十七岁时，父亲突然病重住院，妈妈哥哥疲惫不堪，气氛很闷，少年人不知道生活其实可以更糟，掉了很多眼泪，于是哥哥当年的好友，很郑重告诉和妈：时间可以抹平一切伤痕。

果然，时间抹去了一切的灰色，甚至记忆都模糊了，夏天与哥哥聊天，知道那位大哥哥朋友在商海起伏少了从前的书生气，而哥哥却说，如果大家日子都过得下去，就不要逼了他怎样，刹那间，和妈对自己的哥哥很生敬意。

大概成熟与通融，很大程度上是对人对事的点到为止，而且接受人的改变。

比如，校园里的才子佳人，十几年后成了北美论坛上通俗的大妈与猥琐男

这一点，很哑然失笑，记得首届也是唯一一届南京小姐是医学院学生，夺冠后立即嫁给留美博士随夫赴美--1992年，应该是最圆满的选择，这也是很多当年的女学生们的选择。

可惜女学生们都有不再长发飘飘的一天，而彼时的理工全奖也被新一代小留学生讥笑为‘猥琐’

生活的困惑常在于自己的选择能否经得起时间的推敲

比如，很快35岁了，于是生理钟时时敲响，也居然开始质疑自己当初三十才愿意当母亲的决定，和爸更是把自己多年单身视为一个错误，只有当了父母才知道，孩子父母彼此的健康存在是何等重要

邻居是位风姿卓越的女律师，16岁就单身妈妈，所以她的女儿比和妈还大，生了孩子继续A-LEVEL读法律考执照，四十多岁收获了现在的伴侣一位也是早年为父却离婚的教授，如今，他们年过五十，生活稳定儿女都有家室，回顾从前，邻居二人一笑而过，说那时不知道苦，唯一正确决定是要了孩子们。

而同事是新近单身妈妈，两个女儿两岁与十个月，经常她会趴在桌上痛哭，最痛莫过于产后孤单一人带两孩子从医院回家，却咬牙坚持全职，有一天她说要存钱等女儿们五岁就带去逛迪斯尼，和妈当时内心大憾，曾几何时，这些已是理所当然，所谓的计划怎么会是去迪斯尼，而是怎眼怎样，晚上讲给和爸听，自己先红了眼圈。

更难过小米的老父亲离开了她，虽然都会有这么一天，小米的父亲很宠她，所以小米大学里就手持一张牡丹卡读父亲手书的文言家信。

那个时候，我们窝在宿舍的蜡烛下谈将来谈男友淡文学谈自己，却怎么也谈不到父母会老会离开。

所以，小米，节哀，我们都会面对这一天，请允许我用和和的话说，你的父亲是天上的星星，你的父亲就像雨点回归了大海。

 

 

 

 

 

昨晚顺利接到公公,据说飞机很空,他一路睡了过来,老人看起来精神不错,虽然又掉了一颗牙齿,和和讲公公我们给你买新牙齿好哇?

和和当然是最高兴的,却也不忘立即纠正公公喝水的声音,老先生欣然接受,和爸立即咬太太耳朵,说以后你别当恶人了,什么话可以让小的说.

公公背来他自己的新笔记本,背来了三十公斤书,背来了新款豆浆机,背来了干妈舅妈选得和和漂亮衣物,干妈在京都买得小兔让和和喜欢得爱不释手,同吃同睡.

第一次老同志发自内心说,儿子女儿孙子外孙女真好---既然这样,我们就努力做他价值观内的好儿女吧.

夜里还听到他与奶奶聊天,和爸欣慰道,再老的夫妻都不应该分开.

谢谢哥哥嫂嫂芃芃,谢谢和和干妈--你们一直是我那一头的牵挂!

