Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #1
Thrupenny bits
Yes, I mean those two girly lumps stuck to the front of you that you’ve grown to know and love… from the early weeks of duff’ness, they develop their own personality altogether. Welcome to the anomaly that is alien pregnancy boobs.
You may notice at first that the straps of your favourite dark and lacy number suddenly dig into your shoulders and leave deep tracks where there never were before. Then the rest of the bra suddenly begins to tear under the strain of growth… they threaten to spill their contents on every bend-over… they create a weird muffin-effect that makes your chest look like it’s perpetually frowning. Time to go shopping. Not only for a new cup size, but a bigger (horror!) chest size too – we need to make room for all that rib-growth and baby weight, don’t we?! Katie Price, eat your heart out.
(Scroll to the end of the post to see an amazing pair of tits*)
High beams
Don’t even start me on the raspberry ripples… you could pad that bra with re-inforced titanium and those things will still find a way to poke through and stare at passers-by. Full beams, baby… get used to woolly sweaters. If the darkening of their colour doesn’t alarm you, their sudden sensitivity will… it’s like somebody came along one day and re-wired them completely. If you have fillings in your teeth, and have ever accidentally experienced the sudden shock voltage of chewing tin-foil accidentally, you’ll have an idea of what an brief brush with those nipps feels like. Electric shocks, when you least expect it… takes a lot of getting used to. This does of course also have its advantages, but that’s for a whole other post.
There are ways to ease the boob situation of course, that you don’t always find in books. If you don’t want to roll over and trap a nipple under your elbow while you sleep; thus making you hit notes that Kiri Te Kanawa herself would be jealous of, wear a bra to bed. This over-the-shoulder-alien-boulder-holder also helps to stop the formation of shuddersome stretch marks that never go away, and gives you something to put cabbage leaves into when things get overly hot and stuffy in there. Yep, a good bra is your best friend, and so is that lovely lady in the lingerie shop that will fit you out properly… when your thrupenny bits are in order, that’s a quarter of the battle of pregnancy sorted, right there. Oh – and stay away from tight white tee-shirts… because you just never know what might leak, or from where. That panic you feel when you realise that things have gotten so bad even your boobs need nappies – that’s normal. It’s not pretty, but somebody’s got to do it I guess.
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*…there’s nothing quite like the sight of nuts nestled between lovely tits.
God be with the days before Christianity
I’m reading ‘The Mists of Avalon’ right now, a book about Arthurian legend from his mother and his sister’s point of view. In them days, it was all about appeasing the Goddess and natural ritual and Bardic poetry and such other lovely stuff, as Christianity and convents slowly crept into their consciousness.
I can’t help but be slightly jealous at the constant mention of the Bealtaine fires. May first every year, everyone in the community douses the home-fires, then celebrates life and re-birth during a giant hooley by a huge fire. As part of the ritual, it’s required by the Goddess that random people should couple up… so named the unity of the Great Mother and her young horned God. Not an orgy, no no, just appreciation for the exuberant healing powers of spring. It’s not just at Bealtaine either… they get to do this every quarter of the year to celebrate the ever-changing stages of life and death. This is most likely the origins of bonfires at Hallowe’en, then? Can you imagine loads of skobies all dressed up as Gardaí and Zombies all shaggin’ away after their sugar rush because the Goddess wants them to?
Pity they didn’t have Youtube back then!
Tit for TAT
Gerry Ryan actually stopped talking about himself for long enough to let a very interesting subject through on his radio show this morning. That subject was male breastfeeding. Yes, that’s male lactation.
A young man named Ragnar Bengtsson, a Swedish father of a two year old boy has decided to conduct an experiment on himself to see if he can produce breastmilk in order to supply his future children. His theory is that if he stimulates his moobs on a three-hourly basis (playing havoc with his image at college), by December he should have stimulated enough hormones to produce milk.
This has been done before, apparently. In some cultures where powdered milk is unavailable, the death at birth of a baby’s mother has led its father to suckle the infant successfully to weaning stage. This fact amazes me… that throughout history, and in some parts of the world today, men are breastfeeding babies.
Three things are needed for boob-juice. Mammary glands, a Pituitary gland, and a hormone called Prolactin, normally produced by the Pituitary gland in the later stages of pregnancy. Men have (potentially) all of the above, given that they are born with the first two, the third requirement can in theory be stimulated into action without the help of artificial hormones.
I wish this guy the best of luck, without any fear of this idea taking off in Ireland whatsoever. Sweden’s male to female roles in the workplace are quite the reverse of what’s happening here, with 90% of women in the workforce and 16 months of paid maternity/paternity leave in most, if not all jobs in the country. This means that the concept of the ‘stay at home dad’ is far more liberal there. Children therefore bond with both male and female role models which can only be a healthy thing.
