09-11-2005
Another moderately sleepless night (Is this a contradiction in
terms?) but I think we are getting better at this. Mummy can now distinguish
between the different yowling sounds. There is the "I am hungry: feed me now!"
wail, the "I am bored. Someone needs to entertain me" sniffly wail, and the "I
need a nappy change" scream. Thank goodness, being a boy rather than a
fastidious little miss, the latter are rare (This is no doubt sexist projection
and gender stereotyping!). Another thing Mummy has learnt is not to sit down
range without protection during a nappy change. Probably, the less said about
that the better, though matters would have been helped a great deal if Daddy
hadn't lost it completely laughing himself to death. Mummy now has the two men
in her life well sorted out. There is the lovey-dovey smoochy (Baby) "Leo" and
the Faulty Towers (Daddy) "Leo!". English is a tonal language after all.
10-11-2005
Happy feast day baby Leo. And all the other Leos out there.
Strange to be called "The Great" at a week old...
Oh dear. An absolutely horrific night. Poor baby was up until
4:30 a.m. If he keeps it up, this diary is going to be dreadfully monotonous.
The good part is we have an endless number of friends offering advice on how to
calm restless babies. Apparently, a friend of a friend still lies to his 6 or 7
year old children that "mummy needs to return a video". At midnight. Five
minutes in the car around the ring road and everyone is asleep and ready for
bed. Unfortunately, middle of the night trips out with the pushchair have been
vetoed, lest the baby proves too tempting for the insomniac kleptomaniac
academics prowling the streets in this city.
The various baby books (we have read them all) are providing
much entertainment on this subject. Should we go for "tough love": leave them
alone to scream their heads off? Coddled babies never acquire the autonomy to
explore their world and become confident adults. Or "supportive affirmation"?
Never let them feel abandoned. Only by starting in the sure knowledge of their
parents love will children have the self-confidence to explore their world and
become confident adults.
The nasty option generally is much more fun. Unfortunately, we
seem to have evolved to be emotionally manipulated by our babies, and babies
designed to twirl us around their nobbly wrinkled fingers in turn. There is no
fighting genetic determinism, not if Daddy pretends to be an evolutionary
biologist. It looks like Mummy and Daddy will continue to get up in the middle
of the night
11-11-2005
Thinking about what an efficient feeding machine the baby is. He
takes a couple of deep breathes and then plunges onto his mother's breast.
Anyone who has seen a scrum engage will know what this is like. Mummy managed to
have steamed fish at the same time as feeding the baby, provoking Daddy to point
out that apparently kissing is derived from mothers chewing up their food and
passing it onto their weaning bairns. Surely this is nonsense or urban myth. Now
we have to find someone knowledgeable to put Daddy in his place (in a metaphoric
Moses basket of swaddling ignorance). This will be a short entry today because
both parents were too exhausted even to finish their dinner. Some baby habits
must be catching!
12-11-2005
Went out to a pub with Baby for the first time for lunch: a
birthday celebration for his granddad. Now why can't he sleep as happily when he
is not in the car. This is becoming a Jekyll and Hyde story (like the baby
transformation scene at the end of the Incredibles).
13-11-2005
Daddy came out of the bathroom to
find Mummy curled over laughing in tears as a huge hydrological disaster zone
slowly seeped out around the hiccupping baby into the mattress. Sometimes
laughter seems the only response and if that makes our neighbours doubt our
sanity, so be it. Found an appropriately serendipitous biblical quotation from
Habakkuk: "...the surging of mighty waters and my body trembles, my lips
quiver at the sound". Actually baby Leo was not crying because he was wetting
the bed. Babies are quite shameless. He just wanted seconds.
The midwife assured us that
hiccups bother parents more than the baby. Well, our baby wails when his hiccups
don't go away, and I don't blame him either. So what is the remedy? Feeding him
more provides immediate relief but they return as soon as he is sated. A
quick Google search provided an undergraduate refresher on phrenic/vagal nerves,
spasms of the diaphragm and what have you, but the list of possible causes of
hiccups is as scary as the medical encyclopedia in Three Men in a Boat. One
traditional remedy from the grandparents is to feed the baby a teaspoon of water
to break the cycle. Unfortunately, our midwife had mentioned in passing that we
should never ever give the baby water. On the face of it, this was plainly
ridiculous advice, so much so that we let it pass without comment. Now, however,
we are too wimpy to give this a try lest our baby suddenly turn purple or sprout
wings (the midwife didn't actually say what would happen, but unspecified "bad
things" should only be limited to the more fecund imagination of either of the
parents.)
