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!



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!

Further Bananas

I think there are a couple of points about Friday’s post that I should perhaps clear up. Reading back through it I might have given the impression that the baby was finished with breast-feeding, and also been a bit glib about postnatal depression.

1. The baby is still breast-feeding as well as eating her pulped yams, to the extent that occasionally Lynne’s boobs actually run dry. This is because the baby is a giant butterball. Luckily her stomach is now robust enough to handle all the new substances and also formula milk, which caused so much trapped-wind drama in the past. Now that she is five months old, the baby farts like a motorbike.

Still, the baby is never happier than when she is dozing with her rosy, milk-fattened cheek resting against my wife’s breast. Weaning the baby isn’t something that is going to happen in a week, but we do have two more months before Lynne has to go back to work and the bulk of the childcare responsibilities fall on my narrow shoulders.

2. I have no idea how the postnatal depression score is worked out, and luckily I don’t have to know. The health visitor left scoring Lynne until now because she was identified as low risk. I mentioned that the average score is supposed to be about ‘11’, and while this could mean ‘feeling a bit sad and run down’ it could also mean ‘ready to kill my partner because he does fuck all round here except watch the fucking telly’.

This takes me back to my primary bit of advice to all new parents, which is that everything is much easier if you treat it as a two-man job. Fathers, take as much paternity leave as you can get and be involved as you can. And another thing that I might not have mentioned before. Make sure your good lady knows that you still fancy her. This is very important. Everyone around you will go on about how cute the baby is, and of course the baby is cute, but it could leave the tired mother feeling as if she has been relegated to the status of a dairy cow crossed with a toilet attendant. Depressing.

Prams and That

This week we have been taking the baby outside for wee danders about the shops. We have taken her out before, Lynne has even taken her as far as Braehead, but since we have a variety of conveyances for the child and we have pretty much used them all in the past couple of days, I thought I would talk some shit about them, compare them and that. Score them out of ten and the like.

My daughter is pretty underwhelmed by the whole experience of going outside. Its December, its cold, so we bundle her up and she sleeps the whole time. We swore blind that we wouldn’t be the kind of parents that dressed their kid up as an animal but someone gave us a furry snowsuit, with little ears on the hood and the mitts made to look like paws, which the baby looks ridiculous in. We can’t resist. Also, the suit is so cosy that just putting her in it knocks her out. It’s almost instantaneous. It’s a shame we have to take it off her.

Anyway, conveyance number one. The Premaxx Baby Bag. This is a Swedish sling thing with pockets and what have you all over it and it looks the business. Ours is orange and deep red. It goes over one shoulder and you slot the baby in and she hangs across your chest as if she’s in a hammock. It has draw toggles that you have to play with and you need to twist the strap on your shoulder origami style so it takes a couple of goes to work out what to do with it, but the baby looks really snug in there once you have figured it out. Its handy for short trips, you can go into shops that it would be a fight to get a pram into, but since all the weight is on one shoulder, it starts to get a bit sore after a while. I wouldn’t like to walk for miles with it on.

Score: 7/10 great for short trips, a bit complicated and sore on the old shoulder.

Conveyance number two. The Baby Bjorn. This is the same idea as the sling thing, but is more of a rucksack affair with the baby sitting upright on your chest. The straps go over both your shoulders so you can for a bit further with it on before it starts to get too heavy, but I prefer the sling for a couple of reasons. First, the sling looks better. The Baby Bjorn looks like a boring piece of hiking equipment, which gives me the matching-waterproofs horrors. It has a neck support for babies that are too small to hold their own heads up, but this only works if the baby remains motionless, if she tries to have a look around or even falls asleep it makes her head loll around alarmingly. Lastly, the one we have got is second-hand, and I don’t like the idea of putting my daughter into something that someone else has already shat in.

Score: 4/10 functional, boring, and baby can’t even really sleep in it.

Which brings us to conveyance number three, the trusty pram. We have a Mamas and Papas Pliko pramette. I will probably dicuss prams in disparaging detail in a further post, but for now we chose this one because it’s small lightweight and simple, with a cracking turning circle and no pedometer or any of that silly shit. This beast can go for miles. It can carry a formidable amount of shopping in the undercarriage, but be careful with this because it affects the steering. Remember if you pack loads of shit in your pram you still have to push it home. Out of the three methods of transportation this is the one with the most room for the little passenger, she will never look squished, even in a huge furry bear suit. The only problem with it is carrying up and down the stairs to the flat. It’s light but not four-flights-of-stairs light. We have left it chained up at the bottom a few times, but I don’t like doing this because I don’t want it getting manky. There are students live below us and I don’t want them coming home drunk one night and playing with it. I would end up trying to fight them in the stairwell in my underpants.

