Chinese Water

The baby is having her morning sleep. She has been up since 6am, whingeing about her teeth. With her gums so sore she just wants Lynne all the time. She was very disappointed when Lynne went to work.

Yesterday I bought her a teething ring. It is filled with water so that I can put it in the fridge and it will be nice and cool when the baby chews it. Chinese water, imagine that. It's raining outside and the ring is filled with water from the other side of the world. There's a point there if I could think of it.

In other news I have made a language breakthrough. It's this; 'Mawmawmawmawm,' doesn't always mean 'Lynne'. It can also mean 'milk'. I can't imagine that Lynne will be very happy about that, but there you go. 

I'm quite tired now, but tomorow is my day off. I'm going to work.

Teeth!

After enduring periodic bouts of shrieking and drooling so much she looks like she's been swimming, the baby finally has a bit of tooth showing. It is in her lower left gum, like some snaggle-toothed hick. It's pretty sharp too: it must have hurt like a bastard. 

It still hurts like a bastard too, she is currently doing circuits of the floor, squealing and grabbing things, chewing them to fuck. She is better than she was first thing this morning though, my nose is covered with scratches and my lips are sore where she tried to twist them off. Got to go she is making for the door.

There's No Nectar Points On Formula Milk

... because it's evil. Like cigarettes. No nectar points on them either. Boycott Nestle.

I don't really like the new automated checkouts in the supermarket. I think that ringing all the stuf through the till is the shop's job, and is included in the price. If I have to do it all myself I think everything should be cheaper. And the machine is rude. It barks demands for independent approval of my alcohol purchases, and reacts with shrill suspicion at every shift in my bag's weight. I've a good mind to squat on the machine shouting, 'Unverified item in the bagging area!' at the top of my voice and see what they do then. They would have to double-bag that one, at least.

But most of all it's impersonal. The other day I was pulling the plug from the laptop out of the socket and I turned round to find the other end of the cable in the baby's mouth. Don't panic, it's a bit harder than that to electrocute yourself with the computer's power cable but it still wasn't good. Anyway the baby wasn't really interested in being told off about it.

I was telling this story to the girl at the supermarket checkout. I felt she would be a sympathetic ear as I had previously told her that I spent my days looking after the baby, and she had looked at me in horror and said, 'Babies shout a lot!' On this occasion she agreed with me that cable chewing was not an activity to be encouraged, and told me a cautionary tale about the death of her hamster. It had had a similar enthusiasm for chewing cables which had ended badly.

It took her three attempts to tell me this story, since she had her hands over her face and her shoulders were shaking. I couldn't tell if she was crying or laughing. A huge queue gathered behind me, faces angry that my social interaction was slighly inconveniencing them.....

THIS POST HAS BEEN INTERRUPTED BY THE BABY TRYING TO CHEW THE POWER CABLE.

Baby 2.0

The baby has worked out how to crawl. This means that all my daily tasks now take just a little bit longer. It is almost impossible to dress her. She gets stuck under the sofa, or disappears altogether. She yanks open the bottom drawers and starts rummaging through my bank statements.

Today while I was feeding her lunch and she was pulling faces at me and laughing, I thought about how much she has changed. She used to be a little bundle of white blankets and spiky dark hair, and at the time it seemed like it was forever, but it was only a few weeks. She used to look totally like me, but now she looks like Lynne. She is changing so fast but I’m too close to it to notice it happening.

She was trying to stand up in bath tonight.

Yawn

Today the baby wouldn't eat her soup. She was too tired. I don't know how she could have been too tired because we both slept in, and something of the hierarchy of the household can be deduced from observing the sleeping positions of the inhabitants; baby, luxuriating across the middle of the bed; me, slipping down the crack between the wall and the mattress with a bare corner of pillow; Lynne, up and getting ready for work.

Of all the things in the baby's life, whether or not she goes to sleep is the only one over which she has any real control, so it is odd that it is the most problematic. She likes to sleep on her stomach but she has also recently discovered how to sit up from this position too. This means that when I put the sleepy baby in her cot, she immediately rolls over onto her belly, which is good, but then she pushes herself upright and cries because she can't sleep like that. It's really silly. 

She is asleep now. I got her to sleep by spooning her. We lay on the bed and I closed my eyes so she couldn't make eye contact, breathed in and out as loudly and slowly as I could, in the hope that this would be soothing, and pinned her down with one arm across her chest. She struggled for a bit, then started rubbing her eyes, then her breathing slowed, and she was gone. I then gently moved her into her cot and crept out of the room. It all took about twenty minutes. What a carry on.

Someday It Will All Just Be White Noise

We went to see a nursery yesterday morning. It is just around the corner and has a free place for the baby on a Monday. Handy. We read the HM Inspectorate report online, which was good, and went to see them. They seemed nice and they seemed organised, so we are going to put the baby in there.

It was raining when we left. Lynne went to work and I went to the supermarket. The baby fell asleep in her buggy. And here I made my mistake.

Since it was raining I didn’t stay out. I should have gone for coffee or something and left the baby to sleep the morning away, but no, I had to take her home and try and get her up the stairs into her cot. Of course, she woke up and spent the rest of the day screaming at me, pretty much none stop, even managing to scream between spoonfuls while she was eating her lunch.

The baby refused to have her afternoon nap, preferring to writhe about on her blanket shouting. She was so tired and angry that she her eyes had gone the baleful red of a smackhead’s little peepers.

‘Unnnng!’ she cried.

‘I know it’s ung,’ I said. ‘It’s all ung. Go to sleep.’

The bay could clearly sense that I was getting annoyed even though I was trying not to show it. Have you ever tried to pretend that things are great when they are really, really not? For hours? By the time Lynne got home my nerves were shot. I got the baby’s tea ready, handed Lynne the spoon and went out for a pint. As I left the baby grinned, grinned, at me from Lynne’s arms.

‘Don’t bother smiling at me,’ I told her. ‘Now you’ve got your mum you think everything’s cool. Well, it’s not cool at all.’

This morning she screamed at me again. It took me a while to realise that she was sitting in a big pile of poo. I thought she was just being an arsehole again. She is asleep now. Good girl.

The World Cup Is Fucking Shit

But here is some nice music

What Is This Greasy Potato All About?

Took the baby to the library for bounce and rhyme this morning. I was the only man there. That meant that I got a whole verse of 'The Hello Song' to myself. I'm not sure I can handle any more of that.

When we got home we ate an avocado. We ate it like this; I would have a bite then the baby would open her mouth and I would put a little bit in. She would then pull a face as if it was the worst thing she had ever tasted. Then I would have another bite and she would open her mouth eagerly for her bit and then pull a face, just as if it was the worst thing she had ever tasted. Then I would take my bite... and so on. We did that until the avocado was finished.

She is asleep now so that I can watch the football.

As Promised...

I promised you recipes, but I will have to work fast because the baby’s afternoon nap should really be my dish-washing window.


Here is a wee curry-

Half an onion
A stick of celery
A small garlic clove
A red pepper
A sweet potato
A tin of tomatoes
Half a cup of lentils
Half a teaspoon of Thai green curry paste (careful now)
A wee bit of coconut block

1. Cut all the veg into tiny bits.
2. Put it all in a pan with a teeny tiny bit of oil and cook it until it is softened.
3. Put everything else in.
4. Cook, cook ,cook.
5. Serve with rice and whiz it in a blender if it’s too lumpy.

The baby loves this stuff. These quantities will make up three or four little pots, which means three or four dinners. Hooray!

D Day

Today Lynne went back to work. No going back part-time, no half measures, no fucking about, she is nine to five from here on in. Me and the baby watched the football.

That's not entirely true. I was working this morning so my mum came round to babysit. The nursery has let us down: their building work is going on for another six weeks so we are looking elsewhere. We might have a place for the baby in a nursery round the corner from the beginning of July, but we haven't been to see it yet.

In the meantime, my mother has stepped into the breach. My folks live 45 minutes in the car away and they do like to see the kid, but I feel bad about getting them to babysit while I go to work. I have volunteered to work every Saturday instead of doing the Wednesday shift to make it easier, but this isn't ideal either bcause that means that I will have to use my holidays to get a weekend off. We have been here before.

The baby and my mum have made friends now. I don't know what the baby had against her, I think maybe she had sussed out that when my folks turn up Lynne and I tend to disappear and leave her with them. Or maybe it had to do with stupid noises. I mak a lot of stupid noises, so does Lynne, but my mum is a bit uptight for that carry on, and maybe the baby found being clutched at in steely silence a bit alarming.

