This morning, as I was lugging baby and buggy up the stairs, I bumped into my elderly downstairs neighbour. With her pearls, bun in her hair and accent like Marlene Dietrich, she's always very glamorous. She's also very deaf. Or so we thought.
'Are you having work done on the floor in Samuel's room?' she enquired.
Apparently she regularly hears a rhythmic thumping sound from his room so loud that it shakes her ceiling. I realised that it must be from when we pop him on the floor and let him have a good kick. He loves to hear the sound of his stumpy little legs thumping on the floor. But he must be seriously loud. After all, this is a woman who says she never once heard his hideous colicky screams. If this is what he sounds like now, then when he's bigger and tearing around, he'll sound like a rhino.
But this is the problem with living in London with a baby - houses are too expensive so you end up in a flat, everyone on top of each other. And we're at the very top of an old and rickety Victorian building that certainly wasn't designed for young families. As much as I love our place, I do live in fear of tripping on any of the 50 (I've counted) wobbly steps I have to climb with Samuel in my arms.
I dream of moving to a ground floor flat where you can glide straight from street to hall without any huffing or bumping or risk to life and limb. Somewhere where there would be nobody downstairs bothered by Samuel's happy kicks. Oh, and a garden that he could run straight out onto from the back door would be on the wish list too, but now I'm just getting greedy.
I don't know how long we'll be here for, but in the meantime I think I'm going to have to invest in some kind of squishy floor tiles to try and dull the noise of his little feet and try and keep the neighbours sweet. Everybody needs good neighbours.
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