More Baby Led Weaning

Cute AND Clever? Must take after his mum!

One of the best things we ever did with Marty was “baby led weaning”, whereby you feed your little one proper food and let them manage the process themselves. 

There were a number of reasons why we thought this approach would be a good idea. Firstly it was cheaper and easier than buying or making your own mush. Secondly, who in their right minds would voluntarily eat said mush? Surely, if you want your child to have a sound and sensible approach to food, it makes sense to feed them something that you’d at least consider eating yourself? Thirdly, letting them feed themselves rather than subjecting them to a ‘force feeding’ regime seemed eminently sensible, not only would it increase manual dexterity at an early age but it would also let them decide how much they wanted to eat by listening to their own bodies rather than demolishing a jar of pureed ‘God-knows-what’ because ‘mummy bought it, so you’d better eat it’. Finally, letting Marty sit at the table and join us for dinner was just a hell of a lot easier and more pleasant for all concerned.

We got a surprising amount of negativity when we decided on this route. The health visitor felt that Marty might not get enough to eat if he just fed himself and stopped when he liked. We suggested she take a look at the herds of obese people waddling through town and ask herself if the current approach to food seemed to be working.

Other people took exactly the opposite stance and warned us that they’d seen this approach in action and that our child would get fat and eat rubbish. Bearing in mind that we weren’t giving Marty a debit card and freedom to roam around the local supermarket it seemed unlikely that he’d eat rubbish unless we actually gave it to him, but yes maybe you do need to state the obvious caveats to a life of ‘baby led weaning’, namely that you eat a healthy and balanced diet yourself – and no that does not mean a burger in one hand and a coke in the other – and that it is only ‘baby led’, you’re still the adult, so you don’t have to follow; I dare say that – if left to his own devices - Marty would love to gorge himself on chocolate coated poppadoms, smothered in strawberry jelly and topped with treacle sponge cake... but that doesn’t mean he’s going to.

The final warning came from my mum and I suspect it’s impossible to embark on a life of baby led weaning without these words of ancient wisdom ringing in your ears, “He can’t eat proper food! He’ll choke on something and die!” I’ve no idea where this wisdom arose from. Yes, babies might look a bit awkward when feeding themselves and they may well occasionally choke but this is natural, so much so that the gag reflex in a six month old baby is highly developed and very close to the front of the mouth. You still need to make sure they’re sat upright and never left on their own when they’re eating, but that aside it seems perfectly safe – we didn’t have a single problem.

Marty has now turned two and we seem to be seeing a number of huge advantages from BLW that we’d never been told about, all revolving around his dexterity.

He can now eat yoghurt and jelly from a pot, with a spoon, then turn and have a drink from an ordinary cup.. and barely spill a drop! Ok, you wouldn’t want to hug him afterwards whilst wearing your best Armani suit but there was a time when he just looked like a small, animated, mound of yoghurt by the time he’d finished eating. Those days are definitely behind us and the advanced dexterity seems to have affected things you wouldn’t generally associate with eating; he learnt to jump off the ground – clear off the ground – within a few weeks of his 1^st birthday. He already skips down the road. He’s a demon on a scooter. He can put bottle lids back on and take them off. He’s just starting to brush his teeth in a fashion that might actually prevent tooth decay – he was just sucking off the toothpaste.

Ok, it might all just be a coincidence that he’s quite advanced in all these areas but they all share a link in that they require, brain, eye and body coordination and that’s exactly what Baby Led Weaning promotes. All in all I'd very much recommend it.

The Terrible Two's

Light blue touch paper and step well back.

“The terrible two’s” is a bit of a misnomer but, to be fair, the more accurate “The Terrible 18 months until God knows when” is nowhere near as catchy.

Sadly, whilst Marty might have been a little slow learning to crawl and walk, he was right there on the button when it came to the terrible two’s. I don’t know how he learnt it but as he turned 18 months he suddenly realised a wonderful truth: “If I cry, they will come!”, followed by “If I cry really hard I may even get my own way.. well maybe not but it’s worth trying anyway.” By all accounts they can keep this up for quite a number of years in fact, if the House of Commons is anything to go by, some can keep it up well into their dotage.

Apparently this has nothing to do with your child suddenly deciding to become a truculent little bugger because he or she thinks it will wind you up - although it’s hard not to come to that conclusion sometimes - but everything to do with their brain developing to a stage where an idea of ‘self’ emerges. Until that stage a baby couldn’t readily discern between themselves and their surroundings; they ask their arm to move and it moves, they ask their parents to move and they move, they ask the sky to move and the clouds pass by. As a result they assume they are all the same; they are at one with the world and the world is at one with them. Alas, this illusion only persists if you resort to class A drugs, for the rest of us you have to give up on this conclusion and come to an idea of ‘self’.

Of course there is a lot to be said for a sense of self but it does first insist on you giving up control of a lot of things. Marty is slowly learning this with planes; it doesn’t matter how much he screams and cries, planes only show up in the skies above Lincolnshire as and when they want to. Things are proving less straightforward with his parents.

The problem is that he’s being forced to give up on the idea of being able to control everything in life and as a result he’s really fighting to control something. The latest incarnation of this frustration is his refusal to walk anywhere if you are holding on to his reins.

If I’m in the right mood, i.e. it’s not 4am, I find these little temper tantrums quite amusing, although Marty is still only dallying with tantrums in that he is yet to throw himself to the floor of the local supermarket and scream and shout whilst pounding the floor with his arms and legs. I dare say this will happen in the next week or so and I’ll have to smile that dangerous smile at the passing shoppers as they give that look that says “Can’t you control your kid?” To which the answer is of course is “Yes. So one more word and I’ll let him loose on you!”

Of course there are many upsides to this stage in your child’s life in that both of you are going to improve your negotiating skills enormously, which is really what it’s all about; Marty wants total control, I’m happy to give him some - This article at safekids.co.uk covers it all quite nicely.

On a slightly different point I read a while back that at the age of two a child finally becomes more intelligent than a dog. I have a few issues with this statement but the biggest one is that the author cannot ever have met my dog – we have moss growing in the garden that could run intellectual rings around our dog, and trust me, it’s not even smart moss!