Anyway, my first proper day of being a true hausfrau was fine. I got back about lunchtime, we ate, we read books, the baby chewed the books and we watched the football. I had a fiver on Chile and they won. The baby feel asleep before the end of the match so I missed the Swiss free kick that was their best chance of the game. Just as well, if I'd been watching it, it would have gone in.

When Lynne gets home we will all have our tea. I will put up some recipes tomorrow.

Progress Report

I’ve just realised that I haven’t actually posted on how the baby is getting on for fucking ages. I’ve been chuntering on about every other bloody thing.

Anyway, she’s fine. Thanks. She still doesn’t have any teeth, I was a bit premature with mentioning them, but I can see the shining little white buds under her gums if I gawp into her mouth for long enough. The teething pain seems to have subsided for now and will come and go, oooh, until the teeth actually come in. Which could be any time over the next year. In the meantime, everything in here is absolutely chewed to death and covered in slobber. Everything. She has gummy little hands too, and likes to grab my nose with her thumb up my nostril while she slaps me with the other hand. It's horrible.

I was premature with the crawling too. The baby can roll about the floor quite confidently and sometimes she kicks her legs when she is on her belly as if she is trying to find a purchase with her knees, but she hasn’t figured out that she needs to lift her chest of the floor with her arms to become truly mobile.

I suppose the main development is that she doesn’t grunt so much when she has a poo. This would make it hard to tell if she had done one, but she has decided she will no longer tolerate a dirty nappy. The signal is now a hoarse shriek that is sometimes so hoarse it makes her cough.

She babbles all the time and recently I have noticed that there are times when she seems to say ‘Dadadada’ and ‘Mamamama’ in what would seem to be appropriate contexts, but I know this is wishful thinking. She is far, far too young to be talking yet.

She isn’t the little pudding she used to be, but she is still just a baby. But sometimes, when we put her in a dress, she looks like a proper little girl.

Public Information

APOLOGIES. THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY DISRUPTED BY THE WORLD CUP. UNCONCERNED DAD HAS A FIVER EACH WAY ON ENGLAND TO WIN THE TOURNAMENT, WHICH IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF MONEY. POSTS ARE IN THE PIPELNE SO THERE WILL BE UPDATES OVER THE WEEKEND.

More Sweaty Dreaming

Strange dreams again this morning. I dreamt that me, my dad and my cousin who I haven't seen in years, were all in charge of security at the Kelvingrove Museum. There was a display of rare blue diamonds we were guarding but someone kept stealing them and putting them back, moving them about and stuff. Really irritating. On a more mundane level, though it seemed equally pressing at the time, I dreamt that I had put some soya milk in the freezer and forgotten to take it out.

'I'll give you a fiver if you give the baby her breakfast.'

That was Lynne's voice. The sun was streaming through our curtains, Lynne was looking really cozy and determined to be asleep* and the baby was lying on her belly, headbutting a puddle of drool that lay on her blanket. I went into the kitchen to mix up some baby rice with mashed banana. I was really feeling the sweaty waking-from-a-vivid-dream bamboozlement. The dreams are the product of waking early in the morning and then going back to sleep, my id going wild in the extra snooze-time. The baby has been waking at about 4.30am these light mornings, depending on how much milky pudding we can shovel into her after her dinner. The more milky pudding, the less she wakes up in the night.

Of course, I have no intention of taking that fiver off Lynne. I give the baby her breakfast most mornings anyway. And of course, I know you think I'm having anxiety dreams because Lynne is going back. to work soon. In two weeks to be precise. But you amateur psychiatrists don't know it all. I mean, just because I like my CDs in order doesn't mean I like to push things up my arse.

*She later told me it was the first morning since the birth she hadn't woken up with a sore back and she was really comfy. Just think about that for a second if you are going to have a baby, folks. It will be seven months on Sunday.

Rude Awakenings

I had a horrible dream last night. I dreamt that I went to the dentist and she diagnosed me with leukemia. She did this by taking me into a little office and showing me a big piece of green card with leukemia written on it in red letters. I was wondering what to do about this when I heard the baby squealing and woke up.

I sat straight upright and said, 'Hey!'

The baby looked round and smiled. She was lying on her front busy doing something that required high pitched shrieking with the corner of her blanket in her mouth. I picked her up and dumped her in the bed next to us. She saw my nipple ring and pulled a face, eyes wide and lips pursed. Its the face that usually means she wants to play with the buttons on my shirt. Nooo....

'I think she's hungry,' mumbled Lynne.

'You think I should get up and feed her?' I asked. It was 6.30am.

'I've already been up!' Lynne was as indignant as you can be with your eyes closed.

I hadn't meant it like that. I just wanted to know what to do.

Time's Getting On...

It four weeks until Lynne goes back to work. I am absolutely prepared for looking after the baby single handed, but there is one thing that worries me. Now that I have a wee part-time job the baby will have to go into child care on Monday mornings and Wednesdays. A day and a half a week. We have found a nursery, they are on my way to work so they are really handy, they seem nice, they make positive noises when we ring them up, but they still seem to be building the place.

The work was meant to be done by the end of May, which is now, but the scaffolding is still up. Everything has been so easy so far, I'm just getting nervous that this is where our luck runs out.

The Goodness of Milky Puddings

I took the baby to get weighed at the health centre today. It had only been two weeks since we last had her weighed but she had lost three ounces that time, and Lynne was worried. Not really worried, you know, just a she-needed-to-know kind of worried.

The baby weigh-in takes place in a wee room with the heating turned right up, changing tables in each corner and a collection of chairs where parents sit with their half-dressed kids. At the front is the table with the scales on it and the two smiling health workers who call out our names in turn. I strip the baby down to her nappy and she babbles as we sit looking round at the other babies. I'm trying to work out if there are any as pretty as she is. I'm not sure what she is thinking.

It gets to our turn and I take the baby's nappy off and put her on the scales. This is a race against time because we have to get a reading off the scales before she craps and pisses everywhere. But she manages to preserve her dignity and we find that she has gained 10oz. She is now 17lb 1oz.

The health worker asks me if there is anything we think we are doing different. I tell her we have been giving the baby cheese, yoghurt and milky puddings. She nods approvingly.

I take the baby home and we have scrambled egg on toast for lunch. Lynne feeds the baby her egg with a spoon and then the baby gums each piece of toast into a gooey ball and throws them on the floor. For a finale, she thumps her plate with both fists so that it flips over and falls on the floor. We cheer and the baby laughs. 

Dead Fox Hand

We had vegetable lasagne for dinner, the three of us, the baby's mashed up roughly with a spoon. The move onto solid food has been surprisingly easy and the baby seems willing to eat whatever we put in front of her, which is pretty impressive seeing as how she has no teeth.

When we were finished Lynne glanced out of the window and said, 'Oh, the fox is dead.' Looking out I saw a fox lying on the opposite pavement in broad daylight, it's head at a funny angle.

'What should we do?'
'We can't leave it there.'

I went out with a bin bag. It was odd that the fox was just lying out there on the pavement, foxes usually take themselves away to some little den to die in private, so I think there must have been some violence involved. It was lying among some little broken pieces of polystyrene and in the gutter was a length of metal, like a kick-stand broken off a bike, with a twisted bit of spring round one end and tape round the other. I don't really know how the fox would have been killed used these bits and pieces, maybe it was just hit by a car. This is as far as my forensic investigation took me.

I picked up the dead fox by the tail. It was absolutely rigid, and its fur was unpleasantly wet. Bear in mind that I am a city boy here. Its tail stuck out stiffly so that the corpse wouldn't fit in my fucking bin bag. I shouted up to Lynne, who was looking out the window.

'I need another bin bag!'

She didn't open the window. She waved.

I mimed putting the fox in another bag, double-bagging if you will, and held up two fingers. Lynne disappeared from the window. I stood there, with a dead fox half falling out of it and my hands held out awkwardly to my sides. I felt like they were streaked with vermin and death. It looked like I was surrendering.

A woman walked by. 'What's that?' She winkled her nose.
'It's a dead fox.'
'Did you kill it?'
'No, I'm... I'm waiting for my wife to get me another bin bag.'

I was sad about the fox. I used to see it cutting about in the street at dusk or early in the morning, and I liked that, those times when there was nobody about but me and the fox. It's not all bad though, the other day I saw a fox cub in the window of a derelict flat. There was work being done on it, and some vixen must have made a den in there when work stopped for winter (or the recession) and littered amongst the scaffolding and pulled-up floorboards. So it all goes around, I suppose.

