Other people's babies

A couple of things have happened recently that made me feel I was taking another step to dadhood.

1. We went around to a friend of my wife's and without asking (or thinking), I picked up their son and gave him a cuddle. My wife looked at me strangely, I woke up like out of a daze and sheepishly retreated from dadhood to manhood and went off in search of a beer.

2. Last week an old work colleague brought their baby to the office and (again without thinking), I got up and went to have a look.

I even asked some knowledgeable questions about how she was sleeping and whether she had teeth yet. Ok, so they were not really knowleagable questions, but they were a huge advance on mumbling "congratulations" that made up my dealings with new mothers in the past.

I'm not sure what to draw from this, but I think I'm entering some new territory. A few months ago I'd rather have gone to the dentist than spend more than a second with someone else's baby.

Now, not only am I spending time with them, I don't mind them throwing up on me.

Well, perhaps that is a bit strong, I do mind it when they throw up on me.

But the general thought holds true.

It may have taken me 35 years, but I've discovered other people's baby's can be interesting.

Sophie's normal, bouncy service is resumed

A few days ago my daughter was in hospital with a temperature that was way too high. She was in a real state, and had her parents panicked and the doctors puzzled

Now, three days later, she's back to her bouncy self.

It's like nothing happened.

Except that her parents can remember.

As far as she's concerned, it might as well never have happened. But I keep looking at her sideways, when we think she's not noticing us. I'm trying to see if she lets her guard down, to see if this revitalised Sophie is real, or if she's hiding her pain and putting on an act to spare us.

I should have more faith in her, it's no act - if there's one thing babies are, it's honest. I should know by now that she has no problem waking my wife and I up in the middle of the night, or screaming in the middle of a quiet part of a TV show. And if she has no problem with that, then when she's got something legitimate to play on, there would be absolutely no holding back.

Perhaps I should stop judging her through my standards.

Or maybe it's not judging, but me trying to get rid of the guilt I feel because it really was a hassle when she got sick. Don't get me wrong, the sickness was all about her pain, which was horrible, but it meant a lot of extra work for my wife and I as well.

My wife and I are still feeling the strain, and while it's great that she's well again and while I would take her place to save her from any sickness that comes up, there's a small part of me that thinks she should still be showing some effect of it. It's not fair that she can carry on as normal after giving us such a fright.

But maybe I'm learning a bit more about being a parent. Maybe being a parent is learning that inone of this is about me at all. My daughter is seven months old, what is she going to do - say thank you? Maybe the way to look at it is that this is unconditional love. She has the right to expect this of me because this is what parents do. Maybe when I realise some of this, I become a parent?

In a way it's refreshing. I spend so much of my working life trying to say the right thing, to pick the best moment to ask a question. She just goes right ahead with what she wants to do or express. I can't can blame her - it's effective. Not so sure it would work in the real world though, unconditional love is not so common in the workplace!

So this week our life can resume. It's back to spooning in solid food and trying to get her to bed on time. But that's not a bad thing - for the moment, to my tired eyes, the normal routine has never felt so fresh.

Hospitals are no place for babies

It's been seven months of prettty easy sailing so far, I guess it had to happen sooner or later. On Monday night I was leaving work and got the dreaded call to hurry home, my wife was concerned about Sophie.

Sophie is never ill, there's the odd bump when she suddenly forgets how to sit, or is too ambitious with the crawling, but never anything serious.

Until now.

I knew something was wrong when I came home and instead of the frantic wiggling and giggling I get each night when I open the door, there was a listless glance, then she turned away. That was about the worst feeling ever. I'm expecting something like that when she's a teenager, but there should be a lot of time yet when she thinks Dad is just the greatest.

The new, listless Sophie was a really strange experience. Over the past seven months, we've really got to know her and she's developed a real, chirpy personality. Always talking, dribbling and trying to move about. To come home to a daughter who is like a zombie, just staring and moving slowly was to come home to someone I didn't know.

