Wednesday 23 December 2009

Home Alone

Today Lynne has ventured out of the house by herself. She is going for shopping and drinkies with one of her pals, and maybe a wee snowball fight or something. This will be the longest she has been away from the baby and so far it seems to be going well. She hasn’t phoned yet, anyway.

‘Mummy is going out!’ I tell the baby. ‘We have the house to ourselves! We can do whatever we want!’

In the baby’s case, her favourite thing to do is probably lying on the floor with her pants off, shouting. She takes after her dad.

Tuesday 22 December 2009

The Interview Before Christmas

Yesterday I had a job interview. I will hear if I got the job in the New Year. It’s only part-time, but this is really perfect for us if I am to keep up my duties as house-husband and look after the kid once Lynne goes back to work.

Irritatingly, there are many people for whom this plan does not compute. This is the 21st century, the sexes are meant to be equal, gender roles have been flipped, but still we keep meeting people who just don’t understand how Lynne could have a decent job and bring home good money, while if the situation was reversed, and I was working and Lynne stayed at home, nobody would think that was weird at all. The idea of a woman being able to earn enough money to support her family seems to be a complete blind spot for a surprising number of people. I can’t help feeling that people somehow think that I’m taking the piss.

Never mind. I don’t need to wrestle bears to know I’m a man. I don’t have time, I’ve got nappies to change.

Friday 18 December 2009

A Grim Realisation

You might have noticed from the last few posts that the baby is crying more. It’s not that bad, she never cries for no reason, usually it’s just that she is hungry or wants a cuddle. But she cries just ever so slightly too much for a nicotine fiend like me to handle with no cigarettes. So I went to Boots to buy some more nicotine gum.

I had a tuna sandwich before I went and as I was leaving the house I realised a terrible thing. I swore blind that I would not be one of these parents that lives vicariously through their kids and ends up lost when they grow up and leave home. I will never just wear clothes that are boring and practical. I’m still young and vital, I have my own life, and, OK, I might not be the snappiest dresser but the jeans are flared, I’ve got a pair of Converse on. But then this happened. As I was draining the tin of tuna I squirted it all over myself, and then just dully rubbed it into my top with a dishcloth. And that’s how I left the house. What is happening to me?

The Kid Ain't Got No Class

No she doesn’t. Ways that she has no class include sneezing and farting at the same time (she gets that from her mother who is in all other respects completely demure), pulling faces when she is having a poo and then audibly sighing with satisfaction, being sick down her chin and then rubbing it in with her fist, and liking Paul Simon.

That last one is my fault. I have been singing the Boy in the Bubble and You Can Call Me Al to her since she was born, I guess just because they were the mellowest little catchy tunes I know the words to. Remember, I’m a dad now. I’m not supposed to know what’s cool.

Anyway, over the past couple of weeks the baby has been becoming more engaged with the world around her, and she is also making a lot more noise. Each morning she wakes up bright and chirpy, I give her her morning bottle while Lynne sleeps, we read the paper and I drink coffee, and she progressively gets more grumpy with me until eventually I can’t stand the noise she is making any more and I put Graceland on. I found out quite by accident, but she loves it. She could be going absolutely apeshit, but when the drums kick in on the Boy in the Bubble, that’s it. Rapt attention. The title track seems to be her favourite, when it’s on she stretches her neck until her head is wobbling on the end of it and her mouth hangs open. This means that she actually likes my singing and wants to hear the original versions! Ha ha!

I only play her the first half of the album of course. Every tune on there is a belter. But if you ever see an old vinyl copy of Graceland, have a look at it. Side A will be all scratched to fuckery while Side B will be pristine. That’s because it’s bollocks.

Thursday 17 December 2009

Christmas Is A Time For Family

In case you hadn’t noticed Christmas is coming up. Now I like Christmas, I’m not one of these people that moan that there is too much tinsel in shops and too many adverts for Marks and Spencer’s on the telly. Fie, pish and mimsy. These things aren’t important, I’m surprised people have the energy to get worked up about them. For me the important things about Christmas are that you don’t have to go to work and all your friends are off as well, you get to drink as much fancy booze as you want and eat loads of nice food, and people give you presents. And there are probably going to be silly hats to wear. What’s wrong with that?

