Walking backwards

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

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

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

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

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.

Levelelling up

The girl appears to have levelled up again. In the past week or so she's added a whole bunch of new skills to her repertoire.

• New consonant – The letter L. Today she just started saying la la la la la over and over for ages this morning.
• New service – Kisses on request. You ask her Can I have a kiss and point to your cheek, she'll smile, walk over and plant a kiss on your cheek. Sometimes twice.
• New dance move – Spinning. Sometimes when she likes a song, she'll start spinning. Only occasionally will she fall down afterwards.
• New skill – Get up on sofa. She can now get up on the taller sofa. It takes her a while. Well, she couldn't do it 2 days ago. Only managed it a few times yesterday, and will much effort. Today she can almost always manage to get up. And occasionally fall over on her back getting off. Done that 3 times today, which kind of dampens the excitement on the new skill.
• Enhanced grabbing range – she can now reach more than 50% of the stuff on top of my dresser. And open the drawers.
• Forthcoming skill – blowing her nose. For now, she just holds a tissue in front of her face and makes a raspberry noise. But she’s close.

It's weird how a whole slew of new skills all come at once.

What goes around comes around

I've been carrying the girl in a sling since she was born. I've always found it a rather sweet way to transport the child. It's a little like a long extended hug, or at least it was when she was very young. Now she tends to be much more active, and will often flip through a book while attached (often swatting my nose or adams apple when turning the pages).

I have found myself planting a kiss on the top of her head at random moments when carrying her in the sling. I'd be just standing or walking around, and, well, why not? Until recently I never really considered if it she liked it or not.

Now, I've been carrying her on my shoulders on occasion. If we're walking around and she's out of the sling, it's sometimes easier to carry her that way than to walk alongside her – given how easily she can be distracted by, well, everything. The past few times she's been on my shoulders, she's occasionally bent down and planted a kiss on the top of my head. I nearly melted the first time she did that. She'll also sometimes swing her head round till she caches my eye and smiles at me.

I think she likes it.

On a similar note, I do wonder how long I can/should be carrying her in the sling. She can walk just fine now, though I'd not be willing to walk down Oxford Street with her this time of year. But I do find that one advantage of babies transported in prams, is that their parents will take them out at any time and they can walk alongside them, or play while waiting in a queue and so on. The sling is a bit of a pain to take her out and put her back in, so I only do it if I'll be a place for a while. I sometimes feel that keeping her in the sling is stunting her ability to deal with the world around her.

I also wonder how big she should get before it's too troublesome to carry her. At this point I already have RSI in one shoulder from picking her up (and she's small for her age), and if I carry her for too many hours in a day, it does start to hurt. How long can I keep carrying her before it starts to be a bad idea for me? And will this happen before she's ready to walk everywhere? And if so, how will we transport her around? I'm not going to start using a pram.

Travel fever

I don't understand why the girl gets sick, usually with a fever, every single time we go on holiday. Except for that one trip we made when she was ten weeks old, she's come down with something every time we travel. It does not matter if we go by car or plane, stay in a house or a hotel. She always gets sick.

We live in London, so she's not wanting for constant exposure to strange germs. Could travelling have such an impact on her that it weakens her immune system?
I'd potentially blame it on travelling in winter and her dealing with the unexpected chill, but the same thing happened when we went to the beach in August. She eats mostly the same things on holiday. The only notable difference is that we put her in disposable nappies when travelling (rather than reusable cloth). That can't possibly make a difference, can it?

We're going to be in the States for 3 weeks at the end of the month. I'm dreading what sort of cold she'll come up with this time. Must stock up on baby ibuprofen.

meanwhile...

It's been ages since I've posted here. Not sure if it's lack of time or volition. So much has happened in the last 7 weeks, this would be the largest post ever if I tired to cover it all. So I'll keep this brief.

The girl has followed the pox with a number of small colds. Or maybe one long one. It's hard to tell. On the bright side she's learning to wipe her nose with a tissue. She gets it a little right, but its mostly just practice for now. It'd be just like a daughter of mine that she'd be able to use a tissue properly before she can talk. I guess we'll work on blowing get nose next.

Mimicry is her new thing. If one of us does something, she'll try it too. Sometimes with words like rice or cat. Or dancing – which is fun, at least when she dances to songs I like.

I tired exercising in front of her. When I did push ups, she lay on her tummy and kept going into cobra pose. She tried to do sit ups with me, but didn't have the muscles for it. So she walked over and kissed my belly in between sit ups. After a while she crawled onto my chest. So I kept doing the sit ups, but of course, it was much more challenging. But the baby giggles made up for it.

Pre Post Pox

We seem to have survived the worst of the chicken pox. It's been a big shock to all of us. Life is starting to return to normal. Normal with less sleep and extra medications.

She went through a couple of days of abject misery. She'd spend most of her mornings very fragile, bawling at the slightest slight. She'd hardly sleep for more than an hour at a time, even at night. Which made the rest of us rather tetchy and on the verge of a bit of meltdown. After that it was just a fragile little girl, with occasional bouts of scratching.

I think the worst for her was being cooped up inside for a couple of weeks before it started and almost a couple of weeks afterwards. When L first took her outside to a park, she clearly missed being there. It's practically a month since she'd been and I feel sorry for having to be away for so long during the one time of year it's best to go.

The thing that helped the most was the camille lotion. I'm sure it helped her at least a little. But it really helped me a lot covering up her spots under an opaque white layer. Seeing the spots always brought on the guilt of having not avoided the exposure to the pox in the first place. It was weird that, after a year of my brain swimming in oxytocin, it just cut out and replaced with guilt. A bit of a depressing come down.

She's no longer contagious now. Most of her spots thankfully just faded away. There's a lot which have turned into scabs – mostly on her back and face. So we're just waiting for the scabs to fall off or disappear. We're still attacking her regularly with a combination of camille lotion for the scabs and vitamin E oil for where the scabs came off, plus the occasional antihistamine. And most of the laundry basket is black clothes with loads of the white camille splotches all over them.