Ameli has really been enjoying many firsts the last couple of days!  Isn’t it sad, in its own way, that we can experience so many new things in such a short space of time, and yet we don’t remember any of the emotions we felt at these experiences? Imagine the awe involved in moving from the confines of the womb to the clear blue skies of the great outdoors, or the sensation of hot and cold after the steady temperateness of their internal world? How could that not fill you with awe? And yet we don’t remember any of it! Is it any wonder that babies sleep so much, what with everything they have to process from the moment they’re born? It would exhaust the best of us!

First time on a bus

This morning,  Ameli had her first trip on a bus. She was a very unhappy, possibly hungry little girl, but I had a schedule to keep to get her to the embassy, so decided to feed her on the bus.  She whimpered in her extra special ‘sorry for myself’ voice until the big red bus pulled up. Then she stared, wide eyed for the entire 30 minute journey, totally disinterested in milk or mommy, at all the people and the beeping door!

Upon arrival at Trafalgar Square she promptly fell asleep against Mommy’s chest as we walked towards our destination and just as promptly woke up the moment we stopped to stand in line for our turn. Fortunately I had expressed some milk in to a bottle, which she devoured with her champion appetite!  Twenty minutes of queuing later, Ameli’s first time on South African soil (albeit there was no actual soil anywhere on the marble flooring) was rather short lived, as it turned out that Martin also had to sign the forms they handed me at the front desk.  So, back to the bus stop and back on the bus and Ameli again was so excited by this bus business I couldn’t even persuade her to sleep!

Back home, I quickly made a pudding I’d promised a friend for her birthday, and then, having changed my little lady out of a nappy explosion in to a very pretty dress that I myself wore as a child, piled Ameli in to the car. This is her first time wearing a dress, and I thought she

Smiling in my pretty dress

looked ever so pretty. We drove to one of the other sites of my old workplace, (where my friend still works) and she screamed all the way. I promised her that we would just drop off the pudding and go back home so she could catch up on the sleep she so obviously needed after the morning’s exertions and excitements.  I got out the car, picked her up, at which point she stopped crying and decided I wouldn’t need her nappy bag.  Well, this is one of those less pleasant firsts that as humans we all experience at some point or other, and I’m just pleased it happened on breast milk.  Ameli made a funny sound, sort of like a gulp and a gag and a squeal all at once, and then threw up in not one, not two, but three large fountain -like spurts.  All the way down her pretty dress, my blue blouse, my neck and back.  So there I was in the parking lot of my old work trying to clean myself with a muslin, and yanking out wet wipe after wet wipe to clean her up. Of course, by now she’s crying again, because really, who likes lying in the front seat of a car, covered in their own vomit?

Well, I managed to get us both to some state of respectability and took her inside where she was fawned over, fussed over and I just nodded and smiled when person after person told me how precious and cute and well behaved, quiet and dainty my squawking, screaming, vomiting little girl is!

She’s finally asleep and I am going to have a shower. I think I still have baby sick in my ear.

3 Comments

A Plethora of Firsts

  1. Oh how I love this entry My Friend! Very comical in all of it’s reality and I can just see you in the parking lot wondering, “What’s next?”, as you clean up your Pretty Princess!

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