Talking in soft voices

My wife has a cold and her sneezing scares the child. Yesterday she erupted whilst he was sat on her knee and the poor mite was terrified; it wasn’t just a plaintive little whimper it was the clarion scream that signifies true fear... and she got that reaction by sneezing whereas I only manage it when he squirms his soapy little self from my grasp in the bath and finds himself holding his breath and looking up at me through the bubbles... (he’s far too bright to open his mouth under water, he just lets me know that he’s not happy once he’s been fished out!)

Not only that, but when my wife did scare him, I managed to reduce him to giggles again with my usual mix of animal noises and over-the-head baby acrobatics. She thinks that it is unfair that whilst I can pitch my voice at “werewolf growl” or deliver a chest-thumping Tarzan ululation to giggles and smiles, a simple sneeze from her delivers panicked tears.

I feel that this is another one of those areas where many parenting books get it wrong by trying to do too much of a good thing... they often teach that you shouldn’t startle a child or talk in harsh tones around the child; that hushed, gentle tones should always be used.

My own thoughts contradict this for many reasons: the fact of the matter is that your emotional and endocrine based responses are there to keep you alive and well and protect against social and macro-scale (i.e. something your size or slightly larger) threats that want to do you harm, and in many ways they are analogous to the immune system. Now, whilst some restraint is to be encouraged (i.e. don’t torture your kids [as an aside all the cases of children being water-boarded seem to come from the USA!) wrapping them in verbal cotton wool is likely to produce analogous results to fearfully rationing peanuts whereby low exposure leads to sensitization and death! Similarly, experience of growls, sarcasm and even vastly over-dramatised threats at a young age is likely to lead to the kind of young adult who grins knowingly and thinks their way out of a conflict situation or mugging in later life (if a child has never heard a sarcastically raised voice, they’re likely to be the fetal-position chalk outline with extra groin based damp patches!)

This is something that the wife and I agree to differ on. I feel his exposure to both approaches is advantageous in the long term, and it is interesting that when he’s feeling down both her dulcet tones and my growls have the same calming effect; maybe it’s not so much what you say, or how it’s said, but that you’re there, caring enough to interject.

DAD

The right amount of worry

I have this friend who’s recently become a dad. Our kids are about the same age and I guess we’ve got an awful lot in common, even down to the way our kids were dragged into the world (bonding over forceps conjures an interesting mental image, but I digress!)

The thing is with this dude is that he’s a worrier; part of me thinks that his adventures are more somber because he worries, and part of me thinks that maybe it’s the other way round... he worries because he’s one of those unfortunate individuals to whom bad things happen as a matter of course.

Take our attitudes to caring for a baby. My personal philosophy is that a baby will survive most things with a minimal of fuss, and this is borne out by the fact that whilst I’ve been dizzy and out of action for three days with a seasonal bug, the net effect of the same bug on the baby is that he’s learnt to enjoy gurgling snot-bubbles of various hues out of his nose. Meanwhile my friend panics that the child will somehow contract Ebola from a swallow-borne coconut (an African swallow obviously!) and when looking at a kid from his perspective the child suddenly appears far less robust.

The problem I often face is when dealing with questions. Recently we’ve had the following exchanges and I feel my responses haven’t really lived up to his angst-driven expectations:

“My baby wakes me up every night. He grunts whilst breast feeding!”

“He probably wont pull more than once at Glastonbury!”

“My baby shows signs of autism.”

“Well, looks like you’re holidaying in Vegas in matching suits!”

“I don’t have any time to relax.”

“Let me show you how to cradle a sleeping baby and play xbox at the same time!”

This is the usual pattern of our exchanges, and I often play the voice-of-reason in his more pathetic metro-sexual moments. The last exchange has been rather more worrying and my usual humour doesn’t seem to be cutting it... he said:

“I walked into the room, and the baby was laughing but my wife was in tears, what should I do?”

To which I wanted to reply:

“I saw this in a movie once. Get an exorcist, the baby’s clearly possessed!”

