Moving Out

Ah, they grow up so fast.

Already, I find myself sitting at home as F makes her way out into the big wide world. Going to do things I can't do, have experiences I can't share, wearing such old clothes of mine as she's decided will suit her better. While I sit at home remembering the days when she'd sit on my knee and play happily. What a maudlin old man I am.

How much worse when she actually has to leave home for real, I wonder?

As it was, I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself because V had taken F swimming for the first time and I couldn't go with them. This was because they'd gone with Godmother L to a ladies-only nudist beach along the coast from us. This was another reason to feel a bit left out. Surely the naked ladies would understand the camera was only for photos of my daughter's first paddle?

I've seen photos, which are almost as good. (Of my daughter paddling! What did you think I meant?) F wearing my old green bandana over her UV swimsuit, and making it look much better than I ever did. Not a particularly difficult achievement, admittedly, you could drop the bandana on the decaying carcass of an exploded elephant seal and it would look better than I ever made it look. But still.

F is in a grabbing phase. She has learnt to grab. She enjoys this very much, when it suits her purposes. Her purposes this week mostly revolve around her feet, but like her father before her, denuding a low-lying bookshelf of tomes is quite high priority too. She's taken a special interest in a stack of Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, relegated to a bottom shelf out of the eyeline of visitors. I claim this as evidence she's already interested in my nerdy timewasting dark arts. V says it just means she wants to throw them out.

Grabby when it suits her purposes, though. Sometimes this is just out of fun. She's got a collection of plastic smurfs from her mum. Although she kind of likes picking them up and chewing them, she'd much rather thrash a chubby arm through a line-up of the little blue creatures sending them all flying instead. Smurf tossing - less offensive than dwarf tossing. I can see it catching on.

And she's lazy at dinner. She can pick things up and transfer them to her mouth, but it takes her a while and it's still fairly inaccurate. 'Mouth' can translate as far as 'ear' or 'Daddy', depending on just where some decimal place goes awry in her mentally predicted trajectories. She often tries to get us to put the food into her mouth instead.

She does this by opening her mouth and adopting a position like a skydiver, then vigorously launching herself face-first towards the spoon or your hand, depending. As with genuine skydiving, it's not a neat way of eating.

Bragging Rights

Bragging about anything baby-related seems kind of hubristic to me. Like copper-plating oneself before going out in a thunderstorm. Every time we've said 'oh, she's so lovely, very calm', F will usually erupt into a volley of fox-like shrieking within ten minutes or so to prove us wrong. Similarly, if we've ever said she's got a temper, she bathes whoever we've made the claim to with a basalm of smiling.

She likes making us look like delusional liars, I guess.

All the same, I can't help wanting to brag a little bit this week. F is maintaining her high rate of learning, which this week seems mostly to be object-related. She manipulates things, really really concentrates on picking them up and putting them down and turning them round, waving them around carefully like a wizard with an experimental wand. All whilst focussing intently on how her fingers and wrists move.

She's worked out that things dropped from the table go to the floor, so when she hurls insert any given object here to the ground, she looks after it to check it's trajectory. As though she can't quite trust gravity is still working. She needs more proof.

I'm tentatively giving her access to her plates and cutlery. I wouldn't brag about the results of that, it generally earns me a healthy coating of fruit puree or a good workout for my knees and lower back as I crawl amidst the table legs looking for her spoon. But she gets the overall shape of the expected performance one gives with them, even if she's just roughly approximating the choreography. I can appreciate that, it's all I ever managed in musicals.

No, this week has seen only one thing I want to brag about. She's been quite the last few days, as we're trying out a slightly new and improved routine. Some of the squalling is along the 'hang on, we're supposed to do this now, what are you playing at?' lines.

Some of it is because we aren't putting her to bed quickly enough.

Babies, I was led to believe, cry when you put them into their beds. Then you stand next to the cot, cajoling and pleading in whatever form you mistakenly believe will work, until they've broken your body and spirit. At which point they can rest happy, leaving you sobbing on the changing mat. F has done her fair share of that earlier on this year.

But now, she gets angry and shouty until you put her down. Not just tiredness, the eye-rubbing and grouchiness that comes with that. This is a different kind of yelling, much more pointed, like the kind when you don't let her eat your spaghetti or close the iPad when she's using it. 'I've had enough of your nonsense! Take me to bed now!' seems closer to what she's telling us.

Great, right? Miracle baby. Plus she sleeps for ten or twelve hours every night at least, as well as long afternoon naps. Smug smug braggity smug.

