Tag: Asperger’s Syndrome

Afraid of Number 2, Part 3

Gillan Drew3 Comments

Irrespective of whether you are religious, spiritual, agnostic or atheist, having your first child is an act of faith.

No matter how much you learn or how well you prepare, no first time parent knows what they’re getting themselves into. You don’t know if you’ll make a good parent, or how you’ll cope with the lack of sleep, or the crying, or the screaming, or if your relationship will survive the stress. You don’t know what it’s going to be like changing nappies, or feeding, or bathing, or dressing, or being entirely responsible for another life in its physical, emotional and developmental needs. It’s the equivalent of being led blindfold to the edge of a cliff and then jumping off and trusting you’ll survive the fall. It’s not rational at all.

So why do we do it? Unless we play fast and loose with contraception, we do it because we’re driven to do it, without rhyme or reason. We do it because a couple of billion years of evolution have programmed it into our DNA to ensure our genetic legacy. And we do it because our hearts are crying out for completion, for something more to love.

Having a second child is nothing like that. It’s not such a leap into the unknown as you pretty much already know what it is to have and raise a baby. You know how your lives have changed, how your relationship has altered, and therefore how a second baby is likely to affect this fledgling family dynamic. As a result, discussions about a second baby are less to do with the heart than they are with the head.

‘I want Izzie to grow up with a sibling so she has someone to play with, learns to share, and won’t be lonely. I think an age gap of two to three years is best – with Izzie at pre-school there’ll be less disruption, and they’re close enough in age to get along. And I’m better with toddlers, you’re better with babies, so you can look after the new baby while I look after Izzie. It’s the perfect division of labour.’

So says my partner Lizzie. It all sounds very logical, and rational, and clinical, but logic had nothing to do with why I had Izzie. I had Izzie because my entire being was crying out to become a dad. There was a gap in my heart that I knew only a baby could fill.

Izzie filled it. It might change in the future, but right now I feel complete. My heart is whole. I don’t feel the pressing need to have a baby that I did before. So surely, then, it wouldn’t be right to have another baby purely because I can justify it intellectually?

And there are other considerations. As I wrote yesterday, Izzie was our miracle baby, a gift from the gods. How ungrateful would we be to take that miracle and demand another? And the journey to her birth was so long, and moving, and life-changing that how could a second baby possibly compete?

‘This is our daughter Izzie. After years of fertility treatment and events conspiring as though Nature itself determined that we should become parents, we were gifted with her presence. And this is our son Gregory.’

[pregnant pause]

‘We thought Izzie might like a playmate.’

Now I know that our children aren’t meant to compete, and I know that every child is a miracle (No, says the biologist, it’s a natural process resulting from the coming together of two gametes), but Izzie has set the bar pretty darned high. Even the reason for having a second baby – for Izzie’s personal development – means even before it’s born it’s in her shadow, not desired or considered in its own right the way Izzie was. And that’s just wrong.

It’s wrong to Izzie too. I love her so much and we’re so close, I feel like having another baby would be something of a betrayal. It’s like saying to her, ‘You’re great, and all, but we need more. And you can’t provide it. So there. Sucks to be you.’

And, in all honesty, I am afraid of having a second baby. My heart is full. People say that you always worry you won’t love the second child as much as the first, and then it arrives and your heart grows to fit all the love you feel and you don’t know what you were worrying about. You discover your capacity for love is boundless, and blah, blah, bollocks.

But what if you don’t? What if you discover that, heaven forfend, you have a limited capacity for love, and wouldn’t you know it, you’ve just hit your limit? Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200. Go to the back of the class.

I have specific reasons for my doubts. Because of my Asperger’s, I’ve always struggled to manage feelings and relationships. If I had a friend, I couldn’t be friends with anyone else because not only would it be a betrayal (I know it’s not, but I can’t help feeling it is), I couldn’t find the mental space to consider the needs of more than one person at a time. And when I have a partner, like I do now, the very thought of wanting to spend time with anyone else just makes me feel dirty. This is a lifetime pattern of behaviour. I’m a U2 kind of guy (one-love, one-life).

I loved the fish until we got the chickens; I loved the chickens until we got the cat; I loved the cat until we got the dog; and I loved the dog until we got Izzie. What if, by having another baby, I transfer my love to it and can no longer care about Izzie or manage to consider her needs in such a way that I go from being a good dad to merely an adequate one? I don’t want to turn my attention and my heart away from her towards anything else and let her down. The very thought of it is heartbreaking.

This is all a very long-winded way of saying I’m afraid of having a second child. I’m afraid I don’t have enough love to encompass two children. I’m afraid that my relationship with my daughter will irrevocably change. And I’m afraid if I’m spread so thin I’ll lose my ability to be a good, caring, attentive dad.

