Twenty two months and sixteen days

Alice is stringing more words together now, although her pronunciation is still idiosyncratic to say the least. Disturbingly, her longest sentence to date has been: 'Watch telly in a minute, mummy?' Disturbingly because I was quite convinced before she was born that we would remain a television-free household and thus avoid all such requests altogether. Ha! Ok, technically we are television-free in that we don't own a set. But then BBC iPlayer came along...

I'm not going to beat myself up about it though. When Alice still had a two-hour nap in the day, I used that time to do housework and maybe even have a nice cup of tea and a sit down. Now she only naps when she's out in the buggy, so a session with the electronic babysitter can feel like the only way to preserve a) a semblance of order and b) my sanity. And at least she doesn't see any adverts. [Cue sound of goalposts audibly shifting].

Speaking of TV, I sat down to watch Teletubbies with Alice the other day and thought to myself: wow, I can't believe it's ten years since I first watched Teletubbies and it's still on TV now! Then I realised that the REALLY unbelievable thing was that I'd watched it ten years ago. Willingly and with intent. Before I had a child. As did everybody I knew.

I know that at the time - the late 1990s - the country was still in the grip of Irony, and that infantilisation and nostalgia were all the rage. But looking back, I find that to be no excuse. After all, Teletubbies was a new programme at the time, not something from my childhood that I could legitimately get all gooey about. And as for it being somehow 'trippy', 'surreal' or 'psychedelic, man'... well, compared to lots of other children's programmes both before and since, it's pretty tame and orderly. I suppose it did speak to very studenty concerns though: toast, unpredictable cleaning appliances, and silly dancing. Oh and there was that one who was like, gay! Hilarious.

Twenty one months and fifteen days

Most of the time I walk around congratulating myself on how advanced Alice's vocabulary and communication skills are for her age. But occasionally it will occur to me that just because I can understand her, it doesn't mean she is making sense.

Example: would an outsider necessarily glean anything from the words 'yoya poon'? No. Whereas the mummy-translator renders the above into 'yoghurt spoon' and further into the full intended meaning which is something like 'I would very much like to eat a yoghurt with my spoon now. Make it so.'

Twenty months minus 3 days

New words: hello, biscuit, woof, Batman.

Surprised she didn't learn 'biscuit' earlier since she asks for one about every ten minutes...

Nineteen months and one day!

Okay, six months without blogging. That's quite a long time when I consider that it represents a third of Alice's entire life.

So, updates:

POETRY
Nothing doing. (I am giving a reading to 20 Spanish students next week but I don't think that counts as a major development compared to say, actually putting pen to paper.

NOVEL
I have begun my crime novel several times, and have been foiled twice by laptop meltdown and once (ok more than once) by a complete change of mind about plot, setting, tone and characterisation. Ha.

BABY
Alice is finally walking, with a determined John Wayne swagger. She goes to nursery 1.5 days a week, and loves it. Her favourite activities are looking at books (hm, don't know where she gets it from), eating and/or smearing food into every available surface, putting things into other things/taking things out of other things, throwing balls, and chatting to the ants in the garden.

She had her first speech assessment with the cleft team last month, and 'passed' with flying colours. Although the cleft palate is causing slight nasality, she can make all the key consonant sounds including the tricky 'p' and 'b', and her vocabulary and communication skills are very good for her age. Words mastered include: mummy, daddy, duck, dog, cat, rabbit, cow, mouse, pig, teddy, bear, ant, rain, star, ball, house, brick, book, bye, banana, please, bee, peas (the last three are a bit interchangeable), up, down, red, blue. The list grows daily. She's a constant babbler as well, but hasn't yet combined the conversational talk with the actual words.

Just lately, she is prone to instant tantrums if what she wants doesn't materialise, occasionally even before she asks for it, which is not a welcome development. I think we might have spoiled her a little, and now that she's not a baby any more and technically has other ways to communicate, I tend to panic when she does scream and just do whatever she wants. Oh dear.