This year is more complicated. Now that we have a baby the festive season has been turned into a political minefield. You see, my parents live about half an hour away but Lynne’s live in Aberdeen. If we visit my folks over the Christmas period then one set of grandparents think the others are getting special treatment. Lynne’s mum already thinks my mum is constantly round here, luxuriating in grandmotherhood while she waits bleakly by the phone for any titbits we cast her way.

Well, we are not playing that game. If we can't please everyone, we are not going to please anyone at all. We are staying in here and having our own wee Christmas, and everyone else can fuck off. Christmas is a time to be selfish.

But we can’t even win with this. Yesterday I phoned my mum. She already knew we weren’t going to her place for Christmas so the first thing she said was, ‘So, are you going to Aberdeen for Christmas?’ Pretty innocuous you may think, but there was a definite tone. ‘Hell no!’ was my instant reply, but its not enough. My mum, being of a naturally suspicious demeanour, thinks I’m part of a conspiracy to make Lynne’s mum into Grandmother Number One. The fact that I’m still pissed off with Lynne’s mum for the way she behaved when the baby was born is obviously a cover to hide the depth of the conspiracy. My mum snidely mentions that she was surprised to get a Christmas card from Lynne’s folks after their last phone conversation. She just can’t resist stirring it.

We have to nip this bullshit in the bud. I’m not running round after everyone else for the rest of my life. For Christ’s sake, she’s my daughter! It’s not about you guys at all!

Anyway, yesterday we put up the Christmas decorations. Yay! The baby is unimpressed with it all. I suppose the whole thing sort of passes you by when you are six weeks old. At least we won’t have to get her any presents, she won’t know the difference. Lynne has been writing Christmas cards round the clock. About 4pm I made some coffee to go with my last piece of nicotine gum. Lynne had some coffee too. This turned out to be a schoolboy error. Once the baby had supped from the caffeiney breast she was up all night, her arms and legs working as if she was miming a marathon runner. She hollered for hours and with no nicotine in my system I had a hard time keeping a lid on my stress levels. When I changed her she farted while the nappy was off and sprayed guacamole coloured poo over my legs. Then she looked really pleased with herself and said ‘Ung!’ She has no class at all.

Tuesday 15 December 2009

Prams and That

This week we have been taking the baby outside for wee danders about the shops. We have taken her out before, Lynne has even taken her as far as Braehead, but since we have a variety of conveyances for the child and we have pretty much used them all in the past couple of days, I thought I would talk some shit about them, compare them and that. Score them out of ten and the like.

My daughter is pretty underwhelmed by the whole experience of going outside. Its December, its cold, so we bundle her up and she sleeps the whole time. We swore blind that we wouldn’t be the kind of parents that dressed their kid up as an animal but someone gave us a furry snowsuit, with little ears on the hood and the mitts made to look like paws, which the baby looks ridiculous in. We can’t resist. Also, the suit is so cosy that just putting her in it knocks her out. It’s almost instantaneous. It’s a shame we have to take it off her.

Anyway, conveyance number one. The Premaxx Baby Bag. This is a Swedish sling thing with pockets and what have you all over it and it looks the business. Ours is orange and deep red. It goes over one shoulder and you slot the baby in and she hangs across your chest as if she’s in a hammock. It has draw toggles that you have to play with and you need to twist the strap on your shoulder origami style so it takes a couple of goes to work out what to do with it, but the baby looks really snug in there once you have figured it out. Its handy for short trips, you can go into shops that it would be a fight to get a pram into, but since all the weight is on one shoulder, it starts to get a bit sore after a while. I wouldn’t like to walk for miles with it on.

Score: 7/10 great for short trips, a bit complicated and sore on the old shoulder.

