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.

Reaping The Whirlwind

Tonight, the baby suffered the consequences of eating so many bananas on Wednesday. About half an hour after I put her to bed she woke up crying, a salty little tear running down her cheek. On investigation I found she had done a massive poo, and, even as I watched aghast, she continued to curl out further quantities of bumrope after I had taken the nappy away. I thought it would never end. All I could do was try and hold her legs out of the line of fire. Her pyjamas were put out of action almost immediately.

The baby was mortified. Even after she had stopped crying she stared at me seriously for a long time. I don’t understand it. Having a hug poo is definitely in my top three favourite things to do.

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.

Mostly Slagging The Underground

Living in the city it is easy to dismiss everyone around you as a miserable prick, rushing about their business and swearing at anyone who dares to share the same pavement. But if you go outside with a buggy, everyone smiles at you. If you so much as look at a set of steps a horde of clutching hands reaches out to carry you and all your accoutrements where ever you would like to go. People are nice. Old ladies actually get out of the way as you go past, and staggering drunks babble at you and drop coins into the pram. (This is less welcome, but something of a Glasgow tradition. The coins can be rinsed.)

Public transport is another matter. The buses are ok, but they won’t let you on if there is already another buggy on the bus. And the fucking underground, the famous clockwork orange, doesn’t even have a lift so you need to fold the buggy and carry it and the baby onto the escalator. This means that a team of at least two people are required to get a baby onto the underground, which is ridiculous. And there’s more. If you fail to fold up the buggy on approaching the escalator, they shout at you over the tannoy. Nobody comes out to help. Many times I have seen a flustered young parent struggling to get all their equipment in order at the turnstile while the tannoy squawks at them like God’s tinnitus.

But on the whole getting out and about is easy, as long as nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong it’s a disaster. Yesterday we were in a shop and the baby woke up, blinked for a bit, and then proceeded to poo straight through every layer of clothing she had on. We were quite close to the Botanical Gardens, which has baby changing facilities, but I didn’t fancy the idea of completely undressing the child in the park on a cold day in March. We were only carrying a back-up vest anyway. We had to sprint home with the kid before the poo went cold.

Snotters

The baby has had a cold for the past few days. Every morning she has been a mess of snot and tears. She has been so bunged up that she cannot eat and breathe at the same time, a state of affairs that she finds extremely distressing. She has been having a good sneeze too, and her poo has been bright green.

Her poo isn’t supposed to be green, at least not all the time, so we phoned the health visitor. She said that while the baby has a cold she is swallowing some mucus and this will end up in the nappy. It’s nothing to worry about, but phone anytime if we are worried.

So that’s ok. We also got some saline drops to put up the baby’s nose. They are a decongestant. The baby is registered at chemists’, so God bless the NHS, we can get stuff for her for free! I don’t really understand how this works, the health visitor tells us what to get and the chemist just dishes it out. We don’t have to produce a bit of paper or anything. Who keeps a lid on it, I wonder? Could we just go in and say the baby needs blackcurrant Strepsils, diazepam and some vallies?

Maybe that would raise some eyebrows. Other cold-fighting news is that I have been picking the baby’s nose. I have two methods for excavating her nasal cavity One is to lightly pinch the baby’s nose between my thumb and fore finger until a bogey appears that I can roll into a little grey-green ball and flick in the bin. The danger with this method is that the baby doesn’t understand what I am doing and keeps trying to suck my fingers. The other method is to insert a damp cotton bud into the nose in the hope that the bogey will adhere to the end of it. Bizarrely, the baby loves this and giggles throughout the procedure. At least she holds still.

Responsible Waste Management

The world is conspiring against us, but all we are trying to do is do the world a favour. I’m talking about nappies. We have been using disposable nappies, for nearly three months now, and the baby gets through them as if they are going out of fashion. And they are going out of fashion, at least in the little West End bubble we occupy.

Long ago, in that hazy distant past before the baby was born, which was in fact less than three months ago, we bought a starter pack of reusable nappies. There are many different types to choose from, old-skool flannel sheets that need to be folded like a fajita and pinned into place to more hi-tech varieties, but the ones we plumped for were Bambino Mios, because they were going cheap on Ebay.

We contemplated a future of rinsing poo from off-white bits of cloth and having freshly washed nappies hanging from every radiator in the flat like so many other smugly ethical West Enders that have gone before. But then fate lent a hand. As we reached the end of our original supply of disposable nappies and we were gearing ourselves up for the Bambinos, our pipes froze. Obviously you can’t reuse reusable nappies with no hot water to wash them in. So we bought more disposable nappies. We will try again when these run out, we thought.

Now our washing machine has packed in. It can be fixed, it just needs a new dial, but for the time being I am taking our stuff to the launderette. I don’t think the old dears in their would take kindly to me shoving their machines full of shitey bits of cloth, they have already seen fit to pass comment on the length of my shoelaces and my ignorance of the spin dryer. So we have bought more disposable nappies.

