It's Emma in a wig! 

Ye gads, it's hot out there.
I don't really do hot.
I'm too hot to go to the park, even, and the Elf is amusing herself by tipping clothes pegs onto the floor and eating them, and as long as she's happy..

I went to the pediatrician yesterday for the first time. She was nice, if a bit brusque; professional rather than charming.
"When did you move here?" she said
"August last year" I replied.
"And who has been looking after Emma in the meantime?"
"No-one."
"No-one?" (loud, shocked incredulous tone.)
" Umm, excuse, excuse, helpless gesture, please-don't-be-mean"
Then I said that she was a very healthy girl but that she didn't like drinking milk.
"She doesn't drink milk?"
Then she gave me a packet of milk flavouring powder by a very famous, very huge Swiss multinational (they don't need me to advertise for them, and if you want my opinion neither did she) and told me to try it. Fair enough, she had a valid point and she wants the best for my elf. Despite the couple of frissons above, I liked her.

The Elf quite liked the flavoured milk, but got bored after about 5 gulps. I saw this stuff in the supermarket today and it costs over 6 CHF (£3.00) for about 300g. Ouch.

My instinct is to not buy it. She loves cheese and yoghurt, and up til now I've been very happy just to give her plenty of these milk alternatives. But now I feel a bit angsty about whether I should be pushing the milk thing a bit more.

And there's another part of me that feels bonkers for worrying, that we are so lucky with everything we have available here and take for granted. If you happen to be a baby in South Sudan, you get fermented sorghum and that's pretty much it. I'm conscious that that sounds sanctimonious and guilt-inducing, but it's not intended to be either. It's only a statement of fact.

I'd also just like to remind you all that Mrs Principles here has just polished off the last of the Stroopwaffeln..

Language games

I can say some things in schwitzer deutsch:

"Bist mued?" Are you tired?
"Bist krotzelig?" Are you ticklish?
"Gruzig" Gross

all of which have their uses if you spend most of your life talking to a baby.

I did tell some friends of friends that the meal they had just cooked for us was "nicht gruzig."

I wonder now if that was appropriate.

We went to Bern on Saturday. It was like being in a different country. It was also my first real exposure to schwitzer deutsch, and I am still traumatised. 9 years ago I did a degree in German, so stick me in Germany and I can still just about get from A to B though not grammatically and lots of gesturing. Not so in Bern. We went into 2 restaurants, and both times I felt my brain short circuit as I tried to make my order a) because my brain is trying very hard to be in France and b) because I could only recognise about 1 word in 5 when anyone spoke """"German"""to me. Schwitzer deutsch is like hearing Germans speaking Welsh. So I just sat there like a fish, noiselessly opening and and shutting its mouth until the waiter asked me again what I wanted in English. Just as well, as that way I managed to avoid the tongue sausage (the regional specialty, mmm! mmm!) Still, it made me feel like a bit of a failure.

In Bern they are also big on bears. Pictures of bears everywhere, as well as actual bears in sunken stone enclosures on the edge of the old town. It doesn't look that uncomfortable in there - there are ponds and lots of greenery and a ball on a stick (like a medieval mace) for them to play with. But still, if I were a bear I think I would much rather be roaming the Rocky mountains, scaring the trekkers. It must be tedious having tourists pointing and dogs barking at you all day. I'm not a zoologist or anything, but I think they definitely looked bored.

Dear Blogger,
When we started out, we were so good together.
You gave me a forum to ramble unendingly about L'elf de la neige avec les cheveux blondes.
You were funky and blue, and your colours cheered me up.
You showed me how to post pictures, and that was a lot of fun. It still is.
It's so funny how we don't talk anymore.
Why d'you have to make everything so complicated?
How can you just leave me standing, alone in a world that's so cold?
We can't go on together with suspicious minds.

I posted a piece of code into my template that should let me have a link list. Getting to this point was arduous enough, and then it didn't work.

