Month: August 2015

Out and About With Baby

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

TV and movies lie. I always knew their depictions of birth and infancy were inaccurate and/or exaggerated – the first sign of labour is the waters suddenly breaking, women return to their pre-pregnancy weight the second they leave the hospital, and if you have a penis, you are utterly clueless about childcare – but there was one thing I accepted as the truth: new dads are the sexiest beings on the planet.

I’m perfectly happy with my partner Lizzie, of course. But there’s no harm in basking in the adoration of scores of single women drawn to your self-evident paternal prowess. If TV and movies are to be believed, as a guy, you can’t leave the house with your baby without sexy twenty-somethings swooning at your feet.

And I was kind of looking forward to that. As a balding thirty-five-year-old who can no longer tick the 25-34 box on forms (I’m lumped in with 44-year-olds now, and that feels ancient!), I wanted to feel attractive again, even it wasn’t actually me they cared about but the baby girl strapped to my chest.

It’s not true. At all. It doesn’t matter where I take Izzie – round the village, into town, down to the beach, through the forest – these broody nubile sex-goddesses are nowhere to be found.

But that’s not to say that I go unnoticed.

I’m quite a hit with grandmothers. In fact, I can’t go out without some slightly overweight old lady with blue rinse or a horribly off-putting wig standing too close and reaching a wrinkled, liver-spotted hand towards my baby while telling me about her grandchild’s chickenpox. It’s hardly reassuring me that I can still kick it with the youngsters.

The content of these encounters is equally disappointing. If I’m on my own, they coo and ah over Izzie and then look at me and say, ‘Tell her mother well done for having such a beautiful baby.’ If it’s someone we know they ask how Lizzie is feeling, how she’s coping, and tell me to congratulate her on doing such a wonderful job.

Er, don’t you want to tell me I have a beautiful baby, or ask me how I’m coping? No? Ah, I see, I’m just the dad.

It’s worse when Lizzie’s with me. Strangers and friends alike address all their questions and compliments to her, while I stand there with the baby in the sling and the changing bag over my shoulder like an overburdened caddie whose only job is transporting Izzie and her accoutrements from A to B. Because, of course, the mum does all the real work – the dad’s just decorative.

I take the puppy with me these days to see if that’ll add to my allure, but all that manages to do is interest eight-year-old girls. From this I have to conclude that sexy twenty-somethings aren’t interested in babies, while thirty-somethings and forty-somethings are so up to their eyeballs in their own kids that they don’t care one jot about anyone else’s.

Either that, or I have to accept that as a dad, I’m no longer attractive to young people. But at least the grannies like me.

Crying Kids Need Comforting

Gillan Drew3 Comments

It’s become a cliche to say that babies do not come with a manual. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome who loves clearly defined rules and black and white instructions, even I can appreciate that no two babies are the same and need to be treated with sensitivity to their individual needs. Yet if we all know this to be true, why are there so many books and theories about how we ‘should’ be raising our babies?

To illustrate this point, when my daughter cries, I pick her up. I do this because when Izzie wants something, she cries. That is, when I have missed the subtle signs she makes to communicate that she wants something, she cries. It’s a ‘come on dad, why aren’t you listening to me’ sort of thing. If I’ve ignored the signs too long, it’s more of a ‘for crying out loud I’ve been asking for ages, are you blind and deaf or just stupid’ scream. Unfortunately I don’t speak baby, so crying and screaming are part and parcel of a new parent’s life.

What Izzie wants comprises a rather small list: feeding, changing, burping, holding. She’s too young to crave world peace and cigarettes. So when my daughter cries, I pick her up, because she wants or needs me to do something. It seems pretty simple to me.

But this is a major bone of contention between competing parenting theories. Child-centred philosophies such as Attachment Parenting advocate this nurturing, touchy-feely ethos, while this is anathema to parent-led approaches like the Ferber Method. The former believes that a baby needs to feel loved to create emotional wellbeing, so you should comfort her when she cries to show her she’s safe; the latter that the kid needs to find a way to comfort herself because the world’s a hard place and it’s about time she learned this, so you should leave her to ‘cry it out’. I’ve got to say, I’m definitely swayed towards the first, even though child-centred approaches are far harder on the parents.

I am, however, surprised by just how many people subscribe to the parent-led theories. This is the idea that the child needs to adapt to fit into the world it finds itself in, rather than the parent adapting to the child. So if Izzie cries, we’re told to leave her to self-soothe; by picking her up we’re making a rod for our own backs; she’s playing us for fools; she’s learning how to manipulate us; we have to be cruel to be kind; and we’re creating a needy, dependent child who won’t be able to cope with the pressures of modern life.

Can I remind everyone she’s six weeks old?

In the 1950s a scientist/sadist named Harlow carried out some truly horrific experiments on a bunch of rhesus monkeys to see what kinds of parenting they responded to. Separating them from their mothers at birth, he put them in cages with two surrogate mothers. One, made of chicken wire, had a nipple that provided milk; the other, covered in soft cloth, provided nothing. The prevailing theory at the time was that the bond between mother and child was based on food. The monkeys, in short, would prefer the chicken wire monstrosity.

Not so. The monkeys spent their days clinging to the soft and cuddly mummy, only going to the chicken wire to feed. They craved the comfort and cuddles of their parent, and not only did this soothe them, it was vital for their social and emotional development. Indeed, those monkeys placed in cages containing only the wire-nipple mother grew up disturbed, unable to socialise, horribly ill-suited to communal monkey life.

The detached parenting style claims that cuddling your baby when she cries makes her dependent, emotionally weak, but Harlow found the opposite with his monkeys. When he put scary objects in the cages with the babies without cuddly mothers, they cowered in the corner; those with cuddly mothers were far braver, going up to the objects to investigate because they felt safer knowing they had support. Proof positive that nurturing children makes them better adapted to life in general.