Parenthood: The things they never told you!

As a new parent there are many things you may run out of from time to time - sleep, nappies and patience, to name but a few - but the one thing I can guarantee that you’ll never run short of is advice.

From the moment you declare to the world that a baby is on the way – and when to tell people that is often the first bit of advice you’ll get – everyone and his mate will be queuing up to offer words of wisdom.

Of course this isn’t a bad thing. Yes, 90% of the advice can be filed away under the heading “Statements of the bleeding obvious”, much can be politely ignored and some is just downright batty but in the mix are some true gems that make you feel grateful for having a close family and fine friends.

One thing I’ve noticed though is just how much of this advice seems to be geared towards making parenthood convenient. A classic example is:

“Oh don’t sleep with your baby! They’ll want you to always sleep with them!”

Of course they will, after all it’s very comforting to all concerned and is what we’d all be doing if we were living a more natural life. After all, this idea of everyone sleeping in separate rooms is astonishingly recent and, whilst having your own space is all very nice, the first thing most of us do when we leave home is to hunt down someone willing to share a bed with us.

Attachment Parenting is the ‘new thing’ to help address this slightly perverse view of baby rearing and, like most new ideas, is just taking us back to how we used to behave before work, 60’s pseudo science and Victorian morality arrived to fuck things up.

I can’t say we’ve fully embraced attachment parenting. Not because I don’t agree with it but because I’m not sure my back would be up to the job... although the fact that it seems to have more than a hint of the bobble hat brigade about it is also a bit off putting – why is it that so many people with good ideas feel the need to spoil it all by wearing daft head gear and drinking Yak’s milk?

Anyway, this blog wasn’t supposed to be about the advice you get, it was supposed to cover the advice that doesn’t rear its head above the carry cot.

So far I have come across two very important points that I wish I’d known about before Marty arrived.

The first is floorboards! Do yours creak? If so, sort them out before baby arrives, especially those in the proposed nursery. I singularly failed to do this and I very much regret that fact. Ours creak like crazy things and as a result getting Marty to sleep and then getting out of the bedroom afterwards is like a scene out of an Indiana Jones film. If the floor creaks he’s going to wake up again so I have to mark my start position, take 4 paces to the left, 3 steps forward, two to the right.... I have yet to be chased out of the room by an enormous boulder but I have also yet to get out of the room first time without Marty waking up.

Another thing that no one mentioned was glasses. Do you wear them? Did you invest in gloriously expensive ones? Oh dear!

Here is a simple test to see if your glasses are suitable for parenthood. Pick them up in both hands by the bits that go over your ears. Now, whilst holding on tight, stretch your arms out wide. Now throw the glasses on the floor and giggle in delight. Now pick them up in your fist and hurl them across the room whilst shouting ‘Daggies!’. Repeat until the guy in the opticians notices what you’re doing.

I only need glasses for reading so I have taken to buying a box of them every few months from Poundland. In our house they have the life expectancy of an asthmatic Mayfly but they are wondrously cheap and provide Marty with some exercise.

Words

In conference

By all accounts words didn’t come easy to F.R. David. Sadly, this didn’t stop him writing one of the most annoying pop songs of the ‘80’s, a song which pops into my head every time someone mentions ‘words’... which at the moment is surprisingly often as words are currently dominating Marty’s life!

The rate at which his vocabulary is growing is frankly astonishing. Every day he seems to add at least three or four more words to his repertoire. I’ll grant you that they’re not the largest of words - ‘repertoire’ doesn’t feature for a starters - but these days virtually everything you say around him comes back seconds later at a higher pitch.

Of course his enunciation still leaves something to be desired and it does take a degree of imagination to translate his words - which is often helped by the fact that he’s stabbing a finger at whatever he’s talking about. The biggest barrier to translation is that he still struggles with certain letters of the alphabet, mainly the letter ‘P’. So we have ‘Tigger’, his little pink mate ‘Tiglet’ and their bear buddy who, according to Marty, is called ‘Mmmn’. Meanwhile, the word ‘Bear’ can be either a soft fruit or an animal that defecates in dense foliage – allegedly – and the sky above Lincolnshire is full of ‘banes’.

The oddest of all though is his word for Snowman, which is something along the lines of ‘Bow-bar”. Go figure!

As you might have gathered I’m rather proud of all this so it was with some dread that we all went to a kiddies birthday party attended by, amongst others, his nemesis. This is a lovely little girl who is about 5 months younger than Marty and is light years ahead of him; when he could barely sit up she was crawling, when Marty had learnt to crawl, she was walking, when Marty was walking, she was doing hand stands in the corner of the room....

So I entered the party fully expecting Marty to be running around the room, stabbing at the wallpaper and screaming ‘Tiglet’ whilst this young lady sat down at her high chair, turned to her mother and said “Mother dearest, could you possibly pass me some cutlery, I have an urge to dissect this pomegranate.”

But not a bit of it! If anything Marty has a better vocab! I was well impressed.

There is a downside to all this though, words after all have power. Marty should by now be fast asleep but as I write I can hear a tiny, mournful voice echoing from his room, “Tigger? w'are you? Daggy? w'are you?” The temptation to race into his room and cuddle him is almost overwhelming, but I suspect the clever little bugger knows that J

Moving in to his own room

Marty's Nursery Mural

When Leanne was 6 months pregnant she suggested that I start the process of transforming the spare room into a nursery for our forthcoming baby. Maths has never been my strong point but even I could figure out that we had at least 3 months to sort this out. We also didn’t know if we were going to be blessed with a boy or a girl, an essential piece of information when it comes to decorating themes. Reluctantly Leanne relented and we decided to wait until the baby had arrived, after all it was only going to take a couple of days, maybe a week at most, to convert the bedroom.

Marty duly arrived and settled into our bedroom. This was fine as he took up little space and we all felt happier sleeping close together. Alas, there was a rather large fly in our otherwise blissful family ointment, a fly that started buzzing annoyingly a few days after Marty moved in. And it was this; whilst Marty was a picture of happiness and delight during the day he cried a little a night, then he cried a little more, then he started to bawl, then scream and then, before you knew it, morning arrived.

I valiantly coped with this by moving to the spare room.

