First steps

Today, in the presence of Rachel, his aunty Sam and his kind-of-aunty (Rachel’s aunt, so probably a great aunt, strictly speaking) Anne, J took his first steps. Five minutes later, with me in the room this time, he did it again. He’s just over 10 months old, so that makes him quite clever, so far as I can tell.

Winter wonderland

What would it be like to live in a world without windows? Today, for the first time (other than when simply standing outside and imagining) I can tell you the answer: the views would look great but it would be absolutely freezing. We’re getting two new windows today, and having another one renovated. So far, all they’ve done is take the old ones out. And opened the front door, for good measure. It’s arctic. Colder than a frog in a fridge. But somehow, looking out of these big voids in our wall, the outside looks more beautiful. Not beautiful enough, however, for it to be worth leaving it like that, not even for 10 minutes. Thankfully we’ve got a downstairs, separated from the rest of the house by a big, thick, and very much closed door, behind which I am currently hiding.

J’s rapid dudification continues apace. He can now wave. Or at least hold is hand in the air in salutation. It’s a small step, but we’re celebrating it all the same.

Playing up

So here’s proof that J is a very happy and, if I may say, extremely handsome little chap. This week’s brilliant development (OK, not that amazing, but it’s a start) was his first proper interactive game. It’s pretty simple, but then you’ve got to start somewhere. This is how it goes: he’s playing with something. He holds it out to you. You take it and smile and say thankyou. He takes it back. That’s it. Simple, but he loves it. Loves it. You can play it, with just one object, for minutes at a time, without the smile ever leaving his face.

T remains 90% wonderful, but that other 10% is getting noisier all the time. When she wants to strop, she can do so with enviable commitment, and at impressive volume. What she needs to work on, however, is her choice of stropping points. Things that might push her, instantaneously, over the edge include not letting her do something – anything, turn on the TV, turn off the TV, climb into the car all by herself, sit precisely where she wants to, flush the toilet, etc – or trying to do something she doesn’t want to do, normally extremely boring things like put on some socks. Still, decent effort.

Last week my parents gave her some new pyjamas. The top has a smiley tiger on it. The bottoms are in tiger stripes. “Grrrrr,” she said. “I’m going to be a tiger in bed.”

Baby boom

Some thoughts, then, based on our visit to the Lakes, and since:
1) Tiny babies are scrawny, ugly and mildly annoying. They squawk too much, in a bit of an irritating way. Unless they’re yours, of course, when you may be genetically prevented from seeing this obvious truth. It’s a little uncharatable, of course. Little Jacob didn’t prevent us from having a pleasant time. In fact, in many ways he improved it. He will grow, flesh out, become a little more logical in his behaviour patterns, be a good friend and playmate to our two. But he reminded me (of one reason) why we don’t really want to be having any more.
2) Having said that, it’s not just other people’s babies who are mildly annoying. For all that I loved and cherished him as my son, I have found it, at times, a little difficult to bond with J. But now, the good bit has started. I remember, with T, it started at about eight and a half months. With Josh, just a few days under nine. But at some point, while we were away, I realised that he’s turning into a little dude. A grinning, loving, gorgeous, cuddly, blossoming little dude. And now, if T was anything to go by, he’s just going to get cooler. Every week, between now and, well, about 13, he will be able to do something new, something cool, and I’m pretty excited about it. With T, at about this time, Rachel went back to work and I arranged to get every Monday, and most of every Tuesday, off work to look after her. It made me quite guilty, with J, that I couldn’t imagine wanting to do the same with him. Until now. Now, I think it would be pretty fun.

Break in the Lakes

So we’re in the Lake District for New Year, with Rachel’s parents, her brother, his wife and their four-week-old son. It’s cold, and it snowed last week, which means there’s ice everywhere. Smaller roads are unpassable, almost all paths are unwalkable, even town centre footpaths resemble small ice rinks, without the health and safety measures, and anyway it’s cold enough to make children weep after just a few minutes, and that’s assuming they haven’t by that time fallen over and broken their ankles.

We are, in short, housebound. We might as well just have locked ourselves in our home for a week and saved ourselves the journey. Today, we got a visit from my old friend Anton, who moved to Israel a decade ago and was visiting with his girlfriend, Adi. We arranged to meet in Bowness, and took the kids there earlier to mess around in the soft play centre. When Anton arrived, we went for the easiest, most basic walk we know, thinking there was little that could go wrong. It was a death-defying half-hour of small skids, much of it undertaken with T on my shoulders. We then went for a pub lunch, which was great, though Anton got a bit stuck when he tried to leave and required a bit of a push. Then we came back to the flat. Given that the sun sets before your lunch has had time to settle in your stomach, we hardly had much choice.

Rachel’s parents were here for a week before we arrived, in which time they went to the supermarket once and for a walk once. Then add the fact that most of the local businesses were ruined in November’s flooding and are closed for repairs, so there’s no local pub to escape to.

The kids, though, are relishing the attention. T hit it off with Rachel’s aunt Anne (who with her family own the flat upstairs) to such an extent that she spent the best part of a day up there, before Anne went home to Birmingham. She is incredibly sociable. Her current favourite thing is declaring people her best friend in the whole world. Her first act at the soft play this morning was to run up to a random girl, tug her sleeve and ask if she would be her best friend. The girl nodded. T ran back towards me. “Daddy!” she cried, “she said yes!”

