Bit Short, but Look at the Quality!

I'm shit at posting on this blog.

I promised a long tale covering 3 months of baby developments, but events conspired against me. The main event was a crushing tiredness that felt as if my frontal lobes had been removed and the space packed with warm, wet cotton wool. The full story will have to wait for another day but a promise is a promise, so here are some of my personal highlights from the end of last year.

• Shortie had her first birthday. We had a party. I wore a rubber kilt. We had fireworks in the park. Shortie cried.
• Shortie tickles her own tummy. We ask her where her tummy is and she grabs it and says, 'Tickle, tickle, tickle.' She gets sick of this long before we do.
• One day I told Lynne that Bjork was working on an opera about Kiwi boot polish. She believed me and went to work and told her friends about it. Har har har!

Blah

Shortie is ill. Again. She has a cold. Her face is red raw, two towering columns of green snot connect her nostrils to her lips, and when she lies down to sleep she hacks like an old jake.

Lynne and I have the cold too. I hadn't noticed until I went to work and suddenly realised that I felt like shit. I had been that busy with the baby that it hadn't registered.

Well, anyway, I have been looking back at this blog and I realise that with a whole chunk of time I didn't post that there are a million things I haven't told you about. (If there is actually anyone reading this and giving a fuck). How did we get the baby into her own room? When did she start nursery and what was that like? How come she likes sausages all of a sudden? Thins like that. Well, I'm working on it and will post a partial full account tomorrow.

In the meantime, I would just like to say a little something about the new breast feeding research that caused a furore last week. Shortie started eating solids about the six month mark, but I know another kid that wasn't interested in expending her diet beyond milk well into her seventh month. Someone else I know has a kid who, at three months, grabbed the banana out of her hand and started munching it. What I mean to say is that all parenting advice is just to make you feel guilty and serves no other purpose. Childcare manuals are bullshit. Just do what feels right and use your common sense. Throw those books away and be free!



Vocal Perambulation (is that even a word?)

Tonight, after we had bathed the baby and put her in her pyjamas, she pulled herself up with a chair leg and tottered across the floor towards me, smirking with her nose in the air.

It's as if something has just been switched in inside her. For weeks she has been pulling herself round holding onto he furniture, wobbling and falling over. It's been nerve-wracking. Every time she was upright I could feel my eyes scanning for all the hard edges she could hit her head on. Proper walking? It's about time.

Talking too! Her vocabulary (which previously comprised wishful thinking on my part and strange grunts on hers) has blossomed. She keeps it simple, pointing at her cup and saying 'Milk!', picking up the TV remote as if it's a phone and saying 'Hello!', sitting in front of the bin shouting 'No!'  

Lynne reckons that it is really time to start watching our language. We can't send the baby to nursery saying, 'Shit! Fuck! Shitfuck!' like I do. It would be terrible if the first thing she said to her grandparents was 'Arsebiscuits!' Heheheh. No, it really would, now.

But I think I just need to be more creative in my swearing. Multi-syllable curses that are really difficult to say. That's the answer.

The Nightly Dishes Chat

I learnt something new about In The Night Garden today. The Tombilboos have names, they are called Un, Ooo and Eee. One, Two, Three in baby-talk see. I hadn't known they had names. After all this time. I felt a bit cheated, as if they were changing things about when it was all already decided. I had just thought they were all Tombliboos and that was it.

I shared this information with Lynne. She says I should make more of an effort to leave the house and talk to someone who isn't the baby. It's 9.45pm on a Friday night and we are doing the dishes. 

Lynne picks up her box of peppermint teabags from the pile of plastic tubs Shortie had thrown on the floor.

'Have I really got no teabags left?' she says, looking in it.

'The baby was eating them so I threw them out,' I say.

Lynne doesn't reply and I feel the need to justify my actions.

'Well, she was sitting there bouncing with a bunch of them in each fist, and they were all soggy, and she was looking up at me with her tongue out and it was covered in bits of tea,' I say. 'So I took them all off her and put them in the bin.'

Lynee puts the box down and says, 'You have the rest of the wine. I'll have cocoa.'

Floorbiscuit

The baby didn't eat much of her Weetabix this morning. She usually has a couple of goes at it, and the Weetabix can be revitalised with some fresh milk and a quick stir, but I don't really like doing this. I am not really a breakfast person, and I find the amount of milk that a single brick of Weetabix can absorb alarming. Given enough time it thickens to a grey mulch again. Top up, stir, top up, stir, and one day I could end up with an evergrowing lump of goo overflowing the cup, colonising the tabletop, spilling onto the carpet and making for the door.

But I suppose I would have thrown it out and given her some new Weetabix long before it came to that.

But this morning she wasn't interested at all so I lifted her out of her chair and set her on the floor. She crawled around shouting, 'Duck! Duck!' which is one of her favourite words. Then she finds something and eats it.

I have no idea what it is. I only know that it is floorbiscuit. Floorbiscuit seems to be an important source of nutrients for the scavenging baby, and is composed of broken and ground up, but otherwise tasty, morsels either spilled or hidden under the furniture and in the rug. I am confident that none of the floorbiscuit in the living room is of any real vintage because we hoover regularly, but floorbiscuit from other parts of the house is suspect.

And of course, kitchen floorbiscuit gives me the horrors and must be identified and confiscated as a matter of urgency. It could even have come from under the cooker!

'Bedtime. No, it's BEDTIME.'

It's late. Putting the baby to bed turned into an epic task. Thinking back to before Christmas it seemed that at 7:30pm we would lay her gently in her cot and she would roll over and close her eyes, ahh. bliss, what a good baby.

It can't have been as easy as that, I know, but the holidays definitely have disrupted her sleeping pattern. Tonight, as I tidied the living room and washed the dinner plates, I listened to Shortie shouting and throwing her toys out of the cot. Peeking round the door I could see by the night-light Shortie standing in the cot bouncing up and down, grinning that cock-eyed grin that means she is grinding her teeth. Awake. Lynne sat by the cot looking exasperated.

An hour of that and then I took her and spooned her on the bed. The baby, not Lynne. This means pinning her down while she moans, until she gives up and goes to sleep. She shakes her head, screwing her eyes up and pulling her ear, anything to keep herself awake. I watch through from under my eyelis, my eyes half-shut so that I don't make eye contact. That would be an invitation to laugh, play and pull at my face. She is gone in five minutes. What a performance.

Remember Me?

My New Year's resolution is to post on this blog again. It has ben a while, but then I have been busy, not so busy that I din't have a spare minute, but busy enough to let it slide. Letting things slide is one of my main life skills. I like to call it prioritising tasks. I've put that on my CV.

I realise that over the past four months of silence a lot of vital developments have been missed, so to update on Shortie's progress, she:-

• has seven teeth
• is standing (almost) unaided
• is on the verge of walking
• is on the cusp of talking
• is lucky she is so cute because she is a little bastard

Yes, I call her Shortie now, a bit mean, I know, but once I started I couldn't stop. Sometimes I call her Sausage as well, and if she is upset I call her Sunshine.

Oh, and I deleted the last post because it was shit.

More tomorrow. I am drinking the last of the festive booze.