So in a way, I guess having a second child is a leap of faith. You’re not sure you’re going to love it – you don’t feel that you can – but you have it anyway, trusting that it’ll come good in the end. I said before that you can’t live your life imprisoned by fear, or else you deny yourself the chance of something good, and perhaps this is one of those things.

But not right now. Right now, I don’t feel the desire for a second baby, not on its own terms. My heart isn’t crying out for something to love. And until it does, I can’t even think about bringing another child into this world.

It’s explaining this to Lizzie that’s the hard part.

Afraid of Number 2, Part 2

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

My route to fatherhood wasn’t the usual one. The thing with watching your girlfriend undergoing IUI with donor sperm to get pregnant with a baby you don’t particularly want is that over time you come to accept that, for better or worse and with no input from you, there’s going to be a baby in your future. And that does weird things to both your head and your heart.

Because Lizzie so wanted a baby – because her very being ached for it – I wanted it to work. For her. I read books on babies, pregnancy, parenting and babies conceived by donor sperm so I could support her through every stage of her becoming a parent. I injected her every afternoon with hormones, drove her thirty miles to watch her have probes inserted into unmentionable areas to scan her ovaries, then thirty miles back listening to her excitement that we’d seen a follicle or heartache that we hadn’t.

Then, after a couple of years adjusting to this weird set of circumstances, I sat in the room and held her hand as she underwent insemination with the seed of a man she’d never met and was never likely to (which means a virgin can get pregnant – take that, God!). After which, I treated her like a queen – albeit a queen that needed her court jester to help her with two suppositories a day. Definitely think I got the shitty end of this arrangement…

Two weeks later came the agonising – ‘Is that blood? No, that’s not blood, it’s just – oh God, please don’t be blood. Oh Christ, it’s blood. But maybe – no. It’s gone. That little follicle we watched grow and grow on the ultrasound screen, that we nurtured and spoke to and treated as though it was an actual baby, has gone. And those two weeks we’ve spent thinking and hoping you might be pregnant – they’re over.’

The strangest thing – I was just as heartbroken as Lizzie. I don’t think anybody who hasn’t undergone fertility treatment can understand what it’s like when it doesn’t work. It feels like a miscarriage because you’ve seen the egg, you’ve seen the sperm, you’ve seen them meet. It’s not just a period – it’s the loss of a baby, a dream.

People who knew what was happening said, ‘So? It took me/my partner a year to get pregnant.’ But that is not the same thing. When you’re trying for a baby naturally, a period means you simply try again – an upcoming month of sex, cuddling and romance, yay! When you’re having IUI, it means another month without sex. Another month of injections, three-hour round trips to the clinic every couple of days, scans, pressure, insemination, suppositories. It’s cold, clinical and the most unromantic thing you can imagine.

Also, you’re acutely aware of the fact that you only have enough money for three attempts. As Lizzie couldn’t grow follicles without injections, and wouldn’t ovulate without a different injection, and was using donor sperm, each failure dramatically reduced the possibility of her ever having a baby. So it’s completely different from trying for a baby naturally.

On the second attempt, on the way to the insemination, I drove my car into flood waters and screwed the engine. Looking back, I wonder if, subconsciously, I did it deliberately as a result of the stress of the whole shebang. But we were towed out of the flood, made it to the hospital, and Lizzie was promptly inseminated again.

This, similarly, didn’t work, but we were more prepared for failure this time and we knew we still had one shot.

It really was third time lucky. The follicle grew beautifully; the hormone-induced mood swings were almost non-existent; and the insemination went so well, we were almost guaranteed a healthy, happy baby. So when the blood came again, we pretended it wasn’t a period for the longest time, until we had to face the devastating truth – there would be no baby in our future.

After having spent three years getting my head around having to raise a baby, the fact that suddenly there wasn’t going to be one knocked me for six. Over the years, I had grown not just to accept my impending parenthood, but desire it, not in my head but in my heart. I was as desperate to be a dad as Lizzie was to be a mum.

But we’d run out of money. That third miscarriage/period was the most painful experience of my life.

On the other hand, I’d run out of reasons why I didn’t want to be a father. After a lot of soul-searching, I realised they were all based on fear – that I wouldn’t be good enough, I’d mess the kid up, I wouldn’t be able to cope, it wouldn’t like me, it’d be autistic. But then I thought: what if I was able to cope? What if I was good enough? By wrapping myself in cotton wool and avoiding the possibility of bad things happening to me, I was denying myself the possibility of good things – great things – happening too.

If you deny yourself the possibilities in life, then you’re not living and you might as well be dead. And what had all my self-protection got me? Life still found a way to intrude, time and time again.

It was like a spiritual awakening. I realised I needed to give up control and learn to embrace a little chaos and random chance – not an easy admission for someone with Asperger’s Syndrome. Suddenly, I had faith in myself and life. So I decided to leave the issue of my parenting in the lap of the gods – we would stop using contraception, and if I was meant to be a father, Lizzie would become pregnant.

