Stand By Stomach, Here Comes Banana!

We started to give the baby solid food on Monday. I say solid, but really it was a thin mush of baby rice and formula milk. She didn’t show much interest in it, instead she grabbed the spoon and smeared the goo over her head and upper torso. But at least she didn’t cry.

Tuesday saw two attempts to feed her baby rice, Lynne tried with a mixture made with formula milk which had the same level of success as Monday’s effort, and in the afternoon I gave her a concoction prepared with breast milk, which she ate greedily. She got some on her eyelids, and also put her hands in the spoon before grabbing at my collar, getting it on my face as well.

We don’t know if it was just a case of third time lucky, or whether the breast milk had produced a more palatable goo, or whether she just couldn’t understand why Lynne was trying to give her the goo when Lynne has a perfectly serviceable set of boobs.

On Wednesday I went to work. When I returned the baby had had some mashed banana, and there was some sweet potato on the hob for her to have for her tea. The health visitor had been, and we now have some recipe cards for meals the baby can have. The recipes are all fairly simple. Here are some examples:

Boil a sweet potato
Mash it to a pulp

Or:

Boil a carrot and a parsnip
Mash them to a pulp

Or:

Boil a…
…you get the idea.

Incidentally, the health visitor gave Lynne her post-natal depression score. She scored ‘3’. This quite a low score, because my wife is irrepressibly, at times annoyingly, chirpy. Apparently ‘11’ is about the average score. No, I don’t have any idea what that means.

Anyway, giving the baby solid food is going well. When she sees the cup and spoon in our hands, she flings her arms out stiffly, one leg going like she is sitting on a nerve, and says ‘grrrr-oooh’. This indicates excitement. Her favourite meal so far seems to be potato and peas, blended to a pale green goo. Before you wrinkle your nose at that, think of the pipe-bagged nonsense those fools serve up on Masterchef. It’s exactly the same.

This morning the baby laid her first cable. I was so proud.

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.

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.