The Goodness of Milky Puddings

I took the baby to get weighed at the health centre today. It had only been two weeks since we last had her weighed but she had lost three ounces that time, and Lynne was worried. Not really worried, you know, just a she-needed-to-know kind of worried.

The baby weigh-in takes place in a wee room with the heating turned right up, changing tables in each corner and a collection of chairs where parents sit with their half-dressed kids. At the front is the table with the scales on it and the two smiling health workers who call out our names in turn. I strip the baby down to her nappy and she babbles as we sit looking round at the other babies. I'm trying to work out if there are any as pretty as she is. I'm not sure what she is thinking.

It gets to our turn and I take the baby's nappy off and put her on the scales. This is a race against time because we have to get a reading off the scales before she craps and pisses everywhere. But she manages to preserve her dignity and we find that she has gained 10oz. She is now 17lb 1oz.

The health worker asks me if there is anything we think we are doing different. I tell her we have been giving the baby cheese, yoghurt and milky puddings. She nods approvingly.

I take the baby home and we have scrambled egg on toast for lunch. Lynne feeds the baby her egg with a spoon and then the baby gums each piece of toast into a gooey ball and throws them on the floor. For a finale, she thumps her plate with both fists so that it flips over and falls on the floor. We cheer and the baby laughs. 

Election 2010!

So today I voted. It was no hardship; the polling station is right across the street from my flat. I thought about taunting the SNP guy handing out pamphlets outside, I could have opened the window and shouted, 'Do you want a cup of tea?' and when he said yes I could have replied, 'Aye, thought so,' and shut the window.

But that would have been childish.

We took time out from watching people go in and out of the polling station to go to the health centre to have the baby weighed. She hadn't been weighed since before she started on solid food. It turns out that she has lost three ounces. How can this be? She eats an incredible amount of food! Lynne feels guilty. I try to reassure her, three ounces is a very small amount of weight, and the baby is already huge anyway. The woman in the health centre doesn't seem worried, she says that dairy products are the answer. Cheese, yoghurt and milk. When babies start on the solids it happens, because veggies and stuff aren't packed with so many calories as the all milk diet. So we now have eight kinds of cheese in the fridge. I have just give the baby her tea, stuffing her with tuna and pasta, baby rice with a peach mixed through it and two cups of milk. I ate black pudding and mushrooms on toast. Nice.

Then I rocked I baby to sleep. She would fall asleep in my arms then wake up when I tried to put her down and start moaning. I had to deploy a Beatles song, sung by me, with the lyrics changed so that it was about tickly bums. In the end I managed to put her down and her eyes stayed closed, a little whine escaping from her lips like a deflating balloon.

Oh, and, because I know that you are dying to ask, of course I voted for Nelson Mandela Morgan Freeman.

Banana Binge

It would be easier to feed the baby with a foot pump and a funnel. This evening for her tea she ate a good portion of butternut squash followed by two bananas. And she still wanted more. Ok, two bananas, you say, you could eat two bananas. Well, think of the size of her. It’s like you eating two bananas that are each the size of a gas cylinder you can get at the petrol station, or a bag of golf clubs, or your own leg or something. That’s right. It’s a lot of food.

Little fatty.

Hopefully going to bed with a bulging belly will mean she will sleep through the night. The past few weeks she has been waking up at 2am, and then again at about 5am. This sort of coincides with starting her on solid food (in fact, the main reason we started her on solid food when we did was that the baby seemed to be hungrier), but it could just be a growth spurt. Either way, the baby refuses point blank to have anything to do with formula milk when she wakes in the night, so maybe it’s just a comfort thing, wanting to be breastfed back into unconsciousness.

The sooner she is sleeping through again the better. Lynne is starting to get a little resentful of the amount of sleep I have been getting.

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.

Milk and Newspapers

This morning I am a bit disappointed that once again a man with a British passport has been tortured in Guantanamo and nobody seems to give a fuck. There is some minor outrage on the Channel 4 news and the Guardian newspaper, but they are notoriously liberal hand wringers, and can therefore be safely ignored.

Most papers are of the opinion that if we moan about our citizens being tortured by one of our allies then the Americans will reduce the level of co-operation with our intelligence services. I would hate to see a bomb go off in London because the Americans were too busy playing political games to tell us, and I don’t really believe that would ever happen. Maybe the real reason no one cares is that the man was a brown man.