In Ireland however, men hold on to their well ‘ard image tightly while still wishing they were curled up in somebody’s womb. Most would happily pass a law against public breastfeeding, seeing it as an abomination, the destruction of the true purpose of breasts – the titty wank. It’s probably an unhealthy mindset, but I’m a sucker (sucker, gettit?) for butch. If I caught TAT suckling our future new-born child I fear I would grab that child and run as far away as possible from the beardy freak. But then, I’m not Swedish.
Having a child suckle a hairy boob, that’s an entirely eerie concept. Yes it produces skin-to-skin contact which is excellent for a baby’s psychological growth, but it somewhat blurs the idea of a nurturing mother, doesn’t it?
Then again, there are many women out there who don’t like the idea of breastfeeding for the fear it will saggify their breasts and muck up their nipple alignment which is devastatingly entirely true. Some don’t do it because they don’t have time, others are completely horrified with the idea. Isn’t it the right thing to do for the father of the baby to give breastfeeding a go if this is the case? Far healthier for the child, and daddy gets a taste of that wonderful bonding feeling that is a totally unique experience. It’s win-win, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?!?!?
PS… I’ve discovered via a link on the article’s web-page, that breast cancer among Swedish women has DOUBLED since the 1960′s. Coincidence or Kismet? I wonder…
The post in which K8 is told to bugger off
I went back to the Megalithic Tomb today, this time armed with bad-ass thorn resistant gardening gloves and a heady thirst for archaeology.
I worked hard for an hour, and was delighted to find a sapling Hawthorn tree, almost strangled completely with ivy. I freed it up to give it room to grow, and sent it some energy as you do… then began to work on the area around the entrance to the tomb to see if I could get inside.
A car pulled up on the road beside the field in which I was working.
“OI!!! What are you at?!” a woman in a silver car shouted from her driver’s seat. As I approached, she wound her window up to within four inches, as though I was about to attack her from the other side of a heavily barbed fence. She had a face on her like a Chihuahua chewing on an earwig.
“I’m very sorry to trespass… I…”
“You’re not trespassing!” she interrupted.
“I found this tomb over-run with brambles and thought I might take it upon myself to clean it up.” I smiled my prettiest smile.
“You have no business doing that!” she shrieked. “I’m sick of young ruffians coming in like they own the place and destroying everything, sick of it!!”
“I promise you, I’m no ruffian” I replied; “I used to be an archaeology student and this sort of thing fascinates me. I’m destroying nothing, only cleaning the place up. I’m very proud of it.”
“I’m proud of it too, so GO AWAY! When one comes in to wreck the place, the rest of them follow” she shouted.
“I didn’t mean to offend…”
“Well then GO AWAY” she shouted even louder. I began to get slightly pissed off.
“Look, if you don’t let me do this, then I can’t find a way to protect it. The Council could come in tomorrow and bulldoze the lot and we’d lose a seriously amazing piece of history.”
“It is protected!”
“I don’t believe it is… I looked on the archaeology information website and can’t find any record of it.”
“SO WHAT?!” she scowled.
“So… could you tell me how I can get permission to access the tomb to clean it up and protect it?”
“You can’t have permission!! GO AWAY!!” She smiled a demonic sort of smile and shut her window. End of conversation. I walked away, furious.
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What are the politics behind this? Does anybody know? If I’m not trespassing then who is she to tell me to leave?
I hope the tomb faeries break the pistons on her crappy little car. Stupid bint.
So close, yet so far.
Tomb raiding
I wrote a while ago (here) about my search for a Dolmen.
I failed this search for a very good reason; there is no Dolmen. There is instead a megalithic tomb, or *happy claps* possibly even a chambered grave. Thanks to the combined efforts of my dear old Dad, my neighbour, a website (what are the odds?!) and Google Earth, we found it.
Today, being the second day of our Irish summer, I decided to go and explore it. Yes, I have been given a myriad of household things to be done at Headrambles Manor, but… call me Ms Croft, the curiosity of ancient history got the better of me. Sorry Dad, the cesspit can wait.
Not much to look at, is it? Hidden in plain view by a thick blanket of raspberry brambles and nettles, the knarly looking Hawthorne tree should have been a major clue. My neighbour, before she moved away, wanted to visit this place at midnight on a full moon with me. I thought she was a bit touched for wanting to do so at the time if I’m quite honest, but today when I went to visit the tomb, I could feel what she was talking about. I felt like I was trespassing, dancing on somebody’s grave. It was not my place to explore… call me quirky, but I felt a very weird condensed sort of energy surround this place.
Armed with a pair of secateurs, hedge-clippers, gardening gloves and a ribbon, I attacked. No… wait… that sounds quite violent – of course I asked it for permission first. I’m not stupid. Just because I might not believe in something, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. 1,000 ancient Irish Druids can’t be wrong, I’m not about to go inviting faery curses upon my family, thank you very much.