I reckon the baby needs to be changed about five or six times a day, sometimes more. That means we use nearly hundred nappies every two weeks. That is a lot of landfill and it is a small Scotland. We are already perilously close to being submerged in garbage as it is without adding several tonnes of dirty nappies to the pile.

Reducing waste and recycling seem to be on the back burner of environmental concerns right now, eclipsed by the huge 'debate' over carbon emissions and global warming in general, but it is the issue closest to my heart. I have always been annoyed by the wilful wasting of resources. Take the crap plastic toys you get in cereal boxes. They are made in their thousands using our ever-dwindling supply of hydrocarbons and they are so absolutely fucking useless that it makes me angry. I challenge anyone to provide an example of a child having fun with a toy out of their cornflakes. I don’t believe it has ever happened.

The compromise we have reached is to use Nature’s Path biodegradable nappies. They are fully compostable, apparently, but just who would want to mess about with them in such a way is beyond me. They sell them in the Boots round the corner so it is handy and they are not that expensive. They are certainly better than the Boots own brand; we have a whole pack of them that we shoved in the cupboard in disgust. The only one we ever put on the baby disintegrated on contact with her poo and we never used them again. Maybe we should just throw them out.

Christmas Is A Time For Family

In case you hadn’t noticed Christmas is coming up. Now I like Christmas, I’m not one of these people that moan that there is too much tinsel in shops and too many adverts for Marks and Spencer’s on the telly. Fie, pish and mimsy. These things aren’t important, I’m surprised people have the energy to get worked up about them. For me the important things about Christmas are that you don’t have to go to work and all your friends are off as well, you get to drink as much fancy booze as you want and eat loads of nice food, and people give you presents. And there are probably going to be silly hats to wear. What’s wrong with that?

This year is more complicated. Now that we have a baby the festive season has been turned into a political minefield. You see, my parents live about half an hour away but Lynne’s live in Aberdeen. If we visit my folks over the Christmas period then one set of grandparents think the others are getting special treatment. Lynne’s mum already thinks my mum is constantly round here, luxuriating in grandmotherhood while she waits bleakly by the phone for any titbits we cast her way.

Well, we are not playing that game. If we can't please everyone, we are not going to please anyone at all. We are staying in here and having our own wee Christmas, and everyone else can fuck off. Christmas is a time to be selfish.

But we can’t even win with this. Yesterday I phoned my mum. She already knew we weren’t going to her place for Christmas so the first thing she said was, ‘So, are you going to Aberdeen for Christmas?’ Pretty innocuous you may think, but there was a definite tone. ‘Hell no!’ was my instant reply, but its not enough. My mum, being of a naturally suspicious demeanour, thinks I’m part of a conspiracy to make Lynne’s mum into Grandmother Number One. The fact that I’m still pissed off with Lynne’s mum for the way she behaved when the baby was born is obviously a cover to hide the depth of the conspiracy. My mum snidely mentions that she was surprised to get a Christmas card from Lynne’s folks after their last phone conversation. She just can’t resist stirring it.

We have to nip this bullshit in the bud. I’m not running round after everyone else for the rest of my life. For Christ’s sake, she’s my daughter! It’s not about you guys at all!

Anyway, yesterday we put up the Christmas decorations. Yay! The baby is unimpressed with it all. I suppose the whole thing sort of passes you by when you are six weeks old. At least we won’t have to get her any presents, she won’t know the difference. Lynne has been writing Christmas cards round the clock. About 4pm I made some coffee to go with my last piece of nicotine gum. Lynne had some coffee too. This turned out to be a schoolboy error. Once the baby had supped from the caffeiney breast she was up all night, her arms and legs working as if she was miming a marathon runner. She hollered for hours and with no nicotine in my system I had a hard time keeping a lid on my stress levels. When I changed her she farted while the nappy was off and sprayed guacamole coloured poo over my legs. Then she looked really pleased with herself and said ‘Ung!’ She has no class at all.

Sorry, I had to Wait For My Arse To Subside

I have been ill since the weekend. Pissing out of my arse to be precise. Between the baby and me it’s been like living in an open sewer in here. We’ve been working in shifts.

But now I’m back. What’s been happening? On Friday I went to the Registry Office and reported the baby to the authorities. She is now legal with a birth certificate and everything. We had to register her within 21 days of her birth and I was tempted to leave it and see what happened. Would they have deported my baby? Would there have been a dawn raid? A midnight flight to Diego Garcia and a crèche full of orange sleepsuits? But I bottled out and conformed in the end. I didn’t even give her any comedy names, I left her middle name as her gran’s, even though her gran hasn’t acted nearly grateful enough about that.

I also went to the doctor’s to get a new prescription for nicotine gum. My doctor is a big, round, grey haired guy with pilots’ glasses who is normally pleased to see me. I think that he is glad to see someone sensible after all the bams and old dears he has to deal with, and if that seems patronising to you, then you should see his fucking waiting room. Even though large glasses on the older male are a sure sign of an arsehole and the doc does spit when he’s talking, I think he’s ok. I expected to spend a wee half hour talking about his wife’s horses and how much he misses smoking himself, but this time he was all brusque and businesslike. He had a medical student in with him and was trying to pretend he was the Man in front of him. He didn’t want to give me the gum again because I have been getting it on and off for ten months now, but I reckon he was just talking tough in front of the new guy. He gave in in the end.

