Diary of an (ex)London mum

I read this article in the Guardian last night and was fairly alarmed by it because my personal experiences of renting, albeit not hellishly horrible, somewhat reflect the article's main points.  I rented for over 15 years as a student and then as a working professional in the U.K.  Rent accounted for half or more of my monthly expenditure in both cases.  I chose not to share with anyone because I needed the space and the freedom to work at all hours without disturbance, and in a way I was paying such that I did not have to deal with the problems associated with flat sharing.  This requirement for personal space was non-negotiable for me as I wanted to focus on developing my career, and the fact that I am in a position to own a property now has much to do with this dedication to my professional development: being in my job enabled me to get a mortgage.  However, renting for 15 years meant I did not have much savings and so I am a 'minority stakeholder' in our...

I was driving to purchase a high chair for Baby and was, as usual, listening to BBC Radio 4, my favourite radio channel, when I heard an interview of Kishwar Desai on her book on surrogacy in India, Origins of Love.  It shocked me deeply, I suspect more so now that I have a little one of my own.  The desire for people to have a child may push them to do things that they might not necessarily consider as otherwise correct; whilst there is nothing wrong with surrogacy, practices that infringe on the basic rights of the surrogate mother should not be allowed.  Truly shocking. This book is now next on my reading list.

I think anyone that has a baby will tell you that it is astonishing how quickly they seem to learn things.  Lately I have been watching Sprog and been thinking a lot about nature versus nurture.  I am sure in the end it must be a balance of the two but I can't help to think that a lot of things must be, at least on a basic level, by instinct.   I do try to expose him to new stimuli by involving him in my activities as much as possible.  He is never left behind: he is with me wherever I go and whatever I do and I try to show him as much of what I am doing as possible.  However, he cannot possibly understand why things are being done or what is being done yet.  In the first instance it must just be the urge to copy what he sees.  He has learnt, for example, that I like playing a game with him where I put our feet together, underside of my feet to his, and I nudge his legs in different directions.  He responds by trying to exert pressure h...

Its 11 weeks since Baby was born.  Today, for the first time since birth, Baby was not well: he threw up what appears to the contents of his stomach from the morning feed.  This was not a leak; this was proper vomiting.  It was very alarming to watch and we were worried as a quick look on the internet indicated that vomiting plus refusal to feed was something that we needed to be worried about: Baby has been refusing formula for the last two days even though he was quite happy to have breast milk.  We did manage to get him to have 100 ml of formula first thing in the morning this morning but he had then steadily rejected it and seemed to be hungry for milk two hours or so after.  And then came the vomiting.  This consisted of milk that didn't look very digested.  We called our clinic and was put through to the out-of-hours GP on duty this weekend.  She was very kind, asked us a number of (expectedly) pertinent questions and then told us not to w...