Now we are back

Given how my last posted ended, it does give the impression that the au pair moved in and murdered us with an axe in our sleep. Nothing could be further from the truth. As far as I'm aware she didn't axe murder anyone during her entire time in London – certainly not any of us.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I've just been too busy or too lazy to post for the past few months. I've a spare hour so I'll try to do a small catch-up.

The replacement au pair came and went. This one was a twenty year old from Italy. She was in London already on a course, so she decided to stay with us for six weeks as an extension of her stay. This was perfect since it was an extra two weeks beyond what we needed. She and the girl got along really well. We've even Skyped after she left so the girls could talk to each other.

While she was here our basic routine was... She got up at 8 and ate and tidied the kitchen. We got up with the girl at 10ish. She'd dress the girl and get get out of the house by 1030 or 11. Then they'd stay out til 3 or 4, back in time for the girl's nap. While they were out, we'd get whatever work we could done. When she was back, once the girl was down for a nap, her time was her own. She was taking a language course while she was with us, so she studied for that, or read, or Skyped to friends. She'd usually join us for dinner. Then she'd quietly go off to her room and eventually to bed, and L and I would work til 2 or 3. Repeat til the weekend, which she'd have off.

All in all it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. The au pair, while she didn't kill anyone, did manage to rip off almost all the childproofing in the kitchen. To the point that all my attempts to replace it have not stuck and at this point we're mostly using hope and strong language to keep the girl out of trouble. I know it wasn't on purpose, but it did irk me to have the childproofing broken. Moreso than the one time she put away the dirty dishes and I had to remember what was in the dishwasher and try to find it in the cupboards.
On the plus side, we actually got along – which is great since she was living in our house. She gave us space, often going out on weekends and a few other nights per week.
She took the girl out to parks and museums and other places, and was completely trustworthy with her. She even taught the girl to say spoon instead of foon, which was a lovely surprise.

We never went thought pasta as fast as we did when she was here. Or rice. I can eat a good amount of pasta or rice in a sitting, but the au pair would match me on that. Adding the daughter's increased appetite, and we went though a lot.

While it was good to have time to get work done, we were a bit tight on space for a while. We had to move all the girl's stuff into the office and our room. She slept with us and the au pair got her room. But four in the house went surprisingly smoothly in the end. And the house did feel huge once she left.

Once more unto the breech

We have a new au pair starting on Sunday. As you may recall, the last one just up and disappeared on us essentially saying it wasn't what she expected. A number of interviews later and, to cut a long story short, we've a 20 year old Italian lass coming to live with us on Sunday. Which is good, since we're kind of at the breaking point on being able to get work done.

It's been 3 weeks since the last au pair left. We started the search for someone new. Of the lot, three really stood out. The first was a charming male au pair from UK (a maux pair?). After a Skype interview we made an offer, but he turned us down – in the end, he needed more money than an au pair job could pay. The promise of free accommodation doesn't help if you already live with your parents.

Another potential looked good until the end of the call. Well, first off she'd not be able to stay the entire time we needed, but we could have lived with that id the rest was good. But then she ended the call with Oh, can I bring a friend?

She dodged all the questions of Who? and Can you give us a CV or some details of who this person is that you want to live rent free in our house and have access to all our stuff?
All the while she found it odd that we'd object, like we wouldn't find it at the limits of our space living with three adults in this flat, and having a fourth couldn't possibly make any difference.

There we other potentials, but the one we settled on was already in London doing a class. She'd be available for 6 weeks when the class ended, but she was happy to come over for lunch to meet us all. It went well. Much better than her Skype call (which wasn't the best connection anyway).

So this whole time since the last au pair left, the nursery – now the au pair's room – has sat empty and unused. Which is a bit of a pain since we're short on space as it is in our house. but it felt like giving up if we started putting stuff in it again. It will be nice to get it used again and not feel wasted. I'm still hoping that at some point we start to see some benefit of having an au pair, and it'll take some the burden off and let us get some work done.

In summary – less terrified than last time, but more cynical.

Well *that* was disappointing

I'm still a bit shocked at how badly that au pair worked out.

When I last posted here, I mentioned we'd just hired a 24 year old austrian girl to look after our daughter while we get work done. She started last sunday, and on Monday, after a weekend visiting friends in Brighton, she declared she'd quit and was packed up and gone in under half an hour.

All this a day before my daughter's second birthday, which just adds to the awkward

Here's the story as far as I can tell…

This was our first time doing anything of this sort, so we went into it with a few reservations. We didn't want to leave the au pair alone with the girl until we knew we could trust her. So the first few days had her looking after the girl in the house (nicely coinciding with some well-needed rain), where we'd be on hand, but working, in case we were needed, or with L going with the au pair and the girl to one of the many nearby parks, partly to show the au pair around, and partly to see how she'd treat the girl outside of the house.

By the 3rd day we felt comfortable enough for her to take the girl for walks alone. We seemed to get along well, I even cooked with her, and it all felt quite comfortable. In her off time, we'd share meals together and spend time with her to make her comfortable with us and in her new home.

The only problem I'd had with her is when she was supposed to join me at a park. Due to a confusion with bus stop names she foudn herself in the wrong park and ended up not being able to meet up with me before I left. Admittedly, she did try calling, but the local (o2) networking was dropping our calls, and the one which could have gotten through I ignored because it arrived at the same time as the girl face planting off a swing into a patch of mud (causing me to try to comfort her and find out of she was hurt or just messy and find somewhere toy clean her up (air dryers in a loo don't help clean up messes)). All in all, it's a pretty minor problem to have, but she did end up missing an entire morning's work.

On Friday, day 5, we asked her to join us for a friend's birthday lunch. After which she'd head off to her friends in Brighton for the weekend. She was supposed to come back Sunday night for dinner with us, and work again on Monday. I cut short lunch, skipping the pub part, to head home and get some work done. That was pretty much the last time I saw the her, or at least the her I thought I knew.

On Sunday we exchanged a few text messaged which amounted to just this:

Are you joining us for dinner

No, I'll be back Monday at noon

Eh? We kinda need you here for morning

I won't be able to make it before then, I'll explain later

We were a bit annoyed at that, but we assumed she was having a life complication and it'd just be a bump we'd get past.

