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.