 

和爸昨晚兴头头送张报纸看，和妈乐了调侃他怎么改看卫报了，他正色答：人在屋檐下，不得不低头。

和妈大笑，对啊，这家在我名下。

和和六个月以前座椅都是朝妈妈的，六个月后才调转看人，当时没有理论支持，大姑子非常保守，建议和妈要让和和多看亲人的笑脸而不是路人们可能的长脸，这篇文章很是长了和和爹妈的志气，父母的直觉最重要。

此文特别献给新手妈妈小竹子！

 

Are modern buggies bad for babies?

Liz Attenborough has been campaigning against forward-facing buggies since 2003 and now she has the evidence to back up her opinion. But, asks Sally Williams, are they really such a bad thing?

Liz Attenborough first started worrying about buggies in 2003. It wasn't that they had got so complex - although her eyes did widen in wonder at the "3D travel systems", lockable front swivel wheels and "cosi" sleeping bags - what bothered her was the position of the baby: most face outwards, rather than towards the person pushing. This means that mother and baby can't commune and for Attenborough, who is manager of Talk to Your Baby, the National Literacy Trust's campaign to encourage parents to talk more with their babies, this is very bad news indeed. "We know we've got a problem with communication skills and buggies aren't helping," she says.

Attenborough, 56, believes that talking to babies is as essential as changing their nappies. She thinks cooing and chattering and singing should be statutory because the amount you talk to your children influences all sorts of things, not just how they learn to talk, but also their ability to make friends, and progress academically. She says that 90% of nursery workers are worried that speech difficulties among pre-schoolers are increasing. "Lots of young children start school only knowing a few words and aren't able to construct sentences," she says. This, she warns darkly, can lead to behavioural problems, exam failure, delinquency, perhaps even prison.

Clearly, talking to your baby is a serious business, an act for the common good. Attenborough has identified aspects of modern life that inhibit it: television, radio, iPods, mobile phones and au pairs who don't speak any English. "It's just terrible," she says, head in her hands. "People think they're doing the right thing, having someone look after their child, but they're not looking to see if they're actually engaged with the child."

Now she is focused on another culprit: forward-facing buggies. They may be good in practical terms. They may be excellent at off-roading across mountainous terrain and collapsing to the size of a handbag, but for her they are rubbish at the one thing that matters: tuning in to your baby.

A former director of Penguin Books (and head of Puffin children's books), Attenborough first joined the National Literacy Trust as director of the National Year of Reading (1998-99), a government-backed initiative, administered by the NLT. She set up Talk to Your Baby in 2003 after the NLT became increasingly aware that problems with literacy are linked to early communication skills. Talk to Your Baby is a small but passionate operation, with support from hundreds of health visitors and childcare professionals.

Attenborough is married to an economist, and has two children, aged 27 and 23. She cuts a commanding figure and, unlike her target parents, is very good at talking indeed: entertaining with lots of jolly laughter and theatrical asides, especially when recounting badgering phone calls to buggy manufacturers. "They won't speak to a little charity that is being annoying," she cries.

"I endlessly get put on to PR people." They wouldn't talk to her either.

At the moment, she is disappointed by pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2004, Paltrow had a Bugaboo, an extremely expensive upmarket pushchair (£499) with a facing-in function, and Attenborough was thrilled to see pictures of her interacting with her daughter Apple as she pushed her around. But now she has been photographed with a Phil & Teds Sport Double, which is lavishly equipped with air-filled tyres, four-position ergonomic seats (both outward-facing), multi-position handle and a double-decker design, where one child can be seated above the other. For Attenborough it represents a new low: "Where I live in Richmond there is nothing but these things and you see lots of little people hanging over the edge or looking unspeakably bored." They haven't got room to lift their hands up, she says, let alone interact. "All they've got to look at is the shape of an older sibling's bottom in the seat above. They are sitting where the shopping should be."

Attenborough's anxiety about buggies wasn't backed up by anything concrete because nobody had done any research. Until now, that is. This week, Talk to Your Baby has released the results of a study by Dr Suzanne Zeedyk at the University of Dundee school of psychology. Asking the question "Does the direction a buggy faces alter the style of parent-infant interaction?", it observed 2,722 children in buggies in 60 towns across the UK, as well as a more detailed second study of 20 mothers and their infants. "The data clearly shows that away-facing buggies are the worst for talking to children," concludes Zeedyk. The study also confirmed that the buggy of choice is away-facing, which means that there are a lot of babies left to entertain themselves.

