I Don’t Like Mondays: Part 2 (Now with added York)

We return to the gripping story of Monday the 26th of November. But this time around we've added some random pictures of York for your viewing pleasure. Think of it as a slide show of 'what we did on our trip to York' with a discussion about Monday running in parallel. It's a blog entry for GenX and Y and other strange types that enjoy multi-tasking. (We start with some glorious ruins of an abbey, a result of Henry VIII's closing of the monasteries):

You know what it is like when you are waiting for something good, something nice, something that will just really hit the spot. And then that thing gets delayed. And then delayed some more. And then some more. And yet, you don’t stop anticipating what it will be like when it finally arrives. You still look forward to it, knowing how good it is going to be.

We had two things like that over here in Oxford. One was that our shipment of 15 boxes would arrive.

Eight large boxes full of items that we thought would really help us manage daily life better over here—linen, baby clothes for Tiny, adult clothes for us, some kitchen gadgets like a bread maker, special pizza tray, and mixmaster. Our dvds—quite a number of hours of viewing for a couple without a TV. Some board games like Settlers of Catan and its expansions, Tigris and Euphrates, the epic War of the Ring (yes, if you have a spare entire day, you too can recreate the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy of books as a boardgame), Bohnanza, and even The Game of Thrones (which we’ve never had a chance to play so far). We like our games, you might have spotted.

Seven book boxes full of…well books. These are divided between two groups. The first is the books that would really help our studies along—essentially work tools. These are books on John’s Gospel, some systematic theologies and treatments of the doctrine of the Trinity, a good chunk of patristics, and the like. The other group contains books that we need for our sanity.

(This is the other side of the York Minster from where the other pictures were shot. The York Minster includes some quite stunning gardens and multiple large old buildings around the outskirts of the gardens. They're impressive, but a minnow to a whale compared to the Cathedral.)

This is one of those things that non-readers probably just don’t ‘get’. For many people reading is like housework. It needs to be done. It probably even has to happen fairly frequently. But it is a chore. Something you do because you need to, and you move through it as expeditiously as possible. Statements that books are needed, let alone for mental health, seems a bit bizarre.

But for some of us, and Jen and I definitely fall into this group, it really is the case that we need to read. And we need to read things just for the pleasure of the reading, or because we have an interest in the area. Documentaries, radio, conversation, don’t really work. Even newspapers and magazines don’t quite have the requisite effect. There is something about the sustained storytelling of a novel, or the sustained exposition of a work of non-fiction that keeps the mind and the sense of being open to the world ticking along. Sooner or later (and usually sooner) we need to read.

And so the other set of books are enjoyment books. Novels that we’ll really want to read again in the next four years. Books of history, theology, and cultural analysis that are on our ‘read sometime in the next four years’ programme. Books of poetry that are on Jen’s ‘read regularly’ list to sustain the soul. You get the picture.

The nice thing about the last ten weeks is that we’ve coped so well with little more than two suitcases, a fully furnished flat, and purchasing a fair amount of kitchen stuff. By the standards of typical Western materialism we’ve been almost camping! In fact, it showed that it is possible to function with a lot less stuff.

(What's left of a tower as part of an old fortification. Looks far more impressive at this distance than close up. The neat part of the defensive strategy were a series of signs right around the mound saying 'keep off the grass'. As long as you had a critical threshold of literate invaders, this tower should have been impregnable.)

However, it’s also shown that certain of the gadgets that clutter one’s life can make a huge difference. We’ve noticed the absence of many of the things in the boxes many times over the last ten weeks.

So, we’ve been looking forward to these boxes arriving. A lot.

So guess which day they came?

That’s right, and they arrived about five hours after we got into bed.

Baddeley’s don’t really function well on either:
a) low sleep
b) radically changed sleep

Both of those together are synergistic. Just not in a good way.

(Before we get inundated with messages about sleep and small babies...Relax. We're aware of the issue. But it doesn't seem like there's a cure, it's just something we'll have to persevere through.)

Anyhow, you know how you look forward to something and look forward to it and look forward to it, and then it comes at precisely the wrong moment. You can neither savour the moment, nor do you quite have the resources to cope with the extra load it places upon you.

That was Monday. The boxes came, and the rejoicing was a fairly tepid ‘I suppose this is good;’ ‘Yep, been waiting for this for a while now.’
(Part of the cemetery connected to a small church buried away in the centre of a town block. It didn't face onto any street at all, you had to walk down one of two lanes to get to it, and the lanes only existed to get you to the church. Why you had such a church right on the doorstep of the cathedral, and several other churches in easy walking distance is beyond me. But it was active up until the early nineteenth century.)

Receiving the boxes required a bit of work. The delivery company would charge us extra to take them to our flat (and even more to use the lift…). So I did it. This involved a minor logistical exercise that I’m proud to say I worked out the first day I faced it.

