Yes, I still exist

Having two children leaves me with very little time for the pondering and writing I need to maintain this blog. Actually, there's a lot of things I've not really had time to do since the son was born. I've hardly had any time to work on the daughter's spaceport beyond simple repairs. Spare time seems to go to cleaning and reorganising rooms and just trying to have enough space in this home for 4 humans.

R is 9 now. As she gets older I'm less comfortable putting details about her life out there. Part of it is that it's not my story to tell. On the other hand it's my life too. So I generally keep details here to a point where she won't hate me for this later. That said, she's a proper human now. She's grown. Her legs are only 10cm or so shorter than mine. And she seems to know more about cellular biology than I ever did (Thanks lockdown). She also can fall alseep on her own now without being tricked, but I do still read to her from a book every other night because we both like it and, TBH, it's the only recreational reading I ever do these days.

The boy, T, is 15 months now. I've skipped a lot of his life on this blog. He's very different from R, even though they look really similar, especially in the first few months. They both got teeth really early (like at 3 months). They both started walking early (he started at 8 months, but slowly built up to it over the course of 2 months when he could walk around the room just fine. she started at 10 months, but just decided I walk now and in the space of 3 days was a pro). I don't think many of the differences between them are boy vs girl. They're just different people with brains and bodies that work differently. Plus he's grown up more than half his life in some form of isolation or lockdown, so he's not had much physical socialisation. No idea if that's had a big impact on him or not, tho.

Some interesting things about T:

• He never got into crawling. He bear walks – back legs slightly bent, knees nowhere near the floor.
• Until quite recently he's had no sense of stairs. To go downstairs he'd just walk straight off the step and just expect someone to catch him. Needless to say, the stairs have been babygated off.
• His favourite book is We're Going on a Bear Hunt. When he was young, he didn't like any other books. The only way to keep his attention in another book was to start a page with We're going on a bear hunt. We're going to catch a big one. followed by the book's actaual text.
• bear was his first word. He has a very easy time with words that begin with B, to the point that he inserts a B to make words he can't otherwise pronouce. He says up as bup.
• He's picked up some baby sign language and will actually make signs. "Hurt", "Done" and "More" are the 3 he uses most. The last of which make sense since he eats amazing amounts of food.
• When he wants me to sit next to him, he pats the surface he's sitting on with his hand. I always dutifully join him there. Whenever I pat the seat next to me to get him to join me, he ignores me and acts as if I did nothing.
• He learned to say no pretty early on. Not in a terrible 2s kind of way, but more in a helpful way to answer questions. Do you need the loo? no.. He may have said yes once or twice, but I can't really tell. He certainly never says yes when we ask if he wants something. He laughs uncomfortably and manaically, which is a good sign. But no words.

I could go, and at some point I'll go into more details about things. When I have the time.

28 Days Later

The boy is 4 weeks old now. I'm now back at work. So I guess we've entered the 3rd stage of normality where this is what stuff will be like from now on.

Which isn't entirely the case. I'm still trying to find my new routine. I've been doing the doing the morning school run every day, which I wasn't expecting. So apparently I'm no longer that guy who gets in early to work. I am I guy who always stays late? Am I the person who's always working from home? I'm not sure yet, but I guess having kids forces you to learn things about yourself.

The boy is getting bigger. He started out quite big at 4.2kg, and has put on another 820g. So we're now into the next size up nappies. He's been wearing 1-3 month size clothes since birth and we're now on the verge of getting out the 3 month size stuff. We're in a hurry to get him in all the cute infant stuff we've got or else we'll never get a chance to use them. This is very different from R who was reasonably petite throughout her infancy.

Needless to say, I am constantly comparing the new child to my daughter. This is the same, this is different. Based on x, y should happen next. Etc etc. I found I spent more time with R just drinking it all in and living in the moment as if it would last forever. With the boy I recognise where he is and I am anticipating what comes next. Next should come smiles and hand control. That should be fun. But really, I don't mind if we just jump straight to walking and babyproofing.

