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.