I'm a Bit of a Knob Sometimes...

After my last post I had intended to continue over the weekend by riffing on feeding and sleeping patterns, vis-a-vis the baby, but events conspired to prevent me. So instead I offer this, three instances of petulance on my part that happened this weekend. I tell these stories against myself.

I was eating breakfast on Friday morning when Lynne said,

‘Give the baby some of your scrambled egg.’

‘No,’ I snapped. ‘She’s got porridge and she’s [expletive deleted] eating that.’

Lynne leaned towards the baby as if to share a confidence and cooed, ‘Daddy is angry with us.’

Two points about this. The first is that I am trying not to swear so much in front of the baby, she is still too little to take it in but I need to kick the habit before it’s too late. You have to imagine the [expletive deleted] spoken in a neutral voice an octave lower than the rest of my statement. I’m not saying that is an honest transcript of what I said; just that that is how you should imagine it.

The second point is that I was angry with Lynne and the baby. It went back to the asparagus Lynne gave her. I know it is important for the baby to try new foods, but giving her exciting things like asparagus, or strips of toast spread with Dairylea, with her dinner only serves to highlight the shortcomings of the goo that forms the bulk of the meal. And if the baby does not embark on the voyage of sleep stuffed to the gunwales with grub, she wakes up hungry and I end up getting up at 5am to shovel baby rice down her throat. So, quite neatly, I have shown that the fact that I was tired and grumpy was all Lynne’s fault.

My in-laws came down for the weekend. Yas, ya fucken beauty! There is still a slight frisson of tension between me and my mother-in-law, but the baby is blissfully unaware of this and loves her grandparents unreservedly, giggling and bouncing up and down as they play with her. This is made all the more irritating as the baby howls with displeasure at the sight of my mother’s face. Stupid baby.

That is all background to instance of petulance number two. I came home from work on Saturday to find Lynne and her mother fussing over the baby in her cot.

‘Hey,’ I cried, pointed at Lynne’s mother’s feet. ‘No shoes in the bedroom! We’ve got a cream carpet in here! I’m not allowed shoes in the bedroom!’

‘Oh, sorry,’ she replied in a voice that didn’t sound very sorry at all. That was the only point I scored all weekend. Pretty needless really. Make sure you mark it up there with the rest.

On to number three. On Saturday night I went out to for Tiny Eric’s leaving do. He is leaving for America on Wednesday so he wanted a few drinks in the pub. I was there at 9pm, but he was nowhere to be seen, but I saw another guy I knew so we had a pint. He was only staying for one and then going on to the Halt Bar. Tiny Eric pitched up half an hour later with another one of his mates and said he was going to find a table round the corner, but my Halt Bar mate was in the middle of a story so I told Tiny Eric I would join him in a minute.

When I went in search of Tiny Eric I couldn’t find him. There were bands playing down the stairs, a girl sitting at a table in the doorway taking the money and stamping the hands.

I asked her, ‘Did a little guy with glasses and a tie go in here?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s indie music. They are all little guys with glasses and a tie.’

‘How much is it?’

‘Five pounds.’

‘A fiver?’ I scoffed. ‘I’m not paying a fiver to see shit bands in the pub!’

So I went to the Halt Bar. I probably won’t see Tiny Eric ever again.

I Should Just Be Waking Up About Now

Well, the results of the election seem to have been met with widespread disappointment, as if people expected the ugly ducklings they voted for to turn into beautiful swans by morning. I am watching breakfast news,  breakfast news for God's sake, the morning after the first meeting of the new cabinet and the general mood of the nation seems to be surprise that the government is made up of the same old fuds that were on the telly before. Who would have thought it? There also seems to be rolling footage of a Bee Gee drinking champagne with be-medalled war veterans. I must be delirious. They must be congratulating him on his survival.

I have been awake for hours. At fucken hell o'clock this morning I had to get up and shovel baby rice into the kid, who has been up all night demanding milk. That is because she wouldn't eat her dinner. She had a big lunch, and for her dinner she had some asparagus spears, which she chewed up enthusiastically, and a plate of vegetable mush that she turned her little button nose up at.

Now she is grabbing her foot with both hands, grinning and talking shite to me as if it is all cool. It's not cool at all. I want to be in bed.

Coffee To Go

Lynne went into the coffee shop while I waited outside with the pushchair. An old guy sat outside, a big round bear of a man, looking huge at the tiny aluminium table he was sitting at. He watched me as I crouched in front of the baby, prodding her and pulling faces.

‘Is that your first?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Aye, I brought up my daughter by myself,’ he replied. ‘Since she was six weeks old and her mother tried to kill her.’

The old guy then proceeded to tell me his life story. He lived in Canada, had a good job and was married, but when his kid was born his wife went a bit loopy. The doctors wouldn’t talk to him about it; they just gave him the pills and left him to get on with it, he said. He would come home from work and find that his wife had shut the baby in the cupboard under the sink with a three bar fire, that kind of thing. Finally he had enough and decided to take the kid and come back to Glasgow.

He bought a plane ticket, but he didn’t have any papers for the baby and was wondering how he was going to get her through check-in, but somehow everything went his way. A stewardess saw him struggling with his bag and the baby and offered to help, picking up the kid and walking straight through customs. He was able to go through as a single person. Then he was sat on the plane feeling like a criminal, which technically he was, when a man came out of the cockpit, with gold braid on his jacket and a fancy cap.

‘He looked like an admiral!’ the old guy said.

He started to sweat, but the man just asked if he wanted a travel cot for the kid. He could have laughed with relief.

When they landed in Glasgow he had to smuggle his baby through customs again. His luck held; in front of him a customs official had broken an ornament that an old dear in a big hat was carrying in her luggage. She looked like Margaret Rutherford, he said. She was going apeshit, and everyone was fussing round her. He walked straight past it all, and found himself back in Glasgow with nothing but a baby, a bag of clothes and twenty-six Canadian dollars.

He managed to tell me this whole story in the time it took Lynne to buy two coffees.

‘It took me seven years of messing about to get a divorce and custody of the child,’ he said. ‘But she is thirty-three now, she has two degrees and she works down south.’

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Audrey,’ he smiled.

Just then Lynne came out of the coffee shop and started telling me why it had taken so bloody long to make two fucking coffees. I was hoping the old guy would hang on so I could tell him how much I had appreciated his story, but he must have assumed that I had lost interest in him. He picked up his shopping bags and sloped off down the street by himself. I just let him go.

Election 2010!

So today I voted. It was no hardship; the polling station is right across the street from my flat. I thought about taunting the SNP guy handing out pamphlets outside, I could have opened the window and shouted, 'Do you want a cup of tea?' and when he said yes I could have replied, 'Aye, thought so,' and shut the window.

But that would have been childish.

We took time out from watching people go in and out of the polling station to go to the health centre to have the baby weighed. She hadn't been weighed since before she started on solid food. It turns out that she has lost three ounces. How can this be? She eats an incredible amount of food! Lynne feels guilty. I try to reassure her, three ounces is a very small amount of weight, and the baby is already huge anyway. The woman in the health centre doesn't seem worried, she says that dairy products are the answer. Cheese, yoghurt and milk. When babies start on the solids it happens, because veggies and stuff aren't packed with so many calories as the all milk diet. So we now have eight kinds of cheese in the fridge. I have just give the baby her tea, stuffing her with tuna and pasta, baby rice with a peach mixed through it and two cups of milk. I ate black pudding and mushrooms on toast. Nice.

Then I rocked I baby to sleep. She would fall asleep in my arms then wake up when I tried to put her down and start moaning. I had to deploy a Beatles song, sung by me, with the lyrics changed so that it was about tickly bums. In the end I managed to put her down and her eyes stayed closed, a little whine escaping from her lips like a deflating balloon.

Oh, and, because I know that you are dying to ask, of course I voted for Nelson Mandela Morgan Freeman.

Pre-Election Wobbles

There is an election tomorrow. It's hard to know which way to go without jeopardizing my Family Tax Credits. My local MP, who is standing for re-election, can't even be arsed with his flyer. The section with his fat face on it with a quote from some constituent is entitled 'endorser header', which is surely the title off the template. And the bit where he states his policies, lots of the sentences end with a (?), as if they hadn't decided what they were going to put there. But they printed it anyway. The cock's name is John Robertson and he is standing for Glasgow North West. He doesn't give a fuck.

