I Blame The Baby

Oh, and while I'm in a bit of a blogging frenzy, I'd just like to take the opportunity to say how sad I am to not have been to the Zurich Film Fest this year. This is the first year this century (!) that I haven't been an extreme attendee of at least one film festival, and sadly it's also the year that there was a bit of an Australiana theme at the Zurich fest. On the bright side, I did miss out on all that Zurich-and-back public transport tedium, the aggravating ticketing system and eating far too many (delicious) pretzels when I didn't have enough time for a proper meal.

Huh?

I have serious problems remembering things that people have told me in french. Yesterday I caught the train to Geneva, and spent the whole trip (all hour and twenty minutes of it) sitting opposite a man with a one-year-old daughter. Babies being the conversation-makers that they are, we spent the whole time chatting, about babies, daily life, politics, the weather (when will all this stupid fog go away?), all the usual stuff. And really, by the end of it I could hardly remember anything he'd said. It happens every time a conversation goes for more than about 10 minutes. Which can be embarrassing.

In other news, the Tiniest Australian (citizenship, check; passport, on the way) has started eating solid food. It's messy. I have some sort of unexplored hatred of the idea of feeding her pureed food, so we're going with the idea of baby-led weaning, which means that she has spent the last few days sucking on chunks of bread, raspberries (which she seems to really enjoy, at least the bits that make it to her mouth and don't just get mushed into nothing by her inept baby hands), capsicum (ditto), pork, carrots and zucchini. And then wiping herself, me, Reto, all our furniture and everything she can get her hands on with a horrible mixture of pre-sucked food and slobber. What a cutie.

Disappointing

I saw a cheese at Coop today called "Moron du Jura" and I was going to buy it for the sole purpose of putting a picture of it on here, but then I didn't.

Things that make the No cry lately: people sneezing, people blowing their nose, people laughing. Which is a bit of a bummer because I have a cold and we've been watching 30 Rock on telly.

Really?

Did I never put up a single picture of the No? Okay, here's one:

Who knows why she's so sad. I suspect it's all an act.

Return To Lisbon

Having agonised for ages over where we should go for a holiday, we finally (last week) made a decision to go back to Lisbon (next week. Well, tomorrow actually). I'm thoroughly looking forward to going back to somewhere that we've been to relatively recently, so we don't have to face all the usual drama of finding out where we are and how we get where we want to go. Plus we had a really great time there last time, and even though it seems very unlikely that we'll happen across a film festival this time, I'm full of optimism. Plus we seem to be staying at some wacky interesting hotel that Reto found, and not a return trip to the B&B from last time, which, although not bad, does suffer somewhat from being above a wine bar full of drunken people who don't know which is the light switch for the toilets and which is the light switch for the B&B room.

On a potentially negative note, it will also be the No's first flight, which we are all bracing ourselves for. Good practice/terrible advance warning for her first flight to Australia, which we are thinking will happen in Feb or so next year.

Seasonal Confusion

Apparently the supermarkets here are in denial about it still being summer. My local Migros started selling the "autumn" themed yoghurts weeks ago, and yesterday in Coop I saw some Christmas biscuits. Specifically, I found pfeffernusse, which I love and have stupidly missed out on for the last few years because shops seem to sell them briefly in October (or September, I now discover) and I think "ooh, it's too early for that" and then they vanish forever. Anyway, there they were yesterday, sitting on the shelves and giving me the eye, so I bought them and now I seem to have scoffed the lot.

They're not really as good as I remember, actually.

Ways In Which I Will Never Be Swiss

1. Answering the phone by saying my name instead of by saying "hello". Some junk mail caller got all stroppy at me the other day because I wouldn't tell him my name. He didn't seem to know how to proceed if he couldn't call me Madame whoever.

2. Writing 1s, 7s and 9s with all their extra tails and lines.

I Didn't Vote ..

.. but fortunately they're not going to fine me*. Even though it's all my own fault.