Someone please help me do thiis, using terms for someone very young and a bit simple.

Alternative careers

1. Chief chocolate taster, Lindt and Sprungli.
2. Chief duvet tester, Heals.
3. Manager, Tasting department, Gouda Gilda's Siroopwaffeln.
4. Dog walker. (No, really. I love walking dogs.)
5. TV reviewer. (Then we could get a TV.)

What shall I do?

I got a very nice email yesterday from my boss saying "hello, hope you're ok, oh yes,the conditions of your career break mean you have to do 3 paid weeks a year. Bye!"

Well if I hadn't been painting my toenails I would have dropped my strawberry daiquiri. I mean work? Work? Paid work, where you have to turn up and stuff? I think I've forgotten how it's done. Anyway, this reminder that although I don't get money from them, I am still technically someone's employee, has given me the jitters.

I loved my job. I loved working in a big, busy hospital with lots of people around, much too much work usually, but job satisfaction in spades. I really miss the very sociable nature of nursing, as it can be quite isolating being at home with a snow elf. And it would feel like a break; currently my day starts at 6-6.30am and finishes at 7pm, including weekends and night duty. The only difference is that Emma doesn't shout at me for being in my pyjamas at lunchtime, and on sunny afternoons we just sit in the park for a couple of hours while I read and she picks at the grass and chews it. I can't complain.

I'm just not sure I can face the travel. We've been back to the UK about five times now, and it's exhausting. Not just that, but each time I come back I have to re-adjust and remind myself that I live in Switzerland now and maybe I should invest a bit more in our lives here; make some more friends, explore some more, that kind of thing. Nor could I bear to leave my beautiful little creature for weeks at a time.

Should I resign? That would mean paying back a whole wodge of maternity pay, and closing the door on a job I genuinely enjoyed. Should I try and get a job here? Not sure my French is good enough. Should I just carry on, my snow elf and I against the world? I'm happy for now, but she already gets easily bored if it's just the two of us on our own for too long. So I've signed her up for playgroup, starting in August. And I'm not sure what I'll do with all those free afternoons, but pottering around the house isn't going to do it for me.

* fret fret fret*

Politics, Swiss style

A funny thing is happening around Lausanne. There are posters, everywhere, of a cartoon woman with her mouth open, screaming, and her hands covering her ears. There is a speech bubble that says "Schengen? Non!"

Schengen? What's Schengen?

Well, it's a joint agreement between so-called Schengen countries (i.e. the EU, mainly) on matters of border security, justice and migration issues. The Swiss are having a referendum on 5th of June on whether on not to be part of Schengen. The gun lobby are not happy bunnies, as this means waving ta-ta to their guns, in line with the EU's much stricter weapons legislation. The Left are twitchy about the centralised criminal database, and that people might use it to spy on ordinairy Joes instead. But whatever your politics, if you're a Swiss person, there is a debate to be had.

But why - here comes the rant - reduce all that to the simplest, stupidest scaremongering? A woman from a horror film screaming "Non!"? (Then again, maybe she'd just seen my Big Hair.) I got very annoyed by that "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" Conservative campaign, but at least in it they made statements about x or y where there was a 'because' implied. I didn't agree with them, but thanks for not treating me like a stupid person. Or at least not like a really stupid person.

Three things that have gone wrong today

1. Emma's outfit
..composed of a lilac matinee jacket with matching trousers, a miniature white polo shirt and pink shoes. She looks like she should be on a Saga golfing holiday in Florida.

2. Emma's lunch
..which was an undercooked poached egg on a bed of undercooked asparagus. I was trying to re-create the meal I had in a restaurant last night (clock that, we went out), but I should have left it to the professionals. She didn't eat it because I couldn't bring myself to offer her any. (I gave her bread and strawberries instead.)

3. My hair
..because I washed it. And now it is big. Big. If I leave it, the style is OK, but that's because it's stuck together with grease. Rock, hard place; you see?