But does it really matter? "If it's for short periods of time, maybe it doesn't matter," admits Zeedyk. "Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask - what is a good amount of time?" According to the NLT, the average baby sits in a pushchair for between half an hour and two hours a day. "If you have long periods of time when babies can't find their parents, that is damaging to their development," she says. There was something else: babies in buggies that face-in are twice as likely to be sleeping, than if they are facing away. Zeedyk thinks this reflects stress levels: "If you're being pushed down the street and you've got big things looming in front of you, that makes you a little anxious. You start to look uncomfortable, or maybe whimper. Does your parent notice and come around and say, 'Honey, it's OK'? Or are you left to cope with that stress on your own and do you do that quite a lot during the week?"

In the second study, only one baby laughed during the away-facing journey, while 10 did so during the facing-in journey. Attenborough is gripped by this finding: "How extraordinary is that?"

If anything, Zeedyk says the need to commune with babies is more urgent than ever. "We now know that a baby's brain is developing more quickly between birth and five than it ever will again." She says that babies aren't inert beings, but have brains teeming with busy neurons just waiting to be connected - "I like to see it as building motorways in the brain" - and, more alarmingly, if the road isn't built, the neurons die.

"Between birth and five is the window for language development. If you don't get interaction during that period, the window closes. That's not to say you can't learn new words and have a bigger vocabulary - it's just harder."

So why do so many buggies face away? The earliest examples of baby carriages in this country were facing-in, such as those coaches in miniature built for Lady Georgina Cavendish at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. By the 1860s, their popularity had increased, and children were bobbing about in sprung carriage-built prams with liveried wooden casings, rich buttoned leather (and arsenic-coated harnesses). Thereafter, most prams stayed facing-in, until 1965 and the invention of the now ubiquitous Maclaren pushchair. A former test pilot, Owen Maclaren designed the compact, easy-to-carry "umbrella fold" buggy, when the arrival of his granddaughter made him realise how heavy and cumbersome prams and pushchairs were for mothers. Maclaren buggies were never intended for newborns, but the shift to facing outward remained in pushchairs for all ages, for practical reasons. "It has a lot to do with the way the product folds down," says Andrew Tarbett, marketing manager of Silver Cross, one of the oldest pram makers, most of whose products face inwards, though they are expensive - the Balmoral costs £1,000. Like most manufacturers, Silver Cross also makes reversible pushchairs that will face both ways, for about £340. An ordinary stroller can cost as little as £15. "Suddenly we have the possibility of a socio-economic divide," points out Zeedyk. "Middle-class parents can afford buggies that are good for babies, but parents from a different class can't."

But surely one of the benefits of prams is that they allow babies to be quiet for long periods of time, thus giving exhausted mothers a welcome break? "Absolutely right - parents want some peace," agrees Zeedyk, "but if we can't find some balance between parents' peace and babies' needs, then we create babies that are actually more anxious and more difficult for parents."

Maclaren sees it differently. While parent-facing buggies are reassuring for newborn babies, older children of six months and above need to be stimulated by the world. "By then they are usually sitting up and are highly inquisitive, insisting on looking at where they are going and interacting with the surroundings that are approaching them rather than facing backwards towards their parents," a spokesperson says. Parents are more likely to nurture a child's verbal skills when they spend "quality time sitting down with a child in a calm environment, without any external distractions", she adds.

Attenborough disagrees: "What parents don't realise is that you are the stimulation your child needs," she says. "Seeing the world go by unmediated is scary beyond words." The irony, of course, is that parents are encouraged (by the trend for early-years education) to believe that it is far more stimulating for babies to be facing the world after the age of six months, and that you cannot expect a child to learn much with nothing but the face of whoever is pushing the chair to watch for hours on end.