This is the tomb after an hour’s worth of pulling brambles apart. The ribbon on the left tied to a branch is a gift, I thought it couldn’t do any harm. The wee hill in the background is Carrickgollogan, or Catty Gallagher, if you ever wondered how Katie Gallagher’s pub beside Bray’s Dart station got its name, now you know.
At one point, a very loud “MUUUERURURRR” sound from behind startled the Bejeezus out of me. Turns out I’d attracted an audience.
After two and a half hours I had to quit to collect Puppychild, but I’ll be back. Apart from all the embedded thorns which I’m having a lot of fun tweezing out, I consider myself extremely lucky to have such an unusual pile of rocks near my gaff. Cleaning them out and taking care of them is kind of nice in a painful sort of way and besides, you never know when the Council may sneak along on a dark night and bulldoze the lot… somebody needs to classify it and protect it. That’s me I suppose.
Parknasillogue Megalithic Tomb: After a haircut
My Bladder is taking the piss
I’m sure you’ve heard dodgy stories about toilets in Thailand. Yes, they are porcelain holes in the ground. That I can deal with. It’s the lack of toilet-tissue I have problems with. Because their sewer system can’t handle solid matter other than the obvious, they supply the user with a hose fixed to the wall beside the unit and the rest, my friends, is up to your hands and your imagination. A nation of drip-driers who most likely go commando? I thought it rude to ask.
That was all well and good until TAT and I visited a bamboo tattoo studio on our penultimate day and spent the whole day being tapped to death, but that’s for another post. The bog in that place was the weirdest of all. A tiny cubicle, no hose, no toilet paper, just a bricked-up shower cubicle, an enormous spider skulking the doorframe, and a huge batik wall hanging depicting Metallica crossing over through the doorways of hell. It was all very charming until I realised a day too late that this bathroom was also E-coli heaven.
Yes, poor K8 the Gr8 spent the entire 22 hour flight home with crossed legs and crossed eyebrows and curled toes, praying teary-eyed at regular intervals for the seat-belt sign to be switched off, and convincing perplexed airline staff that peeing during take-off and rough turbulence is easy-peasy. Bloody Nazis and their safety regimes.
So, other than the fact that it’s sunny in Ireland for a change and it’s a crime to spend time indoors on blogs, this here website has been quite quiet. Sorry about that. Normal stories of deep-fried maggots, strange tattoos and Ladyboys will resume shortly, as well as a wee anecdote about how I was propositioned by a lesbian hooker if you’re very very good.
In the meantime, here’s a dodgy photo just begging for a caption;
Not just an Irish Liquor
I vaguely remember ‘Carolan’ music when learning to play the violin all those years ago, but apart from that I drew a blank when it was suggested to me over the phone.
Wedding music. The thought freaked me out, man. Just think… all those specialist musicians out there waiting to screw you as soon as you mention the ‘W’ word, just because they’re handy with a few strings and a plec. Everyone I researched cost at least nine hundred quid. For an hour!!! We’re in the wrong job lads! But; happily, a friend piped up one day and suggested I ask her second-cousin’s brother in-law’s nephew who happens to play in Dan’s bar in Greystones of a Tuesday night. Apparently those fellas can do amazing things with Mandolins and flutes that would blow the acoustics right out of a church, so myself and TAT went to have a gander last night.
What an atmosphere! Dan’s is a tiny pub that looks like it’s the household pet belonging to The Beachhouse bar/restaurant next-door. It’s like as though somebody left it there by mistake, or maybe its neighbour partook in a course of steroids…Dan’s bar is a strange but beautiful place.
The group of lads consisted of two guitarists, a tin whistler, a mandolin player, a box-squeezer, and a very timid bodhrán player. That was before the Uileann pipe player happened by, bringing a Venezuelan chap with a Suzuki guitar (a cuatro?) and a very beautiful singing wife who stopped time with her songs about the moon. A chap wandered in towards the end, ordered a pint, and drank it while singing all fifty-nine verses of a pretty comedic Irish song, then buggered off again. The Accidental Terrorist and I were quare’n entertained, and discussed becoming part of the furniture there at some point in the future.
They played a few Carolan tunes for us to give us a taster for Churchy things to come, that might have sounded something like this:
Apparently Turlough O’Carolan was a blind itinerant Irish harper who lived from 1670-1738 and got an enormous thumbs-up from Mr. Vivaldi himself for his music composition. He wasn’t rated much as a musician by his peers, rather for his poetry. For example, he fell off the wagon once, and penned the following poem;
He’s a fool who give over the liquor,
It softens the skinflint at once,
It urges the slow coach on quicker,
Gives spirit and brains to the dunce.
The man who is dumb as a rule
Discovers a great deal to say,
While he who is bashful since Yule
Will talk in an amorous way.
