Meeting the Grandmother

One of the greatest moments of my life was introducing my daughter to my parents (she's their first grandchild and they've waited over 30 years). They've heard her on the phone and seen her on the webcam, but nothing compares to meeting in the flesh.

Even over the few weeks we spent back with them she changed a lot - growing from someone who could fit in our overhead luggage compartment, to someone who, well, who would still fit, only not so well.

Unfortunately I think my mother had seen so many photos and so much video of Sophie that she thought they knew each other. I gues this is the sort of thing that happens to TV and celebrity stalkers, this example was just a bit closer to home - no one expects the grandmother stalker!

Mum's first reaction on seeing Sophie was to rip her out of my arms (not even pretending I was the one she wanted to see) and turning away as she did it.

Of course this meant that Sophie couldn't see her Mum and Dad. This got a predictable (howling) reaction and so my poor Mum was stranded with a crying baby in a crowded airport lounge. Not exactly the meeting she had imagined.

But things soon warmed up between them, and in a couple of days they were the best of friends. With Mum it was the first time we'd had a babysitter and it quickly became adictive.

• Crying baby in the morning? Pass her over to her grandmother.
• Baby who wants to play at 6am? Over to her grandmother.
• Baby who should be taken out for some fresh air? Over to her grandmother.

Very quickly there was basically one answer to every question we had about Sophie - Very quickly grandmother became our crack.

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.

Bonding with Baby

Families are all about bonding and mother and daughter have definitely bonded. But is there such a thing as too much bonding?

Spending so much time together is great for them, but it makes life hard when I come home and want some time with my daughter. She just can't stand to be without Mum, and after a few minutes starts looking around more and more frantically.

After the weekend, when I've had the chance to spend lots of time with her, things are fine again with us and she no longer looks for Mum. It worries me that they can be too close, there must be a line where they have a happy medium, but because we have no family over here and because I work during the day, there's no one else either of them can spend much time with.

It leads to jealousy on both sides, my wife says she doesn't like being in different rooms from her daughter for more than a few minutes, andwhile she claims it's ok that I can play with my daughter, she hates even the thought of anyone else touching her.

It works both ways, my wife said she was holding our daughter a few days ago when they caught sight of their reflection in the mirror, My wife carried her closer so my daughter could see herself better. Closer. Closer. Then our lovely, peaceful daughter pounced! She hit the mirror a couple of times in a rage (luckily there were no sharp objects around). How dare another baby take her place with Mum!

So now we have another rule added to our list, this one to keep baby facing away from the mirror. This is not something we can explain to her, no matter how patient we are. It's just a matter of time before she works out the truth, that she is the most loved baby ever and that no one is going to take her place. I think she knows this is the truth with Mum, as a London Dad, I just have to work out the best way to convince my daughter that Dad really wants to bond too.

Family Overseas (Tyranny of Distance)

Being a new Dad with a family overseas is both great (because of the distance) and terrible (because of the distance).

Great because my wife and I get to do things almost completely our own way and amke all our mistakes with no pressure - there's no Mum or Mum-in-Law standing over us saying "don't do it like that". On the other hand we don't have ready-made baby-sitters (!) and, because we don't speak absolutely every day, it also magnifies everything that happens. This means a joke we make about bottle feeding or giving a dummy, or an email with a funny photo can get completely misconstrued.

I'm now being extra careful with the photos, I've learnt to use The GIMP, a free image editor, which lest you paste in fake backgrounds and make things look much more exciting and dangerous than they really are. While I don't think they believed the one with the shark about to bite, the ones with her sitting alone in the log didn't go down too well. Dad was about a yard away, I promise!

There's a great "Split Enz" song (Six Months in a Leaky Boat) that talks about the "tryanny of distance":

"Aotearoa, rugged individual,
Glisten like a pearl,
At the bottom of the world.
The tyranny of distance,
Didn't stop the cavalier,
So why should it stop me,
I'll conquer and stay free."

Not quite sure what that means, but for me it means that Aotearoa (the Maori word for New Zealand) is a long way away from London and of course London is a long way from New Zealand too. As much as we share photos and the hours we spend on the web cam, it's not the same as having family there. I can see Mum wince over the web cam if she thinks I'm holding my daughter the wrong way, she's wonderful and doesn't say anything, but I know.

Still, I think we're doing ok, and are going to make the trip back in a couple of months to show the results of all our parenting. Not entirely looking forward to the flight (over 30 hours), so will be looking for some advice on flying with a new child. It's going to be an interesting time and I think we'll spend the flight back here relieved, but also wiser because we've got a lot to learn and a lot of people willing to give advice. That old selective hearing might just come in handy once again!