Best Job Ever.... I Think

People tend to think that being a stay at home mum is like a long boring vacation where the stay at home mum has lot of time. I know this is something that we talk about a lot on so many platforms. Fact is as a stay at home mum, I have to fight myself from aggressive job hunting and remember why I chose to do this. Yes this is a choice a woman has to consciously make and reinforce every so often. This is because from where I sit, the pressures of a regular office job and the demands look like holiday. See, I’m that girl who started cooking real meals for the first time in her life while in 3^rd year. Not out of necessity but rather out of embarrassment. All the boys in my crew could cook and so much better than me. I could easily have lived off take-aways and strategic visits. My mother tried but I was more interested in my bike and the everything else far from the kitchen so do not ask what kind of mother I have… she really tried. 

Any hoo the point is, I am not particularly good at this keeping house thing. I am trying to figure it out a husband and 2 kids later. At least now I know my cooking won’t poison anyone but sometimes I just wish to be back in that high pressure newsroom. It’s so much easier than overseeing everything in the house. That’s everything from construction to gardening to house-keeping and of course the kids.

Today little man didn’t want to go to school. First he woke up late, then He didn’t want to wear his clothes. Had to bribe the guy candy by candy to get him across the road to school. Then start him off at the playground so that he can remember how much fun playschool is. 

Come back home to find baby is awake and his agenda is to play with mummy. He loves to watch mummy sing and dance for him, so she does as she changes his diapers and nurses him. He sleeps, the construction guys are here, with a long list of needs. Then the mother moment! Baby is awake, nursing construction guys need this that and some of that too, the water guy is here, he needs he wants, house-help is also demanding attention… these moment will occur at least 3 times in a day. The people may be different. The trash guy, the landscaping guy, the watchies, the groceries guy… name it. Before I sit to relax its time for little man to come home… if you have an active 2 year old you know the next break you have is when he’s asleep. But Baby is now fully awake… somewhere there hubz needs his time, supper needs to be made, served and fed, baby wants to coo and s mile with no one but you. Its 10pm the living room looks like 10 storms passed through it. I think baby might be ready for his bed now, might is the key word. I put baby down, everyone is asleep. I lie down in bed. I didn’t call… I didn’t visit my recuperating family, I didn’t get around to finishing this and that document, that other proposal is 2 lines long now, yey. Argh tomorrow I’ll try again to do everything and see how far we go.

See, the newsroom on an election day is so much easier, get your assigned story to follow, run like a maniac to get the hourly bulletin up on time for 8-10 hours at least there might be 10 minutes here for lunch, five minutes there for tea, a decent bathroom break. See? Lunch, tea, bathroom… luxuries in my current job description. Then I go out there and someone can barely hide their disappointment that you have no job or title beyond mum… jeez. For now, I will proudly be mum. 

The luxuries of a decent meal, a decent bathroom break and a relatively streamlined day will have to wait until I’m sure my babies can handle themselves for about 8 hours a day without me and can tell me all about it at the end of the day.

My Baby Grew Up

Little man went to school today. Well its playschool in a more regular and formalized manner than he’s done before. He is just shy of 2 years and 6 months. Why so early? He wanted to be out where he was hearing other children play. He’d go to the gate every time the play was especially loud and ask to be let out in his special language (He can’t really talk but we understand each other well enough). After about a month of that his daddy and I got the point. We figured that worst case scenario would be that he doesn't like it and he could always come back home seeing that the school is literally next door.

Well the point of this little write up is that its official, little man is going to school and I miss his noise terribly! There’s no one to alert me that baby is awake. No one to help me blend smoothies and fruit shakes by gleefully dropping the fruits into the blender. No one trying to ride the dog… the morning is quiet. I miss my little man. I think this is one of the hardest things about being a mom, when the baby grows faster than you are willing to let him… which is all the time, but milestones like these make it all too obvious, they are growing, and there’s nothing you can do to stop this growth as it inevitably leads to their moving out of home… before I turn into a teary momma wailing for her baby to stay home, I’m off to do something mummy like and productive… like I don’t know, bake cookies for him to carry to school tomorrow.

Meanwhile, thank God I stumbled onto this. I'm not crazy :)

Project Shower

Taking a shower with a newborn and a toddler is a long term project. Just putting it out there so that you know where I’m coming from. Also, so that you can politely ignore the fact that I may be a little ‘ripe’ or overly dry skinned when you come over.

It’s never the right time for a shower, even at 3 am in the morning. During the day, I can’t leave little man with sweet baby. Little man loves his little brother. So much so that he believes he must share everything with the baby. His food, read choke hazard; his toys, read impact; clothes, read smothering risk; the list goes on. So leaving the two unsupervised is a no-no. In his waking hours, little man is always around sweet baby. When little man is off to eat, baby is also feeding. Baby also doesn’t seem to like being left alone. If he’s asleep, he’ll wake up crying should he be left alone for more than 2 minutes. If he’s awake, well the minute I get out of his line of vision, that’s some loud desperate wails.

When one is asleep, the other wants mums total and full attention. When both are awake, there is risk in the exuberant love displayed by the older one.