When she was born we read through the baby books and decided to buy a digital thermometer. Right now, we kind of wished we hadn't, because it was reading over 38 degrees celcius. With the thermo strips there's a bit of leeway (if I squint I can make the reading go up or down), but with a digital thermometer, the numbers were staring me in the face. Looking at the book again, it said 39 degrees meant an ambulance, so 38 is pretty bad.

We called up the hospital and they said to come on in. We got there, did our initial check and sat down to wait.

And waited.

And waited.

An hour isn't a long time when you're doing something fun, but when there's a sick baby to look after, time starts to drag. We started to do silly things like measure her temperature every five minutes. it got to 39, then back to 38.6, then back up to 39.1, then back down again.

The paediactician finally came to look at Sophie. After peering in the ears, checking the eyes and resisting Sophie's attempts to spit out the tongue depresser, she told us didn't know what was wrong.

Next up were the blood samples. As if poor Sophie wasn't unhappy enough, they put a needle in her foot and took out what seemed like half her blood supply. They then wrapped up her foot, keeping the needle in, just in case they needed more samples.

An hour or two later the samples came back fine, they still din't know what was wrong. So we sat down to wait again. I'm an active person and have never thought that doing nothing was the best thing to do, but all our hoping and wishing must have worked.

Her temperature started to come back down.

4am in the morning, we've done nothing, and her temperature started to come back down.

So that's it. A pretty lame story compared to what some parents have gone through, and, knowing Sophie, she's going to put us through a lot worse yet. But for the moment, that is bad enough, and a definite remnder that life with a baby is not all smiles and cooing, and that even the regular crying ain't so bad when I compare it to the night I spent with her at the hospital.

Her Sole Intention is Learning To Crawl

I came home last night to find we'd hit another milestone, Sophie had worked out how to crawl.

Well, not exactly how to crawl, but she had an idea about how a baby might be able to move across a rug. Like a jigsaw puzzle, she has all the parts and it's only a mattter of time before she puts them together in the right order.

One arm forward.
Then the other arm.
Or was it the leg?
No, pretty sure it was the arm.
Or both arms?
Oh dear, that doesn't feel right.
Splat.
etc.

It's so hard to watch, she knows all the individual parts of crawling, but just can't link them together. And (being a man) all I want to do is to solve her problem, to explain how it all goes together, to take over completely and do it for her. But that's not going to help - I know this because I tried.

I tried demonstrating by crawling across the lawn. I tried sitting down and talking her through the process. I tried encouragement. I moved her arms and legs for her. Then my wife tried to make me realise there can be few things more pitiful than the attempts of a man of 35 trying to teach a six month old baby how to crawl.

So, in spite of my efforts, for the moment we're safe. But the kiddie locks for the cupboards will be taken out of their packaging this weekend and anything mouth sized or "push overable" will be taken off the floor. Six months on, the realisation of what I've done is still finding new ways to hit me.

Feeding time at the London zoo

I think Sophie knew something was up as she was carried to her brand new, sparkling white Ikea highchair.

It was a suspicious look she gave me, but as she sat there banging her spoon I was optimistic that there might be a chance of her trading in Mum's breast for pureed carrot, sweet potato or parsnip. Not the smartest of trades, not one I would have made, but then she was only a baby, and who knows how they think. Maybe my wife and my combined 70 odd years of experience could outwit her six months of baby cunning.

It started well - the picking up, the strapping into the chair and giving her the spoon. But from there, things got a bit harder.

With a lot of experience under my belt I don't usually have a problem finding my mouth and swallowing whatever is deposited, but trying to explain the process is not that easy. The part about putting the spoon in the mouth was fine, My wife and I could mime it and Sophie got the idea pretty quick.

