Just Bouncing Along On a Swiss Ball

For some reason Sophie has no intention of letting anyone be comfortable while they are holding her, When I walk in the door, all I want to do is give my daughter a cuddle and sit down.

Not an unreasonable wish, you'd think, but she gives me a choice, sit down with and hear her cry or stand up and hear her coo. Somehow she can tell whether I'm standing or sitting - it must be some sort of sixth sense because I've got my wife to measure the angles and nothing changes. Short of having an altimeter there can be no way she can tell the difference whether I'm up or down, especially with her eyes closed. Heck, sometimes late at night I'm not even sure if I'm standing or sitting. Even so, with some spooky sort of baby ESP, she knows.

But the other night while cleaning out some cupboards I came across an old inflatable Swiss Ball (a relic from the time I read in a magazine about the virtues of throwing away my office chair and using one of these instead. At the time I had delusions of increasing my core stability and decreasing my waistline).

A blinding flash of inspiration had me dust it off the Swiss Ball and blow it up - maybe it would give her the rocking movement of standing and me the comfort of sitting. Maybe I could bring my 30 plus years of experience in negotiation to bear on my 11 week old daughter. Maybe we could cut a deal.

So I picked her up, got her happy, then slowly sat down.

And stopped.

Silence.

Ding ding. A rare round goes to Dad.

Our house is now a happy one again. Dad can come home from work and sit down. Daughter can get her evening cuddle. Oh, and Mum can watch my progress towards core stability and a healthy waistline.

Growing Up - Staring Eyes and Poking Tongues

It's amazing how things change every day, I thought it was all moving fast in the beginning, that transition from Sophie being inside my pregnant wife to out here in the real world was amazing enough. I thought that nothing could top it when Sophie came home from the hospital, but she just seems to change faster and faster, and every day brings something new.

Now when she's being carried in the Baby Bjorn I don't have to worry about her head bumping around, it goes exactly where she wants it (though I've learnt that the more uncomfortable it looks the happier she probably is). Unfortunately the days of having her tucked in facing me are very much over.

Much to my distress, suddenly Dad's chest is not the most fascinating thing around, the outside world is much more exciting, especially other people. Not great for a Dad's ego when he's ignored and complete strangers take her full attention. She just stares at them, and to make things worse, she's started getting a reflex action: the harder she stares, the more her tongue pokes out.

So we're walking around the Sainsbury's in Streatham with Sophie in the Baby Bjorn. Her eyes are wide open, she's grinning, and her tongue is hanging out.

My first thought is that this is London and you should never stare at anyone, but it's time for me to get an education because all she gets are smiles.

Babies, it seems, can get away with anything, even in London.

My Daughter's First Steps

Ok, so first steps is optimistic for a twelve-week old baby, but she can almost roll over!

Yesterday, Sophie was lying there on her playmat, wriggling around a bit more than usual, when she lifted up her head and one arm, pulling her shoulder about an inch off the ground, then fell back. Then she did it again, and again. We feel like spectators at our very own Olympics; she's giving it everything and we're there to cheer her on.

But like all good Dads there are a couple of things that worry me:

1. She has a habit of not liking what she gets, and she doesn't like being on her front, so I've got the feeling she might not like what she gets when she does learn to roll over.
   
2. I quite like the fact that when we put her down somewhere she stays put. This is the start of her getting independent (maybe a velcro grow suit so we could stick her in place would help?)
   

So Sophie has registered another first, getting a shoulder off the ground might not rate highly, it's not going to make the news, and a year ago I would have been embarrased to write about it, but right now everything she does makes her parents proud, and we don't care who knows it.

Why I Love Daylight Savings (the Spring Addition)

Ah, daylight savings, spring forward, fall back and all that. My wife and I have been trying to get our daughter Sophie into a routine for a few weeks now and then along comes the government and changes things on us.

It's a nice feeling to be able to blame the government for some of my parenting difficulties. Yep, blame the government, that has a nice ring to it. I'm going to have to look for more ways they make my life hard. I wonder how difficult that's going to be . . .

But while I wasn't looking forward to daylight savings (pardon the pun), it did bring me one small, rare and petty victory over my daughter. Every morning when Sophie wakes up, my second thought is "I can't wait to see my daughter". Unfortunately (and this is something I'm working on as part of my quest to become the perfect Dad), my first thought is, "what I wouldn't give for another hour's sleep".

And guess what.

