Funny Clock

Any working mums out there? I’m always totally punctual of course… Love this from findababysitter.com:

Swimsuit Time

This week the UK is going to experience a heatwave.

Not a heatwave by New York standards, indeed the 17 degree temperature (about 62 in fahrenheit) probably wouldn’t even register on a New Yorker’s idea of hot weather.

Nonetheless, in the UK (a country, which in the five early-summer weeks I’ve been back has experienced snow, hail, high winds and torrential rain), you have to take what you can get.

Since my parents own a (little used but heated) swimming pool and my photographer friend Chloe is not away on some exotic location for once and wants to come around for a dip, I’ve ordered a new swimsuit.

Buying a swimsuit is not most people’s idea of a good time so buying your first one after the birth of a child you’d think would take the trauma one step further.

However, my new body-shape needs make the selection quite simple: just find me something that covers up the area between my shoulders and upper thigh. No more  trying to figure out what cut of bikini makes me look thin; agonizing over halternecks or bandeau in the cold light of the changing room mirror.

I just want something that is vaguely pretty, vaguely cool and shows off my best bits (carrying around a 20lb baby makes for toned arms, and my legs have always been pretty good), and covers up the rest. Not black, not ugly, has padded cups but doesn’t make me look like an atomic Jessica Rabbit.

I’ve bought this one from The White Company. Pretty, non?

Viva La Visa

As you may have picked up from a few of my early posts (here and here and here and, oh, here), when I came out to the US I was on the H4 visa. And, as you may have also gleaned if you’d read them, I was less than happy about it.

When the move to the US was first discussed, I was promised a working visa, so I could continue my career as a journalist and web editor, and so I could contribute to society as any educated, mildly ambitious and intelligent person would wish.

However, because of a cock-up by the previous management – or a total lack of foresight or planning at the very least – we ended up with the H1B on, well, an H1B and me on the H4.

The H4 visa is called The Trailing Spouse visa. That is not a joke – it’s actually called that. On it, one cannot work, can’t even volunteer – making cupcakes for a school fete could be considered entrepreneurial by a particularly jobs-worthy immigration agent.

So you are simply expected to sit idle, or breed.

If the bebe hadn’t come along and forced me into maternity leave, I would have gone mad. Or gone home.

The visa is retrograde, repellent, offensive, unrealistic (show me a couple that can afford to live on one salary in NYC), and misogynist (I’ll bet my oven glove a high percentage of those spouses are women).

And my heart goes out to anyone who is on it. (Not that I have anything against sitting idle; although involuntary sitting idle is basically prison.)

Anyway, after a lot of paperwork and cajoling of editors to say nice things about me, I am now the owner of the 01 visa, which gives me full working rights. And it’s nice to be in the real world once again.

(The 01 is aka the Extraordinary Ability Visa, and when the Consulate officer interviewed me and asked me what I’d been doing in the US for the last near two years, he said, so what’s extraordinary about being a mom and wife? I nearly punched him. But I didn’t because there were men with guns nearby.)

If you are on the H4, and don’t want to be, don’t give up your search for a suitable work visa. I think the H1B’s HR department got so sick of us complaining and asking and bitching (me, not the H1B – he’s more professional), they just agreed to help us so we’d leave them the fuck alone.

Advice on finding a new visa: don’t bother with the USCIS websites or lawyers; find someone in the same situation or similar industry as you. Those websites are, I’m sure deliberately, very hard to make head or tail of, and it’s better to get a personal recommendation for a lawyer anyway.

Mail Order Fashion

My quick, two-week visit back to the UK has turned into an entire month. Never trust a lawyer who says, yes go go go, your visa will be in next week and you can kill two birds with one stone by going to your home US Consulate.

Almost five weeks later and my visa will be FINALLY in my hot, sweaty (from stress and pulling out of hair) palms by Tuesday and I will – with any luck – be on a plane on Wednesday back to my home and husband.

The H1B’s patience is running out – but hardly surprising as this has been the longest we’ve been apart since we met, plus he hasn’t seen his 10-month-old daughter for a 10th of her life (that’s a long time in pre-toddler days).

Anyway, on the upside, all this being stuck in the depths of the Surrey woods has given me ample time to indulge in some decent UK shopping. And I don’t even have to worry about the rising cost of parking (my mother’s relentless gripe).

While everyone knows there has been a boom in internet shopping, what has quietly and successfully taken off in the UK is the mail order catalogue. I’m not talking about the 1990s JJ Bean variety, or those ones that sell post-menopausal women fleecy nighties.

My mum’s kitchen table is littered with catalogues from super-stylish companies (and generally v. expensive – as if ordering from a book somehow makes you forget the value of the pound… like when you went to France pre-Euro days and thought you were a millionaire).

Some of the good ones are The White Company, Wrap, Plumo, Pure and Baukjen. Of course, Boden has been doing this for years and has recently itself had a bit of an style upgrade. (Boden has made it over to the US quite successfully and I know they are looking at a rebrand so they can appeal to the US yummy mummies even more.)

Although, not to forget the web for one moment, another new discovery is Atterley Road, who I’m  more than a bit obsessed with. They have perfectly captured the market gap between ASOS (young, low-ish quality, very fashion driven) and Net-a-Porter ($$$, dresses that wouldn’t fare well with baby chuck-up). It’s full of curated pieces from Hobbs, Jigsaw, Whistles (basically, the best of the British high street if you are over 25), and a few less well-known brands like Danish Ilse Jacobsen and Peach Pink, who do nice, not-bonkers-expensive handbags.

And, ta-dah, they currently do free shipping to the US.