Not that I expected much. We’d learnt during the fertility treatment that Lizzie ovulated without drugs about twice a year. She also didn’t form a thick enough wall of the uterus to enable the egg to implant without suppositories. And on three occasions, viably-proven sperm had been implanted right on top of the egg and failed to fertilise it.

The odds of Lizzie growing a follicle, the follicle getting big enough to mature an egg, the egg being released, us having sex at exactly the right time, the sperm penetrating the egg and the egg implanting, were so astronomically small that we figured we’d be in for a long, hard slog. So, in the meantime, we’d get a puppy and live our lives as normal. If a baby came along then great, but if not, we had to get on with our lives.

Lizzie was pregnant within two months.

I knew from the second of that first positive pregnancy test that everything would be fine, Lizzie would carry it to term, and it would all work out okay – I’d trusted in the Universe to tell me if I should be a dad and the Universe had answered with a massive, emphatic yes! There was no chance whatsoever we’d be given such a gift only for it to be taken away.

I’m not a religious person, but everything that happened seems as though it was meant to be, as though somebody wanted me to be a dad and took our little family on a journey of pain and spiritual growth in order to make that happen. And as soon as we were both ready and willing and trusted to fate, we were handed our longed-for baby.

Izzie is a miracle. I truly believe that. She is a gift from heaven we had no right to expect.

But now Lizzie wants another…

Continued tomorrow…

 

Afraid of Number 2, Part 1

Gillan Drew2 Comments

No, this isn’t a post about poop – I’ve done enough of those. And I’m not afraid of poop anymore – I’ve changed so many nappies now that I’m the poop master. Well, maybe not the master – after changing Izzie and washing my hands, I quite often look down half an hour later and think, ‘Why on earth is there poop on my knuckle?’ – so maybe I’m more like the poop first mate. Or at least the poop deck hand. But that’s by the by.

Instead, this post is about baby number two.

With the little sprocket now being nine months old, the same amount of time she was in the womb, the subject of repopulating said womb has been raised. Actually, it was first raised when Izzie was five weeks old and her mother informed me she was desperate to be pregnant again. So in truth, the subject is not now being raised so much as I’m being beaten repeatedly over the head with it.

Trouble is, it’s an entirely cerebral conversation – how much of an age gap do you want between the kids, do we wait until the first child is at preschool or go for it as quickly as possible, how many kids do you want in total? This has prompted Lizzie to suggest we start trying for a second baby in October. Rather, she has tried to suggest it – I have recently developed a serious medical condition where I go deaf whenever the subject is broached. Shame.

People seem to think that second babies will be easier than the first, and I guess that’s true in the same way that the fire that sweeps through the ruins of your house after it’s been knocked down by a tornado isn’t that bad because you’ve already lost everything anyway. But don’t forget that alongside the new baby you have a toddler. As hard as it is with one, it’s going to be exponentially harder with two. It’s like a man hanging off a cliff with a brick in his hand suddenly deciding he wants to hold a second brick in his other hand and hang on by his teeth – it’s doable, I suppose, but good golly gosh you’re making things difficult for yourself.

And I’m not sure I’m capable of planning my reproductive future with anything even approaching logic. ‘How many children do you want?’ asks Lizzie. How could I possibly know the answer to that? I have no idea what our lives would be like with two kids, let alone three, four, five. It’s a totally abstract concept. It’s like asking how many hairs I’d like in my eyebrows – um, a hundred? A thousand? I don’t have a freaking clue.

This could be because I’ve never given the possibility of a second child a moment’s thought. Bizarrely for someone who has taken hold of this parenting thing like a drowning man a lifeline, I spent all of my life up to fifteen months prior to Izzie’s birth not wanting kids – gritty, snotty, smelly little things that would take up my time, my energy and my money. But something happened to change all that.

Around four years ago, Lizzie’s mum asked when we were going to make her a grandmother. Cheers for that. I told her that I didn’t want kids because I always thought I’m too selfish for kids, I never wanted to pass on my depressive mindset to another generation or inflict my bullshit onto anyone else, and I wouldn’t be a good role model, not to mention that it’s a shitty, overpopulated world filled with misery, despair and an aching sense of ennui, and what possible right, or rhyme, or reason did I have playing God and bringing a little person into it? Frankly, the thought of a little version of me running around, blaming me for forcing it into life, was the worst hell I could imagine.

Her response was: ‘Well, that doesn’t stop Lizzie having children.’ And before I knew it, donor sperm had been imported from Denmark and some random fellow named Jan was going to impregnate my significant other.