Score: 9/10 can’t be beaten on range and payload, but it’s a pain in the arse when you live on the top floor.

Thoughts on a Month of Fatherhood

The daily routine is a bit repetitive to bang on about it every day, so I’m going to pad out the blog with my take on current affairs. So here you go.

Who gives a fuck about Tiger Woods? He plays golf.

Should we ban minarets like the Swiss? After all, you're not allowed churches in muslim countries are you? So, nah nah-nah nah-nah. Leaving aside the idiocy of saying things like 'if we don't want sharia law we have to be more like Saudi Arabia', here are some pictures of churches in Iran. Some of them are pretty big and shiny too. Oh.

Nobody is going to ban Christmas trees, for fuck's sake. They are not religious symbols anyway, unless we’ve all started worshipping Odin while I wasn’t watching. Actually I wouldn’t mind if we all worshipped All-Father Odin, Lord of the Slain. Its just that hunting down my enemies and giving them the ol’ blood eagle might put greater demands on my masculinity than I’m used to. Anyway I’ve checked in the Bible. There’s no tinsel or crackers in it either, so I don’t know what’s been going on there.

That’ll do. I just gave the baby a bottle with 30ml of expressed milk. When she finished it she cried for 30 seconds, then forgot and fell asleep. She woke up at 8.30 this morning just when I was in the middle of a vivid dream. I don’t remember anything about it now, just that it was very engaging.

She is a month old today. The days are long but the weeks pass quickly. Odd that. So far the whole fatherhood thing is not as daunting as I thought it would be. It helps that we have a calm, happy baby. Some babies cry all the time for no reason. That would be a fucking nightmare. We are lucky. Some babies can’t figure out how to drink from a bottle once they are being breast-fed. We are lucky with that too. Some babies get covered with thrush and their mother’s nipples get all cracked and infected. Jesus.

But since I’ve got this parenting thing down, here’s some handy hints.

Don’t panic. All a newborn baby needs is to feed, have its nappy changed and sleep. Its straightforward, if a bit relentless after a while, so as long as you are doing these things it will all be fine. If you are freaking out the baby can tell, and it will get upset. Remember its relying on you to know what’s going on. It hasn’t got a clue.

Don’t prod the baby when its asleep to check if its still breathing. I’m pretty sure it will be, and if you wake the baby up in the middle of the night it will be really pissed off and then it’s a fucker to get it to go back to sleep.

Do leave your dishes in the sink. No one will think any less of you. If you have a newborn baby most people will be surprised you’ve got your shirt buttoned up the right way. If you have time to do housework, you should be asleep instead. You’ll need it.

Don’t be afraid of handling your baby. I know it seems really fragile but its tougher than you think and it likes its cuddles. Just remember to support its little head and don’t drop it or bounce it until its sick or anything. Look at the midwives in the hospital; they tossed the baby about like a piece of chicken, didn’t they?

Don’t be shy of the baby’s poo. You will get it all over yourself no matter what you do.

If you are a man, get as involved as you can. If you can get paternity leave take as much as you can. If both of you are in the house with the baby it makes everything much, much easier. Looking after the baby is not just woman's work; its fun too.

That’s it, I think. I’d better go, everyone seems to be waking up.

Milky Tips

The health visitor came round again today. She is a cheery, dark haired woman from Inverness. She doesn’t stay long, since we seem to be coping we get pretty much left alone. People aren’t interested unless you are freaking out, I suppose. My daughter was weighed again, she is now 10lbs, the wee butterball. However, we have a couple of questions about feeding, and the answers are actually pretty useful, so pay attention if you are going to have a kid.

Lynne has a gig at Hogmanay and the kid will be staying at home with me. I need to be able to feed the baby and Lynne isn’t really expressing the volume of milk required. Is mixing with formula feeds with breast-feeding allowed? All the literature recommends against it. In fact its absolutely fine to give formula feeds when you are breast feeding. The only things you have to watch out for is that if the mother’s milk isn’t regularly squeezed out, then the mother’s body will reduce the amount of milk it produces accordingly. And maybe the baby will be unconvinced by the differing taste and texture of formula compared to breast milk, but as far as I’m concerned the kid will get what its given.

