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.

Mmmm... Singing

I finally cracked and went to baby bounce and sing at the library. Not sure about it really. There were a whole bunch of other parents there with their tiny children and we sat round in a big circle on the floor singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’, ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and that sort of thing. My daughter is obviously a bit young for singing, or even for knowing what is going on, but she seemed to like gawping at the other kids.

I had to do all the singing for both of us. This was difficult, I think I am more of a solo warbler than a sing-a-long in harmony kind of guy, or maybe it was just my shameful inhibitions kicking in, but sitting round singing nursery rhymes in a public place seemed to me a pretty grim thing to do.

It’s a bit dodgy as well. If one of the kids starts crying it can set them all off in a wave of woe that spreads inexorably across the room. And that’s appalling. The library has a wooden train in the junior section for the kids to play on, and a little girl fell on it, smacked her head and started screaming. All the parents froze in horror, but not because of the little girl. I looked down and saw the baby’s bottom lip start to tremble.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Give it a couple of years and you’ll think that’s hilarious.’

I admit that that is not the nicest thing I could of said. Luckily no one else heard me. And the baby doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about anyway.

I Thought We Wouldn't Row Until She Was A Teenager

Lynne went out with one of her pals today and left me holding the baby. We were well prepared, there was a pot of soup on the hob for me for the baby there was a bottle in the fridge with 130ml of breast milk, painstakingly collected by Lynne over the previous 24 hours, and in case of emergency, a pack of ready-to-use Aptamil formula.

Everything was ready. Lynne went out. Then the baby started crying. A-ha, I thought. Bottle time. I heated it up in a cup of warm water and put the teat to the baby’s lips.

Still she cried, chewing the rubber nipple listlessly and dribbling down her chin. Jesus Christ, I thought, she can’t have forgotten how to feed from a bottle already. It’s only been two weeks! I rocked her for a little to calm her down then tried the bottle again. This time the volume of her cries did not reduce when I took the bottle away.

I put on Paul Simon. By now the child has ruined that album for me, but if it works… It didn’t. The baby showed no sign of noticing and I was now being assailed by irritating noise from multiple sources. I now found myself getting really angry. The baby had feed from a bottle before. She was definitely hungry, pushing her bottom lip out with her tongue. So why wouldn’t she eat? The milk was there, drink it!

I vented my frustration by blowing a raspberry on the baby’s cheek. She fucking hates that.

Too right. Her already ruddy cheeks deepened in colour and, since her little lungs were already crying to capacity, her wailing wound up into a hoarse croak. I immediately felt incredibly guilty.

Here is an important lesson. You will never be able to soothe a crying baby if you are getting annoyed yourself. I put her down in her cot and set her creepy mobile going and stepped back. The angry colour drained from her cheeks and, after whimpering for a bit, she fell asleep.

I had hoped that that would be that, since when she sleeps it is often like pressing the reset button on her mood, but I was mistaken. She was still hungry, but the slightest touch of the bottle to her lips was enough to prompt the most piteous crying. I gave up trying, and just bounced the baby in my arms until Lynne returned.

My daughter was quite happy for Lynne to feed her. Lynne apologised for leaving her with me, but this annoyed me even more. The baby has been happy to be left with me before. I’m her dad, I don’t need an apology. I went out for a pint. As I put my jacket on and headed for the door the baby watched me accusingly with tearful eyes. I pointed at the bottle of breast milk that Lynne had sweated to accumulate, now wasted. ‘You’re fucking drinking that!’ I called out. ‘I’m coming back in here!’

Lynne laughed. The baby gave me a dirty look.

Our Baby Is Not A Horse

I don’t think that our baby has colic. I think if she did we would know all about it. She is definitely more windy; sometimes I wake up in the morning to hear her bum happily phootling away like an old tank engine coming up to steam, but she is bright and chirpy as long as she is on the breast milk.

The crying seems to have been the formula milk. Her wee stomach just isn’t used to it. It’s not even gulping air from the bottle, she has happily been drinking breast milk both from bottle and boob all along with no ill effects. She hasn’t had any formula since Hogmanay and she hasn’t done the inconsolable crying thing since.

Lucky us, eh?

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.

Happy New Year

I woke up this morning with that usual guilt and furry mouth that welcomes each new year. Ah, the future. I was wondering when it was going to get here.

Last night Lynne was playing a gig while I stayed in with the baby. I was equipped with formula milk and Infacol. I watched the BBC Hogmanay diddly-dee programme. I couldn’t hear it because the baby screamed pretty much constantly from 7pm to within a half hour of the bells. Doctor P came around with a couple of beers, but he quickly moved onto the port and fell asleep. I was glad he was there though; you can’t really strangle your child if someone else is watching. I even deployed the Paul Simon to no avail. After trying everything I could think of, including just ignoring her and staring dully into space, I finally managed to calm her down by holding her face down along my arm with her head hanging over my elbow, joggling her up and down and rubbing her tummy. Ten minutes of this treatment was enough to release an explosive series of farts, after which she fell asleep.