Apparently I enrolled as an overseas voter in 2007 (for the last federal election), but apparently I forgot that and apparently the AEC website don't tell you that sort of thing when you look up your enrolment details, and so when I eventually got around to sending in my forms to apply for a postal vote, I got an email telling me that they had already sent the forms to the wrong address and that now my only chance left to vote is to go to Geneva and do it there (at the permanent mission or whatever it is). Which I had no intention of doing, not only because about a day or two before I got that email I had been to the mission in Geneva to get some stuff certified to make the No into a tiny Australian and I wasn't about to make that annoying journey again.

Even if they had sent the voting forms to the right address it still would have been extremely annoying. To complete the forms, you have to get another Australian (one who is enrolled to vote, I suppose) to sign your voting forms. I have a grand total of one Australian friend in this country (hello Sarah!) and she is inconveniently located in Zurich. So in many ways, not voting is much more convenient for me, but you can all rest assured that if Tony Abbott is the next PM, I will feel very very guilty.





* There's a federal election on today in Australia, in case you didn't know, and voting is compulsory, in case you didn't know, in the sense that they fine you if you don't vote, but apparently not if you misinform them about your address and thus scupper your chance of voting. And apparently it's not really compulsory if you don't live in Australia, and after you've been away for 5 years or something it might be not so much compulsory to vote as forbidden. Nice (that was sarcastic, by the way. I find it outrageous that they apparently want to deny me my chance to vote in my own country, even if I don't live in it).

Is It Something In The Water?

Last night as I was making some rice to have with dinner it occurred to me, as it frequently does, that these Swiss are crazy. They recommended cooking time for rice here seems to be 45-60 minutes for brown (which is what we were eating last night) and about half that for white rice*. Really? It's been a while since I cooked rice in what I like to annoy Reto by referring to as The Sensible Continent (=Australia, obviously. And then we have an argument about whether it actually is a continent or not, which Reto obviously always loses because he is wrong and foolish), but I'm sure brown rice cooks there in something like 25 minutes, and white rice in about half that time. And my (many many many) rice-cooking experiments in this country lead me to think that Australian estimates are far closer to the truth than Swiss ones.

Which reminds me of a conversation that I eavesdropped on some time ago, where my mother-in-law and brother-in-law were discussing corn on the cob, and whether we were, at the time, eating the fresh variety or the pre-cooked variety. There was some confusion for a while, and eventually my mother-in-law said "no, it's the fresh stuff; I boiled it for half an hour". I assumed she was joking and sort of laughed a bit, and then when I told them that I was under the impression that corn on the cob needs to be boiled for about 5 minutes it became clear that everyone thinks I have no idea about anything, can't cook and am probably feeding my family on nothing but hay and raw potatoes.

So what's going on? Why do we apparently need to cook everything forever in this wacky country? And why is the corn on the cob still so gristly and tough even after it's been tormented for all that time?






* I mean normal uncooked rice, not that horrible parboiled stuff which looks, tastes and smells weird and also doesn't really seem to even take much less time to cook anyway. I did read somewhere once that parboiled rice retains more of its nutritional value, but that doesn't convince me that it's worth eating.

Not To Be Neurotic Or Anything, But ...

My parents, who are visiting, brought me a bunch of old Good Weekend magazines (which comes with the paper on Saturdays, and which I love). In this one I'm reading now, the journalist flew to Geneva to interview someone. She says

"the two-hour train trip to Lausanne costs more than $100".

Hmm. Maybe she caught a regional train and stopped at every station there is between Geneva and Lausanne, and maybe she means a return first class trip, and maybe the exchange rate was very very very bad, but it seems to me that someone should be doing a better job of checking the facts.

Surely there are enough stereotypes about Switzerland that are true that we can gleefully repeat to others, without making up stuff that is just blatantly wrong? Incidentally, I always thought that the fear of draughts (as in movement of air, not the board game. Oh how the Swiss love board games) was a bit of a rumour. Apparently not.

