Plague diary: day 31 (really, 31?)

Now that the pneumonia is gone, one day seems to be much like another. I did push it a bit too hard on Tuesday, and needed a long rest. The rest of this week has been more or less the same. I'm ok as long as I'm not doing something. But once I do I just get winded and lose all my energy. I can hang up laundry just fine. Then 3 minutes later I realise, no, it wasn't fine. I can't figure out my limits because the goal posts keep changing all the time for no obvious reason.

A couple of the doctors I've spoke to have said that they're finding The Virus can linger as long as 6 weeks. I'm only just past week 4, so I'm not surprised it's still having an impact. I am worrying that this is what life is like now. Perhaps the lung damage is permanent and I'll just have no energy to speak of from here on out. I mean, with chicken pox, I've gotten scarred for life in a number of places on my skin, so it'd not be shocking that covid-19 might do some irreparable harm. No one knows. It's all new to everyone. Like those Samsung phones with exploding batteries. They were just phones. They're expected to just either work, or to break. Nobody expected them to blow up. Perhaps The Virus just smashes things up before it leaves like a renter who lost their deposit.

In other news, the son is getting consonants. M and D and H, mostly. He says Da like his sister did, but not as often, and with more variety of other things. I suppose by the time we next leave the house he'll be walking and speaking at least a few small words. He's eating too. Anything we put in front of him. Blueberries, cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, squash, asparagus, mushrooms, lemons, brussels sprouts. Anything. This is so very different from what we got used to with his sister, who in retrospect, was a picky eater. I always thought she was just the sort to just eat a bit, and was ok with only eating a bit. Now I know, she was really thinking Ok, I'll eat this one thing, but the rest, I'll just move around and hope they never try it again. I like milk. Can I just stick to milk?.

Of course I'm not doing the food prep. I'm sure I would have passed on The Virus by now if they didn't have it already, but I'm still a little wary, since no one really knows how this things can spread. I'll feed him, but with chopsticks so I stay far away from touching the food or touching him myself. It's odd, and awkward and unpleasant. He has changed quite a bit in the last month, and it bugs me to be missing it from so up close.

I've spent a huge amount more time with R than I did while we both had school and work. I'm still sleeping in her room, but I don't really count that as quality time together. I've stopped reading her bedtime stories. I've run out of books from our queue and have struggled to find age appropriate stuff. I read Neverwhere on a few good breathing days in there, but that and the short story sequel are done. I need to get back in to the habit of reading before it's broken entirely.

Also, R is now pretty big. She's still smaller than us, but she's not a little girl. She's a small person, but a proper person. Still very headstrong. We are still facing many challenges. I'm trying to get a bit of learning in there, but all she wants to do is use the iPad or sometimes play with toys (which I'm happy to join on, when I have the energy for it, but her room is so cramped with the extra bed, we can't both use the spaceport at the same time). I've been trying to teach her useful stuff based on things that come up in conversation. Monday I explained how FM and AM radio (frequency vs amplitude modulation) works. Today I explained triangulation (how do we know where a lion is when it roars). On a practical level, to get her away from the iPad, I hid it today, and taught her card games. Poker and solitaire. She seems to like them both and the latter I'm finding less boring. This seemed to get her happily away from technology for the whole day.

Plague Diary: day 8

Day 8 and the whole country is on lockdown. On the other hand we finally got our food order delivered. So we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what we can eat. That said, there was no pasta, so I don't know how R is going to cope.

We had two grocery orders. One, from Tesco that we booked ten days ago. The other from the local veg shop that we called in yesterday. Given the reliability of the latter, I wish we could get everything from them. But it's good to know we won't run out of fresh food.

Today R had her first Zoom conference call with the other kids in her class. Good thing I use this at work all the time. It was easy to install and show her how to use it. Then I just let her be for 90 minutes. It seemed quite chaotic and I did not have the energy to even watch.

On that note, I'm still tired very easily. Talking a lot, especially on the phone, really does me in. I had a couple of long calls today after which I just had to nap. I say I'm easily exhausted, but not at night when I try to sleep. Then I'm just laying in bed for ages. (Last night wasn't helped by R setting an alarm for 7am, which only I heard. So I had to hunt down where her iPad was so I could kill it.

