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 Illnesses

I thought baby illnesses worked like this...The tiny tot is born into the world with very little immunity other than that supplied by the mother via the placenta. As he or she drinks their mother’s milk more immunity is passed on from the mother. However they are still very susceptible to things like the common cold and so will get lots of them in their first few years. Meanwhile mum and dad will smile on serenely in the full and certain knowledge that they are already immune to that variant of the common cold.

Alas, it turns out that that is all a load of bollocks! Ever since Marty entered the house we have all of us been going down with colds like there’s no tomorrow – I have had more this year than in the last decade!

How come? I can understand that Marty will catch everyone of the 100’s of different cold viruses floating about the place but by now I should have built up immunity to 80% of them, surely? Yet every time Marty has caught a cold the entire house has gone down with it. Instead of sharing my home with a cute and cuddly bundle of joy I appear to sharing it with a 2ft tall bio hazard!

Ok, I can understand the mechanism by which I might catch one of his colds. He has a nasty habit of waiting until my face is about 3 inches from his own and then - with absolutely no facial clues whatsoever - sneezing. I’m no medical man but I’m fairly sure that having your face regularly drenched in snot and phlegm is a sure fire way of picking up infections – as well as offering Marty some mild amusement. But surely I should still have immunity?

My only conclusion is that there are two distinct types of cold; the common cold which floats around in the air, and the kiddie-cold, a virus which resides in flooring. As we grow up we get fewer and fewer kiddie-colds because we’re growing away from the source of infection. However, add a toddler to the home and things change; the toddler picks up the cold from his close proximity to the floor, and then shares the joy via unprovoked sneezing.

It all makes perfect sense. In fact I may contact The Lancet with my medical breakthrough.

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!