To prove Attenborough's point, Thirza Ashelford, the principal of Norland College for nannies, has made a film of a 25-minute buggy journey, from a child's point of view. "It is mind-numbing in its boringness and compelling in its ghastliness," reports Attenborough. "You see nothing but the backs of people's thighs and the lower shelves of shops, and when they wait to cross the road a lorry comes within an inch of the child's nose."

Attenborough's aim is simple: she wants everyone to realise that talking to your baby is as important as feeding, cleaning and keeping it warm. "I don't think people are wilfully not talking to their babies - they just don't think about it. Often, these days, the first baby you hold is your own. You haven't got lots of aunts and cousins all around with everyone having lots of children. One reason that people come up with [for not talking to their babies] is they don't know what to say, so they don't say anything, which makes you want to weep, quite frankly."

She says you don't have to talk non-stop and that simple things such as looking at books, singing songs and nursery rhymes are a great way to bond. There are lots of opportunities throughout the day, and going out for a walk with the buggy is one - for example, "Look, there's a fire engine."

"We're not saying that if you change the way buggies face, all communication problems will be solved," Attenborough says. "Buggies alone aren't going to transform things. But [ones that face out] are surely a missed opportunity."

生日前夜，父母还在忙布置，突然听到一声闷响，和爸拿出当年在A&E混的好功夫冲进卧室，发现小妹妹躺在了地上

这是有生以来第二次，第一次发生在去年和妈上班的前夕

和妈小心翼翼抱起姑娘，和爸左摸右摸，还好，没有包，小朋友乘机一个大WEE，迷迷糊糊还问，天亮了没我四岁没？

窃笑了半天，老南京话说兴奋过度就是头上起佸子

五点多点，小人突然醒来，冲下床找礼物，当她看见漂亮的粉红的doll house矗立，小脸放光，也不拆其他礼物了，撅起屁股玩吧

提醒她还得拆要穿的tinkerbell行头，玫瑰红裙嫩绿鞋，她飞速拆飞速穿飞速跑到镜前搔首弄姿，爸爸妈妈当年结婚在套房里换衣服都是三下五去二，哪里有她这种劲头！

捧着蛋糕派对用具拖着裙子，伺候她去学校，一路上她神采飞扬，见人报告我今天四岁

和爸和妈各带一个蛋糕到单位，不知道为什么，和和四岁了，这种开心铺天盖地的强烈

下午接她，老师拍了不少可爱的照片，而且说这些孩子父母都同意拍照，和妈看了一张一张，确认和和在幼儿园的生日派对很热闹，小朋友互相搂搂抱抱，很八卦杂志风格：）

晚上，家里朋友小聚，密友阿姨亲手做一个完全有机的草莓sponge cake，好吃好看，等再吹了蜡烛，和和已经睁不开眼睛

去年生日，父母送和和对私立教育的commitment

今年生日，父母送和和是房产合同上的签字，如果一切按计划，下学期开始和和就可以在离学校很近的新家了，每天走路上学放学。

 

 

P.S 谢谢各位的祝贺，对于孩子的成长，作为父母我们是欣喜的，过去的四年，和和带来的快乐满足思考付出其实让我们的人生趋向positive。

     四年过去，和和健康快乐自信温和，在未来的岁月里，我们卑微的希望和和能

     ---------------幼时有父母、祖父母宠爱

                       长大了有朋友来往

                       韶华时求得知心

    

 

 

和和在期盼中入睡，左边是妈妈右边是爸爸，这是三岁的最后一夜。

听她呼吸均匀，爹娘赶紧跳起来装doll house,吹气球挂彩纸包装礼物与明天的新衣服靴子，学校party的蛋糕蜡烛相机，家里庆贺的蛋糕卡片刀叉碟盘都一一分好

一岁时傻乎乎的看蜡烛

两岁时开始抢蛋糕

三岁时要求戴皇冠项链

今年，衣服靴子蛋糕都是自己挑，每天必问我的生日是明天吗？ 她得意洋洋就要四岁了。

爹娘双双感情用事眼泪汪汪，争先恐后再抱抱三岁的女儿

于是和和睡在了父母的臂弯里，完全不知道爹娘是如何的如何的心潮澎湃

明天，和和，你四岁-生日快乐，健康成长！

 

自从有了和和,十一月才变得特别,如上周所说,我们都在盼望和和的四岁生日.