Thanks, Everyone

Noémie: waah, waah, waah
Everyone In The Entire World: Oh, she's teething.
Me: Aaargh!

Really, strangers on buses who have spent a grand total of two stops-worth of time in the vicinity of the No feel the need to tell me that the reason she's crying is that she's teething. Really? Not that she's hot, tired and hungry? Well, I suppose you're the expert aren't you, whoever you are?

Grr

Me: Grr, it's so hot.
Everyone Else: But you're Australian, you must love it.
Me: If I loved the heat I wouldn't have moved to Switzerland. Grr.

How Good Are We?

We went to visit our tiny new nephew the other day, and because R is the godfather it was his responsibility to bring the geburtstafel (baby name sign thing that sits in the garden for the next year or so). Poncy and ridiculous as I think these signs are, we dragged out all our DIY skills (minimal, I thought) and made the best sign ever.

Pretty good, hey?

Who Needs 'em?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, single parenting seems to be suiting me surprisingly well (R is off in the army). Under my watchful single eye (just call me Cyclops) No has progressed to sleeping a whopping 10 hours straight (well, she's done it a few times over the last week), I've found the time and enthusiasm to cook myself all sorts of fancy and delicious food that I never really bother with when Reto's home, I've scrubbed half the flat in preparation for moving (next week!) and packed a fair bit of it as well. I'm also an expert (albeit a fairly fed up one) at lugging our stupid pram up and down our stupid stairs a million times a day,and wrangling it onto buses and trains and through tiny tortuous aisles in shops. In between that and all the baby-carrying I'm constantly doing, I'm sure my arms have never worked so hard. Oh, and I successfully took No off for her first lot of vaccinations, which she coped with admirably for the first second or so, but then the realisation that she'd been stabbed in the leg set in and she screamed like she's never screamed before, poor little thing.

Unfortunately, Reto comes home again on Friday (having finished all his army duty forever!) and will no doubt throw everything into disarray, or at the very least force me to watch a lot of sport (Wimbledon AND the World Cup, zzzz) on the telly.

Who?

Being Australian, I think I'm supposed to be genetically programmed to call everyone by a shortened version of their actual name. I've always been a bit uncomfortable with jumping into the nickname pool with people I don't know very well (as in when you meet someone and they say "Call me JayJay! Everyone does!") but in general I thoroughly approve. I'm not really sure, though, what I'm supposed to do about all these babies I've been meeting lately. The vast bulk of the parents seem to call their new babies by their full names, rarely using any sort of nickname. It seems a bit crazy to call these tiny funny little people long, serious names (Benjamin? The name's longer than the baby is!), but everyone seems to and I rarely hear shorter versions being bandied about. I've even heard people say that they don't like it when babies are referred to by too many different names because they find it confusing and they imagine the babies must too. Hmm.

Fortunately this isn't a problem that keeps me up at night, and I can cope with the drama of calling children (or anyone!) by their full name if I feel I have to. Rest assured, though, that, should you happen to meet my daughter, she has a million nicknames, we rarely use her actual name, and that you can call her practically anything you want. No, Nonie, Noé, N, Nonifer, None (rhymes with "zone"), any one of a squillion embarrassing babyish nicknames with "muffin" and "pudding" and other dessert items in them. Even the full Noémie if you want to be original.

She doesn't seem to be suffering any sort of crisis of identity yet.

Things I Could Have Blogged About Lately ..

.. but didn't.

As it turns out, babies aren't to be trusted at all. Just when I think she's getting in the habit of something, she changes her mind and does things completely differently. Which is bad when her non-habit has been sleeping for 6 hours a night, good when it's crying and crying and crying every time I have the audacity not to hold her constantly.

