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Random Thoughts

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

It’s my birthday next week. Lizzie keeps asking me what I want. Apparently ‘a day to myself’ isn’t an appropriate gift.

Whenever I sneeze, Izzie bursts into tears in absolute terror. So when she’s in her chair, cot, or with Lizzie, I rush out of the room if I feel the urge. But what do I do when she’s asleep in my lap and I feel a sneeze coming on?

Check out my new i-phone, bitches!
Check out my new i-phone, bitches!

Izzie is fascinated with my face. If she’s not twisting my ears, tugging my awesome beard, or pulling my glasses off and flinging them on the floor, she’s pushing her fingers as far up my nostrils as she can manage. As cute as she is, it’s rather unpleasant.

Izzie is so innocent and uncomplicated, her face is a succession of emoticons. When she finds something funny, she laughs; if she’s happy, she smiles; sad, her bottom lip sticks out and her eyes fill with tears; confused, she frowns and twists her mouth; tired, she yawns and rubs her eyes; surprised, her mouth falls open and her eyes go wide. They could use her on those caricature cards they give to autistic people to explain what different emotional states look like.

Where do all our muslins disappear to?

When I fart these days, it smells exactly like the baby’s poop. I know for a fact we’re not eating the same thing, so what’s that all about?

When babies cry, it’s out of need, frustration and annoyance. They’re not really sad, despite the tears. When they’re genuinely sad – like when they wake from a bad dream or their dad sneezes – their crying looks and sounds completely different.

People keep asking what Izzie’s getting for Christmas. She’ll be six months old – she can have the wrapping paper from whatever I unwrap, and the box it came in if she’s lucky.

The first song she heard after she was born, playing on the radio in the operating theatre, was Phil Collins’ Can’t Hurry Love. If they’d waited a few minutes before yanking her out, it would have been Ellie Goulding’s version of Your Song, which would probably have been more appropriate. But then, they were hurrying, love.

Why do they have radios playing in operating theatres?

Not sure how much actually made it to your stomach there.
Not sure how much actually made it to your stomach there.

All-terrain buggies should be renamed ‘heavy, big-wheeled, wide wheel-base buggies’, because other than being incredibly heavy and too wide to go down shop aisles, that seems to be the only difference. The only genuinely all-terrain buggy is called a sling.

Apparently, the middle knuckle of my right index finger is more appealing than a teething ring.

Whenever I walk down the street these days I pay inordinate amounts of attention to other people’s babies, and conclude that, yes, mine is the best. People say I’m biased, and I am. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

She woke me up the other morning rhythmically banging her feet against the cot’s headboard. The fact she was put to bed facing the other way doesn’t seem to concern her.

Right now, when she burps, we cheer and tell her well done. In a couple of years we’ll tell her off for being so rude!

Izzie is terrified of missing things. She refuses to fall asleep in the afternoon as though worried in case something exciting is just around the corner. You can see her eyes drooping, but she refuses to give in, whereupon she goes past the point of tiredness into frenzy mode. That’s where she’s super tired, hyper alert, and has completely forgotten how to get to sleep. Tip: it’s not by pinwheeling your arms while shouting and going red in the face.

They need to build statues to honour whoever invented the dummy.

Now that Izzie is going to bed around 8pm, Lizzie and I keep sitting on the sofa, staring at each other, and wondering just what the hell we used to do in the evenings.

What is going on with that little cough thing that babies do for attention?

All my clothes seem to be covered in crusty white stains. It looks particularly dodgy on my black dressing gown. At least I know it’s puke, not that that makes it much better.

That stuff about having to be careful when changing a boy because they pee when the nappy comes off is only half right. If my experience with my daughter is anything to go by, all babies pee halfway through the nappy change, soaking themselves, their clothes, the clean nappy, you, and the carpet all at the same time.

Pesky bib!
Pesky bib!

How is it that dribble bibs are terrible at catching milk, milk bibs are terrible at catching dribble, and food bibs seem incapable of catching anything?

In the battle between the cot in the nursery and the Moses Basket on a rocker by the bed, the Moses Basket wins hands down because a) it’s right beside the bed, and b) it rocks. Whenever Izzie used to stir, I could lean over, pop her dummy back in, and rock her to sleep with my foot, all without getting out of bed or even really out from under the covers. Now I have to get up, go next door, put the dummy in, try to soothe her without rocking, and when she’s quiet I retreat to bed only for the monitor to kick in with grizzles around fifteen seconds later, forcing me to repeat the whole thing five or six times. And that’s a problem at three in the morning.

Izzie keeps doing phantom poops. She makes a noise, I feel the guff, the smell is awful, so I wait a couple of minutes, sniff her bottom to confirm that yes, it stinks, and pat the nappy to confirm that yes, there’s something in there, but by the time I open the nappy the poop has mysteriously vanished. Spooky.

Why, when I use the tympanic thermometer, does it always read 35.4 degrees? Am I not using it right?

And lastly, when I was doing night feeds every night around 3am, I could handle it. Now that Izzie sleeps through to around five-thirty or six in the morning two nights out of three, those 3am feeds every third night are absolute killers that I struggle to recover from. How does more sleep make you feel less awake? Or is it because I check her every couple of hours to make sure she’s still alive?

Being Silly

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

A few weeks ago when Izzie really started interacting with us and the world around her, my brother said, ‘Now’s the time they start to get interesting.’ I totally disagree. She was always interesting, but now’s the time she’s starting to get fun.

That’s not to say the first twelve weeks or so didn’t have their moments. All those firsts – first smile, first tears, first proper sad face, first time she grabbed my glasses and threw them on the floor – were exciting and revelatory. But the past few weeks she’s understood enough to be consistent in her behaviour – she’s discovered cause and effect, that a string of sounds can be funny and not just single weird noises, and she’s interested in everything. Consequently, whereas before she could be soothed by simple rocking or muttering, now she wants a whole song and dance routine.

I said a few weeks back that after colic, teething would be a breeze. Well I’m sorry to tell anyone with the same desperate hope that it’s anything but.

Colic hits in the evenings. True, the crying doesn’t stop and goes on for hours, but you can prepare for it by doing what you need to do during the day. Teething lasts all bloomin’ day, hour after hour, a constant procession of whining, grizzling, crying, chewing on everything within reach, and more crying. You have to change her outfit three times a day because she’s soaked with drool from her neck to her belly button, and that’s with the dribble bib in place. Feeding becomes a nightmare because she just wants to chew on the teat instead of suck, and getting her to sleep is impossible without teething gel, dummy and plenty of rocking.

But unlike colic, with teething you can sort of distract them from it. And that’s where the fun comes in.

