4/52

Slightly late due to assorted family catastrophes... but this week's photo is another sleepy one. Well, sort of.



As you can probably see, Jamie is in fact wide awake.

This week was the beginning of the tentative effort to move from the little bedside crib in our bedroom to the Big Cot in the nursery. Overnight, Jamie will still be sleeping in our room for at least one more growth spurt. But to make the shift as non-traumatic as possible, I planned to start him having late afternoon naps in the Big Cot - overseen by the familiar Ewan the Dream Sheep and Monkey.

So far, it's been limited success only. The nursery is getting established as a safe, comfortable, quiet place, and Jamie hasn't been upset at all. He's cuddled up on the beanbag with me for a feed, then laid down in the cot, and... well... stared at me and Monkey for twenty minutes or more. Quiet. Calm. Content. But very definitely not sleeping! Meanwhile, my mind boggles to see my big strong three-month-old, twice the size he was in October, looking so very tiny-little again.

2/52

This week's photo is of Jamie in his crib by our bedside.



When we brought him home from the hospital, he looked absolutely tiny in here. With his feet at the foot of the crib as per the safer sleeping guidelines, his head barely reached the centre of the mattress! Now, at almost three months old, it seems to fit a lot better.

It makes me feel conscious of the fact that the crib is in fact a six-month rental, by which time he should have outgrown it, and we're halfway through that period already.

He has a bigger cot in the nursery, that should serve for the next couple of years as it converts to a toddler bed. Our plan for the transition is that Monkey and Ewan the Dream Sheep (pictured) will come with him to the nursery. But for now, this is basically what I see by my bedside every morning and evening.

The Nursery

I don't want to give the impression that this pregnancy is all about doom, gloom and disappointment about disability-related problems. One of the most enjoyable things that we've done has been to prepare the nursery for the baby.

Six months ago, I wouldn't have even dreamed of calling it a nursery. It was a boxroom. Because a defining feature of the room was that since even before I moved into this house, it was full, and I mean full, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, of boxes. Occasionally Steve would have a brief flurry of activity to reduce the amount of Stuff in there - most notably, when we got three big Billy Bookcases for the living room and the boxes of books that had been hidden away for years finally got a more appropriate home - but every three steps forwards seemed to be followed by two steps back as we needed *somewhere* to put an unwanted gift, or a bag of clothes for the charity shop, or a broken Whatever that needed to be taken to the tip "at some point, but not right now, because they're closed/it's raining/we're busy/etc, let's just pop it in the boxroom for now so it's out of the way."

Even as late as June, in a discussion about nursery plans with other women who are due to have babies in October, I somewhat resignedly posted this:

If it helps, ours still looks like a boxroom half-full of junk. I’ve given up on “beautiful” and am prepared to settle for just being able to get the carpet cleaned before the baby is here.

But by early July we were able to get to the window and in mid-July, we bought paint. By the end of July, the walls were starting to look like this:



Steve did the big roller work, the magnolia and the blue. I did the clouds, freehand, using a sponge. It took quite a while to get them *all* done - obviously I could only do very short sessions and only while someone was able to help me on and off my table (a ladder is more traditional but would have been asking for trouble). But I was so happy with how it came out, and it meant a lot to me to have done them myself.

Painting complete, I was able to go ahead and order new blinds, and a new carpet too (plug goes here for Godiva Carpets, a local firm who provided excellent customer service, fast fuss-free fitting, and competitive pricing). A set of flatpack drawers was assembled, and is now filled with washed and folded vests, babygros, sheets, blankets, little hats, tiny mittens and other assortedness. The Big Cot has been assembled too, although at the moment the mattress is still in the wrapper and my hospital bag is sitting on top of it, because at first the baby will sleep in our room. And then to top it off, my mother found some monkey decals online.





It's unequivocally a nursery now. Steve and I both like going in there just for the reassurance of it, that it is a completed project that's ready for Offspring, one that doesn't have to be a second-rate panic solution cobbled together at the last moment. It feels good.

Monkey World!

Christmas went off without a hitch, very relaxed, lovely presents, saw a couple of people, had plenty to eat, marvellous. Then it was Boxing Day, the snow had thawed and the sun was shining and I really didn't want to waste the day by sitting indoors staring at the computer. We ummed and ahhed over a few ideas, but we didn't especially want to brave the sales, and we couldn't be sure of which of our favoured haunts for cups of tea and cake would be open on Boxing Day. So in a rare burst of spontaneity, we decided to go further afield.