Talked to the GP yesterday about my symptoms and Covid-19. She said it does sounds like I've got it – which does bring some peace of mind. She also says that since it's been a week I should start to feel better soon. Most people are over it after a week, she says, except some take a turn for the worse around day 8 or 9. Which implies that if things are still ok Thursday, I should be past the worst of it. Apparently the lung/cough issues should linger for ages – but that doesn't really give me an idea of when I'm no longer contagious. Nor does it give me a sense of when I'd be ready to work again, but I should be able to work that out for myself.

Plague diary

Day 6 of what appears to be covid-19. It's hard to tell since most of the symptoms are so generic and there is nearly zero testing in the UK. All I know for sure is that I've got a fever, some mild chest and throat symptoms and am exhausted all the time. The girl has a higher fever and is bouncing off the walls trying to find something to do. L and the baby are both fever and symptom free.

I was coping with working form home for 2 weeks before coming down with anything. I decided to self-isolate when someone on the floor above me at work tested positive. Most of my coworkers decided the same thing. I have to say that our conference calls became much more chatty once they became nearly the sole human interaction we could experience.

I'm still not sure how I caught this. Could be anywhere. Looking back at the 5-14 days before I felt anything, I'd not gone out much, but since I've been on pills that make me immunocompromised, it appears it doesn't take much. And when it hit, it came on pretty fast. I started feeling a sore throat at around 5-6am. By 11am I was completely wiped out and dropped off the conference call, saying I'd be out for a while. Hung up and and went to sleep.

The next day R came down with a fever, so I've been sleeping on an inflatable mattress in her room. Which is much better than the tiny sofa in the office I had been using. Since then, everything has shut, including schools. We're slowing running out of food, so I hope out grocery delivery does not get cancelled (like our last one was). Beyond that we're catching up on a lot of old Deep Space Nine

(With R's newfound interest in all things Trek, we've already watched all of Next Generation, plus 2 of the movies and a little Picard)

Unfortunately I don't have an extra energy to do useful things like clean the place, or file away the mess of papers which have accrued. The one night I stayed up late dealing with bills completely wiped me out, and I won't be doing that again.

To keep R in the right mood, on Friday I read her The Masque of the Red Death as a bedtime story. She absolutely loved the description of the Black Room – It sounds so beautiful. And she said that maybe this could happen to the Tories, which means she understood what the story was about.

Annoyingly the pleasure of when I get better will be diminished by the fact I've no idea if I've actually got covid-19 or am just sick. So when we all feel fine again we'll still be stuck here uselessly quarantined until 2021, at this rate. I've already written my MP get universal testing, I suggest you write yours too.

Now to sleep

Just to keep track of this milestone... for the first time ever, R completely put herself to bed with no help at all from either parent. While bedtime has been getting easier and easier over the past few months, this is the first time we had no involvement. Well, none beyond We are sooooooo tired. We're just going to go to sleep now. Please don't stay up too late. You have school tomorrow. Zzzzzzz Or something to that effect.

It was a long day. We had out annual street party. I was up early cooking a nice chilli for the lunch (the longer you spend cooking, the better it tastes). The party iself involved loads of food, to the point that once it was over, despite it being dinner time, we had no room left. Except R, who has been too busy playing to notice there was lunch. So after putting together a quick sandwich for her dinner, I went to bed. The above conversation was done with me under the covers and my eyes closed. I'm pretty sure I was asleep before she was in pyjamas.

She clearly went to bed at some point, as we had to wake her in the morning. But she did the job of getting to sleep, and, more importantly, showed no signs of resentment toward us for having to do it. Nice way to turn a parenting fail into a parenting win.

Can cook, won't eat

The other day I was chatting with someone who said My mum is a terrible cook. Before my politeness brain filter could kick in I found myself saying Perhaps it wasn't her. Maybe she was a great cook before you were born. Maybe she loved cooking. And once you were born you refused to eat anything she liked or knew how to cook. And all she was left with was throwing together some ingredients you hadn't turned up your nose to lately and hoping for the best, which just left everyone with a general sense of disappointment.

