Lost and Found

Yesterday brought another reminder of Sophie's Christening.

I finally got around to taking my suit to the drycleaners* and was doing a final pocket check, when I found the booties that went with her Christening outfit.

Yep, those same booties that I swore I put in in the car, the same booties that I desparately tried to find someone else to blame for losing and the same booties that I spent at least an hour looking for, cursing under my breath all the while.

I'm pretty sure this is the coolest thing I've ever found left in my pockets. It definitely ranks above hankies (clean or dirty), above bibs (usually dirty) and above cash too (at least the amounts I'm likely to find in my pockets).

In terms of the feeling that came with finding them it rates above everything.

Not sure also what this says about her Dad trying to teach her stuff when his memory is going already. At this rate I'll have forgotten everything before I get to pass it on.

At least I'll be in good company though and can (quietly) blame forgetting the bonnet on my wife. In my (quiet) opinion, the gown is so long that no one would have seen the booties anyway, but the bonnet - on second thoughts mentioning the bonnet is only going to cause trouble!

So tomorrow it's off to the post office to send the booties 11,000 miles back to Christchurch to await the next Christening and their next wearer, and by sending them, I'm taking full responsibility for smuggling them out of the country. Best to have them in a safe place, and who knows, in another few years there just might be another call for booties and a bonnet ...

* Yes, she's just as keen to leave her mark on Dad's best suit as she is any of my older clothes. Yes, it has taken me three weeks to get around to unpacking. And no, I'm not looking forward to handing the suit over to the drycleaners after all that time in the suitcase.

Sophie's Christening

The main reason we went back to New Zealand was to introduce Sophie to the Grandparents, especially mine because she's their first grandchild.

But while we were there we also wanted to get her Christened and to do it in the church we got married in (which is the same one connected to the primary school my wife went to - not sure exactly how weird that is!).

There was a lot of tradition around the Christening, Sophie wore the gown that's gone through about 4 generations now - different coloured ribbons for boys and girls of course - and it's a neat feeling to bring someone in to a tradition like that.

I've had traditions before, but most of them are of the rugby club or university initiation type you don't really talk about in polite company. This was something really special and even though we're not regular churchgoers, it felt like bringing her into a wider family and connecting with something larger. A bit like getting married, just affirming someone in front of a group of other people extends it from the purely personal and is like taking on more responsibility.

More precisely, I think it's a process of making her more real. I think about her all the time, and on the train home each night I can't wait to see her, but sometimes, on the rare morning that I wake up naturally (and not to the sound of crying at 5:30am), it takes a moment before remember I'm a Dad as well as the person I've always been.

Now there's more to me than just me. We have this wonderful daughter, but she's still so small and while she is developing her personality and has carved out a permanent place in our hearts, there is a very big world out there and so many things she needs to go through to become a person.

Now we can look back at the Christening videos and photos and have something else to show her, another rite of passage that we took her through. I think that's what parents do, make a list of everything a child should go through and try to take them through it in the right order and to try to help them make sense of it all. Hopefully her Christening will be at least a small part of that.

Taking in the Thames

London is scorching right now. It's been a hot week, that for once lasted through into the weekend so it's out of the office and into summer mode.

With another day scheduled to get up to around 27 degrees it was a chance to get outside and take Sophie around our old haunts along the Thames in Rotherhithe.

It's a nice walk if you get the chance. Take the Jubilee line to Canada Water, walk around to Greenland Dock and follow the Thames back up to London Bridge station, or if you're feeling energetic (which we definitely weren't) go on to Waterloo or until you just can't walk any more.

To make the walking easier, there are also some great pubs like The Angel (where Captain Cook drank and with some fantastic views of Tower Bridge, well away from the stress of the tourists and the "look at me" clan further up the river) and The Mayflower (where the pilgrims set sail) - these pubs are only to be visited for historical purposes, of course, but after a couple of hours walking in the sun, I told myself I deserved a drink!

I think this was our first hot outing, and being a true red blooded male, I never had a doll, but I will quietly admit it's great fun getting Sophie all dressed up.

It never fails to surprise me all the things that need to be remembered, it's definitely not just a case of grab the baby and walk on out the door. Not sure if it's a girl thing? My wife has long and painful sounding preparations before we go out too, so now with two girls in the house maybe I deserve that drink even more ...

In her defence, my wife has inherited what seems like an endless supply of clothes and is always up for an excuse to get a new outfit together.

My own sense of things like what hat goes with what shirt needs a lot of work and I think I might be given up for a lost cause. Heck, sometimes I'm just happy to get the clothes on the right way around.

So faced with the choice of trying to make sense of my wife's stack of fashion magazines and fetching, wiping and carrying as directed, I think I'll stick to the latter. London right now is too hot to argue, I'll just do what I'm told.

Babies and the Modern Workplace

My imagination hasn't run so far as to think about bringing a baby into work, but I stumbled across an article from The Guardian (not my usual choice of red blooded male reading material) today that had a journalist go ahead and do just that, with predictable results.

Apparently the US has a lot of advocates for a child-friendly workplace, but if a newspaper like The Guardian can't make it work, there's no chance for it happening in London.

Some great descriptions of the attempt though, like

... checking emails, now that's proper work. Technically, you can do this with a baby on your knee, but there are flaws in this plan. Mine likes to thump the keyboard repeatedly, or until he has found "select all" plus delete, whichever is the sooner. Then he likes to stand up, and sit down again, and wriggle and grunt, and all this makes it really hard to think. When I'm at home, I have a whole battery of baby-pleasing techniques - I can sing songs and dance about, I have an elaborate mime that I can do with a monkey, which pleases him so much he almost always needs a snooze afterwards. But for some reason - call me crazy - I feel inhibited in an open-plan office, so it is a bit of a grey day, from his point of view.

Read the full thing here.

The one time Sophie came in to the office see my workmates we forgot to "prefeed" her. This meant that as soon as she got in the building she decided it was time to feed, and that means about a 10 second window before the crying starts.

Of course my desk was in the corner of the office that was furthest from any toilet we could use to feed her. The result - I got to show off my screaming baby to the whole office as head after head popped up to see what the heck was going on.

From proud father to chastened father in a very short time - my daughter is already starting to making a habit of that!

Back in London

If anyone is wondering why things have been super quiet on this blog, it's because I've just spent three weeks going cold turkey on computers while on holiday back in New Zealand.

This meant lots of travelling in planes (about 30 hours from check in to check in) and a lot of hours in carseats as well.

As a way of getting to know your baby, travel must be right up there at the peak. There's something about taking a baby in a confined aeroplane that brings all the eyes and ears of the world to parents with babies. I can hear their thoughts as we walked down the aisle to our seats, every set of eyes I met had one simple message, "please not next to me, please not next to me" as we looked for our seats.

In the end we were lucky enough to sit next to another couple with a baby a couple of weeks older than ours. They were both great, with sleeping in great proportion to crying.

We've come back to two main challenges, the first is that we spent the last three weeks taking full advantage of not having to bother about a routine. With a gaggle of grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts clamouring to change nappies and try their hands at quieting a crying babay, it's been easy to get lazy. The second issue is sleep, three weeks is about the right amount of time to adjust to a different time zone and now adjusted, it is of course time to adjust back again. New Zealand and London are 12 hours time difference, so we parents are literally about to change day into night - I just hope Sophie appreciates what we're doing for her!