I'm No Expert - a Blog on Motherhood and Life in General

Yesterday a friend’s baby turned one year old. I went to visit them today with some presents. As I looked at Cecilia my heart swelled, such a beautiful little girl! She was smiling cheekily and doing all kinds of things that one year olds do – pulling to stand, attempting to stand on her own, sticking everything into her mouth. I just wanted to scoop her up into my arms and give her a big cuddle. But I couldn’t. I was looking at Cecilia through the window of her room at the oncology ward of Krakow’s children’s hospital. She recently completed her third round of chemotherapy in preparation for a bone marrow transplant. Tragically, Cecilia is suffering from infant leukemia and has been living at the hospital for the last four months. “It’s not fair, is it?” Cecilia’s mum asked me. All I could do was nod in agreement. It is not fair. It is wrong. Downright wrong, that this is happening to Cecilia and her family. To anyone in fact. But it is happening. It wasn’t easy for me to go to th...

In response to a reader’s comment on my last piece – I certainly didn’t mean that women who don’t have 100% natural births are worth less!! This was a reflection of my personal view on my births. Like many first-time mothers, I was so scared of giving birth that I let my doctor convince me I have to have an epidural. Whilst the pain from the oxytocin was awful, and the epidural magically swept it away, I ended up having a very easy and fast labour regardless, which made me keen to try an unmedicated birth the second time. Following my two experiences I like to let women know (especially those giving birth first time around) that the epidural is a fantastic option if you feel you need it. However, I am quite against convincing women to choose before they are in labour. I am also against denying a woman an epidural if she feels she needs one, as I have heard some Polish hospitals like to do. In my second pregnancy I attended the same antenatal yoga course as I had with Karolinka. The...

I know what you’re thinking, that I’m going to write about how children want to be independent and tend to get frustrated when we want to help them do something. No. I’m not talking about children here, but us mothers. A couple of days ago, as I left the café I had been enjoying dessert at with my stepson and his friends, I blurted out that I am busy because I have a fire engine birthday cake to make that evening. Filip’s young friend was surprised, “Why don’t you just order one?” she asked. I thought about it for a moment (horrified by her suggestion), and quickly said: “It’s a mother’s ambition thing, one day you’ll understand.” That evening, despite feeling sick obviously coming down with some sort of bug, I managed to get the kids involved in helping mix and bake the cake (after Googling “easy chocolate cake recipes”). While the cake cooled, I put the kids to bed and edited 10 or so pages of text before my hard drive crashed. Luckily I managed to email what I had done first –...

Easter is coming up and I noticed a poster around town with a man covered in blood called Mysteria Paschalis or some such. It reminded me of when, at Easter time last year, K and I would regularly take the tram to preschool instead of driving, and the trams featured posters with Mary holding a very bloody sheet. Soon enough, my daughter started to get interested in them. Who was the woman with the dirty sheet? What was it on the sheet? Hmmm. I explained that she was Jesus' mother, and the sheet was covered in his blood as he'd been hurt. "Eh, it'll wash out," was her calm reply. On a different note, the kids are very into Mary Poppins. I've bought the latest enhanced DVD version and they watch it in two languages. S's favourite scene features the filthy chimney sweeps dancing on the roof tops. When Michael looked into the chimney and got covered in a thick blanket of soot, Szymus said "Look at all that clean soot on his face." Anyway, this lead...

Yesterday I was rolling around in bed, feeling absolutely drained from a gastro bug. My concerned son (aged 2 and 10 months), who had just been through all this with his sister the day before, pulled a chair up to the fridge to get me a bottle of water. "Here, drink this," he said, then, with a proud smile: "I saved your life."

If you have a baby in Poland EVERYONE will tell you to give it a dummy (or pacifier, binkie, whatever). EVERYONE. Because, at the end of the day, you can throw the dummy out and, after a few “restless” days and/or nights, your baby will be “weaned” and will grow up with a much smaller chance of dental problems. If you have an Australian guide book to raising babies, it will say not to give a dummy/pacifier/binkie, and list the bonuses of thumb sucking. It's your call. In my first pregnancy, when I followed the baby lists down to a T, I bought not one, but two different types of dummies just in case the baby had a preference. And she did. She preferred NOT to suck on any dummies at all. She hated them. She would spit them out. Yes, I tried many times. It’s not my damn fault!! And I was happy, because I remember sucking a dummy to the age where I could clearly give my grandmother instructions about not “washing” it in juice, but in water thanks. (Wasn’t I smart for my age? That’s...

Today I overheard Karolinka trying to cheer Szymus up about being born second: "When you're second you don't even have to go to hospital, you just pop straight out onto the bed. It's not important to be first."