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.