Conveyance number two. The Baby Bjorn. This is the same idea as the sling thing, but is more of a rucksack affair with the baby sitting upright on your chest. The straps go over both your shoulders so you can for a bit further with it on before it starts to get too heavy, but I prefer the sling for a couple of reasons. First, the sling looks better. The Baby Bjorn looks like a boring piece of hiking equipment, which gives me the matching-waterproofs horrors. It has a neck support for babies that are too small to hold their own heads up, but this only works if the baby remains motionless, if she tries to have a look around or even falls asleep it makes her head loll around alarmingly. Lastly, the one we have got is second-hand, and I don’t like the idea of putting my daughter into something that someone else has already shat in.

Score: 4/10 functional, boring, and baby can’t even really sleep in it.

Which brings us to conveyance number three, the trusty pram. We have a Mamas and Papas Pliko pramette. I will probably dicuss prams in disparaging detail in a further post, but for now we chose this one because it’s small lightweight and simple, with a cracking turning circle and no pedometer or any of that silly shit. This beast can go for miles. It can carry a formidable amount of shopping in the undercarriage, but be careful with this because it affects the steering. Remember if you pack loads of shit in your pram you still have to push it home. Out of the three methods of transportation this is the one with the most room for the little passenger, she will never look squished, even in a huge furry bear suit. The only problem with it is carrying up and down the stairs to the flat. It’s light but not four-flights-of-stairs light. We have left it chained up at the bottom a few times, but I don’t like doing this because I don’t want it getting manky. There are students live below us and I don’t want them coming home drunk one night and playing with it. I would end up trying to fight them in the stairwell in my underpants.

Score: 9/10 can’t be beaten on range and payload, but it’s a pain in the arse when you live on the top floor.

Quote of the Day

Lynne asked my mum what she wanted the baby to call her. My mum said

'She can call me anything she likes. Just not nan, gran or nanna, or anything like that. I'm not a goat.'

Sunday 13 December 2009

Southpaw

You know, I don’t believe in ‘cluster feeding’. I think they have just been making it up. It seems to me that as the baby gets bigger, she needs more milk but Lynne’s boob is always the same size.

I think the baby is going to be left-handed. It’s the side she favours. As Lynne cradles the baby’s head and moves her mouth towards the nipple, the baby curls her right arm across her chest in a classic guard posture and swings wildly for Lynne’s face with her left fist.

Friday 11 December 2009

The Baby Grew Up While I was Out

I should have known better than to take on the assistant vice principal on his own turf. It was the last day of the survey today, and he played a blinder. I can only shake my head in admiration. What he did was this; about 10am he put a sign on his office door saying MEETING IN PROGRESS. DO NOT DISTURB. Then some time around midday he went home, leaving the sign on his door. I didn’t realise there was nobody in his office until 2pm. I have no way of knowing how many people were in the meeting, when they were there, and when the office was empty. I have no numbers for that room all day.

Ha ha! I salute his raw cunning and if I had to be outwitted by anyone I am glad it was him. But I don’t really care. I am finished, and I will get paid all the same.

They say a watched pot never boils, and my daughter seems to have grown a personality while I have been out. She looks up at me and smiles when I come in, a big toothless smile that transforms her into a little person. When I left for work on Monday she was still an inert lump that would just lie there, staring into space and blinking. It's surprising how much she has come out of herself in so short a space of time. There are other changes too. She has decided that she is no longer willing to sit about in a dirty nappy. She now tells us if she needs to be changed. She also likes to shout; as I was changing her she was grinning, kicking her legs and saying ‘MAAUUGH!’ This is the start of conversation. She is more aware of the world around her and will gaze in wonder at a rattle or a stuffed zebra that squeaks, where she showed no interest before. I can’t wait until she starts to laugh.

But I don’t think I have missed anything. Things I might have missed are her first trip to Braehead, an epic journey on the bus that Lynne took her on yesterday. The furthest I have been with the baby so far is Partick Library, but more on the outside experience in a later post. Today she hawked up her first loogie. Apparently she sneezed up a huge ball of snot and Lynne didn’t keep it for me to see. Babies born by c-section are a bit more mucusy for the first few weeks because they haven’t been wrung out in the mangle of vaginal birth.

Anyway, now that I am officially unemployed again we can get back into the old routine.