There are 8 boxes.


And 7 book boxes.


There is one lift.


It’s fairly small.


and it takes a little while to move several floors. So it is the rate limiting step.

So the way to tackle the move is to get all the boxes from outside the block to the lift. Then move the 8 boxes into the lift, go up with them, and unpack them out of the lift onto our floor. Head back downstairs and repeat the process. Then move the fifteen boxes into our flat. This way I have the minimum number of journeys in the lift. This may seem like a small thing, but you’d be surprised how many people need to be faced with the problem a couple of times before they twig to it.

So the boxes came in, and my body was not a happy camper. My brain was occasionally shorting out and coming back on line. (Seriously, there’d be times I’d just sit there and have to wait before my brain seemed to want to get moving again). This was OK for the box moving bit of Monday.
(This is the part of the York Minster that seemed to get used most often to do actual church stuff. On the other side of the raised platform there were multiple rows of chairs laid out.)

However, there was another task that Monday required of yours truly.

It was the other thing that had been anticipated. Remember I’m over here to do some doctoral work on a guy called Athanasius? All through this term I’ve been working on everyone other than Athanasius (not quite, but it seemed like it). Writing a two thousand word essay each week for a discussion with my tutor. It’s been great. But I have been waiting for the chance to write one on Athanasius. To get stuck in to him, use some of my previous thinking and reading, and produce something I could be pleased with. So guess what day that had to be written?

That’s right. Monday.

I got to write my long anticipated essay while my brain periodically went off-line every so often.
(An arrow slit in the defensive walls that go right around a fair sized chunk of the modern city of York. Not that the walls are modern, just that the city is now bigger than them. Just so that we're clear on that point.)

This was the Monday that not only was tough going, it took the enjoyment out of two of the things we’d really been looking forward to.

Bad Monday.

MDB

I Don’t Like Mondays. (Part 1)

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oot the whole day down

Unlike Boomtown Rats we here at Baddelim don’t really have it in for Mondays. While not quite rating up there with squirrels, we’re happy to live and let live when it comes to Mondays. (And how exactly does one go shooting a day anyhow?!)

However, some Mondays distinguish themselves. And not always in a good way. Monday just gone was like that.

The difficulty was that Monday began without the normal ending process of the Sunday immediately preceding it. Somewhere a bit after eleven o’clock we began to make moves towards bed. We naturally tend to a bedtime after midnight, and it requires constant vigilance for us to keep our body clocks from being set too far back. Unfortunately, the more tired we get, the harder it is to marshal the energy to not stay up. One of those perverse paradoxes that makes being a Baddeley so much…fun.

So we were tired, which was why we were heading off to bed a bit late. (It takes time to go to bed early, because most of us resists the brain saying ‘go to bed now’ - so an eleven o’clock start to the process wasn’t a good sign). And then Jen informs me that she’s had constant stomach pain since 5pm in the afternoon (there’s apparently a “don’t worry Mark with trivial information” clause in our marriage vows that I don’t remember signing off on). This is a bit of a concern. Particularly as Jen had that the previous night, and couldn’t sleep for the middle three hours of the night as a consequence. (Can I just observe once again how grateful I am that I am not the pregnant one?)

The pain fits none of the criteria the amazing Radcliffe Hospital (and it really is amazing, it’s one of the best things about being here—which is pretty amazing in itself, as it’s got a fair bit of stiff competition) told us about in the pre-natal intensive we attended. It fits none of the criteria in any of the books we have. Jen even spoke with a midwife about this pain before and was assured it wasn’t an issue. Apparently the body generates all kind of random pains in this last stage. (Again. Grateful pregnancy is not me.)

Nonetheless, seven straight hours of moderately intense abdominal pain is probably worth some kind of check. And, as part of the amazing health care we get here, we have a 24 hotline where Jen can call a midwife and get an immediate answer. There’s a person at all times whose job it is just to take calls. You couldn’t colour us more grateful. We’ve used it once before when something unusual happened and they were fantastic, and assured us that it was nothing special.

So we called, expecting another, “It’s nothing” response. We like those. They’re very comforting.

What we got instead was, “Ring the delivery suite and tell them what you just told me.” Possibly not the answer we were looking for. And delivered (Jen assures me) in the kind of tones that suggested that the person was not weak-minded and so the Jedi mind-trick wouldn’t persuade her that these weren’t the droids she was looking for…

So Jen did what she was told (it’s possible that the Jedi thingy was working in reverse). The delivery suite listened to the information and said. “You need to come right in.” Again, not really the answer we were looking for.

So we looked at each other and realised that this could be it. The most likely scenario, we figured, was that they suspected preeclampsia, and if that was the case there would be a quick caesarean and not-so-little Tiny (that’s the pre-birth name so we wouldn’t have to call the new Baddeley ‘It’ all the time) would be coming three and a half weeks ahead of schedule.