This morning, when I looked at the clock, another hour of sleep is exactly what I had got. So for the first time ever I'm grateful to daylight savings for giving me an almost normal sleep. It looks like Sophie has been preparing for daylight savings since the day she was born (all of 12 weeks).

So maybe instead of blaming the government I should do something nice, maybe give them a donation. A tithe sounds about right, 10% of my wages. On second thoughts it was a great hour's sleep, so maybe I should show some real appreciation and double that, perhaps more than double it? And what do you know, a quick look at my payslip and someone's done it already. How thoughtful of them . . .

Filters (I Don't Hear No Crying)

The other night I had been holding my daughter Sophie for about half an hour while she was trying to get to sleep. I was watching TV, I can't remember what it was, but there was nothing great on. Then, suddenly, I realised she was crying again, and not just crying, screaming. Somehow I had filtered it out completely.

My first thought was, what a crying shame to waste my moment of Zen-like focus watching TV!

My second thought was that I have moments like this every day. My journey in from Streatham officially takes about 50 minutes door to door. Some days it crawls by and the train takes an age to get from station to station. Other days I'm at work before I realise it, and haven't even got annoyed by anyone taking up my personal space on the train.

My daughter (and all babies) have the same thing. If they have decided to sleep then it's impossible to wake them. I can pick Sophie up, change her nappy and put her down in another room with no problem. This makes them great when we want to take photos as it's the onnly time they stay still - being pushed in a hollowed out log (like in the picture above) takes equal place with being tucked up in a cot. When she has decided that she doesn't want to sleep though, there is a problem. The slightest noise can wake her (heck, even no noise can wake her).

I think life would be so much easier if I could filter our attention like this. It's like the old self help saying that while you can't control what happens to you (the baby in your arms is crying), you can control how you react to it (ignore it - oops, I think "ignore" might be the wrong word here!).

If babies could concentrate on sleeping when they're meant to be sleeping, it would make parents' l Of course this is never going to happen in the real world, so put the word out I'm working to invent an attention filter, or even better, I'm looking to buy one. And I promise I won't waste it watching TV!

Good Times, Bad Times

Having a daughter has brought some of the strongest feelings in my life, and as an INTJ, feelings are not something I usually pay much attention to.

In the days of my youth
I was told what it was to be a man,
Now I've reached the age
I've tried to do all those things the best I can

Led Zep lyrics are great in that they can be bent to fit any situation. There been no brown eyed man stealing my wife away (that I know of anyway) and it been a long long time since I had any dealings with a sixteen year old girl. But what I 've found is true as a Dad is that all the things I was told "in my youth" have stared to float back. I've posted before about how everyone has advice for new Dads, but I think it's the advice people give you before you are a Dad, before you're even thinking about becoming a Dad, that is the most important.

In those days of innocence, when meeting people and discovering girls is a new adventure, fathers are people who are there in the background for most, who come home at night and watch TV. I was lucky enough to have a great Dad, but silly enough not to know it, or rather to take it for granted. After all, didn't everyone's Dad take them to tennis, to rugby, help coach their teams? The simple answer is "no".

I went down to Streatham Common last Saturday and there was lots of football training, some coaches were out there giving it everything, encouraging the kids to run up the hill, to chase the ball and do the drills. But what struck me was that there weren't many parents there. I guess sport has become a sort of a babysitting service. These kids grow up thinking that it's normal for someone else to take care of them, that parents are not for learning from, that parents are what you have when something isn't so important.

So perhaps it's not something that's said aloud, and it's defintely not politically correct to talk about how someone else is raising their children, but letting someone else bring up your kids and get the best out of them is an option. But taking it is not what I think it is to be a man.

Last Night I Dreamed I Was Holding a Baby

I think the subtitle for this post shold be something like, "Does it count as having your turn if you only dreamed it?"

Last night was my turn in charge and so I got my daughter to sleep, collapsed into bed and went straight to sleep.

Unlike her state in the picture above, I dreamed that she was grizzly, so I was rocking her to calm her and send her back to sleep. She kept crying, so I started to rock harder, full of good intentions, but I just couldn't get her down. I was finally about to admit defeat and pass her over to my wife when my wife gave me a jab in the ribs. "Ouch", I said, "what was that for?" She explained that it was my turn to get up and look after our daughter, all the rocking I had been doing was in my sleep.

A quick debate revealed that my dreamwork did not count towards anything. Usually dreaming of someone is a good thing, but from some children, there is no escape.