{six month birthday}

My sweet little babycakes,

Before you arrived, when we were waiting and waiting, I had such grand plans of how I was going to the most perfect parent for you. I was going to make all sorts of wonderful birthday cards for you every month. I was going to keep them in a box and give them to you when you have your own babies, and send copies of them to your Granizados. It was a grand plan, like lots of my other plans, but unfortunately it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because you happened. And you are the most incredible thing that has happened in my life. I was so incredibly happy when you were born, I couldn’t stop just looking at you for months. I would look and look and look and feel like I was staring at the first person in the world. My eyes were drawn to you like a magnet and I couldn’t put you down because I just wanted to hold you so I could look at you better, without getting a crick in my neck.

Even now, your papa and I sneak into your room when you’re sleeping just to make sure you’re real and we grin at each other like fools and we can’t even articulate what we are feeling because we don’t think there are words to describe how happy you have made us. One of those early days after you were born, I was sitting in the nursing chair on the balcony watching the sunrise thinking how happy I was to have had a little baby girl daughter, because you are a sacred and wise, wise woman and I know that one day when you have your own babies you will also experience all these incredible feelings too and that made me so happy that I had to look at you again.

I’m trying to hold onto each and every moment with you, because one day I know that you won’t want to be held and kissed and cuddled and will one day fly the coop, flea the nest and leave us. Already I miss you when you were a little teeny tiny baby and couldn’t even focus your eyes. All you could do then was snuffle around my chest, searching for milk. I want to hold onto every moment as much as I cannot wait for the next, to see what changes they will bring. I can’t wait to show you flowers, rivers, kayaking,  gravity, tides, the moon, horse-riding, hiking, climbing, play-school, school and university. I can’t wait to show you the world.

My friends ask me what it’s like to be a mother. Everything in my life has changed this year, and I feel as though I have lost hold of everything that I was, in order to become everything that I was supposed to be. I don’t know if I feel confident or competent enough yet to feel like a mother, but I feel honoured to be your mama. You’ve taught me so much and you make me feel like a child again, because I see everything through your eyes, through the eyes of a child, again. Watching you change and grow every day is endlessly fascinating for us, it’s like watching brain plasticity in motion. Holding you, sleeping with you, feeding you and carrying you everywhere with us has been such a divine experience. Seeing your little face for the first time, seeing your teeny tiny arm and even tinier fingers sticking out of the blanket as your papa held you in the hospital when we were all finally together, holding you to my chest, opening your nappy to see if you were a boy-baby or a girl-baby, taking you to see the Sagrada Familia for the first time, where your papa and decided we were a sacred family, camping for the first time with you, and carrying your three month old self over the top of the Pyrenees with your papa in front of us, are all memories that make my head swim with emotion.

I brought you to your six-month check up yesterday and the doctor asked if you were a good baby, but I don’t think babies are good or bad, whether they cry or not, sleep or not, are happy or not, is not a measure of goodness. And still, I wanted to say that you are more than good, you are the best little baby girl in the world. You are so clever and perfect, and calm and wise. But I couldn’t, and not just because I couldn’t pull the spanish words together, but because all I could do was look at you. You don’t have to do anything to be good, you just are, just by being you.

You came at the most perfect moment in our lives and your papa and I are so excited to spend the rest of our lives together, as a family, and we are so grateful to you for coming to us and being here with us.

Thank you.

kisses and raspberries on your warm bellybutton babycakes

{superhappyface}

It gets cold sitting out on Placa Catalunya a few days before Christmas.

A piglet has to wear her hat and scarf; show her colours.

By popular demand, all the way from ArizonaBoston, we now have commenting. If you want to reply to anything on Riu’s blog, you can do that above.

Just above where herself and la Pantera Rosa are looking.

Cool, go for it. It’s not as much hassle as people might tell you.

We use washable nappies in general life and our experience of using them on the camino was a little problematic, but not terrible. The plan was to take a limited number of nappies, hand-wash them as we went and dry them as much as we could on radiators at night, and off the back of the rucksack during the day. It kind of worked for a while but because we went in winter, there wasn’t much sun-drying during the day. We were always short a few clean dry nappies. In the end we parked the washables in a pension and used disposables. We felt bad about that but if you go in the warmer weather, you should have no problem rotating clean, dirty, wet, and dry ones.

As regards sleeping, most of the pilgrim hostels wouldn’t take us with a baby, because it is all dormitory-style communal bedrooms. That’s understandable. We generally had to stay in private pensions (cheap, family-run small hotels, basically). It costs more, of course, but it also meant we had privacy and the baby wasn’t troubling others.

It’s great fun with a baby, everyone will love you. We are going back to do some more later this year, possible by bike the next time. Let me know if you need to know anything else.

Jim.

To quote George Bernard Shaw “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” History doesn’t record if GBS ever wrestled a piglet, but he was a smart guy, so he probably didn’t.

This monkey, on the other hand, clearly hasn’t read Shaw.

Riu dishes out some serious smackdown to El Mono, and it’s quite apparent that she likes doing it.

Little zebra goes to the GinTonic bar.

An award-winning GinTonic bar for an award-winning zebra.