If, every time she cries, you think, ‘Sheesh, not again,’ then it’s going to be a very long teething time. I made that mistake. Six hours is a killer with a baby that won’t settle, won’t rest, won’t sleep, won’t soothe. So you have to change your thinking. A lot of books tell you to embrace your silly side, and they’re right – when else are we going to have a legitimate excuse to act like a hyperactive eight-year-old?

Crying is not the enemy, just your reaction to it. Instead of thinking it a chore every time she cries and you have to comfort her, you have to think of it as an opportunity. ‘Yes! I get to act like a lunatic again!’ And how far you take it is up to you.

The past few days, in order to soothe Izzie I’ve been a human beat box – ‘wickedy, wickedy, wah, wickedy, zoop zoop, pow’ – turned her into an aeroplane, a spaceship and a pterosaur, reenacted the ‘Hot Stuff’ dole queue scene from the Full Monty, used more funny voices than Seth MacFarlane, sung a million-and-one half-remembered nursery rhymes, dusted off my guitar, made up all kinds of pretend languages, jumped around doing my Gollum impression, done peekaboo by holding up the muslin, my T-shirt and the dog, blown raspberries on her belly, read to her from a geology textbook (which she strangely enjoyed) and changed the lyrics to around two-dozen popular songs. For example, her afternoon lullaby, to the tune of In the Bleak Midwinter, goes:

Sleepy time, my baby,

Sleepy time for you,

Sleepy time, my baby,

Time to have a snooze.

Why oh why won’t you just sleep?

You’ve been up for hours,

So sleepy time, my baby,

Dad’s mood is turning sour.

She loves it, and it keeps her quiet. It doesn’t actually send her to sleep, but it stops her crying, and changing the words to the second four lines is always fun:

Come on baby, go to sleep,

The hour is getting late,

If you don’t close your eyes right now

I’ll roll you out the gate.

That sort of thing.

She also enjoyed this morning’s rendition of Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix – a duet that alternated between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. Admittedly, a passive-aggressive amphibian and his physically-abusive spouse might not be ideal role models, but right now she has no idea who they are, so all’s good.

Unfortunately, acting like Jim Carrey all day is incredibly draining – not even Jim Carrey likes to be himself. I’m not going to lie to you – looking after a baby of this age is bloody hard work. But it can also be surprisingly fun, and kind of therapeutic, if you allow yourself to be a little silly. And the rewards – your child’s laughter, smiles and bemused silence instead of tears, tantrums and burst eardrums – are well worth the effort.

Mother-Baby Groups

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Lizzie is regularly taking Izzie to mother-baby groups, and for my sins I have accompanied her to a few. I have to say, hats off to her, because it allows the baby to socialise with other babies/become overstimulated/pick up and incubate enough germs to start her own chemical weapons factory. But this is a good thing, apparently.

I say hats off to Lizzie because if it were down to me, Izzie would never set foot in one – or bottom, as the case may be – since I’ve discovered that I cannot stand mother-baby groups.

I thought that I was into babies because I loved Izzie so much, but the truth is that I’m into my baby, not babies per se, so my tolerance for and liking of the screaming, crying, vomiting, farting, pooping, dribbly offspring of other people is not the same as my tolerance for and liking of the screaming, crying, vomiting, farting, pooping, dribbly issue of my own loins. And when there are ten of them crying all at once, it’s damn hard not to tap out and say, ‘That’s me done, my ears are bleeding and my blood-pressure’s so high I can feel my heart beating in my eye-sockets!’

But that’s not the only problem with them. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, I struggle with social situations at the best of times, but good golly gosh, mother-baby groups are hard work. They can be very cliquey, there’s a competition to see whose child is most advanced for their age, and everyone acts like the world’s greatest mother, making it really difficult to ask questions like, ‘How do I get her bogies out of her nose when her nostrils are so small?’ and, ‘Is it normal to have this dreadful fear of inadequacy and the constant spectre of your shortcomings as a parent?’ Because everyone seems to pretend they’re the living embodiment of Mother Nature, and we won’t condescend to talk to you because you’re clearly a beginner in this parenting game.

Being the only adult with a penis, you tend to stick out like a sore thumb too, and whenever I step into one of those groups, I feel my identity slowly sucked from my body and replaced with breastfuls of oestrogen. But that’s not my main issue with these groups, nor is it simply because they’re full of women – it’s because they’re full of mothers.

When you have a child, people stop seeing you as a person and start to see you as that thing that carries the cute baby around and takes it away again when it starts to cry or needs changing. ‘How’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Look at the baby! Ahhh.’ This transition from ‘individual’ to ‘baby’s plus-one’ can be particularly difficult and contribute to postnatal depression. When you’re coping with a momentous lifestyle change – marriage, divorce, coming out, changing career, abandoning the dye-job and letting it go grey – you need the support of the people around you who know you and see you as you to get through it. They remind you who you really are, what really matters, and smooth over the rough edges of your new identity.

But when you have a baby, everyone you know switches their attention to the little one, so not only has your life changed dramatically, your emotional support structure abandons you to focus in on the very thing that’s brought about the change. Frankly, it can be a bummer.

So, you go to mother-baby groups hoping to meet like-minded souls who know exactly what’s it’s like to be seen as nothing more than ‘mother’, people crying out for conversation about something other than nappies, and breastfeeding, and the day-to-day slog of childcare.

Then you get there.

Here’s a typical conversation at a mother-baby group:

‘Baby, baby, baby, I’m a mother, baby, baby.’

‘Ah, baby, baby, baby, I’m a mother too, baby, baby, baby.’

‘Breastfeeding, nappies, weaning, baby, baby, did you know I’m a mother, baby.’

‘Nappies, nappies, baby, I’m a mother, men just don’t understand.’

And so on, and so forth.

The only other topic of conversation is where they’ll meet up during the week to discuss being mothers some more. It’s like they’ve become Stepford Wives, or something – the thing that made them human has been sucked out and they’ve turned into boring child-rearing robots. For crying out loud, ladies, you’re people as well as mothers! You have other dimensions! There is a whole wide world out there filled with art, literature, politics, entertainment, sport, work, relationships, hope, dreams, joy, love – why on earth don’t you lift your eyes from your child for half a minute to see it?

Of course, I’m being facetious – I’m exaggerating. But it’s to prove a point. This morning I walked along the beach with the dog for ninety minutes. Every so often I’d pass a couple of women pushing their babies in prams, because it seems that young mothers love to go out in pairs, walk side-by-side, and completely block the promenade for everyone else. I understand it – nobody wants to stay in all day every day with their baby, and when the weather is nice, a walk along the beach in the sun with a friend is exactly what the doctor ordered.

