Marking the years from pillar to post

It’s five years this week since Ava was born, and I find myself begrudging fitting a small birthday tea into my hectic schedule. My feet, it feels, haven’t touched the ground, since she was born – it seems almost yesterday that I was up in stirrups having my coil put in six weeks after she was born, and that is where soon I’ll be again having the darn thing out again, if I stick to the letter of doctor’s orders. Buying party bag bits and bobs at the overpriced but charmingly stocked Museum of Childhood today in Bethnal Green, I remembered about the next onerous task on my to-do list… five years’ worth of contraception passed in a flash, and without a piece of copper blocking the next generation, who knows where I’ll be in another year’s time… back in stirrups?

I hope not, but I feel the pressure to make my mind up soon – before the kids get too old to appreciate a sibling other than as an annoyance and an embarrassment as they enter their teens…I’m prepared to be a little fatalistic about it, but I do feel the need to have something of a pregnant pause before the event.

What with the dog and the house and the career and Jonah, poor Ava gets such a small sliver of my attention, a sliver upon which she has thrived, undemanding and, never knowing any better, perfectly content. But I’ve noticed of late she’s needing me a bit more – perhaps I’ve been giving her too much short shrift.

Fitting in baking a cat cake, and working around a mid week, after school tea party pays testament to our time and budgetary restraints of the moment.

We’ve had to take out a loan to buy a new car after the Alfa died on the M25 last week picking up  our new pug Johnnie – who cost the best part of an arm – my friend Sam picked up the bill for the leg) as well as the last bits and bobs for the house that we might as well get now, and enjoy, rather than live in hole until we can properly afford, but which will eat into our fairly strained monthly budget. We had to cancel the long-planned trip to Florida next April to celebrate my sister Katie’s wedding. She’s taken it well, all thing considered.

So there’s no sense in doing anything rash, much as my blasted hormones are telling me otherwise. I feel harried enough already without Mother Nature giving me a kick in the womb every time I see a newborn. I don’t even like babies anyway, especially other people’s.

But when things calm down, if ever they do…. but the overwhelming tiredness of pregnancy and afterwards seems such an antithesis to the attack mentality that takes me through each and every day, from cycling the 12 miles or so in an out of work, the non stop rotation of written content I churn out week after week, my lunchtime yoga sessions and heroic clean up missions, with still enough energy to paint a wall, have friends for supper, have enthusiastic sex at least once a week, sort out the childcare, wipe my snotty daughter’s nose, sort out my roots, keep my legs /chin at least semi hair free, wrap twenty layers on pass-the-parcel and… yes, well consider baking a cat cake out of dog related child guilt.

I’ve got a lot on.

Maybe babies should wait another year / lifetime.