Dia del Deporte 2010

Our second annual Sports Day and picnic was today and while it didn't quite attract the crowds of last year's event, it was superb fun!

Another scorching day, with the temperature hovering around 34, found us lolling under shady trees in the beautiful Retiro. Rosie seemed very happy lying on her back checking out her surroundings, occasionally entertained by her father making strange faces at her.
Cesar turned up with a cool box, tunes, and the paper - perfect. Aboubacar and Ibrahima followed not long after with a football and snacks, with Jon and Ana joining us just as we were tucking into the salads and snacks - they'd brought bocadillos and disgusting sweets!
Ibrahima has a real soft spot for Rosie - his hermanita - and it appears she has one for him; she was totally comfortable being held by him and watching the scene.
I ran away with the first heat of the egg and spoon race - a steady hand and a steady pace saw me move through the field as the others went awry. In the second heat Cesar just pipped Ana to the line. However, for the second year running Aboubacar was our champion, winning a high-octane final in style.

Tennis and football followed, before everyone was whipped into playing a sort of Rounders/quick Cricket hybrid that was a lot of fun. Ibrahima top scored, but Ana turned out to have a demon throwing arm and took several smart catches.

We finally headed home at 5.30ish, just missing the rain as it came down - another tradition from last year's event!

The Battle of Sleepy Corner II By Kate

It seems it's a culturally specific thing to expect (and need) an unbroken sleep overnight totalling around eight hours. And that infants are expected to sleep unbroken for around 12 hours (or more) - often alone in their own rooms. Societies without these kind of expectations don't tend to report as many "baby sleep problems" as a result. Such problems, it seems, are more related to parental expectations. Which is all kind of reassuring, although it doesn't make me feel less knackered after yet another night of Rosie's multiple awakenings.

On the plus side, Rosie isn't a big cryer on the whole (fusser, yes) and whimpers rather than shouts when she wakes up. More often than not, she goes back to sleep fairly quickly once she's had a feed (or a comfort suck, or a modest libation, or a quick thirst-quencher). She mainly sleeps from around 7pm (give or take half an hour) until 0700 (ditto) - waking up at intervals that vary from up to 5 hours in the first part of the night (very rare, it's usually 3 or so) followed by every 45 mins - 2 hours, usually diminishing as the night moves into morning. She also fidgets a lot, which tends to indicate that she's either a) about to wake up or b) isn't getting back to sleep as easily as she (I) would like. On these occasions, combinations of dummy-tapping and tummy-patting usually help her relax, but it can take a while. I would love to learn how to do those things while still asleep - but it takes skill that I don't possess. Mind you, I have fallen asleep with my hand resting on Rosie's tummy once or twice. It's not that comfortable, even though she sleeps beside me in her baby nest. The blood has a tendency to drain down my arm, which is inconvenient.

So the negative side is that Rosie wakes up a minimum of 5 times a night and she is generally a lot faster at getting back to sleep than I am, so 5 hours of fragmented sleep (having retired by 9pm) is usually the most I can hope for.

Actually, I've discovered it's perfectly possible to function on that kind of sleep. After ten days of insomnia when I was getting perhaps 2 hours of broken sleep, I now consider 5 hours to be a fairly decent amount.

So what's to be done? Rosie has a bed-time routine and she naps okay during the day generally. She's breast-fed on demand and even when it's not a feed she particularly needs when she wakes up, it's still generally the fastest way to get her nodding off again. Experiments of not offering her milk and fobbing her off with a dummy have proved disastrous, so I'm inclined to go with the line of least resistance for now.

When will it change? Who knows. Some babies obligingly sleep through the night when they're only a few weeks old. Others do so to start with, then throw a curve ball at their pleased (smug) parents by ditching that habit in favour of waking up loads when they get a bit older. One theory is that babies tend to sleep through when they hit a certain weight (11lb, 13lb and 14lb have all been quoted to me) another is that they do so when they get to a certain age (6 months), yet another is when they start on solid food. All of these (apart from 11lb) are milestones Rosie has yet to reach. However, call me pessimistic, but I suspect Rosie will sleep for longer stretches in her own good time and I would be (very pleasantly) surprised if it's anytime soon.

Meantime, I've been ignoring the advice to sleep when Rosie sleeps during the day. Mostly I can't do it anyway and lay there feeling more stressed about the issue than I otherwise would. Instead I try and do something vaguely useful - some writing, or a bit of housework (the few bits Theo hasn't done). I actually feel better if I've achieved something for myself than if I'd managed a power nap. And I tell myself that when Rosie's bigger I will look back at this sleepless period and wonder at how quickly it passed. And finally, I remind myself that my sleep deprivation is not only shared by countless other parents, but it's also culturally specific. So that's okay, then.

Painting in Retiro

Sunday saw the annual speed painting festival in the Retiro Park. We popped along to enjoy the good weather, meet our artist friend Anne for a drink and check out the work in action.

Here are some of our favourites:
Naturally painting wasn't the only activity going on in the park - there was also a classical concert taking place, a water-borne demo, a vast array of hawkers and buskers, acrobats practising and dance troupes rehearsing.
Who needs festivals when Madrilenos lay on this kind of free entertainment every weekend?