That’s when it began to hit us just how unready we were at this stage. We haven’t taken delivery of the cot yet (not until the end of this week), although we have a travel cot. The hospital overnight bag wasn’t fully packed. There was no food in the freezer just ready to go (there’s only snack dispensers at the hospital…). We didn’t have a list of what to pack that wasn’t already packed, nor where those items were located.

Oh yeah. And we didn’t have a name.

We’ll probably need one of those.

We had a shortlist, for both genders. But you can’t really apply Heisenberg’s Uncertainity Principle to names. The child would probably want a particular name of their own, rather than a haze of probabilities around a small cluster of names. Not that using different names for the one child wouldn’t be entertaining for us…

What we did have was Michael Jensen who was quite happy (not quite happy, but certainly not disgruntled) to be woken up just before midnight to drive us to Hospital. (We’re rather pleased with ourselves for arranging to have such a good neighbour in the same block of flats.)

This was a good thing, because that meant we had someone reliable for those times when you really just have to go, and you have to go now. We tried cabs once before when we had to go to the hospital. We tried four taxi companies. One wouldn’t answer their phone. It gets better. One had their phone disconnected (!). The third had a working phone and actually answered. It seemed like a winner. But they didn’t have any cabs available for an hour… The fourth one promised to send us a cab. But didn’t. So it was good to have the ‘Michael Jensen, hospital driver extraordinaire’ thing worked out.

However, we were flustered, on the back foot, and how can I put this? Not really in the mood. We were ready for bed. We still had three weeks to go. We were still thinking in terms of ‘soon’, not in terms of ‘any moment now’. We hadn’t done any of the running it through in our heads in advance that we do to plot out possible responses to things when we know something momentous is coming.

In a word, we weren’t ready.

We got to the hospital around midnight. And received simply the best treatment we have ever received from a medical institution. Both the receptionist and the nurse were everything you would want: confident, competent, nice, and relational. They put us at our ease without being cloying.

The first thing they did was measure Jen’s blood pressure and seemed to relax once that was in the clear. They seemed to carefully avoid the ‘preeclampsia’ word, but we’re fairly sure that was what prompted the call in.

Having gotten us in, however, they were taking no chances. Jen was placed on a bed in fairly short order and hooked up to two machines. One to measure the child, one to get a reading on her. We were told that they’d measure things for about 20 minutes and then a doctor would be in to see us. Oh, and to give Jen something to do, they gave her a button to press every time Tiny moved. As they didn’t even look at the tally later, I suspect it wasn’t even connected… (Jen assures me that they did look at the results of her tallying, and that they do turn up on the graphs generated by the machines. The things we try and convince ourselves of when we don’t want to admit that we were just being kept occupied…)

The amusing thing about that was that Tiny clearly didn’t appreciate the cold metal sensors even partially invading Tiny’s world (please note the skilful avoidance of any hint of gender there…). And so Tiny exploded into a sustained period of quite intense kicks. Which has been one of the few times I’ve seen this, because it seems that Tiny already has a Baddeley sense of humour. Apparently aware of Jen’s desire for me to witness this activity, Tiny has mastered the art of stopping kicking just at the point that Jen calls me over to look. But even the pursuit of a long running gag seemed to take back seat to sustained aggression against the metal pads.

About quarter to one in the morning, the nurse contacted us over the intercom to let us know that the doctor would be delayed because one of the births ‘wasn’t going well’ and had been taken to surgery. She said he would be with us as soon as it was finished, which ‘should be soon.’ About twenty past one in the morning she came back to let us know that there was no idea how long the doctor would be. She looked over the charts, really liked what she saw, and so took Jen off the machines. Tiny promptly returned to the “don’t kick when Dad might see” game—despite the fact that, Jen assures me, for the last few months 1:30am has been prime kicking time. The nurse still had no idea about the abdomen pain, which had continued throughout, and wasn’t going to discharge us without the doctor seeing us.

So, about 3 in the morning, two very, very disorientated and tired Baddeley’s looked at the funny doctor as he did doctory things, asked doctory questions, and declared everything in order. Oh yes, the abdominal pain was probably muscular, as everything expanded to get ready for D-Day. That was good to find out.

So around quarter to four the Baddeley’s made it in the front door of their flat. Apparently it’s easy getting a cab from the hospital than to the hospital. We promptly collapsed into bed. But only after acknowledging that the good thing out of this little false alarm was the way it flushed out where we were unready. We think we were probably 70% ready. But for something like this, 90% is really a minimum. Thanks to this, we know now where the problems are, and can take steps this week to address them.

However, that wasn’t the end of Monday… oh no. Not this Monday. This Monday had more to give... MDB