This was our weekend

Thursday 0600: Emma wakes up, full of beans. So do her parents, less so.
0700-0900 Frantic packing, which included the following for Madame:
1 travel cot
1 baby sheet
1 baby sleeping bag
1 monkey
Other toys (loads)
4 tupperware containers, containing all manner of baby sludge
1 Emergency Snacks Box
1 baby back pack
1 snowsuit
5 vests
3 pairs trousers
2 pairs tights
3 tops
1 woolly cardigan (I should have brought two, this one became encrusted with bolognese within minutes of our arrival)
bath bits
nappies and wipes
Emergency Medical Supplies

Mother and Father bring:
some clothes.
money.

Mother bursts into tears.

1030 Set off, car bursting at the bodywork. Get stuck in traffic jam. Protracted screaming from GHSE. Mother placates with snacks. GHSE eats entire contents of Emergency Snacks Box within 10 minutes.

1230 Arrive at destination. Gasp at Alpine beauty. Ignore fact it's starting to spit.

1240 Freakishly drop mobile phone down very narrow gap between wall and window pane. Spend 15-20 minutes with coat hangers trying to get it out.

1400-1800 Watch La combat des reines. Our party descends on rare, rural cow fighting event, where black, horned, scary looking cows - all ladies, by the way- paw the ground, stare each other out a bit and then tussle, horns locked, until one of them backs off, a bit bruised and pride hurt. Meaner than tennis, less mean than bullfighting. The assembled crowd was made up of leather-skinned men smoking pipes and taking the whole thing extremely seriously. We looked as at home as Americans in Ly-ces-ter Square, with our cameras, our trainers, our 'jazzy' raincoats. ("Gahsh, this cow thing is neat!") A group of these pipe-smoking dudes played Alpine horns in the interval, which was very exciting, a bit like seeing an elephant in the wild. (Or not.)

Friday
0630 - 1000 Wake up. Potter. Tickle snow elf. Drink tea. Stare.
1015-1600 Go on hearty ramble with assembled party. Ignore spit and wind. Eat picnic as it starts to snow. "I-i-isn't this f-f-f-fun?" we remark to each other, like Brits do.
1600-2300 Watch DVDs. Hang out. Drink hot chocolate. Eat cold chocolate. Tickle snow elf. Stare.

Saturday
0715-0915 Run up a mountain with a friend (the Bern 16km is in 2 weeks). Get lost. Panic. Pray.
0915 Return to find anxious husband imagining raising Emma on his own.
1030-1600 More hearty rambling. More spit and wind. "Isn't the v-v-view b-b-beautiful?" we chime, our fingers frozen around our cheese sandwiches.
1600-2300. Watch DVDs. Hang out. etc etc

Sunday
0630-0900 Pack up, clean, pack up, clean, chuck Snow Elf 'neath the chin.
Go home.

In other words, it was a great success.

See you Sunday

Right, readers, over and out now for the next four days.

We're off to a chalet.

I will not be relaxing: I will be flaggelating myself for being too inept to organise a postal vote.

Please don't elect Michael Howard in my absence.

Or Robert Kilroy-Silk.

The Raisins Effect

"Recent studies have revealed that raisins significantly improve the psychological state of diminuative mammalian bipeds. Scientists studying the female Snowelfiga goldenhairiga have reported raisins decreased distress signals, such as high-pitched vocalising and lachrymosal activity. While the ingesting of raisins showed the most beneficial effects on mood and behaviour, even the rattling of the raisin pot and allowing the Snowelfiga to let the raisins run through her paws resulted in increased felicitousness. Further studies will examine the relationship between the so-called Raisins Effect and the Snowelfiga's symbiotic interactions with another species, Monkeus monkeus. PS No elves were harmed during the course of these investingations."

extract from Mammalian Elf and Fitness Magazine, 12, (1) 20.4 - 4.5 2005 pp11-14

The coach offers the team a drink