At midnight she woke up, bright and cheery, as if nothing had happened. But I won’t forget. I’m going to save it up for the wedding speech.

A Grim Realisation

You might have noticed from the last few posts that the baby is crying more. It’s not that bad, she never cries for no reason, usually it’s just that she is hungry or wants a cuddle. But she cries just ever so slightly too much for a nicotine fiend like me to handle with no cigarettes. So I went to Boots to buy some more nicotine gum.

I had a tuna sandwich before I went and as I was leaving the house I realised a terrible thing. I swore blind that I would not be one of these parents that lives vicariously through their kids and ends up lost when they grow up and leave home. I will never just wear clothes that are boring and practical. I’m still young and vital, I have my own life, and, OK, I might not be the snappiest dresser but the jeans are flared, I’ve got a pair of Converse on. But then this happened. As I was draining the tin of tuna I squirted it all over myself, and then just dully rubbed it into my top with a dishcloth. And that’s how I left the house. What is happening to me?

The Kid Ain't Got No Class

No she doesn’t. Ways that she has no class include sneezing and farting at the same time (she gets that from her mother who is in all other respects completely demure), pulling faces when she is having a poo and then audibly sighing with satisfaction, being sick down her chin and then rubbing it in with her fist, and liking Paul Simon.

That last one is my fault. I have been singing the Boy in the Bubble and You Can Call Me Al to her since she was born, I guess just because they were the mellowest little catchy tunes I know the words to. Remember, I’m a dad now. I’m not supposed to know what’s cool.

Anyway, over the past couple of weeks the baby has been becoming more engaged with the world around her, and she is also making a lot more noise. Each morning she wakes up bright and chirpy, I give her her morning bottle while Lynne sleeps, we read the paper and I drink coffee, and she progressively gets more grumpy with me until eventually I can’t stand the noise she is making any more and I put Graceland on. I found out quite by accident, but she loves it. She could be going absolutely apeshit, but when the drums kick in on the Boy in the Bubble, that’s it. Rapt attention. The title track seems to be her favourite, when it’s on she stretches her neck until her head is wobbling on the end of it and her mouth hangs open. This means that she actually likes my singing and wants to hear the original versions! Ha ha!

I only play her the first half of the album of course. Every tune on there is a belter. But if you ever see an old vinyl copy of Graceland, have a look at it. Side A will be all scratched to fuckery while Side B will be pristine. That’s because it’s bollocks.

I'll see your waaaugh and raise you WAAAUGH.

The baby is never going to last six months in the moses basket. When we lay her in it the space between her head and the top of the basket is getter smaller and smaller. She is growing fast, which isn’t surprising given the amount she eats. At this rate in a few weeks I will have to dismantle the cot in the nursery and put it up in the bedroom, and there won’t be any room to move in there. I am also starting to doubt Lynne’s ability to eat enough food to supply all this milk and still stay alive. The kid won’t leave her alone.

I say this because I have only seen the baby’s grumpy side for the past two days. I am working. That’s right. Its only for this week; I'm doing the college survey again. I have to get up in the morning and leave the house like normal people. I don’t get my morning cuddles any more, where I remove the noisy baby from the bedroom so Lynne can sleep, give the baby the milk Lynne expressed the night before and watch her blink in the morning sun as I drink my coffee. No. I get back about 5pm when its already dark and the kid’s been up all day and just wants to be fed for hours so Lynne can’t have her dinner. I take my jacket off and pick her up and she flails her little arms around and goes red, her face puckering for the big howl. I howl back at her. She looks puzzled.

So the baby is finding her voice now, and it’s a loud one. But it’s still not as loud as mine.

Cow and Gate Update

The formula was a bad idea in the end. My daughter has been crying inconsolably all afternoon and into the evening. She has just gone to sleep now. We couldn’t work out what was wrong with her, she was making hungry faces, but she gurns all the time anyway. She would only feed a little at a time so we thought she was only suckling for comfort. She was red faced and grumpy every which way I held her. She was sick on my side of the bed. I had put her in a wee dress that she had never had on before, so I changed her into her sleepsuit and checked the seams of the dress for scratchy bits. Nothing. We checked her for rashes. Nothing. We discussed whether she felt warm. She always feels warm. I even looked up ‘crying’ in the Pregnancy Bible. It said that sometimes babies cry for no reason. Thanks for that.

About 8pm she did a massive fart. It was huge; the shockwave reverberated round the round the room like the Tsar Bomba had just gone off in here. Then she chilled right out. All that time she just had trapped wind. Fuck Cow and Gate.