Monday noon comes and goes with not a sign or peep for the au pair. In the end we declare the day a waste and start to consider if we dock her wages or ask her to work on the weekend. I finally give up waiting and decide to pack up the girl and get out to the shops to buy some food for the girl's birthday lunch the next day. As I'm waking out the au pair comes in, bringing a friend of hers with. I'm a bit dubious about the stranger in my house, but, as the place is her home too, I couldn't complain. So I just say Hi. I'm off to the shops. I'll see you in a bit. L is upstairs. To be honest, after her being so rude to just show up hours late like that, I didn't want to talk to her.

I get the next bus out and 3 minutes later I get a call from L saying the au pair has just quit. I'm shocked. I get off the bus and get the first bus back home. When I get there, the au pair is in her room, with her friend, behind the closed door. L is working in the office and just tells me that the au pair had said that she was working far more hours than she was willing to do, and she would quit immediately and move out. The friend she brought was there for support, but as far as L could tell, was just there to be rude to us.

L brings me up to date for a few minutes then I go to talk to the now ex au pair. I catch her just as she's leaving, and bring up the fact that we had a contract and she could not just walk away with no notice. To cut an unpleasant interaction short, I'll suffice to say voices were raised and doors were slammed and that's it she was gone. She never even said goodbye (or anything for that matter) to the girl before she left.

The whole thing left me feeling just betrayed. I mean, I felt I could trust her and she goes and throws this in our face. I'm still puzzled about her claim she was working 12 hour days. Unless she counted time spent conversing or eating together as work, or the time she spent exploring the neighbourhood as work… I can't see how she's arrived at anything like that figure. A number of her final complaints, like how we were working from home, we told her about in her Skype interview. She never complained once about anything the entire week she was working. One of her references warned me about her taking on too much work and letting it get to her. Turns out, that was spot on, but I didn't expect it to come to a head so quickly.

It come across as her quietly seething against us the whole time, which doesn't strike me as true, since she did honestly seem to be having fun with us.

The only thing which seems to fit all the evidence I see is that when she visited her friends, they just talked about the parts she didn't like which spiralled out of control. Kind of like how when you explain the problems you have in a relationship to someone who doesn't know your partner they just quip Leave his sorry arse without knowing anything really about the situation. And given how rude the friend who came with her came across, this seems credible. So after a couple of days of egging her into it, she's turned the whole thing in her own mind into to a lost cause.

It's all supposition regardless. It doesn't really matter.

Anyways, this all means we're back at square zero. Desperately trying to find another au pair or childcare solution and still get the work done we need. All in all, over that one week we got maybe 3 hours of work in the same room the whole week and we generally wasted that on catching up on stuff that accrued while getting the house ready for the au pair. And now we have the added bonus of the girl asking where the au pair is. We've had houseguests before, so we're hoping the girl treats it like that and not anything traumatic. So we just explain that she went home and is not coming back. L and I try to not mention the au pair's name to avoid reminding the girl, though she still says go home on random occasions which we think is a reference to the au pair.

What I've been doing the past 7 months

This story will be long, so please pack a bag lunch and make yourself comfortable. We'll make a pit stop part-way through in case you need the loo.

I don't talk about work much here, but it's relevant now, so bear with me. I left my job back in October. I got a bit of cash from the redundancy so the wife and I decided to throw caution to the wind and start our own business.

Now for the last four years I was working there I'd been at risk of redundancy something like 4 or 5 times. I lost count, it happened so often. Each time I considered if I were better off leaving or better off staying. Usually it was met with We're buying a flat, we kind of need the income, or We're planning on having a baby, the security of a job, even if I don't like it is a good thing.

It's hard trying to make major life changes when work is in turmoil. It all boils down to Can I afford to do this, and when the source of income is in doubt, everything else which seems clear becomes more dubious. And you end up holding on to maxims like I've a kid on the way, I can't leave, when you should be focussing on things like There's never a good time to have a chid, just get on with it. Jobs come and go and people find ways to get by. If you can't plan beyond the next big unknown you're not going to plan very far.

So… When the redundancy fairy visited me I came up with three options.

1. I'd just move on to another job somewhere else. With luck, I'd find something I'd like
2. L would get a job and I'd stay at home being a full-time father. I liked this idea a lot. It was really tempting.
3. Start a company with L and we'd both work from home, splitting the child care 50%.

We settled on the last one. Which clearly was the hardest of the lot. But, when else would we ever be able to do this? I felt I could not use the baby as an excuse. L and I had been talking for years about going into business together – our skills are nicely complementary and we both have Visions of how to make things Better. And when else would we get the opportunity? Between the redundancy pay and a small business grant I got, it was now or never.

The grant specifically stipulated the money could be used for most any business expense, but Not childcare. So the one real barrier we have to getting the company off the ground, the grant would not support. I cannot stress how annoying this is.

And, besides, no other option would let us both have such an active role in the girl's early life. We'd both be there, even if one of us was locked in an office, the other would be around, and we'd switch the next day.

Since then we've been trying lots of approaches to work. First we tried shifts. In each shift, one of us would work while the other would look after the girl, and when she'd nap or be down for the night, we'd work together. I'd do 4 hours, then L'd do 4, then I'd do 4. Then next day we'd switch.

That didn't really work. If the girl had trouble getting to sleep, it'd bugger the whole schedule. Plus I personally found it was time to switch every time I'd get on a roll. I guess it's the way I work – start off with something simple to get me in the mood, then get to something really hard which requires hours of thought and effort. Which usually would begin around hour 3.

We tried a few other failed options till we settled on switching days. One of us would work 3 days in a workweek and other works 2. Weekends are up for grabs, depending on what we'd planned. Whoever was not working would look after the girl. Except for breastfeeds which all required L. And by this time the girl stopped being able to be settled by anything other than breastfeeding. Which meant that even if L was working she'd lose about 3 or more hours of productivity a day. So all the time we'd planned to be able to work together would just be spent me working instead of her.