On reflection I really wasn’t the best person to go to for advice in this kind of situation. If I ever encountered a moment like that with my own wife and child, I would probably check the room for sharp objects and then try to make up my mind whether the wife or demon-child posed more of a threat to my person and sanity before calling the ghost busters. For once my somewhat lumbering friend got it right, he gave everyone a big hug, told them he loved them and is just keeping a quiet eye on them both.

It would appear that when it comes to dealing with upset and depression in a family being more of a man means being less of a lad. I think I learnt something and would like to throw the blog open to comments from anyone feeling they’re shouldering it all some days, because you’re not alone.

DAD

Seduced by the Dark Side

Those of you with an eye for detail may have noticed the new badges which point to the fact that this blog is now a member of the “mumsnet blogger network” (I’m buried in their directory somewhere in the M section!) , and can also be found in the rather small fatherhood category.

Is this going to change my blogging and parenting style? The short answer is no, which only leaves the question of how long a father who believes in introducing his child to the wonderful world of adrenaline fueled laughter and risk taking is going to hold on to his affiliate status. I tend to find the idea that mums are the only or primary parent either comical or offensive depending on how the marketing spin is presented. As such my link to mumsnet is an attempt to move behind enemy lines and start rattling some cages.

A telling case when looking at gender bias in parenthood is TESCO’s marketing campaign. They have recently managed to be both offensive and unintentionally humorous. I received a magazine, addressed to me, with vouchers from them as part of their “shop even more with us now you’ve had a baby” marketing campaign (I’m not sure what the official name of the campaign is as they have not yet replied to my emails). The magazine had two tiny pictures of men buried in its pages – one of whom was demonstrating a complete lack of chivalry by standing at the top of some steps watching a woman labour to carry a pushchair, presumably containing his child, down the steps. These two solitary men were massively outnumbered by women, often clutching a baby whilst grinning womaniacally (a feminist maniacal grin!). Marketing material like this is offensive; those women would not have the baby to clutch without a man being involved at some stage, and assuming that the woman remembers his name, there is no reason why the guy’s presence in the child’s life isn’t as celebrated (and photographed for glossy promotional literature) as the woman’s.

As for the humorous, the vouchers I recieved contained one that read “introduce a friend to our mother and baby club so she can experience our discounts too!” Reading this as a man I imagined sitting next to a rather buxom young lass in a bar and trying the line “would you like to try some TESCO discounts, because there’s a special club I can help you join!” My imaginary conquest didn’t end well, nor did the imaginary divorce hearing where “TESCO made me do it” was not considered a rational defense!

So, dear reader, I see it as a moral duty to fight the corner of dad-ness. I may even try to goad some of the mumsnet denizens into commenting on my posts, but will remain true to my principles and the importance that being a dad has for me and the sprog.

DAD

Dad’s night out

Two days ago I had my first night out since Harris was born. It was really quite dramatic, and involved both drugs and a nice blonde running her hands up and down my bare chest...

Sadly, this was in the context of being admitted to hospital... the drugs were painkillers and the girl with the nice hands was an impossibly pretty surgeon who was busy deciding how much of me she was going to turn into hors d’ouveres for Hannibal Lecter this time (it seems that every two years a different chunk of my insides is sent to the pie factory in the sky!). The most incongruous element is that I had a lot of fun; the team consisted of the aforementioned bombshell together with an eerily cheerful yet far too tired nurse who kept writing all my vitals in the wrong boxes on the form, leaving me with a resting pulse of 98 and a blood oxygen level of 67, and a diminutive Iranian health care assistant who talked geography and homesickness whilst taking my blood and explaining that it didn’t really matter which tube she filled first (despite the instructions to the contrary on the poster in the nurses’ station!), and all the time I was immersed in the world beyond bills, nappies.