她的衣服定了,她的蛋糕定了,和和将第一次在学校,在熟悉的小朋友里庆生,22日公公飞到,再把她和奶奶的生日再过一次.

感谢生活,把曾经粗线条的自己变得愿意细心并且愿意表达细心,依然记得一些朋友的生日,虽然很少按时说出,总怕造作.

所以要祝哥哥生日快乐,祝小米生日快乐----你们都是十月的天平,你们从不愿意负人总是自己背很多责任.

和爸不止一次质疑为什么几年里从来没有给岳母过生日,坦白说,和妈忽略到不知道自己母亲准确的公历生日,大概只有老外婆最记得自己的女儿,所以和妈痛下决心查万年历,发现1938年的那一天,是11月15日,原来自己的老妈妈居然也是天蝎,难怪这么和谐.更加坚定了要生个天蝎老二:)

当然,也很内疚那么多年,举手之劳都没查母亲的生日,希望还不算晚.

上一周风风雨雨,空闲时间都在安排假期,从圣尼可拉斯到圣诞节,到二月的Half Term的滑雪假,甚至和爸六月的SF会议与休假,还要硬着头皮参加和和的学校的慈善活动,再一次谢谢CanCan的周到安排.

和和看学校小朋友戴起了Poppy,也要求佩带,和妈非常艰难的解释你不是英国人,所以你不需要,就像今天的老兵节纪念,上帝保佑女王奏响起,和爸提醒和妈应该站起来,而却对小姑娘说你不必要站,于是和和有了无数个为什么? 什么是战争什么是为国捐躯,这都是父母绞尽脑汁都很难解释的,小姑娘天真得说,我要做蛋糕送给打仗的人,他们吃了蛋糕就不打仗了--那一瞬间,从心底里发抖,如果这个世界永远如她想象中天天天蓝,那么,做为父母就没那么多担心恐惧了.

身份认同的开始远远早于父母的预计,比如和和第一反应说自己是English,然后会自我纠正为Dutch,最后会说我有大哥哥在中国.

她俨然在学校已经接受了最基本的古板性教育,告诉父母XX太太讲结婚可以与丈夫生小宝宝,不结婚就没有小宝宝的--这很合英国政府五岁开性教育课与12岁接受防宫胫癌疫苗的政策.

她极其重视recycle, if we don't recycle, the blue sky will turn to be the rubbish sky

再比如,假如她摔了,奶奶中国式说对不起,她会说奶奶不是你的错,不需要道歉,这不过是个小意外,而且我没受伤.

点点滴滴,和和在思考在判断在成长,也许她已经真正开始记事,很好奇怎样的一个片段将是她人生的最初记忆?

继续对二战中的男女奇怪兴趣,于是又看了the edge of love,百分百的英国,百分百的文艺,让和妈忍不住对那样一个年代一再窥测.

 

天气转冷，就更需要大雪壁炉与好电影

于是一盼Bride Flight,荷兰人自Turkish Delight后的一种类型的爱情片，1973年的艺术青年Ruter Hauer在2008年也老得面皮发了皱，如果英国下月还不上线，和爸和妈就去荷兰自我满足一下。

二盼明年一月的24 season 7，已经预定，如果一切顺利，参加滑雪的家庭可以聚众吃饭也可以等小朋友睡觉后父母们一起看24.

这样一来，风雨中日子比较有过头。

 

P.S., 和和在一天一天倒计时她四岁的生日，也在等待公公的到来。