It was, without a doubt, a game-changer. But since Lizzie acquires pets like a successful zoo then leaves me to look after them, I figured it would be something like that – I would help her raise the unholy affront to nature, but without any responsibility for deciding upon its future or blame for giving it faulty genes. In short, I would be uncle dad, mummy’s partner, and nothing more. Hardly ideal, but it was that or leave. And truth be told, I was looking forward to the Facebook update – ‘My girlfriend’s pregnant.’ ‘Wow, congratulations, you’re going to be a dad.’ ‘I never said I was going to be a dad. I said my girlfriend’s pregnant.’ Ouch…

So we embarked upon a journey of IUI treatment (intra-uterine-insemination) involving blood tests, internal and external ultrasounds, dye injected into fallopian tubes, hormone therapy that turned Lizzie into a snarling, vicious animal, daily injections, suppositories and counselling. We watched follicles grow day by day on her ovaries but never get large enough to pop. She became a medical object that had to be scanned and poked and prodded and studied, month after month after month. Not good times, for sure.

But then, amazingly, one of the follicles grew. And it kept growing. And it reached the right size. So we gave her an injection to release the egg, and a day later Jan came out of the freezer and his seed was separated from his juice (the womb is designed for sperm; semen irritates it), and he was placed into a long transparent tube and off he went.

Then something strange happened. I discovered in that sterile, unromantic hospital room that somewhere between watching the follicle grow on the ultrasound screen and repeatedly injecting hormones into Lizzie’s belly, her journey had become my journey. And good gosh I hoped that Dane’s alien sperm knocked up my girlfriend…

Continued tomorrow…

Good Dad / Bad Dad

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

For nine months, Izzie only ever encountered Good Dad. He’s a nice guy, a caring guy. He hugs her when she’s sad, feeds her when she’s hungry, kisses her when she smiles. He sings her songs at bedtime, acts like a loon to make her laugh, and gives her everything she wants. He’s a big, cuddly bundle of fun.

The past few weeks, there’s been a new guy on the scene: Bad Dad. And Izzie doesn’t like him nearly as much.

‘Ba-da,’ she cries. ‘Ba-da!’

She’s reached the age where she’s increasingly mobile, increasingly opinionated, and increasingly capable. She watches everything you do, and you can almost hear the cogs whirring inside her skull as she works things out. Like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, it’s a problem-solving intelligence that is scary when combined with her baby-Superman-lifting-a-car strength.

Mostly, it’s small stuff. She can take off her nappy, help herself to her biscuits by swiping them out the pocket of the changing bag, and yesterday proved she can stand without any support (though when she realised we were watching her she grabbed onto the sofa). And if she gets her hands on the baby wipes, she opens the packet and pulls them out one by one, creating a big wet mess in the middle of the carpet.

Far more alarming are her attempts at overcoming safety features. She’s figured out where she has to grab to open the stair gate keeping her out of the kitchen, but luckily doesn’t have the strength or dexterity to do it yet. When you strap her into the car seat or high chair, her fingers move to the buckle the second you move yours away as she struggles to press the release button. And when you change her nappy, she knows the exact moment you’ll be looking to the left (to pick up the clean nappy) and uses that split second to roll to the right, crawl past your thigh and make a break for the door – which she’s figured out how to open.

Into this repertoire of experimental behaviours she’s recently introduced a number that could be categorised as ‘How to manipulate mummy and daddy’. They are, from mildest to I-want-to-die-est:

  1. The throw-your-bottle-on-the-floor-for-attention.
  2. The pouty bottom lip.
  3. The fake cry.
  4. The angry shout.
  5. The lose-all-control-and-scream-like-a-wild-animal-that’s-being-poked-with-a-red-hot-poker-until-you-start-to-choke-and-then-turn-purple-in-order-to-get-your-own-way.

This last one is used every time she’s put in the play pen, every nappy change, every costume change, every time I take her out of the bath, and every time I take something off her.

And so, in response, I have had to break out Bad Dad.

Bad Dad is tough but fair. Bad Dad tells her no when she’s pulling hair, or trying to open the door to the hall, or going into mummy’s handbag. Bad Dad takes car keys off her, and TV controllers, and the dog’s toys. And Bad Dad doesn’t take any shit.

No matter how much Izzie cries, screams and pitches a fit, Bad Dad doesn’t let her get her own way. She completely understands the word ‘No,’ but it’s a battleground right now as she tests the boundaries to see what she can get away with.

‘Daddy says No? I’ll reach for it again. Oh, he still says No. In that case, I’ll stick out my bottom lip and – wow, it’s still No. Maybe if I cry a bit, real tears even, now I’ll just reach out – nope, that didn’t work. I’ll shout as I reach for it – damn it, I’ll just throw a full-blown tantrum, then he’ll have to give it to me.’

To be honest, I don’t like Bad Dad either. He’s nowhere near as fun or as happy as Good Dad. He’s mean and unkind and strict and severe. He hardens his heart to his daughter’s tears and holds her while she sobs, even though he was the cause of it all, and it would be so easy to make her happy by giving her what she wants.