What’s kind of scary is that the only person on the ward who was finding hospital as exiting as me was the guy in the bed next to me. His day out consisted of "worse TV, but better food" and the surgical extraction of the mobile phone he’d somehow managed to turn sideways whilst concealing it in his rectum from the guards at HMP Nottingham (he deserves a medal, it was a large Sony Ericsson, not something manageable like a Nokia). We sat, (flanked by the guards who couldn’t really go anywhere on account of being chained to the patient just in case he received a suspicious call) discussing how good it felt to be on the outside... the only difference being that his sentence is up in 10 weeks time whereas mine runs at least until the kid finishes university.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ward C31 at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre for providing a degree of light comic relief along with excellent medical care... it would be really nice if you could start doing theme-nights!

DAD

My Grandfather's Axe

There is a scene in the work of the great Terry Pratchett’s book The Fifth Elephant where the Low King of the Dwarves is explaining about the importance of having something to pass on. The King explains that his axe has been in his family for many generations, but at various intervals in history, the weapon has been modified with new blades, handles and ornamentation so much so that no part of the original axe remains... yet the axe is still the same axe that has been handed down through 14 generations.

As we’ve moved into the new house and started our family I’ve been acquiring and inventorying things that I’ll be putting to good use. I guess these things can be categorised into tangible and intangible goods; I’ve got the dining room table that went from my grandfather to my parents, back to my grandfather, to the local church and finally back to me; when moving it in the other day I found the sticker that a removal company fixed to the base in the 60’s on the underside bearing my maternal grandfather’s surname “Gribben” in neat biro lettering. The tablecloth we’ve been given to go with it was a wedding present to my mother. Perhaps most touching though (and the items that put me in mind of the Pratchett quote) are the mismatched set of kitchen supplies and utensils that my father has put together for me. Dad is a chef, and nestled in there is a history of his career; an army issue cook’s knife from his days in uniform, and other items acquired along the way. Most impressive, provided it is used sensibly, is a giant heavy long bladed cook’s knife from “before he joined the army”, the blade is well over a foot long and it is probably as close as this family would come to a heraldic weapon. My dad would dismiss it as “just a big knife”, but I feel that the sword hung on the wall of some lofty and ancient family’s manor also started out as “just a big knife” before whichever battle in which it was deployed to prune the family trees of other nobles. I’m proud of it because I know the history, even if it wasn’t one of the big knives at Bosworth Field.

After the physical things come the intangible things we inherit. With the kitchen equipment comes a knowledge of how to use it after years spent under the whithering and somewhat sarcastic tutelage of my dad; yet I’m not the chef, I’m just a reasonable cook. Similarly there’s the love of languages and travel together with a fairly common sense approach to the international scene gleaned from Granddad Gribben that seems to be creating an increasingly globally mobile and internationalised family; yet I’m no linguist, I’m just someone with a knack for languages.

Where does that leave us as dads? What is our “Grandfather’s Axe”? It would be a mistake to try and hoist the tangible stuff we’ve surrounded ourselves with on our kids if they don’t want it. For many years I lived out of a suitcase and giving too many things too soon would prevent my kids from seeing the world. It also can’t be the core of our professional beings; different people are capable of very different things, and take quite different routes through life even when they share chunks of DNA.

Instead I think it’s the attitudes that are important and that we can pass on. I’d like to think that my boy will get the family’s attitude to fair play and the raucous sense of humour. I’d like him to be ambitious and to love learning in whatever form it might take. I’d also like him to love food and D.I.Y. like me and his Granddad, try to understand and lead others like his mum, nurture and care like his Granny, always be warm and positive like my Grandma Peck, love languages and differences and seek out peace and happiness for all and adventure for himself wherever he might find it. If I can get him to do that, no matter what he owns and what he does, then far into the future being a member of this family will mean as much to my descendants as it does to me. That identity and security then is my “Grandfather’s Axe”. I believe the motto of Nottingham, my home city, says it best “Vivit post funera virtus” - "Virtue Survives Death" for those non-Latin speakers out there.

