The Threshold of Self-Propelled Gnawing

The baby cannot have any gluten or dairy products before she is six months old. She is six months old on Friday, so today we bought gluten-free baby pasta shapes from Boots. It will be much easier when we can just whiz up a bit of our dinner in the blender for her, but for now we just need to get enough food into her to make sure she doesn’t wake up hungry in the night. I cooked up a tomatoey sauce with red pepper, onion and courgette. No garlic, no herbs, and certainly no seasoning. It was all right actually, which is just as well because I made enough for a weeks’ worth of the baby’s dinners. The baby chewed her pasta shapes enthusiastically with her little pink gums.

The baby is on the verge of having a tooth. There’s a sore looking patch on her upper right gum with shiny white enamel showing through. She drools almost constantly in a thin string of clear wetness that soaks her clothes, my clothes, Lynne’s clothes, the baby’s bed, our bed, my pillow, the sofa, and all other soft furnishings that you can imagine we would have in our flat.

The tooth must move in waves, because sometimes the baby grins and chews her giraffe (whose limbs have been felted by this treatment), while other times she screams horrendously. We have some Bonjela, that aniseed horror, to soothe her tooth, but when it is irritating her she thrashes around quite a bit when we try to put it on. This means that I have to hold the back of the baby’s head with one hand while I heartlessly thrust my finger into her gob. It does the trick though.

The baby’s new trick is to roll onto her front when put down on her back. She then flails wildly, looks about smiling, or just lies face down in a puddle of her own drool. Today she hoisted her bum into the air and worked her knees as if she was trying to find a purchase on the rug. It’s time to baby-proof the flat – she’ll be crawling soon. Watch this space.

Some Logistical (un)Concerns

Last night I made a job lot of baby food. Sweet potato boiled up and mashed, put in to little pots and frozen. Regular potato and lentils, likewise. We are now out of little pots. The little pots are pretty useless anyway, we bought a load of them thinking they would be meal sized for the baby, but after only a few days on the solids she was chowing through three or four of them at a time. We need bigger little pots. (Hint; a handy little pot would hold at least four good desert spoons).

Even so, I have just tried to make stewed apples, despite having no little pots to put it in. I chopped up the apples, put them in a pan with a bit of water and left them on a low heat until they were fucking burnt.

The apples were shit anyway. They were the supermarket savers type, thrupence a tonne, and when I cut them up they had gone that fluffy way inside. I should have known better; I mean, russets in April? Please.

In other feeding news the baby has stopped waking up in the night wanting to be fed, which is good news for Lynne. A few times I got up in the night and tried to feed the baby some formula, but the baby would have no part of this, and would cry piteously until Lynne gave in and got up. The baby has been waking at about 5 or 6am, and I either take her through to the living room and feed her baby rice or mashed banana, or take her into the bed with us for a little further snoozing. I know this is spoiling the child and I shouldn’t really make a habit of it. Also, it is hard to continue sleeping while the baby is punching me in the face.

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.

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.

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.

Hello Again

It has been a while hasn’t it? My only excuse for not posting for so long is that I have been busy. And it’s my blog anyway. So get it right up ye.

What has been happening? Right now I am lying on the floor typing. The baby is on a cushion next to me, watching me gravely while absent-mindedly chewing a plastic ring. I have just been feeding her a mixture of baby rice and formula milk. That’s right. We are moving her onto solids. I had intended to feed her it on a spoon, but I made it too runny so I put in her tommy tippee cup. She ate it all right, but ended it soaking, what with spillages and gagging.

Lynne is out with one of her pals tonight. So I have a glass of wine. Just a small one. I attempted to watch In The Night Garden as well, but the baby cried at the Ninky Nonk. Kids are meant to love that shit as well, but be careul clicking on that link. The noises are terrifying.

Last week Lynne and the baby went to visit Lynne’s folks. I stayed here by myself. We got a new sofa too, and had chucked out the old one, so for half the week I was in here, no family, sitting on the bare floor, drinking beer and eating junk. It’s funny but I am so used to having someone there when I go to bed that I couldn’t sleep. I would just lie in the dark, listening to the noises that the house made.

On the Wednesday night I cracked and bought some cigarettes. Coming out of the shop two guys were leaning against the shutter. One of them, with a big tan* across his fucking cheek, asked me if I had a spare fag. I said no. He pointed out that I had a full deck in my hand. I conceded that that was true, but kept walking. His friend then weighed in, asking me if I had a spare fag, just as if it was the first time anyone had ever mentioned it.

Here we go, I thought. I weaken in my no smoking resolve and end up getting a kicking in the street for it. That’s the thing about Dumbarton Road; you can hardly walk down it at night without some bam trying to tap you for fags and change.

‘Look, mate,’ I snapped. ‘These are my only fucking fags and I’m fucking smoking them, all right?’
‘Alright, there’s no need to have an attitude about it,’ said the guy with the tan. He looked genuinely upset at my lack of charity.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s been a hard day.’
‘Well, don’t take it out on me,’ he said huffily, and the pair of them walked off.


*for people who don’t live in Scotland; a tan is a facial scar, usually received from a knife or bottle.