J, meanwhile, is a simple soul. He likes walking. Obviously, being still a day short of nine months old, he can’t walk by himself. So he demands that someone hold his hands and support him while he goes for a stroll. It’s charming, but it doesn’t half hurt your back after a while. He has also developed an incredibly painful pinch-grip, which he produces apparently without effort but which is enough to prompt howls of anguish even in the most stoic of cuddlers. The CIA could do with studying his technique, it would have hardened trainee suicide-bombers weeping and begging for mercy within minutes.

A note of optimism, though: tomorrow night, we visit L’Enclume. Only the best ruddy restaurant in the entire country, says The Telegraph. That’s assuming we can get there, of course: it’s only a few miles away, but there’s some snow forecast.

Sniffles

I write this from the kitchen, with J asleep in the loft and T, who still insists on taking her lunchtime nap in a buggy, in the living room. Rachel is at her parents, meeting her new nephew Jacob, born to her brother and his wife a couple of years ago, giving me a rare chance to use a computer she’s been hogging every evening for genuinely important things, rather than random blogging. The rest of us can’t meet Jacob yet because we’re all viral – J has been puking, pooing and wheezing, T has been sniffing and coughing, and I have a common or garden cold, augmented by sporadic pooing and puking. It’s probably best if Jacob meets the rest of the family in a little while. Although I’m by no means confident that we’ll have an entirely virus-free family at any point before June, and we’re due to spend a week in the Lake District with Jacob after Christmas.

Pictured (once I upload it in a few hours) is T in the dentist’s chair, which she visited for the first time this week. I’d been building it up for a while in a non-threatening way, she seemed happy to go and was running around the waiting-room excitedly asking “where’s the dentist?”, but the moment we were showed into the room she shut her mouth and refused to open it, no matter how many stickers she was bribed with, until the dentist stuck his finger in her mouth and made her cry. We must have a genetic fear of dentists.

Toothless

Why can’t we just be born with our teeth already in place? Sure, the breastfeeders might suffer but I’d have the backing of at least 50% of all parents and we’d all benefit somewhere down the line. I write this while perched outside J’s room, hoping that at some point he will stop howling and go to sleep. Downstairs T is rejecting her breakfast, having not eaten a decent meal for the best part of three days. It seems particularly cruel to have two children with an 18-month age gap who still contrive to be teething at exactly the same time – J’s first teeth arriving simultaneously with T’s last. J’s problems seem to go a bit deeper than just teething, though. He’s coughing. He’s pooing. A lot. Parenthood manages the seemingly impossible feat of making winter even worse than it already was – now, not only is it cold, dark and bereft of hope, it’s also the harbinger of infinite ailments, bringer of coughs, sneezes, sniffles and interrupted nights. It cannot end soon enough.

Back to work

Today is a must-blog day, marking as it does Rachel’s return to work after her second (and final, subject to accidents or unforeseen mind-changes) maternity leave. As the dust settles on this new world, we will see what it contains, but it certainly includes: an hour and a half of pre-work/play solo double childcare for me in the morning, three days a week; a rum old time for Rachel herself, who unlike me will never, or near enough, have a day without work or childcare, and a nanny called Marta who we can’t really afford – J needs to get a nursery place sharpish. We had a little shock this week when we discovered our current account had slipped (more a slump than a slip, if truth be told) into overdraft. We’ll have to spend more wisely and eat out less otherwise we’ll have to sell the kids and we wouldn’t want that.

(Kids, if it’s 2025 and you’re reading this, we never actually considered selling you)

Totally potty

A week and a half in, we’ve had our first accident-free day. There was a half-accident involving poo, but we’ll pass that by. We’ll pass that by because, in every other respect, T is amazing. She’s the coolest, greatest thing. She smiles a lot. She sometimes tells you off by putting on a stern face and wagging her finger in a way that can only be described as hilarious. She has started explaining everything she says, with a gloriously exaggerated “be-cause” (as in, “don’t tickle me, be-cause my tummy’s all full”, or “we’re going on a spaceship, be-cause we’re going on a spaceship”. Logic not required). And, when I put her to bed tonight, her last words to me were “Daddy I love you. Bye-bye. Goodnight.” And I couldn’t script a better sign-off myself.

J, meanwhile, is only happy when he’s standing up, which he can only do when an adult is there to assist him. He has also started talking. So far he says a-buh, boo and guh. And when he’s really happy he makes a really weird high-pitched squealing noise, the kind of sound that must make the neighbours think we’re torturing kestrels. I’m guessing what tortured kestrels sound like, by the way.

Wee rules

So after one week, we can look back at potty training, job done, and wonder what the big fuss was abou … oh hang on, we don’t live in GinaFordLand.

If you come to our house you might notice that the floorboards in the living room have an unusually bright shine to them at present. That is because they have spent the week being weed on, mopped, towelled and wiped. They’ve been buffed to a professional sheen. And they’ll probably be just as shiny a week from now.

For the last few days we’ve packed T off to nursery with five or six changes of clothes and she’s come back with all of them wet. On Thursday she even had to borrow another change of clothes from nursery.

She is terrified of wee and as for poo… She’s done one of those in the potty all week, the rest she’s saved up for when she’s wearing a nappy. When she needs a wee, she runs up and down and begs you for a cuddle. The trick is knowing when to stop cuddling and dump her on the potty smartish, otherwise you’re getting wet.

Today, we’re trying a new tactic. Bribery.