ALIEN SMELLS

When I pick her up from one of the minders she smells of perfume. That's because her minder smokes a bit and tries to cover it up with heavy perfume. When I pick her up from the other minder she smells of fried food. Both smells remind me that I'm not giving her the best start. I put her in the bath as quickly as I can and it's only when she smells of Sainsbury's basics soap that I finally can pretend to myself that I'm a bona fide ordinary mummy.

BONDING OVER THE LOO

X and I were up all night chucking up in turns. It started with her doing the technicolour yawn at school, then she puked in the car, on the stairs, on the bed, in the bath, on the sheets, on her nightie, on the sheets, and so until she had regurgitated, spat, vomited and spewed everything lodged in every twist of her angry little tummy. The bile fizzed in the bowl. Poor thing. I watched her watching appalled as the steaming stuff streamed out of her mouth in an angry acid explosion that, over the night, gradually got clearer and clearer until I thought there could be no moisture left in her and her body would crumble to dust. It must be frightening when your body takes over so totally when you are little. But then X came out of the womb with her body fighting stuff. She's a little fighter.

I was quite proud of myself, given my hopeless fear of bodily things. I managed to actually remember that it was me supposed to be comforting her and to make my voice low and quietly reassuring rather than squeaking in panic and disgust. I told her it would be over soon - or ,in other words- lied. I handed tissues, got drinks, plumped pillows and restrained myself from rushing to phone NHS Direct. This is a big step towards bona fide motherhood for me, especially as she had been ill with a chest infection as well so there was that little fear that there was something bigger wrong.

Then I started to join in the puking party. Every time I had to run to the loo she ran too and watched me hanging over the loo, I couldn't stop her. Then she passed me the tissues and the water, I couldn't stop her, she seemed keen to join in the fun. 'That was a lot,' wasn't it,' she said peering into the bowl after one of my heave-ho's.

Strangely, it was weirdly quite a good experience; well, in retrospect, now the lingering nausea is abating. I've been feeling very disconnected to X recently. Maybe it's a common parental feeling but I sometimes wonder if it might be to do with her being adopted, I sometimes wonder if she feels that the bond isn't visceral- especially given the fact that she screamed at me in the street the other day," I hate you, I wish I had my tummy mummy."

When I was at university there was an arcane bonding game played by drunken biochemists after they had ingested huge quantities of their own homemade alcohol distilled in the lab. It was called the dwyll flonk, don't ask me why. It involved a bucket of sick and a mop and everyone standing in a circle and- I don't want to think about it, really. Lets just say it didn't seem much fun at all to me but they all seemed to really make a party out of it. I thought it must be a boy thing.

Last night, after a day in bed, in an exhausted fug of bile breathe and dehydrated - headache sleep we both finally emerged blinking, with griping tummies and chapped lips, and looked at each other over the chaos of towels and sick bowls and smiled and hugged.

'That was a nice day, wasn't it, mummy,' she said, snuggling up to me and making my aching tummy retch. 'Nice?' Well, I wouldn't go quite that far but as dwyll flonk puking parties go, it really couldn't have been better. In fact I'd go so far as to say she is a great person to have a puke with, very relaxed and with an almost amused fascination for it.

And another interesting thing - we may not have a visceral genetic connection but her sick looked just like mine. It looked just like tinned fruit salad. So I thought that must have been what she had for lunch. But mine did too - and I definitely haven't had tinned fruit salad since I was about her age. Maybe everyone's sick looks like tinned fruit salad and the whole carrot and tomato thing is a bit of a red herring? Uhghh- just made myself feel sick again thinking about herrings...

.

You have to be dinosaur friends to take children out together in London.

One of my bestest friends came to stay this weekend with two of her children. We used to work together as a creative team so we know each other really well. This helps when doing really, really challenging and demanding parenting things like a whole day out at a museum in London.

We went to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. There was a child meltdown on the tube on the way there, a child multi-wail in the picnic area about the horrific prospect of eating sandwiches, a child keening session about the fact we didn’t want to go upstairs, and a child group whimper at the fact my friend and I didn’t want to spend the entire time in the shop. Admittedly the shop boycott was a bit of a mummy double standard, given that my friend and I once spend several hundred dollars apiece in a single hours shop in Soho, NY.

In between these freak-outs my friend’s nine year old mercilessly interrogated a museum man about spiders in the precise and confident manner of Kirsty Wark doing a Newsnight piece on arachnids. I tried not to flinch as the husk of the hairy body of a massive spider was put in my hand and I learned the exact way that the living creature heaved it’s way out. I never knew that spiders (well, this one, anyway) breathed by holes in its skin. Apparently this is good as this is the reason that spiders cannot get as big as they could if they had lungs, but a few hundred years the atmosphere was richer in oxygen and the spiders were therefore much, much bigger. I decided that the digital world may possibly be a small price to pay for the lack of ginormous hairy spiders. It’s a close call…

Meanwhile the four year olds spent the afternoon rigorously investigating the grating on the floor and the museum lighting system.

“Well, at least they’re showing interest in their environment,” said my friend, as we dragged them away. But then she was the one that said that even said it was good when we were being made redundant so I never listen to her when she's being so glass totally ridiculously brimming over when it is clearly not even half full. Then we dragged them all off for a melt-down on the way home on the tube.

