Illness and NHS...

We have had quite a rough weekend with the little one not keeping very well. It started off with fever on Thursday night. She seemed to be recovering quite well from that by Friday, thanks to baby Calpol. But as Friday progressed, the fever was accompanied by vomiting and diarrhoea. The little one was alert and mostly cheerful, albeit a bit crankier than normal, so we were not unduly worried. I have lived in this country for far too long to know that the doctors would not tell me anything which I did not already know, so we did not bother going to one on Friday. We researched a lot of baby sites on the internet for foods to avoid and coupled with information from my sister (who is a doctor based in India), we were all set for the virus to run its course.

Saturday came and she was slightly better with her fever lower than Friday, but the diarrhoea had not subsided. Getting her to eat or drink anything was the biggest problem. She was refusing to eat anything solid and survived on multiple bottles of juice, as that was the only thing she was drinking without a fuss. We also found that she loved boiled cooled water with a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar added to it. She looked quite tired and miserable all day, yet refused to sleep any more than she normally does. So after debating for a while, I decided to ring NHS direct for advice and was put through to a doctor quite quickly.

The doctor, lets call her G, asked me to buy Diorylate sachets, to prevent dehydration. But the most important thing was that instead of attempting to put me at ease, G was rather curt and told me that if the little one’s fluid intake reduces considerably, then I should rush her to A & E for replacing her body fluids. Now I am all for vital information to not be hidden from the patient, but the way in which it is done is extremely important. For a mother who is already in distress, a big part of going to see a doctor or taking advice from one is for the comfort factor. To be told that what your child has is nothing more than a routine virus and that it will help her build up her immune system. That this is all part of the growing up process and then probably mention an extreme scenario where she could have mentioned replacing her body fluids. I am normally quite a calm person and don’t panic very easily, so I retained my composure and hung up as quickly as was possible under the circumstances.

The other thing which doctors and probably even the pharmaceutical companies don’t realize (or maybe they do but don’t change) is the taste of these medicines. Diorylate sachets are available in different fruity flavours, but have such a funny taste that there is no way that a child is going to drink it. The little one had one or two sips and decided that she doesn’t want any more and no amount of singing and cajoling would get her to drink any more. So we finally resorted to giving her boiled cooled water with a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar, so that she did not get dehydrated.

Come Monday, her fever had disappeared but her diarrhoea had not. So against my better judgement and to allay my parents-in-law’s fears, we went to the GP and what a sheer waste of time that turned out to be. My GP made us wait for an hour, in spite of us having an appointment. The when our turn came, she gave the little one the briefest of glances and told us to stop her giving her any diary products, and give her Diorylate. I told the GP that the little one doesn’t like the taste and is there something else which I could give, and her answer was – “just make her drink it”. I think she implied force-feeding it to the little one, but I would never do that. I don’t believe in force-feeding and I was not ready to change my principles for this GP. The worst bit of it though was her attitude – such a callous, casual, uninterested consultation. She did not make any effort to engage the little one, take her temperature, ask us any questions about her diarrhoea. And to think that a substantial part of our monthly pay check goes towards the NHS makes my blood boil. I know she is not representative of the entire doctor community and there are other good doctors out there, yet that does not help me at the moment.

Above all though, the little one is back to her cheerful, bubbly, bouncing self..

Second Child Dilema...

Broaching this senstive topic to Calculus is proving to be so hard for me. I know what his thoughts on the subject are, which are very different to mine. But I know, above everything else that this has to be something which both of us want and that there are no in-betweens.

I have been pretty clear from the start that if I have children, then I want more than one. I have not been overtly maternal - its not that I dont like children. I love kids, but did not want any of my own when I got married. I was perfectly happy to lead a life without any and in our conversations before we got married, we had both agreed that having children would not be a big priority for us. However, after 7 years of married life, my maternal instincts blossomed and I wanted a child at that very moment. I am not entirely sure what brought about that change, or if anything triggered my feelings to alter but change it did. Calculus was rather surprised by my transformation, but to his credit he was very supportive with my choice. We were very fortunate to discover that I was pregnant, very soon after we decided to have a child.The pregnancy went along well, we have a beautiful daughter who is nearly 10 months old and is good as gold.