This was of course the ideal opportunity to start decorating the room and moving Marty in, and I would have done this it wasn’t for my wife and what, during my days in I.T., used to be referred to a ‘scope spread’. It turned out that whilst a nursery was good, a new downstairs bathroom and shower would be great... and whilst I’m at it why not insulate and lay a wooden floor in the utility room? And, come to think of it, if I’m laying a wooden floor in that room why not re sand and varnish the floors throughout the house? And wouldn’t it be nice if the conservatory had some radiators.... As if this wasn’t bad enough I’d also told Haynes Publishing that I’d write a manual for them! Oh yes, and I had to go to work!

To cut a long story short, this weekend I finished the mural on his wall - which on reflection was probably a tad ambitious bearing in mind I hadn’t painted in 10 years and had never attempted ‘art’ with vinyl matt emulsion before. With that done it was just a matter of plumping up the pillows in his cot, arranging Tigger and his soft, cuddly, minions on the floor and inviting Marty in to cut the ribbon whilst daddy drank the champagne.

And so yesterday was his first night in his own room! Much to my surprise he seems to have taken to the idea straight away, which would suggest that he was finding us as hard to sleep with as we were finding him. We’ve put in a night light and a small radio, set very quietly to classic FM, and the combination seems to lull him quietly to sleep with little or no bother at all.

So what’s the most surprising thing about all this? Well Marty is still only 21 months old. At one point I thought that he’d have buggered off to university before I’d finished his nursery

Death Wish

incognito

It’s an astonishing fact that there are now about seven billion people inhabiting this planet. That’s seven thousand million of us! And what’s the most amazing thing about this – other than that there are an awful lot of people having an awful lot of sex? Well, it’s that every single, solitary, one of those seven billion people had, from the age of next to nothing until at least 4, an uncontrollable urge to try to kill themselves! How on earth did we reach seven billion when every single kid on the planet seems to have been born with a death wish? 

Take young Marty as an example. In the early days, when an inability to move much tended to cramp his style, he would contentedly dice with death with mundane acts such as choking on his own vomit or trying to eat his pillow. However, once he’d learnt to move, a world of opportunities for an early demise where his to grab... or suck, or poke, or eat.

Put him in a room filled with soft, cuddly, perfectly safe toys and he would, within minutes, be throwing Tigger and his sidekicks aside and making a bee-line for the electrical socket in the corner of the room where, if left to his own devices, he would spend the morning trying to get the cover off so he could electrocute himself in spectacular fashion.

From the very moment he learnt to walk it became clear that his sole aim was to go as fast as he possibly could. This achieved, stage two was to go as fast as he possibly could into wholly immovable objects. Not a week has gone by where he has not been sporting at least one enormous bruise.

We recently returned from our summer holiday – We went to Wales so treat the word ‘summer’ in its loosest possible sense. On the very first day Marty managed to almost knock himself out by running head long into the dining table, a collision that resulted in him sporting an enormous black eye for the whole of the holiday.

Not content with concussion he diligently went to work on the gas fire – which, despite being a ‘family’ caravan home, didn’t actually have a fire guard. We spent hours building elaborate barricades around the fire and Marty spent hours trying to thwart our defences. On the last day of our stay, whilst his parents were busy packing everything into the car, he finally broke through and achieved his holiday goal – he got burnt!

As I write I can hear the battle going on between him and his mum; she wants to cook dinner, he wants to climb into the oven! I tell you now, if we all followed young Marty’s guide to health and safety there should be no more than about 20 of us on this planet... and 9 of those would be in hospital at any one time.

Baby development

Marty 5 months ago

Well it’s all go, go, go on the developmental front at the moment. 

The most obvious one is that Marty has now learnt to cry very loudly and is intent on practising at every opportunity – usually at, or around, bed time. He’s always been able to cry but just recently he’s managed to take it up a dozen or so octaves and increase the decibel output to something between Concorde racing down a runway and a Space shuttle launch.

Of course the advice you get from everyone is that you should just ignore it. We try, honestly we do, but it’s like trying to ignore the fact that someone is attempting to saw your leg off. I think soundproofing is the answer, that or we locate Marty’s bedroom in a concrete bunker several miles from the main house.

The walking has come on a treat. He now races around on two feet, only stopping to jump up and down, turn around, and then crash head long into some immovable object. He’s got so many bruises on his forehead and shins that I was thinking of buying some Arnica oil for them all. Sadly, they don’t sell it in ¼ ton pots, which is the bare minimum we’d need. Ideally we’d just hold him by his toes at bedtime and dip him in it.

The most obvious gains recently have been with his talking. He now understands pretty much everything you say to him. There is however, one important caveat to that statement: he now understands pretty much everything you say to him... when he wants to! If you say something he doesn’t like, just as “Bed” or “No! Marty” he suddenly claims Lithuanian descent and can’t understand a word your saying - which he expresses with a quizzical look and the word “Ay?”

Marty today

He seems frustratingly close to the basics of conversation, he’ll say “I love Mummy” – with enough prompting. He can say “Bye, bye” and “Hiya” and wave at the appropriate moment. For some reason he knows the word “Pineapple” but he’s still reluctant to say the word “Ball”. This is despite the fact that he has about 200 balls in his room and has barely seen a Pineapple. Go figure that one!

Sadly, he’s still not able to put anything into a sentence. I keep feeling he’s almost there but I suspect we’re really months and months away.

One of the weirdest things is just how much he’s changed in the last few months. I was looking at some photos from 5 months ago and you’d struggle to think it was the same child; his hair has changed from red to blonde, his face shape has altered, even his nose seems a different shape now!

I was wondering why we hadn't noticed all these changes and then I remembered that we usually only see him through a thick covering of yoghurt.

Learning to Walk

And he's off..

The two major baby milestones are learning to walk and learning to talk. Sadly, Marty still says very little other than “Ikea” or “Aky Arr” – translation seems to depend on how keen you are on flat packed furniture stores. However, he has finally learnt to walk!

It’s been a long old slog though. I knew that it takes a baby, on average, about a year to learn to walk. What I hadn’t realised is quite how long a year can seem. A foal is up and about within minutes, yet it took Marty months just to learn to sit upright! Frankly I found it hard to regard this as a genuine success.