Thursday 10 December 2009

Being Paid To Watch Jeremy Kyle

Lynne reckons that the baby misses me during the day. Awww. I wasn’t so sure whether that was true, it’s still hard to say how much the baby takes in, but when I came home today she looked up at me and gave me a big, gummy smile. She’s been trying to smile for a few days and now she’s cracked it. It made going to work worthwhile.

I have one more day on the college survey. Good. It’s pish. My little round of rooms takes about ten, fifteen minutes to check off and then I am free for the rest of the hour. It’s not enough time to do anything else, but just enough time to be a bit bored. I sit in the staff common room with the other guy that is surveying the building, talking shit and watching daytime telly. Everyone else that uses the common room is a middle-aged woman and, as you can no doubt imagine, this is a nightmare. Any work place with a single sex population is always problematic. If it’s all men it quickly turns into a pirate ship. If it’s all middle-aged women, well…

Yesterday one of them grassed us up to our boss because I left my bag on the sofa. Apparently someone had wanted to sit there and couldn’t. Nobody had said anything about my bag to me. Bear in mind that all day all these women had grinned a big ‘Hiya!’ at us whenever they came in or out. Today the crisis was over milk. Who was drinking it all? I bet it was her. That sort of thing. The staff fridge is now full of separate pint cartons with labels on them to identify their owners, the levels marked with marker pen. As we were redistributing the milk between the cartons so they all held the same amount before we left tonight, we noticed that the cleaners had misspelled ‘cleaners’ on their carton. It was a cruel laugh, but we laughed it anyway.

One of the joys of my round is the office of the assistant vice principal. A lot of the staff in the rooms I’m surveying seem to be scared that if I don’t put down that they have lots and lots of people in their rooms they will end up being allocated tiny offices in the new building. They think I'm a spy. I don’t think it will work like that. I think they will take my numbers, make it into a graph, bin the graph, design a big fancy building, decide they don’t have enough money, and then build a glass and steel box same as they always do. It seems to me that what I’m doing is pretty pointless.

Anyway, the assistant vice principal is one of the more prickly customers. He is used to being an alpha male round here, he doesn’t like to be counted. Every time I knock on his office door, every hour throughout the working day, he has a new bit of shit to give me. Last thing today I find him having a meeting with another guy.

‘Let’s see your numbers, then,’ he says.
‘It’s boring really. See?’ I say. I turn my clipboard round so he can see it.
He holds out his hand. ‘Come on, don’t be shy.’
I pass him the clipboard. ‘You're that line.’
He frowns. ‘There’s a lot of zeros. What do all the fives mean?’
‘That’s the code for what you are doing. Five means admin work.’
‘It doesn’t mean picking my nose or scratching my arse?’
‘No,’ I say, deadpan. ‘That would be a seven.’

Tuesday 8 December 2009

I'll see your waaaugh and raise you WAAAUGH.

The baby is never going to last six months in the moses basket. When we lay her in it the space between her head and the top of the basket is getter smaller and smaller. She is growing fast, which isn’t surprising given the amount she eats. At this rate in a few weeks I will have to dismantle the cot in the nursery and put it up in the bedroom, and there won’t be any room to move in there. I am also starting to doubt Lynne’s ability to eat enough food to supply all this milk and still stay alive. The kid won’t leave her alone.

I say this because I have only seen the baby’s grumpy side for the past two days. I am working. That’s right. Its only for this week; I'm doing the college survey again. I have to get up in the morning and leave the house like normal people. I don’t get my morning cuddles any more, where I remove the noisy baby from the bedroom so Lynne can sleep, give the baby the milk Lynne expressed the night before and watch her blink in the morning sun as I drink my coffee. No. I get back about 5pm when its already dark and the kid’s been up all day and just wants to be fed for hours so Lynne can’t have her dinner. I take my jacket off and pick her up and she flails her little arms around and goes red, her face puckering for the big howl. I howl back at her. She looks puzzled.

So the baby is finding her voice now, and it’s a loud one. But it’s still not as loud as mine.

Saturday 5 December 2009

A Bit of Sense, Anyone?