We started EC from week one with the boy, and it seems to be working decently well. Whereas the daughter we started from month 5, so she had to unlearn using nappies in favour of the loo, the son was introduced to toilets as soon as we could and is managing a degree of bladder control. He'll fuss when he needs to pee, and if we get him there in time, he'll hold it til he's over the toilet. We've been catching at about 50%, so we're only going through several nappies a day instead of many-many per day.

Like with his sister we're putting him in disposables at night and reusables during the day. I'm finding the reusables we've got now leak far lass than they did with his sister. I can't tell if that's 8 years of nappy tech improvements or it's a boy/girl thing.

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.

My fantasy nappy bag

Nappy bags are troublesome. Off the shelf nappy bags always have some major failing and other bags always have something which makes them not quite right for the job. Part of the problem is we have unusual requirements which few manufacturers cater to. And even when we find something which is great, the girl gets older and requires something new to be carried around with us.

Most nappy bags look like a standard woman's over-the-sholder handbag. At this point I have so much RSI from parenting I'm not willing to carry anything of any decent weight on one shoulder for any length of time. So that style is right out.

There's a number of lines of nappy-bags-for-men, all of which look like courier bags. These take some weight off the shoulder, but distributes it right across the child – since she's sling-carried. So that's not an option either.

That pretty much leaves backpacks.

Fine, there's plenty of backpacks out there. Surely someone must make something that fits my needs? Well… so far it appears not.

So, what do I need?

• A compartment for food. Enough for 2 meals - just in case we're away for longer than expected, or she decides she's ravenous. Ideally this would be insulated so it'll stay cold/warm, but that just just a wild dream.
• An outside pocket for her water bottle. Or at least somewhere to store it where it won't leak on anything else.
• An outside pocket for an umbrella. We live in London. The only way to ensure it won't rain is to take an umbrella with us wherever we go.
• A compartment with enough room for a change of clothes in case of accidents. Plus some extra space for a jumper or coat and a few small toys or books. Even better would be enough room for a jumper for me, so I don't risk getting cold.
• We're ECing her, so we need a place for the portable toilet seat we have to carry about. And it's got to be in a separate compartment from the clothes and food. The compartment has to have enough room for her nappies.At his point we carry around 1 or 2 cloth nappies with covers, plus a couple of emergency disposable nappies, just in case. I can live with these being in the clothing section, but the "toilet" section needs enough room for them once they're used.
  For those unfamiliar with reusable nappies, used ones go into a wet bag, aka The Bag of Yuck, until I can get home and trasnfer them into the laundry pail. The "toilet" section has to have enough room for the wet bag filled with 2 nappies and an entire change of soiled clothes. However, as long as the change-of-clothes compartment gets smaller as the toilet compartment gets bigger, I'll be happy.
• It's got to have enough room for stuff I need with me. All I really need is enough space for some pills, lip-balm/moisturiser, a couple of cloth grocery bags¹ and, as I said before, a spare jumper. L probably would like a bit more space for her stuff since she doesn't usually have as many pockets as I do. This could go in the clothes section, but I'd rather not have to dig through baby socks and suchlike to find my ibuprofen.
• I don't need a changing mat. I can't remember the last time she had a miss outside the house that we needed to put her on a mat to resolve.

When she was an infant, we got by rather nicely with a Petunia Pickle Bottom bag. It could be a backpack or a shoulder bag. Plus it was tasteful – not too girly or too manly, and never looked awkward with what either of us were wearing. When all we had to worry about was changes of nappies and clothes it was great. But its one big section doesn't play nicely if you have toilet seat and clothes and nappies all together, leaving no room for food. We still use it when travelling since we only have disposable nappies then, which take up less room.