So I can feel doubly good about heading back to Brooklyn asap.

Gisele Goes Make-Up Free!

pic from Fashionista: Gisele Goes Make-Up Free!

A make-up free state is OK for Gisele but the rest of us should take caution. I should be grateful that my husband maintains that I’m the best-looking gal he’s ever seen. Charming, but outside the comfortable boundaries of domestic bliss, this false sense of security can have grave consequences. In our early days of romance, I would, for instance, happily bound into work in at a hip television company in North London, my face free of under-eye cover-up and pale eyelashes untainted by mascara – carefree in the thought that love provides a more powerful glow than Nars Orgasm blusher. Only to head to the bathroom mid-morning and catch a glance of myself in the mirror under the fluorescent bulb, and run silently screaming to the beauty cupboard.

Oh Those Crazy Dutch!

Guide to Modern Motherhood (in a rap. Thanks to Fiat)

Back in the UK for a fleeting visit. My sister-in-law showed me this. Hilarious.

I love British TV.

How to Make Friends

I love this post from Jezebel, about how to make friends when you are old.

As someone who is under 37 (OK, I am 37), who has lived in four countries, ten cities and too many new houses to mention, I know a thing or two about making new acquaintances.  When I moved to Brooklyn for my husband’s job and with a visa that wouldn’t let me work, it was soundly up to me to make a home. And that meant making friends.

Falling pregnant in the second week you are in your new city helps. Yes, there is the awful morning sickness, the homing-pigeon hormones that have you weeping for your childhood bed and the sobriety but having a baby is one hell of a way to meet people. Pre-natal yoga, hospital waiting rooms, birthing classes are all excellent places to meet kindred spirits. It’s not like you can’t spot someone in the same situation as you either.

However, making friends when you are pregnant can be very odd too. Bonding over leaking breasts gives a a false feeling of intimacy  You’ll find yourself in situations where you’ll know if someone has a family history of postnatal incontinence or hemorrhoids before you know if they have any siblings. Or before you’ve even had a chance to snoop around their bathroom cabinet during a coffee morning.

Once the baby is born, if you meet a new friend in the supermarket queue for example, there is a danger of unintentional over-sharing because you are so damned happy to be talking to an adult for the first time in eight hours. Like the time I told a woman that I used to fake a squint as a child for attention. It’s not just me and my social Tourette’s. Total strangers have asked if I’m planning a vaginal birth or not. Sir, the stretchability of my cervix is none of your business!

Mommy ‘meet up’ groups should be treated with caution too. They are OK  for the first six weeks when frankly you are so high on hormones and delirious with lack of sleep that you could talk to a lamppost if it stood next to a cushioned seat that won’t irritate your suppurating C-section wound. But after that, it won’t take you long to consider ditching the group. And this is to be advised, least you go mad with the ‘Mommyness’ of it all.

I’ve sat through lunches where one Perrier-sipping woman said that she didn’t watch TV or check her Blackberry while she was breastfeeding least the baby feel she wasn’t totally present. I took a slug of my lager shandy and mumbled something about a mother’s sanity being the most vital element in child raising.

And, stay away from Mommy websites too. They may be good for snapping up a second-hand Bugaboo but they do breed a certain type of parent that has way too much time on their hands. One recent post by a local mom asked how other mothers were dealing with the ‘hair pulling phase’. She stated that her eight month old baby was yanking her hair really hard but she didn’t want to stop him least it limit the baby’s sense of adventures and curiosity.

Because they wouldn’t be able to see me rolling my eyes, I cancelled my membership. (That will teach them; though if anyone knows of anyone who is flogging a second-hand umbrella stroller, do let me know.)

Now my baby is nearly nine months, I can say I have four good local mum friends. One is my neighbour, two I met in the same birthing class and one I met randomly in Gorilla Coffee. That’s plenty for me.

Saucy

I Iove the way Worcester Sauce comes wrapped up like a Christmas present in the U.S

Cable TV Confusion

There are some things about America that I find mind-boggling.

Like ordering a cheese and ham toastie. Today, however, I’m shocked by the virtual monopoly TV and internet companies have on a zip code. In the UK, it’s a free-for-all, with all sorts of companies offering ever-cheaper services, but I’ve just found out that our particular zip code has an an EXCLUSIVE DEAL with Time Warner Cable.

I have not got the energy to go into the details of our problems with TWC but suffice to say that I think we pay way too much for an internet service that comes and goes, and 7billion TV channels, of which we watch about three. (And our rates keep mysteriously going up – to around $130 a month currently.) I’ve probably spent around 4 hours on the phone to them in the last month, with no budging of fees or offer to fix the internet problems.

All  I want is a super-fast internet service and public TV. And I don’t really want to pay more than about $50 a month for it. We only really watch CNN, and then stream everything else. We are on a Breaking Bad marathon on Netflix (you don’t even have to get off the sofa to start the new episode people!!). OK, we’d miss out on the new series of Mad Man on AMC but it’s not like you can’t get it elsewhere.

I asked for advice on Park Slope Parents and a very nice Brit bloke called Keith emailed me back, saying, “We now have internet only service through Cablevision (around $30 per month) and purchased a Roku box for streaming TV shows plus a Boxee (with a Mohu Leaf antenna) for basic live TV (however we rarely use it – streaming works just fine for us)”.

Yet I’ve just been told by Cablevision customer service that they don’t work in areas where TWC cover. What kind of free-market insanity is that??

So what can I do? I’m held in a deathgrip with ghastly TWC, like a Nelson’s Lock with some sweaty, hairy wrestler. And it stinks.