Now I want another one. My reasons are many - I have thoroughly enjoyed motherhood. This of course, is a large part because of the little one. Even though I should probably call it quits when I am ahead, my body craves another child. Also I have such a fulfilling, close and wonderful relationship with my siblings that I want that for my daughter too. In these days of small, nuclear families, siblings are all the more important. She does not have many cousins either - just a brother from my side of the family, who is 16 years older than her and nearly from a different generation. Not to mention the fact that he lives in India, which makes it difficult to begin with for them to form a bond. Things might have been different, had we been in India, even though the age gap would still be a factor.

Calculus has just one brother, whom he is not close to at all. His brother has one daughter, about 3 years older than ours. Yet I dont see them being close at all, mainly because we dont meet them. They stay on the other side of the pond and the chances of us meeting often seem very remote. That means she will not have any cousins whom she will be close to, from Calculus's side of the family either. I worry a lot about how things will be for her once Calculus and I are not around. It would be so much nicer for her to have someone she pick up the phone (or even better meet) and share joyous news, or could be just the fact that she has somebody to whom she can moan about Calculus and my annoying ways, when she is a bit older. Close friends do fill that gap to some extent, but I would be much more at peace with myself if I know that she has a sibling whom she can be close to.

Calculus has never been close to his brother and his argument is what if our children turn out like them. I have no concrete response to that, of course one can never tell how things will turn out, but I am hopeful that with the right environment at home and our influence, our children will turn out to be close to each other. There are no guarantees in life, but this is a calculated risk I am more than willing to take.

All the online resources on the net suggest that I should NOT nag Calculus - something that I know already and hence am doing the next best thing - blog about it. Jokes apart, I am old already and am not doing myself any favours by waiting. We need to plan so that I can get the whole baby thing done soon. I dont have any illusions about how difficult things will be - specially because both our parents are old and so we cannot expect them to help us out again. But we are in London, fortunate enough to be in a city where we can get help. It is undoubtedly expensive, yet it is an extravagance which we now can afford.

In the past, we have spoken about adoption. But now that we have a child of our own, I am scared of this option. I am not entirely sure if I trust myself entirely to treat both children (adopted and the one of my own) equally. I have a friend who is in a similar position - she had a baby boy of her own. When her son was nearly 6 months old, her partner's brother's children were put up for fostering and subsequently adoption by her partner's brother. Both she and her partner did not want the children to lose contact with the other siblings as well as their family, so she and partner adopted one child and the partner's parents adopted two children. My friend finds it extremely hard to treat her adopted girl and her own son equally and I have seen her struggle through my own eyes. She is committed to change her attitude though and is working hard on it, yet the fact remains that treating the two children equally does not come naturally to her. There is always a feeling almost of over-compensating the adopted child, to ease off any guilt. Having seen her struggle through it, I am in two minds now. Its not as if to say that I will feel the same way, but the seeds of doubt have been sown in my mind.

So what do you 'only child' readers of mine think ? of course, others too are welcome to add their thoughts.

Random Thoughts

A friend has been writing thought-provoking, heartfelt posts on her blog one after the other and today's post touched some very raw nerves. This was the bit about not being proud of everything that you have done. I have so many things that I am not proud of at all abd I have been thinking about them since I read her post. I dont have the guts to reveal them today, maybe some day. A part of me says that there is no need to revisit those horrible days and that some things are just better off left in the past. But maybe thats my way of justifying not writing about those things.

Sometimes I wish that this blog was more anonymous that it currently is. However,I have met some truly wonderful people through this blog and I would not change that for anything.

I have been feeling low and melancholy for the last couple of weeks. I am not depressed, I have been there before and this time its vastly different. There is no real reason that I can pinpoint to for it. It started just after my parents left and maybe has something and possibly everything to do with their leaving.

I am having to micro-manage two of my team members and I hate it. I like to let people to plan for themselves and not interfere too much, as long as the deadlines are met. I am having meetings with them every day to monitor their progress, which is very draining. I had to warn one of them yesterday and it was awful.

My IL arrived last night and the little one took to them immediately. My MIL is great with her and has already built quite a rapport. All the stimulation, particularly late evening did not help at all and the little one just refused to sleep, even way past her bedtime. She just wanted to carry on playing.

I did not realise till very recently just how fiercely competitive I can be, not something that I am proud of.

My mind plays some horrible tricks sometimes. I am grateful for a LOT of wonderful things in my life, yet its the ones which you dont have which keep coming back, clouding my judgement entirely. I know this is just a phase and like everything else, it too shall pass.