If only I had a phone with a camera (as opposed to one with no features at all, which is what I do have. Still, it's capable of sending SMSes, so it's far superior to my previous phone) I could have taken all sorts of pictures of interesting things lately. Especially mysterious horse parades through Bern (I think they were protesting about something. I've never seen so many foals and shetland ponies at a protest) and the adorable baby bears, who are still very cute and are much more adept at tree climbing than they used to be.

Reusable nappies are far better than I anticipated. They always seemed like a good choice from an environmental smugness perspective, but I heard so many negative things about them (usually stories involving poo explosions) that my hopes were pretty low. As it turns out, the ones we got (Bambinex, in case you're interested. Which we chose because they were about the only ones we could find in Switzerland) have been perfectly good so far. The main negative aspect that we've discovered is that by the time we've folded them down to their smallest size and then velcroed them up and put on the waterproof top layer, No's bottom half is so enormous that she really can't fit into the clothes she normally wears.

Reto will be abandoning me to single parenthood quite a lot in the coming weeks. There's a practice run where he goes away for work for a night, and then the extended version where he spends a few weeks gallivanting around and playing with guns/bayonets in the army. Of course I won't have time to worry about my abandonment issues or looking after No on my own, because I'll be too busy packing up all our belongings so that we can move into our new flat a few days after R gets back. Great.

Who?

I keep forgetting I have a baby. Not in a neglectful leaving-her-at-the-shops kinda way, but more like I wake up hearing strange noises and I wonder if we have a cat or something. This morning I went into the bathroom to find Reto changing N's nappy and I was so surprised to find that there was a baby in there and that I recognised her and that she was in fact my baby.

I may be sort of sleep deprived (actually I'm not, but I do sort of have a cold so let's blame that).

The Future

This is Reto's last week of leave, meaning that next week I will be left holding the baby all on my own. Which I'm sure will be fine, but I suspect I need a bit more practice at getting N in and out of the sling on my own, and I haven't even tried to use the pram yet (that's Reto's area), and it seems that N is not a fan at all of public transport. So that bodes poorly. We're going on an experimental train trip to Bern this afternoon to see how we all cope with that, and hopefully it will be less unpleasant than the last few bus trips. Thank goodness almost everything is within walking distance of our place.

UPDATE: N doesn't seem to have the same loathing for trains as she does for buses! Bern was an outrageous success, apart from the bit where the toilet with the nappy-changing thingie was locked and you had to ask someone for a key to open it (it was also the disabled toilet - great plan, people responsible for the toilet. Make the least-mobile people have to go back up and down the stairs and chase you morons around looking for a key). Plus we had some delightful Mövenpick icecreams and got almost sunburnt and saw one of the bear park bears swimming in the bear park pond. Which was charming.

Baby On Board

Various relatives visited us on the weekend, and some of them gave us a baby sign (as in those signs that you see so often in people's gardens in this country, with the name and birthday of recently-born babies, as well as a cute picture of a stork or a bunny or a cartoon character or something). Apparently the giving of these signs is generally the responsibility of the godparents, and since Noémie doesn't have godparents, we thought we'd be saved from getting a baby sign. Apparently not.

One one hand, it was very sweet of them to make this sign for us (not to mention to spell N's name correctly, which, as someone whose name is ALWAYS spelt wrong, at least in this country, is a favourite concern of mine. Shortly after she was born an SMS was sent (not by Reto or me but by a well-meaning relative who will remain anonymous here so as not to make me sound too complainy) in which N's name was spelt wrong and her weight was increased by 2kg, which caused most people to say "surely that can't be right!", but still, you never know when misinformation like this will stick), but on the other hand ....

it's really not something I want to stick in the window. I don't feel the need to advertise the birth of our baby to the world (apart from via this blog, apparently), and really, I've always found these signs kinda stoopid. Much like I would also never put a "baby on board" sign in my car (if I had a car, which I don't). Hmm.

I guess it's one reason to be glad that everyone thinks we live too far away to visit.