The business trip

Work has asked me to spend more time at our office in Germany. This is clearly not easily compatible with spending time with the wee one. So I hatched a plan I'll, go, but the family comes with me. They agreed. I decided that we'd just try it for a single week, to make sure this was remotely feasible.

To cut a long story short – I won't be doing this again.

The trip over was filled with annoyances, which I won't go into since none were related to the child. She only started being problematic when she started bawling in the rental car from just outside the airport for the next half hour on the autobahn. That and the car's transmission was buggered and try to rev out of control every ten minutes or so.

We escaped that death trap and arrived at the hotel to find that the room work booked for me was not actually a double. Why have someone do bookings for you if they screw it up? I'm competent enough to make my own mistakes – I don't need help getting a booking wrong.

The good part about cosleeping is that you don't need to worry about travel cots or anything of that nature. What you do need to worry about is the destination having a bed big enough for even two people. This hotel does not have the concept of beds bigger than a single. So we had to try our luck with the bed legs bound together to try to keep them from eating the child.

The first day worked out well. I went into the office and got useful stuff done. L stayed at the hotel with the child, away from household distractions and got things done herself. In theory, if things kept on like this the trip would have been fine.

That evening the wee one started feeling poorly. Dinner was awkward with her being quite fussy. We suspected a fever, but, due to a I thought it was already packed error, we had no way to check it. We ended up getting the hotel to call us a doctor.

Note to other new parents in the UK: Get yourself an EHIC card now. It takes 3 minutes to fill in the forms on the web site (or six if you have to fill it in from scratch after mistakenly filling in the child's details first) and will save you trouble in the end.

Doctors comes shortly after and tells us 3 things.

1. She's a very well-behaved baby (always good to have you baby professionally assessed as wonderful)
2. She does have a fever – alternate baby paracetemol and baby ibuprofen to keep it in check.
3. it's not meningitis or encephalitis or anything worrisome. It's all teething related. No need to be concerned unless she stops eating.

Good to know.

So we get very little sleep that night with a fussy pained baby. And we fill the prescription first thing the next morning.

She does not eat all day.

Well, not more than a few sips here and there. But she's clearly getting more and more dehydrated. Stuff comes out, but nothing really goes in. At 4 in the morning L and I finally start discussing the logistics of taking her to hospital.

She latches on for a full feed half an hour later.

She starts getting better and is fine by the next day. My ability to deal with humans continues to degrade. Work ends up with several heated conversations by the end of the week. I decide that while the comfort of having family makes the trip much more comfortable, the strain of having family makes the work much harder.

So no more bringing family with with on trips. Or at least not until the baby can promise to stay healthy the whole time.

Waste matters

Toilet training is working. Or at least EC is. I've been told not to call it toilet training because people get their knickers in a twist over that.

Regardless, it is useful. First thing every morning after she wakes we place her on her Thomas the Tank Engine toilet seat (very odd choice of marketing there) and she does the full set of excretions with a very smiley face when we tell her how proud of her she is.

The best part is having fewer dirty nappies to change. If I time it well, we get to her before she has to go. And she knows now that when she's on the loo that now is the best time to go. You can see her putting effort into it. Her belly wrinkles and she taps her right foot sometimes – so cute!

The next best thing is that cleaning a baby's bottom after using the loo is soooo much easier than cleaning one after going in a nappy.

All in all I claim this experiment to have worked. We'll have to wait and see if there's any surprising long-term side effects. But for now, having the wee one understand there's and time and place for producing waste can only be a good thing.

Now we area sitting

First off, happy new year! Looking back, I'm a bit startled to find I started this in 2010. Admittedly, it was the end of 2010, and now it's the start of 2012, but it's interesting to watch how this gestation thing has evolved from watching the wife and guessing at what was going on insider her, to watching the child and guessing at what is going on inside her mind.

I'm impressed how fast the wee one's picking up things. Literally, in places. She's gotten quite good at grabbing. She can pick up toys pretty well now. Or various other things like nappies, towels, clothes, anything remotely near where she's sat. Tonight I was feeding her and she surprised me by grabbing the bottle, and holding on to it with both hands. I eventually let go and she kept holding on, and drinking. Which is really novel since she's refused to drink out of a bottle for weeks, until yesterday. And now she's drinking and holding the thing. She needed a bit of hinting about tilting it to get more as it empties, but she was firmly and clearly feeding herself. I'm rather proud.

In other skills news, she can also sit. She can't get in a sitting position on her own, but she can stay sitting for a while til she gets tired. She finally mastered that on Sunday. It certainly made getting her in position with the Skype video call too the grandparents much easier.

Most interesting is she now responds to her name. I'm still shocked at that. I say her name and she turns and looks at me. I can say other things and she won't turn. Not in the same way. Well, sometimes she responds the same way, like when I say Doodlehead. But she does not respond at all when it's L's name, even if I use the same tone. Clearly I need to experiment more with this one.