Caraway

When we moved to South Wales (in the UK) about 8 years ago, we did not have a proper Indian restaurant in the city that we lived. We had loads of restaurants of the Bangladeshi/Nepali/Pakistani kind but none that were really Indian. Being new to the country and not really knowing so much about the existence of these different kinds of cuisines being passed off as Indian, we tried a couple of them, only to be disappointed each time. We used to be surprised at the terminology they used too on their menu – ‘balti’ for instance. I had never heard that word being used in the context of cooking before, for instance.

Soon we learnt from our experiences though and eventually stopped going out to these places. The mind does not learn though and the cravings for different things Indian never stopped. So we had to innovate and do the next best thing – learn to make them ourselves. So I learned to make at least some of the dishes that I missed most – ragda patties, idlis, vadas. (I used to cheat for vadas and drive some 30 miles to my uncle’s to eat some great medu vadas – he makes them really really well and any day better than any restaurant !). Eventually, even the suggestion of going out to eat at an Indian restaurant was enough to drive me mad and Calculus knew better than to suggest it. On the few occasions we went out to these places with friends (who would insist on eating out at these places and then complain about them), I would moan and whine to Calculus.

This attitude of avoiding Indian restaurants has changed considerably since we moved to London, for obvious reasons. One of my favourite Indian restaurants in London is the Punjab – in Covent Garden. After the Indian restaurants in Cardiff, this was a welcome change. The restaurant has been in existence for a very long time and the décor is quite outdated but nice and they have some lovely pictures on their walls. The food has a home-cooked feel to it, is simple and flavourful. The owner is very friendly and mingles around, talking shuddh Hindi, which is always a pleasure to hear.

So when I read about Caraway, I was vaguely interested to try it out because it’s closer to home than the Punjab is and I could drive to Carway as opposed to getting the tube to get to Punjab (which in itself is a reason for me) and most importantly, Caraway have rumali roti !!!. So we decided to try the restaurant last night and came away, fully agreeing with 30in2005. The food is wonderful, authentic Delhi food and incredibly well-cooked. We had vegetable Manchurian, malai kofta hariyali, onion kulchas, rumali roti and some dahi bhalle for starters. The dahi bhalle wasn’t great, but was nice. The vegetable Manchurian was awesome – I am definitely going back there for that. I have to say that I was disappointed with the rumali roti though. I was expecting them to be like what they are in India – but this seemed like a really big thin chapatti to me rather than a rumali roti. Their onion kulchas were great though. This place is definitely a find with the food too far better than Punjab !! The only drawback though is finding parking around there is quite difficult. We had to park a few streets away and walk, which with a baby is not ideal but we can live with that.

The little one behaved admirably in the restaurant and was happy with us giving her pieces of rumali roti and onion kulchas that we were having. She kept happily calling out to the waiters with ‘aa aa’ or signaling to them and they were only too happy to keep her amused by talking and playing with her. On the way home though, we seemed to have brought home a different child ! She started crying (for no apparent reason, at least to us!) the minute we strapped her on her car seat and kept going at it pretty much all the way home. I finally had to break the law and keep her on my lap, yet she would not stop wailing. I tried everything that I could think of – sing to her, talk to her, play with her but to no avail. I am ashamed to admit this but I was so so annoyed with her then and instead of even trying to console her any more, I just ignored her. Calculus could tell that I was irritated with her and kept talking to her while he was driving, but that did not help either. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, we got home and she stopped crying just like that. The strange thing is we still don’t really know what bothered her. Once we were home though, she forgot all about it and carried on playing happily. I, on the other hand, was sulking that she had been so annoying. I know, I know I am a bad mother to probably even feel this way, but it’s the reality. She has been a fairly good baby so far and I have been just been spoilt I think. Yet it made me realize how much more patient ( I like to think I already am patient) I need to get to deal with her yet-to-begin temper tantrums.

Having the "Talk"

There have been a lot of posts in the blogosphere about J K Rowling's latest confession that Dumbledore is gay. Thanks to my new surfing-less policy, I am quite late in adding my two cents to the various opinions floating about. I am not going to blog about that directly, but about a discussion which Calculus and I had as a result of all those posts.

