Pass the Pimms, Mater...

There's no accounting for babies' tastebuds. After a tummy bug our baby refused everything except yoghurt and fruit for about a month. Then (especially when he saw a slightly older baby eating new things) he got interested in more variety again. But it's no good making him 'baby-friendly' things like simple tomato sauce with teeny tiny pasta or peanut-butter sandwiches - which apparently are the favourite food of half the babies I know - no, he has higher aspirations, like -

Strawberries - I first gave him a tiny mashed up bit with some cream from an Eton Mess I was eating. Now he wolfs them down, biting them savagely and managing to get through eight large ones in one day. And the other favourite is -

Smoked salmon. No good giving him simple plain salmon, nicely cooked up a la baby cooking expert Annabel Karmel, no, he wants smoked salmon, which he'll eat and eat and eat. I'm sure this makes me a Bad Mother - the salt! the uncooked fish! but he loves it so, you know....

Meanwhile the baby rice and baby porridge and baby pasta are sitting untouched on the shelf. Given these fancy new tastebuds he's developing I've been thinking what else I could offer him. Champagne in his bottle? Pimms in his drinking cup? Canapes topped with caviar after a hard day at the childminder's? All I can surmise is he likes quite strong tastes and interesting textures. So I'm off to look round the supermarket and in my cookery books for ideas. Squid pieces? Chorizo?  Tapas selection? Crispy duck in Chinese pancakes with plum sauce and spring onions? Who knows.

I can see you...

We spent two weeks at my mother and stepfather's farm with the baby and a change of scene brought lots of new leaps forward.

First of all, me and my husband went out for lunch, twice, without the baby - for the first time in 9 months. Admittedly, we spent most of our time out talking about how sweet our (absent) baby is - it's true what they say, absence does make the heart grow fonder. But to just be the two of us with no baby in tow was a novel feeling and very pleasant. As with our childminder, leaving the baby with someone else gives you confidence to do it again - nothing dreadful happens and really they have a pretty good time! We're setting up a babysitting club with our NCT group shortly (poker chips give you hours to trade) so we hope to make it a more regular occurrence.

Meanwhile, the baby learnt to 'see' animals. I often point out cats and dogs we come across round London but he used to blank them. A trip to the zoo resulted in the same treatment of giraffes - even though they were right there in front of him, towering several metres above us. But on the farm he met horses, donkeys, sheep, dogs and puppies, cats and kittens, chickens and chicks, ducks and ducklings. He did his best to avoid his toes being nibbled by the donkeys while the cats did their best to avoid being nibbled by him. Yesterday, sitting on our front step waiting for his Daddy to come home, a dog walked by on the other side of the road with its owner. "Dog" I said, as I've been doing for months. He stared at it, grinned broadly, and frantically tried to stand up so that he could watch it as it walked further away.

Another baby staying at the house, one month older, inspired him to try new things. She ate new things, he looked at her and ate them too. She could pull herself to standing via the furniture and he promptly headed for the furniture and tugged at it, trying to hoist himself up. She could crawl, and he redoubled his efforts. His foot still seems to get in the way and he has resorted to Commando-style crawling (arms only, dragging his legs behind him) to get where he wants to get to, but having a role model made a difference. A new baby is starting at our childminder's, who is just four months older, I think he will continue to provide inspiration for new adventures.

These experiences make sense. He saw things another baby could do, he had time to experience animals up close for a prolonged period and he spent time with his grandparents before he was left with them so he was comfortable with them, so none of these events are really surprising.

But while we were away we missed two swimming classes. One of the skills they are being taught is to 'hold on' to the side of the pool, a safety measure should they ever fall in. Before we left he would place his hands on the edge and hold on, but he had to have a knee under him to hold him up and he was doing nothing to support his own body in that position. The day after we flew back was swimming class. "Hold on" we said, and he gripped the side firmly, put his feet against the side of the pool and hoisted himself forward. The teacher told me to let go and there he was, holding onto the edge of the pool, head clear of the water, keeping himself safe all alone. I was astonished. I had expected him to perhaps not remember some of the exercises, even maybe to be a bit scared by the regular dunking underwater. But he had moved on leaps and bounds. The change of scene must have been building up some new pathways in his mind.