So that conversation ended with a terse maybe and a quick change of topic. But it did get me thinking about how my daughter is going to look back at dinners when she's older. For most of her life so far, she won't eat anything I like or know how to cook. The things she consistently likes is pretty much limited to chocolate, nuts, chips and pasta. Plus her new discovery: cheddar (aka, the thing she couldn't stand 6 months ago). I can't eat the first two and won't cook chips, and since she won't eat pasta sauce all I can cook that I know she'll eat is pasta with some kind of cheese – I'm now spending too much of my time manually putting tuna or peas inside the gaps in conchiglie just in hopes she gets some greens and protein

At this point I'm making dinner once or twice a week. Which is a radical change from the days of getting antsy when I skipped cooking for a night or two. I keep experimenting without any luck.

It always goes like this: You like x, I've made a tasty dish with x. Give it a try

…

Oh well. I guess that's the last time I cook x.

Repeat until all foods are gone.

About a decade ago I developed a number of food allergies which decimated what I can eat. After removing foods L doesn't like or want to eat I'm left with a restricted set, but something I can make nice things out of. Once I drop the girl's preferences out of it, I'm pretty much left with sautéed nothing with salt to taste.

I'm not going to make two dinners a night – one of her and one for us, because, damnit we're a family and we are going to eat dinner together. So that's what I'm not going to do. I have no idea what I am going to do.

No idea how to solve this one beyond wait and hope. I know her tastes will change, but waiting solves nothing.

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.

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.

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).

Baby sitter

Tomorrow we're getting our first real baby sitter. Hiring a professional to come in and look after the child while we go off to an evening wedding.

I really don't know the etiquette for this. We don't have a TV. I don't have any computers in the house I'm comfortable letting a stranger use. Do I give the sitter our Wifi key and tell her to bring a laptop or phone? Tell her to bring a good book? She's going to sit in our house for 7 hours – maybe 5 or so after the kid's gone to bed.

Do I provide food for her? The sitter, not the baby. The baby gets all the milk she needs (L's been pumping). Do I leave something for the sitter? Um, there's oatmeal and lemonade and some left-over pasta sauce in the fridge. And help yourself to espresso. Somehow I don't think that'd be too appealing.

And looking at our house from the perspective of a stranger — man it's unevenly cluttered. Yes, it's a bit messy. that we can tidy up. But a lot of things just have no "away". They came into the house after the baby was born and have just sat on a sofa or chair or table, and that's as away as they get. At least through some rather hard work in the past week from L we can now walk from one end of the nursery to the other without having to jump over something (which I can kind of pretend was a makeshift baby gate).

On a similar note, today she found the off switch for the router. She just crawled over and cheerily flicked the switch on the surge protector. Fortunately the PC plugged into it was off, but it killed the internet for a bit. Perhaps it was because I stopped her from pulling the books off the shelves? Regardless, I've got to find a way to have my stuff and her stuff coexist in the same rooms.

Made of straw

The girl's been making a huge mess when drinking lately. She's pretty much given up on the sippy cup and now just treats it a chew toy she can bash food with. We've been giving her water from an actual cup for a couple of weeks. She drinks it, but ends up soaked. We've tried shallow and wide and narrow and deep, but she finds a way to spill most of the glass all over herself and the high seat tray.

Today, on a whim, I tried a straw in the cup. She immediately started chewing it, then spent a few minutes blowing bubbles in the water, She liked that. Then, just as I'd resigned myself to an afternoon of her blowing bubbles in water, she started sucking up the water. The flow was more than she could swallow, so some dribbled out. But for the first time in weeks she drank a whole cup of water without drenching herself.

Of course a few minutes later she realised she could take the straw out and play with it. But that just means I have to hold the straw in the cup. For now (I hope).

She ended up drinking over 250ml after dinner. Which means I think we're in store for some very wet nappies overnight. Mixed blessing that.

Now we are different

This is not the same girl went on holiday with two weeks ago.

We came back a few days ago. Over the period we were gone the wee one has levelled up quite a bit.

She's now producing a stream of babble. Before she could say a few syllables, sometimes in combination. Now I'm pretty sure she's saying what she thinks are words. Every now and then she'll repeat something back someone says to her. That's the best part – not necessarily her understanding, but her clearly interacting.