Early Morning Drinking

My daughter is in the middle of another cluster feeding frenzy. She was latched on to Lynne for just about the whole day yesterday, finally going to sleep at 10pm only to wake again about 1am. I was still up watching a crappy Bruce Willis film. I had little flashes of recognition, so I think I had seen the film before, but I must have blanked it from my memory because it was so tremendously bad. That’s a good thing; its like watching a whole new film. What was also new was that although I was up alone on a Friday night, I didn’t ransack the kitchen for horrible booze. I happen to know that there are the dregs of a bottle of cooking sherry and the arse-end of some Crabbe’s green ginger wine in the top cupboard, but I didn’t touch any of it. Over the past year of unemployment I have necked the Bulgarian whiskey, which smelt of seaweed and turned my pee green, the Bercherovka, a Czech spirit that I think tastes of Christmas but no one else can stomach, and the grappa, a colourless tipple with the ‘nose’ of petroleum that substitutes an acrid burning sensation for flavour. All these and more I have chugged with my late-night pal Bruce. Now something is different. I have responsibilities now. Parenthood has changed me. I drank milk.

But I digress. Lynne and the baby got up at 1am and the baby cried, had a feed and then refused to go back to sleep despite some pretty intensive rocking action, cried again, had another feed. The baby feeds for a bit, then drops off Lynne’s nipple like a sated leech, lying on her lap with a wee smile and eyes closed. This is the Milky Coma of Pleasure, and should never be mistaken for actual sleep. She will undoubtedly want to be fed again and will object to being moved. This cycle can last up to two hours. All this meant that I missed the second half of the film, thereby ensuring that at some point in the future I will sit through it again, thinking I have never seen it.

That was us until 3am. The baby wakes again at 6. At 8.30 I give in and get up, determined that Lynne is going to some sleep. In the back of the cupboard is a single carton of Cow and Gate ready-to-use formula. I put the sterilizer on, full of bottles and that, make some coffee and change the baby. She is chewing her fist and making hungry faces. I go to wash my hands and prepare the formula, but the baby starts crying again, I think of her lying on the changing mat, thrashing around on her own in the middle of the floor and in my hurry cut the carton of formula in such a way that it goes everywhere. Sloppy. Not very unconcerned. I need to stay frosty.

The baby seems willing to take the formula while remaining unconvinced. I am now sitting with a puke rag over my shoulder and a dozing baby in my lap. Drinking from the bottle makes her burp prodigiously, the force of the last one caused her to head butt me in the teeth. She wasn’t happy.

Friday Morning

The baby won't really settle in her bouncy chair and while I can pick her up, I can't type one-handed. I have changed her nappy and heated up a bottle for her, but she pushed it away after a couple of wee slurps. I think she just wants to stop me filling out this application form. Have you ever tried to demonstrate a competency for Personal Effectiveness-Collaboration with a crying child in one arm? Its actually not that easy.

The closing date is noon today, and I have done as much as possible by trawling the myriad other applications on my hard drive, cutting and pasting what I could. I was meant to finish it last night but I was too tired and got distracted by the telly. I will make it though. One of the competencies is, after all, Delivering Results-Motivation.

'I don't like it! I don't like it!'

The baby can’t hold her head up on her own, especially not in a bath of water, so I have my hands under her neck and back. For a few moments it seems that she might get used to the bath, but then I submerge her further and she starts screaming again.

‘Right, that’ll do,’ says Lynne.
‘You’re joking aren’t you?’ I say. ‘You haven’t even washed her face!’
The baby continues screaming. Lynne rubs the cloth quickly round her cheeks and forehead.
‘There,’ she says.
I shift my hands to get one free and splash some water gently over my daughter’s chest. Her eyes are screwed up, little face puckered crimson, shrieking at the top of her tiny lungs. I laugh.

Lynne gets the towel. ‘Come on. That’s it,’ she snaps. With the baby crying like that, Lynne can’t handle it. Me, I have gone all the way through unconcerned and deep into cackling callously. The towel has a little hat in the corner, and Lynne put it on the baby’s head as I lifted her out. Lynne lays her down and delicately dabs her dry. My daughter has stopped making that horrible noise, but still looks aghast at the depth of our betrayal. Then she pees all over the towel.

We had left it ten days; the baby had had only one bath until now, in the hospital the afternoon after she was born. The midwives did that. We weren’t worried about our smelly baby, the community midwife told us not to worry about it, babies’ skin is very delicate and if you bath them too much when they're tiny its not good for them. The West End is full of babies with dry skin and eczema from being bathed daily by fussy mothers, while more, ahem, working class areas are full of healthy, dirty kids.

We have a wee baby bath and I filled it with a few inches of warm water, using my elbow to test it, making sure it was blood temperature, so I knew her dismay at being bathed didn’t come from the water being too hot. I leave flinging babies into boiling tubs to Attila the Hun. I think she just didn’t know what was happening to her, poor mite. Just when she thought she was beginning to work out how things worked, we take off all her clothes and dump her in all this weird stuff. Ha ha, I think. You'd better get used to it. We are going to do it again on Sunday.

Here is a picture of a shark. It's too big to fit in the bath, so it's a pretty tenuous illustration really.

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.