Time when we could work together was really productive, but got really rare. We'd occasionally get a sitter in to look after the girl for half a day while we'd work. Which gets expensive after a while, especially since the grant would not cover it as a business expense. This was especially troublesome with client meetings. The girl was young enough at the first few to come along with us without getting in the way, but now she's far too active to sit still for that long without taking one of our full attention. Now, either one us stays at home with her (which is not ideal since L and I sell ourselves best when we can tag team), or we have to arrange childcare.

That carried on for a while until L got a hard deadline for her thesis corrections. After waiting for like a year for comments she finally got the details she needed to do the corrections. This came with a two month deadline. there's no way she could do that, raise a child and run a business. So we panicked and decided this was a problem we could throw money at, despite not having any income yet. We'd put the girl into childcare.

Daycare is impressively expensive. It'd be a huge chunk of money over just the two months we needed. L discovered that getting an au pair would be much cheaper and more convenient. L had been an au pair for a bit once upon a time, so she was more comfortable with the idea than I. Over the space of the next few days we searched for and found a decent match. So we'd committed ourselves to a couple of months of feeding and housing (and paying) a 24-year-old from Austria in exchange for her looking after our daughter.

What followed was a couple of weeks mad clearing out the nursery and turning it something fit for being a grown-up's bedroom. Plus there was the moving the girl and her cot into our room, and tidying the whole flat so we'd not embarrass ourselves.

The au pair arrived on Sunday. We met her at a train station and took her home. She's settled in pretty well so far. I was initially anxious… well… terrified, but it's working out ok. I feels a lot like having a house guest. Except one I never met before that I don't mind asking to look after my child. It's a situation I never expected to find myself in and I guess I'm just taking it in my usual whatever happens happens, get on with it manner.

Bunny X

On our street is house with what appears to be like some kind of vent on the side. The girl has decided to call it "Bunny X" because it looks like bunny ears and it's in the shape of an X.

She is right. And since she says Bunny X every time we pass the house, I'm always reminded of her ... facsinating insight into the world.

Favourite book

Her favourite book is Boiloi gorl. She'll ask us to read it to her over and over again. This is what she calls Blueberry Girl, a poem Neil Gaiman wrote for a friend's soon-to-be-born daughter. The fact that my daughter loves this book pleases me greatly since I read excerpts of it at her naming ceremony.

I'll read the book to her, and she'll point to the animals in the book, saying their names. Sometimes she'll point to the baby in the book and say her own name, and point to the mother and say mamma. Sometimes she'll repeat lines back to me in her mostly-decent attempts at English Lady light, Lady dark or say lines I'm about to say instead of me Gifts boiloi gorl.

This is the first book she's gone to the efforts to memorise parts of and ask for by name. Daily. Or more often. It's got the point where we can calm down a crying fit by reciting parts to her (L and I pretty much have the whole thing memorised). This morning, she was hungry, tired and a bit ill, I only managed to stop a long crying fit by playing a video of Neil Gaiman reading the poem. Which I then put on repeat for half an hour to get her to eat breakfast.

What's that?

She's been playing the What's that? game for about 3 or 4 days now. She'll point to something and ask What's that? – sometimes it'll be something she knows, but usually she actually does want to know what it is.

I really like this game. It's fun to explain easy things. That's a chicken, and that's a duckling which is a baby duck. Sometimes it's really hard, like when she asks sequentially about two of the same thing and I try to figure out what is the difference between them that she's noticed, or do I just say That's also a xxx?

I suppose I'll get sick of it over time. Then again, I'm sure she will too. Until then I enjoy the curiosity and the sharing. It makes me both feel needed and proud that she's taking such an interest in knowing what's around her.

Today we were walking with a friend through a cemetery. All the graves were different, so the girl pointed to nearly all of them asking What's that? and we sort of took turns trying to explain what a grave is, how some are above ground, some below, some in a small building called a mausoleum, some have pots built in for people to put flowers in, how to pronounce these new long words, and so on. It was a long walk, so there was a lot of explaining.

The last time the girl and I walked through a cemetery was a fortnight ago and she didn't do What's that? yet. Instead she pointed at the first several headstones and said Locked door for each one. I found this somewhere in the realm between creepy, disturbingly profound and "what do you know that I don't?"

Near names and far names

Apparently L and I both have a pairs of names, according to the little girl. When we are near she calls us dada and mama. When we are far away she calls us by our first names.

A perfect example of this was the other day when L made me a coffee. She asked the girl to call downstairs to me and tell me the coffee was ready. The girl came over to the top of the stairs and called out Bob! Toffee. Bob! When I came in view she said Dada!

I can only guess this is because L and I, tend to only use each other's first names when calling to each other across the flat. Regardless, it's led to a rather cute side-effect.

Reading

I've not been posting a lot lately, so I've skipped a number of her new language skills. A couple of months ago she started recognising uppercase letters and a few numbers. Last week she managed to read her first two words.

We were walking down the street and she kept passing and stopping at the water meters in the pavement in front of each house. On each one is written just WATER, so she'd stop and say the letters on each. Not in order. Usually something like Tee... Eee... Ay... Are... Double you.

Each time I'd say What does that spell? It spells water!

We kept this up for about 20 or so houses.

The next day L took the girl the park. A few hours after coming back she tells me, You'll never guess what the girl did today. We passed the water meters in the pavement, she stopped at one and read the letters and said water!

I explained what happened the day before and how this is one step better than that. To test, I wrote, in uppercase in my dodgy handwriting on a scrap of paper WATER and showed it to the girl. She said each letter in random order as before and said water! Partly, but not entirely scientific, but it's good enough to show that she recognises the word, not the situation.

The next day I was showing off this skill to my parents over Skype. I told them she'd read her first word and showed her the scrap of paper from the day before. She said water, then she turned over the paper and said her own name. I was a bit surprised at this. I looked down and saw that at some point L must have written the girl's name on the other side of the scrap of paper. So apparently she can read two words now.

I doubt this will scale well. At some point she needs to be able to sound out words phonetically, not by recognising the shape (I suppose if we were teaching her Kanji, it'd be a recognition and memorisation). But at least she clearly now knows that letters make words.