She's learned to point. Finally my point vs poke training has come to fruition. She'll point at something of note and say Dat!, which I can only assume means What is that?So I always answer her with That's a painting or That's a mirror or That's toilet paper.

She gotten lots of other hand movements. She was waving before we left. She's regressed a bit on that, but she's started waving again a couple of days ago. She also enjoys shaking hands. At least she'll stick out her and and let you shake it. She'll also put her hands on her hips. I can't tell if it it's intentional, but she often has a bit of a stern look about her when she does it.

Stairs. She can go up and down stairs now. All the shallower carpeted stairs at her grandparents' and my uncle's places really helped. She's since been able to go up an entire flight of steep wooden stairs at our place. She's much slower and hesitant in going downstairs. It's basically, sit on the stair facing out, dangling her feet over the edge until she's practically standing on the step below. Then she stands on the stairs below, holding on to the bannister.

She's not quite standing. Well, she doesn't think she can stand. She can stand holding on to things, or leaning against something. But she'll only stand unsupported for a few seconds before she realises and sits down. But a controlled sit, which is good.

She still can't walk on her own, but she walks quite well when holding hands. Or using a walker. Or box. Or anything draggable that's big enough to lean against. She's far more comfortable with it than when I walked her through her first queue at the start of the holiday.

All this progress seems to have come at a price. She's sleeping very lightly now. It seems like any movement near her will wake her up. She will wake up without crying, sometimes, which is nice. But she's still awake and really hard to get back to sleep.

She's also not eating much. she'll breastfeed like a champ, but she's hardly eating any solid food we put before her. Even roast mushrooms, her heretofore favourite, are summarily tossed on the floor.

I'm hoping that goes away soon and we can get her to bed and stay asleep without too much effort. I've been a bit dozy in the brain the past couple of days at work.

In other news, I found an article online which explains the whole "fine with just one child" thing far better than I did the other day. Must be something in the air to cause both of us to post the same thought at the same time.

Food

Dining is starting to settle down a bit. We're almost at a point I can live with. She eats with us, but she eats her own food. For L and I, I make the usual grown-up food. For the little one I usually roast some vegetables. No spices, just roasted at low temperature (125-150°C) for a few hours. I start the oven when I start dinner. Chop some combination of mushrooms (She really likes the mushrooms), onions, peppers, aubergines, celery, potatoes or whatever else we have at hand. Put it in a dish and take it out after we're done eating. Put it in the fridge, then dole it out over the next few days.

I have to say, the stuff tastes brilliant. I've never really had the patience for roast veg for meals before, but this works really well, since it's so little work and prepped in advance. It's hard for me to not pick at the food meant for her. Though I draw the line at not taking food from her tray.

My only concern is that it really does taste better on the day it's cooked. But it does still taste ok after being refrigerated a few days.

We feed her by putting a selection of stuff on her tray,and letting her pick it up. She's done when she doesn't try to eat anything new we put down.

Breakfast is less exciting – sliced fruits: Banana, orange, apple. Whatever else we have around – carrots, tomatoes. I do need to start having a more consistent set of breakfast foods around. Like toast.

We used to try to put her to sleep before dinner. At first she'd be in the moses basket we kept in the dining room. She'd often sleep for the first 10 minutes of dinner, then start crying. One of us would gulp down dinner and settle her, while the other would eat. Usually it'd end up with L feeding her.

After a while she'd sleep through dinner. She graduated to sleeping in her own cot. We'd aim a video phone at her and watch her over skype on the laptop. This often degraded to one of us bolting downstairs to collect the crying girl, bringing her upstairs til she was calm again.

After 6 months had passed we started baby-led weaning. Which started off very slowly. She'd take the stuff, put it in her mouth. Chew, sometimes completely masticating it. Then it'd just fall out on the tray of her high chair. I started with simple easy to grab food like carrot sticks, celery, sliced peppers and cucumber. It certainly helped her master grabbing things. She was holding between thumb and index finger quite deftly. But that was pretty much all she got out of it. This went on for a couple of months. It seemed any food she'd ingest was by accident.