It’s drink that uplifts the poltroon
To give battle in France and in Spain,
Now here is an end of my turn-
And fill me that bumper again!
Problem sorted! Thank God for Irish Trad, and for the fact that I don’t have to pay through the nose to see some young wan’s Aria on my wedding day. Now, to find a babysitter…
How to love thy neighbour's stretchmarks
If there’s one thing lately that irritates me more than an army of wasps at a picnic, it’s the loss of sisterhood in today’s society. Not that I’m a feminist but… (uh-oh…)
What women tend to do nowadays is wrap a compliment in an insult and get away with it scott-free. Much like these examples;
“Walk behind me, you’re a skinny bitch and you’re showing me up.”
“God your hair is gorgeous, I fucking hate you!”
“Your boobs are so perky today Mary, I hope you die in a horrible car accident.”
What would make for a really refreshing change, would be to overhear the following conversation;
“Howye Mary, I prayed for your sebaceous glands last night, I see it paid off!”…”Yeah I thought my hair was extra glossy today, thanks Aine!”
We’ve lost the knack of sisterly caring and support in this heavily patriarchal world, the ying and the yang are totally off kilter and instead of rallying our femininity together again, we wish cancers upon each other and that really, really sucks. Menses are hidden, menopausal women are left on their shelves, caesarean sections rule the day for a quick and easy birth instead of securing a happy and calm environment for mother and baby. We’ve been converted into cows… jealous, backbiting cows.
In the spirit of this, I would like to remind women who we used to be… Goddesses. (WITCH!! WITCH!! I hear you say? Yeah I wouldn’t blame you, for you’ve been conditioned that way.) I shudder to think of the 9 million women who were burned, drowned or commited suicide in defense of their sisterhood. This post is for them, and for you ladies out there who hate your bodies and hate your friends because of theirs.
Let me introduce you to the Goddesses who used to inhabit our souls before they were bet out of us:
Gaia; Knows that stretchmark creams are truly pointless.
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Hecate: Never could be arsed with the likes of Oil of Olay.
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Rhiannon: Knows that ‘pale and interesting’ far outweights St Tropez fakeness.
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Sappho: Born on the island of Lesbos and will kick seven shades out of you for slagging her about it.
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Yemaja: Wants you to tell her to her face that motherhood isn’t a real job.
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Baba Yaga; Wise beyond Botox
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Isis; Beyond asking if her bum looks big in this.
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Mary; Loves you with or without your Wonderbra.
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Of course there are some other Goddesses that should be included here, but maybe best celebrated in the privacy of one’s own home;
So go on out there and love your women. Wish blessings upon their belts and tell them you think their acne is cute. Sisterhood is dead. Long live sisterhood.
Two great inventions
On a personal level:
Community games. I’ve just discovered that once a week, parents from all over this locality empty their children into a field in the twilight hours under the watch of choirs of blackbirds and babies with chilly ears, for no apparent reason. Nobody organises it as such, it’s more like an underlying knowledge that parents have, like a school of fish changing direction in the same instant… they just know.
I just poured my child onto this field and watched as she ran eight laps, then did ten minutes of jumping jacks and five minutes of running around in circles before oozing herself back into the car and collapsing into a rosy-cheeked afterglow. Every child in the village did the same. Absolute. Genius.
On a global level:
Here is a youtube video that I just simply can’t put into words other than ‘I want one’.
It has a lot to do with Minority Report, something to do with painted fingernails, and is potentially the best invention I’ve ever seen. Imagine walking up to a complete stranger and seeing buzz-words projected onto their teeshirt-front in a tag-cloud describing their profession, their likes and dislikes, and their favourite type of cheese? Pranav Mistry is the genius behind ‘Sixth-Sense’… a gizmo that pulls google right out of the dark ages. All for the sweet cost of $350. Watch.
Happy Days
Ahhh, good times. Finally the Equinox has arrived and everything is on the up-and-up. Last year I wouldn’t have known this, but happily this year I have a quirky neighbour who is educating me in all things earth.
Apparently now is the time to plant things, that is once the new moon arrives. See, the moon not only has control over the tides, but also over underground water tables and other such funky unseen elements it would seem, so growth is far more prosperous as the moon is waxing.
Once the moon is full and begins to wane, that’s when you do your weeding, or bury that body you’ve been trying to get rid of.
I’m absolutely raging I planted my hash-plant seedlings last week, If only I’d known.
Don’t believe a word of what Kirk M tells you about the Egginox, by the way. Like a fool I tried to balance an egg on its tip and failed miserably. Suckered. That dude must have some seriously funky chickens.
Not a bit of it.
Also…
I’ve never been much of a fan of sport, but…
Isn’t it great that now the Irish can be known to excel at something other than excessive drinking? Woohoo!