But here’s the rub: as I passed these people – I must have met six such pairs today – I’d catch snippets of their conversations, and every single one of them was talking about babies and mothering.

The babies are asleep. You’re walking in the sunshine with your friend. The sea is lapping lazily against the shore. The air feels great in your lungs. It’s time to be you. And you’re still  talking about babies!?

That’s the thing I struggle with. I guess you’ll say, ‘It’s a mother-baby group, of course they’ll talk about babies and being mothers,’ and you’d have a point. You could also say, ‘But you’re talking about babies and parenting,’ and yes I am, but I’m not the walking embodiment of fatherhood and I never pretended to be – and it’s my blog, so nah, nee, nah, nee, nah, nah!

I’m sure people who enjoy mother-baby groups, and enjoy being earth mothers, will think I’m a silly man, so what do I know, and that’s fine. But we didn’t erase our identities the moment our children were born, and we don’t cease to be adults with adult needs just because we look after children all day. True, it informs a great deal of how we think about things – a couple of people I know died from carbon monoxide poisoning the other day, a mother and her son, and all I could think about was how awful it would be to lose Lizze and Izzie in like manner – but we are not one-dimensional characters just because we’re parents.

With Izzie on my lap I talk about the science behind the new Matt Damon movie, or the latest atrocity on the news, the etymology of the word ‘halcyon’ and how rough Kate Moss looks in her latest advert, if the new Facebook promo is really using the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind? on piano, or why the band PVRIS isn’t better known. If I one day found that all I could talk about was nappies, weaning, feeding, teething, and babies, babies, babies – well, that would be the day I realised I needed to find a new interest, and fast, before I ceased to be a human being and became a robo-nanny. Actually, come to think of it, that sounds rather fun…

It’s Harder On the Parents

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

Izzie has just spent her first night in her cot in her own room. Despite what I’ve said about accepting the passage of time, how it’s natural for a baby to move from one stage to another and instead of losing anything, you’re gaining a deeper understanding and a richer relationship, it’s still an incredibly bittersweet experience to see your daughter move on. Scratch that – it’s a painful, heart-rending, panic-inducing kick to the balls. And it hurts.

All week I’ve been putting off setting up the monitors, as though burying my head in the sand could somehow avert the inevitable. I secretly hoped they wouldn’t work, or I wouldn’t be able to figure out the instructions, or we’d have a power cut or no heating and she’d have to stay in the Moses Basket beside my bed, in my room, with me. Because for all my pontificating and philosophising, I’m just as emotionally insecure as the next parent, and I’m struggling to let go.

And that’s what parenting is all about. Our children do not belong to us – they belong to the Universe. And we are just borrowing them for a time. Each stage of their lives lasts just as long as it’s meant to, and no matter how much we might want to cling to a certain period because it makes us feel good, or important, or validated, we have to learn to let it go, release it emotionally, and move on to the next.

Easier said than done.

We put her in the cot in a grobag and she cried and cried. As we’re not advocates of the ‘cry-it-out’ method, I put my hand on her chest and rocked her gently from side to side until, after adding teething gel and a dummy, she suddenly went out like a light. So I removed the dummy and went next door and felt sick. My stomach tightened into knots, my arms tensed as though I was preparing to box, and my legs jiggled with nervous angst.

Ten minutes of sweating and writhing about in agitation, plagued by guilt, worry, my inability to accept change, and I could bear it no longer. I crept in there to find her still fast asleep, and in the same position I’d left her.

I spent the next hour staring at the monitor, watching the temperature gauge, waiting for it to burst into life – nothing. I woke every couple of hours feeling emotional and panicked. At four, I got up to check on her, and once again she was fast asleep, though in a slightly different position – about ninety-degrees away from straight. But she seemed okay, so I went back to bed, stared at the monitor for an hour, turned up the heating.

I got up at seven but she was still asleep, and it wasn’t until eight that she began to stir. After all my worrying, all of the stress and mental anguish, she slept right through from eleven at night till eight in the morning as though it was nothing.

Admittedly, she was facing the opposite direction to how we’d put her to bed – her feet to the headboard – but it just goes to show: this growing-up lark is far harder on the parents than on the children!

Stop Growing Up!

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I must have a different concept of time to other people. ‘Can you believe she’s almost sixteen weeks old already?’ they say, as if it’s magically just happened on its own.

Yes, I can well believe it. I was there every day of the previous fifteen weeks.

A variation on this theme is, ‘I bet it feels like just yesterday she was born.’

Nope, it feels like she she was born 111 days ago. 111 long, hard, tiring but ultimately rewarding days. It feels like it was years ago, and I can barely remember my life before Izzie was born – it’s a grey blur where I had free time and sleep, like in a fairy tale.

Another old chestnut is, ‘Before you know it she’ll be eighteen and moving out.’

I’m not sure how she’ll be eighteen ‘before I know it’. I can’t imagine the upcoming hell of teething, toddling, talking and terrorising are going to slip by unnoticed. Nor can we get through eighteen birthdays, eighteen Christmasses, a million holidays, school trips, sports days, parent-teacher evenings, pimples, boyfriends and ‘the talk’ without being made aware, every step of the way, of the passage of time.

My whole life, time hasn’t passed for me as quickly as it seems to have done for others. Maybe it’s my Asperger’s Syndrome, the fact I pay attention to every little detail and don’t let anything past unless it’s been examined, interrogated, probed and analysed, every last ounce of information and experience wrung from it before it’s let go. At sixteen I felt I’d lived a lifetime, by twenty-five I was sure I’d lived three, and now, at thirty-five, I feel older than the dinosaurs.

So I’ve never understood how time can just fly by.

And yet, one piece of parenting advice has been ringing true of late: ‘Make the most of each moment because they grow so fast.’

Over the full range of eighteen years, the changes are going to be slow and steady and we can revel in them one by one. At this age, however – from about three months – the changes come thick and heavy and uncomfortably fast. I mean, yesterday Izzie had no idea her feet existed; today they’re the most exciting thing in the world and if she’s not staring at them or reaching for them, she’s stuffing them into her mouth.

The speed with which she’s come on in the past three weeks is incredible. She can now roll on her side…

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..support her own weight (albeit with a steadying hand)…

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…hold her own bottle…

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…put giraffes in her mouth…

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…and she’s teething. Which means if she isn’t talking non-stop, she’s trying to cram everything she can get her hands on into her mouth, or, failing that, chewing on her hands themselves.

What you lookin' at!?
What you lookin’ at!?

