Being Paid To Watch Jeremy Kyle

Lynne reckons that the baby misses me during the day. Awww. I wasn’t so sure whether that was true, it’s still hard to say how much the baby takes in, but when I came home today she looked up at me and gave me a big, gummy smile. She’s been trying to smile for a few days and now she’s cracked it. It made going to work worthwhile.

I have one more day on the college survey. Good. It’s pish. My little round of rooms takes about ten, fifteen minutes to check off and then I am free for the rest of the hour. It’s not enough time to do anything else, but just enough time to be a bit bored. I sit in the staff common room with the other guy that is surveying the building, talking shit and watching daytime telly. Everyone else that uses the common room is a middle-aged woman and, as you can no doubt imagine, this is a nightmare. Any work place with a single sex population is always problematic. If it’s all men it quickly turns into a pirate ship. If it’s all middle-aged women, well…

Yesterday one of them grassed us up to our boss because I left my bag on the sofa. Apparently someone had wanted to sit there and couldn’t. Nobody had said anything about my bag to me. Bear in mind that all day all these women had grinned a big ‘Hiya!’ at us whenever they came in or out. Today the crisis was over milk. Who was drinking it all? I bet it was her. That sort of thing. The staff fridge is now full of separate pint cartons with labels on them to identify their owners, the levels marked with marker pen. As we were redistributing the milk between the cartons so they all held the same amount before we left tonight, we noticed that the cleaners had misspelled ‘cleaners’ on their carton. It was a cruel laugh, but we laughed it anyway.

One of the joys of my round is the office of the assistant vice principal. A lot of the staff in the rooms I’m surveying seem to be scared that if I don’t put down that they have lots and lots of people in their rooms they will end up being allocated tiny offices in the new building. They think I'm a spy. I don’t think it will work like that. I think they will take my numbers, make it into a graph, bin the graph, design a big fancy building, decide they don’t have enough money, and then build a glass and steel box same as they always do. It seems to me that what I’m doing is pretty pointless.

Anyway, the assistant vice principal is one of the more prickly customers. He is used to being an alpha male round here, he doesn’t like to be counted. Every time I knock on his office door, every hour throughout the working day, he has a new bit of shit to give me. Last thing today I find him having a meeting with another guy.

‘Let’s see your numbers, then,’ he says.
‘It’s boring really. See?’ I say. I turn my clipboard round so he can see it.
He holds out his hand. ‘Come on, don’t be shy.’
I pass him the clipboard. ‘You're that line.’
He frowns. ‘There’s a lot of zeros. What do all the fives mean?’
‘That’s the code for what you are doing. Five means admin work.’
‘It doesn’t mean picking my nose or scratching my arse?’
‘No,’ I say, deadpan. ‘That would be a seven.’

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.

A Bit of Sense, Anyone?

Here's a wee video for those of a thinking persuasion:

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.

Thoughts on a Month of Fatherhood

The daily routine is a bit repetitive to bang on about it every day, so I’m going to pad out the blog with my take on current affairs. So here you go.

Who gives a fuck about Tiger Woods? He plays golf.

Should we ban minarets like the Swiss? After all, you're not allowed churches in muslim countries are you? So, nah nah-nah nah-nah. Leaving aside the idiocy of saying things like 'if we don't want sharia law we have to be more like Saudi Arabia', here are some pictures of churches in Iran. Some of them are pretty big and shiny too. Oh.

Nobody is going to ban Christmas trees, for fuck's sake. They are not religious symbols anyway, unless we’ve all started worshipping Odin while I wasn’t watching. Actually I wouldn’t mind if we all worshipped All-Father Odin, Lord of the Slain. Its just that hunting down my enemies and giving them the ol’ blood eagle might put greater demands on my masculinity than I’m used to. Anyway I’ve checked in the Bible. There’s no tinsel or crackers in it either, so I don’t know what’s been going on there.

That’ll do. I just gave the baby a bottle with 30ml of expressed milk. When she finished it she cried for 30 seconds, then forgot and fell asleep. She woke up at 8.30 this morning just when I was in the middle of a vivid dream. I don’t remember anything about it now, just that it was very engaging.

She is a month old today. The days are long but the weeks pass quickly. Odd that. So far the whole fatherhood thing is not as daunting as I thought it would be. It helps that we have a calm, happy baby. Some babies cry all the time for no reason. That would be a fucking nightmare. We are lucky. Some babies can’t figure out how to drink from a bottle once they are being breast-fed. We are lucky with that too. Some babies get covered with thrush and their mother’s nipples get all cracked and infected. Jesus.

But since I’ve got this parenting thing down, here’s some handy hints.

Don’t panic. All a newborn baby needs is to feed, have its nappy changed and sleep. Its straightforward, if a bit relentless after a while, so as long as you are doing these things it will all be fine. If you are freaking out the baby can tell, and it will get upset. Remember its relying on you to know what’s going on. It hasn’t got a clue.

Don’t prod the baby when its asleep to check if its still breathing. I’m pretty sure it will be, and if you wake the baby up in the middle of the night it will be really pissed off and then it’s a fucker to get it to go back to sleep.

Do leave your dishes in the sink. No one will think any less of you. If you have a newborn baby most people will be surprised you’ve got your shirt buttoned up the right way. If you have time to do housework, you should be asleep instead. You’ll need it.

Don’t be afraid of handling your baby. I know it seems really fragile but its tougher than you think and it likes its cuddles. Just remember to support its little head and don’t drop it or bounce it until its sick or anything. Look at the midwives in the hospital; they tossed the baby about like a piece of chicken, didn’t they?

Don’t be shy of the baby’s poo. You will get it all over yourself no matter what you do.

If you are a man, get as involved as you can. If you can get paternity leave take as much as you can. If both of you are in the house with the baby it makes everything much, much easier. Looking after the baby is not just woman's work; its fun too.

That’s it, I think. I’d better go, everyone seems to be waking up.

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.