We came up with Monkey World in Dorset. The idea was that we could spend the remainder of Boxing Day packing in leisurely fashion and doing the three-hour drive down to the south coast, get to a hotel in time for dinner and a good night's sleep, and then in the morning we could get up nice and refreshed, see the monkeys for a few hours, and drive back home again. Unfortunately, while the park is open every day except Christmas Day, the admin office for bookings and information is only open Monday to Friday, so I couldn't phone in advance for the finer details of the access features.

Now here's the thing. Disabled access... well, it can be a bit hit-and-miss. An attraction boasting a blue wheelchair symbol could mean that there's an entire step-free multi-sensory experience within, enjoyable for anyone regardless of impairment. Then again, that blue wheelchair symbol might just mean that a standard-size manual wheelchair can get through the entrance gate and that somewhere on site is a single disabled loo which might be usable once the boxes of cleaning supplies have been moved elsewhere. It is in the interests of any attraction to claim to be easy to find, accessible, value for money and so on. The question is always to what extent the promotional materials match the reality.

Which is why, as Steve booked us in to our hotel for the night, I was picking up as many leaflets as I could see about other winter attractions in the Dorset area. Just in case.

Happily, I needn't have bothered. The claim on the website that they have "a selection of 25 motorised scooters" was not marketing-speak for "given enough notice, we can hire up to 25 scooters from other companies" - they really have got their own fleet of mobility scooters, charged up and ready to go, in a covered pen right next to the entrance gates. It's still safer to pre-book, especially at the busier times of year, but seriously - 25 scooters! It beats hands-down the one or two ex-NHS wheelchairs that are generally available elsewhere.

Unless you are very fit, I would definitely suggest using a powered mobility aid rather than a manual wheelchair because some of the slopes are quite steep. However, they are mostly surfaced with smooth tarmac, they aren't dangerously steep, and they certainly beat steps.

The whole park is accessible to the scooters with the exception of a "woodland walk" which, as you might guess, is a walk through some woodland. There aren't any monkeys in that section though, so I didn't feel I was missing much. Even the playground has an accessible swing*, and of the two accessible toilets, only one had a baby-changing table fixed to the wall, but... it was at wheelchair height! You may now retrieve your jaws from the floor.

Even more impressively (yes! there's more!) is the acknowledgement that accessibility does not begin and end with wheelchairs. If you aren't a wheelchair user but can only manage a certain amount of walking, there's a liberal scattering of memorial benches throughout the park. If you have impaired hearing, you can request printouts of the keeper talks. If you have impaired vision, you can request information in Braille, and there are also several tactile sculptures to enable you to get an idea of the features and scale of some of the park's residents. They've really thought about things, and you get the impression that they'd be open to other suggestions.

However this has turned into a post about access rather than about monkeys, and it was the monkeys we went to see.

Monkey World is primarily a rescue centre rather than a zoo, and the focus is very much on the rescue and rehabilitation of primates, followed by the education of humans. For instance, there are scores of capuchins and no gorillas. This is because there were a lot of capuchins needing rescue, whereas there aren't so many at-risk gorillas and there are better facilities available for the few that do crop up. There's no one there going "Bob, we've got to get a couple of gorillas, it'd be a real crowd-puller."

Do not go if you want to be "entertained", do not expect parades and cartoon characters, and I think if you were so crass as to ask to pet a monkey or have your photo taken with it, you would probably be ejected from the premises. Most of the residents have been rescued from a life where their "job" was to be a photo prop cuddling tourists.

Don't get me wrong, it is very entertaining to watch the monkeys playing, and to hear or read about their adventures and interactions. They even have their own TV show (in fact Steve and I may have been the only visitors not familiar with the monkeys from TV. I've since discovered that the programme is on Tuesday evenings when I go to knitting). But it's also really nice the way everything is done to fit around them being monkeys, rather than them being exhibits. None of it is Disney-ified or over-anthropomorphised. If anything it's the reverse - even the playground areas are set up to mimic the equipment in the enclosures, which I thought was a nice touch.

My favourite group was probably the chimps. I loved watching them flying about the place in much the same way as I enjoy watching Parkour. Despite the enclosed space, there is a tremendous sense of freedom and of synchronicity with one's environment. I felt the most empathy with the orang-utans, and my Adorability Award goes to the woolly monkeys.

We had an absolutely wonderful time wandering round, despite the cold weather. I'm shattered now, but that was only to be expected and I think it was worth it.

All the photos were taken by Evilstevie and can be found here.

* No, I didn't.