Firsts

F has a tooth now.

We know this because she uses it to savage any hands that are left within range. She's good at luring you in, as well. If you touch her, she does a cute grabby-cuddly thing that makes you go 'awww ook at da riddoo baby'. That lasts just long enough for her to bend over your hand as though she's going to kiss it, but don't be fooled. She's actually going to clamp her 90% gums on your knuckle, then shear the 10% tooth backwards and forwards as though she's sharpening it on a strop. No idea why, it really doesn't need it.

This is a big first for her. She's actually been pretty reasonable, considering razor-sharp nuggins of enamelled bone are breaking out inside her mouth. Not too grumpy, not too sleepless, not too much indigestion. Lots of drool, but not so that I could really tell the difference.

We're starting her on solid food. Well, solider food. It's all paste or goo, the kind of stuff I used to serve to elderly people on nursing wards. Most of it looks and smells pretty unappetising. V says the pureed fruit tastes good, I'll take her word for it. The salmon and stew things I tried this week (to check if they were hot enough, I hasten to add, I'm not one to steal my daughter's food without a good reason) were blobby, bland things.

I guess that's appropriate, though, babies aren't allowed most of the best foods when they're starting out. No green leafy salad, no honey, no salt, no sugar, no chocolate, no pulses, no dairy. It's a miserable list, and one I seem to have an unerring ability to forget.

After the midwife told us that letting her lick a finger's worth of whatever we're eating is fine, it gets her interested in food, I keep thinking 'oh, a tiny bit of this won't matter'. Then V vociferously points out that I'm about to feed her, oh, I don't know, bloody steak with a honey soy glaze, served with a cheesy puy lentil bake and a mound of raw spinach. With twixes stuck in it. You know, something really appropriate.

I'm just keen to let her try things, I guess, it's very exciting watching her eat something for the first time. I can't read her reactions, though. She always looks as though you've shoved an old sock under her nose on spoon one. By the last spoon, she'll be crying if you don't feed her fast enough. We haven't found anything she doesn't seem to like yet. I guess she takes after me, and will happily eat old tyres so long as there's bread or pickles to go with. Or peanut butter. Which she also isn't allowed, that reminds me.

So feeding is going well. Like a fish to water, I'd say, if that didn't imply a degree of smooth and liquid grace that's not quite there yet. She also takes after me (and farfar) in her ability to get food in her eyebrows whilst eating. Like a hog in muck, that's probably nearer the mark. Very happy, anyway.

The other first for this week was yesterday. I had a voice audition to go and prep for, a computer game thing where they wanted samples of me screaming. So I did a vocal warm-up before I went out, something I've not got round to doing for several months. Lots of vocal swooping up and down scales, saying 'ma-may-mee-moo-more', blowing your lips out - all that stuff that actors do with total po-faced seriousness before a show, something that usually makes it look even more idiotic.

F sat on V's lap throughout, staring at me in puzzled disbelief. 'Is that something people do?' she seemed to be thinking. 'Will I have to learn that? I'm really not sure about growing up any more. I think I'll just stay like I am now.'

For me, this was my first thrilling taste of how she'll react to everything I ever say or do while she's a teenager.

Dealership

New pram.

V has been fixated on getting a new one for months. More months than we've had F for, I suspect. We've got a hand-me-down from Uncle D, a perfectly functional three-wheeler with a basinette fitting for baby. Nothing fancy, maybe a little battle-weary, but it works.

Well, okay, it worked. Three wheels is a good and stable arrangement, but the centre of gravity on the pram wasn't as low as it could be. Try and get it over a steep curb and it could feel a bit precarious. And it didn't have free wheels, you have to push down on the handlebars to turn a corner. V isn't as strong as usual at the moment after her illness, so pushing it up and down hills or round supermarkets was a lot tougher than it should have been.

And it was old, and the wrong colour, and one of the tyres wouldn't reinflate, and then screws started falling out of it for no obvious reason and look, it's just not even a decent design compared to all these new ones on this website and goddammit okay we'll go and get a new one. It only took mentioning it three times a day for three months to get me to agree.