“Oh look he’s sitting up all by himself!”

“And?”

“It’s a major breakthrough!”

“Eh? He’s sitting. Even politicians can manage that! What do you want me to do, ring Mensa?”

Marty seemed to enjoy it though, so much so that it was many more months before he felt the urge to move.

How he went about his first ventures into motion was largely determined by our flooring; downstairs all the rooms have either tiles or varnished wood flooring. This is great when Marty is throwing yoghurt around the room but it’s a far more difficult surface to learn to walk on, and far less forgiving when things go amiss.

Marty, however, soon realised that if he lay flat on the floor in his full-body romper suit he could reach out and slowly but surely drag himself over to those toys out of reach. He seemed very pleased with this development and I must admit I was impressed with his grit and determination.

From a parental point of view it changed things a little. We had got used to the idea of being able to find our baby pretty much where we’d left him. With the development of the ‘drag’ this was no longer a given. Fortunately it was a slow and laborious form of locomotion, so if he wasn’t exactly where we’d left him, he was still pretty close to exactly where we’d left him.

We’d expected that the ‘drag’ would be a brief interlude en route to the ‘crawl’ but this was not to be. Again the flooring played a part here in that Marty attempted a full crawl quite early on but forgot to move his arms at the same time as pushing forward with his legs. The end result was an unforgiving nosedive into solid pine, a painful memory that seemed to put him off the whole idea for many months.

I hadn’t realised how far behind Marty was until we went to a party and he sat there looking bemused as his slightly younger compatriots crawled around him with lightening pace. To make matters worse the host had a home fitted with wall-to-wall carpeting, a surface wholly unsuited to the intricacies of the ‘drag’.

The shame and ignominy of being out performed by children that were months younger seemed to spur us all on. That very evening we spent 30 minutes practicing movement across the bedroom carpet and within a few weeks Marty had grasped the essentials of the crawl.

Of course this was just the incentive the competition needed to learn to walk. The very next party saw Marty crawling around the room whilst the opposition teetered about the place on two feet!

Marty seemed entirely unmoved by this development; crawling got him from A to B with all the alacrity required of a 1 year old who doesn’t even own a watch. What was more it made a lovely noise on wood flooring.

There was certainly something very endearing about being greeted by a grinning, giggling bundle of fun, slapping his hands as loudly as he could on the floor as he crawled across the room towards me. Once he’d reached me he’d grab my trousers and use them to climb to his feet. Once there he’d give me a big satisfied smile and lift up his arms to be picked up. I guess there are better ways of being welcomed home but I’m struggling to think of any.

I felt I fully understood Marty’s reluctance to walk as it seemed very like my attitude to snowboarding; I’d learnt to ski, finally got good at it, and now everyone is saying I need to start all over again and learn to snowboard! Why? I like skiing, I like going down black runs as fast as I can. Why do I want to risk pain and injury trying to get down a mountain on an ironing board?

Whatever the reason, Marty reached the grand old age of 14 months before deciding that bipedalism was the future. Sadly the adage “You need to learn to walk before you run” was entirely lost on him. As far as Marty was concerned the only advantage of walking was the extra speed it offered, and so from the very beginning he combined walking with jogging and jumping.

This is all very impressive and we are immensely proud of him. The only downside is that he still tries to overcome a loss of balance by running faster. Sometimes this works, usually it doesn’t. The end result is that barely a day’s gone by when he hasn’t been sporting at least one bruise on his forehead.

The day my child exploded

Marty prepares for his world famous
David Dickinson impression

Over the years I have suffered from tennis elbow and housemaid’s knee – or heroic plumber's knee as I prefer to call it. However, I am currently suffering from ‘Dad’s arm’, am extremely painful condition brought on by holding a small child at arm’s length for a protracted period of time. To be honest it’s all my own fault, a classic example of naivety followed by panic.... And here is the tale.

Once upon a time a little boy was racing across the bedroom carpet on his hands and knees, giggling away, as his idiotic father pretended to chase him. This was all prior to bedtime so his father shouldn’t have been getting him all excited in the first place. He ought also to have remembered that said child had eaten only an hour before. However, they were both thoroughly enjoying themselves, blissfully unaware of the disaster that was to befall them.

Let’s take a quick break at this point to discuss some of the fundamentals of parenthood. Yes, it is marvellous and a young child is a delicious bundle of wonder, joy and delight. However, basic biology cannot be denied and the golden rule of ‘What goes in must come out’ is rigorously applied.

Regardless of the number of roses you use to tint your glasses,  dealing with number two’s is not a pleasure; it’s unpleasant when you’re expecting it, it can be damn right terrifying when you’re not.

So, back to the unfolding disaster.... As Marty crawled between my legs I grabbed the end of his trousers and allowed him to wriggle free, listening to his squeals of excitement as he did so.

“These are a bit heavy” I thought, as Marty made his break for freedom... And then two things hit me; first the smell and then the realisation that Marty was leaving brown marks on the carpet with every crawl.

Fortunately Marty doesn’t understand Saxon vernacular of the four letter variety, which is just as well as he ears might have fallen off. I grabbed him before he could destroy any more of the carpet, held him at arms length - for fairly obvious reasons - and screamed “LEANNE!!!!” Sadly my good wife was serenely gardening at the time and didn’t hear that scream or any of the ones that followed. Marty was becoming distressed at the colour of his father’s face and my arms were beginning to give way.

Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, sense reared its head. I raced into the bathroom and with little or no ceremony dumped Marty in the bath and turned the shower on him, praying to God that the household plumbing was up to the job.

Being a typical child, finding himself covered from head to toe in crap didn't bother him one little bit. However, the moment you try to shower him down with warm water he starts bawling his head off as if he's about to melt!. Fortunately Marty's screams seemed to reach across the garden with little difficulty at all and sure enough Leanne wandered into view.

I couldn’t believe how unmoved she was by it all. I believe she actually used the sentence “Oh, come on! It’s only poo!”.

Only poo? I could be the parent of a small child for the next 100 years and I’d never reach the stage were the words ‘only’ and ‘poo’ comfortably fitted into a single sentence.