Well, at least in rhesus monkeys. But the theory is sound, I think. If the child knows they are protected, they feel more secure. Knowing she has a safety net means that, as she grows up, Izzie will be more confident in taking risks. Coddling her actually makes her more independent!

At least, to a certain extent. We don’t want to become helicopter parents that hover over their children so they don’t learn to do anything for themselves, but at this stage, with a newborn, I can’t see anything wrong with cuddling my child.

We don’t follow any particular parenting theory, instead creating our own. Perhaps we are masochists, making a rod for our own backs, but the Gillan-Lizzie-Izzie Method is working for us so far. Our philosophy is that crying kids need comforting. And until we see a reason to change it, that is how it’ll stay.

A Sense of Inconvenience

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

While they might look like normal little people – well, within reason – the differences between babies and us comprise a great deal more than simply size. When they’re born, our baby’s five senses are far from fully developed, and though we might swear blind that our little one is watching the TV, odds are she’s simply gazing in that direction while wondering why that odd person beside her is getting all excited over nothing. In fact, their sensory development is quite different to what you might think.

Surprisingly, a newborn’s most acute sense is that of smell, and experiments on babies show they’re able to distinguish between their mother’s milk and that of another woman by smell alone. That’s pretty impressive, considering that no matter how many times I smell milk from the fridge, I can never tell if it’s gone off until a big lump of congealed yuck drops into my cereal.

According to the experts, touch is also a key sense at this stage. A newborn’s hands and mouths are their most sensitive parts, while the rest of the body can feel temperature and pain, before beginning to sense pressure and touch. Before you know it, that fabric softener you’ve been using doesn’t make things soft enough for her highness, and you’ll need to fork out on one that’s three times the price.

She can hear, but not all the frequencies and volumes we can – if you whisper sweet, soothing words in her ear, she might not even know you’re there. Her tastebuds can only distinguish between sweet, salty, sour and bitter tastes, and despite a persistent myth that this is all anyone can taste, she’ll develop the full range of tastes later. And her vision is probably the least developed of all.

Newborn babies can see around twelve inches and in very limited colours, only able to sharply discern high contrast patterns, such as a chessboard – though why they’d be staring at a chessboard from a distance of twelve inches is anybody’s guess. Beyond that, the world is a blurry mess of movement and shapes and it’s not until around four months, when she develops binocular vision, that she can tell how near or far an object is, its size and relative dimensions, and thus be able to reach out and touch it. Prior to that, no matter how many times she punches you in the mouth, you can’t attribute intention to her – it’s just luck that her flailing hand caught you six times a day in the exact same spot.

There are other senses beyond the five we are (wrongly) taught at school. If we class a sense as a bunch of cells designed to pick up on a specific input, then most experts believe we have at least nine, and maybe as many as twenty-one, including hunger, thirst, balance (which enables us to sense movement), the sense we need to pee or poop, and a sense of the passage of time. In fact, most experts divide the sense of touch into different, discrete categories: touch, pressure, temperature, pain, and itch. So that’s an awful lot of different body systems for our babies to physiologically develop and learn to process.

But if babies are stuck in a bubble with limited perception of the world around them, then how on earth is it that Izzie manages to time her indiscretions for the worst possible time? Her sense of inconvenient timing arrived at birth and has been developing ever since. She’s fast asleep, the light is off, but the second – literally the very second – your head hits the pillow, she starts to cry. You cook dinner and she doesn’t make a murmur, but the moment you sit down to eat and you insert your fork into that first precious potato she somehow senses that now’s the time to scream. Telephone call? I’m going to cry. Furthest point of the walk from the car? I’m going to choose this exact moment to poop.

This morning she somehow timed her pee to the exact second I was slipping the clean nappy into place over the top of the dirty one – the precise moment my hand was positioned beneath her where she could give it a shower. A heartbeat of a chance and she took it. And what’s more, I have a tiny cut on that hand from where she scratched me. I learned two things: baby urine is surprisingly hot, and it feels oddly like acid on an open wound. And a third thing: it’s uncanny how awkward Izzie’s timing can be.

The worst is with her nappies. I have realised, since Izzie was born, that I’m rather squeamish. I don’t understand quite how or when it happened. When I was working as a care assistant in an old people’s home, and later as a student nurse on an infection control ward, I used to roll my eyes when I heard parents moan about dirty nappies. I made a living from wiping bottoms, and not just any old bottoms, but people with clostridium difficile, a hospital superbug that makes people incontinent and their poop into orange marmalade. I cleaned up diarrhoea after people had been eating sweetcorn. On one memorable occasion, we had to hoist a guy with a gangrenous sacral pressure sore up off the bed so he could poop into my (gloved) hands, which is the closest I’ve come to vomiting on a job.

The point is, I did these things without blinking. Perhaps I repressed my disgust and now it’s coming back to bite me, but somehow Izzie seems to know when I’m alone with her, and stores up her poop for then. And this isn’t just any old poop. Since starting her on the Comfort milk, it’s green and it reeks like a diseased goose.

It follows a pattern these days. First, the hard nugget that lures you onto the changing table with a peg on your nose. Then, as you remove the nappy, she passes a softer stool that comes out like a sausage and coils round and round until you have a twelve-inch Cumberland you have to detach from her bottom with a piece of tissue. Then she waits until you’ve been pulled into thinking she’s finished before she projects a green stream of mushy peas across the back of your hand.

Every time, nugget, sausage, peas. Every time I change her, that is. When her mother changes her, there’s none of that, and her mother has no sense of smell. It’s like she senses my weakness and goes in for the kill. So if there are any experts reading this, you need to add a new sense to your list: a baby’s sense of inconvenient timing.