More explosions in talking

The girl is now almost on complete sentences. She's gotten a hand on using nouns and verbs and articles and the occasional adjective and preposition. She'll repeat back pretty much any new word you say to her, with varying levels of accuracy.

She's even realised her name is her name. The side effect of this is she now refers to herself in the third person, and quite a lot – R sad, R happy and so on. Which is odd, but much better than her old habit of referring to herself in the 2nd person (when she'd see a picture of herself she'd say it's you! because that's what we'd say when we'd show her a picture of herself).

In the time since I last posted about her putting two words together, she's now able to explain what she did the day before (Yesterday. Park. Slides!), where she wants to go ( That way (pointing), up the stairs), what she likes (Do you like it? Good. Like the flavour), etc etc.

I gave her a dog puppet my grandmother made me when I was a child. She recently has taken to constantly carrying it all over the house in a mesh bag which she refers to as her doggy bag.

On the other hand, her recent levelling up has been matched by a downgrade in her sleeping. It's driving me a little batty. She's taken to skipping her afternoon nap. Which kind of kills a couple of hours in the afternoon trying to get her to sleep (usually L doing the trying). When I try to get her to sleep, she usually ends up wide awake, and me so tired I'm barely able to stand. And cranky. And not the good kind of cranky where other people might be sympathetic.

She'll either fall asleep later, right when we need to leave the house for some engagement, or stay up till 11 or 12 and be completely loopy. I'm trying rather hard to be patient with this. It could be worse… it could be a potty reversion. I mean, beyond the loopy bits at night, the problem is just me not being in control. So it's really up to me to deal with it. But… that's easy enough to say, it's hard to feel.

Train of why

Last Friday L and I managed to get our first series of Why? questions from the little girl. We were taking a train and L was explaining where we were going and what we would do when we got there. The girl innocuously asked why? I don't think this is the first time she's asked why, but she certainly hasn't done it much. Without giving it much thought, L responded with a simple answer. So the girl asked why? again. And again, and again, I think 4 times total before L and I realised we hit a new milestone! So, we just stopped answering her and got on with transferring trains.

She's not really done this since then – possibly since we caught on to her. I've noticed her asking Why? once since then, but without the trailing refinement queries. But I do expect more and more of this as she get more comfortable with language.

Trapped hand

Today the girl got her hand trapped between the bathroom door and the doorframe. I'm not sure how she did it, as it I was looking away the exact moment it happened. But she managed to find the one spot where she could get her fingers through, but opening the door more would crush them more and closing it would also crush them more.

She calls me out of my distraction by crying Help!. She's got four of the fingers of her left hand stuck past the first knuckle. Her pinky is small enough to be free to move, but the other three won't go past the knuckle. I'm pretty sure they'd started to swell a little. A bit of wiggling the door just makes her scream louder. I call for L to help and we just take turns, one of us holding the girl and the other trying the door, trying to push the fingers back through, or covering them with oil, soap, water or whatever else which'll make them more slippery (I'm pretty sure the oil and soap cancelled each other out).

Nothing works, and the doors won't unscrew from the wall without opening fully. L goes to see if the neighbours have a crowbar while I consider calling 999. The downstairs neighbours add some more consolation and distraction for the girl. L, while one of the neighbour's is fetching tools, gets some tin snips. I think there's nothing those will cut through, but she just sticks them in the space between the door and frame and twists, just enough to bend the wood and free the girl's hand. Just in time for the neighbour's toolbox to arrive.

She comes out, right into my arms and I hold her till L gives her a consoling breast feed. I feel her hand in case anything is broken, but she does not seem to feel any pain. L asks her to make zero and five, that is making a fist and extending her fingers. Which she does without complaint. So it seems she came out unscathed.
For the next hour she would repeat Hand stuck. Door. quite a bit. And any time she got her hand near a doorframe, L and I would lunge at her and grab her away.

Another scary childhood milestone. This one without permanent damage, though I do hope it means she won't do it again.

Upgraded girl

The girl came back from her time away not quite a completely new girl. But she's certainly much more chatty. When we left, she had a few words, but was gaining about 5 new words a day. When we stayed with L's cousin he spent a while showing her various youtube videos of cats. She combined her first two words for him when she later pointed at his computer from the hallway and said Watch cats.

That was just the start of it. Now that she's back, she'll at least try to repeat back any word you say to her. At least a couple of syllables of it. She's started on the alphabet and numbers, though she really only remembers a few of them at this point (5 and Q seem to be her favourites, though G and 6 are a close second).

Taking her to the loo is much easier, since she tells us when she needs to go. And she's only missed a few times in the past month. The downside is she's learned that if she tells us she needs to go, we'll stop what we're doing (often driving on the motorway) and take her to the loo. It seems 3 times out of 4 she just wants a change of scenery. This meant a 6 hour drive up north took over 8 hours, with us stopping every 15 minutes at one point.

We went to a music festival a in April. One of the bands had a little girl a couple of months younger, but about as developed verbally. While they were doing their sound check, the two girls played with each other. It was the cutest thing. Their girl kept shyly handing mine a stuffed tiger, which mine would play with and hand back. This was a really weird experience for me, since I've been a big fan of this band since I was a teenager listening to them on the radio on my way to school. And here I was giving them tips on ear defenders while our children played together.

They then had a little game. Their girl was wearing a shirt with cats all over it. So my girl would poke her on a cat and say cat, and the other girl would poke back and say shirt. This went back and forth for ages. Until my girl got a little pushy with her poking, and knocked the other girl over, making her cry.

I'm at least consoled by the fact that my girl expressed concern when the other girl was upset. Part concern and part confusion. I'm not sure she entirely made the connection that her rough playing caused the problem. It's something I really need to watch out for. She does sometimes slap or hit us with things – which we're very stern about telling her off for doing. But it's much worse when she does it to another, younger, baby – which rarely happens, but mostly through lack of opportunity than anything else. I'm trying to find ways to get her to, if not actually have empathy, at least behave as if she does.