Anyway, the panic was finally over; clothes were removed and thrown in the bin, baths were sluiced down, carpets were cleaned and Marty was once more racing around the room as if nothing had ever happened. It seems I was the only casualty; I can barely lift a pint my arms hurt so much!

Baby Talk

Lost for Words

I have come to the conclusion that the age at which a child is deemed to be able to ‘talk’ has little to do with the intellect of the child and an enormous amount to do with the imagination of the parents. You hear it all the time:

Mother: “Oh listen to the dear, he just said ‘Terrapin’. He’s very advanced you know!”

No he isn’t, he just said ‘Terrr Hin’. He's got wind! Get a grip woman!

In the sense that he rarely shuts up from the moment he wakes up to the very second he drops off to sleep, Marty can be said to ‘talk’. But is he talking English? Well if he is I fear he must be Scottish because what comes out of his mouth makes little or no sense to me at all.

His favourite word for many months was “G”, and to be honest it’s still a popular choice. I was rather hoping that this would be the start of a systematic approach to language and that he’d slowly acquire more and more letters of the alphabet until one day I’d arise to be greeted by my lovely child asking “If papa would care for a cup of tea and a digestive?”. Sadly, this was not to be. Instead Marty has opted to articulate a series of seemingly random words and phrases and the trick as a parent is to try to figure out quite what it all means – if it means anything at all.

“Aggy Ann” is a popular phrase and one that took us a while to solve. It turned out that the young lad was merely displaying all the diplomatic tact of his father, in that he waited until Mother’s Day before he started shouting it out as loud as he could, a look of profound concentration on his face as he did so. This of course was fine, right up to the point we realised that he was trying to call his mother “Aunty Leanne”, a phrase he’d picked up from his 2 and 3 year old friends who compete to see how loudly they can scream this the moment Leanne enters their home. Needless to say his mother was less than impressed, not that this has dissuaded him one iota.

“Ikea” is another favourite but we haven’t a clue what it means. I grant you that he might be talking about the famous store of that name but I think the odds of a 1 year old child taking a keen interest in flat-pack furniture is pretty slim.

To be honest I think GCHQ would have a hard time deciphering most of Marty’s remarks. Often the only clue you get is when he tries to sing the lyrics to songs – you might not recognise the words but you do recognise the tune. This favourite song sadly belongs to that vile, purple dinosaur “Barney” - a loathsome creature with a horribly catchy tune. 

It’s Leanne’s fault that Marty latched onto the song “I love you, you love me...” as she spent most of the journey from Kent to Lincolnshire singing it too him. Of course Marty has played around with the lyrics a bit: “I ya.... G, Eee ya.... G, ayy, eee, aya, aya... G.” 

Elton John eat your heart out!

But what about ‘Mummy’ and ’Daddy’? Of course these are the ones you really listen out for and he does use them quite regularly - which is hardly surprising since we’ve been repeating them too him, ad nauseam, for months now. Sadly he doesn’t seem to associate anyone or anything with the words yet – He’ll often shout out ‘Daddy’ when I come home from work but just as I turn to him, delighted in having been recognised, he’ll turn to the fridge and greet that as ‘Daddy’.

Oddly enough, whilst his enunciation might be minimal, his understanding of what you say to him is pretty impressive. When he was just 6 months old you could ask him “Where’s Tigger” and he’d immediately start looking around for his toy, pick it up and wave it at you in triumph. I found this as worrying as I found it astonishing and have tried my level best to moderate my language around him ever since... with limited success.

I’ll just die if his first real, clear, unequivocal word is “Bugger!”

Baby Led Weaning

The wonder of Spag-Bol

There was a time when babies just started eating pretty much what they wanted, when they felt like it. Sadly science and society got involved during the Victorian era and all sorts of odd notions have sprang up ever since, notions that seem to be based on little or no common sense. The most dramatic result of this was babies eating mushy nonsense as early as 4 months old, a time when their digestive system was still geared to milk but when the baby food manufacturers felt that kids needed to start pulling their weight economically and consuming pureed pear for the sake of their shareholders. To be honest I wouldn’t mind all this profiteering and scientific mumbo jumbo if the end result was well nourished adults with a sound relationship with food but, sadly, that has not been the outcome.

Fortunately there is an alternative – baby led weaning. This is really just a common sense approach that works on the fact that for millennia babies have known when they want to make the change from milk to solids and are more than capable of achieving this with little more than a little guidance and care from their parents.

For me the advantages seemed clear. Firstly, you don’t have to spend months force feeding the poor little buggers, a process that is as distressing for the parents as it is for the baby. With baby led weaning you just start off giving them food they can pick up easily and letting them get on with it. Yes, most of the food ends up on the floor but they have fun, improve their dexterity and learn to enjoy their food.

Secondly, you’re feeding them proper food. I can’t imagine that anyone in their right mind would opt for baby food. It’s not so much the ingredients as the fact that they seem to feel the need to convert everything into a mush. I like steak and chips but not once the chef’s ran it through the blender and poured it onto my plate!

Thirdly, was the idea of starting my kid off on processed food from day one. Ok, most of the manufacturers these days try to be at least vaguely responsible with their ingredients but you’re still never absolutely sure what your child is eating. Just look at Cow & Gate’s “4 month mango surprise”. The surprise turns out to be that it’s mainly apple!

Ok, there’s nothing wrong with apple but at the end of the day you are putting the health of your baby into the hands of large multinational companies that put profit ahead of everything else. For example, many manufacturers make food specifically aimed at 4 month old children despite all the evidence showing that this is too young and can be bad for the child’s health. Sadly, because it’s also bad for profits, this scientific evidence is routinely ignored!

Baby led weaning seems much more natural. Marty largely eats the same food as we do – which has improved our diet as well as his. He learns to handle solids when he’s at an age when his gag reflex is much closer to the front of his mouth and, because he’s in control, he learns at the very beginning to listen to his own body and stop eating when he feels full and not when the jar or the bowl is empty.

As a fortunate aside it’s also a much cheaper approach to feeding your baby... unless you have an expensive shag pile carpet in your dining room, in which case it’s going to cost you a fortune. We have wooden floors and a dog, which has made it a wholly painless experience.