We've been mainly using an old laptop backpack for the past several months. It's got 3 sections, one of which is tiny. So we often end up putting the portable seat in the big compartment along with the food inside a thermos bag. Which takes up far more room than it should. It's passingly acceptable, but ends up packed to the gills almost all the time. And it'll only get worse as she'll need more food (and fewer changes of clothes, I hope) over the coming months.

Sooooo… that's a backpack with a minimum of 3 big compartments and 2 outside pockets. Plus, ideally another smaller compartment. Every time I go to a baby shop, I have a look at what bags are available. Some have some really great ideas, but so far nothing has worked. I've even toyed with the idea of getting her a small backpack to carry her food or clothes, and I carry the rest in my backpack. After all, her back does face out in the sling. But I can't see that working. So I'm still at a bit of a loss and kind of exploding around the edges.

¹ At this point it rarely occurs to me I can still go to a shop if I haven't brought my own bags. I usually just skip grocery shopping on the way home if I don't have a bag I can put them into.

Baby sat

Our first professional babysitter went off without much of a hitch.

The biggest problem was using an online-only agency. We could book, but not give any special instructions. And I really did feel that when sitting a kid for the first time, a heads-up about what they're like would be useful. But there was no way to put that info in the booking, and they only contacted me via SMS, with no return number. So there was no way to say the important essentials:

• She's walking and quite mobile, but can't manage stairs on her own yet.
• We use cloth nappies
• Take her to the loo whenever she wakes up – it usually means she has to go
• She will usually fight and complain when going to sleep
• We've no TV. Bring something to read or a laptop or phone.

That alone would have avoided the surprises the sitter had when she got here. Each datum we told her was followed by a bit of raised eyebrow making it clear this would not be a usual sit. Only the lack of TV warranted an Oh no! from the sitter, in that usual English ambiguously mock tone where you can't tell if they're serious or not.

I did spend the effort in the afternoon setting up a guest wifi account so she could get online, but not access our intranet or require us to change our passkey afterwards. But she didn't bring anything internetly with her. On the uninformed front, I too didn't know what we were getting beyond someone with a female first name. I was more expecting a 20 year old net-savvy txt-maniac. Not the I've brought a newspaper grandmother we got. On the bright side, at least she'd seen cloth nappies before. 15 years ago.

Regardless, it went off as we'd hoped. We left the flat and heard not a peep from her. We got home at 1am and the girl was asleep. And when the girl next woke, she wasn't visibly distressed or anxious from having us gone.

This bodes well for future sittering. Though at £50+ for a night I'd really like to keep it to a minimum.

Standing and walking

She took rather quickly to walking. It plateaued for a bit, but seems to have improved in the past day.

The first day, I would hold her under the arms, dangle her feet on the floor, and twist her a little side to side, so first one foot would move forward, then the other.

The next day, I tried again, and she would move her a feet a little forward when I twisted her.

A coupled of days later, and all we needed to do was to hold her enough to keep her balanced. She'd kick one floppy leg forward, the foot would land on the floor, and she'd pull herself along. Repeat. She's walking. Not by herself, but, if we hold her hands, she can walk across a room. She really likes it. So far we've taken a number of videos of her crossing the room.

Today she's standing with only the tiniest of supports. Just pushing against my pinky finger is enough to keep her upright. Until she starts getting tired, of course. She's mastered cruising. Before she could move along bannisters or the baby cage. ow she can hand off from the sofa to a chair the the baby cage and back again. Arms reaching to their full extent to cross the space between furniture.

It seems that now that she's over her colds of the past few months, she's making up for lost time. Her EC has improved drastically to, with few misses in the past couple of days.

In other news, she's got her 8 month checkup with the health visitors tomorrow. They've been mixed quality so far. I'm hoping it's not a waste of time.

Dadadadadadada

First off, the wee one is making a variety of sounds. One of her recent masteries is saying Dada, which I think it utterly brilliant that that is her first real word, even if she extends it too far most of the time, Dadadadadadadada.... I'm sure she does not actually know what it means yet, but I always turn my head to her and answer yes? when she says it, in hopes she'll get it in time. I always said I did not know what I would be called, and, conveniently, she seems to have decided that for me.