But Bad Dad doesn’t give in, no matter how hard it gets, and how much it upsets him, because he’s as good a dad as Good Dad. And it takes both personas to be the father of a happy, well-adjusted daughter.

But I know which one I prefer.

Sickness bug update, part 2

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When I said the tummy bug was over, I was speaking prematurely. We’ve had vomit every day since Thursday – acres and oodles of vomit including this evening, when I was cuddling Izzie close to my chest. Five days of my clothing being drenched in sudden, unexpected barf.

I have run out of trousers to change into!

As milk seemed to trigger bouts of vomiting, we switched to soya milk. That helped us get more fluid into her, because it didn’t seem to upset her. The next couple of days, the vomiting was caused by biscuits, porridge and fruit. But tonight it was caused by the soya milk. So we’re back to square one.

There’s no logic to it. You give her something for breakfast, she wolfs it down – the same thing for lunch, it’s Exorcist time. One minute she’s happy and playing and laughing, the next she’s spewing as though there’s no end to it. I just don’t get it.

Luckily, Lizzie is feeling a little better. I think it’s clear she had viral gastroenteritis/stomach flu/norovirus, which is pretty much all the same thing and lasts a couple of days. It’s highly infectious, so we are truly a plague house. Quite a wonder that I haven’t got it.

I have, however, come down with a heavy cold. My muscles and joints all ache and my head has been spinning for three days. Worse, as a result of the stress throughout the day Saturday, I had such bad indigestion/acid reflux all night, I felt like I was having a heart attack. Since then my chest has felt like I’ve torn every muscle surrounding my heart. But that’s what it means to be a dad – you dig deep and you carry on.

For how much longer – that’s the real question.

Sickness bug update

Gillan Drew1 Comment

Somehow, things have become worse. Not for Izzie – provided we don’t give her any milk, she seems right as ninepence – but for her long-suffering parents.

The last few months I’ve been donating platelets at my local blood centre. I’ve been a blood donor for years, but after Izzie’s traumatic birth, I wanted to do more to help people in similar circumstances. Platelets are given to people with leukaemia, those undergoing chemotherapy, and trauma cases who lose a lot of blood. Unlike blood donation, which averages three times a year, you can donate platelets every three to four weeks, so it gives me a chance to put my feet up and relax as my blood is sucked from my body, run through a centrifuge to filter out the butterscotch-yellow platelets, and pumped back in.

Trouble is, not everyone can be a platelet donor as you need an excess of platelets and good strong veins. For every 100 blood donors there is only one platelet donor, and platelets only last seven days so are in constant demand. What’s good about platelet donation, however, is that one 90-minute donation can save three adults or up to twelve children. Last time, my platelets were sent to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, so I can feel good about that.

Anyway, I was due to go in Thursday afternoon. However, after being submerged in Izzie’s vomit, I thought I’d better check to see if they still wanted me or if it was too risky. The consensus was that I had been ‘compromised’ and it was better to err on the side of caution and cancel – I wouldn’t want to pass on a vomiting bug to already sick kids. Though I was asymptomatic, I might come down with it myself. So I gritted my teeth and braced myself for a bout of diarrhoea and vomiting.

If you’ve guessed where this is going, it’s my job to disappoint you. I’m fine. Lizzie, on the other hand, spent all night writhing and moaning, clutching her belly, until at six this morning she tried to make it to the bathroom, failed, and vomited all over the landing. Carpet, doors, walls, the works. So I’m getting to be a dab hand at mopping up sick. Especially as a couple of hours later she vomited all over the bathroom floor.

Today, I am therefore a single dad with two sick children. Here’s hoping I don’t get struck down by the same ailment or I don’t know what we’ll do!

Don’t panic! It’s just a tummy bug.

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

I’ve mentioned vomit before on this blog, and it’s always been described rather casually. ‘Ha-ha, she threw up over me,’ and suchlike. ‘What a great dad I am: I get puked on and take it in my stride. Yay me!’

Those were purer, more innocent times, the halcyon days before the fall. The fact is, I had no idea what vomiting truly was. The couple of tablespoons of white, milk-like up-chuck, even when tinged with mucus, are nothing – nothing – compared to the end-of-the-world style vomiting of a stomach bug. And having now experienced that, I will never be casual about vomit again.

When Izzie woke crying at four o’clock Thursday morning, her bed sopping wet with sick, my instincts told me something was wrong. She’s not a sicky baby and vomiting overnight is certainly unusual for her. It was, however, just the beginning.

I picked her up, made her some milk, fed it to her, sat her down, and watched as the Gates of Hell opened and spewed forth an ocean of vomit. In all honesty, it was frightening seeing so much liquid propelled so widely from something so small. It formed puddles in her lap and on the carpet, was so bad that even Lizzie got up (unheard of before half-seven) to help change clothing and bedding and mop it off the floor.