The other thing is expressing. Lynne was coming round to the idea that it was a waste of time. She didn’t seem to be able to express more than 20ml in one go. It just doesn't seem like much. Any tips on expressing? Apparently 20ml is fine for a mother with a four-week-old baby so don’t worry about it. Vary the time of day that you try to express to see if that makes any difference and bear in mind that you don’t have to keep all the milk separate. Its fine to mix it all in one bottle in any 24 hour period. That way you can acumulate a decent feed over the course of a day.

This may all sound straight-forward enough, but these are the kind of things that you stress about when you are a new parent. As always, it all turns out to a fuckload easier than you thought.

Parenting Advice

A congratulatory email has come flooding in and alongside the well-wishing, there is much information in it that seems pertinent to young parents. I feel that a portion of it bears reproduction here:-

Heard some quality neds on the upstairs of the no.20 the other day. After the usual stuff about picking fights in the town ( every time ah punch som'bidy ma haun hurts), spraying graffetti etc , ned 1 says to ned 2 " ur yous wanting a boy or a girl?"

Ned 2- " ah want a girl so ah can punch her first boyfriend"

Girl ned- " ah just want the wee bastard oot, and am allowed to call it a wee bastard cos we no married".

ned 1 then passed on his experience of parenting , being the father of both Sean and Connor, advising that as children could learn from parents you had to be "heavy cautious wi' the blaw man".

ned 2 then rehearsed how he would coach his child to answer questions about suspicious bruising- " say yi walked intae a door, right, say yi walked intae a door".

So if you had any concerns about parenting rest assured that with competition like that you'll have no worries. Just as long as you are " heavy cautious wi' the blaw".

Thanks for that Michael.

Thoughts on the First Week of Being a Dad

Fatherhood is still setting in. I seem to have a permanent tingle of excitement in my belly, not a huge tingle, just the amount I would have if I was going on a holiday abroad in say, three weeks' time. The child is very cute, I am not sure if I am saying that because I am her dad, and therefore biased, but she did seem considerably better looking than the other babies in the hospital. She has a full head of dark hair, delicate wee features and a little pointy chin, and since she was delivered by c-section she did not come out that black-and-blue way newborns usually do; rather she was pink and pristine. By comparison the other kids were bald and lumpen.

Things are still surprisingly calm in the flat, and I am inclined to think that people who tell you how difficult it is to look after a newborn are painting it blacker than it really is. And you know how people love to tell you horror stories. Best thing is not to listen to other people under any circumstances. The child wakes up two or three times a night, gurning and thrashing her little arms about, and we get up, I check her nappy while Lynne gets herself organised to feed her. Then I go to bed and leave Lynne watching Sign Zone or some other crap late-night telly, baby at her breast. This stage is easier on me than it is on Lynne right enough, I really only get up out of solidarity. In a couple of weeks Lynne will be able to start expressing milk and we can keep it in the fridge, so she can sleep while I feed the baby. Perhaps things are easy so far because breast-feeding has gone so well, and the baby is content. She certainly doesn’t cry much, or for very long when she does.

Still, Lynne is tired all the time. So am I, but not as much as her. She gets a sleep in the afternoons and early evenings when the kid is asleep. As this week has gone on the baby seems to take less milk more often, and if this trend continues it will mean less and less sleep for Lynne. I get the feeling that maybe if the baby was awake more during the day, she might sleep more at night, but at a week old there is not much you can do to keep her awake without making her cry. She is still too little to really know what is going on around her.

At a week old, she cannot focus her eyes and cannot support her head by herself. When I hold her she only seems vaguely aware that I am there. To her my face must be some kind of dim shape looming over her. She is fascinated by the light coming in the window, or by the lamp at night. Light and shadow, that’s it, everything else is a blur. She is disappointed that I don’t have breasts and opens and shuts her mouth against my jumper in vain. She doesn’t mind music and loud voices, but a sudden noise will make her eyes open wide and her arms flail wildly for a moment. I have established two methods of interacting however; she will grab my finger and squeeze it, which is good fun, the other is that when I am rocking her she will lift and lower her chin in anticipation of my movements, in the same way that you move your legs when you are on a swing. Oh, and she likes it when I sing Paul Simon to her. 'The Boy in the Bubble' is her favourite.