Confused identities

I went to a gig the other day. I ran into someone I knew and started talking. He was trying to place where he knew me from and asked:

Are you the one whose house we went to that time where we all were drunk and ended up at an after party at yours?

Was there a small baby there? If not, I'm pretty sure you're thinking of someone else with the same name.

Perhaps that statement could have been true if it were more like Did we go to your house when we were all tuckered out after the playground and we ended up at yours drinking tea while the kids napped?
Someone else pointed out we'd met at a vegetarian restaurant and I was the one spending the whole time trying to feed and contain my daughter.

Also slightly related, I've discovered I still have the new parent stand-and-sway. Which does not come across as remotely inappropriate when watching a band play.

Exercise in enunciation

While the girl was easing breakfast, she decided to say pəpaaɺ. I decided it was good time to teach her the difference between words to she's clear on what she wants.

I held up a piece of paper, saying paper clearly enunciating the A. Then I held up a pepper grinder, saying peper, making the E clear. Then I pointed to the browser on the computer saying PayPal, trying to make the difference between R and L more obvious.

She did repeat each one back at me, barring PayPal, which she just said Pal. Of course, once I stopped, she reverted to the ambiguous pəpaaɺ. And, of course, once I finally gave her a piece of paper and crayon to play with, she grabbed the squeegee and ran to the stairs to clean them with it

She's also started a habit of adding -ee to words. sockie for socks. Doggie for dog. Bucky for bucket. Duckie for ducks. Pocky for pockets. She also started using panties for pants, which actually does mean what she means, so that's ok.

Back again

I spent a fortnight without the family last month. L took the girl off to the States to help L's sister give birth. I stayed at home putting in exceptionally long days trying to get work done. All the while I learned a number of things.

• Wow. Sleep is nice. But when you're alone in bed, it's really quite slow to warm up. I took to sitting on the duvet an hour before bedtime so that I'd not have to sleep with a jumper on.
• Without anyone else here, I never spend any time in the kitchen/dining room beyond actually making food. With the family here, I spend good chunks of my day here (where I'm writing this now), eating meals, playing with the girl, etc, etc. Then maybe I didn't spend as much time here because L took the laptop with her.
• Cooking for myself is easy. I can use as much spice and salt as I want. Though I have lots of trouble judging what a portion size for one is. I think I overate alot.
• I gravitate to later hours. By the time the family came back, I was keeping EDT time rather than BST. Dinner at 11pm, bed by 5am. Which meant we were all jet lagged when they returned.
  We'd Skype once or twice a day, which is what led me switch time zones. Chatting with L after she ate dinner was usually around 3am or so my time. And chatting in the morning so I could see the girl was around 7am or so her time (on a good day when the girl didn't wake her at 6am when the sun came up in their curtainless room).

While they were away I was able to make the flat slightly more liveable. I replaced another 3 bulbs (we have lots of those GU10 halogen bulbs, most of which have blown out. We're slowly replacing them all with much more expensive LED ones. It seems that the only place I can find with decent bulbs is ordering then online on Amazon, but 1 in 5 are dodgy and have to be sent back. Sigh. So we're just lacking now on the dimmable bulbs, which are really expensive and often have a rather dodgy definition of what "dimmable" means) – I bought 4, but one was bad. But we've now got one more room which use tens of Watts instead of hundreds of Watts.

I tried to do some DIY, but I just did not have it in me to drill holes in our nice walls and counters. So I left that for L and just settled on cleaning the stuffs with all those noxious chemicals I don't like to use when the girl is around. That said, I didn't manage to clean and seal all the floors since, 1) no one likes a neighbour who hoovers at 10pm, and 2) to really clean all the floors, I'd have to move an awful a lot of very heavy furniture.

I even got to work on my physio – something I just can't seem to do with the girl around. My right arm has been some degree of dodgy for several months now. At least now it's not debilitating, but it's clear I've lot lost a lot of flexibility and buggered my posture a bit (I bend down a lot). At least my extensors pollicis longus have had a chance to heal. They take the brunt of the weight when I lift up the girl, and have been getting ouchier and ouchier over time.

When L and the girl came back, they flew into Heathrow. I took the tube down to meet them. Their plane was delayed a bit, and it took what felt like ages for them to get their luggage and come out. It was a surprisingly teary reunion. Well... on my part. The girl was just a bit confused and clung to her mum, and didn't really pay much attention to me. Not as exciting as I'd hoped, but I was far more choked up by the whole thing than I expected to be.

Since then the girl has been really clingy to her mum. It's harder to settle her, and I can barely put her to sleep at all. We've not had a single night where she's slept by herself the whole time. I think she's still getting over all the chaos of the past month, with all the new things she's been doing and places she's been staying. Well, we have a month at home before going anywhere else. Hopefully she'll get used to hanging out with me again. We've already had a few pleasant days out, and I've planned a few more. So, even if things are not the same, it'll still be fun.

By the way, their trip to the US was successful and I have a new niece (that I've only seen over Skype).

Holding hands

We spent a long weekend away on holiday, doing a good deal of travel by car. For the first time, the girl has been comfortable holding my hand. I don't mean sort of holding like grabbing onto a finger, or guiding while walking down a street, but actual hand holding – the idle sort you do when you're just being comfortable with someone's presence.

When in the car, I usually sat next to her in the back seat, with her in the car seat. Not always, but often enough the girl would sit quietly and hold my hand. It was the first time she'd done that. It was really sweet.

It was also the first time in ages I'd had time to just sit down and watch TV with L. We were staying with L's cousin. A few times after we'd put the girl to bed we'd plop down in the comfy chairs and watch something. The weird thing was holding L's hand. I didn't recognise it. It still fit, fingers interwoven, like it has for ages. It just somehow it didn't feel familiar. I mean, we must have held hands at some point since the girl was born. I'm fairly sure, at least. Maybe her hand has changed... I know mine are much drier these days – all the extra handwashing has taken a bit of a toll. Maybe that's what feels unusual. It's hard to tell. But regardless, it was nice to have those moments to just sit together.

L has taken the lass with her to visit the family in the States. I'm back here in London getting, what I hope will be, a lot of work done. And, with luck, give the house a decent tidy – the first real opportunity to clean it without the girl being around. Time to break out the noxiously fumed floor cleaners.