What is more, her personality is developing daily. She’s a happy, inquisitive, strong-willed, hyperactive sod with quite a temper on her if you don’t understand what she wants and respond quickly enough for her liking. If you make eye-contact with her while she’s feeding, she smiles and tries to talk to you, causing her to spill her milk everywhere and start to choke. But if you’re holding her while talking to someone else, she gets grumpy that she’s being left out of the conversation.

And she wants entertaining now, too. Things that interested her a fortnight ago aren’t good enough anymore. A few random noises? No, perform for me, daddy! When I sang Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears In Heaven’ to her the other night, she thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard, which was a little disconcerting given what it’s about (look it up if you don’t know). Then yesterday, when we were playing, I said to her in my best French accent, ‘Ah, ma petite pomme de terre!’ and she burst into tears and wouldn’t stop crying for ten minutes. So, soft rock, good, French, bad. Good to know.

The truth is, we have to make the most of each moment, because if you’re looking the other way, you’ll miss a world of development going on in your own living room. Right now, you have to embrace every moment or it’ll be gone forever, because they do indeed grow up fast.

So fast, in fact, that I’m actually feeling nostalgic about how she was a month ago – that baby that seemed to sleep a lot more, and struggled against us less. The baby that wasn’t quite as wilful as the one we’ve got now, because believe you me, she is going to be quite a handful – as stubborn and fiery-tempered as both of her parents. Or ‘determined’ and ‘passionate’, to put a positive spin on things.

In all honesty, part of this nostalgia comes from the fact that I’m scared of the future. It’s selfish and stupid, but I’ve been so darned good at this baby thing, I don’t want her to move on to the next phase. Lizzie takes her to baby groups and to parties and out swimming, and as Izzie grows up she’s going to love those things more and more. As someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, I really struggle going to things like that, and while Lizzie has this innate understanding of toddlers and children, I never have, even as a child. As Izzie grows and becomes less like a baby, more like a toddler, and turns to her mum for the ‘fun’ things, I’m terrified of being left behind.

Of course, my relationship with Izzie will always be different from Lizzie’s relationship with her. I’m just paranoid that as she becomes more complex, I’ll struggle to relate to her or understand her as I do now, and that would break my heart.

But then, I think that in this society, we’re programmed to believe that change wrought by time is universally bad. You lose your hair, your teeth, and your bladder control; standards drop everywhere you look; kids run around like rootless, feckless waifs; and you don’t understand the world you live in anymore.

Clearly, given the numbers who tell you to cherish every moment, plenty of people feel as though their children ‘slipped through their fingers’, to paraphrase the song from Mamma Mia that made all our mums cry. But instead of focusing on what we lose, let’s look at what we gain over time – experience, confidence, a deeper understanding of ourselves and richer, more fulfilling relationships.

The only way of surviving both life and parenthood with a modicum of happiness is to embrace the passage of time, not resist it. Instead of wanting Izzie to stop growing, instead of holding on and resenting that we have to change, I should let go, enjoy every individual moment as a single thread in a lifelong tapestry of such moments. I will not be losing anything as Izzie develops because our relationship will grow, and both of us with it. Tomorrow, I will not be who I am today, and that will be a result of my changing relationship with my daughter. We’ll be different together. And that, my friends, is life.

Travels With Baby, Part 2: The Experience

Gillan Drew1 Comment

If you imagine going on holiday with a baby is horrendously difficult, you’d be absolutely right. You’d also be quite spectacularly wrong. So work that one out.

By way of introduction, we went glamping on the Isle of Wight from Monday to Friday. Of course, you can call it glamping all you want, but a ‘canvas cottage’ is still a tent in a field buffeted by September winds and rattled by the first rains of autumn. Once your clothes are wet, they stay wet, the bed is made of foam on the floor, and at night the temperature drops to around twelve degrees.

I'm happy in my hat, daddy!
That’s okay, I’m warm enough, daddy!

As I have mentioned in a previous post (Out and About With Baby), the anxiety that goes hand-in-hand with Asperger’s Syndrome means just going to the shops by myself is a major ordeal. However, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of going away – since going out’s already so stressful, the anxiety from a holiday is a difference of kind rather than intensity, and if you’re going to struggle anyway, it makes a pleasant change doing it somewhere other than home.

For a similar reason, since looking after a baby is already so difficult, holidaying with one isn’t that much harder. At home your life revolves around sterilising bottles, making up feeds, changing nappies, and ensuring the little one is wearing clean clothes, is the right temperature, and you have enough spares of everything to stock your own branch of Mothercare. On holiday, the same applies. The main difference is that instead of popping to the supermarket, attending mother-and-baby groups, walking the dog or heading into town for a coffee, on holiday you’re visiting a stately home, taking part in an axe-throwing competition, playing crazy golf or searching for somewhere that does gluten-free cream teas (not common, I can tell you!).

Of course, there are other difficulties specific to travelling with a three-month-old. You leave home with the car piled up to the roof because you don’t know what the weather’s going to be like or how the baby will develop – one day she’s happy with the carry cot/pram, but the next she spends the whole day doing stomach crunches as she tries to sit up and you need to use the pushchair instead, or else she’ll have abs to die for. In addition to the travel system base unit, carry cot, pushchair and car seat, sunhoods and raincovers, parasol and umbrella, you have to add the steriliser, bottle warmer, changing bag, extras with which to refill the changing bag, baby’s suitcase containing warm weather and cold weather outfits, your partner’s suitcase, your backpack, a couple of rucksacks of food, drink, formula, a paperback (like you’ll ever find time to read it!), 6-way adapter plug, phone charger, Glo-egg. I have no idea how people can go away with two kids because we maxed out the available space with one.

Then there’s the fact you’re out and about for most of the day. When we go away, Lizzie and I tend to burn the candle at both ends, so to speak – Monday to Friday, and we checked out Alum Bay, Freshwater Bay and Ventnor, played crazy golf at Shanklin, enjoyed the arcades at Sandown, explored the WWII ruins at Culver Down, saw the windmill at Bembridge, walked the beaches at Whitecliff Bay and Ryde, visited Osborne House, East Cowes and Cowes, scoffed tasters at the Garlic Farm, shopped at Arreton Barns and Newport, navigated a hedge maze in Godshill, and still found time to go swimming twice with the baby, win a pub quiz and have a meal out. Such a heavy schedule means you need your sleep at night, and if the baby sleeps through as she started doing a few days before she went, then all is good.

Except the baby doesn’t sleep through. Because the routine has been altered, she alters with it. She knows things are different so she behaves differently. She doesn’t get tired when she usually does, doesn’t want to miss things, becomes overstimulated by all the sights and sounds and smells – ‘look, daddy, Queen Victoria’s bed, and a gold chandelier, and what sort of wax are they using to clean these marvellous wooden floors?’ So she keeps going, gets over-tired and grumpy, crashes suddenly early evening, and wakes at two am and five am. So holidaying with a baby means you’re horribly tired, and when you get home you really need another holiday.