Now, I'm not an unreasonable man (spoiler: I am an entirely unreasonable man). In all honesty, I couldn't really tell the difference between pram A and pram B when asked to give an opinion on a catalogue image. The idea of going to a special pram shop and trying to pick one out felt like a terrible minefield of an experience, especially when I know my wife already has strong and preconceived opinions on what we should get. "You like this one? Really?" Pressure plate tripped, kaboom, legs flying in all directions.

But it needed doing, so I steeled myself.

God, they're like car dealerships. Lot after lot of glistening moulded contours, sturdy all-terrain wheels and folding cockpits. Sat-nav and hidden machine guns on option, I don't doubt. And very helpful sales staff, ready to give you six confidential reasons why they personally would pick the 5000 SEK model over the 2500 SEK one, all of which revolved around the terrible risks to your infant's health entailed by not having adjustable suspension or a built-in cup holder.

Once I'd got over my curmudgeoning, though, it was kind of fun putting F in new buggies and taking her for quick spins up and down the aisles. She was definitely enjoying it, which cheered me on, at least. We got a four-wheeler with easy action steering, a seat that can face forward or back depending on who's sulking about what and red go-fasta stripes on the hood. As well as a sticker that promises the extremely dubious quality of Polar Protection. Yeah, just like Scott had.

Everyone was happy, not least the three sales assistants we got through. V bartered 10% off for taking the last of that particular model (Emmeljunga's Ozone. They are so like cars, right down to the desperately trendy urban names) off their hands, seeing as how it was the one out on display. Until the next one that they put there after we'd left, at any rate, but that's just my cynicism talking.

There's a kicker to this tale.

The morning after I fully expected our breakfast conversation to be about something other than new prams. How naive. "When we fly to Scotland, we're going to have to get a cheap and rubbish pram to take with us, because I'm not trusting Ryanair with this one."

Facepalm.

Bring Your Daughter To Work Day

I often get work at very short notice. Acting is great this way, because you might be having a quiet month and feeling as though that's it, your career is over. Then pow! Out of nowhere you get something and it's all hoots and gravy again.

Equally, acting is crap this way, because out of nowhere you get a miniscule opportunity, you work like stink for it and then have nothing to show when the audition turns out to be for someone else entirely and they just didn't explain it properly.

Not that this was one of those times. This was a voice job, one where I'm expected to liase with the client via Skype during the recording. Said client kept changing their mind about what dates and times would actually work. When it came to it, V was tied up with a follow-up x-ray, and it turned out that none of the rest of the family were available to babysit. So F came to the studio with me.

The studio head was entirely welcoming about this. He has younglings himself, he knows how it goes, and he said actors often bring their kids in with them. After all, you get hermetically sealed into a sound-proof booth so that your 'creativity' can't leak out and disrupt the delicate equipment. No matter how loud your child, the end recording isn't going to be affected.

All well and good, but when it comes down to it, no amount of explaining to F that daddy was going to bugger off and leave her alone for a while was really going to help.

We had a decent length walk out in the sun beforehand. I even got to the studio a little early so I could feed her and tuck her up. "Make yourself at home," the guy who let me in said rather snidely, as I whipped out a bottle and a baby and set to.

I left her snuggled under a blanket in her pram, safe in the dim recesses of the staff kitchen, then left to do the recording, hoping that she'd be okay. Optimism is a fine thing, if rarely rewarded in life.

The recording went fine, two sides of A4 about some deathly dull corporate website tool in eight minutes flat.  Coming out of the seclusion of the booth, I found everyone in the office had donned earphones and was huddled in front of their computer monitors with studious looks, the kind that tell the world they are working on something really important and cannot possibly come away from the terminal just now.

F was howling and weeping in the kitchen, kicking the sides of her pram in a panic, unable to work out why she'd been abandoned. She was fine once she'd been picked up and reassured that this wasn't an orphanage. It took me a bit longer to calm myself down, not that my own fears were any less unreasoning.

Still, good to know it can be done. I don't think I want her to get used to being dumped in kitchens, exactly, but despite our mutual terror nothing bad actually happened. Both of us will have to get used to this in due course for our lives to run normally.

Cloud

Quite a tough week, that.

V has been back in hospital again, still not really over whatever it is that's been making her out of breath, so I've once more donned the mantle of Solo Dad. It's a rubbish mantle, mostly made of pukey blankets and poop stains. No less heroic for all that, I like to think.