The problem came with what to do once it was in the mouth. Six months of life experience and she had the theory and practice of sucking pretty well sorted. With a breast, pusing the tongue up works perfectly to seal off the mouth and provide the suction. This doesn't work quite so well with a spoon - when you have a spoon in your mouth, pushing up the tongue propels food out of the mouth and down the chin.

mmm

And again

mmm

Fifteen minutes later and we had emptied the container of sweet potato. There was some on Sophie's chin, some on her bib, quite a bit on her highchair, a few small puddles on the floor, a sprinkling on Mum and Dad and possibly some inside Sophie.

Still, she at least she seemed to enjoy the process, and even better was the reward - a good session on mother's breast. I'm not convinced the appropriate reward for eating is more eating (look what it's done to me), but round two awaits us tomorrow.

Sleep Training (Part One)

With the six month mark having passed us by and our travel calendar (consisting of a six-month best of two weekends away in a row) now cleared, my wife and I made the decision to train young Sophie in the art of sleeping by herself.

Up until now, her sleeping cycle has consisted of being rocked and jiggled to sleep over 2-3 hours in about every room of the house as we worked on the principle that she liked moving around - after all, falling asleep in the pushchair was never a problem.

However, all the books said the best way was to put her in her cot and let her fight her way to sleep. The theory behind this is that they need to learn to fall asleep by themselves and the longer they take to learn the more parents have to put up with.

But boy can she scream.

And flip herself on her stomach.

And scream.

And flip over on her back again.

And scream.

And (it seems like magic) she can go to sleep.

There's a transition that only takes a few seconds between being one of the angriest young women on the planet, hating her cot and the uncaring parents who are just stood there watching her struggle and the change to blissing out, mouth open, arms outstretched, and gently snoring.

It's been two nights so far, averaging about two hours each time. We're betting everything on two hours being all she can manage as it's about our limit too.

Perhaps the worst part, though, is that living in London it's not just us who are suffering. I hope the neighbours have as high a tolerence as us right now, if not, we have a bottle of wine and a set of ear plugs for any neighbours who come knocking at the door.

Weekend in Sweden

Last weekend it was Yorkshire, this weekend we've come back from a plane trip to visit friends in Sweden - from not having left the house for the last couple of months, we've turned into social animals.

But it was a different type of social.

Last time we caught up with them, the talk was about old friends and drinking. This time, the conversation was kids, kids, kids. Our friends have a 12 month old, so we got to see first hand some of what is coming, and for the most part it was good, especially in Sweden, where the rights parents get are incredible.

Some of the things I am looking forward to:

• Sophie learning to walk
• eating solids
  

Some of the things I'm not looking forward to

• Sophie learning to walk
• eating solids
• personality continuing to emerge
  

I think each of these deserve a post of their own, but to state the obvious, the best and the worst are the same things.

While Sophie can cause a mess at 6 months, the damage a twelve month old can do is on a different scale all together. Not only can they move heavier objects and do it more quickly, they have the added danger of being mobile.

At the moment, Sophie is sitting happily and can roll over, but she hasn't go the hang of crawling. It's great to have her stay basically where she's put. Once walking is a posibillty, it only takes seconds for them to disappear, or empty a cupboard or basically destroy a room.

Eating is the same story. I smiled when I saw the plastic raincoat in the baby shop, "knowing" that while Sophie can dribble a lot, apart from the odd baby barf, she's never maanged to cover herself in food completely. With out friend's young son this weekend I saw it was possible - not only possible, but probable.

But gosh, he's got a real personality. He knows what he likes and is starting to resist any attempt to tell him what he should like. At the same time, he's a real copycat, whenever his Dad touches something on the stereo, he does too, whenever his Dad grabs a beer from the fridge, he tries to as well and even when his Dad picks something up, he does the same (unless it's a toy to tidy up by putting it back in the basket!).

All these things to come. Six months have gone by and our bundle of joy is now eight kilos of fast growing baby. I get the feeling tat whatever happens next is going to happen too fast and not fast enough ...