Here's a wee video for those of a thinking persuasion:




Cow and Gate Update

The formula was a bad idea in the end. My daughter has been crying inconsolably all afternoon and into the evening. She has just gone to sleep now. We couldn’t work out what was wrong with her, she was making hungry faces, but she gurns all the time anyway. She would only feed a little at a time so we thought she was only suckling for comfort. She was red faced and grumpy every which way I held her. She was sick on my side of the bed. I had put her in a wee dress that she had never had on before, so I changed her into her sleepsuit and checked the seams of the dress for scratchy bits. Nothing. We checked her for rashes. Nothing. We discussed whether she felt warm. She always feels warm. I even looked up ‘crying’ in the Pregnancy Bible. It said that sometimes babies cry for no reason. Thanks for that.

About 8pm she did a massive fart. It was huge; the shockwave reverberated round the round the room like the Tsar Bomba had just gone off in here. Then she chilled right out. All that time she just had trapped wind. Fuck Cow and Gate.

Early Morning Drinking

My daughter is in the middle of another cluster feeding frenzy. She was latched on to Lynne for just about the whole day yesterday, finally going to sleep at 10pm only to wake again about 1am. I was still up watching a crappy Bruce Willis film. I had little flashes of recognition, so I think I had seen the film before, but I must have blanked it from my memory because it was so tremendously bad. That’s a good thing; its like watching a whole new film. What was also new was that although I was up alone on a Friday night, I didn’t ransack the kitchen for horrible booze. I happen to know that there are the dregs of a bottle of cooking sherry and the arse-end of some Crabbe’s green ginger wine in the top cupboard, but I didn’t touch any of it. Over the past year of unemployment I have necked the Bulgarian whiskey, which smelt of seaweed and turned my pee green, the Bercherovka, a Czech spirit that I think tastes of Christmas but no one else can stomach, and the grappa, a colourless tipple with the ‘nose’ of petroleum that substitutes an acrid burning sensation for flavour. All these and more I have chugged with my late-night pal Bruce. Now something is different. I have responsibilities now. Parenthood has changed me. I drank milk.

But I digress. Lynne and the baby got up at 1am and the baby cried, had a feed and then refused to go back to sleep despite some pretty intensive rocking action, cried again, had another feed. The baby feeds for a bit, then drops off Lynne’s nipple like a sated leech, lying on her lap with a wee smile and eyes closed. This is the Milky Coma of Pleasure, and should never be mistaken for actual sleep. She will undoubtedly want to be fed again and will object to being moved. This cycle can last up to two hours. All this meant that I missed the second half of the film, thereby ensuring that at some point in the future I will sit through it again, thinking I have never seen it.

That was us until 3am. The baby wakes again at 6. At 8.30 I give in and get up, determined that Lynne is going to some sleep. In the back of the cupboard is a single carton of Cow and Gate ready-to-use formula. I put the sterilizer on, full of bottles and that, make some coffee and change the baby. She is chewing her fist and making hungry faces. I go to wash my hands and prepare the formula, but the baby starts crying again, I think of her lying on the changing mat, thrashing around on her own in the middle of the floor and in my hurry cut the carton of formula in such a way that it goes everywhere. Sloppy. Not very unconcerned. I need to stay frosty.

The baby seems willing to take the formula while remaining unconvinced. I am now sitting with a puke rag over my shoulder and a dozing baby in my lap. Drinking from the bottle makes her burp prodigiously, the force of the last one caused her to head butt me in the teeth. She wasn’t happy.

Friday 4 December 2009

Thoughts on a Month of Fatherhood

The daily routine is a bit repetitive to bang on about it every day, so I’m going to pad out the blog with my take on current affairs. So here you go.

Who gives a fuck about Tiger Woods? He plays golf.

Should we ban minarets like the Swiss? After all, you're not allowed churches in muslim countries are you? So, nah nah-nah nah-nah. Leaving aside the idiocy of saying things like 'if we don't want sharia law we have to be more like Saudi Arabia', here are some pictures of churches in Iran. Some of them are pretty big and shiny too. Oh.

