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.

Baby Weight

I didn’t realise how important the weight of a baby was, all I was interested in was the number of fingers and toes and other essential “bits”, how much they all weighed was largely an irrelevance. I mention this as we appear to have had a problem during the initial “weigh-in”.

When he first hit the scales Marty was 5lb and 13.5oz, which seemed surprisingly light for a fairly robust looking fellow. Mind you, at the time we had a total of 4 minutes parenting experience between the two of us so we just went with the flow; if the experts say he’s a light weight then who are we to argue?

Two days later and the midwife popped over to check us all out and weigh Marty again. This time he was 6lb 11oz. Apparently babies lose a little weight in the first few days -  judging by Marty, they achieve this by round the clock bowel movements – but our little one had gained almost an entire pound! There were a number of possible explanations; either the hospital scales were wrong, the midwife’s scales were wrong, or Leanne was producing ‘super-milk’’, milk of such sustaining power that young Marty would be 6ft 4” and fit to line up against the All-Blacks by April.

The fact that Marty was up to 7lb 2oz by day 5 of his life suggested that the Hospital scales had been in error and that the odds were that he’d been 7lb, more or less, when born.

Again, I didn’t think this was a big deal, yet Leanne was pretty upset by it. I put this down to the fact that she was well into the post-natal blues with her emotions set to ‘hair trigger’ mode, but it turns out she had a point; the first three questions everyone will ask you are: what was it, how much did it weigh and what have you called it? The order may vary from time to time but the questions remain... and we didn’t have hard and fast answers. From what I can gather, to a post-natal women, this is the equivalent of admitting that you’ve forgotten the name of your child; it is a crisis, with a touch of drama and hint of damnation. For me? I’m just thinking of having a badge made up with: “Boy. Marty. 7lb”, writ large upon it.

The first night

Some of the first advice we received after the birth was from a mate in Spain saying ‘don’t let them throw you out of the hospital too soon. Stay for at least 3-4 days’. Sadly, this is austerity Britain and, whilst they weren’t exactly holding the door open and saying ‘here’s your coat, what’s your hurry?’ there was an underlying feeling that everyone thought we’d be better off at home. Fortunately we shared that feeling so, after they’d checked Leanne and Marty for wear and tear, and made sure the little one was feeding ok, we packed our bags and came home, a brief 18 hours after the birth.

When it comes to preparing for the arrival of a baby there are two schools of thought; the “Boy Scout, be prepared, dib-dib-dib” approach and the “Yer,yer,yer.Wotever” school of advanced preparation. Needless to say, I am no Boy Scout.

I’ve no idea why but I thought things would just figure themselves out as and when required. Hence finding myself in the nursery at 4am with a disposable nappy, a pile of cotton wool, warm water and not even a glimmer of a clue what to do with it all. Fortunately Leanne was a girl guide, so between the two of us we managed to remove the old nappy....

Have you ever wondered how common phrases came about? You know, things like “as cute as a button”. I use this phrase a lot around Marty yet I cannot recall ever seeing a button and saying to myself, ‘Wow, look at that button! Cute or what!” Well another common phrase that I never really understood was “Sticks like shit”.... right up until the moment when we peeled back that first nappy!

Apparently the black gunk we revealed is called “meconium”. According to Wikipedia this is Greek for “Opium-Like”, which is bizarre because I imagined it was Greek for “OhmygodwhattheflyingfuckisTHAT???”

Meconium is a black-green, tar-like, substance that a baby excretes immediately after birth in order to frighten the fuck out of parents. It’s astonishing stuff and it’s amazingly tenacious. I think we started trying to wipe if off about 4:10am and finished about 5am. It was like trying to remove dry concrete with a cotton bud! I was strongly tempted to dip the entire child in white spirit at one point but I suspected that this approach would be frowned upon in midwifery circles, so we tried again but with a really big bit of cotton wool.

Having finally removed all traces of meconium from Marty’s arse we had to dispose of it. At this point my lack of preparation came back to haunt me yet again.

We had bought this really neat bin that you put the nappies in and then twisted to seal everything up nice and air-tight. Terrific idea and dead easy to use but at 5am it was still in its box and even the simplest of tasks becomes horribly complicated when you’re dead tired and trying to read installation instructions whilst balancing toxic waste in your hand.

So he’s my first bit of advice for fathers-to-be; prepare! Buy a nappy and have a look at how they work. Give all your purchases a go before the big day arrives and when you first encounter meconium make sure you’re wearing elbow length rubber gloves.... or better still give them to your wife and just stand well back.