Thirteen months and seven days

Alice is suddenly able to clap her hands, having previously shown a resolute lack of interest/ability in that area despite keen demonstrations from all family members. However, rather than enthusiastically joining in with games of pattacake, she tends to reserve her applause for musical entertainments on the television, chiefly Dancing on Ice and Christina Aguilera concerts. I KNEW there was a reason we don't have a TV of our own...

She continues to thrive in every other way, eating like a horse (if the horse had a habit of flinging handfuls of food to the floor without warning), cruising the furniture at high speed (though not standing or walking unaided yet), and chattering constantly. Tentatively identifiable words include: mama, dada, banana, grandma, dog, book and - wouldn't you know it - 'no'.

Ten months and fifteen days

The last month or so has seen a bit of a spurt in Alice's development, and she can now do the following (all calculated to impress her unutterable cuteness so firmly upon her parents that they will instantly bend to her will, I'm sure):

- wave hello and goodbye
- give a thumbs up
- say 'mama' and 'dada' (not always in deliberate reference to us though)
- say 'muh', 'duh', 'guh', 'buh', 'thuh', 'luh' and various interestingly intoned combinations thereof
- give kisses when prompted (or at least bump her open mouth towards roughly the right area)
- crawl
- cruise-walk round the coffee table/along the sofa
- play peekaboo

Here she is at my poetry reading yesterday, with friend Flora:

Four months and twenty three days

Lots of nice firsts with Alice lately:

- solid food (baby rice mixed with her formula; she enjoyed eating it and playing with the spoon etc but was so alarmed by the effect on her bowels (much harder poo) that we have stopped giving it to her for a little while.)

- sleeping in her own room and in the big cot (she loves it as long as she can sleep on her familiar lambskin - will I ever get to wash it? - and now has her daytime naps up there too where she goes off much more happily away from the tempting distractions of ooh, mum washing up.)

- rolled over from front to back (she can't do the other way yet - gets halfway over then doesn't quite have the momentum and just wobbles on her side).

- baby group (I've never been much of a joiner but I don't know many people in Seaford so last week I bit the bullet and went along. It was nice but a bit overwhelming and noisy even with only 7 or 8 mums and their babies. Alice was the youngest one and was much admired but got a bit over-excited and started crying, which curtailed my attempts at proper conversation slightly.)

Twelve weeks

Some of Alice's favourite things, at 12 weeks:

Colours: red, black, white, pink
Food: milk, milk and more milk
Music: yodelling, Star Trek themes (TNG and Enterprise), Baroque, jazz
Hobbies: riding in buggy, looking at stuff, sucking, bouncing
Toys: zebra rattle, cuddly elephant, daddy's nose/beard
Places: buggy, rocker chair, anyone's lap

Eleven weeks and one day

I shouldn't laugh, but Alice's latest antics are reminding me overwhelmingly of the 'drinking problem' gag from Airplane - she is learning to suck her fingers but doesn't reliably remember how to do it yet, and frequently ends up mashing her fist into her eye or ear instead, then looking slightly puzzled. I must say it will be a great boon to her parents when she masters it properly, as we won't have to spend hours in uncomfortable postures while holding a dummy in her mouth to keep her happy any more.

Nine weeks and five days

Have just returned from the doctors, where Alice had her first immunisations in the form of a giant needle in each thigh :(

But they're confounding creatures, babies. The nurse advised me that she might be grumpy from the pain and have a temperature later on, so I stocked up with Calpol and braced myself for a crying jag. But although she screamed for all of two minutes when she had the jabs, she then fell immediately and peacefully asleep in her buggy and shows no sign of stirring yet. Whereas for the past two days, when she's had no particular reason to cry - at least not one that translates well into adult language - she's been constantly grouchy and clingy and waking for an extra bottle in the night. Sometimes I wish so much that she could just tell us what's wrong, for all our sakes...

Mind you, given that her face is only about three inches in diameter she can certainly convey a lot of expressions with it: surprised, delighted, suspicious, entranced, blissed out, miserable, cross, shocked, concentrating (ie. pooing), interested, indifferent, yawning, coughing, sneezing, hiccups, dreamy, excited, worried...