If you want to find out more about it there are umpteen websites, just enter “baby led weaning” into Google. Alternatively, we bought the book cunningly entitled “Baby-led weaning” by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett.

Teething

Teething gets the blame for a lot of things in our house. Marty won’t settle at night? Teething! Marty’s developed a rash! Teething. Searching for a cause of the London riots or pondering the rise of the Arab spring? Here's a thought...Teething!

My mum recently kicked a lot of this into touch. Not because she has a finger on the pulse of Tottenham ‘youf’ or a deep understanding of the political picture in the Middle East but because she was privy to a surprising bit of genetics; no member of our family has ever teethed until they were close to one year old!

So there you go! Marty has been crying because he’s seven months old and wants the world to know it. This rash is an allergy to bubble bath. The London riots were a result of too many misspent youths being separated from a £100 pair of Nikes by nothing more than a pane of glass and an ASBO. And the Arab spring was a caused by people waking up to the idea that having a say in the running of your own country was probably not a bad thing after all.

And just when we got our heads around this what happened? Yup, Marty sprouted two teeth!

I can’t claim to be able to remember my own experience of teething but I’d have thought that once the teeth had broken through the gums the pain would abate. Alas, judging by the decibel count, Marty seemingly disagrees on this point! He’s been crying the house down this evening despite two, clear, pearly white dentures.

I suppose they could just be the vanguard and umpteen teeth are even now forcing their way through his tiny gums. Certainly his heartfelt sobs would suggest that something is amiss in the dentile arena; although so many things are changing right now it would be a brave parent who’d pin it all down to one event.

Anyway, it looks like my mum’s theory has gone the way of ‘Cold Fusion’; a laudable dream crushed by the fierce heat of reality.

Cot Death

On me back, John!

As the birth of young Marty loomed Leanne began preparing the surveillance apparatus we would require to ensure Marty’s survival in the rough and tumble world of the nursery. Apparently we would need a movement monitor, definitely a sound monitor and most probably a CCTV video camera. I dare say that, if left to her own devices, Leanne would have added armed guards, watch towers, an air ambulance on permanent stand-by and a dedicated hot line to the local A&E.

And why were we doing all of this? Because of ‘Cot death’, or ‘SIDS’ as they prefer to call it these days.

To be honest this is something I’d rather just ignore and pretend isn’t real but the sad reality is that a small number of babies die each year and no one really knows why. Rather than just say “Sorry we really haven’t the foggiest idea” doctors feel obliged to give the unknown a name “Sudden infant death syndrome”, for example, and then spend decades coming out with conflicting advice on what to do and not do about something that they may, or may not, know anything about. Of course the media then get in on the act, confusing and misrepresenting facts as the feeling takes them, until every parent in the land is thoroughly terrified.

We really did try to fight the paranoia that this all brings but we still ended up with a motion monitor that, quite literally, listens to every breath young Marty breathes and flashes up a cheerfully green light every time he makes the slightest of movements.

All the talk around SIDS really annoys me. You hear people talking about it as if they know what it is. They don’t! By definition it’s the death of an infant by an unknown means. Even giving it a name is misleading in that it implies that there is a single condition with a single cause, which is almost certainly not the case. Another problem is that most of the advice comes from ‘observation’ rather than experimentation; they observe that children sleeping on their backs don’t die from unknown causes as often as children sleeping on their front so the advice goes out that all children should now sleep on their backs.

At first sight this seems sane advice but it isn’t. For example, here’s another observation: “People with coughs are far more likely to die in a domestic fire.” This is a fact. So what do you do? Do you start taking cough medicine before you go to sleep at night? Do you fill your home with throat calming sprays and balms? No doubt this is the advice the media would be giving us if armed with our little "fact". But they'd be wrong, not because our observation is wrong, it isn't, but because what we observed is not a cause, it's an effect. The truth is that people who cough all the time invariably do so because they smoke and wandering around your home with a naked flame grasped in your hand increases the odds of you starting a lethal fire. The sane advice is to stop smoking but that wasn’t what was observed so that’s not the advice given.

According to the statisticians, the chances of your baby dying of SIDS is far greater if you are a young mother who is skint and hasn’t got a qualification to her name. This is a statistical fact and is utter bollocks because being poor and not having a GCSE (or whatever they call them these days) does not increase the risk of SIDS. However, bringing your child up in a small, unhealthy, damp ridden house probably does, and guess who lives in such places? Yup, young, poor mothers with little education.

Of course some people will point out that when New Zealand started asking all mothers to put their babies to sleep on their backs, the incidence of SIDS went down. This is true, but then it was going down before they started to put babies on their backs.

A comparison comes from the plumbing & heating industry. When ‘Corgi’ came into force to regulate gas engineers, deaths due to faulty gas appliances dropped dramatically; ergo Corgi saved lives! Well you might be right, but you probably aren’t. Corgi came into being at much the same time as room-sealed boilers hit the market. These are 1000’s of times safer than the old boilers and it is almost certainly this innovation that caused the dramatic drop off in gas related deaths.

The same may well be true with putting babies on their backs, in that poor mattresses might have been the root cause and changes in the design and the materials they were made from meant that the incidence of SIDS was already dropping.

Finally, the problem with putting babies on their backs is that they really don’t like it. They sleep less and they don’t sleep as well. As a result early development is slower when compared to babies who sleep on their fronts. So how did the medical fraternity choose to tackle this fact? Well the choice was to tell the majority of parents who listened to your advice that their child was now developmentally retarded... or just redefine normal! So that's what they did; “normal” development is now slower than it used to be and what were once regarded as “normal” babies sleeping on their fronts are now considered “advanced”! I kid you not!

So at the end of all this we’re left knowing as little about what to do and not to do as we were when we started. And why am I wittering on about all of this? Well, last week, at 4am the monitoring device keeping an eye on Marty went off and the alarm started screaming out through the night.

Leanne leapt out of bed and then spent what seemed like half an hour trying to turn the bedroom light on - although it was probably no more than 10 seconds. Having done that she stood frozen at the foot of the cot whilst I yelled “Poke him! Poke him!”

Fortunately, before we were both wholly over run with panic, Marty farted, said “Ooooh” and kicked a leg out and from this we figured that he was probably still alive.