Take Wednesday for instance. The idea was to shower in the morning after putting baby down for a nap and turning on baby tv for little man. As soon as I got to the bathroom door, little man had silently gotten up the stairs and was trying to ‘gotea’ his baby brother. Who woke up angry and wailing… no problem though. My ripe self will continue mummy-ing (nursing, changing diapers, cooing, burping, dancing etc etc) till they are both asleep. They both nap at around 2. So finally, I clean up little mans mess in the room, eat, take a breath of fresh air and eventually get into the bathroom. As I turn on the shower, baby man is awake and hungry/wet. So I nurse him, burp him, we stare lovingly into each others eyes for a bit then he dozes off. 

this is on a good day

Little man then wakes up and has a gazillion stories as he follows me to everywhere including into the loo… clearly the shower has to wait. Next opportunity is when little man is asleep and baby sweet is bathed and with his daddy. Daddy is too tired to stay awake. As the water hits my skin, baby realizes he is alone and his wails start getting desperate. I have no heart for it. I’ll aim for soap tomorrow.

Food Glorious Food

Sometime earlier this year I was checking out the kindergartens in my neighborhood. Little man is 2 years old, the right foundation for his education is very important. I was looking for a place where children are allowed to play first and learn later. Do you know there are kindergartens that give homework and exams to kids in playgroup? That is too foreign for me to understand so I don’t want to deal with it.

There was one particular kindergarten that stood out thanks to an interesting conversation with the owner. After a quick tour of the house/facilities, she gave me the lunch menu as the apologetically explained that some items in the menu will soon be removed after parents complained. Before she mentioned that I wasn’t even looking at the menu, so now I looked to see what these contentious issues were.

She continued to apologetically explain that she was only trying to meet the children’s dietary needs the way the met those of her own children 30 odd years ago. She continued to explain how opening the kindergarten/daycare forced to get in with the times.

irio

So the problematic foods in the menu were Matoke, Ngwaci (sweet potatoes), Ndumas (Arrow roots), Njahi, Mukimo… even ugali was a problem food! Apparently, young mothers want their babies to eat pasta, meatballs, rice, fries, cabbages (yuck! You cannot pay me to eat that tasteless mass of fibre!) and other city foods. My gosh we are a lost generation – my thoughts as she was speaking. I left having kept my shock to myself.

Days later at a salon in one of the new fashionable malls near my neighborhood, one of the ladies working on my head exclaimed her disgust when she discovered her child in kindergarten was being given stewed sweet potatoes with traditional greens cooked in milk. She said ‘I escaped from the village and left backward things like those there, my child should eat like a child from Nairobi! I pay good money for that’. Her words, not mine.

It seems to be modern is to forget or ignore everything that is not ‘urban’. I felt somewhat silly as a mother because just around that time I was trying to introduce little man to grilled bananas with milk for brekkie (if this doesn’t sound heavenly to you, I am profoundly sorry for you).

I know that there are wonderful nutritional benefits in these traditional foods but I like my food to be yummy first and healthy later. I have enjoyed roast bananas and milk since I was a child, my relationship with Ngwaci is legendary, honey glazed baked pumpkin (which my house-help thinks is madness and steers far away from). Arrow-roots are a fairly new and I’m very choosy about it. More recently I have a yearning for Mukimo with fresh maize and nettle leaves (don’t know their kikuyu name) I want my babies to enjoy that food too. But when parents threaten to pull their children out of school for offering these delicacies, I fear my kids might dislike these foods out of peer pressure. I will try though to give them the same yummy magic my mummy gave me and hope they become traditional food ambassadors someday. Besides, these foods are so healthy, there’s no point discussing the nutritional value here. Its like trying to explain why gold is precious. The way things are going, these foods are getting as hard to find and as expensive as gold anyway so the comparison is quite appropriate. On that note, where can I find nice Ndumas? The ones that cook into deep purple.

Life that Is

Magic exists you know. It’s not some fantasy relegated to children’s stories and Disney like movies. Magic is as real as the air you are now breathing. It’s as elemental as the oxygen, hydrogen and carbon molecules that clothe the air.

You want proof? Every day living and breathing proof? Look at the magic that is procreation. That a human being with all parts inside and working can come into existence from literally nothing to a one point something foot wailing individual in 9 months. That’s three quarters of a year. If that doesn’t convince you of magic then look at a baby’s eyes. Eyes so deep and intense with the knowledge of a thousand ancestors as well as a thousand descendants.

Have you noticed how babies look as old as they are young? Maybe it’s the nature of an old piece of human consciousness or soul slowly slipping away as the baby slowly and troublesomely starts to get used to his new and young mortal body. You can almost hear a grumble in the air around a new born baby ‘It is rather limiting, this body’.

Watch a baby in its first few months of life. Surely there is magic there. An old elemental magic. I like to call it life.

Poor soul, that it should live so bound. Lucky soul, that it should have purpose enough to be granted a body to walk the earth. An identity with which to build, or destroy among men. There is magic. It’s as real as the air you are breathing now.