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.