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.

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.