Maternal Panic Sydrome

It’s snowing in the UK, so extensively that my brother has been stranded in Norway (where I’m informed that Norwegian airport staff find it comical that anywhere shuts for snow), and this has given me a bit of respite and a chance to write.

This last month has been one long string of “baby firsts” (which will be the subject of other posts). It’s also exposed a rift between the parenting style of myself and his mother together with an outbreak of MPS (not to be confused with PMS, an equally feminine condition for which you don’t require a baby!). Baby and I have discovered that his mum worries about a lot more stuff than I do, much to our amusement.

I had a lot of fun yesterday afternoon with a particularly cute onset of MPS. I was called over because the child was “bruised and bleeding from the head”. I followed a little known route to diagnosis which I think we’ll christen "the three L’s":

LOOK

Hmmm, that looks like Marmite to me, and I was holding him whilst I had my breakfast.

LICK

[This stage was accompanied by a shriek of hygienic outrage]

Oh, that tastes like marmite as well, I’d better polish his head with my sleeve.

LAUGH

Whilst trying to explain how the Marmite got on his head, and that she worries too much!

I’m a big believer in the axiom “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and so the baby’s first adventure with solid foods was a raisin one day whilst I was baking with him in the high chair rather than anything suggested by the glossy booklets provided by oh-so-concerned companies trying to sell baby food. He’s also been carried out into the snow to experience the tickle of cold on his face and still sparse scalp (against motherly protests). You would have thought I had delivered the line “I'm just going outside, and may be some time” rather than merely stepping into the driveway. My wife’s reaction is probably tinged by the fact that she’s never lived anywhere less than tropical for winter before.

I feel that people have an instinctive manner when it comes to raising children which is largely dependant on what was done with them as a child. Essentially, parents default back to what didn't kill them as infants. These differences would exist in any family, but are probably all the wider thanks to differences of race, nationality, religious outlook (not the same as a religious difference, I just expect any deity that created me to have a sense of humour!) and social class between my wife and I – for the record, she’s the “uptown girl” with the doctorate.

To me children are proto-adults, embarking on their first steps towards the rest of their life. For this reason I let him chew my uncle’s dog, stroke passing cows, watch cooking, and sample anything that doesn’t contain one of the forbidden foods (at this age, salt would be lethal, and processed sugar, dairy, meats and baked goods would not do him any good at all). To her he’s a doll, this special little self contained bundle who’s almost frozen in time. It’s probably why she fills a baby book whilst I make plans.

DAD

Nappy Fillings

When selecting Crime Scene Investigators and Homicide Detectives, I feel a good initial test would be to have them change, examine and categorise a baby’s nappy. They are likely to react to the crime scene and the nappy in much the same way. Some will turn slightly greeny-pale, attempt to keep their distance, avert their gaze and avoid breathing in; others will note spatter pattern, observe consistency and attempt to determine time of nappy fill (which interestingly, correlates very nicely with the time of death on a crime scene given the body’s inability to control sphincters post-mortem!)

I am very much in the later group. As a baby is not capable of verbalising their state of health and gastric comfort level, a categorisation system of the relevant stool (or to use a more technical term, arse-gunge) together with the method of its excretion is required.

The Gassy Repeater

The baby breaks wind repeatedly. If awake the baby will look puzzled by this. If asleep the baby may make quite adult, yet disturbing, little sighs. Minimal poo will be produced, although this may be enough to remind the baby that they are wearing a wet nappy.

The Blocked Pipe

The baby will want to produce something, but can’t. This infantile constipation is probably due to either not stirring formula milk enough, or (if breast-fed) shaking your wife like a butter churn. If asleep the baby will rub its face against a nearby pillow, if awake they will be cranky. A single large explosion will follow resulting in a wide ranging but quite dry and coarse spatter pattern across the inside of the nappy. If this is allowed to dry the baby will experience discomfort.

The Creeping Ooze

Without any apparent effort or signal, the baby will develop a full sloppy nappy over time. You will discover this when either the baby cries for a nappy change, or when the ooze manages to escape the confines of the nappy and soak through the baby’s clothes. There may be a smell. Because the creeping ooze is unannounced, you can surreptitiously pass the parcel before “suspecting” a nappy change may be due.

The Reverse Exorcist

The baby also has the power to instantly, dramatically and noisily fill their nappy at such high volumes and pressures that the resulting torrent of poo will burst out of the nappy and either fill their socks, ooze out of the neck of the baby grow, or both. You will probably hear a loud ripping noise signifying that your baby's tardis-like capacity for poo are once again in operation. Producing more than their own bodyweight in poo, the baby will be ecstatic, probably because they know that the only response to such a substantial gout of excrement is a warm shower and singing.