It was really cute at first. She'd make a horrible face whenever she was introduced to a new food. This stopped pretty quickly, and the only food she's really reacted too since was a mushroom from a thai green curry. I suspect it was too hot for her. I recently tried feeding her a chunk of lemon (seeds removed) to see if she'd replicate the looks in the babies tasting lemon for the first time video. She ate it right up. Yum.

We got to the point where we were about to give up the baby-led weaning. We decided to feed her puree one meal a day.

Day one worked. She at an entire meal.

Day two, she started to be dubious about the puree.

At day 3 she was refusing the puree entirely. And eating solids. It's like she realised that if she did not get on with eating the real food we give her, she'd have nothing but this mush forever. Which, in fact, was more or less true. Or perhaps she finally figured out how to swallow. Which seems more true, but doesn't sound as nice.

So what's next? At some point we need to start feeding her more grown-up food. I'd like to be able to only have to make one meal. I also need to get more D and iron in her diet – since she's not getting much from milk.

The real downside here is the output. Her stool really smells bad now. And is much less pleasant to clean up. She's defecating far less now, and she's using the loo for most of it. But that just makes the dirty misses even harder to deal with.

First time away

Work has picked up in intensity. This does not play well with spending time with the wee one. L is home all day with her while I work, and I tend to only see her nights and weekends.

So I'm on my first work trip since the child was born. I told them I would not travel until September. So they asked if I could travel on September first. I, of course considered this taking the piss. I ended up convincing people to come to London.

A few weeks later and I can no longer avoid it. So off to scandanavia for 3 (well, 2.5) nights away. I'm away for as short a time as I could get (they wanted another 2 days).I prepared by making an absolutely huge curry. It barely fit into the pot. I hoped it would feed L for at least a couple of dinners (she went out for din with friends one night).

That's all I could do to provide any help at all for L while I was gone. It just felt mean leaving her alone to care for the child. I'm not sure if there's anything I could do beyond finding a nanny to come in – and I doubt L would want that.

I've gotten used to being without L while on trips. Between SMS, email, VOIP and skype video being away is about as painless as it can be. But that doesn't work with the baby. I can't cuddle or change her remotely. The best I can do is watch her over skype (we set up an account for her). It helps, but, of course the hotel was having internet problems. So I got a few minutes of watching her (nice)before it just got a bit awkard.

I'm back home tonight. L has come down with something. So the annoyance of taking care of a baby alone is now the annoyance of taking care of a baby while under the weather. We have her immunisations tomorrow. So I'm going to try to take her myself so L can get a bit of rest. Which means doing early morning conference calls beforehand, then heading into work in the afternoon.

Sometimes I feel I have to take care of one baby during the day, and another (more cuddly one) at night.

The birth story. Part 4

Saturday, 30 July 7:05pm. A sense of reality starts to return a bit and the midwife mentions the placenta and having to wait for it or taking drugs to get it out sooner. L says she wants it to come out on its own. So they bring in a birthing stool (a chair with a hole in the seat) for L to sit on. I ask about weighing and the Apgar test. They say they can wait for the measurements and she's clearly fine so doesn't need poking or testing.

We look at the umbilical cord, which is a pale organic-looking tube – reminds me a bit of a pulsing sausage or something. It's nice to finally see it, having been so dependant on it working for so long. I wonder what it's providing to the baby now. Is it just topping up her air and nutrients? I mean, it was working full force just a few minutes ago, and it's clearly still running. The baby can't go long without oxygen, so it must be providing at least some of it, just in case the birthing takes a while. I'm just curious what it's doing and how the mechanics of it shutting down work.

L tells the midwife to wait for it to stop pulsing before cutting it. I've no idea if the midwife did or not, but she eventually clamped it in two places and asked me to cut it. this couldn't have been more than 10-15 minutes after the birth. I specifically mentioned in the birth plan that I had no desire at all to cut the cord, but there I was, handed the scary scissors and in a state of massive suggestion. (now I know why the neighbour named his 3rd child after two of the midwives). So I cut the cord, and a splatter of blood comes out and onto the towels on the floor. The midwife asks if she can take the cord blood for testing. Again, yeah, whatever. It's there. Help yourself.