DAD

Nappy Fillings

When selecting Crime Scene Investigators and Homicide Detectives, I feel a good initial test would be to have them change, examine and categorise a baby’s nappy. They are likely to react to the crime scene and the nappy in much the same way. Some will turn slightly greeny-pale, attempt to keep their distance, avert their gaze and avoid breathing in; others will note spatter pattern, observe consistency and attempt to determine time of nappy fill (which interestingly, correlates very nicely with the time of death on a crime scene given the body’s inability to control sphincters post-mortem!)

I am very much in the later group. As a baby is not capable of verbalising their state of health and gastric comfort level, a categorisation system of the relevant stool (or to use a more technical term, arse-gunge) together with the method of its excretion is required.

The Gassy Repeater

The baby breaks wind repeatedly. If awake the baby will look puzzled by this. If asleep the baby may make quite adult, yet disturbing, little sighs. Minimal poo will be produced, although this may be enough to remind the baby that they are wearing a wet nappy.

The Blocked Pipe

The baby will want to produce something, but can’t. This infantile constipation is probably due to either not stirring formula milk enough, or (if breast-fed) shaking your wife like a butter churn. If asleep the baby will rub its face against a nearby pillow, if awake they will be cranky. A single large explosion will follow resulting in a wide ranging but quite dry and coarse spatter pattern across the inside of the nappy. If this is allowed to dry the baby will experience discomfort.

The Creeping Ooze

Without any apparent effort or signal, the baby will develop a full sloppy nappy over time. You will discover this when either the baby cries for a nappy change, or when the ooze manages to escape the confines of the nappy and soak through the baby’s clothes. There may be a smell. Because the creeping ooze is unannounced, you can surreptitiously pass the parcel before “suspecting” a nappy change may be due.

The Reverse Exorcist

The baby also has the power to instantly, dramatically and noisily fill their nappy at such high volumes and pressures that the resulting torrent of poo will burst out of the nappy and either fill their socks, ooze out of the neck of the baby grow, or both. You will probably hear a loud ripping noise signifying that your baby's tardis-like capacity for poo are once again in operation. Producing more than their own bodyweight in poo, the baby will be ecstatic, probably because they know that the only response to such a substantial gout of excrement is a warm shower and singing.

Sadly, all of the above are normal and will fill your waking hours with dread opportunities for scientific investigation. In the spirit of “not getting sued” I thought I’d add a few notes on poos that are bad news. As a general rule the thing to be mindful of is not the “how” or even the “how much” unless your baby is producing watery-diarrhoea. The thing to be really careful with is colour: A normal baby should be producing poo that is somewhere between sunset yellow and cheap scrambled eggs (possibly with a bit of green thrown in). Anything other than this, especially if it’s red, black or glow-in-the-dark should be reported to a doctor immediately.

DAD

Lullabies in Brobdingnag

I think my son likes me because I have no shame. This is ironic as this same characteristic often causes adults who know me (particularly his mother and grandparents) to roll their eyes skywards in despair.

I will quite happily sit making ridiculous but giggle inducing faces at him for hours on end, and have little problem in involving him in adult life at such a young age. One of his favourite trips out was the day we visited the solicitor and he sat on the desk leaning back against my shoulder cooing and babbling at every possible break in the otherwise quite expensive and adult conversation between me and my solicitor (and why shouldn’t babies be along for the ride whenever possible? I don’t take him on site when visiting clients, but given the often dull nature of adult life it’s quite fun to see the world through the eyes of someone so tiny that even a small excursion is a journey into the land of the giants... this is another admirable fatherly sentiment and nothing at all to do with the fact that I’m too tight to pay for child care and conveyancing!)