What had happened was that he’d managed to work his way to the very top of the cot and then turn himself around so he was sideways to the cot itself. This meant he was no longer lying on the monitor and so the alarm sounded.

When I asked Leanne why she froze she replied that she hadn’t froze, she was merely trying to figure out how to check that he wasn’t dead without waking him up!

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.

Car Booting for baby



I am cute. You will do my bidding



I must admit that when people said that having a baby would change my life I never realised they were referring to car boot sales.

Before Marty’s arrival I’d never been a fan of ‘car booting’. Wandering a field filled with al fresco tat struck me as an utter waste of time, the middle class equivalent of scouring the municipal tip; same garbage, higher prices.

However, I have now come to realise that, whilst there are still far too many people trying to off load the sort of stuff that any right thinking person would have consigned to the bin a long time ago, there is also a hard core of parents running what amounts to a ‘swap shop’. It’s brilliant!

It’s not that I don’t like buying new stuff but the fact is that they grow out of things so fast you’ve barely had time to get your new purchase out of the box before it’s redundant.

For example, we want something to keep Marty upright. He’s started sitting up now but he’s yet to develop anything remotely like a sense of balance, so he needs some sort of support. Well they do a rubber ring affair for just this eventuality and how much does it cost in the shops? £15! For a rubber ring! A rubber ring he’ll be able to fit in for about 3 weeks! So we’re off to the car boot sale to see if we can pick one up for a fiver.

It’s the same with shoes. A baby shoe can set you back a small fortune so we’re buying second hand. After all three month old babies are not renowned for their long distance treks so I think it’s safe to say that the shoes will be in decent shape.

Actually, when I think about it, why are we buying him shoes in the first place? Surely this is like buying your goldfish a bike? We might as well go the whole hog and buy him a set of hiking boots and a rucksack for all the good it will do him.

Aside from car boot sales what else has been happening? Well Marty can now giggle! He’s been able to ‘Gii’ and ‘Ooo’ and ‘Aah’ for a while now but he couldn’t manage the true, full on, ‘giggle’. Well now he can and I must say, it’s been worth the wait.

Changing times

Changing times

Well at 15 weeks Marty got his 15 minutes of fame, or at least 7 of them.

In the meantime, his mother got to be eloquent on the telly and I got to look and sound like a right numpty. I was going to post the links to this televisual experience but it would appear that the news teams have moved on and young Marty’s brief flirtation with fame is at an end.

So aside from getting to say “goo” to the nation what has been happening? Well not much to be frank.

Don’t babies develop slowly!

I’m not sure what I was expecting by 3 months. I was fairly certain my car was safe and that he wouldn’t be asking to borrow the keys any time soon but I did think he’d maybe be crawling by now and uttering the occasional word, but not a bit of it.

Just to check that we weren’t bringing up a dullard I went on-line to check for Autism and other such things. I'm not sure it was the best of ideas as the advice is hardly definitive and I was still left with "Hey, Up! He's not looking at me! I've been usurped by the curtains as a point of interest! Call the doctor!" 

I think we're alright though as, whilst he might have an unnautral affinity for the drapes, he is at least making lots of noise, and apparently that's a good thing. From what I read, if your baby makes no discernable voluntary noises within the first 12 months you either have an issue with autism.... or you need to get your hearing checked.

So, aside from my own paranoia, Marty is getting on fine, in fact he has made some major breakthroughs. Only last week he suddenly stopped waggling his arms and legs around in a wholly random fashion and settled down to very carefully stare at his hand.

You could see the soliloquy running through his head “Is this a hand which I see before me, the fingers waggling? Come, let me clutch thee!”

This lasted a good few minutes and since then he has been actively reaching out to grasp things, only stopping to stare at his digits and run through another Shakespearean monologue.

At the weekend I was sure he was going to be left handed as he was reaching for everything with his left hand. Just to throw my theory out of the window he’s now started reaching for things with his right hand. So at least he knows he’s got two, which can only be a good thing.

All is also improving on the fatherhood front. I have finally managed to get him into those suits which only come with buttons and few, if any, poppers. What’s more we managed this without the shedding of tears by either party. In fact we’ve got into quite a morning routine: I pick him up and let him have a good stretch. Then I lay him down on his changing mat and give him a few moments to stare at himself in the wardrobe mirror. Satisfied that he still exists I now open the nappy to see what the damage is, at which point Marty breaks into a huge grin and gurgles like a good ‘un during the entire nappy changing routine.

I guess it’s only right that he should enjoy people wiping his arse. There is after all only a very brief moment in life when all concerned get a genuine joy out of this.

The madness....

Being a parent is like moving into a new flat only to discover that your flat mate owns the entire collected works of “Black lace” and isn’t afraid to play them. In this instance it isn’t ‘Agadoo’ blaring out through the night. Oh no, it’s far, far worse... it’s “Baa, baa black sheep”... and what's more you can't pack your bags and find another flat!

Marty loves lying on the floor and looking up at his mobile as blue frogs and yellow monkeys slowly pass by, and I for one do not have a problem with this. Sadly, the utter bastards that make these mobiles can’t leave it at oddly coloured fabric creatures. Oh no! They have to go and add music. So, whilst Marty waves his arms and gurgles incoherently, his attentive parent is driven slowly up the wall by the vile hordes of the Fisher price orchestra and their reggae rendition of ‘Baa, baa bloody black sheep’  

What is it with nursery rhymes that makes them stick to the inside of your brain like congealed porridge? I’ve spent the last week getting on with my work, minding my own business, only to discover that I’ve been humming “We went to the animal fair...” to anyone who cared to listen.

I’ve got a theory that, whilst “Mummy” and “Daddy” might be the first words your child actually speaks, the impetus behind this urge to talk is the need to scream out:

“In the name of all that is holy, will you please, please, turn that bloody music off before I throttle you with my rattle.”

Mind you, I could be wrong. In fact it has to be said that Marty seems a little less than delighted when I turn the music off in an attempt to stop my brains running out through my ears.

I suspect that ear plugs might feature large in my future.... that or a padded cell.