If you have never tried nicotine gum, its pretty disgusting. As you chew the nicotine gets released and you feel a stinging sensation on your tongue, a numbness spreading over the backs of your gums, then your gullet tightens and your gorge starts to rise. But then, if you remember, your first cigarette was pretty disgusting too wasn’t it? And you get used to the gum if it’s your only source of nicotine. I quite like it now. I really should be weaning myself off it, and hopefully with the baby on the scene I will be busy enough to keep my mind of the withdrawal. Giving up smoking is a funny thing, its easy if you want to do it, impossible if you don’t, but either way you need to really keep yourself occupied if you are going to stand a chance. I’m still going to have a cigar at Christmas though. But from now on I’ll have to go outside to do it.

I Am At The Centre Of A Conspiracy To Part Me From My Cash

Another day, another rejection letter. I now have enough of these to insulate the loft. Today’s was pretty sooky, ‘although I undoubtedly have much to offer’ they will not pursue my application any further and they ‘are sorry to give [me] this disappointing news at this time’. They also thank me for my interest three times. Count them. Three. It could be worse; I got one rejection letter that told me sternly that there were ‘other candidates who more fully fit the job criteria’, which I thought was pretty fucking rude. They might as well have told me I was shit and had done with it.

There was also a letter from the bank. Aw, you fucking bastard. My credit card payment bounced and they are charging me £35, plus £28 unauthorised overdraft fee. They don’t say what the thirty-five quid is for, it’s just some kind of generic fee I suppose. That means that the work I did on Friday, the money from that has gone straight to the bank. They did it again! There is a fiddle that the bank runs and it goes like this. When they take your money it happens instantly, a miracle of modern technology. But when you pay money in it takes up to five working days to clear. By this simple mechanism they fuck you.

‘Judas priest!’ I cry. ‘Forget you, you bunch of forgetful monkey-chuckers!’
I try not to swear in front of the kid, you see.

Well, this isn't happening again. I phone up my credit card and cancel the standing order for the minimum payment. The woman asks me if I have thought about insuring my cards against identity theft. I tell her that anyone can steal my identity if they really want it and good luck to them. If I am late with my credit card that costs me twelve quid, but the bank are waiting to sting me for nearly seventy. Twelve quid, thirty-five quid, these are serious amounts of money when you are unemployed, large enough to worry about, but small enough for you to actually do something about. The fact that if you add up my mortgage and everything I owe a horrendous sum of money, thousands of pounds, is of no consequence. It’s an astronomical figure, it might as well be a round £100,000, or a cool million, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right now. I might as well worry that the sun only has enough hydrogen fuel for another 5 billion years. It isn’t real, its the small numbers that get me worked up. I suppose that's where the banks fucked up in the first place.

That said, I would be even angrier about the sweaty, grasping hands of the bank if any of my tax had gone to bail the bank out, but I haven’t really paid any tax for about a year. I can rest easy knowing that the last time I paid any tax they just used it to buy bombs to drop on Afghanistan, so that’s all right.

I explain all this to the baby as I change her. She has been awake most of the night and now Lynne is getting some much-needed sleep. The baby has managed to poo right through all her clothes and bedding, so I am cleaning it up. I say ‘poo’ rather than ‘shit’ because, even though it smells pretty bad and I get it all over my hands, it isn’t really as offensive as my own faeces, and I have had occasion during my long and varied career to find that in some places that I hadn’t fully anticipated. No, ‘shit’ is too harsh a word. Even 'crap' doesn't convey it. 'Poo' is perfect. For the record, the poo started green at the beginning of the week, like pesto with hints of mustard, but has now settled into looking like carrot soup with crushed almonds in it.

So I tell the baby about the iniquities of the banking system. I tell her about money, the little tickets that everyone agrees are necessary for survival on this planet, and how nearly everyone is sick of this game, but everybody has been playing it for so long nobody knows what else to do. She doesn’t seem bothered, as soon as she is clean and in fresh clothes she falls asleep in my arms, pink and warm. I suppose she is right. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Homecoming

Yesterday afternoon my family came home. We had our first night in the house together. Its nice not to be alone in that big empty bed any more, even if it has only been five days. Everything seems to be going smoothly enough, the baby slept at the end of the bed, woke up at 1.30am and then at 5am, I changed her and Lynne fed her each time. Seems that I get the arse end in this deal, while Lynne gets the laughing end. Still, if this turns out to be the routine I reckon I can totally cope with it, but then the baby's lungs have a lot of growing to do.

Today was pretty relaxed as well. Bit tired, but not too bad. My parents came round with cooing and presents. The baby did a poo and so I changed her, but since my folks were watching, she didn't kick me or scream at all. Good girl.

It's odd though. All this time it has seemed like the pregnancy was the whole thing, but now it turns out that that isn't the thing at all. Having the baby is the real thing.