I'm starting to think that I live in one of those constituencies where my vote won't really count.

I'll be voting tomorrow anyway. I won't say who for, it is meant to be a  secret ballot, but I will refer to the Guardian Weekend magazine, which contained a nice little set of interviews with the prime ministerial candidates and a cluster of other politicians. They were asked what their favourite colour was, what team they supported, things like that. When asked which living person they most admired they all said, every motherfucking one of them, they said Nelson Mandela.

I've nothing against Nelson Mandela, good guy, but get a fucking imagination.

I asked Lynne which living person she most admired. 'Helena Bonham Carter,' she replied. 'How does she get her hair to do that?'

Me, I would say Morgan Freeman. When he played Nelson Mandela in that film. He played God once as well.

Tuesday Morning

The baby woke up at 5am this morning. She wasn't hungry or anything, when I looked into the cot at the end of our bed she lay there grinning and wriggled a bit. She just wanted a chat.

'Ummm ummm ummm,' she said. 'Grrr-ohh, nah um da!'

She jabbered on like this for ages. Despite the presence of actual syllables in her banter, she is only six months old so it is far too early to expect any real talking from her. That means I have to listen to this cobblers for months yet.

'Ba bab bab bab ba,' I say.

She replies, 'Errr eh eh, ummm muh muh muh.'

I lie back and hold her high over my head, and a thin line of drool falls to connect our chins. She reaches out with her Fully Realistic Grasping Claws, grabs my ear and twists it, then attempts to chew my cheek. It's time for her banana and apples.

Mmmm... Singing

I finally cracked and went to baby bounce and sing at the library. Not sure about it really. There were a whole bunch of other parents there with their tiny children and we sat round in a big circle on the floor singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and that sort of thing. My daughter is obviously a bit young for singing, or even for knowing what is going on, but she seemed to like gawping at the other kids.

I had to do all the singing for both of us. This was difficult, I think I am more of a solo warbler than a sing-a-long in harmony kind of guy, or maybe it was just my shameful inhibitions kicking in, but sitting round singing nursery rhymes in a public place seemed to me a pretty grim thing to do.

It’s a bit dodgy as well. If one of the kids starts crying it can set them all off in a wave of woe that spreads inexorably across the room. And that’s appalling. The library has a wooden train in the junior section for the kids to play on, and a little girl fell on it, smacked her head and started screaming. All the parents froze in horror, but not because of the little girl. I looked down and saw the baby’s bottom lip start to tremble.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Give it a couple of years and you’ll think that’s hilarious.’

I admit that that is not the nicest thing I could of said. Luckily no one else heard me. And the baby doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about anyway.

Watch With Baby

We went to see Clash Of The Titans today at the Grovsenor. They do a 'watch with baby' screening at 10.30 in the morning, where you can take your child to see the latest films full of sex and violence and no one minds because they have all brought their kids as well. The price of the ticket includes a tea or coffee. 

The film was ok. I have fond memories of the original 1981 effort with it's Ray Harryhausen monsters, mostly because I think that it was the first film that I ever saw a boob in. Yes, a boob, on the telly, in the afternoon during the Easter holidays. That's brilliant when you are a wee boy sitting on the floor surrounded by half-eaten Easter eggs. 

Anyway, we sat in the dark, ranks of parents with their tiny tots, and my first impression of taking the kid to the cinema was, 'Christ's sake, its's a bit loud isn't it?' but I soon realised that there was a reason for this. All the babies were quiet for the first half hour or so, but then they started kicking off. You would hear, in an aisle somewhere behind you, a tiny 'waughh.' Then another, closer this time, away to the right. 'Waughh'. Then another, Jesus, it's closer this time, and another. Then another, 'Waughh!' God Almighty, it's right behind you! Then the giant scorpions attack with a thunderous soundtrack of crashing boulders, the screams of dying men and bombastic music. All the babies are stunned into silence.

Good job.  

The Threshold of Self-Propelled Gnawing

The baby cannot have any gluten or dairy products before she is six months old. She is six months old on Friday, so today we bought gluten-free baby pasta shapes from Boots. It will be much easier when we can just whiz up a bit of our dinner in the blender for her, but for now we just need to get enough food into her to make sure she doesn’t wake up hungry in the night. I cooked up a tomatoey sauce with red pepper, onion and courgette. No garlic, no herbs, and certainly no seasoning. It was all right actually, which is just as well because I made enough for a weeks’ worth of the baby’s dinners. The baby chewed her pasta shapes enthusiastically with her little pink gums.

The baby is on the verge of having a tooth. There’s a sore looking patch on her upper right gum with shiny white enamel showing through. She drools almost constantly in a thin string of clear wetness that soaks her clothes, my clothes, Lynne’s clothes, the baby’s bed, our bed, my pillow, the sofa, and all other soft furnishings that you can imagine we would have in our flat.

The tooth must move in waves, because sometimes the baby grins and chews her giraffe (whose limbs have been felted by this treatment), while other times she screams horrendously. We have some Bonjela, that aniseed horror, to soothe her tooth, but when it is irritating her she thrashes around quite a bit when we try to put it on. This means that I have to hold the back of the baby’s head with one hand while I heartlessly thrust my finger into her gob. It does the trick though.

The baby’s new trick is to roll onto her front when put down on her back. She then flails wildly, looks about smiling, or just lies face down in a puddle of her own drool. Today she hoisted her bum into the air and worked her knees as if she was trying to find a purchase on the rug. It’s time to baby-proof the flat – she’ll be crawling soon. Watch this space.

Some Logistical (un)Concerns

Last night I made a job lot of baby food. Sweet potato boiled up and mashed, put in to little pots and frozen. Regular potato and lentils, likewise. We are now out of little pots. The little pots are pretty useless anyway, we bought a load of them thinking they would be meal sized for the baby, but after only a few days on the solids she was chowing through three or four of them at a time. We need bigger little pots. (Hint; a handy little pot would hold at least four good desert spoons).

Even so, I have just tried to make stewed apples, despite having no little pots to put it in. I chopped up the apples, put them in a pan with a bit of water and left them on a low heat until they were fucking burnt.

The apples were shit anyway. They were the supermarket savers type, thrupence a tonne, and when I cut them up they had gone that fluffy way inside. I should have known better; I mean, russets in April? Please.

In other feeding news the baby has stopped waking up in the night wanting to be fed, which is good news for Lynne. A few times I got up in the night and tried to feed the baby some formula, but the baby would have no part of this, and would cry piteously until Lynne gave in and got up. The baby has been waking at about 5 or 6am, and I either take her through to the living room and feed her baby rice or mashed banana, or take her into the bed with us for a little further snoozing. I know this is spoiling the child and I shouldn’t really make a habit of it. Also, it is hard to continue sleeping while the baby is punching me in the face.

Reaping The Whirlwind

Tonight, the baby suffered the consequences of eating so many bananas on Wednesday. About half an hour after I put her to bed she woke up crying, a salty little tear running down her cheek. On investigation I found she had done a massive poo, and, even as I watched aghast, she continued to curl out further quantities of bumrope after I had taken the nappy away. I thought it would never end. All I could do was try and hold her legs out of the line of fire. Her pyjamas were put out of action almost immediately.

The baby was mortified. Even after she had stopped crying she stared at me seriously for a long time. I don’t understand it. Having a hug poo is definitely in my top three favourite things to do.

Banana Binge

It would be easier to feed the baby with a foot pump and a funnel. This evening for her tea she ate a good portion of butternut squash followed by two bananas. And she still wanted more. Ok, two bananas, you say, you could eat two bananas. Well, think of the size of her. It’s like you eating two bananas that are each the size of a gas cylinder you can get at the petrol station, or a bag of golf clubs, or your own leg or something. That’s right. It’s a lot of food.

Little fatty.

Hopefully going to bed with a bulging belly will mean she will sleep through the night. The past few weeks she has been waking up at 2am, and then again at about 5am. This sort of coincides with starting her on solid food (in fact, the main reason we started her on solid food when we did was that the baby seemed to be hungrier), but it could just be a growth spurt. Either way, the baby refuses point blank to have anything to do with formula milk when she wakes in the night, so maybe it’s just a comfort thing, wanting to be breastfed back into unconsciousness.

The sooner she is sleeping through again the better. Lynne is starting to get a little resentful of the amount of sleep I have been getting.