After settling Izzie onto newly-clean sheets, I spent the next two hours on the internet becoming an expert on all aspects of childhood vomiting. The main stipulation of the sites I visited was: don’t panic! It’s only vomit. Keep her hydrated, be gentle with her belly, and stop being such a wuss.

Now, being an overprotective (read: hypochondriac) dad, I’ve had to develop a hard and fast rule on baby illness so I don’t turn her into a medical guinea pig that gets rushed to the doctor every two minutes: if she’s happy, playful and eating, and has no obvious signs of illness such as a temperature, blood coming from her ears, or buboes, she’s probably okay. So in the morning when Izzie seemed bright and breezy, we got on as normal. Lots of water to rehydrate her, and oodles of bland milky porridge and a banana to settle her empty stomach.

Slightly neurotic about her dying of thirst, and the ensuing inquest where we’re deemed to have been neglectful parents followed by a media witch hunt that hounds us out of the country, I sat her on my lap on the sofa to give her a top-up of milk. And two minutes later, with a little feminine toss of her head, she exploded all over me.

When I say exploded, I mean that stuff just flew everywhere. I was wearing T-shirt, shirt, trousers, boxer shorts and socks, and the only thing I didn’t have to change were my glasses. The last time I was covered in hot, smelly sick, I was nine years old, wearing blue and white striped pyjamas, and I remember feeling unclean and ashamed. In an instant, I was that child again and unable to move.

I shouted for help, which is what I’d done as a nine-year-old. Unfortunately, Lizzie chose that moment to have one of her autistic episodes – overwhelmed by the knowledge that she couldn’t go to baby group and would have to change her plans, she became angry and overwhelmed, so had to go and have a time-out to calm down. Gee, thanks, honey. It’s not like it’s soaking through to my skin and dripping from my fingertips!

Luckily there was a support worker present, who definitely earned her pay and saw more of me than she probably liked as I peeled off soiled clothing layer by layer then dealt with the baby in just my underwear.

Water was the order of the day. Sips of water, the websites say. No food for about six hours, then small amounts of bland stuff to settle her.

Izzie didn’t act ill, not at all – she was playing with her toys, standing against the furniture and getting up to her usual high-jinks. So mid-afternoon, when she was clearly hungry, I gave her the blandest porridge in the cupboard, which went down a treat, followed by fromage frais and then half a biscotti. She seemed happy as Larry, so I made some milk, sat her on my lap on the sofa and –

Instead of describing in graphic detail what I’ve already covered before (explosion, ‘help!’, oh god it’s so warm and smelly), minus Lizzie’s time-out but including the ‘assistance’ of Ozzie the dog in clearing up, here’s a picture of Izzie with bunny ears:

IMG_0856
Cute

While I was changing into my third set of clothes for the day, Lizzie’s cousin texted us to say her little one had had a similar thing earlier in the week, a 24-hour vomiting bug. Provided you can endure and make sure she drinks plenty, it passes. So armed with this knowledge, we tried to force dioralyte down her throat to rehydrate her (see above about hypochondria), which was a horrible failure, switched back to water, which was a success, and put her to bed.

Today, she seems much better (touch wood), but since the three vomiting episodes were triggered by milk, we’ve avoided risking giving her anything but water. I’ve discovered from my research that babies can develop lactose intolerance from tummy bugs like viral gastroenteritis, meaning milk makes them vomit and you need to give them lactose-free milk for up to four weeks until the gut recovers. Gosh darn it, why do babies always get ill on four-day weekends and bank holidays?

What I’ve learnt from this experience is just how frightening it can be for a parent when their baby keeps vomiting. I mean, at one point I seriously expected her head to rotate three-sixty degrees and Latin phrases to start bursting from her lips. You think it’s going to go on forever, that every drop of water or morsel of food will come back with added force. But it passes. Thank God it passes!

It’s also an eye-opener how vulnerable you can feel when covered in someone else’s vomit. Forget waterboarding, try a baby with a vomiting bug! But on the plus side, there are far fewer poopy nappies to deal with.

One thing’s for certain: I will never be nonchalant about sick ever again!

The pleasures of toys (not that sort!)

Gillan Drew1 Comment

Prior to the arrival of our little bundle of joy, I’d see those parents with a wicker basket of handcrafted wooden toys for their children – ‘we don’t believe in consumerism’ – and I’d think: ‘what a bunch of bloody hippies. Go back to smoking roll-ups and drinking herbal tea, the grown-ups are talking.’

In hindsight I think they’re geniuses and I really wish we’d had a rule about toys long before Izzie was born.

The problem is that without a clear idea of what you want, toys have a tendency to multiply. My lounge has turned into a multicoloured mayhem of shapes, materials and textures. It’s like living inside a Disney cartoon, complete with jaunty music, flashing lights, and twee sing-songs.