Sadly, all of the above are normal and will fill your waking hours with dread opportunities for scientific investigation. In the spirit of “not getting sued” I thought I’d add a few notes on poos that are bad news. As a general rule the thing to be mindful of is not the “how” or even the “how much” unless your baby is producing watery-diarrhoea. The thing to be really careful with is colour: A normal baby should be producing poo that is somewhere between sunset yellow and cheap scrambled eggs (possibly with a bit of green thrown in). Anything other than this, especially if it’s red, black or glow-in-the-dark should be reported to a doctor immediately.

DAD

Lullabies in Brobdingnag

I think my son likes me because I have no shame. This is ironic as this same characteristic often causes adults who know me (particularly his mother and grandparents) to roll their eyes skywards in despair.

I will quite happily sit making ridiculous but giggle inducing faces at him for hours on end, and have little problem in involving him in adult life at such a young age. One of his favourite trips out was the day we visited the solicitor and he sat on the desk leaning back against my shoulder cooing and babbling at every possible break in the otherwise quite expensive and adult conversation between me and my solicitor (and why shouldn’t babies be along for the ride whenever possible? I don’t take him on site when visiting clients, but given the often dull nature of adult life it’s quite fun to see the world through the eyes of someone so tiny that even a small excursion is a journey into the land of the giants... this is another admirable fatherly sentiment and nothing at all to do with the fact that I’m too tight to pay for child care and conveyancing!)

Perhaps my favourite place to take the baby is the post office. The staff there are lovely and always happy to see the baby when we go in – whereas the baby thinks he’s visiting a rather creepy zoo where they only exhibit middle-aged women behind safety glass, so it’s really a win-win situation. However this all changed a few days ago when we visited the post-office with the baby in the carrier and he decided to wake up and howl. The noise was deafening and, as only baby cries truly are, mentally debilitating. Faced with this onslaught I went for the only solution guaranteed to calm a crying baby. In the post office, with a large queue behind me and two slightly bemused ladies looking out from behind the glass I started to sing, not the slightly sad embarrassed whimper that some parents seem to manage, but a full on song, first in competition with, then drowning out his cries. When he realises someone’s singing he stops crying like a car who's tank has run dry, gazes and then forgets to stay awake. I went with the somewhat rude version of ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’; within the first verse he was quiet, and by the end he was asleep. Quite what everyone else thought of my singing I don’t know, but I think my son likes me because I have no shame.

DAD

Too cool for school (Part 2)

As a man, your baby arriving a little early is a good thing. Ideally you want the baby to arrive sometime after it’s gained the capacity to breath and scream unassisted; at a size where man-paws wont crush or damage the child, but before (and this really is the important bit) you’ve spent too long wandering the streets behind a disgruntled, pregnant, baby book fuelled shopaholic. With this in mind the arrival of my son was ideal. We had sleeping arrangements (a baby hammock I’d purchased with air-miles!) in place, together with a few clothes and as many free nappies as we’d been able to obtain through various supermarket promotions... yet we’d avoided buying an excess of fashionable plastic junk or furniture designed purely for the first few months of his life. This has convinced me that many of the organisations that mums subscribe to are in fact front organisations for novelty producing Mafia; in the same way that the CIA might have a shell-company to fund operations, or organised crime may operate a laundrette, the overpriced-junk cartels of the world have baby books and “community websites”!

The fact that the child decided to burst into the world early was bad enough, and I quickly forgot all about the missed antenatal classes and the baby books that I hadn’t read. Those books wont tell you the following anyway:

1. Women in labour are likely to go through all of the positions they went through whilst conceiving.

2. Gas and air is really, really good... Although if trying it as the dad, you should remember that this is frowned on by the medical profession, and doctors will not approve if you’re high when they enter the room for a progress check!

3. You may end up wearing your wife’s clothes at some stage during proceedings (following being doused, head to toe, in wife-vomit!)

After 10 hours in the delivery suite the doctors decided they’d had enough (this was 4 hours after the vomit incident which was where I’d have made any snap decisions that needed making!) This led to perhaps the most interesting, yet traumatic experience of my life – a forceps delivery under theatre conditions. Breaking this down for you, “under theatre conditions” means that the mother of your child is now semi-conscious – due to exhaustion and a spinal anaesthetic – surrounded by all manner of machines (yet sadly and incongruously lacking the machine that goes ping!) and hospital staff. “Forceps delivery” means that they’re going to be pulling the child head first out of your wife, possibly whilst bracing a foot on the edge of the operating table. There is going to be blood, and most other bodily fluids sloshing around, and just when you think it can’t get any worse the baby appears, carefully made up by mother nature as a special effect from the Aliens franchise.

The baby will be fine with all this, but honestly speaking, as the father, you’re better off with a biology textbook and few gruesome sci-fi/horror movies than you ever would be with a baby book.

Oh, and one essential piece of advice. Once you're in theatre, no matter what happens, DO NOT go round the “feet end” of the operating table... you have been warned!

DAD