The spirit of a great granny

I consider myself fortunate to have a (to normal eyes) ludicrously extended family. We don't just have stepmothers and stepfathers - that's ordinary. We have relationships like 'my half sisters' half brother' and I once flummoxed my fellow students by telling them that for Christmas we would be at 'my stepmother's stepmother.' And so on. I have five siblings, all 'halves' whom I consider wholes. We have family get-togethers that would be unthinkable in other families, with two ex-wives, the current wife and all their offspring in the same room as my father, and everyone happy to be together.

What this requires, to make it work, is a generosity of spirit, and this was exemplified by my stepmother's mother, who was always very grandmotherly towards me. But she impressed me even more when my own baby was born. She took a surprisingly great interest in him. "I can see he's very intelligent", was her first remark on having seen an early photo of him, wrinkled and pink. I sent more photos and she rang me every time to say thank you. I would start normal conversations with her and she would stop me. "Tell me about the baby," she'd say and I would describe his swimming lessons, his fun in the doorway bouncer, about him learning to sit up. When she met him she focused all her attention on him and held him gently, her growing-frail arms tenderly wrapped about his not inconsiderable frame.

Tonight a candle burns on our table for a person who knew what it meant to be a real Great-Granny, and that blood ties had nothing to do with it.

Lift me up, please

It doesn't take long before a baby cottons on to how they can play you at your own game. We hold our arms out to our baby before we pick him up and he started to respond by lifting his own up towards us, a sort of acknowledgment that he was about to be picked up, which we thought was sweet. But now he has gone one step further. My husband was trying to tidy the room while the baby sat on the mat with toys. But he was getting bored and kept throwing away the toys and whinging. My husband, needing a few extra minutes to finish tidying, attempted to pacify him with offers of different toys. But the baby wasn't about to be fobbed off like that. Instead, he raised his arms up to my husband, clearly signaling wanting to be picked up. It's a small step, but a giant leap as it were, because once he's realised that, there are an awful lot more steps along that road. "I wonder what his voice will sound like?" said my husband one day. I think we're going to find out pretty soon, and after that it won't be silent signals, it'll be full on, loud requests that are a lot harder to ignore. Recently, walking along a busy road with my pram and fairly silent baby I came across two grandparents being held hostage by a toddler in a little red coat, who was crouched in a heap, screaming her head off about something while the two of them attempted to pacify her. I smiled sympathetically and the woman, seeing my small baby smiled back. "All still to come," she prophesied.
Can't wait.
Gulp.

Divvying up

So now I'm back at work, albeit part-time and last night my husband and I were sitting trying to work out how the household chores will work out as we enter a new phase. While on maternity, and mostly because we wanted the baby to sit and eat with us, we ate dinner at 6pm, which meant the minute my husband walked through the door, which meant I made dinner every night (pre-baby we used to alternate this task religiously). That was okay, although I did run out of ideas - and interest - I enjoy cooking but every night is a chore, not a creative process. It made sense because of the social aspect, the timings, and because I wasn't out at work. But now? My husband's new chore is to drop off and collect the baby, every day that he is at the childminder's, so then it sort of make sense that I should cook. But five nights a week? Forever?

I don't feel hard done by or outraged. It's more of a nagging feeling. I could say okay, we'll eat late and he'll cook on alternate nights. But eating together matters to me and so that's 2 nights, and then the three nights where I am at work he has a new chore and I'm more likely to be at home by 5 while he (and baby) will not get in till 6.15.

I don't have an answer. The weekends are okay, he makes breakfast, I make lunch, each of us cooks one evening meal just like we always did. The best I've been able to come up with is that perhaps on Sunday night he should cook and cook double portions so Monday night is just heating up? And that I revise our shopping so that a few meals are very quick and easy to prepare... takeaway would be the easy option of course but that's really not very good for the waistline and I could do with my waistline decreasing, not increasing.