You see, Lizzie is obsessed with trawling around charity shops and baby jumble sales and returning with endless bargains in pink plastic and green felt. Bargains that ring and chime and jangle, and aren’t really bargains at all when you can’t walk from one side of the lounge to the other without stepping on something that squeaks, or dances, or blinks at you.

Most of the noisy toys are from a company called Vtech, and I have nothing against them. Individually. My problem comes from the fact that when the table is singing, and the walker joins in, the toy TV controller sings its song, and the toy phone starts to warble, it creates a cacophony so unholy it can summon Satan.

Worse, they seem to have used the same woman to voice all of them. ‘Watch some TV with some friends,’ she says, along with ‘can you find the duck,’ ‘ring home,’ ‘who’s calling,’ ‘now I know my abc,’ all at the same time. The voices never stop. These things are meant to teach kids, not make them schizophrenic.

And that’s just the start of it.

I’m not sure the lessons are as productive as they might think. Apparently, rabbits go ‘boing’. Never heard that myself. And one toy from Fisher Price sings, ‘five little cookies make a yummy snack.’ Really? I’d have thought five little cookies make a baby fat!

And thanks to it being in the public domain, every single one of them plays Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. That song’s always bewildered me, even as a kid. ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.’ It’s a freaking’ STAR! The answer’s in the question. Okay, when Jane Taylor wrote it way back in 1800-and-whatever, she probably thought they were ‘God lights’ or ‘angel smiles’, or something, but damn, can’t we change it to reflect current understanding?

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, you’re a ball of hot gases undergoing nuclear fusion, that’s what you are.

Better?

The ABC song, which I’ve noticed has the exact same tune as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, and which all the toys also play, is driving me utterly insane. In American English it work fine: ‘T U Vee, W X, Y and Zee.’ But the toys have all been recorded in British English, so she sings: ‘T U Vee, W X, Y and Zed.’ It doesn’t seem to bother Lizzie, but every time the song starts up I cringe, waiting for that awful, jarring non-rhyme. The only way I can cope is to sing along with it, substituting  Zee for Zed. And doing that fifty times a day isn’t relaxing.

I think there’s a reason the musical drum Lizzie brought home a few weeks back was so cheap, because if you ever want to torture someone, this thing was designed by the Marquis de Sade. Every time you tap it, it plays a note. The notes it plays seem to unite to create ‘The Wheels On the Bus.’ But it doesn’t play ‘The Wheels On the Bus.’ There are extra notes crammed in there at random, and others arbitrarily removed. If you were to sing along to it in your head, as you do automatically, it would go like this: ‘The wheels on round and round, round and round round, round and round, the wheels on the round and round, all all day day long.’

‘Just turn them off!’ I hear you scream.

I fully agree. But you clearly don’t appreciate the depth of my problem. Turning them off isn’t as easy as you might think. You find a switch and flip it, move onto the next one, only to discover you haven’t turned it off at all – you’ve simply switched it from ‘annoying tune’ to ‘annoying song’, or increased the volume, or switched on the lights so you can enjoy your own disco/epilepsy. One of them even rolls around the room, forcing you to chase it, and once you’ve caught it, it spins a chicken over the top of the off-switch, as if laughing at you: ‘ha, the only way you can reach this switch is with lightning reactions, or else you break it!’

Funnily enough, despite all the bells and whistles she can choose from, Izzie’s fallen in love with a little cuddly green dog that has become something of a security blanket. Well, not the dog, actually – the bone attached to the dog by a little blue cord. She’s only happy when she’s clutching this blue cord, the bone on top, the dog dangling down under her feet. She drags the dog around behind her, trips over it, gets it stuck on things. Instead of using two hands to pull herself to her feet, she only has one free nowadays.

It’s made dressing her, or changing her nappy, or strapping her into the car seat or high chair, an absolute nightmare. Because she has to let go of it so you can put her arm through the sleeve or the strap, or avoid getting poo on it, and letting go of it is not something she’s going to do without a fight, followed by excessive amounts of screaming.

She even sleeps with it now, and I have to admit, I’m happy to let her if it keeps her quiet.

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She’s asleep, we have fifteen minutes to turn off all the toys!

So here’s to the hippy parents with the handcrafted wooden toys, roll-up cigarettes and herbal tea – I take mine with milk and a sweetener, thanks. See you at the commune!

Interest in People

Gillan DrewLeave a comment

In the past week, Izzie has decided that faces are awesome (I said faces! I was quite clear about that). Whether pulling faces or, indeed, pulling faces, those things that go together to make up the human face have become inescapably fascinating (and not just human faces either; I have to give a shout out to Ozzie the cocker spaniel, who sits patiently while the baby pulls on his eyelids).

