Spoony

V read a website last week, one of those 'normal childhood development milestones' ones. They're great. One quick read provides 90% of your RDA of paranoia and fear. F was looking pretty good - bits of walking, talking, etc, plus what it referred to as 'increased levels of activity', which is certainly true. It also said 'starting to use a spoon.'

Nope, none of that. She's trained me to do it for her, more or less. But if some random website says normal children can do that by this age? Well, by God and St. George! I shall immediately commence a rapid programme of spoon training, and devil take the hindmost.

I had a simple approach - feed F about two-thirds of her usual breakfast porridge, then offer her both bowl and spoon and let her work it out.

Learning Notes 

Day 1

Porridge feels good. Good on the face, good on the elbows, good on the floor. 
F can now keep her baby skin smooth and soft with regular oatmeal peels. 
Two metres is still inside the splash zone. 
F has mastered this skill Matrix style. Yes, that's right - there is no spoon. Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Day 3

Porridge can be used like a drum. 
Porridge can be used like glue. 
Porridge can be used as a projectile weapon.
Porridge should not be used as porridge. That's boring. 

Day 5

Sudden progress! F can now fill the spoon. Then she meticulously wipes it clean with her other hand, turns it upside down and chews the other end. Every little helps, I guess.

All the same, holding the spoon and dipping it into the porridge after a mere five days seems like a tremendous rate of progress. I don't know when she's practising between meals, but she must be slipping it in somewhere. Middle of the night, maybe? When she wakes up yowling at 0300, it may represent some new breakthrough in spoon theory. I did find porridge on her blanket this afternoon, which may prove this hypothesis. Either that, or eight metres and a wall is still inside the splash zone.

Both Ends

Freya is talking now.

Proto-talking, to be fair. Like 'Mama' does mean 'mummy', but also 'myam myam' (as in 'give me more food'), 'pick me up' and 'I'm awake, come get me.' 'Baba', which seems to denote me, also has multiple connotations. I don't think I get all of them yet. I'm also interchangable with mama, which for F's purposes is quite accurate.

It's funny, she actually first started saying 'mama' about three months ago. She said it over and over again for about two days, then totally lost interest in it and wouldn't repeat it at all, not for love nor money. We didn't actually offer her money, to be fair. Maybe that's where we went wrong.

Suddenly, whatever linguistic switch that operates these things is back on, though. She shouts for whoever takes her fancy when she wants to change positions or get dropped toys.

She shouts a lot, actually, just happy babbling. The best one is the long held note she does when you push her pram over cobbles. She clearly enjoys the way the bouncing makes her voice shake. Gothenburg has some pretty rough streets. They're the ones that make her sound like a yodelling competition.

As though to balance out the endless stream from the top, though, she got constipated yesterday.

F isn't a complainy baby. Pretty calm, generally, which means V and I aren't used to her having a day when she's all screams and miserable faces. Maybe it was a week of very hot sweaty weather, or maybe eating too many majs krokar, don't know. I do know she passed an interesting collection of pinecones and snail shells, perfectly sculpted out of poop.

No wonder she wanted to spend the entirely day lying stomach-down on mummy's legs, it looked exhausting. We went out and got a healthy supply of prunes and fresh fruit, including a punnet of raspberries. They're one of F's favourites, one of the first whole fruits she tried.

She can eat them all by herself now. You can recreate the spectacle of F eating a punnet of raspberries in your own home. Simply load handfuls of them into a shotgun and fire them at a chair from above. Once your house looks like the aftermath of a Guy Richie film, you have the general effect.

It worked, though, very smiley and active today. Also poopy, but in a good way.

Friday 2nd

0700 - F and V are both up at the same time. V is getting ready for work and having breakfast. F is, well, basically the same, I suppose. While V eats, I feed F, then myself, and then play with F for a bit until she goes back to sleep.

0800 - V has left, F and I are sleeping. So flat out that when the digital TV installation people call, I don't notice, and wake up to their polite note on the doormat. It's pretty polite. I suspect their attempt to rouse me was pretty polite too, I don't usually sleep through doorbells, but you never know.

0900 - F has a second breakfast, banana flavour porridge with some mango and apple puree on top. She liberally applies this to her face and hands, accounting for her excellent complexion.

1000 - As I sit and look for acting jobs on the internet, I'm struck by the aroma of feces that seem heavy in the air. Looking round, I can see F in her stroller with a nice sticky tail of poop extruding itself down her right leg. Amazingly, it avoids the stroller, floor and toys altogether, instead accumulating nicely all over the inside of her clean clothes. And then, shortly afterwards, Daddy.

1100 - More sleep for F, some writing for me.

1200 - Out and about, picking up groceries from Willys (a Tesco analogue), a package for V and an iced coffee from Espresso House (a Starbucks analogue) for me. After all, this is my second official day as a lattepappa, staying at home while my wife works. I got off to a bad start, I didn't have any coffee at all yesterday.

1300 - Lunch, which is chicken with rice and vegetables today. We've run out of fruit puree, I didn't think to pick any up from Willys, and F is extremely vocal about her displeasure. Instead, we make do with vanilj krokar. These are basically vanilla-flavour wotsits (and just as awful as that sounds), but F loves them.

1400 - F is napping solidly, after a rousing few hands of Sweep the Smurfs. I need to invent some kind of self-redeploying smurf escalator (a smurfscalator?), otherwise I'm solely responsible for maintaining a constant supply of pixies to the bookshelf. It's like working in a tiny blue bowling alley before the automation of pinsetters.

1500 - I'm practising an unaccompanied song for an audition next week. F helps by accompanying me, first on the piano, then by singing, and then by mashing the wordsheet into the piano keys. This helps because I can't rely on the words any more, I have to learn them.

1600 - We go out for a walk to the botanical gardens. It's a very hot, sticky summer day here. August is called Rotten Month in Sweden, because all your food goes off twice as fast in the cloying summer weather. F cools off by splashing around in the fountains, where she's extra interested in the other naked toddlers doing the same thing.

1700 - Still out walking, wandering through Haga and looking at the outside of a flat we're interested in. F is more interested in the teddy bear blowing bubbles outside a toyshop. I explain to her that we can't add that as a requirement to our flat-hunting, but she doesn't seem convinced.

1800 - We all sit together in a little cafe that's on one of the bridges over the canal. V and I have a cool beer and some chilli nuts. This enrages F, who can't see why we get exciting fizzy drinks and crunchy things where she gets nothing. And I've left the thermos of water for making velling (her evening milky drink) at home, so we have to make do with more krokar.

1900 - F goes to bed and falls very totally asleep. V and I sit up on our computers, searching for flats or reading about advanced philosophy.

Okay, not really. V goes to bed around ten, I sit up playing computer games until late (0100), because it's Friday and I let myself do that on Fridays. Sorry. Maybe I'm a terrible parent.

But would a terrible parent buy their daughter this?

Baby V Cthulhu in Facial Feeding Frenzy Championship.
Result - 1:0

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

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.