Fucken...Hingmy

It’s been a tough week to be going outside by myself. I must look like a chump, or maybe in my fur-lined, red chunky knitted hoodie people are mistaking me for Father Christmas, wandering down Dumbarton Road merrily distributing fags and change. Yes, that really is what I have been walking around in. And of course it’s fake fur, I’m not Joan Collins, I even think the wool bit is polyester, but I think it looks cool, ok?

Anyway, on Monday morning I left the house to go to work and as I was crossing the road there was a guy in a tracksuit standing on the other side as if he was waiting for me.
‘Got a pound?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said, though in fact I did have a wee nugget in my pocket, but I needed it for the bus.
He must have sensed the presence of the pound about my person, however, because he squared up a little and said sternly, ‘You’ve definitely not got a pound?’
‘Definitely,’ I snapped.
He didn’t look as if he was satisfied with this reply, but just as I was steeling myself for a mouthful of abuse and/or physical confrontation the wee burd he was with pulled on his arm and said, ‘C’mon, we’ll get a pound off someone else,’ and the guy sloped off after her.

On Tuesday afternoon I was on my way to work again and a steamer rolled out the boozer just as I was walking past.
‘Alright mate,’ he wheezed as he fell in step beside me.
‘Alright,’ I replied evenly.
‘Here,’ he continued. ‘Have you got…’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I muttered, quickening my stride.
‘I was only going to ask you for the time!’ he shouted after me.
‘No, you weren’t!’ I called back over my shoulder.

Tonight was the best though. The baby had gone to her bed and we were about to settle down with a glass of wine to watch a DVD when I decided that since it was Easter we should treat ourselves to some crisps as well. I put on my hoodie and ran out for some Pringles.

As I was coming up to the shop on the corner a guy in a cheap leather jacket came out of the close in front of me, a fag in one hand, rummaging in his pocket with the other. He looked up at me.
‘Got fifty pence?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said, walking past him.
He hurried to catch up. ‘Got any change at all?’
‘No.’
He blew up. ‘There’s no fucken need to say it like that!’ he screamed. ‘I’m fucken sick of cunts' fucken…hingmy!’

I was getting pretty sick of cunts' fucking hingmy too, but I didn’t tell him so because he had started to kick the shit out of the bin outside the shop. I slipped past him into the shop and bought a tube of Pringles, slightly worried that when I stepped outside again the Pringles would reveal that I had in fact had some change in my possession the whole time. I might have to fight the guy and spill my Pringles. They were sour cream and chive as well.

Outside, he was gone. I saw him further up the street, harassing other people and shouting, stopping every now and then to root through his pockets.

What is it about me that attracts bams? What is it that I am doing wrong? Is it because I respond when someone speaks to me in the street? I could just blank people, but that would be miserable. Maybe I should try wearing my flat cap more often, you know, go a bit more incognito.

How The Hell Are We Going To Get Knocked Out In The Quarter-Finals Now?

Imagine my horror when I saw this. I couldn’t even bring myself to read the article. It looks like the team England will be sending to South Africa is going to be made up of snapped players, hobbling about with their hips popping. This is distressing. I am not generally interested in football, or any sport really, but I do enjoy the odd 90 minutes of nationalism when the World Cup is on.

It reminds me of an argument I had with an American friend who had been here long enough to start to enjoy a game of football actually played with the feet. He said that as the game gained popularity in the US, with the amount of money they could throw into the enterprise coupled with the sheer size of the country, it was only a matter of time before they won the World Cup. For some reason this simple opinion made me incredibly angry.

‘You what!? Scotland will win the World Cup before America ever does!' I yelled at him. 'And that’ll never happen!’

Teletubbies Vs Big Tone

I came home from work today and slumped on our new sofa in front of the telly. It took me a couple of seconds to realise that Lynne was talking and that I was supposed to listening.

‘Today me and the baby watched the Teletubbies on YouTube,’ she said.
‘Oh? How was that?’ I replied.
‘She didn’t laugh or anything, but she watched it.’
‘Good.’
‘But that said, I left her watching an interview with Tony Blair while I made tea. She didn’t laugh or anything, but she watched it.’

Further Bananas

I think there are a couple of points about Friday’s post that I should perhaps clear up. Reading back through it I might have given the impression that the baby was finished with breast-feeding, and also been a bit glib about postnatal depression.

1. The baby is still breast-feeding as well as eating her pulped yams, to the extent that occasionally Lynne’s boobs actually run dry. This is because the baby is a giant butterball. Luckily her stomach is now robust enough to handle all the new substances and also formula milk, which caused so much trapped-wind drama in the past. Now that she is five months old, the baby farts like a motorbike.

Still, the baby is never happier than when she is dozing with her rosy, milk-fattened cheek resting against my wife’s breast. Weaning the baby isn’t something that is going to happen in a week, but we do have two more months before Lynne has to go back to work and the bulk of the childcare responsibilities fall on my narrow shoulders.

2. I have no idea how the postnatal depression score is worked out, and luckily I don’t have to know. The health visitor left scoring Lynne until now because she was identified as low risk. I mentioned that the average score is supposed to be about ‘11’, and while this could mean ‘feeling a bit sad and run down’ it could also mean ‘ready to kill my partner because he does fuck all round here except watch the fucking telly’.

This takes me back to my primary bit of advice to all new parents, which is that everything is much easier if you treat it as a two-man job. Fathers, take as much paternity leave as you can get and be involved as you can. And another thing that I might not have mentioned before. Make sure your good lady knows that you still fancy her. This is very important. Everyone around you will go on about how cute the baby is, and of course the baby is cute, but it could leave the tired mother feeling as if she has been relegated to the status of a dairy cow crossed with a toilet attendant. Depressing.

Stand By Stomach, Here Comes Banana!

We started to give the baby solid food on Monday. I say solid, but really it was a thin mush of baby rice and formula milk. She didn’t show much interest in it, instead she grabbed the spoon and smeared the goo over her head and upper torso. But at least she didn’t cry.

Tuesday saw two attempts to feed her baby rice, Lynne tried with a mixture made with formula milk which had the same level of success as Monday’s effort, and in the afternoon I gave her a concoction prepared with breast milk, which she ate greedily. She got some on her eyelids, and also put her hands in the spoon before grabbing at my collar, getting it on my face as well.

We don’t know if it was just a case of third time lucky, or whether the breast milk had produced a more palatable goo, or whether she just couldn’t understand why Lynne was trying to give her the goo when Lynne has a perfectly serviceable set of boobs.

On Wednesday I went to work. When I returned the baby had had some mashed banana, and there was some sweet potato on the hob for her to have for her tea. The health visitor had been, and we now have some recipe cards for meals the baby can have. The recipes are all fairly simple. Here are some examples:

Boil a sweet potato
Mash it to a pulp

Or:

Boil a carrot and a parsnip
Mash them to a pulp

Or:

Boil a…
…you get the idea.

Incidentally, the health visitor gave Lynne her post-natal depression score. She scored ‘3’. This quite a low score, because my wife is irrepressibly, at times annoyingly, chirpy. Apparently ‘11’ is about the average score. No, I don’t have any idea what that means.

Anyway, giving the baby solid food is going well. When she sees the cup and spoon in our hands, she flings her arms out stiffly, one leg going like she is sitting on a nerve, and says ‘grrrr-oooh’. This indicates excitement. Her favourite meal so far seems to be potato and peas, blended to a pale green goo. Before you wrinkle your nose at that, think of the pipe-bagged nonsense those fools serve up on Masterchef. It’s exactly the same.

This morning the baby laid her first cable. I was so proud.

Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen! For Your Pleasure...

My new job is going well, thanks for asking. I’m not going to say too much about it in case my cover gets blown and I get busted slagging it off online, but let’s just say it is a customer service role that includes a bit of old lady action. So far said old lady action has been a bit tame compared to this fond memory from my previous job, which I will present in the form of a play.

-----------------------------------------------
Dramatis Personae

ME, a worker drone skilfully mixing the tasks of stock replenishment and customer service

OLD LADY, selecting cucumbers, a bit frisky for an old bird

SAM, a fellow drone, just going for his lunch break

OLD MAN, pretending to choose potatoes while he eavesdrops

-----------------------------------------------
Act I, Scene I
A fruit shop


OLD LADY: I can't believe supermarkets chuck out cucumbers because they're not straight enough. What difference does it make?

ME: You'll take them any old way. Straight or bendy.

OLD LADY (laughing): When you get to my age you'll take what you can get.