I asked Calculus if he would be comfortable with our little one knowing about alternate sexuality whenever she is ready for that. In my opinion, children mature very young these days, so it is hard for us to pin-point an age at which she is ready to know about it. Also, children have far more external stimuli in the form of TV, internet, school than we ever did, when we were growing up and so it would be very hard to shield her from such concepts. But over everything else and Calculus agrees with me, I dont see being gay as anything to be hidden from my child. She may not need to know the intracacies of a gay relationship, but I do want to inculcate a sense of normalcy in her mind about a gay relationship and not think of it as something to be kept hidden. Sure she may have questions about why they are different from a heterosexual couple, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. In my house, my gay friends will get the same treatment as any other couple because honestly, I dont see why such a big fuss of it is being made of it in the first place. They are just two people in love and if they decide to spend the rest of their lives together, then thats their business. I only wish they did not have to be so marginalised in our society, as they are currently.

We also discussed about when we should have our "all about sex talk" with her.. (i know she is not even an year old yet !). Calculus thinks that her school would do it, but I beg to differ. I want her to know about it from me (now that Calculus has handed me that responsibility, without a fight !!) and not from a school training. I want to tell her all about periods, sex before they do so in school. I did not have a sex talk from my parents when I grew up and I found out about periods from a friend of mine in school. Now this girl was a bully and I was a tad bit frightened of her and she made it sound all gory and nasty, very much like a horrible horror movie. Of course I was terrified and had nobody to discuss it with, and lived with my fears. I dont want my daughter to go through that, I want her to be much better prepared than I ever was.

Surfing less

A friend’s husband recently changed jobs and asked for his new cabin to not have a direct connection to the internet. On second thoughts, I am not entirely sure if there is an existing connection or if it was a self-imposed internet ban. In either case, he has to go to the library to check his email or surf the net, which makes it so much harder. Initially when I heard it, I convinced myself that it was a ridiculous idea and a waste of time. But over the last few days during my holiday, when I did not surf the internet as much, I actually found that I was doing things which I normally would not – for instance read more, listen to music, read to my daughter or play with her. It got me thinking and I decided to experiment with this less-surfing policy during my week long break, which ends tomorrow.

I have been doing rather well this week. I login a couple of times a day to check my email (which is better than refreshing my gmail every 2 seconds, just so that I don’t read an email a second late, which is what I used to do). I make it a point to shut down my computer each time, so that its that much harder to login. I know I should not have to resort to these measures, my willpower should be sufficient, but it takes a while to break away from a habit of many years. It gets easier; I was edgy the whole time on my first day. On the second day, I decided to step out and experience some culture, so wandered into town to the V & A museum, so the day passed by quite quickly. Yesterday, I went into the Science museum and walked along South Kensington. Today was the real test as I decided to stay in all day and not surf the internet much. Of course it was hard, but I survived and logged on just thrice. Tomorrow I want to cut that down further. But more than anything else, it has changed my attitude to reading blogs. The fervor and enthusiasm with which I used to read blogs has reduced and I am going to finally be very choosy about the blogs I read. Of course the downside is that I am not able to reply promptly to emails and they pile up, but will work out a system to work through that. Or like my friend says, do what they did in the pre-email days - pick up the phone and call !!!!!

At work, it is going to be much harder. I will have to rely entirely on my willpower as I will not be able to unplug the network cable connected to my laptop because of the nature of my work. Most of the work that I currently do is directly on a server, on the network. So I will have to discipline myself and this week was to set me into that frame of mind. I don’t want to reduce the frequency of my posting though because I like blogging and also like many others, I harbour the hope that my daughter will grow up and read this someday.

A Holiday of Many Firsts...

• Back from a week’s holiday in the Netherlands. NL is special to me because it’s the first country I visited and stayed for long durations outside of India and the warmth of my parental home. I also think its such a beautiful country, straight out of a picture postcard. Strangely enough, NL is also the first country the little one visited outside of the UK. I did not wish for it to be this way – I wanted India to take that honour but it did not happen because of various reasons.

• It was the little one’s first flight. The flight on the way out was uneventful with her sleeping most of the way. On the way back, she displayed some impeccable timing, which meant that I had to change her on the flight, which was no mean task. My respect for mothers travelling with infants long distance increased ten-fold then!!

• It was our first family holiday.

• It was the first time I was meeting my friend’s daughter, born in June this year.

• It was also the first time we travelled with so much baggage, what with all the baby equipment.