Then there are the smaller practical considerations. Playing crazy golf, for example, is exceedingly awkward when you keep having to move the pushchair down staircases, over speed bumps and around lighthouses and windmills. You can’t play air hockey in an arcade with just the two of you, and nobody to watch the baby. Every time you get out of the car you have to debate whether to use the carry cot, pushchair, car seat or sling. And all the while, the clock is ticking between feeds, so you keep part of your brain focused on where you’ll be and whether there will be a cafe there where you can warm the bottle.

I think one of the hardest things about holidaying with a baby is that when she’s having an unsettled day, you’re stuck with her. At home you’d put her in her Moses Basket, rock her to sleep, perhaps go for a walk, put on some music or the television, and when all else fails you can take turns with your partner, allowing one of you a few moments of respite. On the last day we left the campsite at half ten and the ferry wasn’t until after seven. Izzie spent the whole day grizzling, crying, having mini-tantrums and demanding constant stimulation. This culminated in an utter refusal to sit in her car seat, and endless screaming when she did. Every time I tried to put her in the car seat she would straighten out and go stiff as a board, so I’d have to try and get her to bend at the waist, force her bottom into the seat, and hold her there with one hand while I attempted to put her straps on with the other. She might only be three months old but she knows what she wants and what she doesn’t, and boy is she strong!

But it’s not all bad. Going away with a baby didn’t stop us from doing most of the things we’d normally have done without her, and her smiles and chuckles made up for just about all the tears and screaming and inconveniences. Her fascination with every trivial, insignificant detail is a wonder to see and makes you look at things with new eyes. And you get to feel like a proper grown-up.

But not too adult to pass up a sundae that's bigger than your head!
But not too grown-up to pass on a sundae that’s bigger than your head!

All in all, going on holiday with a baby is hard work, but so is everything when you have a baby. It’s a slightly different experience from holidaying as a couple – you’re more focused on the baby and her welfare than on the things you’re actually doing – but by taking you away from the everyday grind, you can enjoy one another’s company and bond as a family without the usual stresses of home. That said, I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience unless it comes with a guarantee of four nights of uninterrupted sleep!

Travels With Baby, Part 1: Facilities

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

The main thing I’ve learned from taking Izzie on holiday to the Isle of Wight is how baby-unfriendly the world can be. And that’s not just the occasional person muttering, ‘F**king babies,’ as you squeeze the pushchair past their rotund frame on the pavement – it’s the facilities, or lack thereof. If you’re a parent in general, or a dad in particular, they sure don’t make it easy.

Arreton Barns, for example. I asked about baby change facilities in the pub. They had them, but only in the lady’s. So can I go in? No. They brought out the changing mat and I was obliged to take it into the men’s loo and change her on the floor of a cubicle. Not the cleanest or most hygienic place to put my knees, or, for that matter, my baby.

Cowes: the baby change was in the public disabled toilet, which was locked with one of those special keys disabled people have, but that parents don’t have. Not overly helpful. So I went to the nearest pub, which didn’t have baby changing facilities but allowed me to change her on a bench out the back. Very good of them.

And Sandown is clearly still stuck in the 1960s since there are no baby changing stations in the men’s loos, forcing me to change her on the passenger seat in the car in the rain – not much of a problem except the seat slopes towards the rear of the car, meaning she keeps face-planting into the upright. But that’s better than Whitecliff Bay, which has no toilet facilities whatsoever, and doesn’t seem to mind you getting sand in your baby’s bits.

I’m starting to sound like a bit of a moaner, but in addition to the above, in the past week I’ve changed my daughter’s nappy in a doorway down an alleyway, in a lady’s toilet, in the boot of the car, on a grass verge beside a car park, and on the floor of a tent – though the latter was admittedly kind of unavoidable since we were camping. It’s not so much that I mind  changing Izzie in random places – after three months you’re a dab hand at changing a nappy – it’s that if people object to something as discrete and inoffensive as breastfeeding in public then how will the crowds of shoppers and tourists react when I pop her down on a bench in the High Street, whip off her clothes and proceed to wipe oodles of smelly green and yellow poo out of her creases? I’m going for ‘unsupportive’ at the very least.

I know there are people out there who’ll say, ‘There weren’t changing stations in my day, we had to make do with broken glass and rusty nails,’ but just because they suffered doesn’t mean everyone has to or the situation can’t be improved. Sometimes you’re quite a distance from the car with the baby in a sling when she drops a bucket of gloop in her nappy that starts to spill out and soak through her clothes and you just can’t wait. And it’s incredibly awkward trying to change a baby when you’re on a slope and it’s blowing a hoolie, with one hand holding her ankles, a second cleaning her up, a third hand trying to keep leaf matter out of her bottom, a fourth preventing her from sliding off the changing mat and rolling down the hill into a ditch where she’ll never be seen again – you get the picture.

So top marks to Osborne House for having an entire room in which to change your baby, and a large one at that, without a toilet in the corner and piss on the floor. Unfortunately, they lose points for their dashedly rubbish bottle-warming arrangements.

For those of you that don’t know, you make a baby’s bottle by mixing cooled boiled water (boiled water that has been cooled, yo) with some scoops of formula (powder) and either heating or cooling the resulting liquid to body temperature, since we’re trying to fool kids into thinking the milk comes from a breast and not an udder with additives.

But here’s the rub – the mixture is apparently only safe to drink for two hours and it’s impossible to keep stuff at the right temperature until you need it. So before heading out for the day you boil the kettle, fill a bunch of bottles with water, pack the powder and leave the house weighed down like a freighter. When little one needs a drink, you take a bottle of water, pour in the powder, shake vigorously and ask a nice waitress or waiter to bring you a small jug of hot water into which you can place the bottle until the formula is the right temperature. Simple.

Except when I asked for a jug of hot water, the man at Osborne House looked at me like I’d asked him for a mug of pure, unfiltered urine. He went away, came back and told me he couldn’t bring me hot water because of ‘health and safety reasons’. But he offered to take the bottle out the back and heat it up for me.

Now, the reason you see us splashing milk on our wrists is not because we like the smell of dairy – it’s to check it’s not too hot and going to scald her, or too cold and going to make her gripe. While there’s no real evidence that cold milk is necessarily bad for a baby, their digestive systems are still developing, and if from an evolutionary viewpoint we’ve evolved to drink milk at body temperature, at least for the first few months, then why mess with nature?

Yes, daddy, why?
Yes, daddy, why?