So... I think we'll have to mess around with the formula till we find something acceptable. It's a tricky one. The best solution is to find something acceptable, wait a few years and teach the kids to cook us dinner. After all, they don't work....

Sick of being sick

Thank God for washing machines. Ours has been on continuously for the past week and a half. Our baby got a tummy bug which resulted in endless throwing-up and - ahem - accidents the other end. Within two days he'd run out of all his clothes and was in a vest with the heating turned up to keep him warm while we frantically hung washing on every available radiator round the house. The bedding went the same way - our travel cot was pressed into use while the cot mattress was washed and dried sloooowly. Our own supply of clean clothes dwindled but his clothes took priority over ours on the radiators.

I'll give NHS Direct a nod here as they were unfailingly kind and helpful - and reassuring which matters most - on the phone when I rang. Although their first line of questioning, for meningitis, does make your heart stop for a moment and have you muttering prayers of 'please don't let it be that' while you're on hold for a nurse.

As the baby got better, my husband got worse, his own tummy bug exactly mimicking (in milder form) the pattern of illness - feeling better, then worse, over and over again. I stopped saying 'he's on the mend' after a few days of being proved wrong.

By the way don't call an out of hours doctor unless you are willing to be called in to see them. I rang NHS Direct for the last time just to check it was usual for a tummy bug to drag on for more than a week and whilst they were kind as usual they suggested I call my out of hours doctor just to be on the safe side. When I did (by this time it was 9pm and the baby had been asleep for two hours) they insisted I should bring him in. "What, now?" I asked. "Yes." I considered refusing (it seemed to me what he most needed was uninterrupted sleep) but when a doctor tells you to bring your baby in to the hospital where the out of hours surgery is... you sort of have to do it. So I called a taxi, got the baby out of bed (husband lying in bed feeling horrible), took him to the doctor who looked him over and said he wasn't dehydrated and to carry on as I was - we got back to bed by 11pm.

And then work loomed. Now that I'm back at work for two days a week initially it became clear the childminder was not going to be an option as the baby was still too ill and equally I could not, after only one week back, bring myself to cry 'ill baby' and not be at work. So I left a still-poorly husband with a still-poorly baby and the two of them mostly sat in bed with toys and telly (and plenty of spare clothes and towels for accidents) and were poorly together. Thankfully they were both reaching the tail end of the illness. Meanwhile on my second day at work I spent the day fighting off low-level nausea and as soon as I was safely through the work days started to feel vile myself.

So now my husband and the baby are back to normal and I'm at the tail-end of it all. It's been a week and half of household illness.

And there are still about 6 loads of washing in the laundry basket.

Piranha!

There's a rather depressing scale for artificial intelligence which compares AI to infants and various other creatures, so your baby is equivalent to an earthworm till it's 5 months old, then a fish till 9 months, then a quadruped mammal, etc. It's a bit disheartening to have your lovely baby (whom you think is an undiscovered genius) compared to a fish.

However in one respect my baby is certainly a fish. He is a piranha. He got teeth very early and with four teeth, two top and two bottom he launched himself on the world. He has tried to bite the childminder's nose off (this I blame on my husband who taught him the game), visitors have to be warned not to put a finger in his mouth and when you hug him he wraps his arms round your neck (ahh, sweet) and then savagely sinks his teeth into your shoulder. I have actual scars.

The first night after being at the childminder he slept a bit fitfully and I thought oh, cute, he missed us. Mmm, not so much. Yesterday a new upper tooth was revealed while its twin lurks on the other side, its white outline clearly visible, ready to pop out any minute. Soon he will have 4 teeth on top and two on the bottom.

I have to take my hat off to the amber teething anklet and necklace he wears in that we haven't used Bonjela since we got it (except one day when we left it off - fools!), so at least the teething process is going smoothly.

I need some sort of body armour for protection. Meanwhile I am offering crunchy apples and cucumbers so he has something to bite that isn't us.

I have warned him: don't push your luck. He may have almost 6 teeth now.
But I have 27.