So the baby is finally free and her own entity for the first time since she was a bouncing ball of a few dozen cells trying to find a nice place to attach to. She doesn't seem to notice, so we don't make a big deal of it. We're just staring at her and smiling.

She's this wee tiny thing with an elongated misshapen head and greyish blue skin with a fine down of dark hair on her arms and back. Her head has dark hair with drying bits of goo in it. It's lighter than mine and L's, but not a lot. She's got a V-shaped widow's peak line of light-coloured hairs at the edge of her hairline which I still don't know what's going on with. Her nails are long and rather sharp. I guess she did get my nails in the end.

Her eyes are still a bit bulged out. She favours her right eye, and is not opening her left much. The blood vessels in her left eyelid are quite visible and I wonder if she scratched it in the womb or hurt it on the way out (turns out there's no persistent problem – she's using both eyes just fine now). She has golden eyelashes. Far blonder than the rest of her hair. Rather odd – normally people have dark lashes and light hair, not the other way around. So I can't tell if her hair's dark and going light or light going dark. With that combination people might think she dyes her hair :)

She has L's nose – I was right about the 22 week scan. (turns out, looking back at the 22 week scan, it looks just like her. We couldn't guess what she looked like at the time, but looking at the scan now, it's clearly her forehead and nose and lips and chin). Her cheeks and mouth and nose look a lot like a baby picture of L taken when she was 5 hours old. She's much thinner in the face, but the resemblance is clearly there (and has been getting stronger as her face fills in). I love the fact that she's me from the side and L from the front.

Around now, the original midwife comes back from her break. She's rather surprised to have missed it all: Wow. That was fast. I'm glad it was so easy. You should consider doing a home birth next time.

After some more gazing at the child the midwife points out that L's feet have turned blue, and asks if this is normal for her. No. No it's not. So she goes to sit on the toilet instead. They take this time to finally weigh the girl. I stand next to her while they put her on the scale. 3180 grams (7 pounds) and 49 cm long. They put a nappy on her (she's already passed some chocolately-looking meconium) and hand her back to me wrapped in a hospital towel. I hold her and stare at her and smile and walk around. She's soooo light, and the first baby that I ever held that didn't melt down after a few minutes.

I say she's very light, but I weighed over a pound less when I was born. L weighed over a pound more. So my family thinks she's a large baby and L's family thinks she's so very small.

I hear a plop from the loo and L says that the placenta has fallen out. This is 40 minutes after the birth – another textbook figure which encourages me. L comes out and picks up the camera and starts taking photos of me holding the baby. It's the first photos of the child and I'm beaming at her in all of them.

L convinces me to give her the baby back. I use the lull to tell a few people about the birth. I send my inlaws an SMS saying It's a girl, but of course you knew that already – what else could I say as tersely? SMS the sister-in-law to let her know she's an auntie. And I phone my parents (curse their lack of GSM phones) and am finally able to say yes, you are grandparents now (the answer to the first question out of their mouths every single time I've called them for the past month).

Meanwhile they check L for damage. Turns out she has class 2 tearing, which the midwife explains that class 1 is minor, class 2 is deeper tear and could need stitches. Class 3 is a nasty tear, and class 4… you don't want to know. Given how nasty she described class 3, I really don't what to know about 4. They initially want to stitch up L, but the midwife who comes on after 8 (when they change shifts) says it's better to just leave to heal as is – which L is fine with.

Things start to quiet down a bit. Around 10pm I start telling non-family people about the birth. I completely forget that we made a list, and just pick a few seemingly at random (a few days later I find the list and realise that I can't be trusted to do this from memory, since I'd still not told them). I joke with L that we should call the people who gave us a lift to hospital and ask if they could pick us up on the way home from the party.

I finally turn to the bag we brought. Three bags, actually. One an insulated bag of food. Still full of all the frozen smoothies we'd planned to keep L going though the long labour. I give her one – may as well not go to waste – and put the ice coffees I brought into the kitchen fridge. I try to eat some of the emergency rations I brought. Turns out they're terrible. Note to self: don't make emergency rations in a hurry, just make your usual tasty food.