Poppy

Naturally, Kate and I have been trying our hardest to tempt as many friends and family to come out to Madrid to visit as possible, dangling the carrot of picnics in the Retiro, beers on pavement cafes and guaranteed great weather as an added bribe.
So, naturally, when my bw (best-woman) Poppy finally made it over from Brussels it rained nearly the whole time. Typical. Still, who needs the sun, right? In fact it was just like old times - as if we were still in Bristol!!Pom was en route, in a strange kind of way, to Dublin for a conference and naturally we couldn't possibly send her off to Ireland without a hang-over. Cue two nights out on the town, sampling the vast array of night-life Madrid has on offer, from the sublime (Mercardo de San Miguel) to the ridiculous (LaTina Turner in La Latina) to the just plain crap (most of Calle Huertas). Tapas clubbing.
There was some non-beverage based cultural action - a trip to see Guernica, some sight-seeing, but mostly out non-drinking time was spent doing some serious catching up (we hadn't seen Poppy since we moved to Madrid), sharing some quality gossip, and gurgling at Rosie, who was a star as ever.

Next time Pom there will be sun, we promise!

How to humiliate yourself in public... just like that! - by Theo

Some months ago I decided to do a fun lesson for some of my younger students by basing it on a magic trick. This magic trick to be exact, whereby you guess the other person's chosen card by simply dealing out 21 cards in a certain way three times. As a trick it requires no skill or preparation, you just have to be able to follow the instructions (the point of the lesson - reading for gist); a six year old could do it.

This morning my former students Javier messaged me to ask if I wanted to come with him and his friend Lucia to a magic show in Ventas after work. Great! I hadn't seen Javi for a while and I've always enjoyed seeing magic; for me it's a win-win situation - when you can work out how they did the trick you feel pleased with yourself, and when you can't you just feel amazed.

The show turned out to be at a small magic school, some kind of end-of-term graduating ceremony for recent students, hosted by one of the teachers. The performance space was small, with barely twenty of us seated in three tiers. This kind of intimacy was necessary for the show as the majority of the performers were doing card tricks, with the 3 of hearts making repeated appearances. This may have been intended, as by the end it had become a kind of running joke.

Pretty much every performer - there were about 9 - asked for at least one volunteer to shuffle the deck, chose a card, check the table and so on, so it was kind of inevitable that eventually my turn to be called upon would come around.

In the end it was the compere who called me up and, after checking I understood Spanish, decided to score a cheap laugh by handing me the deck of cards and announcing "y ahora, de ingleterra, el magnifico Theo!" and retiring from the stage. Great.

I probably should have just sat down again. Or given him back the cards. He was really stretching the timing of his little joke a lot and the stage was becoming a vacuum. Then I remembered the class I had done. "Fine" I thought, "I'll do a trick." It was an easy trick - a six year old could follow the instructions. Except I didn't have the instructions.

As was kind of inevitable, I screwed up the trick. However, I like to think I did so with a sense of comic timing and I was certainly rewarded with laughter that I feel was, on the whole, with me rather than at me. The irony is that if the compere had called on Javi, who was sitting next to me, he would have actually got some magic - Javi is an excellent amateur magician. Anyway, I said to Javi I'd go with him another time, and this time I'm damn well going to practice in advance!

when is a chair not a chair? - by Theo

When is a chair not a chair? Well, when it's a baby gym of course! I came home from work one day to find that Kate had improvised a little baby gym for Rosie by tying toys to the underneath of one of the dining room chairs. Rosie then lies underneath on the lovely quilted blanket my Auntie Debbie made for her and, voila, baby gym. At first she just stared up in wonder, but after a few days she started to grasp the fact that if she bopped things with her hands they would move - it's been invaluable for keeping her entertained!

Incidentally, it's no longer as morbid as it looks - the bear is now hanging by it's foot rather than its neck after I pointed out how unsuitable it was for a baby!

Que casualidad! - by Theo

El mundo es muy pequena. Hoy, al guarderia en Calle Ibiza, encontramos una mujer que vivia abajo de nosotros en Bristol. Se llama Susie, nuestra vecina anterior, y lleva dos meses viviendo en Madrid con su marido y sus dos hijas en Arturio Soria, no lejos de nosotros. Que sopresa!

It's a small world. Today, at the playgroup in Calle Ibiza, we met a woman who used to live below us in Bristol. Her name is Susie, our old neighbour, and she's been living in Madrid for two months with her husband and two daughters in Arturo Soria, not far from us. What a surprise!

let's do lunch - by Theo

With going out for dinner pretty much off our social menu for the foreseeable future, we attempted to maintain our social life last week by 'doing' lunch.

We began by meeting the lovely Roger Tarry and his charming girlfriend Liz for an al fresco lunch in Plaza Santa Ana on Tuesday. They were over for few days on holiday and to visit various friends, all of whom teach English here, and had been thoroughly enjoying themselves. We know Roger from the Bristol music scene that Kate and I used to be involved in, and it was great to catch up and hear the latest gossip, both musical and otherwise.Thursday saw us heading to the Sticky Fingers anglo-playgroup in Calle Ibiza to meet up with our friend Kirsty and her daughter (and Rosie's fbf - future best friend) Emily. The playgroup was quite diverting, even though as Rosie isn't crawling yet she didn't get a huge amount out of it, and the other Mums (I was the only Dad) were very friendly and welcoming. Afterwards we headed back to Kirsty's lovely house in Rivas for lunch - which I cooked - and a swim for us adults while the babies napped.Sunday saw us yet again enjoying great company and a delicious meal with our Venezuelan friends David and Natalie at their flat - we had a originally been trying to maintain parity on the meals cooked front, but we think we now owe them three! Vichyssoise, Greek salad and a delicious pasta were on the menu, though Rosie was, as ever, the star of the show. She knew it too, beaming at our hosts and kicking away in beguiling fashion.
After all this food, thank goodness I'm getting some exercise these days!