Perhaps my favourite place to take the baby is the post office. The staff there are lovely and always happy to see the baby when we go in – whereas the baby thinks he’s visiting a rather creepy zoo where they only exhibit middle-aged women behind safety glass, so it’s really a win-win situation. However this all changed a few days ago when we visited the post-office with the baby in the carrier and he decided to wake up and howl. The noise was deafening and, as only baby cries truly are, mentally debilitating. Faced with this onslaught I went for the only solution guaranteed to calm a crying baby. In the post office, with a large queue behind me and two slightly bemused ladies looking out from behind the glass I started to sing, not the slightly sad embarrassed whimper that some parents seem to manage, but a full on song, first in competition with, then drowning out his cries. When he realises someone’s singing he stops crying like a car who's tank has run dry, gazes and then forgets to stay awake. I went with the somewhat rude version of ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’; within the first verse he was quiet, and by the end he was asleep. Quite what everyone else thought of my singing I don’t know, but I think my son likes me because I have no shame.

DAD

Daily Exercise

One of the most useful things about having a baby is being able to do away with dumbbells. The little guy started off at just under 3kg (6lb 6oz). He is growing steadily and as I use him as a dumbbell my arms are keeping up with his growth.

Readers are probably divided into two camps and I’ll have to deal with you separately. For argument’s sake we could call these two groups “boys and girls”, although these distinctions are blurred by the lovely champion from Khazakhstan (pictured), together with the current trend for metro-sexual males whose lack of upper body strength and desire for emotional-oneness would make Gandhi weep oxymoronic tears of masculine shame.

The first group are thinking “tell me more, I’ve had to cancel my gym membership because nappies are so expensive.” For those of you who are thinking of using the baby for weight-lifting there are some essential safety guidelines:

DO NOT DROP THE CHILD

- Make sure the child is firmly held in your man-paw at all times.

DO NOT PRETEND TO DROP THE CHILD

- Whilst you may think that it’s funny to give them a little fright, this will lead to a lack of calmness and trust, and then when the child struggles, you will drop the child!

DRESS THE CHILD IN SUPERHERO THEMED CLOTHING

- This way their little brain will tell them that they’re battling King Kong or flying, rather than being used as a cheap substitute for exercise equipment.

COUNT AND TALK TO THE CHILD

- This will stop them becoming disorientated and showering you with baby-vomit.

DO NOT LIFT BY THE HEAD... or anything else that might come off

- This is a mistake you’d only make once! I've found a good technique is to lift the baby with the heel of my hand just below his ribs and my digits splayed across his ribcage. He is supported and will find falling off difficult (unless you have tiny hands or a huge baby).

STOP IF THE BABY SHOWS SIGNS OF DISTRESS

- This could also lead to struggling, or worse, a nappy fill so violent that it is forced out between the poppers in the baby grow.

The other group are thinking (in a high pitched, rising tone) “you can’t do that to my baby!”. For those of you in the shrill camp, realistically, what are you going to do about it? Thanks to the aforementioned baby-lifting we’re much stronger than you, and when we hold the child up that high, you can’t reach! On a more serious note (just in case the response to “what are you going to do about it?” was “file for divorce!”), the partner who is exercising with the child is involving the little person in their life, modelling a positive healthy lifestyle and (by virtue of not dropping the baby) building up trust and confidence between parent and child – which is exactly what you’ve been asking us to do in other nagging sessions conversational interludes recently.

DAD

Too cool for school (Part 2)

As a man, your baby arriving a little early is a good thing. Ideally you want the baby to arrive sometime after it’s gained the capacity to breath and scream unassisted; at a size where man-paws wont crush or damage the child, but before (and this really is the important bit) you’ve spent too long wandering the streets behind a disgruntled, pregnant, baby book fuelled shopaholic. With this in mind the arrival of my son was ideal. We had sleeping arrangements (a baby hammock I’d purchased with air-miles!) in place, together with a few clothes and as many free nappies as we’d been able to obtain through various supermarket promotions... yet we’d avoided buying an excess of fashionable plastic junk or furniture designed purely for the first few months of his life. This has convinced me that many of the organisations that mums subscribe to are in fact front organisations for novelty producing Mafia; in the same way that the CIA might have a shell-company to fund operations, or organised crime may operate a laundrette, the overpriced-junk cartels of the world have baby books and “community websites”!