Obviously we're looking at webpages called things like 'babies who oversleep' and 'early onset narcolepsy - a parent's guide', and both pretending we aren't. 16 hours a day is well within normal limits (isn't it? isn't it?), so it's all fine. We're fine. Nothing to worry about here. No sir! Just move right along, let someone else see our somniac prodigy.

I get the distinct impression F is actually just lying under her blanket half the night, sniggering to herself. Try and comb the tangles out of my hair? Take this new parental worry! Tee hee hee.

Half Birthday

Six months already? Surely not.

I was having a conversation at a barbecue with a slightly drunken Iranian yesterday. The gist of what he was saying seemed to be about parenthood, how it's not just about raising your children and seeing them develop. It's also the mirror of that, seeing how they develop you and what comes out. It was an interesting point and probably very true. Some of the profundity may have been lost behind a fug of booze, though, the conversation was a fairly incoherent medley of politics, psychology and nationalism.

Also at the barbecue yesterday were two other babies, one only a few weeks old, one a couple of months behind F. V and I both swore the youngest one was much smaller than F had ever been. It wasn't true, F turned out to have been shorter and lighter at birth. It's just impossible to imagine her as a little red rag of a person like that any more, all tiny and floppy and crinkly. Not now she's mastering flirting and chatting, or has decided that other people sneezing is the funniest thing ever.

F has done a heap of developing. Even a video from two months back, showing her trying food in a spoon for the first time, shows a totally different little girl. She can sit upright unaided now. Sometimes, anyway, if you prop her up right. She hasn't quite worked out that leaning forward will upset the balance. But yesterday was the first time she did it without the set up, she grabbed the bar across her pram and then stayed there for about fifteen minutes, happily doing pull-ups and gnawing on the fabric cover.

She plays piano with me and enjoys singing along. She can just about get her nap back in her mouth without our help. She can eat a wafer biscuit, biting out soggy mouthfuls with her two baby teeth. She can stand upright if she's got something to hold on to. All this is new in the last week or so alone.

And physical achievements like these don't really get across the way that she's appearing as a person now, her character emerging from the confused crying and constant sleeping she did as a newborn.  As though a little more of her brain wakes up every time she does. She's interested in things, she asks to be taken to stuff that's caught her eye. She sulks if she's not allowed to, e.g. chew through daddy's earphone cables.

After the first bloom of interest in a project has waned, I'm frequently guilty of moving on to something else and never finishing what I started. This is a trait supposedly common in people born in a Dragon Chinese zodiac year, as I was. Knowing that has often made an excellent excuse, of course, astrology is usually a self-fulfilling prophesy I find. Scorpios are brooding, passionate and secretive? Excellent! I'll maintain those character flaws instead of working on them, I'm supposed to be that way.

I mention this as an excuse for why I haven't written anything on this blog for two weeks. Being a father gets exhausting and difficult. It is easy to get tired, and I have been feeling that lately. It isn't that F's not doing as much funny or sweet stuff or being less inspirational, just that I haven't been able to muster the energy to write about it.

F is a different project every day, in a sense. I don't think of her as a project, a job or a chore, despite her occasional efforts to convince me otherwise. It would be impossible to lose interest, she's just too interesting.

The first time she tries something out, it doesn't usually work. The wafer biscuits, for example - watching her trying to get her hands to do what she wants is fascinating. You know the intent is there, but it's like seeing a first time crane operator on their first demolition job The things that fall down and break aren't quite the ones she's aiming for yet. But she doesn't give up, she keeps trying. And she's also very good at asking for help, often quite vocally.

When I started writing this particular entry, it was a bit of an uphill struggle. The tiredness I'm still feeling, the suspicion I'm writing to a rather empty gallery, the typical writer's niggle of 'what am I writing all this for?' - all there in spades today. Luckily F woke up and wanted to play. We played Scrabble. F loves playing Scrabble, it's one of her favourites. I hold her up to the box and she takes the title printed on the side as an instruction as she tries to pull it out of the stack of other board games.

Half an hour of that has restored my faith in the world. That's why I like being a dad so much. F can be a better, more developed person every time she wakes up. She's very inspirational that way. She makes me feel I might be able to do it too.

I'd prefer to develop into a person less likely to get so over-excited about a bag of scrabble letters they start crying, mind you. Let's face it, though, I'm a wuss. That would probably be a step up.

No month

One

Two or three? Not sure

Four

Five

Six