Walking off a cliff of verbage

Around a month ago L and I started to be concerned about the girl's language development. Mostly it was that she could only say a few words, used them erratically and pretty much with only one syllable. It wasn't any red flag or anything, but better to be safe than sorry. I mean, she could certainly understand us – that's been clear for quite some time. It's just she would not say anything to make her needs known. So we decide to take her to the monthly Talking Walk In to have her checked out by a professional.

The next session was 3 weeks away.

About a week after we made that decision she started adding a new word roughly every day. Plus she started being able to make new sounds like L and K. Not only did she have new words and sounds, but she started to be able to use them in useful way. Stuff like

• help
• please
• book – give me that book to read or read me that book
• cup – I want water
• shower I want to bathe
• back – take this away or I want to be someplace I was earlier or just give me that thing I had earlier
• sock / boot – as in,give me the... or take this ... off me
• panda – she carries around this tiny stuffed panda everywhere. She says this over and over if she can see it and she wants it. It came with a small book, and occasionally she calls the book panda too
• tissue – please wipe my nose
• bag
• bed
• cot
• bees – she has this bee mobile she's fond of
• oh – that's surprising
• teeth
• wet – Oops. I've missed.
• seat / sit – Usually with tapping next to her please sit next to me, though sometimes it's I want to sit there.
• talk – Oooh Skype. I want to talk.
• watch – Is that Youtube/iPlayer? Can I see?
• walk – I want to go outside
• up – lift me up, she also says this when walking up the stairs
• down – She repeats this when walking down stairs
• dark – I notice you just turned out the lights
• light – please hand me / turn on the light
• bucket – she has a toy pail she likes to play with
• and occasionally she says what sounds like bog when she needs the loo.

On top of that, hello, water, dog are now quite distinct. She even has fun repeating duck and dog over and over making sure the words are sufficiently different. Same thing with keys and cheese, though less often (she really likes cheese, but she also really likes playing with keys – I'm not sure which she likes more)
She can say cat, but recently has tended not to in favour a sad, plaintive mewing noise she obviously picked up from her time spent with friends' cats.

Anyway, back to the point of this post… Over that three week period she started saying more and more. To the point that when she babbles, we can catch some sense in there as often as not. Two days before we were due to take her in, on a whim I decided to recite the alphabet to her:

A — ay
B — beeeeee
C — ceee
D — dee
E — əə
F — eh
G — Jee
H — ay
…and so on, for the full alphabet. We got to the end and she'd managed all but a few letters. L looked at me and asked Do we really need to take her to be checked out?
At which point we decided that if she wasn't on track, she was coming along nicely. It's weird how it seems to have exploded from almost nothing to almost practical in such a short period of time. Brains are fascinating.

Random chatting fathers

The other day I was taking the train home with the girl. She didn't want to be in the sling much that day, so she did most of her own walking and, on the train, she sat in her own seat, opposite me. Despite, or because, it being the two of us in a pair of bench seats for 5, no one sat in the other 3 seats, even though it was rush hour.

At the first stop, a man carrying an 18 month old boy in a sling got on the train, and immediately decided that this would be a good place to sit. We quickly got to talking, mostly because the girl started saying Bæ bæ bæ over and over as soon as she saw the baby in his arms.

It was nice finding a kindred spirit to share the ride home. He'd spent his afternoon with his son at the Museum of Childhood. I'd spent the afternoon with the girl at the Museum of London. He extracted his lad from his sling and plunked him down next to the girl. Despite being practically the same age (she's 19 months old), there was a marked difference between them. He was bigger than her, but quite shy. She was quite interested and babbling to him, with the occasional pointing or poking. He sat there looking a bit tired and droopey eyed barely registering her, while we exchanged stories about what each museum does well and what other good places we've taken our kids lately.

I'd never done that before – meeting a fellow father and just gabbing away about fun things to do with children. I mean, I do that with friends all the time, but it's the total stranger part that's new to me. Usually with complete strangers it's What a cute baby or other suchness about the child. I suppose what I liked about this is it was about parenting. Not how the baby looks or what they do, but here's some fun things you can do while being a part of their life.

Earlier that day, in the museum, I spent the bulk of my time just following the girl around as she walked from exhibit to exhibit, looking under the tables, walking circles around models in glass cases, taking guides and handing them to bemused staff and pointing to a taxidermied rabbit and saying Cat!

One of my favourite parts was in the 18^th century section where they have artefacts about half a foot under the floor covered clear glass, so you can look down and see various bits and pieces of daily life from back then. It's sturdy glass, so you can walk over it too.

So I did. I, in clear view of the girl, walked on this glass, at a slow pace so she'd see what I was doing, but without breaking my stride. I always walk on glass bridges whenever I can, because it feels so wrong and so mundane at the same time. The girl followed, but with very hesitant steps. The first step onto the glass was in complete disbelief that it was possible to do this. Each subsequent step clearly said It feels solid, but all my instincts say that can't be. She never quite got comfortable walking on the glass, but at least she started getting use to the fact that it was evidently possible to do so. Every step was measured and slow, and stepping back onto opaque land was as hesitant as stepping onto the glass had been.

I consider this one of my jobs as parent. To dash her world view. To show her how her instincts can be plain wrong. I'm kind of hoping it will just give her a better class of instincts when she's older.

All tomorrow's parties

It seems to be getting harder and harder to be sociable with a child. Going out with the wife and without the child is expensive and requires lots of advance planning. I can go out by myself, which is okay, but I married L because I enjoy doing stuff with her. It's not as fun going to clubs or gigs without her. We could have people over, but that seems to be less and less an option.

If I try having a party or some other event, I'm more and more finding people won't come. Of all the various events I've organised over the years, the number of people who say they're going to come has dropped dramatically. However that's not dropped nearly as dramatically as the number of people who say they'll come and actually do show.

I've organised a lot of social events over the years. I've gotten used to people saying I might be able to make it, but x… and that meaning there's around 20-40% chance of them coming – depending on what x is. But if someone says I'll be there then they're almost certainly going to be there. I got the the point that I could guess quite accurately the number of people who'd actually show.

