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.