Jasmine Stalker-Firth

I bought a yoga cookbook when I was pregnant as I like yoga and I had cravings for chickpeas and lentils. Neil wasn’t sure they were cravings as apparently I eat mad things when not pregnant. Now he has finally joined me in my madness and yesterday made a mountain of yoga kitcheree: mung beans and brown rice. Apparently, kitcheree is nice to eat when you have been fasting. However, if you have been stuffing your face with chocolates and shortbread for weeks, then it doesn’t taste of much at all, I can tell you.

I made a banana nut pie and we had lots of slices as according to the yogis, bananas increase calmness and humility. It is hard to tell if we are calmer or not, even if Neil keeps buying big bunches of bananas from the fruit man at the end of the street, but we are less tired and getting into a routine. And it is good. Yesterday, it was one of our busy days: the usual dialysis, changing her PD dressing, and drawing up medicines. And we managed to squeeze in some cooking and football.

Jasmine loves watching football, it must be the movement. She also loves looking at herself in the mirror when we are washing her. We tend to wrap her in a towel and hold her over the sink so that there is no chance of getting her PD exit site wet. She leans back so that she can get a good look at herself in the mirror and smiles at what she sees. Neil says that she takes after me.

Jasmine no longer vomits through the night as we feed her 25mls per hour over 8 -9 hours. We all sleep well now and she only begins to vomit around 6am. The downside of this, is that she vomits more during the day, but it is easier to handle when you aren’t tired. The next step is to figure out a way of stopping her vomiting during the day. She tends not to sleep much either during the day because she sleeps all night. But even when she needs a nap during the day she will fight it so that she cries with exhaustion and irritation at 7pm when we connect her and the machine fills her up with fluid. I have been getting into bed early too since Neil forces me to and then runs in and shouts ‘Lights out’ and wrestles whatever I am reading out of my hands. It is great fun and we never stop giggling.

Jasmine’s mucus comes and goes. Our latest theory is that because she has a NG tube her body produces mucus to fight this foreign body which is stuck up her nose. It came out again yesterday and I had to repass it. This doesn’t get any easier but I am so glad that I do it and we can get it over with in a couple of minutes. Being in control of our day is so good. Last night her alarms went off on her dialysis machine every couple of hours so we are a bit tired today – it seems that we can’t control everything.

Anyway, specially for Barbara, her weight today is 4.5kgs and she was 58cms (or thereabouts) at her last clinic. They increased the amount of calcium she takes as she hasn’t enough at the moment to make her bones grow big and strong. I had to laugh at myself the other day as we were plotting her height on a graph and she is on the 2nd centile, which means that if there were 100 people in the room, there would only be one person smaller than her. I felt depressed about this until I realised that small person would be me. Viewed in this way, she is growing well.

This week has passed by in a blur of DIY as we are still making shoe racks. This latest one actually holds our shoes and has freed up space in our hallway to put the buggy.

On Wednesday we went to Canary Wharf. Jasmine loved the shiny buildings and it was nice and sunny. She also loves the tube and stares at everyone, who then feel obliged to say how lovely she is. Again, she is so like her mother, Neil says that I am always squeezing compliments out of people. I didn’t think I stared people down on the tube to get them, but perhaps I do. I have had many a compliment on the tube.

On Thursday the nurse came round to give Jasmine her epotein injection and then the curtain man came round. He is going to fit us with some curtain tracks in our bay window. I hope he does come back to fit them as I am afraid I was overcome with giggles about having corded curtain tracks and imagined standing by the cords on a morning and saying: “I now declare this pod bay open”, as I pull them open. You could tell that the man thought we were mad and was glad to leave, and that was before we showed him the curtains we have bought.

On Friday we went to an antiquarian book fair at Olympia. We kept Jasmine in her buggy as we didn’t want her vomiting on anything as there was a first edition of Jane Eyre for £95,000 and we got to see books signed by Dickens, Wilde, and Fleming. She was the star of the show as the youngest person there and took yet more admiration in her stride. Afterwards we went to the pub and had a quick shandy before braving the tube home. My mum told me to stop telling everyone that we go to the pub all the time as we sound like a pair of lushes, but you have got to grab your beer drinking opportunities when you can.

I have had a couple of people say that Jasmine’s chair looks like a potty (my mum included). It is hard to tell from the photo but it is really comfy and spongy and supports Jasmine really well, as it is ergonomically designed for babies so that they can learn to sit upright. I am laughing as I type this as I suppose it does look like a potty and have started to wonder what kind of nutter people think I am. Would I really buy an oversized potty to put my daughter in? Perhaps I might have done, if I’d thought of it.

I have to stop here as Neil has started to cook more mad food in the kitchen so Jasmine and I are off into the bathroom to admire ourselves and practice our surprised but joyful expressions for when Neil gives us buckwheat and seaweed burgers for lunch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.