The Pantone Colour of the Year 2011 is pink. Well, Pantone call it honeysuckle but that’s just being fancy, isn’t it. Apparently last year’s bright Turquoise (Pantone 15-5519) reflected the need to get away from the grey of global recession and this year’s Pink (Honeysuckle) reflects a community-style spirit of making the most of things, rolling up your sleeves and just getting on with it. Or so say the trend- setters. Though we all know what the cool-hunter, marketing- guru ,colour-designer at Pantone really did was go to work after dressing their three year old daughter and just couldn’t get the riot of Barbara Cartland shades out of their head when they started work on the grey ‘what colour can we dream up for this year?’ brief.

I’m done with being fed up with the marketing tyranny of pink everything for girls (both little and big), not to mention metrosexual and homosexual men. Which pretty much means everyone in the world who isn’t Jeremy Clarkson or the Olympic shot-putting team. Like Pantone, I’m embracing it. Pink, that is - not the Olympic shot-putting team.

This old litter attendant is ON STRIKE.

There’s nothing to make a person feel more Methuselah-like than a bad back. I’ve been walking around like an old hag, clutching my gnarled spine. The pain every time I bend has made me realise just how many bits of pink plastic I pick up every day. Things will have to change: by hook or by crooked walking stick, X will be trained to pick up her own pink dross.

I used to live in a fairly neat house. I remember when my social worker came to check out the house for suitability for me to be approved to adopt. “Not very child-friendly is it?’ she said disapprovingly, as she scanned my white-walled, newly-shelved, tenant-enticing styling. “There’d be something a bit weird about a spinster without even a boyfriend or state approval to have a child having a house all set up for a baby,’ I seethed – inwardly, of course; I never dared to disagree with the statuesque woman whom I sincerely hoped one day might morph a stork.

I should have seen the writing on the newly wallpapered walls the moment X crawled into the house. After I’d only had her for about a fortnight the architect-designer, who’d helped with my kitchen extension, came over to the house to take some snaps for his portfolio. ” Babies and minimalism don’t really go together, do they?’ he said mildly critical, as he surveyed the 3d version of his computer-aided design accessorised with baby bric -a –brac. I smiled my new smug-mummy smile. I totally knew he was totally wrong and that his boringly perfect design was totally improved by a few bright wooden toys. Just look at Elle Deco, there’s always some vintage wooden horse rocking on the real stone floor. Anyway, we didn’t litter, we artfully scattered. Totally different.

Now things aren’t scattered, artfully or otherwise; they’re definitely littered. Kiddie litter is everywhere. You know the way that little bits of white cat litter kicks into every nook and crevice? Kiddie litter is far worse because it’s not organic. The bits of pink plastic do not ever silt naturally into the floorboards. The older she gets the worse it gets. Baby toys come in manageable wooden lumps that encourage almost OCD neatness in children, rings that stack in size, shapes that post into boxes. Toys to spread the wings of the imagination also spread all over the house. Bubble-wrapped packages spill forth multiplicities of homeless design accessories: little gold phones, miniscule plastic Manolos, tiny hairbrushes. Even the accessories have accessories: the little pink doggie with it’s little pink basket and hairbrush. Where will it end?

Well, now I can’t pick it all up and shove it all into the pink dolls-house. I literally can’t get down to floor level without clutching onto chairs and doing heavyweight lifting manoeuvers just to hoist my heavyweight bottom up again. Finally X has been picking her own litter up and all I’ve been doing is heavyweight bellowing. She’s doing quite well, but I think it’s telling on her. She actually asked me how my back was this morning.

Four!

She's so proud of being four and so angry when her friend teases her for only being three - especially now it isn't true.

Fancy being proud of getting older, yearning for it, glorifying in being a big girl. Why am I depressed to think about getting older? When did I stop being proud of another year? I remember not wanting to be nine and stopping eating because I didn't want to be a teenager. I was probably much younger than many others in that way. In Japan they revere the old, or is that just a myth? And does that stop the old being depressed about getting older?

Is innocence the lack of fear of death? When do children realise they will die one day? X knows the word 'kill' but I don't know if she really knows what it means. I'm pretty sure that she doesn't. No wonder getting older seems like getting better. It's only after a million skincare ads have told you how fabulous it is to wind back time that

you get the idea that backwards is better.

She went to see her half sister yesterday. She fell twice and hurt a different knee each time, racing to catch her up. Her older sister can read. Her older sister is taller and more confident and can climb higher. Her older sister does not spill her hot chocolate. Her older half sister is a whole year and a half older. Why wouldn't a little girl want to be a big girl and do big things?

Why shouldn't I still want to get a year older and do more things? There are surely plenty of people older than me doing great aspirational things, surely? Beyond Elton and David, that is....

It must be nature because it isn't nurture.

Silence for too long from the bathroom.

'What are you doing?"

"Cleaning the bath. It really needs it!"

There she was, in the bath, happily cleaning the tide mark with our facecloth.

I can't think where she learned that from - I don't think she's seen me do it that often and I don't even think that Joyce, our cleaning lady, does it that much either....

Maybe all little girl's just love to clean - when they are four.