Since F.’s arrival, the house has gotten very cosy very fast. To me, he remains something of a mystery, with his software coder’s hours and kaleidoscope of facial expressions (half-smile, vacant, frown, deep frown (think, checking your investment portfolio kind of frown), back to half smile). Second time around, however, I have much more tenderness towards a newborn, because I know how brief this phase is (we have the 3.5 year old walking, talking, singing, dancing, joking proof of this in the very next room), and because I know how lucky we are to be experiencing this completely and mindfully.
Anno’s getting the hang of the whole maternity leave thing now, abandoning her Blackberry for an unlisted iphone number. Despite her sleep deficit (I essentially hang on to F. for very brief stretches because of the whole underdeveloped mammary thing, and the fact that I seem to make him cry within seconds – my personal best of not-crying wakefulness thus far can’t be much better than 3 minutes!), Anno is amazingly active and is thoroughly enjoying her time and space with F. I heard them this morning cooing to each other at 445am – now that’s a miracle!
We have decided to make the most of the overlap between the maternity leave and my not having a full time office job by working on joint projects and enjoying ourselves as much as possible. As Gareth C. mentioned, we probably won’t have such a length of time together again until retirement. We accordingly decided to celebrate F.’s second week birthday by having a small party.
One of the tasks was to arrange for coffee for about 35 people. In NY, I might have gone to DunkinBucks or some other such chain to get one of those box’o’joe arrangements so we thought this would be easily done here. We visited all the major chains (most of which give you that sense of any-place-ism – the wifi, the $5 frappucino, the blond wood counter etc.), only to be met with confusion:
Us: Hi, we’d like to arrange for coffee for about 30 people at our house. Do you offer such a service?Them: Err, we can sell you powdered coffee and you can make it at home.
Us: Hmm, that’s not quite what we had in mind. Perhaps you could deliver a canister of coffee to us?
Them: We can make coffee for 30 people and you can pick it up from us before your event.
Us (hopeful now): Yes yes, so do you have a large enough container for this?
Them: Now (this is a classic Kenyan opening gambit for delivering bad news), you would have to provide the container.
Us: SILENCE
Our nanny F. (who has appeared in these pages before, and is a card carrying AN) finally resolved the issue by making pot after pot of strong stovetop espresso and putting it into the large yellow thermos which we use to deliver tea to the night guards.
Unrelatedly, except in the spirit of having maximum fun, S. had her school photo day recently. Parents were asked to bring children in full school uniform (I am guilty of allowing her to wear her Barbe-a-papa tshirt every so often), so we timely delivered a clean, smiling and be-gelled (S. pronounced her hair to be ‘cool looking’) girl to school. When I can back to pick her up after Karate at the end of the day (1pm), I noticed that she was wearing a tattered red tshirt (not the regulation white polo she had been wearing at drop-off).
I asked the teacher where S.’s shirt was (mildly annoyed that my daughter was wearing a torn shirt for no apparent reason, on photo day), leaving implied (thankfully) the question of ‘what kind of show are you running here?’. Ms. M. (the teacher, and, I'm beginning to suspect, also a full blown AN) cheerfully replied that S. had volunteered to take off her shirt to lend to one of her classmates who had apparently not worn the correct uniform. Now I know this isn’t exactly cleaning lepers’ bed sores in Kibera, but I was still pretty damn proud. S. continues to be a curious and affectionate big sister, but leaves the house for longer stretches of time (up to 20 minutes at a time) to hang out with the askaris (the guard watchman) or the groundskeeper, or just play with the dog. The guardbox near the gate has a bewildering panoply of hulahoops and stuffed dolls by it. Anno and I are trying to make sure she knows that F.’s arrival does not represent a zero-sum scenario…I'm feeling mild anxiety at how quickly she's getting so big.
As the cliche goes, the days are long but the years are short. Here's proof (on rollerblades) of how self-sufficient S. is getting now:
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