Nudist

Spring is here. I know this, not because of the very pretty daffodils which are just emerging into bloom by the front door, nor even by the very London way of knowing it's spring - 'when you come out of the tube from work it's still light!' says my excited husband, but because of the nudist.

Opposite our house is another house with a very large bay window, with no curtains at all. In the room within, clearly visible to anyone passing (and especially to us) is an old lady nudist. When we first arrived I thought she was wearing a nude-coloured sarong before we realised no, she was actually naked. In winter, perhaps feeling the cold a bit (as you do in  old age), she covers up, but today is a warm day and there she is, all naked again.

My baby would like her. He, too, is a nudist. He is very happy to be undressed, delighted to wear nothing but a nappy, ecstatic at bath-time when he gets to wear nothing at all, and utterly livid when we dress him again afterwards. He grumbles at the nappy, starts to complain more loudly when we put on the vest, screams when the babygro goes on top. The very first photo of him, newly snatched from the womb, shows him lying on a hospital table, wearing only a nappy, his first ever clothes waiting by his side. He is howling, face scarlet with rage, hands in fists. He will be delighted when warm days arrive and he can wear nothing at all in the garden.

Until then, he will have to be jealous of the old lady nudist.

Here we go round the - cot

Our baby can now move quite a lot. In the daytime, we can only leave him safely for a few minutes on the floor on a mat - the bed, sofa and changing table are all too risky. He's also taken to leaning perilously out of his bouncy chair to try and retrieve fallen toys. Even on the mat, you can go and answer the door, take the parcel or wave off the salesman and come back to find he has mostly left the mat and is now lying with just his head on it, while the rest of his body is on the wooden floor. He doesn't seem to care that when he lifts up his legs and then whams his feet down it's a lot harder than the mat.

At night, though, his moving about is getting him into a tight spot. In his cot, he gradually wriggles until he is lying diagonally, feet lifted up and propped on the slats on one side, head against the other slats. Then he whams his feet down, which shoves his head back against the slats... and cries. I recall being at a friend's house and listening to the baby monitor as her one year old baby girl drifted off to sleep. There was a lot of snuffling and wriggly noises. This, apparently, was the baby creeping round the cot until she found a good corner to squash herself into and go to sleep, ignoring the vast expanse of soft comfortable mattress and blankets available to her in the rest of the cot. Perhaps it's something to do with finding a little cave or a safe spot and a big cot seems too exposed. It must take years before instinct gives way to the bliss of stretching yourself out fully in a kingsized bed.

I say he moves a lot, no doubt I will look back on this and laugh when he starts crawling/standing/walking. Probably this is a golden era of stillness.

Message Received

Three nights ago I made a new rule. The baby, now a strapping five month old, gets one feed between 9pm and 7am, and one feed only. This feed happens after 1am (so that the night is reasonably evenly split up). So the rule goes: not before 1, not before 7. I know he is able to go at least six hours without a feed and so any other time he can just be soothed back to sleep without feeding. I hope over time this will make him sleep better and move towards longer stints without feeding. I repeated this rule to him each night, usually at bathtime.

Bizarrely, since then he has not woken up before 1 and has willingly accepted just one feed, if he does wake up at other times he has meekly gone back to sleep with cuddles alone. Considering that the nearest thing he had to a pattern recently was to wake up at 11.30 or 12, and that he usually demanded about three feeds a night, it's very odd, almost as if he could hear me. This sounds silly but it's happened a few other times, nights when I say 'I can't bear another bad night, he has to sleep well' and he then sleeps beautifully or nights when I've said 'why don't you sleep until 2?' and he does. Even my husband noticed. "Can he hear you?" he asked, "Because when you say something like you really mean it he does it." I'm not sure if it's just random, or whether something about my intent rubs off on him or....? Who knows.

Anyway I'm thinking of asking if he could start potty training next.

Strange Treasures Lodg'd in this Fair World

We have a set of plastic stacking cups, bought for less than £5 but colourful and one of those items that get played with for years and years, pressed into service for every kind of game. Right now they float around in the bath and we pour warm water over our baby and use them to wash his hair. Each cup has three small holes in the bottom, probably some sort of health and safety regarding breathing although your baby would have to have a head the size of a cat to get stuck in there... maybe it's for cats. Anyway, when you scoop up a cupful of water, the three small holes slowly let the water out in thin streams. We hold one high over the baby's tummy and the little streams fall on him like a very pathetic showerhead. But he thinks this is one of the most extraordinary things he's ever seen. He gazes up at it with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open and tentatively holds out a hand to feel the water trickling on his palm, amazed that, for once,  he cannot grasp this thing he can see. Leaning over the bath we agreed that if that was your benchmark for 'amazing' then every day of your life would be extraordinary.

