I'm about twelve.

What the Christ is that on your face?

I have a part in a play about vikings, an adaptation of one of the Icelandic Sagas I love so much in fact, that starts rehearsal in a couple of months. I'm very excited about it, as I'll be performing in Swedish (probably). I auditioned in Swedish too, but decided that wasn't hard enough and translated the piece I did, famous Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, specially for the occasion. I only wish I could accurately portray the looks on the faces of the audition panel as I hammered through it with my most enthusiastic foreign acting. I also had to dance (never pretty), demonstrate my acrobatic prowess (I did a handstand) and swordfighting skills. The latter against myself. With a mop.

Regardless of this impressively insane experience, my lazily untrimmed winter beard went on to swing me the role. I was asked to keep growing it and I'm now about eighty percent facial hair by body weight*, much of which is just inside the corners of my mouth. I keep seeing movement in my peripheral vision. When I whip round to see who's creeping up on me, I find my coiling sideburns, sieving the air for nutrients like the tentacles of a hungry anenome.

*The other twenty percent is a claggy accumulation of egg yolk, herring bones and the mockery of bypassers.

Har du sett min apa?

We had a Pippi Longstocking month last month.

Bit of a departure for F. If she sees real people on the telly, she usually wrinkles her nose up and denounces them as being a 'mummy program', by which she means Dr. Phil, CSI Denver or whatever other generic daytime crap is chuntering on in the background while V does something else entirely.

But Pippi somehow passed this acid test, and we had several marathons of watching all of it back to back. And singing the theme song, which is now a bedtime staple. V called F 'my little firecracker' the other morning. "Ne-Hej!" said F loudly and angrily, as she does if you call her anything other than her proper name or do anything before she's told you to do it. "But Pippi is a firecracker," we explained, and then she grinned widely and accepted her new title.

Pippi, whose surname is actually Långstrump, is a peculiar rolemodel for children. F quite quickly understood that you shouldn't really jump up and down on top of tables, eat birthday cake for breakfast or jump off the edge of buildings. It's funny when Pippi does it, but not in real life. F realised this quickly because Daddy was extremely fast in giving serious explanations of gravity, nutrition and other science facts, as though Open University was using the show as a teaching example - "Let's just pause the action here and think about what Pippi is doing for a moment. If you consider the acceleration of a free-falling body in normal atmospheric conditions..."

It's a great bit of old telly, though, made in Sweden in the 70s with brilliantly duff special effects. Proper heritage stuff. The nearest equivalent I could think of was the old BBC Narnia adaptation, the one where Aslan was a motheaten sock puppet and the Beaver family was the Talking Animal equivalent of putting on Blackface.

F's favourite episode of the whole series was of course the one with the worst possible connotations in English. It's where Pippi, idly considering some of her treasures one morning, comes up with a strange new word. She decides to use this word for everything until she finds the thing it really means.

The word in question, sadly, is 'Spunk'. It's quite hard to stay deadpan when the episode is riddled with classic dialogue like 'all the best sweet shops sell spunk', 'oh, what a sweet little spunk!' (to a baby, as well) or 'Don't you know it's dangerous to drink spunk?'

But it's stay deadpan or explain to F why I'm sniggering, and that's a conversation for a later date. When she's, say, in her mid-thirties.