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.