So how on earth was Mr Waiter Man going to get my baby’s bottle to the right temperature? Splashing it on his wrist? No thank you, sir, she’ll just have to drink it cold.

He then proceeded to serve us our teapots of boiling water without a trace of irony. Health and safety, my ass!

But then, perhaps he had a point. Two other places gave us boiling water in wine coolers. Great for the heating, but when it comes to getting the bottle out, it bobs up and down like a fishing float and burns your fingertips while red hot steam scalds your hand. But even that was preferable to the place that gave us a cup of hot water – a cup that was smaller than the bottle!

So, restaurateurs and city planners: you have the power to make the world a much easier place for us parents. A plastic changing table that folds down from the toilet wall, and half a jug of hot water – not a cup, not a wine cooler, a jug. That’s not asking too much, is it? Is it?

The Truth About Parenting

Gillan Drew1 Comment

Izzie is three months old today, so I’ve been a dad for a quarter of a year. It is one of those milestones that encourages you to look back, assess, evaluate, decide what you did well and what was wrong. I don’t believe in regrets, but there are a few things I could have done differently and that I wish I’d known about before Izzie was born. And with that in mind, I feel I’m qualified to tell prospective parents and new parents how it really is, and offer some advice from my experiences.

(FYI, I’m not going to refer to the baby as ‘baby’ in this post because that smacks of a 70s midwifery handbook (‘pull baby out, turn baby over, smack baby on the bottom’). Likewise, alternating between he and she is confusing while s/he is just plain annoying. Thus I will use ‘she’. Half of you will be pissed but the other half perfectly happy.)