The baby has no opinion on the human rights of alleged Islamic terrorists. She is too busy perfecting a high-pitched squeal, which is new, and thrashing wildly, which is already standard procedure. She still won’t feed from a bottle, though ever morning as I sit here trying to read the papers online I try to give a little milk that Lynne has expressed the night before. Instead of quietly lying in the crook of my arm and feeding, the baby chews the teat on the bottle, growling, jerking her head about and flailing like a lunatic. It’s like fighting with a dog over a slipper.

So as far as bottle feeding is concerned I think the game’s a bogey. Yesterday I bought the baby a cup and today, now that it is washed and sterilised, I will try to feed her with that.

Essence of Dog

The baby and I are friends again. The whole thing was forgotten about by the time I got back from the pub. I was upset at the time though; I even had a scotch egg on the way home. To anyone not au fait with this particular delicacy, it is a boiled egg wrapped in dubious sausagemeat, dipped in bright orange breadcrumbs and fried. It is served cold, wapped in cellophane. If you find that hard to imagine, think of an ovary wrapped in a testicle and you won't be far wrong.

I don’t know why she wouldn’t take her milk; maybe the bottle was sitting next to the blue cheese in the fridge and she could taste it or something. But it has encouraged us to do something that we haven’t done since before Christmas, that is for Lynne to express some milk in the evening so I can feed her in the morning while Lynne sleeps in. We let it lapse because the baby has started sleeping through the night!

I hadn’t mentioned that had I? The baby has started going to her bed at about half ten, eleven and sleeping until eight in the morning. The rings under Lynne’s eyes have completely disappeared!

Other important news: today Lynne accidentally referred to herself in the third person as ‘mummy’. She was mortified. Also, the baby has a crunchy head. This is a common condition called cradle cap. Like all baby ailments it has a needlessly brutal Victorian sounding name, but all it really is a bad case of dandruff. We tried rubbing baby oils into the kid’s crispy scalp, but the thing that really works is olive oil. The only thing is that this makes the baby’s head smell a bit like dog.

This is ok. I like dogs. Sometimes I rub the baby's tummy as well.

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.

Southpaw

You know, I don’t believe in ‘cluster feeding’. I think they have just been making it up. It seems to me that as the baby gets bigger, she needs more milk but Lynne’s boob is always the same size.

I think the baby is going to be left-handed. It’s the side she favours. As Lynne cradles the baby’s head and moves her mouth towards the nipple, the baby curls her right arm across her chest in a classic guard posture and swings wildly for Lynne’s face with her left fist.

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.

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.

Cluster Feeding

At the moment we are completely baby-lead. That is the technical term for it. This means that the baby gets what it wants when it wants. The baby is too small for us to have it any other way, but it does mean that Lynne is up feeding her at all hours of the night, while the baby has a nice long sleep in the late morning/early afternoon. Not very convenient.

Lynne has been trying to express milk into bottles that we can keep in the fridge, but it needs a little more practice. This morning I fed the baby from a bottle that was in the fridge, the most plentiful expression so far, an abundant 8oml. This is not enough for the baby. Still, it keeps her quiet so that Lynne can have another half hour's sleep. It's an odd feeling, holding a suckling baby in my arms, watching her serious eyes gaze at me over the plastic curve of the bottle. It's amazing to think that anyone could be so small and helpless. So dependent on me.

The baby is having a growth spurt and wants to be fed all the time. This is aparently how it works; the baby goes through periods of 'cluster feeding', demanding milk all the time to fuel a period of growth. It lasts for a few days and then returns to normal. Until I can bottle feed this is harder on Lynne than me. On the upside, Virgin 1 is showing Unbeatable Banzuke at Jesus Christ o'clock in the morning most days. It has Brian Blessed in it. And he is dressed like this

Absolutely fantastic. Look at his shiny little codpiece. Brian is as always, really very good value. It takes a lot of front to carry off a costume like this.

My daughter is certainly getting bigger, her eyes can focus now, large and solemn, but she shows little interest in any soft toys, even ones that rattle and squeak. She likes to start the day early. She snuffles and gurgles every morning from about 6am. The temptation to check on the baby when she starts burbling is irresistable, but she is always, always just happily thrashing around in her blanket. I ignore her for as long as possible, then I get up and take her into the other room so that Lynne can sleep in peace.

Quote of the Day

Lynne has been trying to express milk. It involves a manual pump with a little bottle hanging underneath.

'But I'm not a cow,' says Lynne in a small voice. She has started saying this a lot.