It's cold in the birthing centre, so we dress up the baby in pyjamas and a hat and gloves and socks. L is very cold due to the loss of so much mass and fluids, so we wrap her up in blankets so she can doze off. Around midnight I take a picture of the baby and try to upload to Facebook, but the phone fights me and refuses to do so. L goes to sleep on her bed-thing, I lie on the fold-out futon and we put the baby in the cot between us, all wrapped up. I keep a hand on her while I sleep.

Stuff happens with L and the midwife during the night. Something about breastfeeding. But I am oblivious to it while I "sleep".

I wake up at about 5am, and finally get the other phone to upload the baby's photo (I've been carrying around two phones for a couple of months, with SIMs from different operators, just in case one has no reception or conks out or something), though it required ages of fiddling and some annoying app updates to finally get it to work (grrr).

We realise later that, while it's cold in there, we've probably overbundled the wee lass. So we remove the overlarge clothes and just plunk her down on my chest, skin on skin, and I put a towel over us. I have the cutest sweetest most precious thing in the world sleeping on my chest and I am in bliss. I lie there with her for hours.

First day out

We took the little one out to lunch today with my parents. It was our first attempt at a restaurant . It seems to have been a success. It was the wife's turn to carry her in the sling (I took her last time). We did take longer than expected to pack the Bag – mostly because every time we'd packed before was on way to midwives and such, and we knew they'd have stuff if we forgot it. This time we were going to the real world, and we'd have to make sure we had everything we needed.

The wee one spent the bulk of the meal in the sling. The wife only dropped food in her hair once. The baby slept or was quiet the whole time. After the meal she seemed to be getting a bit warm, so we took her out of the sling. That's when the next table over noticed and decide to pay tribute to her by cooing, asking her age, and informing us they have 3 girls in their twenties between them.

This seems to be pretty common. It's happened every time we've left the house with her. Later in the meal one of the staff asked how old she was. I told him 8 days and that this was her first meal out. He spread his arms in welcome and smiled. I don't mind this at all. A friendly bit of natter with complete strangers is a good thing, and something that city life seems to miss out on. I don't like the unsolicited advice about how we're doing it all wrong — but only one person's ever done that. The Isn't she cute and You're brave leaving the house so soon I can live with.

The place had cooled down by the time we had coffee, so we put her back in the sling. The wife drank hers with a straw with the excuse that most baby burns are from spilt hot beverages. We clearly are still quite a bit paranoid. The walk home in the rain showed that, me walking close with my arm around the wife making sure she can't slip and fall. And us stopping at every intersection waiting for the green "walk" light regardless of how little traffic there was.

All in all a success with no crying or meltdowns or anything. I wonder how old she has to be before she's too fussy to take out?

Completely unrelated — I keep pondering the adage sleep when they sleep. I don't know if I'm missing something, but it's the opposite of what I find I'm doing. When she sleeps, I do dishes, talk to adults, go online, read, blog, and variously maintain the household. When she's awake I try to calm her down if she's annoyed, or cuddle, or just stare at her. I can't see how I'd do the opposite. Ignore her and do work when she's up or crying. Perhaps this too will make more sense later.

Information overload

I've been slowly making my way through the reams of information they gave us at our first antenatal appointment. In six different places they describe what to expect on your first antenatal appointment. I was unable to find any of that online beforehand… there's some kind of irony in that somewhere. Not sure where, but the end result is that now we know what to expect from here on out — which is a good thing.

In a few of the booklets there are lists of everything which can go wrong with the pregnancy. I understand why it's there, but it is rather disconcerting. I find myself thinking, "well, what would I do?" to each of the various things that can go wrong. I also find myself getting paranoid about things that I can control. "Is there too much vitamin A in dinner? We had spinach last night, can I put a carrot in dinner tonight? Is there too much A in garden peas?. I even asked the midwife about it, and she told me not to worry as long as I don't cook liver, but somehow that hasn't set my mind at ease.

There's a thing called a Bounty Bag, which, as far as I can tell, is targeted advertising with information mostly cut-and-pasted from the NHS documents. Okay, I do it a disservice, since there is actually new material in there, but the majority of information is redundant. Which means in the 300 pages of documents, I probably only have to read like 50 pages of content — but I've no idea which 50 pages. Reading randomly seems to satisfy the engineer in me. I find things like Avoid sheep! which would have never occurred to me to do (mostly from the lack of live sheep in London), but I'm certainly going to do now.