As fascinating as faces are to her, it’s equally fascinating for me to watch how she’s learning what faces mean, and that the things attached to them – people – are just as cool.

Amazingly, she seems to recognise the difference between adults and children, boys and girls – and she’s definitely more interested in those who can one day grow facial hair. At the pub on Mother’s Day she spent the whole meal turning in her seat so she could watch the boy at the table behind us. When he left with his parents, she smiled at him and waved – she’s eight-months old, for crying out loud!

Children elicit a different response to adults. When she sees a grown-up, Izzie watches them, before slowly smiling and then waving – when I took her on a journey around the pub the other night, she made sure to wave at every adult in there until I was sure her arm would fall off. But at least they tend to smile and wave back.

When she sees children, she shouts at them. A loud cry like she can’t contain her excitement at recognising a kindred spirit. She even does it when she sees a baby on TV – she sits in silence, ignoring the noisy idiot box in the corner, until an advert for Pampers or Aptamil or Cow & Gate comes on, and suddenly you jump out of your skin as the baby on your lap roars at the screen. Crazy smart!

Along with waving, she’s learned to point, but only with her right hand. If you point your finger back at her she slowly extends her arm until she touches your fingertip, just like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And this’ll sound really syrupy, but it’s the most adorable thing ever.

Except, perhaps, when you see her practicing her Jedi skills. She reaches for things that are way out of reach – like fifteen feet out of reach – and keeps on reaching, staring at it intently as though she can use the Force to draw it to her. She also sweeps her palm from one side to the other in front of your face from time to time as if doing the Jedi Mind Trick – ‘You will bring me milk and cookies. None of that broccoli shit.’

She’s been so drawn to the TV of late we’ve had to fence it off. She wants to touch it all the time. At first, we thought she was looking at herself in the reflection, but then this happened:

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What’s an Aneurysm, daddy?

[As an aside, I showed this picture to an acquaintance and she thought the person on the screen was Lady Gaga. When I told her it was one Kurt Donald Cobain, she replied, ‘Oh yeah, he was in Thin Lizzy!’ For those of you unsure why that’s so, so wrong, look up Smells Like Teen Spirit, and you’re welcome.]

Because she loves her reflection. If she’s screaming her head off, you just need to hold her up in front of a mirror and she stops instantly, to laugh, and giggle, and reach for the baby in the glass. If you give her a small mirror, she can’t help kissing her reflection like a tiny Narcissus.

And that’s the problem: her fascination with faces isn’t satisfied just by looking. She’s constantly trying to pull your mouth open, twist your lips, ram her chubby little fist down your throat. As she’s so strong, you can easily get hurt along the way. I had no idea a baby could gouge a chunk of flesh out of your cheek:

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That’s going to leave a scar…

This need to pull at faces is teaching her about life and death, or rather, the difference between animate and inanimate. At baby group the other day she picked up a doll for the first time (she normally prefers to play with things she’s not allowed, like TV remotes, phones, i-pads, drinks cans, nunchuks). The first thing she did was try to open its mouth by prising apart its solid plastic lips, and struggled to work out exactly why this was a non-starter. Since it seemed to be ignoring her, and was confusing, she went to the old fall back of giving its hair a good solid yank.

And – ohmygod – it didn’t react. She looked around, confused, perplexed – when she pulls daddy’s hair, especially the hair on his belly, you can bet your bottom dollar it provokes a reaction. You could see her trying to fathom out why this thing that looked like a person wasn’t behaving like a person. It’s like watching a leap up the evolutionary ladder, the moment a monkey first realised it could use a stick to beat the crap out of other monkeys. I’m not entirely sure the penny dropped – there was no ‘ah, I get it – it’s a doll’ moment – but then she has plenty of time to work out that dolls are not real (for one thing, they don’t wake you up at three in the morning, and for another, you don’t have to worry about them one day coming home and telling you they’re pregnant but that it’s okay, he’s a rock musician and one day his band is going to be really big – ‘Well, you did let me listen to Nirvana when I was a baby, dad, so what did you expect?’).

Other than this confused, befuddled, all-is-not-well-with-the-world expression, she’s picked up a couple more. There’s the shocked, split-second oh-my-god-I’ve-lost-my-balance-and-I’m-going-to-fall expression, which she’s become rather adept at as it happens every few minutes. But far scarier is what I call the I’m-a-grown-up-girl-and-I-know-what-I-want-and-how-to-get-it expression. In this second expression, I can see the face she’s going to grow into: self-assurance in the set of her mouth and wisdom in her eyes far beyond her years (months?).

It’s the face of someone who’s going to be strong, and smart, and determined. And quite probably a precocious know-it-all who can cry on cue as she fights tooth and nail to get her own way with everything.

In all honesty, that’s not a face I’m ready to see yet. I provide it here for posterity. Look upon the future and tremble!

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*Gasp!* Magnum!