  1. Plan for it being pure hell with a few light points and you won’t go far wrong – make no mistake, this is going to be the hardest thing you ever do. If you have any illusions about it being fun, joyous, magical, you should get rid of them now. Being a parent is a wonderfully enriching, fulfilling experience, but it’s hard work and it’s draining, and you need to go into it with a realistic appreciation of what you’re about to face. If you mentally prepare for a worst-case-scenario and it’s not that bad, you’ve lost nothing, but if you’re not prepared and it is a worst-case-scenario, it’s going to knock you on your ass. The light points make up for the dark, but they don’t come often, especially at first. So be ready.
  2. Make sure you have plenty of muslins – I had no idea what a muslin was before Izzie was born, but these large squares of cotton are essential. Ostensibly they’re to mop up spillages during feeding (I use them as bibs) and for protecting your clothes from baby vomit while burping, but there are so many more functions. Because they’re thin and breathable you can put them over the baby’s face when transferring her to and from the car in the rain, or when out in bright sunshine without adequate shade. You can lie the baby on one when doing an emergency nappy change on the back seat of your car, or line the changing table in the public toilet so your precious doesn’t pick up another baby’s germs. You can fold them and put them under the baby’s head in their crib or basket to catch dribbles, meaning you don’t have to wash their bedsheets so often, and you can even use them for a game of peekaboo.
  3. Nappy changing isn’t that bad – this is one of the biggest fears of prospective parents and it shouldn’t be. Yes it’s gross, yes it’s smelly, and yes, it can spread all over her clothes and yours until you’re both sitting in yellow poop. But if you’re changing ten nappies a day, by the time she’s 13 weeks you’ve changed 910 of the things and that’s enough to make anybody an expert. What at first takes ten minutes rapidly becomes a ninety-second piece of nothing. So don’t worry – you’ll get it.
  4. Caring for a baby is pretty simple – you think beforehand that babies are incredibly complicated little beings, but they’re not. If our ancestors could raise them in the wilderness without any instruction, there’s no reason you can’t, and the fundamentals haven’t really changed. If she cries it means she’s hungry, so feed her; windy, so burp her; uncomfortable, so change her; tired, so put her down to sleep; has guts ache, so lie her on her back and press her knees (gently!) up towards her chest to help her fart; or wants cuddles, so cuddle her. Mostly, a crying baby means she’s hungry, because they’re always hungry. And if you get into a routine of feed, then burp, then change, then cuddle, then put down to sleep, you avoid much of the crying.
  5. Caring for a baby is mostly horribly repetitive – if you think caring for babies is exciting and varied and confusing and intellectually stimulating, it’s not. It’s a chore like any other chore. You sterilise bottles, make up bottles, feed, burp, change, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Unless you’re breastfeeding, in which case you’re getting sore expressing milk all the time. That’s what you need to realise from the outset. What you’re doing over the first few days is what you’re going to be doing again and again and again and again until it’s second nature. And it’s not exactly exciting. It is what it is, but it has to be done while you wait for the bright points.
  6. You’re not going to break her – babies are surprisingly resilient and often simply bounce without much harm if dropped. But I’m not advocating you treat her as a basketball either. New parents carry their babies like they’re china dolls with cracks in them, but you should really carry them the same way you’d carry a rabbit or a puppy – firmly but fairly. Babies settle easier if you hold them with confidence, not like you’re worried you’re going to drop them.
  7. You will learn to function despite the lack of sleep – this is another of the main things prospective parents worry about – how will I cope when the baby is up every couple of hours? If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll get through the first six or seven weeks on adrenalin, no problem. But after that, the tank runs dry and you still have to get up, still have to deal with things in the dead of night, with no energy and eyes glued shut with sleepy dust. The next few weeks you get through with good old-fashioned gumption and bloody-mindedness. There is nothing physically keeping you going but will power and determination. But the good news is that you reach a point around eleven or twelve weeks where you don’t feel as tired. You look like crap and your mind isn’t anywhere near as sharp as it ought to be, but your body has become accustomed to the strain and you can survive. It’s all about surviving.
  8. Don’t worry if the love is not ‘immediate and unconditional’ – I always thought I’d feel an overwhelming surge of emotion when my daughter was born, and was a little concerned that I didn’t. This is, however, completely natural – by the time you’ve got through labour and birth with all the screaming and all the blood and they hand you this swollen pink bundle that looks Mongolian, you’re in too much of a daze trying to take it all in to feel very much of anything. But it comes later – a few hours in my case. And it grows over time until you’ll look at your baby and would rather die than be apart from her. And that’s when you’ll bore everyone to death about how much you love your baby.
  9. Babies play havoc with relationships – no matter how well you get on with your partner, or how much you love them, one day you’ll look and them and think, ‘My God I hate your face!’ This will be followed by niggles, passive-aggressive barbs, digs, arguments and full-scale blowouts. The stress, responsibility and exhaustion of raising a baby, the heightened emotions, fear, pride and possessiveness, along with adjusting to the changes in your life, leaves your nerves frazzled, your patience worn and your temper fierce, and the person you’re most likely to take it out on is the person right beside you. Mostly over things so minor that afterwards you can’t work out what the fuss was all about (‘What’s wrong with you? You told me there were three bottles sterilised. There are only two. Wah, wah, wah!’). If your relationship is strong, you’ll be fine because you make allowances for each other and know you’re in this together, come hell or high water. If it’s not and you think a baby will bring you closer together, start packing your bags. I don’t mean to be harsh, but the strain a baby puts on your relationship is intense, and if there are cracks in it before the birth, they’ll be gaping chasms afterwards.
  10. You will become paranoid – all those things you did unthinkingly before like pulling out into traffic, crossing the road, stroking strange dogs, going out without a jacket – suddenly these things are risks that could harm the baby. You look around for hazards and you see them everywhere. If you’re walking under a clear blue sky you take the rain cover just in case. You triple check seatbelts. You start to look at the cat as the predator she is. When people you’ve known for years want to hold the baby you wonder when they last washed their hands and if you’ve ever seen them drop anything. This is, again, totally normal – you’re meant to worry about keeping your child safe. Just make sure it doesn’t reach such an extreme that you wrap her in cotton wool and refuse to leave the house.
  11. Don’t lose your identity completely – it’s very easy to become a martyr, and perhaps you even want to, but it isn’t healthy and it doesn’t make you a good parent if you burn out. From now on, people will see you as the baby’s mother or father and not as a person in your own right, so don’t make things harder on yourself by becoming nothing more than a parent. Pick one interest, one thing that defines you as you, be it cycling, reading, fishing, knitting, and try to keep doing it. You probably won’t be able to do it as often as before, but it’s the best way to stay sane and to remain anchored in your life at a time when you feel as though you’re being swept away. Plus people who can only talk about their kids and nothing else are really freaking boring.
  12. Learn Dunstan Baby Language – this is the main thing I wish I’d known about from the start. I’ve mentioned it before in a post (Baby Talk) and was rather dismissive of it, but it’s actually really useful. It’s the idea that all babies have five ‘words’ when they’re born, such as crying with an ‘n’ sound means they’re hungry (‘nargh, nargh!’), a staccato ‘eh, eh, eh’ sound means they have wind and need burping, while a drawn out ‘eairh’ sound indicates lower abdominal pain (i.e. they need to fart). Whether this works for you or not isn’t important – the very idea that different cries mean different things means you can listen to your baby, learn her cues, and cater for her needs so much better than before. The first two months, when Izzie cried I had to work out why; after discovering Dunstan Baby Language, the second she cries I can tell whether to feed her, burp her, change her or massage her belly, and that not only saves time, frustration and tears, it helps you bond with your baby because you’re actually communicating, and that is priceless. I can’t recommend it enough.
  13. Find a good 24-hour store – I know you think you’re too organised and well prepared to run out of something essential, and before the birth you’re probably right. After the birth, however, you develop ‘baby brain’, a condition typified by forgetting which day of the week it is, let alone being able to remember to maintain stocks of cotton wool, baby wipes, nappies, Milton (sterilising solution), formula, nappy cream, etc. You’re absolutely sure you have another packet, no doubt about it, until you reach for it at close to midnight and discover you opened it last week and it’s the one you just finished. And that’s avoiding the fact that things break, the dummy gets chewed by the dog, all the muslins are in the wash, the sleepsuits are suddenly too small, or the online community recommends using Vaseline on her nose to help with her cold. So get ready for a few late night excursions.
  14. Be flexible – you may have decided beforehand exactly how you’re going to raise your baby. Breastfeeding, no dummies, co-sleeping, ‘cry it out’ – you may have the perfect plan for raising your perfect baby. The truth is that babies don’t conform to plans, and as soon as your plan hits reality, one of them has to bend – and it’s not going to be reality. It’s okay to adapt to changing circumstances, in fact that’s what it means to be a parent. You do what’s best for your child, and you, and the family as a whole. The saddest thing is seeing parents stubbornly clinging to something that doesn’t work because they are unable to let them go. Breastfeeding, for example – if you can’t do it, you can’t do it. So stop making everyone miserable, including the baby, and find an alternative. Reality is better than any plan you can make anyway.
  15. Pick up tips – it doesn’t matter where they come from, listen to them all and give them a try. Some will work, many won’t, but they can make life so much easier. Like, for example, to stop your baby spitting out her dummy, rub her nose –  it stimulates the suck reflex since the nose rubs against the breast while breastfeeding. Or when you’re cuddling her, patting her on the bottom soothes her. Or if all else fails and your baby won’t stop crying, the best position to hold her is face down along your forearm, the side of her head in the crook of your elbow and your hand cupping her bottom between her legs. At least, these work for my baby. Yours will likely be different, so find what works for you.
  16. Don’t miss out – if Izzie is anything to go by, your baby will develop so rapidly that every day brings a new facial expression, skill, sound or movement. Izzie, at thirteen weeks, is trying to hold her own bottle, straining all the time to sit up, can both whisper and shout, and is (terrifyingly) able to pull the cord on her dangling toy to start the music playing. People who think babies are boring or unable to do anything are missing out. You need to treasure this time, because it goes by very quickly. And every smile, every giggle, every time your child recognises you and responds with affection, is a gift that you cannot buy. All too soon she’ll be answering back, and then you’ll be embarrassing, and then she’ll hate you, and be off to university, so cherish this time. It’s hard but it’s the best thing you’ll ever do.
  17. Trust your instincts – you’re a parent. Whatever you think is right for your child is right. It doesn’t matter what anybody else says or thinks or does, only what you believe. The responsibility, and the honour, is yours. And so long as you listen to your instincts, you’ll do fine.

So these are a handful of observations from a three-month dad. Hope they help.

(And to my regular readers, I’m on holiday for a few days, so this blog will be going quiet for a week. I’m sure you’ll cope!)

Baby Photos

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

This will be a far shorter post than usual and will ask my readers for feedback on a complex issue that our parents never had to deal with, namely, photos of our babies on social media. I have noticed that whenever people visit, they take photos of Izzie and within minutes of leaving these photos are on Facebook. So my question is: is this right?

A couple of weeks back I saw that someone had posted a photo of somebody else’s baby and the baby’s father got all shirty, saying his friend should have asked permission before sharing a photo of his baby. It got me thinking.

Part of me, deep down, thinks I should be very protective over people putting pictures of my baby on the Internet, and I should do something about it.The Internet is a dangerous place and I’m already worried about how I’ll protect my little girl in the future. I did a search for blogs the other day using what I thought was a very innocuous search term: ‘dad’. Scrolling down the results, I was confronted by a picture of a ‘buff’ dad, naked, glistening, and with a knob the size of my forearm. And I have a porn filter on my router, so it slipped through like an oiled-up cockstar. Scary stuff.