{Enter SAM, putting his jacket on]

SAM: I'm getting a sandwich. Do you want anything while I’m out?

ME: Yeah...

OLD LADY: More importantly, do you want it straight or bendy?

ME: Erm... I’ll have it straight I think.

OLD MAN (as if talking to himself): Aye, straight in the mouth.

THE END

Hello Again

It has been a while hasn’t it? My only excuse for not posting for so long is that I have been busy. And it’s my blog anyway. So get it right up ye.

What has been happening? Right now I am lying on the floor typing. The baby is on a cushion next to me, watching me gravely while absent-mindedly chewing a plastic ring. I have just been feeding her a mixture of baby rice and formula milk. That’s right. We are moving her onto solids. I had intended to feed her it on a spoon, but I made it too runny so I put in her tommy tippee cup. She ate it all right, but ended it soaking, what with spillages and gagging.

Lynne is out with one of her pals tonight. So I have a glass of wine. Just a small one. I attempted to watch In The Night Garden as well, but the baby cried at the Ninky Nonk. Kids are meant to love that shit as well, but be careul clicking on that link. The noises are terrifying.

Last week Lynne and the baby went to visit Lynne’s folks. I stayed here by myself. We got a new sofa too, and had chucked out the old one, so for half the week I was in here, no family, sitting on the bare floor, drinking beer and eating junk. It’s funny but I am so used to having someone there when I go to bed that I couldn’t sleep. I would just lie in the dark, listening to the noises that the house made.

On the Wednesday night I cracked and bought some cigarettes. Coming out of the shop two guys were leaning against the shutter. One of them, with a big tan* across his fucking cheek, asked me if I had a spare fag. I said no. He pointed out that I had a full deck in my hand. I conceded that that was true, but kept walking. His friend then weighed in, asking me if I had a spare fag, just as if it was the first time anyone had ever mentioned it.

Here we go, I thought. I weaken in my no smoking resolve and end up getting a kicking in the street for it. That’s the thing about Dumbarton Road; you can hardly walk down it at night without some bam trying to tap you for fags and change.

‘Look, mate,’ I snapped. ‘These are my only fucking fags and I’m fucking smoking them, all right?’
‘Alright, there’s no need to have an attitude about it,’ said the guy with the tan. He looked genuinely upset at my lack of charity.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a hard day.’
‘Well, don’t take it out on me,’ he said huffily, and the pair of them walked off.


*for people who don’t live in Scotland; a tan is a facial scar, usually received from a knife or bottle.

Mostly Slagging The Underground

Living in the city it is easy to dismiss everyone around you as a miserable prick, rushing about their business and swearing at anyone who dares to share the same pavement. But if you go outside with a buggy, everyone smiles at you. If you so much as look at a set of steps a horde of clutching hands reaches out to carry you and all your accoutrements where ever you would like to go. People are nice. Old ladies actually get out of the way as you go past, and staggering drunks babble at you and drop coins into the pram. (This is less welcome, but something of a Glasgow tradition. The coins can be rinsed.)

Public transport is another matter. The buses are ok, but they won’t let you on if there is already another buggy on the bus. And the fucking underground, the famous clockwork orange, doesn’t even have a lift so you need to fold the buggy and carry it and the baby onto the escalator. This means that a team of at least two people are required to get a baby onto the underground, which is ridiculous. And there’s more. If you fail to fold up the buggy on approaching the escalator, they shout at you over the tannoy. Nobody comes out to help. Many times I have seen a flustered young parent struggling to get all their equipment in order at the turnstile while the tannoy squawks at them like God’s tinnitus.

But on the whole getting out and about is easy, as long as nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong it’s a disaster. Yesterday we were in a shop and the baby woke up, blinked for a bit, and then proceeded to poo straight through every layer of clothing she had on. We were quite close to the Botanical Gardens, which has baby changing facilities, but I didn’t fancy the idea of completely undressing the child in the park on a cold day in March. We were only carrying a back-up vest anyway. We had to sprint home with the kid before the poo went cold.

Snotters

The baby has had a cold for the past few days. Every morning she has been a mess of snot and tears. She has been so bunged up that she cannot eat and breathe at the same time, a state of affairs that she finds extremely distressing. She has been having a good sneeze too, and her poo has been bright green.

Her poo isn’t supposed to be green, at least not all the time, so we phoned the health visitor. She said that while the baby has a cold she is swallowing some mucus and this will end up in the nappy. It’s nothing to worry about, but phone anytime if we are worried.

So that’s ok. We also got some saline drops to put up the baby’s nose. They are a decongestant. The baby is registered at chemists’, so God bless the NHS, we can get stuff for her for free! I don’t really understand how this works, the health visitor tells us what to get and the chemist just dishes it out. We don’t have to produce a bit of paper or anything. Who keeps a lid on it, I wonder? Could we just go in and say the baby needs blackcurrant Strepsils, diazepam and some vallies?

Maybe that would raise some eyebrows. Other cold-fighting news is that I have been picking the baby’s nose. I have two methods for excavating her nasal cavity One is to lightly pinch the baby’s nose between my thumb and fore finger until a bogey appears that I can roll into a little grey-green ball and flick in the bin. The danger with this method is that the baby doesn’t understand what I am doing and keeps trying to suck my fingers. The other method is to insert a damp cotton bud into the nose in the hope that the bogey will adhere to the end of it. Bizarrely, the baby loves this and giggles throughout the procedure. At least she holds still.

Drool

The baby is now exploring the world by putting everything in her mouth. She specialises in grabbing the hem of her dress in both hands and then ramming both fists into her gob, thereby showing everyone her pants. The enthusiastic chewing of everything has also lead to an increase in slobber, the shoulders of all my tops now being covered in a slivery sheen. Drool runs freely down her chin and she clutches at my face with sticky fingers. We think she might be teething, but we are not sure. She did cry a lot last week, but this week she is back to her happy little self. An exploratory finger in her mouth found no teeth and was quickly drenched in slavver.

Milk and Newspapers

This morning I am a bit disappointed that once again a man with a British passport has been tortured in Guantanamo and nobody seems to give a fuck. There is some minor outrage on the Channel 4 news and the Guardian newspaper, but they are notoriously liberal hand wringers, and can therefore be safely ignored.

Most papers are of the opinion that if we moan about our citizens being tortured by one of our allies then the Americans will reduce the level of co-operation with our intelligence services. I would hate to see a bomb go off in London because the Americans were too busy playing political games to tell us, and I don’t really believe that would ever happen. Maybe the real reason no one cares is that the man was a brown man.

The baby has no opinion on the human rights of alleged Islamic terrorists. She is too busy perfecting a high-pitched squeal, which is new, and thrashing wildly, which is already standard procedure. She still won’t feed from a bottle, though ever morning as I sit here trying to read the papers online I try to give a little milk that Lynne has expressed the night before. Instead of quietly lying in the crook of my arm and feeding, the baby chews the teat on the bottle, growling, jerking her head about and flailing like a lunatic. It’s like fighting with a dog over a slipper.

So as far as bottle feeding is concerned I think the game’s a bogey. Yesterday I bought the baby a cup and today, now that it is washed and sterilised, I will try to feed her with that.

Tiny Pin Cushion

It was my turn to take the baby to the doctor’s today. In the waiting room there were many other babies, buggies and gurgles. I recognised a couple from the hospital, who had their boy on the same day that my daughter was born. He was sitting there in a white sleep suit, tiny dome-like baldy head, wee legs waggling. When I lifted my daughter out of her pram, a great long thing with a full head of hair and a snappy pair of dungarees on they must have thought ‘What the fuck?!!’

That’s right. The baby is huge. I stripped the baby off and the health visitor put her on the scales. In the nip, she weighs in at 14lbs 11oz. That is over a stone. The couple in the waiting room must have been worried that my daughter was going to eat their kid.

The baby started to cry as I fiddled her vest back on. It was as if she knew what was coming. The health visitor got me to sit the baby on my lap, and I held her hands as the health visitor injected her in one leg. She started to scream. The health visitor then injected her in the other leg. The baby, the poor little pudding that she is, could only sit there with her hands in mine as the second needle went in. There were real tears and everything.

Bump and Grind

Lynne has wanted to go to Baby Bounce and Rhyme for some weeks now, to mix with other parents and expand the baby’s horizons, introduce her to new social settings, blah blah blah, but my mind recoiled in horror at the mere name of the event. I’m funny like that, a lifelong non-participant in organised nonsense, especially if it has been given a cute name. We have a book, Brain Games For Babies, Toddlers and Twos, which contains instructions for the game of ‘Snuggle, Buggle, I Love You’. Needless to say, I will NEVER play this game.

