At least there’s one thing I can’t feel guilty about

Le Sproglette has hit nine-months of age. She’s sitting up (as of about three weeks ago), she’s crawling (as of about three and a half weeks ago), and she’s eating lumpy food (lumpy food for babies = jumpy nerves for mum).

I haven’t had her weighed lately, but judging by her continued chubbiness in the leg department, I’d say she’s continuing nicely along the 50th percentile she’s made her home. (Except her head. It’s 97th percentile). (Brainy little thing). (While I’m at it with the head thing, message to Zara: your head holes need to be bigger. Obviously Spanish kids have small heads).

But, she doesn’t have teeth yet. And it’s totally, 100 per cent not my fault.

So, one thing I didn’t expect to experience, after all my years of babysitting and generally hanging out with the neices and nephews (both blood and surrogate), is parental guilt/paranoia. As a parent, I feel guilty about almost everything. And if there’s something I don’t feel guilty about, I’m paranoid about it instead.

My brain works along these lines:

“Oh, I feel bad because we’ve been living in a hotel for the past three weeks. Le Sprogletter should be eating a four course meal with a knife and fork by now, according to the baby books, so I’ll make her up some mashed carrot and sweet potato.

“Uh oh, what if the last person who cleaned the oven left some of that evil oven cleaner residue in there? It will poison Le Sproglette. I’d better run a cloth over it to make sure. Shucks, that took an hour; she’s really hungry now, I’ll just give her some food from a jar and make her home-made food while she naps.

“Cool, I have a blender to blend some home-made chicken in, because the baby really needs her vitamin B12, in fact, she’s probably going to be the dumbest kid in the class when she’s older becaue I’ve still not given her meat. But the blender’s been in storage for the past three years, and there is what looks like a rusty washer under the blade. It’s brown, but there’s no rust coming off when I rub it, so I’ll blend it up… Oh, looks great, tastes great!

“I’m going to give her some of that blended rusty chicken for dinner, even though I’m sure there’s no rust in it. Here we go, one spoonful, two spoonfuls… ugh, what’s that? It’s looks like either a tiny bit of tendon from the chicken, or a bit of rubber. What if the blender has leaked rubber into the food? It’s been in storage for three years, after all. What if I’m feeding Le Sproglette rubber? Oh my god, I can’t feed her this. I’m going to put it back in the fridge while I ponder this dilemma and feed her some food from a jar.

“At least she got two spoonfuls of vitamin B12, albeit with rubber….”

And continue as such, ad nauseum. It’s pretty exhausting*. Actually, I have seen a couple of doctors about this inner monologue problem (alright, one of those doctors was a quack in Ukraine, but not from Ukraine), and one says I have PND, while the other is in the midst of diagnosing me post-natal thyroiditis (you need to have two blood tests a month apart).

But bollocks to the medical profession, I simply put my problems down to my ingrained-from-birth Catholic Guilt. (The baptismal font water is two-parts water, one-part pure unadulterated Guilt of the Catholic variety).

So, back to the one milestone Le Sproglette just doesn’t seem close to reaching yet. Her teeth. She has none. She doesn’t even have any lumps where teetch should be. She’s a toothless wonder with a big round face, and even though I have fleeting thoughts that perhaps there’s something wrong with her teeth, I know this is not thing I can’t blame myself for. Or haven’t found a way to, yet…

*To put it mildly.