I'm pretty sure she is actually trying to talk, in general, but just does not have the muscle control to make actual words. When she says something short and a seemingly random combination of syllables, I do try really hard to figure what word she's trying to mimic.

In related news, the internet brought this article to my attention recently: At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns.

I have to say, yeah. True. Clearly. The little one knows her own name. Has for a while. At least she looks at me when I say it. When I say her mother's name in the exact same tone, she does not look at me.

Another case I discovered recently, to my shock, is how well the EC cue for urination works. She was fussing while I was trying to get her to sit on the toilet. I my frustration, I decided it might help to make sure she understood why she was there and what I expected of her by sounding the urination cue.

Turns out, she clearly knows what the cue means. She stood on the seat of the loo and promptly started peeing on my leg and the floor.

So… that article... obviously, and definitely spot on. Babies know more than they let on.

I'm sure if I paid really close attention could point out lots more cases where she knows what I'm saying. She knows that it's me on the other side of the little box when I do video calls on Skype. She is sentient, to a degree, even if she doesn't have the ability to clearly communicate it.

EC going well

The EC seems to be going rather well. I'm impressed how little effort and how much easier it makes life. The little one has taken to it like a duck to… well… not water, but perhaps the grass near a pond. It's not its favourite place to be, but it's content to spend some time there despite being a little awkward.

Anyway, it is a bit of a relief for us. While she still pees in her nappies more often than not, she generally only dirties her nappy on average once every two days. And considering that cleaning her bum after pooing in the loo is so much easier than after defecating in a nappy, I can definitely live with this.

It's not all smooth sailing. She's really good about the loo first thing in the morning, since she's been holding it in all night. That alone would make EC worth it. It's during the day we really have to guess when she needs to go. If she doesn't need to go she'll fidget and cry and generally try to escape – not the safest thing to do when sitting on the loo, even with the baby seat. She also tends to prefer when I'm holding her on the loo. I don't mind that at all, except for the fact that I'm not there during working hours, and disappear for a few days at a time at irregular intervals. I don't know if the relative infrequency is why she prefers me, or maybe I just have an easier time squatting in front of her on the floor (L's hips are still recovering from the pregnancy).

So… EC – definitely a success. I'll certainly be keeping this up.

Eliminating Communication

A few days ago L suggested we start toilet training the wee one. I was reluctant at first, but she made a very convincing case for it. She came across this idea called Elimination Communication, which is a pretty daft name for a form of toilet training. But I suppose DAUT was too obscure a backronym.

EC as a whole has a lot of pretty tweaked ideas, but at its heart makes sense – babies have to learn to defecate in their clothes, which they need to unlearn later. Take advantage of this before they get too used to sitting in their own yukky stuffs. The idea that the lass can be toilet trained now at 5 months is something I can heartily endorse. It could take months, but even one less nappy to change would be appreciated.

So we've been taking turns holding the girl on the toilet seat waiting for her to get the idea. As far as I can tell, so far she just thinks we're nuts and that she was perfectly happy going when and where she pleased. And why does she now have to sit on a cold hard chair, risking falling into a scary tub of water, while we sing to her and make excited faces encouraging something to happen. What. Do you want me to giggle? Cause, as far as I can tell, it's the only thing I'm doing that gets any positive response.

I bought a baby training seat for the loo to make the process a little less scary, but she's still not getting it. Well, plenty of time for her to warm to the idea. It's not like she's got any better places to be.

As a side note, this strikes me as yet another example of how the whole baby thing in our culture is just all wrong. Pregnancy, birth, feeding, transporting… the "normal" way of dong things seems to be the nearly the worst thing possible to do. So it would not surprise me at all if the expected way of doing nappies and toilet training is well off course.

Actually, I knew there was loads wrong about this culture before I even considered breeding. Why should common conceptions of childrearing be any different?