There is one consolation: the
Googled record for hiccups is 57 years. By that time surely baby Leo will no
longer be our responsibility.
14-11-2005
Babies are such loud sleepers it
is a wonder that they don't wake themselves up all the time. Not that they snore
of course. Nothing so innocuous. It is the ever changing collection of random
sniffling, snuffling, groans and wheezes, the occasional wild sneeze followed by
a few hurrumps.
Our midwife had told us that
babies are extremely perverse (on this matter as well as everything else). They
will sleep through a noisy disco and startle awake in the dead silence of night.
We had initially taken this very much to heart and Mummy was determined to
put the baby through a properly educational programme of daytime listening while
he was sleeping. Nothing too challenging, mind you, for his developing mind.
Just the average person's course of counterpoint (mainly Bach, some polyphony)
and folk melodies (medieval Spanish). His parents may be ignorant clods, but by
Jove, the baby will know how to groove.
Alas, we have become increasingly
timid as the days have passed, and increasingly traumatized by sleepless nights.
Which is perfectly ridiculous, of course, because if there is one thing baby
does not have a problem with, is sleeping through the day. Moses' baskets are
wonderful for navigator the Nile (or narrow staircases) but why on earth do they
have to creak so. Thank goodness, the usual response is just half an open eye
just to check that all is well before he falls back into his rackety rhythm of
baby dreams. What do babies dream of? Swimming or Kung Fu kicks? That is the
real question. All this reminds me of CS Forester's story of reporters being
shown around the Western Front. When they finally worked up the nerve to ask The
General how far away the Germans were, he told them 50 miles. "So why are we
whispering?", they asked. "Don't know about you. I have got a cold." was the
reply.
I wonder what babies really think
about baby talk. Do they really find it ridiculous? Apparently (or is this more
urban myth?), babies find repeated words in baby talk easier to parse than
normal speech. This is as least as convincing as evidence that newly born
(Welsh) babies, as a matter of taste, prefer their parents to converse in
Cymraeg than Saesneg. We are going to try to keep up our oochy-goochy talk for
at least 15 or 16 years, just long enough to embarrass the poor kid in front of
all his friends.
One of Mummy's relatives has been
wondering just how long we will be able to keep this diary up. Until tomorrow of
course and no further. Isn't it strange how a few random thoughts on the first
day should still be meandering on a week later? It is a curious mirror of the
baby's progress. The pregnancy was supposed to be a sharp sprint over 9 months
(This is looking back. At the time, even the night of the birth seemed
endless.), which thankfully Mummy came through with flying colours. What we
never noticed is when this turned into a cross-country slog with the finish line
21 years away, if we are likely. It is just as well that splishing and splashing
in the mud is so much fun.
15-11-2005
Baby had a good day today, most
probably because he is now officially a person in the UK, or probably, depending
on whether one is a Guardian reader, a subject of Her Britannic Majesty the
Queen. There was some last minute fretting before the registration as apparently
neither of the parents knew what profession they were in. My parents will
remember my one great ambition throughout my teenage year to be a "social
parasite", a well-defined and distinguished category when I was growing up.
Alas, this would not do.
Anyway, it was almost enough for
us to break out the champagne, or at least the cava. Unfortunately, Mummy will
not be able to drink until the baby is weaned. Actually, the midwife did say the
baby would not mind the odd tipple. This is especially as babies all over the
British Empire and the US have been brought up for over a century on "gripe
water" which is a good 8% alcohol. I guess it does make sense in a bizarre way
that alcohol is fine but water is lethal. That is the problem with being
first-time parents. Everything sounds so plausible.
We are taking advantage of the
temporary lull and turning in early tonight. Fingers crossed. Mummy's parents
are going back to Spain tomorrow and leave us to the tender mercies of Baby by
ourselves.