AND SUMMER SAILED AWAY…CONVERSATIONS WITH LOUISE 2

Oh what a fluster we were in to make preparations for the trio from Brussels. Weeks before their arrival, we went online and searched for baby furniture to prepare for Louise’s stay. I suggested to Annie over the phone that they could sleep in the guest room on the second floor and I could set up her old room, next to ours on the first floor, for Louise. Afterall, Louise had her own room in their place. But it was met with a firm…`No!’ Louise was to sleep with her parents. So Yiannis and I sat down, looked at each other and realized that we had to buy two cots for the baby…one for night time use on the second floor and another for daytime use on the ground floor where the family congregated and bustled about. We ordered two foldable cots…very convenient indeed… with mattresses to go with them. The next thing to get was the baby relax with some musical toys hanging from it and a car seat.

Then as the big day drew nearer, I nipped in and out of baby shops and bought other items…a baby bath with a reindeer and an Xmas tree stamped on it, in the midst of a July heat wave…a leftover from a Christmas sale…some pink sheets, a baby mat with various toys attached to it…soft animals which she could tug at…a rubber horseshoe which she could chew on with her toothless gums and a noisy rattle. For good measure I bought a few more hanging toys for her cot that tinkled some lullabies and chimed out some tunes and a strange looking animal that when pulled, rattled and shivered its way up. Then there were other bits and bops…rubbery bowls and rubbery spoons and great big packs of nappies and wipes for delicate bottoms and then I went completely mad and flitted around the shops like a moth to a flame and snatched up all sorts of baby clothes…just in case.

Two days before their arrival, the cots came and we had to assemble them. They were made in China and Yiannis couldn’t understand the instructions in English and thrust the booklet in my hands and asked me to translate. At that point I was sure dementia had set in…I couldn’t match the diagrams to the instructions. Through trial and error we managed to assemble them but couldn’t make them stand up. They kept collapsing in on us while we tried to click them in and it was such a hot muggy day and rivulets of perspiration were running down our brows and the resident engineer was getting angrier by the minute and issued threats through his clenched teeth…`Just wait and see I’ll get a hammer and knock the whole bl..dy thing in.’ And all the while I searched frantically for instructions on You Tube and… out popped a video…and voila!…three simple steps. After that we needed some sustenance…a shot of whisky and some nuts to crunch away the excess energy.

The big day arrived…Saturday 9 July. The house was fragrant with freshly washed curtains and surfaces gleaming and polished and baby cots with crisp pink sheets scented and stretched and tucked in with not a crease in them and the dangling birds and butterflies waiting to croon out their numbers. At the airport we craned our necks and peered through the gaps between other heads and then waved frantically. Louise looked at us in a daze and then she frowned. When we got home we placed her in the downstairs cot to get a bit of a shut eye while we had dinner. She kept looking at the ceiling and shifting her gaze to the walls in a kind of wonderment. I then pulled the cord on the Caribbean looking parrot with its brilliant splashes and prints of fuchsia and turquoise blue and island sunshine yellow and a great big black beak and it rustled up a jazzy melody…but fast forward, like it was impatient to get it over with…and Louise’s big eyes darted towards it and she flashed the bird and then me her fabulous smile.

Alas, things didn’t go that smoothly. Annie had come all the way from Brussels, dragging along with her, besides other things… a sore throat and a temperature. The couple recounted how it came to pass with differing versions of the story. Annie started, looking at Laurent accusingly…`You brought it from work and passed it to the baby and…’…`No! SHE [meaning the defenceless baby, looking on innocently] picked it up from the nursery and passed it on to me…’ said he. What came out of all that was that the mother hunkered down in her old room for recuperation and father and baby retreated upstairs. Then Yiannis and I slipped into our old role as Annie’s parents. Even when we thought she had flown the nest, she always came back trailing some invisible threads from bygone years that insidiously wrapped themselves around us in a tenacious grip. Can you ever let go of your children? The bottom line is…NO! Annie in her old room…ill…sucked us back into the past of worrying and fretting. We ran around her like wind-up toys…fetching our old family doctor, a ghost from the past, then dashing in and out of her room with herbal teas that Yiannis had picked and brewed himself, a couple of biscuits to munch on, a huge jug of water, cool compresses for her forehead and so on and so forth until we drove her round the bend and up to the top floor to husband and baby. Shortly afterwards, Yiannis and I were felled down like trees. We had a tummy bug…and Annie now well and chirpy, exclaimed…`Ah that’s how it started for us…’ He and I exchanged glances and wondered how it was going to end for us…and then we snorted out a laughter or two…and then it rippled out and shook us from head to toe…because there was little else to do but submit…as the wise men say…to the forces beyond us…to the master puppeteer in the sky. But the Greeks have another saying…` Ola pernane!’…Everything passes…and so it did.

Then the couple announced that they needed a holiday…some time to themselves…presumably away from Miss Innocent. Yiannis and I encouraged them to go…`YES!!! GO GO GO!!!’ I rubbed my hands together. I would have all the time in the world to start Miss Innocent aka Louise on some nursery rhymes and songs and stories interspersed with conversations here and there and wheel her around in her pram to enjoy the trees and flowers and the splashes of sunshine and sights and sounds. Before they left, they brought her cot down to Annie’s old room and casually mentioned that they might extend their holiday…from four days to…who knows how many.

