On coping with two. And voting.

I am living a life of extremes. At 11am this morning I was sweatily lugging a screaming baby round the front room, still in pyjamas with my bra undone while HackneyChild pooed his pants, feeling like rubbish because I couldn't cope with two while mothers everywhere seem to manage OK. By 2pm, having taken them both to the park and voted, I was chowing down on glamourous cupcakes and coffee in the garden of our road's new trendy bakery feeling like a model family. If anyone had seen us then they wouldn't have thought that three hours ago I was the picture of not coping. I try to bear this in mind when I see mums looking like they are coping really well and when I am not.

The fact that Hackney_bloke works from home is a huge help though, I don't know how I would manage otherwise. People say that mums are very judgemental of each other but personally being a mum has made me much less so in many ways - anyone who has a baby and has managed to keep it alive and themselves relatively functional  is doing well in my view, and anyone who is a single mum or whose partner is away a lot I bow down to in awed admiration.

Yeah, voting - I enjoy it even if the result is likely to depress me. (Nationally I mean - I think Hackney will stay Labour). Personally I would vote for any party that promised to fund research into colic and pledged that under their government all babies would sleep through the night, but failing that I still think Sure Start is a Very Good Thing and so my vote is still red. HackneyChild spent the morning thinking we were going in "a boat" and after I had disabused him kept asking "What is vote? Where is vote?". Also this morning I discovered that both baby and child "enjoy" (ie one stops screaming temporarily and the other says "again. again")  The Nutcracker Suite, which is nice, even though we had to listen to the march over and over.