Eight weeks and four days

Just had a sudden pang while reading a book where a mother with a five week old baby was quoted. Alice will never - never! - be that age again. Already she's passed through so many stages, so many firsts, and she's not been alive two months yet. So even though I'm far from keen to repeat the experience of giving birth just yet, I do now understand why most people have more than one child - the miracle seems to be that they can usually stick at just two or three!

I'm just looking at Alice sleeping and considering again the issue of a 'routine'. I'm torn between letting her dictate when she wants to sleep, when to eat and when to play, and trying to establish some sort of pattern. We're told that babies respond well to routine and find it reassuring, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's really *parents* who need it. I would certainly prefer it if Alice slept peacefully and for long stretches at night, rather than in the day, and I'm worried that I've ruined all our chances of achieving this by not keeping her more wakeful during daylight. But it's a vicious circle - if she and therefore I have been up half the night, I am usually only too grateful for a long sleep in the day for both of us. And in any case, the amount of sleep and spacing of feeds in the day doesn't seem to affect her sleep or feeds at night - the whole thing is entirely random as far as I can tell.

Should I allow the randomness to continue and trust her to find her own routine in time? Or is it time to provide guidance? (I also can't figure out the apparent contradiction between the advice to always 'feed on demand' and the advice to establish a routine. How can we implement 'bedtime' rituals like feed-bath-story-cuddle-cot when we don't know when she'll want her evening feed ?)

Six weeks

To celebrate Alice reaching the grand old age of six weeks, here are:

Six Things I Wish I'd Packed In My Hospital Bag:
1) more sanitary pads (oh so many more)
2) more baby clothes (babies be MESSY)
3) more towels (hospital towels are tiny and unforgivingly WHITE)
4) nice teabags (like on the Heart of Gold in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the hospital vending machine produced a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea)
5) lip balm (actually I had this but it was VITAL during labour so worth emphasising)
6) strong liquor (ok I wouldn't have been allowed it but Rescue Remedy just wasn't cutting it when it came to dulling the sheer shock of delivering a baby)

and I wish I'd left out:
1) books (couldn't concentrate)
2) carefully chosen 'birth' CDs (music last thing on mind during labour)

Six Pieces of Advice:
1) don't bother 'getting as much rest as you can before the baby arrives' - it's not like we can store up sleep like water in a camel's hump
2) don't buy any toys for the baby - he or she will be drowning in them from other people and won't appreciate them for months yet anyway
3) stock up your freezer with meals that require no further preparation, or ensure people bring you food - cooking will be the last thing you feel like doing
4) don't read baby 'bibles' etc if you can possibly stop yourself
5) go with the baby's flow at all times
6) ignore everyone else's advice, including the above :)

Six Things I Know About Alice:
1) she cries most between 7am - 10am (when I want to get washed and eat breakfast) and 7pm - 10pm (when I want to eat dinner and go to bed)
2) her favourite things to look at are bright lights and people's faces, in that order
3) she prefers hip hop and classical to indie
4) she finds her own hiccups quite entertaining
5) she will cry herself into a frenzy before admitting she's tired and just going to sleep
6) every day she will do something that makes me realise I don't know her at all

-

One month and one day

Alice was a month old yesterday, still feeding brilliantly and gaining weight which is about all she's supposed to achieve at the moment. She also spends more time awake, can focus on our faces for longer, and may have started awarding her first proper smiles (although wind is still a possibility).

I'm now beginning to understand why both celebrities and literary types have the urge to churn out baby books, but also why there are very few epic works about caring for newborns. One the one hand I do want to talk about her endlessly, and could no doubt fill pages about her biscuity baby smell, the changing shape of her eyes, the amount her hair has grown, the way she stretches her arms... but on the other hand there is pretty much nothing transcendent or miraculous or poetic about the daily tasks which fill up the majority of my hours. Maybe there's not some misogynist conspiracy of silence about motherhood after all; it's just that there isn't anything worth saying about the two fundamentals - feeding one end and wiping the other. However loving and amazed and transformed you feel towards the object of these attentions, it's still basically just feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping. And nobody needs to read about that.

(Having said that, my god, it's astonishing how many foodstuffs suddenly become anathema when you're exposed to a variegated menu of baby shit all day: peanut butter, hummous, mustard... all deeply unappetising until further notice.)