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

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!”

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.

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.