Father's Day



My life as a fishing float

Well I have just experienced my first ever Father’s Day, and jolly good it was too. In time honoured tradition I wore a t-shirt with “I’m the Daddy” writ large upon it, whilst Marty wore a top with “My Daddy rocks” scrawled across it for the world to read. Armoured with such announcements we spent the day forlornly looking for mushrooms and then far more successfully swimming in the local baths.



This was the first time I’d ever been to the local pool but I suspect it will now become a regular Sunday afternoon fixture as Marty seemed to really enjoy himself, despite the fact that he was wearing a bright blue suit stuffed full of polystyrene that made him look like a fishing float with red hair. I’m not too sure of this ‘float suit’ from a safety point of view as I got the impression it could just as easily float him upside down as the right way up but we survived intact regardless.



So what else has been happening? Well Marty has pretty muched doubled in size over the last 4 months and, judging by the amount of drool he secretes every minute of the day, most of this gain has been taken up by enormous great saliva glands that must now occupy at least 40% of his total body weight. If you pick him up for more than 10 minutes you have to wring out your shirt afterwards and we can’t go anywhere without a collection of absorbent cloths to soak up the trails of slobber that he leaves behind him. It’s like living with a bloody great snail.



The other bizarre aspect of babies is the effect altitude has on them; they cry, you pick them up and they stop. You sit down with them and they start crying again! Nothing but nothing has changed other than their height above the ground.

Spot the difference

With this in mind my first theory was that babies have an inbuilt altitude sensor that stops them crying whenever they exceed an altitude of 5ft. Then I remembered a long haul flight where the kid in the seat behind me cried for a solid eight hours despite the plane maintaining a steady 35,000 ft. Then I remembered that that was a pressurised cabin and that he’d have probably stopped crying if I’d just opened a window... and there was a point in the flight where I was sorely tempted to do just that.