Creation Station run play sessions for babies and toddlers but their website also has great suggestions of things to do with babies at home and one of these was a Treasure Basket which is essentially a box or basket full of small objects which your baby can examine, building up their ideas around textures, sounds, shapes etc. It took less than ten minutes to fill one round the house but he loved it. His treasure box so far contains a toilet roll tube, some small stuffed animals from a mobile,  a chunky plastic sundae spoon, a tiny wooden bowl, his hairbrush (he has hardly any hair so no need for it for now!), a few interesting shapes from a box of building bricks, a measuring cup, some cupcake wrappers (horribly mangled in seconds) and a piece of brown felt. It took him twenty minutes to go through them, taking each one and putting it in his mouth, turning it over in his hands, dropping it and picking it up again before eventually flinging it over one shoulder, something he's started doing when an item is no longer of interest. His absorption with each item was quite touching and made me look again at ordinary objects around the house. I found a lovely poem which seemed a good description of what it must be like for a baby -

A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me;
But that they mine should be who nothing was,
That strangest is of all; yet brought to pass
The Salutation, stanza 7; Thomas Traherne

Watching Paint Dry

Our garden is getting a makeover, courtesy of my husband's hard work and the discovery that our baby is willing to sit and watch paint dry. Until recently my husband had to dash out to the garden as soon as the baby napped if he wanted to squeeze in a bit of gardening and DIY at weekends. But recently we discovered that, bundled up in the absurdly warm all-in-one pramsuit (seriously, it's like clothing for the North Pole and suitably shaped like a baby polar bear, with ears on the hood) and sitting in a bouncy chair on the garden path, our baby enjoys watching us at work.

First up he watched me pruning our two rose bushes and four fruit bushes in the front garden. I chatted away and he seemed quite interested. Next my husband started painting the garden fence panels, turning them from rather weathered grey wood to a new-looking brown. The baby is willing to watch one fence panel being painted at a time, about twenty minutes, before beginning to wriggle about and want to do something else. He also stared curiously at a large hole being dug for a new bush in at the bottom end of the garden. My husband has fond hopes, in a few years, of telling him that there's treasure buried somewhere 'in that bed that needs digging' - I temper this with recollections of my own childhood where various children, over several summers, enthusiastically 'dug for Australia', creating a fair-sized duck pond rather than a neatly dug-over vegetable bed.
Still, we'd like a pond in the garden as well so maybe one day....

Water Baby

Our son's first bath came very early on and he was quite relaxed, but then we left the whole bath thing alone for about a month and when we came back to it he was utterly horrified by it. He lay in warm water in his lovely little blue bath, hands clenched in fists on his chest, staring fixedly ahead, ignoring our smiles and coaxing as well as the yellow rubber duck sailing around his legs. It took weeks to gradually unclench his fists and bring them into the water, let alone get a smile out of him.

Once he got the hang of it though, the small bath didn't stand a chance against the splashing water he kicked up, so a transfer from the bedroom to the main bath (with a brilliant bath divider given by a friend) was effected. he even got used to having water splashed over his face. Starting with a tiny stacking cup (number 1) we are currently up to number 6, quite a sizable amount of water in his face with no qualms.

But our first lesson at Water Babies, a swimming class for babies, was fairly terrifying as an onlooker. The class lasts just 30 minutes and within twenty minutes each baby was taken and their whole body including head submerged underwater - fortunately by the teacher, while the waiting parent was told to keep a big smile on their face as the baby resurfaced. Remarkably, no-one drowned and no mothers fainted although you could feel the tension rise from each woman as her baby was dunked. Quite possibly out of the fear of this very moment all the daddies were sent into the pool with the babies and all the mothers elected to watch from the side. Apparently it's good practice to alternate although other mothers I know who are a class ahead of us say it's usually the dads in the water and the mums on the side. My turn next week, eeek. The babies ranged from three months up to a year old and while some splashed in quite happily and didn't seem to care about being dunked at all, one baby howled, setting off our baby, who kept looking at the first baby's terrified face and crying, only to be comforted when looking at the happy babies.

Top tip for all baby watersports then: keep a big smile on your face - and turn your baby's face towards the happy babies!

Pride comes before a Puree

I read once that people get most upset by criticism which attacks something they hold dear. So if you were to tell me my house is untidy I probably wouldn't be that bothered, tidiness is not a virtue I believe I possess, nor one I value that highly - I have bursts of making everything tidy before happily messing it all up again.

But cooking is another matter. This matters to me - I like to eat, I like to cook, I like cooking for friends and family. I like finding new ingredients (my husband despairs of enthusiastic shopping trips where I come home with six kinds of seaweed or four kinds of obscure cereals) and learning new recipes (BBC Good Food, online, is my favourite now, not a single recipe has ever gone wrong from them).

So - baby is weaning - and here come the purees! Having started rather suddenly I began with baby rice and Ella's Kitchen purees, which taste very nice and seem to have very pure ingredients. But while the baby started on those I was marshaling my kitchen. New gadgets, fresh ingredients, a freezer drawer cleared out. I made pale golden pear as well as apple & cinnamon purees, a vibrant green pea puree which took forever to get through a sieve, luminous orange pumpkin and sweet potato purees.

And he won't eat them. I've tried three times now. Each time he makes a lot of faces, then begins to purse up his lips and refuse any more after about four spoonfuls. Crack open the Ella's Kitchen and he opens his mouth again and eats lots.

Maybe the texture is different. Maybe mine tastes more intense (this from my husband, hoping to make me feel better). Who knows. I'll keep trying but there's nothing like a pursed pair of baby lips for giving your cooking pride a knocking!