DAY 1…Little Sunshine was full of smiles and laughter. She found Yiannis especially amusing…could have been his moustache. Anyway work had to start immediately after breakfast. Besides ablutions…bath, washes in the wash basin after every nappy change and slapping cream on sensitive bottom, this five and a half month old infant screamed and howled when she was hungry and as I approached her with the bottle in a panic and tried to hold her in a comfortable position…more for me than her…she grabbed the bottle and shoved it in her mouth with such determination and strength I didn’t know babies possessed…or at least I’d forgotten. The mother texted and asked if I had given her some solids. I ran into the garden, picked a courgette, boiled it with a potato, blended them and…poised the spoon over her mouth…but she moved left and right and the mushy stuff got smeared on her chubby cheeks and I went left and right and finally pushed some into her mouth. She appeared shocked then scrunched up her face and blew it out with bubbles and everything and spattered her face and clothes with it and…SMILED. Ablutions all over again. No time for entertainment.

DAY 2…Ablutions  were pushed to later in the afternoon. First the morning feed…Louise is a very expressive eater…she sucks and grunts and heaves and sucks and grunts and heaves and then burps loudly. Then it was school time…nursery rhymes from You Tube…The wheels of the bus go round and round…Hickory dickory dock the mouse went up the clock…Ding dong bell pussy in the well…I sang along to them and Louise opened her eyes wide and looked at me and then they threw in some modern renditions which I fumbled through and Louise started turning in her chair and babbling loudly and straining against the belt…she was belted down…and then she looked at me straight in the eye and went…`eeeeeeeeeee’ a sharp high-pitched glass shattering scream…` Ok! OK! Time to take a nap now.’ I placed her in the downstairs cot and pulled on the crazy bird that went…ting ting ting ting …fast and furiously and Louise stuck her two middle fingers in her mouth…she had rejected the thumb and soother a long time ago…and I left her to it. Later when her mother texted…`Any solids?’…I promptly replied…`Yes, orange juice.’…I didn’t mention that she had spat it out and then I proceeded to feed her with a spoon, the rubbery one which she chewed on and ingested a bit of the juice and the rest dribbled down her chin.

DAY 3…I really needed to get some groceries. I struggled with all the belts and moon shaped buckles in the pram, which were supposed to slip in easily and go click but…resisted my attempts. But to cut a long story short, after a lot of fumbling, turning the buckles this way and that, I had decided to use whatever brain I had left, matched the shapes and clicked them in. Louise was delighted to be taken out and when we reached the grocer’s, everyone ooh-ed and ahh-ed because of the stories I had fed them with. Louise’s eyes were wide with astonishment with not a trace of a smile which she reserved only for me…`Ahh look at that! She only smiles at her grandma!…I beamed with pride and forgot some of the groceries. At least I got her beetroot, the solid that her mother would ask me about. Did she eat it?… NO!…She shivered, made a face as if to say…`Nasty stuff this!’… and spat it out. Then later on she demonstrated her language skills. She had picked up a new word!…`Adaaa Adaaa’…It must have been all the stimulation she had received under my supervision. We had a wonderful meaningful conversation…`Adaa Adaa?…I went…and she answered in the affirmative…`Adaa Adaa.’ It covers anything you want to say. She could utter it in different intonations, lengths and pitches and once when she got angry because she couldn’t wriggle out of her chair, she growled out a protest…ADAAAA!!!…ADAAA!!!’ Later in the afternoon…surprise surprise…her parents came back. I was relieved because by then my back was stiff and one knee wobbled. They missed little Miss Adaa Adaa… picked her up and played with her and come bedtime… left her in Annie’s old bedroom with no talk of taking her back upstairs.

The following week was the last week which descended upon us swiftly. What about the dining we had talked about…the parrot fish that Annie was craving for at this lovely place by the water, with a view of the lighthouse and the twinkling lights of the port, where the waiters were so courteous and the sommelier never combed her hair…and the place on the mountains with traditional Greek cuisine under a trellis of vine leaves and bunches of hanging grapes and where you had to shoo away the summer wasps…and there was this place and that…Well, we did it all and Louise sometimes behaved and other times not. Then on Friday evening, the day before they left, we strolled to the Japanese restaurant in a warm summer night under a star studded sky. It’s a gourmet’s delight in the narrow alleys of the old town, where jazz melodies in silken voices wrapped themselves around you and where the lights were strung above like lanterns and you sat outside and watched holiday makers dressed in browned skin and bits of clothing, saunter by in groups and couples. Louise wanted to sit at the table with us and so she did on her mother’s and then father’s knee. She banged on the table and tried to grab the food. She ended up tasting a pinprick of wasabi…and screamed blue murder…had a drop of soy sauce to sweeten her tongue and finished off with a slick of avocado cream…` After the wasabi she’ll eat anything’ said her father. Yiannis and I were silent. We exchanged glances and muttered…`The poor baby.’ When we got back Annie plopped her on Yiannis’s  knee and went off to prepare her milk. We heard him shout…`Something hot is spreading on my trousers!’…Well someone hadn’t fastened on her nappies well and number one ran down her legs and left her grandpa something to remember her by.

The next evening they flew off to Brussels. Yiannis and I drove home in silence under the sinking sun. When we got home, we cleared and stored away everything and got back to watering our thirsty plants . After that, we sat in front of the TV and talked about how old she’d be the next time we saw her, recollected the wonderful moments and sighed. Then we decided to indulge and ordered a pepperoni pizza and searched through the Net for holiday getaways… as summer was slipping away fast.

So till the next time…Adaa Adaa!