It was almost as though we were being punished for having an optimistic moment in the last post. Cheerful future? Blue skies and flowers? Not on my watch, quoth fate. How dare you find a silver lining. Back to endless anxiety and sleepless nights forthwith. And have some work stress thrown in for good measure, go on. See how you cope with a few random voice jobs at short notice, get your babysitting timetable organised round that.

It didn't seem like V's been away a week. I vaguely remember moments of 3 a.m. panic. Or, as Freja is now weaning on to bottles of formula, some of the memorably vast dumps she's taken. Those have stuck in my mind, particularly the one she did on my lap which blossomed through her clothes like a horrible experiment in mustard yellow tie-dying.

There was also a fun moment being trained how to operate an oxygen machine in Swedish, for potential home use. It hasn't proved necessary in the end, which is good. I understood most of what was said, and could read up in a manual afterwards to clear up any ambiguity. As ever, I couldn't help but wonder how many times I'd missed important words like 'not' or 'don't', and got an entirely false sense of what the hell I was supposed to do.

The feeling of confused alarm that being briefed on something important in a foreign language generates was well worth it, though. I got to see the nurse try to mime 'bug zapper'. You can't go near them, or anything that sparks, as the lingering aura of oxygen trapped in your hair and clothes might cause you to ignite spectacularly, rather like the bugs they're supposed to catch. I wonder who discovered that first time around?

Otherwise it was one long round of filling, emptying and boiling bottles, sleeping when F did or tiptoeing out of the room after laying her in her cot to catch up on emails. V's family were amazing again, popping round to see how I was or taking F for walks or full days out. I feel a little dazed, as though I've just come back from holiday to discover I still live in the same old place.

V is home for the weekend, and arrived with some celebratory sushi. I thought F had been coping with complete and remarkable calm all through the week, possibly even not really understanding what was going on. But she was so pleased to see her mum home that I now suspect she's got the same ability I have to appear calm under pressure. I'm not actually calm under pressure, I hasten to add, I just start thinking very slowly. This gives an impression of unshakeable hard-headedness. It's fairly worthless as impressions go, you just need to press me for an actual decision on anything and it all goes to pot.

They're both curled up next door, asleep on the bed and catching up on a week of lost hugging. I now realise I'd stopped breathing properly at some point in the last seven days, because I've just started doing it normally again.

Gardening

We're out in Trägårdsföreningen, the botanic gardens in the centre of town, having a walk. It's very sunny. It's also graduation week over here, when Swedish teenagers put on floppy sailor hats and get drunk all over everything. The park echoes to a vast open-sided bus, which is slowly orbiting the park out of sight and blasting out dance music.

Three months ago, this whole place was the colour of a dead labrador and had nothing on display but rotting weeds and leafless sticks in muddy ditches. Now its a marvellous profusion of tulips, pansies, roses and rhododendron blossoms. Elegant water features plash ornately in the centre of discreetly trellised pagodas, rather than the frozen lead pond linings of February.

Adding to this frenzy of colour are the rainbow ribbons of the West Pride festival tied to trunks and railings, the blond flags of hair the already-sunkissed Swedes are flashing as they jog about and the sky, polished antique wedgewood blue.

F has never seen summer. She likes it.

She's wearing sunglasses, little ones like swimming goggles. It's harder to tell where she's looking, but she keeps giving her 'uh!' of approval/excitement every time we turn a corner and see a new vista of fountains and flowerbeds. She grabs at leaves and petals if we pause to examine them, never hard enough to bruise or damage, just enough to see how they feel.

She starts asking to do this for new bushes quite quickly. She doesn't point, she hasn't worked that out at all yet, but she does lean with her body and head whilst doing rather inaccurate reaching. Generally I can tell when I'm moving her towards the right thing because she stops threshing and just waits for it to get in grabbing range.

Life seems very good, at this particular moment. It's almost a year since we moved to Sweden already. The first couple of months seem very far away, when everything was so strange and difficult. We had no money left and no income established yet. I spoke nothing beyond useless language course phrases (The Horse is Eating a Carrot!/Hästen äter en morot!), V was going through the peculiar and, for her, tough rigours of pregnancy.

And look at us now, swanning about in the sun with our lovely daughter! Pity I'm not that far beyond the carrot-eating horse, but you can't have it all.