Lynne took the baby to Bounce and Rhyme herself and I asked her to write about the experience, so here it is. Guest post!!

So the baby and I finally made it to Baby Bounce and Rhyme (or as him indoors refers to it – Baby Bump and Grind) yesterday at the library. The reason it’s taken so long to get there is that it’s on at ten thirty in the morning and getting up, organised and out for 10.30am is really quite ambitious. Though admittedly last week’s attempt was scuppered by watching the new Clangers DVD we had bought for the baby.

Anyway, we arrived a bit late so we didn’t get a book of words, but luckily most songs for babies are pretty easy to pick up, so we managed to hum/sing/make funny noises throughout. I had assumed that it would be run by a wet annoying hippy but to my joy, no! It’s run by a proper librarian who shushed people and told them off for talking during the story. Really - how rude.

There were lots of people there of various sizes and colours and, yes, there were five dads, one of whom was quite fit. (Hey! - ed.) Her babyness seemed to enjoy herself – not too fussed about ‘The Wheels On The Bus’ or ‘Incy Wincey Spider’ but she definitely enjoyed gawping at the other sproglets.

So we will go again next week.

Essence of Dog

The baby and I are friends again. The whole thing was forgotten about by the time I got back from the pub. I was upset at the time though; I even had a scotch egg on the way home. To anyone not au fait with this particular delicacy, it is a boiled egg wrapped in dubious sausagemeat, dipped in bright orange breadcrumbs and fried. It is served cold, wapped in cellophane. If you find that hard to imagine, think of an ovary wrapped in a testicle and you won't be far wrong.

I don’t know why she wouldn’t take her milk; maybe the bottle was sitting next to the blue cheese in the fridge and she could taste it or something. But it has encouraged us to do something that we haven’t done since before Christmas, that is for Lynne to express some milk in the evening so I can feed her in the morning while Lynne sleeps in. We let it lapse because the baby has started sleeping through the night!

I hadn’t mentioned that had I? The baby has started going to her bed at about half ten, eleven and sleeping until eight in the morning. The rings under Lynne’s eyes have completely disappeared!

Other important news: today Lynne accidentally referred to herself in the third person as ‘mummy’. She was mortified. Also, the baby has a crunchy head. This is a common condition called cradle cap. Like all baby ailments it has a needlessly brutal Victorian sounding name, but all it really is a bad case of dandruff. We tried rubbing baby oils into the kid’s crispy scalp, but the thing that really works is olive oil. The only thing is that this makes the baby’s head smell a bit like dog.

This is ok. I like dogs. Sometimes I rub the baby's tummy as well.

I Thought We Wouldn't Row Until She Was A Teenager

Lynne went out with one of her pals today and left me holding the baby. We were well prepared, there was a pot of soup on the hob for me for the baby there was a bottle in the fridge with 130ml of breast milk, painstakingly collected by Lynne over the previous 24 hours, and in case of emergency, a pack of ready-to-use Aptamil formula.

Everything was ready. Lynne went out. Then the baby started crying. A-ha, I thought. Bottle time. I heated it up in a cup of warm water and put the teat to the baby’s lips.

Still she cried, chewing the rubber nipple listlessly and dribbling down her chin. Jesus Christ, I thought, she can’t have forgotten how to feed from a bottle already. It’s only been two weeks! I rocked her for a little to calm her down then tried the bottle again. This time the volume of her cries did not reduce when I took the bottle away.

I put on Paul Simon. By now the child has ruined that album for me, but if it works… It didn’t. The baby showed no sign of noticing and I was now being assailed by irritating noise from multiple sources. I now found myself getting really angry. The baby had feed from a bottle before. She was definitely hungry, pushing her bottom lip out with her tongue. So why wouldn’t she eat? The milk was there, drink it!

I vented my frustration by blowing a raspberry on the baby’s cheek. She fucking hates that.

Too right. Her already ruddy cheeks deepened in colour and, since her little lungs were already crying to capacity, her wailing wound up into a hoarse croak. I immediately felt incredibly guilty.

Here is an important lesson. You will never be able to soothe a crying baby if you are getting annoyed yourself. I put her down in her cot and set her creepy mobile going and stepped back. The angry colour drained from her cheeks and, after whimpering for a bit, she fell asleep.

I had hoped that that would be that, since when she sleeps it is often like pressing the reset button on her mood, but I was mistaken. She was still hungry, but the slightest touch of the bottle to her lips was enough to prompt the most piteous crying. I gave up trying, and just bounced the baby in my arms until Lynne returned.

My daughter was quite happy for Lynne to feed her. Lynne apologised for leaving her with me, but this annoyed me even more. The baby has been happy to be left with me before. I’m her dad, I don’t need an apology. I went out for a pint. As I put my jacket on and headed for the door the baby watched me accusingly with tearful eyes. I pointed at the bottle of breast milk that Lynne had sweated to accumulate, now wasted. ‘You’re fucking drinking that!’ I called out. ‘I’m coming back in here!’

Lynne laughed. The baby gave me a dirty look.

Responsible Waste Management

The world is conspiring against us, but all we are trying to do is do the world a favour. I’m talking about nappies. We have been using disposable nappies, for nearly three months now, and the baby gets through them as if they are going out of fashion. And they are going out of fashion, at least in the little West End bubble we occupy.

Long ago, in that hazy distant past before the baby was born, which was in fact less than three months ago, we bought a starter pack of reusable nappies. There are many different types to choose from, old-skool flannel sheets that need to be folded like a fajita and pinned into place to more hi-tech varieties, but the ones we plumped for were Bambino Mios, because they were going cheap on Ebay.

We contemplated a future of rinsing poo from off-white bits of cloth and having freshly washed nappies hanging from every radiator in the flat like so many other smugly ethical West Enders that have gone before. But then fate lent a hand. As we reached the end of our original supply of disposable nappies and we were gearing ourselves up for the Bambinos, our pipes froze. Obviously you can’t reuse reusable nappies with no hot water to wash them in. So we bought more disposable nappies. We will try again when these run out, we thought.

Now our washing machine has packed in. It can be fixed, it just needs a new dial, but for the time being I am taking our stuff to the launderette. I don’t think the old dears in their would take kindly to me shoving their machines full of shitey bits of cloth, they have already seen fit to pass comment on the length of my shoelaces and my ignorance of the spin dryer. So we have bought more disposable nappies.

I reckon the baby needs to be changed about five or six times a day, sometimes more. That means we use nearly hundred nappies every two weeks. That is a lot of landfill and it is a small Scotland. We are already perilously close to being submerged in garbage as it is without adding several tonnes of dirty nappies to the pile.

Reducing waste and recycling seem to be on the back burner of environmental concerns right now, eclipsed by the huge 'debate' over carbon emissions and global warming in general, but it is the issue closest to my heart. I have always been annoyed by the wilful wasting of resources. Take the crap plastic toys you get in cereal boxes. They are made in their thousands using our ever-dwindling supply of hydrocarbons and they are so absolutely fucking useless that it makes me angry. I challenge anyone to provide an example of a child having fun with a toy out of their cornflakes. I don’t believe it has ever happened.

The compromise we have reached is to use Nature’s Path biodegradable nappies. They are fully compostable, apparently, but just who would want to mess about with them in such a way is beyond me. They sell them in the Boots round the corner so it is handy and they are not that expensive. They are certainly better than the Boots own brand; we have a whole pack of them that we shoved in the cupboard in disgust. The only one we ever put on the baby disintegrated on contact with her poo and we never used them again. Maybe we should just throw them out.

Tactical Bathing

I haven’t posted for a while, you may have noticed, or maybe you didn’t. There are a couple of reasons for this, one, I have been a bit busy, and two, each day I didn’t post made it harder to come up with something good enough to justify breaking the silence, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I got the job. It’s only part time though, so I think I can still cling to the epithet ‘bum’. It’s very dear to me. I’m just waiting for my start date.

Last night we went out for dinner without the kid for the first time. My folks came round to baby sit. Despite spending the last two nights crying until one in the morning, the baby sittee (or should that be baby sat?) showed every sign of behaving like a little angel in front of them in order to make us look like fools. Lynne fussed about with bottles and sleepsuits, laying them out in easily accessible places and showing my mum where they were and so on, but I couldn’t get out of the door quick enough.

