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.

A Yorkshire Solution to Teething

We've just got back from three days in Yorkshire visiting my sister in law, three of the wettest summer (or winter) days I've had in a long time. Arriving in the station, it was about 30 seconds before I had someone call me "duck". I think the ducks were more in their element that us - they have waterproof feathers, we had to dig out the raincoats.

We felt sure the time was right to leave London, Wimbledon had been fairly dry and tradition said it was due for a drenching, but instead we seemed to take most of the weather north with us. The rain ruled out most of our ideas for walking through gardens and all the outdoor things we had planned so the search was on for other pursuits.

Ever since seeing it on the TV ad (for double glazing, I think) one of my goals was to visit the Tan Hill Inn - the highest pub in Britain. So with a lot of sweet talking and promises to get up and rock the baby, to change nappies on demand and all sorts of other things I'm hoping won't be remembered, we set out on a miserable day to drive through the moors to drink a pint on top of the world.

Yorkshire is an amazing place, there must be hundreds of small villages, all perfect pictures with stone houses and stone walls and flowers everywhere. It's like the locals in every village had put on some kind of special decoration for us tourists whizzing through on our cars.

It was our first time in a car for a long while, and Sophie loved it. There's something about cars and babies that just puts them right to sleep and all her toothing troubles were forgotten as we sped along. It was just a pity we did have to stop every now and again, becuase she had some sort of 6th sense that woke her up the second we stopped.

Not sure whether it was teething or being in a new place, she just doesn't like anything at the moment. But there was one other time she quietened down, and I should know by now that's she's becoming one of those children that when it's quiet, you have to worry.

I was sitting there enjoying my pint and watching the driving rain against the (new double glazed!) windows when I spied the above picture out of the corner of my eye. Cold is meant to make gums feel better, so I guess whether it comes from an official, specially designed toy that you put in the freezer or a bottle the landlord puts in the fridge, the principle is the same.

So it's a moral dilemma. On the plus side, it keeps her quiet, and it keeps Dad busy making sure there are enough cold empty bottles to keep her happy. On the negative side, there are some people who might take this the wrong way, and the government is coming up with more drinking restrictions and proclamations (though this might be more of a reason to go ahead with my new solution).

Yep, it's a tricky situation, I think I'll have another pint while I think about it ...

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.

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!

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.