Going green

It's not easy being green

One of my concerns when Marty arrived was how “green” we were going to be as parents. I just don’t like ‘disposable’ whether it’s razor blades or shopping bags; you use it a few times, throw it away, and it spends the next 1000 years in a land fill site. It might provide endless fascination for future archaeologists but it's astonishingly wasteful.

That said we now have a poo-machine in the family; a tiny creature cunningly designed by nature to defecate and urinate on an almost continuous basis. It is not unknown for me to change a nappy and have barely got the new one on before he’s farted for Britain and I’m fetching a replacement.

At the current rate Marty is going to need his own Landfill site before the year is out and sadly he is not alone; in the USA they go through 20 billion disposable diapers a year! Not only is that a very big number all by itself but it can take 500 years for a disposable nappy to degrade. 500 lots of 20 billion! That's almost as much as a bankers bonus! All in all, if we don't change our ways we're looking at our children growing up in a world of nappy mountains – the vast windswept 'Pampers' to the south, the rugged 'Huggies' range to the north.

But I do not want to spend the next 3 years – or how ever long this is going to last – knee deep in poo-plastered cotton towelling and living in a house that smells of week old urine.

So what do you do? Well, as Kermit said "It's not easy being green", whilst there are a number of ‘green’ nappies out there - most of which involve a washable outer covering and a disposable liner, some of which are even flushable or compostable - they are not cheap. Some just plainly cost a fortune, others aren't too bad but do involve a fairly large initial outlay and, when you’re as stony broke as we are, that’s a bit of a barrier.

Why is it that the leading manufacturers can’t produce a nappy that’s biodegradable and cheap? Surely making something out of a petroleum product is expensive and making it out of a recycled, degradable product is cheap?.... Obviously it isn’t but it certainly should be and I suspect it would be if the big manufacturers pulled their collective fingers out and actually took a proactive lead on these matters.

The other green area we’re going to be looking at over the coming months is food; do you buy baby food or do you make your own from organic foods? Fortunately we both like cooking so I think we’ll at least try the cook-your-own stuff.

On the organic front you only have to look at the amount of pesticides and heavy metals most of us now carry in our bodies to realise that it’s probably a good idea to buy organic when it comes to the little fella.

I dare say Jeremy Clarkson would disagree but then he’s become so mutated by petrol and pesticides that he now talks out of his arse, and apparently has done for some time!

Changes

Bathtime - 5 days

One of the things drummed into me as Marty’s birth approached was that you have to make sure you don’t miss a minute of it because it all goes by so fast and they change all the time.

To be honest I largely ignored this advice putting it down as overly romantic nonsense from dewy eyed parents. However, it has to be said that they have a point.

I was only thinking the other day that Marty hadn’t changed that much in the few short months he’d been with us. Then I came across a photo of him having a bath aged 5 days and another of him in the same bath aged 10 weeks and it has to be said that, either the bath has shrunk dramatically, or Marty has almost doubled in size. In fact compare the two photos and he’s changed almost out of recognition; he’s filled out, he’s changed colour, his mouth and eyes have changed shape, the list goes on.

I have heard tell that this is not unusual. Apparently when babies are born they are supposed to look very like their fathers. The idea behind this is that if dad recognises some of himself in the baby he’s more likely to hang around and go hunting on mother and babies behalf. Of course this is utter claptrap; mother is more than capable of hunting in ASDA on her own and if Marty was supposed to be a dead ringer for me he’d have had no hair and been born clasping a pint glass.



Bathtime - 10 weeks



But it does explain why babies seem to change so much in the first few months. Mind you, being squeezed out of a tube that is patently not large enough for the purpose is bound to have an effect on your looks. Maybe Marty’s current mien reflects the fact that he’s had time to ‘relax’ now that he’s not being squeezed from all sides?

Other changes have been equally subtle. When he first arrived he’d move but the movements were slight and, aside from his moro reflex, fairly slow. These days he moves around in his cot like a disco dancer who’s drank one crate of Red bull too many; his arms are waggling, his legs are pumping, he’s gurgling and gooing. Give him a gold medallion and a stick-on hairy chest and he could be mistaken for a Bee-Gee.

Vaccinations

At the grand old age of ten weeks it seemed that Marty had finally got over the throes of colic and that normal volume had been resumed. Yes, he still had a bit of wind, but no more than his dad and it didn’t seem to be causing any undue discomfort.

And so peace rained upon our household, the sun came out, the birds sang at the bottom of our garden and I began to think that this parenthood lark was a bit of a breeze.... and then Marty had his first course of injections.

These are designed to protect him against those diseases that once swept this country and which still kill and main across much of the world; diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, haemophilus influenza, Pneumococcal infection and meningitis.

Surprisingly enough there are people out there who seem to think that these are all just petty childhood diseases; they’re not and you must be a complete loon if you opt to not take these free nhs vaccinations.

So I was perfectly happy to see Marty protected. Sadly Marty didn’t share my enthusiasm.

In fairness to the little lad, the needle was about the length of his hand and there were two of them. Despite this he was still grinning toothlessly as the nurse approached and I think we were all a little surprised when he took the first injection quite calmly.... then his little chin started to shake, he turned bright red, his eyes closed and all hell broke loose. He was screaming the house down as the second needle plunged into his thigh but still managed to go up a few octaves and gain at least a dozen decibels. It took about 5 minutes before his heartfelt sobs gave way to sleepy murmurs and we took the opportunity to pack him back into the car and get him home.

I assumed that would be that but later that evening he developed a slight fever, bad enough to register on the thermometer and to cause him to start crying his little eyes out. Fortunately we’d been advised to buy some Calpol.

Apparently this used to be the wonder cure for all baby ill’s; not only did it stop them crying but it also sent them to sleep! Sadly, parents started over medicating and prams throughout the world became filled with semi comatose zombie babies. So much so, that these days the somnambulant side of Calpol has been removed. Shame really, but at least the pain killing element seems to work really well. We gave a ½ teaspoon to Marty and 15 minutes later calm had been restored and he was grinning at the world once more.

The only downside to Calpol is the name; I keep getting it mixed up with Calgon. I guess there’s no real danger in this, it just means that if Marty is still crying after his medication, we’ll know he’s free of limescale.