I've noticed a trend of of increasing flakiness with friends over the past few years – where people who said they'd come just don't show up, and saying I might come is actually shorthand for Thanks for inviting me. That was before the girl was born. Since she's been here, the flakiness of my non-childed friends as gone up drastically. Pretty much everything I've tried to arrange lately has fallen apart to some degree.

For my birthday last week, I'd tried to organise a nice little outing plus lunch. Despite a number of people saying they'd come, not a single one of my friends did. So I spent the birthday with the girl and her cousins from out of town. While a nice afternoon was had by all, that's not the point. This is just the extreme case of a trend I've seen amplified since the girl was born. yes, I'll come has more and more meant … unless something else comes up, or I decide to sleep in, or the weather is bad… I've stopped having parties at the house, since I got annoyed of buying and making food and drinks for the people who said they'd come, only to have less than a quarter of them actually show.

It used to be as much one in ten would or so would drop out last minute to due illness or some other emergency. And usually they'd mention being on call or getting sick days in advance. I'm getting far more last minute no-warning excuses now. They may be true – perhaps we're all getting older and more fragile. Or maybe they just like the credible sound of these excuses. Or maybe in this age of social media and mobile phones people don't really plan things and just decide last minute based on their mood when they go online and see they have something to do.

While I call out specifically non-childed friends above, it's not that childed friends are immune to dropping out. In fact it's the opposite – it's fairly common for people with kids to drop out last minute, and I expect that. The problem is amplified at children's parties. The number of people who say they're going to show up for a party is several times the number of people who do show. To the point where it's pretty common for no one at all to show, or sometimes only one or two guests come.

I know I've been guilty of this – children get sick, and you don't want to bring a nasty disease and turn a party into a den of germs. The girl was at risk of chicken pox last year (turns out she did have the pox) and we skipped a first birthday party I'd committed to going to. I felt horrible about it, but I did have a good reason. Just the fact that everyone else also pulled out for various reasons makes me feel guilty.

It's pretty disappointing to be in this dilemma. When the girl was very young it was trivial to take her to pubs and restaurants – she'd sleep or quietly sit through. Now she spends the time eating. She's well behaved, but needs enough attention that I find at the end of the night all I can remember is saying a few words to the person sitting next to me and maybe vaguely what I ate. That's not quite true – I can remember what she ate, what she threw on the floor, what she didn't like, which cutlery she used, how much she drank and the number of times I took her too the loo. I can do all that at home.

So, is it even possible to have a family and still have any sort of social life? Am I stuck with Facebook and the like being my only lifeline to my childless friends? Do I only get to hang out with other people with kids of the same age? I don't mind that last bit since we've plenty of friends with kids under 4. But I wouldn't be friends with everyone else if I didn't want to see them.

Talking about talking

So the nappytastic mess seems to have calmed down a bit. Her miss to hit ratio has dropped down to a more acceptable level – she managed a 96 hour stretch without missing earlier this week. It seems that reversions like this are common during growth spurts or when levelling up. And she seems to be doing both right now. Her final baby molars have started coming in – which means lots of her poking around her mouth and making that hurts faces. Though so far she's refused all but one attempts to put Bonjela on it. I don't blame her – that stuff smells foul in a fake-candy kind of way.

She's kind of sort of starting to talk. She's definitely understanding most things as long as we don't start using new synonyms or other unfamiliar words. She can now say and mean a few words, the clarity of which seems to grow day by day.

No is the most obvious. She says it quite clearly, but we thought she was a bit confused at how it's used at first. But I now think it's how we ask the question.

Me: Do you need to go to the bathroom?
Her: (thinking) Need? Not really. I'm, having fun now. I'm sure I'll be fine
Her: No

She's got a wee vocabulary of words she uses like bo (elbow), bowl, ball, hello, baby, bye bye, vaaa (water), dog, duck, bats and cats (bats and cats are never singular). Plus there's ちょうだい and
どうぞ which we convinced her to use because they sound more polite than "gimmie".

She can also say her friend Will's name. As in We're going to the park with Will she'll smile and say something between Wee and Wei. I think it's cute how she's excited to see her friend and recognises when we talk about him.

Holiday from EC

For some reason, for the past fortnight the girl has regressed in her toilet habits to where she was 6 months ago. A month ago she was wetting maybe 4 nappies a week – half of those in her sleep. Now she's going through that many in a day. She's no longer giving us any signals, and will deny that she has to go even when she actually does.

It's perfectly natural for an ECd baby to slip for a while. It's supposed to happen when they level up in other things, or when sick, or various other causes. She's done this before to a degree, but never so markedly.

The weird thing is she's really only missed at home. Well, she missed once at a friend's place and once at a pub yesterday, but for the most part, she's only missing at home. Admittedly she's home more often than she's out and about, but if she'd wet 4 nappies at home over the same period where she wet just one outside, clearly there's something there.

So I've had to regress along with her. Really watching her for any sign of change in behaviour, or interrupting whatever we're doing to take her too the loo. We've even stopped calling it the "loo" or "toilet" in favour of "bathroom" which is made up of sounds I know she can say – just in case she decides to tell us she has to go instead of her usual gesture.

Watching for subtle changes in her behaviour is hard. By the time it's clear that she's gone from normal play to uncomfortably-full-bladder mode, she's actually moved on to unhappy-pants mode, and it's too late. The problem is amplified by (my suspicion that) she's actively trying to hide the fact she needs to go. Today I asked her if she needed the loo (she was still dry). She babbled a bit and handed me a book, demanding I read it to her. Despite the abridgement where the little train could quite easily without much effort, she was freshly wet by the time I finished.

So I can only hope this phase ends soon enough and we get back to normal. In the meanwhile I just have to try hiding my disappointment and making her experience on the toilet as fun as possible, so she doesn't start making negative associations.

Now we understand

The girl made her first real attempt to have what she said be understood. Specifically, she said a word, and I repeated it back to her, then she repeated it back to me, over and over until I finally said what she believed she was saying.