Nobody is going to ban Christmas trees, for fuck's sake. They are not religious symbols anyway, unless we’ve all started worshipping Odin while I wasn’t watching. Actually I wouldn’t mind if we all worshipped All-Father Odin, Lord of the Slain. Its just that hunting down my enemies and giving them the ol’ blood eagle might put greater demands on my masculinity than I’m used to. Anyway I’ve checked in the Bible. There’s no tinsel or crackers in it either, so I don’t know what’s been going on there.

That’ll do. I just gave the baby a bottle with 30ml of expressed milk. When she finished it she cried for 30 seconds, then forgot and fell asleep. She woke up at 8.30 this morning just when I was in the middle of a vivid dream. I don’t remember anything about it now, just that it was very engaging.

She is a month old today. The days are long but the weeks pass quickly. Odd that. So far the whole fatherhood thing is not as daunting as I thought it would be. It helps that we have a calm, happy baby. Some babies cry all the time for no reason. That would be a fucking nightmare. We are lucky. Some babies can’t figure out how to drink from a bottle once they are being breast-fed. We are lucky with that too. Some babies get covered with thrush and their mother’s nipples get all cracked and infected. Jesus.

But since I’ve got this parenting thing down, here’s some handy hints.

Don’t panic. All a newborn baby needs is to feed, have its nappy changed and sleep. Its straightforward, if a bit relentless after a while, so as long as you are doing these things it will all be fine. If you are freaking out the baby can tell, and it will get upset. Remember its relying on you to know what’s going on. It hasn’t got a clue.

Don’t prod the baby when its asleep to check if its still breathing. I’m pretty sure it will be, and if you wake the baby up in the middle of the night it will be really pissed off and then it’s a fucker to get it to go back to sleep.

Do leave your dishes in the sink. No one will think any less of you. If you have a newborn baby most people will be surprised you’ve got your shirt buttoned up the right way. If you have time to do housework, you should be asleep instead. You’ll need it.

Don’t be afraid of handling your baby. I know it seems really fragile but its tougher than you think and it likes its cuddles. Just remember to support its little head and don’t drop it or bounce it until its sick or anything. Look at the midwives in the hospital; they tossed the baby about like a piece of chicken, didn’t they?

Don’t be shy of the baby’s poo. You will get it all over yourself no matter what you do.

If you are a man, get as involved as you can. If you can get paternity leave take as much as you can. If both of you are in the house with the baby it makes everything much, much easier. Looking after the baby is not just woman's work; its fun too.

That’s it, I think. I’d better go, everyone seems to be waking up.

Thursday 3 December 2009

Milky Tips

The health visitor came round again today. She is a cheery, dark haired woman from Inverness. She doesn’t stay long, since we seem to be coping we get pretty much left alone. People aren’t interested unless you are freaking out, I suppose. My daughter was weighed again, she is now 10lbs, the wee butterball. However, we have a couple of questions about feeding, and the answers are actually pretty useful, so pay attention if you are going to have a kid.

Lynne has a gig at Hogmanay and the kid will be staying at home with me. I need to be able to feed the baby and Lynne isn’t really expressing the volume of milk required. Is mixing with formula feeds with breast-feeding allowed? All the literature recommends against it. In fact its absolutely fine to give formula feeds when you are breast feeding. The only things you have to watch out for is that if the mother’s milk isn’t regularly squeezed out, then the mother’s body will reduce the amount of milk it produces accordingly. And maybe the baby will be unconvinced by the differing taste and texture of formula compared to breast milk, but as far as I’m concerned the kid will get what its given.

The other thing is expressing. Lynne was coming round to the idea that it was a waste of time. She didn’t seem to be able to express more than 20ml in one go. It just doesn't seem like much. Any tips on expressing? Apparently 20ml is fine for a mother with a four-week-old baby so don’t worry about it. Vary the time of day that you try to express to see if that makes any difference and bear in mind that you don’t have to keep all the milk separate. Its fine to mix it all in one bottle in any 24 hour period. That way you can acumulate a decent feed over the course of a day.

This may all sound straight-forward enough, but these are the kind of things that you stress about when you are a new parent. As always, it all turns out to a fuckload easier than you thought.