The fact that the child decided to burst into the world early was bad enough, and I quickly forgot all about the missed antenatal classes and the baby books that I hadn’t read. Those books wont tell you the following anyway:

1. Women in labour are likely to go through all of the positions they went through whilst conceiving.

2. Gas and air is really, really good... Although if trying it as the dad, you should remember that this is frowned on by the medical profession, and doctors will not approve if you’re high when they enter the room for a progress check!

3. You may end up wearing your wife’s clothes at some stage during proceedings (following being doused, head to toe, in wife-vomit!)

After 10 hours in the delivery suite the doctors decided they’d had enough (this was 4 hours after the vomit incident which was where I’d have made any snap decisions that needed making!) This led to perhaps the most interesting, yet traumatic experience of my life – a forceps delivery under theatre conditions. Breaking this down for you, “under theatre conditions” means that the mother of your child is now semi-conscious – due to exhaustion and a spinal anaesthetic – surrounded by all manner of machines (yet sadly and incongruously lacking the machine that goes ping!) and hospital staff. “Forceps delivery” means that they’re going to be pulling the child head first out of your wife, possibly whilst bracing a foot on the edge of the operating table. There is going to be blood, and most other bodily fluids sloshing around, and just when you think it can’t get any worse the baby appears, carefully made up by mother nature as a special effect from the Aliens franchise.

The baby will be fine with all this, but honestly speaking, as the father, you’re better off with a biology textbook and few gruesome sci-fi/horror movies than you ever would be with a baby book.

Oh, and one essential piece of advice. Once you're in theatre, no matter what happens, DO NOT go round the “feet end” of the operating table... you have been warned!

DAD

Too cool for school (part 1)

The world can seem an intimidating place for those expecting a baby. A big part of this is due to two things; baby books and antenatal classes.

First, let's deal with baby books. They occupy a cavernous niche in the publishing sector, so much so that Amazon lists over 6500 titles in English language paperbacks alone. They exist not to inform parents, but to provide the financial underpinnings to countless publishing houses worldwide. As a dad, or dad to be, you don't really need to read baby books. Whilst studies have shown that such books can be useful in helping at-risk families plan for and mitigate risks, the evidence also suggests that if you're thick enough to need a baby book, you probably wont understand it anyway. The intended target of baby books, both in terms of marketing and written style is overly-emotional women-folk whose very endocrine system has turned on them; this induces more panic and shopping, yet they rarely break things down by giving a realistic summary of odds and statistics.

Next there's antenatal classes. These are of far more use, especially if you're lucky enough to live in the UK and can go to classes run by the NHS. As they are not operating for profit they tend to break things down far more and give a realistic view of the statistics and worries. They usually have little models to play with that involve challenges like getting Stretch Armstrong out of a plastic pelvis. In the UK there are usually two classes, the first dealing with birth and the second dealing with caring for a child. The first of these classes is really useful, and serves to demystify things: the helpful midwife at mine actually suggested that I take snacks and drinks for myself along to the delivery as it can be a long and tedious process. As for the second class, I'm assuming that it doesn't teach too much useful stuff as the baby decided to enter the world the day before we were due to attend...

DAD

Record Keeping

Having a child feels like staring in your very own science fiction movie. Not the big expensive type where you’re flying to the stars with every gadget and gizmo man’s ingenuity can create, but the type that features a disaster, or an invasion, and the words “It’s life, but not as we know it” (granted these, are the same guys who had the spaceship, but I couldn’t find another quote that summed up panic quite as well.)

As a result of this I thought I’d start writing my daddy diary. Let me be quite clear, this is a dad’s diary. It serves three distinct purposes. Firstly, it is a record of who I am and think as a kind of “insurance policy” should something happen. It’s also a celebration of all the fun to be had being a dad when our inner child gets to hang out with our offspring. Finally, I’m hoping other dads will also find this and feel at least comforted that other fathers go through some of the same feelings and interaction patterns that they are following with their own children.

That’s about all for now. They’ll be more later. Welcome to the blog.

DAD