It went something a bit like this:

bɨts

bits?

bɨts

please?

bɨts

peas?

bɨts

base?

bɨts

pans?

bɨts

bitch?

bɨts

bats?

(smiles) bɨts!

bats

(smiles more) bɨts!!!

bats

(smug) bɨts

Oh, "bats"… You means these? (I point to the monkeys on her dinner tray)

bɨts

I'd pointed to her tray which has a picture of monkeys hanging upside-down from a branch. She's clearly decided that these are bats since her only experience with hanging animals comes from Stellaluna.

Not appropriate for all viewers

The other day the wife and I were watching a video while the girl was puttering around the room. It was nothing of the sort the girl hadn't watched dozens of times before. At one point a mildly scary scene came on and the girl turned to us and started bawling.

The wife tried to calm her down telling her it's just a story. I tried figuring out how we'd be able to watch the rest of the show if the girl was going to react so badly. But mostly I was trying to figure out when this switched on in her. She didn't react this way to the 6,000 spy and cop shows we saw on TV in the US (mostly Law and Order marathons). She didn't react this way before we went on holiday to the US – she was perfectly happy watching Daleks be all kinds of menacing without once making a move toward the safety of the back of the sofa. Perhaps it was the fact that we spent so much time in the States with the people she normally Skypes with. Since we Skype using the same display we watch videos on, maybe she thinks all the people she sees there are real, just they often (usually during dinner) just ignore her and talk amongst themselves.

Perhaps I'm wrong to expect some degree of reason in her actions. I just know I'm going to need to be even more careful in what media we expose her to. We've already had to cut Game of Thrones and other more edgy material out of our dinnertime video routine. At some point we'll have to even drop The Daily Show – and then we'll never know what's going on in the news.

Eat the menu

The lass has reached a new milestone in eating. We've ordered her food from the children's menu. Mixed blessing. We can now bring her to restaurants without bringing food with us, but it also means she's no longer free to feed when going out.

Actually, that's not entirely true. We do still need to take her food when going out since it's hard to know in advance what's on the children's menu and how much they're willing to tweak it to match our paranoid parental dietary restrictions. There's also no way to know if she'll actually eat the stuff we buy for her. And after seeing the negotiation game I've seen my friends play with their kids, I'm concerned.

Just finish what you've got and you can go play…. No? Okay, just eat your greens and you can go…. No? Really, you have to finish your meal….. No? Okay, just one more green bean….. No? Okay, just have one bite of a green bean and you can go play – but you have to swallow it….. No? Okay, fine. Go play.

But none of this has happened to me yet. We've ordered for her 5 times so far. The restaurants have been kind enough to adjust the meal to our liking (not that Pasta, with tomato sauce on the side or Two eggs, scrambled, no salt are such hard requests to fulfil). And the girl usually ate most of her meal – though she never actually ate the leftovers we took away in a doggy bag for later (all of these meals were in the States). On the plus side her leftovers have given me something to pick at while waiting for the coffee and dessert to show up after the meal.

Rocking along

My parents got out some of my old toys from when I was a tiny tot. The little girl really likes the rocking horse. She got quite good at shifting her weight to make it rock back and forth – something she never managed to do with swings. Every time she rides the horse she makes a car engine sound: Rrrrrrrrrrrr. I thought about explaining that horses don't make that noise, but I actually prefer her point of view on the matter.

Green eyed monster

On saturday the girl met her first first cousin. He's my brother's tiny little 10-week-old son. She rarely sees children younger than herself and I don't think she's been around infants since she was one. So she didn't really know what to make of him.

We're currently visiting my parents, and my brother and family were also up for a couple of days. When we showed up we got to meet my nephew for the first time. The girl didn't quite know what to make of him. There was clearly a bit of jealousy when the wife or I held him. She did a bit of acting up and making disappointed ooooo noises with a scrunched up face. She's normally got a good disposition and has never been bothered by us holding other children before. So this was a bit unusual.

The girl tried being gentle to her cousin, but didn't seem to be entirely sure how. The poking in the eye and squeezing the head was not meant maliciously – as far as we could tell. I mean, she was about as gentle with him as she is with me when she tries to stroke the side of my face – i.e. not very. It usually ends up as slapping or scratching. Fortunately with a bit of supervision, she wasn't able to do any damage to her cousin.

She did kind of get used to him after a while. But she kept acting a bit strange the entire time – something that mostly stopped after they left.

Of course some of this could be attributed to being the 4^th time she had to change house during the trip, and the chaos was starting to get to her. I can imagine her thinking Wait… do we live here now? Do I have to live with him? Is this my brother? Is that how it happens? Can I still drink milk? What's going on?

We did try to explain everything to her, and we know she can understand much of what we tell her, but there's no way to know how much of the abstract We're going to visit my parents and your cousin will be there she can possibly understand. At least she's not freaking out when we leave her alone with people for a few hours. I suppose we've done this travel thing enough that she gets that we're not sizing her up for adoption, but just showing her off to new people.

Walking backwards

The girl has been walking for 6 months now. She stared at a slow stumble which has grown into a fairly confident toddle. She'll even run – when she thinks she's been caught doing something wrong. The past few days have seen her pick up a couple of new skills I wasn't expecting to see anytime soon.

The first is walking backwards. I didn't even know toddlers could do that. She started by backing slowly away from things, but once she realised what she could do, she started walking backward down hallways every chance she gets. Of course she does not realise yet that she really has got to look behind herself when doing it. Which is a bit scary. She's already stepped backwards into a stairwell, which fortunately was only two stairs high. A small, but reasonable amount of crying ensued.

The other new skill is walking on tiptoes. I've only caught her doing this once. Something was clearly amiss with the way she was stepping, and I had to look quite closely to see what was up. When I pointed it out, the wife said she'd seen the girl do that once before, and, at first, thought her shoes were fitting her badly, making her walk funny. But, no. She's intentionally walking tiptoed. Not that it was helping her reach higher places (at the time), but I suspect that's all in her plan.

On a separate note, she's saying full sentences now. No idea what words are in those sentences, but once we can get that translated we'll be nicely on our way.