What a lovely sunny day today! Emmeline and I got up early (she seems to have decided that waking up early is acceptable) and we went down to Barceloneta to meet Katie and Elsie, Suzanne and Julia, Tsering and Elena and Andrea and Julia. We must have been quite a sight – 4 mommies with prams all heading for the beach front only to be joined by a fifth mommy and pram!! I must say that we do get our fair share of looks all seated around a ridiculously inadequate table loaded up with a various array or plates, trays, coffee cups, bottles, rice cakes, food pots, toys, dummies etc. and with babies of all about the same age propped on laps or stuck to our chests whilst somehow trying to eat a very fattening pastry and drink a decaf coffee without spilling it over our babies and managing to not let the babies grab everything and pull it off the table! It is an art! I love meeting up with the other mommies and I find it fascinating to watch the babies interacting with each other! They touch each other’s faces; they grab jackets, arms, hair – basically anything in grabbing distance. They bite, chew and suck their new little friends without any problems and when one cries, the others appear to follow suite quite shortly afterwards!
As for us mommies, we start conversations that get cut off half way the minute we have to quickly turn our attention back to our little ones. We try to find out about the other mommy and not just the other babies, but we tend to forget the answers, once again because we always have half our attention focused on our babies! There is some sort of general routine whereby we arrive, find a table and reorganise, juggle babies in order to go inside and order a coffee, attend to the little ones and make sure that they have something to keep them entertained (albeit only momentarily) relax just long enough to be able to gulp down a coffee and think ‘Thank god my baby seems quite relaxed’ before the inevitable. Your baby starts to get a bit irritable because she is bored, she starts to try to grab everything or put everything in her mouth, she starts to whinge, you look at the clock and realise that it takes so long to get ready, out the house and down here that it is almost time for baby to eat lunch . . . and you still have to get home. Before you know it, all the mommies are starting to pack up the bags and babies in order to head home!! We were seated a total of maybe 30 – 45 minutes!
Gone are the days of having a leisurely drink with friends, maybe followed by some tapas and perhaps another wine whilst watching the world pass you by. Everything is now scheduled; organised and controlled down to the last 20ml of milk that baby did not drink!! It is nothing like it was before, but then I never thought it would be!
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