"She will be tall," ...

... says Dr. Cross, "like her mummy; look how long and lean she is!"
"She is perfect," says Dr. Cross, "what a happy contented little baby."
"Her hips are perfect, her reflexes are great, never mind the green poo, and what a lovely smile," says Dr. Cross, "a perfectly perfect little girl."
"How was birth?" asks Dr. Cross.
Now this is the fun bit of Tara's and my 6-week check up. It's that one thrilling moment when patient-doctor relationships are reversed and I get to shock the doctor, for a change: "Birth?" I say, "Oh that was great fun!"
We are officially through with pregnancy and the post partum period now, signed off as well and recovered by the GP (Dr. Cross is not scan-man, whom we see on 27/09 for 'a chat about your recent pregnancy').

This does not take the cold into account that I have so efficiently caught for both of us in my best bogof (buy one get one free) manner (and of course Tara hid any sort of symptom when we were at the clinic). I was not exactly best pleased when I went to bed the other night only to find that this most lovely of sights:


started snoring with two voices the second I turned my back. So Tara has her first cold, is a little cranky, so snuffly she grunts when asleep, and her little coughs are so tiny they are actually quite cute. Not that we would want her to keep them up for that reason, the happier baby sounds she makes at her mobile or parents are a lot cuter still.
Our having a cold or two does not mean, however, that we're only sitting at home on the sofa when we're not vising the doctor.
We have ventured out for an after work picknic with Jose in castle park that took over an hour because Tara did not drink her milk at the same pace as we our coffee. We have hung out in the park and on play grounds. And we even made it down to the supermarket with a sleeping Tara in her pram, made it through the supermarket with Tara at my breast, feeding under my shirt, and surprisingly even made it back home with a pram fuller of groceries than it was of baby. It had been my first shopping trip in months, so I just marched through the shop, regally pointing at 'that, that, some of these, and two of those' for Jose to pick up and buy for me, and fully relied on the storage miracles that can be worked on restricted space when there is a will. Jose obligingly made the miracle happen, but has since been referring to the experience as 'The Mistake'. I'm not fully sure whether he refers to using the pram as a grocery carrier, or to the presence of greedy mummy milky brains as such, and I won't ask either.