Which most of the material seems reasonably professionally put together, I find much of it leaves out any mention of partners. One mothering magazine I read in the waiting room only mentioned men once in an article on postnatal nookie. I was hoping the article on going back to work, which claimed to give every possible option, would mention options for how to share the childcare load between two people. Not a mention — it was all about either staying at home, or working and getting full time childcare.

Most of the Bounty Bag material is the same, with little mention of men, and almost all photos just mums with babies — which is who they are trying to sell too, so I should not be surprised. The NHS material does a better, more complete job of it, which I appreciate. But, to be honest, what I'd like is a Useful Things a Partner Can Do During Gestation booklet. I suspect that's not going to be coming my way anytime soon. Though any advice in the comments on this blog would be appreciated.

Her superpowers have emerged

The heightened sense of smell and taste has started. She complained to me about the men in the gym last night just smelling bad. Also, I made rice noodles with dinner last night. When it came to seconds she declined the noodles saying they tasted wrong. They were a bit overcooked, but tasted like every rice noodle ever. So I’m guessing she either detected some subtle difference or rice noodles are out for the next 8 months.

No time to tell the parents last night. By the time we were done with dinner we were too knackered to deal with breaking the news. Perhaps today we’ll try

Gestation begins now

The point of this blog is to note down somewhere the process of becoming a father. I've read dozens of blogs from women detailing all the things they go through in becoming a mother, but few men I know go into anything but the most superficial details. I'm partly curious to see if it's a personal thing or something inherent in the fact that all the action happens somewhere else. So, without the squicky bits, is there anything to blog about?

I’m going to keep this anonymous for a while, mostly due to the fact we’ve not told anyone at all. Finding out you’re going to be a grandparent via a blog is a little cold, as I see it.

Now that that's out of the way...

It’s been 4 days since the test showed up positive. We’d suspected something since her period was really quite late at this point. We used a bog standard pee-on-a-stick test. When three minutes passed she told me I had to look at it. Fair enough. It was clearly positive. No ambiguity there. I just handed it to her... I wasn’t speechless. But I was surprised how much of a shock it was. I mean, it was not a surprise and nothing unexpected, but somehow it being real just was different. I somehow keep being surprised that I’m just made of meat and hormones and not just sense and logic. So when I get life-changing news I am stunned and I do babble and falter. I put on the kettle and made tea.

Of course, I don’t drink tea. But, being British it just felt the right thing to do for such a momentous event.

This was around 10 on a Friday night. We spent the next couple of hours backtracking to when she must have conceived and when she’ll be due. She estimates that she’s just shy of 5 weeks along and will be due on 23 July. We decide we won’t tell anyone til she can get to the GP and get a proper test from a proper doctor to be sure.

Saturday is spent with various friends at the pub and dinner. The only issue was making excuses for her not drinking. Easy enough to avoid. Or at least I tell myself that no one noticed me switching wine glasses with her when mine got low, then switching again, when mine was empty.

Sunday night we decide we need to sort out our diet. This is important for me to know, since I do just about all of the cooking. I’d been trying for ages to get our diet a bit more diverse, but now I really need to.
Folic acid! Lots of it. Oh the beans our diet will need. So many.
Vitamin D. That’s, ummmm…. mushrooms and sunlight. We’re fine for mushrooms, but sunlight? In England? In winter? We’ll just hope eggs, salmon and soy milk will do.
Vitamin A, but not too much. How much is too much? Is a big carrot too much? How do I go nutrient overboard and just leave out A? Then there’s the rest of the Bs. So I make pasta. With a sauce that has all the veg in the world in it. She computes that it’s shy on D but otherwise hits all the marks.

She can’t get an apt with the GP til Tuesday. She gets an early slot and calls me at work when she’s done. Yup she’s preggers. Yup, she’s 5 weeks along. Yup she’s due on the 23^rd of July. And, yeah, she still needs folic acid supplements. The cook in me is slightly offended.

Today is Wednesday and we’re planning to tell both sets of parents. I’ll post later how that goes.