But while the deep down part of me is worried about people putting photos of my baby on the Internet, the rest of me shrugs his shoulders and goes, ‘So the hell what?’ Before the Internet, people would stick the photos they took of my baby in an album or in a frame, so I still wouldn’t have control over who saw them. Worse, I wouldn’t know which pictures were being displayed and which weren’t. True, there are a lot of sick people out there, but that’s true whether or not pictures of my baby are online. Perhap once she’s older I might restrict the amount of photos of her online because it makes her a target, not just of weirdoes but of bullies and trolls, but for now I’m not sure there’s a problem.

So what do people think? Should I get upset about people posting photos of Izzie to a-million-and-one strangers or simply smile that they think she’s so gorgeous they want to share her with the world? Because I really can’t work out the answer.

And since I have control of the photos on this page, here are some of us from a photoshoot at Closer Photography in Portsmouth (www.closerphotography.com).

Dalton_nb_104 Dalton_nb_106 Dalton_nb_118 Dalton_nb_126 Dalton_nb_139

The Physical Toll of Parenting

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

When someone says ‘new parents’ the first thing you think is ‘chronic tiredness’ because that’s the image we have of newborn babies – noisy, smelly sleep deprivers. Indeed, we hear mainly about the emotional and psychological effects of fatigue, and that’s not wrong because after eighty-nine consecutive nights of broken sleep I can only ascribe the mistakes I’ve been making recently to the fact I’m shattered – yesterday I put the butter in the cupboard and marmite in the fridge, spent five minutes using fingernails, keys and a penknife to pry the lid off my thermos cup only to discover it’s a screw top, and this afternoon somehow dropped my phone in a mug of coffee.

But I’ve realised of late that there’s a physical toll to parenting over and above simple exhaustion.

We all know that for women there are stretch marks and stitches to contend with (along with hormonal changes that cause them to grow scales and breathe fire, but the less said about these the better). But after twelve weeks of looking after a baby, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female: the only thing holding your body together is sticky tape and determination. And perhaps a little each of caffeine and codeine.

I have white hairs in my beard. Not grey – white. They definitely weren’t there twelve weeks ago. I’m missing a stage and jumping straight to silver! And my face seems to have lost some of its buoyancy – it’s not bouncing back with boyish elasticity after sleepless nights like it used to. I look tired.

As for Lizzie, I’ve noticed far more grey hairs hiding amongst her dark locks, but more than that, her face has changed in some indiscernible way. I’m assuming it has something to do with gaining pregnancy weight, losing it quickly after the birth, and screwing up her face muscles for nineteen hours of labour until she can crush walnuts with her cheeks. The distances between her features all seem a little off – her mouth perhaps a couple of millimetres wider, her chin a trifle thinner – so that when I lean it to kiss her, or watch her sleeping on the pillow beside me, at times she doesn’t look like Lizzie at all but a stranger in my bed. Some might find that rather exciting – I find it a little unsettling. Nobody prepared me for the fact my partner’s face might change!

Psychological symptoms are having a major impact on my physical health. I look like I’m calm and completely in control, but inside I’m constantly fretting, and so I keep getting outbreaks of psoriasis under my beard – horrible, itchy, sore, red, flaky dandruff-type stuff that I’ve never had before but is driving me mad these days. I rub the baby’s nappy cream into my beard and leave it there, white and gloopy and sweet-smelling, because it cools the irritation. And having Irritable Bowel Syndrome, I’m a nervous pooper, and my nerves have irritated my bowels something chronic – I’ve had diarrhoea five days out of seven since Izzie was born. Everything I eat comes out within a couple of hours – I can’t imagine it stays in my stomach long enough to be digested.

But it does. I know this because I’ve put on a stone in weight since the birth. That’s just over a pound a week. I know the reason. Normally we eat three meals a day because we’re asleep for eight hours, but when you have a baby and you’re awake on and off throughout the 24-hour period, you realise just how gosh-darned hungry you are at three in the morning. So sneaking a fourth meal into your nightly schedule with a bowl of cereal, couple of slices of toast, or bar of chocolate at silly o’clock, really isn’t as beneficial as you might think.

I had my asthma check the other day. My peak flow is the worst it’s been for years. Admittedly, that might have something to do with the fact I’ve been neglecting to take my inhaler, but I’m not above using the baby as an excuse.

When I struggled up from my chair a few days ago, Lizzie laughed and told me I was like an old man. She’s not wrong. Given the pain in my back, shoulders and legs, I’m hobbling around like an octogenarian. My body is wrecked (I have to be careful how I say that, because I told a woman the other day that I was wrecked and realised it sounded like in answer to the question, ‘How are you?’ I replied, ‘I’m erect.’).

Part of the reason is that I sit sideways in the armchair, my back against one arm and my legs hanging over the other so that my knees are level with my shoulders. It makes it so much easier with the baby to support her against my thighs while I’m feeding her or massaging her belly or making bicycles with her legs. It just means I’m scrunched up in a position not very conducive to my own comfort.

In particular, the lower left side of my back is starting to kill me. Being right-handed, I tend to support Izzie with my left arm so I can use the other to hold the bottle, poke her in the nose, ward off the attentions of the dog, or else scratch whatever happens to itch. When I carry her in the sling, I similarly favour the left, with the straps running from my left shoulder to right hip. This means I’m always leaning slightly to the right in order to compensate, straining my muscles as they battle to keep my spine straight.

At least, I hope that’s what it is. The past five days, the pain has moved from the surface to the inside and I can feel it if I press on my front or my back, as though it’s sitting in my kidneys. Worse, it’s spread to my right side in the past couple of days, making me wonder if I’m dehydrated and my kidneys are aching.

And my left arm hurts too. Since Izzie is twelve weeks old, has been bottle fed for ten weeks, had ten bottles each day in the early weeks and around six now, if we average eight per day then she’s been fed in the region of (clasps his tongue between his lips as he tries to calculate it) 560 bottles. If we conservatively reckon I’ve done half of those, then I’ve held Izzie in my left arm 280 times in ten weeks. This might explain why it feels like my left biceps is torn in two, and is far bigger and harder than my right. If I keep this up I’ll have an Arnold Schwarzenegger leftie and a right modelled on Daniel Radcliffe – not attractive but great for hustling an arm wrestler.

So that is the reality of parenting – it turns you into a grey-haired, odd-faced, flaky-skinned, sore-spined, kidney-aching, stiff, limping, fat, lopsided Quasimodo with diarrhoea. We don’t mention that to prospective parents!