Ha ha! It was odd being out of the house, just the two of us. It really hit me as I got off the bus. It was a little tingle at the back of my brain, as if I had left the house with two bags and had come back with one and suddenly thought, ‘Oooh, I had something else, didn’t I?’

Tonight we bathed the baby. She is getting smarter. She knew exactly what was coming and was red faced and shrieking before she was even in the water. She has learned there is only one reason she is ever naked in the front room.

Lynne almost wavered, but held firm and grimly continued washing the baby down. The baby, seeing her last ally desert her, responded with the only card she had left and pooed copiously into the bath water. It was green. That brought an abrupt end to bath time, I can tell you.

The Quack Of Doom

There is an awful smell behind the baby’s ears. It is a sharp mix of yoghurt and armpits, the kind of smell that is so bad that you can’t help smelling it, coming back time and again for another whiff, as if to confirm that, yes, it really is that bad.

As a result we have stepped up bath time to two nights a week. It seems to be about time. The baby seems to be more inclined to tolerate the bath now; she looks up at me with wide, worried eyes and doesn’t start shrieking as long as she can brace her feet against the bottom with her arms clutching wildly at the sides. That is until she gets her face wet, so we have to wash that last. Then her composure crumbles.

She has a flannel duck to try to inject some fun into bath time. When you squeeze it’s belly it goes QUACK-QUACK-QUACK, QUACK. I’m not sure she isn’t a bit scared of it. Nobody expects that fourth quack.

Brrr. Bit chilly.

In one of those unusual and shocking instances where what happens on the news actually impacts on real life, my pipes froze. I mean the water pipes in the flat, so stop sniggering at the back. There is nothing I can do, but the heating is a closed system so we can still run the boiler on the water that’s in there, and we have a power shower (for some reason the cold tap still works. Must be a different pipe). So all it really means is that we can’t do the dishes. Hooray! And we can’t wash any shitey baby clothes. Boo!

Despite knowing in my heart of hearts that the heating system would be fine we panicked, what with having a baby and everything, and called out a plumber anyway. It cost us a £93 to find out that the pipes were frozen and there was nothing we could do but wait for it to get warmer. We already knew both of these things.

Oh well. Today Lynne was annoyed with me. This was because I don’t have boobs. You see, I can waltz out to the shop any time I want while she is welded to the hungry baby. She hadn’t been out of the house for days and was going a bit stir-crazy, so she decided to go to Boots, to look at nail varnish and buy nappies. I would stay in with the baby; this was the plan. She wouldn’t be gone long.

But instead of leaving the house, she stood over me with her coat on being grumpy while I played with the baby. ‘Stop fussing!’ I shouted eventually (and quietly, to avoid upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the child). ‘Just go, if you are going!’

When she came back she told me that the supermarket was rammed with people panic-buying all the shit. It’s funny how the British like to think of themselves as generally stoic, level-headed people, but then if anything happens everyone goes mental. IT’S SNOWING! CIVILISATION WILL COLLAPSE! BUY UP BOTTLED WATER AND DISPOSABLE LIGHTERS! GET A DANGEROUS DOG!!!

At least for a couple of weeks of the year the main issues that affect the State Of The Nation aren’t wheelie bins and terrorists. They are snow and terrorists.

Our Baby Is Not A Horse

I don’t think that our baby has colic. I think if she did we would know all about it. She is definitely more windy; sometimes I wake up in the morning to hear her bum happily phootling away like an old tank engine coming up to steam, but she is bright and chirpy as long as she is on the breast milk.

The crying seems to have been the formula milk. Her wee stomach just isn’t used to it. It’s not even gulping air from the bottle, she has happily been drinking breast milk both from bottle and boob all along with no ill effects. She hasn’t had any formula since Hogmanay and she hasn’t done the inconsolable crying thing since.

Lucky us, eh?

Party's Over

The Christmas decorations came down yesterday. The holidays are over and I can no longer justify sitting about drinking. Despite our new arrival we managed to have a merry Christmas, entertaining lots of people, on one occasion even providing a pot of soup for seven, count them seven, people. (I bet you didn’t think I could make soup, did you? See, I’m a proper househusband). Having a baby does not necessarily mean the death of your social life. In fact, people seem to enjoy coming round and playing with the baby, probably because it’s easier than having one of their own, they can always give her back when they are finished. All the fun with none of the nappies or crying.

Now, as I have said, the holidays are over, and I am not looking forward to taking all the empties to the bottle bank. On the up-side, I now have a sturdy pram to transport them all in, but anyone who saw me pulling all those wine bottles out from under the pram would probably phone social services. I could make two trips, split the difference as it were, but if I was observed by the same person each time it would look even worse. It’s a real dilemma.

Today Lynne took the baby to the doctors’ for the first time. I stayed here. Lynne put a white shirt on, dressed the baby in some fancy clothes and then dropped her lunch on her. It was beans. Fortunately the beans landed in the pattern on the baby’s dress, so you couldn’t really see it. Then, with the baby in a big pink bear suit, they went to the doctors’.

My daughter got her first injections. They covered a dizzying range of illness, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and so on. She had one in each leg. Poor mite. One in each leg! I bet she cried like a fire alarm.

Who The Fuck Is Larry Anyway?

The baby is now too big for the moses basket. I have moved the cot into our bedroom and put the basket in the cupboard. It’s incredible how fast the wee girl is growing, some of her vests are looking a bit tight and one of her pairs of jeans is too little. We put her in the cot and she flails about a bit, gurgling, burbling, gargling and babbling. The cot has a mobile of wee animals on it that plays a tinkly tune. I’ve seen far too many horror films to ever find it relaxing, but the kid loves it. She looks as happy as Larry.

I’ve been saying things like that lot recently. I don’t know who Larry is. I have started to talk like a parent. When the baby is crying I accuse her of being a ‘grumpy boots’. I got a woolly jumper for Christmas and used the word ‘toasty’ to describe its comfort and warmth. I might even have attempted to express my enjoyment of the Christmas dinner by saying ‘yummy’. I don’t know where all this stuff is coming from, i'ts just spilling out of some secret subconscious recess of my head. Lynne thinks this is hilarious but I just want my brain back.

White Christmas, Babies and Horses

Feeling better, I have decided to more fully chronicle the festive period. I have no idea why I felt so crappy yesterday, I only had two beers, a wee whiskey and I didn’t have a chance to drink any of the port before Doctor P chugged it all. I think it was the stress of the crying baby coupled with going to bed without brushing my teeth, or something like that. Or I am getting old.

My daughter’s first Christmas was white. She wasn’t bothered. As for me, I think there is something exciting about looking out of the window and seeing everything muffled in a blanket of white. A comfy chair, good food, some sipping booze and a few presents. That’s what Christmas is all about. And this year I even managed to watch the Bond film in its entirety instead of tuning in sometime after the first twenty minutes. I don’t think that has ever happened before. I saw the bit before the titles and everything.

Next Christmas will be different. My daughter will be old enough to know what’s going on and so Christmas 2010 will of course be entirely focused on her. But for now she is more concerned with prolonged crying at about the same time every night. We think she might be getting colic.

Colic is a nebulous affliction hinted at darkly in all those baby books that clutter up my bathroom, which I never read. It affects babies and horses. It starts at about seven weeks (in babies, my information on horses is sketchy), usually peaking at twelve weeks old. Beyond that it is characterised by inconsolable crying and might have something to do with trapped wind, but it’s true cause is shrouded in mystery. I suspect it’s just a catch-all term for your baby being a grumpy little bastard.

On Christmas Eve it is so bad I run out to Boots to buy some gripe water. That is a bizarrely Victorian name for a baby medicine, but I don’t know what else to call it. I ask the apocethary, nestled as she is amongst her darkly glinting bottles of salves, tinctures and other trucklements, which one to get. She says they are all much of a much-ness, so I plump for Infacol, on the strength of the picture on the bottle. Not for the first time I think that once the kid can hold her head up on her own we should look into baby modelling. There are some fucking ugly pictures of babies on the boxes of stuff they expect you to buy.

Anyway, the faces my daughter pulls when I dose her with this stuff are hilarious. She purses her lips as if she is sucking a lemon, then slowly chews it with her eyes screwed shut. It does taste awful, right enough, and it smells of a clean, clinical mix of mint and aniseed, an odd smell that seems to bring up memories in me that are so ancient I can’t quite grasp them. Maybe I was given Infacol at her age too.