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 ...

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.

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!