Good Enough Mum

Seven Months: The Start Of The Interesting Bit

I'm going to try to shoot for doing monthly updates on Katie.  That strikes me as possible.  Theoretically, at least.

The 'interesting' in the title is meant quite genuinely, not in some sort of quasi-euphemistic 'May you live in interesting times' sense.  The interesting bit, as far as I'm concerned, is all the stuff that comes after the first six months, which I think of as a sort of rather dull but necessary prelude.  As you can imagine, I looked forward to Katie reaching the six month mark; I approached her seventh month with high hopes that from this point on she would start doing more noteworthy things.  I am pleased to report that she rose to the occasion in fine style. 

A summary of the things she did during her seventh month of extrauterine life:

Sitting up alone.  Although she is still a mite wobbly and prone to suddenly ending up supine (that's one of those delightful contradictory phrases, like 'certainly possible'), she can now sit for several minutes at a time.  In fact, she can now multitask, reaching out for toys and playing with them while still maintaining herself in sitting position.

Sitting in a high chair.  I had a week off in June, and used it, among other things, to finally get the high chair cleaned up from the state that Jamie left it in.  (Yes, I am well aware of how badly it speaks of our housekeeping skills that it took me that long to get around to it.)  Jamie had great fun helping me clean it and Katie now has great fun sitting in it, when I actually get round to putting her there (I am shockingly bad at remembering that feeds for Katie these days are supposed to involve something a bit more than simply plonking her on my breast while I browse the Internet).  I give her some bits of toast, or cheese, or microwaved vegetables, or liver sausage, and she has a grand old time working her way through it (except the liver sausage, which was still fun to play with but which she didn't seem too keen on actually eating).  And, as far as I can estimate from mentally subtracting all the bits that I later collect from her lap/the sides of the chair/the floor from the size of the portion she started out with, at least some of it does actually end up inside her.  My mother, who predated the baby-led weaning movement (isn't it good when doing things in the easiest way possible actually has an official name and backing as something with, supposedly, positive benefits?), is extremely impressed that she's bypassed the whole business of spending months working her way up through progressively lumpier purées, and has concluded that she's a child prodigy.

Trying out the baby bouncer.  Not only did she enjoy this one, but her big brother did as well.  "Swing Katie!" he squealed excitedly, pulling her back for a massive push forward.  Barry and I both leapt towards him with hasty yells of caution which were, of course, totally unwarranted, since Katie loved it.

Having her teeth brushed.  Another item for the "Damn, I forgot we're now meant to do this as part of the routine" list.  So far I have managed to remember to brush them twice in the month since they came through.  Must improve on this track record before she has a full set.  Talking of which, there is a certain "Wow, was that it?!" factor to brushing the teeth of a child who only has two when you're used to performing this service for a child who has the full twenty.  I use some of the time on running the brush over her gums as well, in hopes of getting her used to the idea that this is eventually going to be a more extensive process than it currently needs to be.  She loves it.  (That sentence does seem to be popping up a lot, now that I think of it - good to know that she's also enjoying all these new developments in her life.)

Talking in syllables.  Her previous vocabulary of squeals and gurgles has now been enhanced by utterances of "Ma-ma-ma-ma!  Ba-ba-ba-ba!  Mba-mba-mba!"  This one, we love.  It sounds unbelievably adorable.

(Good gracious - I have actually managed to finish this post within a mere four days of her turning seven months.  This bodes well for the future.)

Now We Are Six (Months)

Katie's fifth month was really the stage in which she moved away from the cute-but-dull newborn period and started actually doing interesting stuff.  I meant to write a lengthier Katie Update Post to mark this, but, as usual, didn't have time until now.  So I'll make this an update on the whole three-to-six months stage, achievements therein, and hope I actually get it finished before needing to write whatever update I'll want to write at seven months.  And, just for the record, I'm at least starting this on the day she turns six months.  Half way through her first year.

I've already written about the rolling over (back to stomach is something she can still only manage with luck and a following breeze, but stomach to back is mere trivia for her now) and the reaching out to grab things (by the end of her fifth month she could get her hand straight to whatever she was reaching for without all the recalibration and rechecking, and, although she's still mastering the finer details of getting hold of whatever-it-is, she's getting pretty good at that as well).  She can also now, if carefully positioned in a well-balanced sitting position, maintain it for a few seconds before she slumps.  Here are a few more milestones from the past three months:

Being enormous.  Well, in relative terms - last time we actually got round to getting her weighed she was only just above the fiftieth centile, so as babies of this age go she's pretty average in size.  However, after having my mental parameters for her set on 'tiny baby' for so long, by the time she was around four or five months I was finding it quite startling to look at her and realise how big she was getting.  And she is longer than average - not drastically so, but when I last measured her, a few weeks ago, she was on the 91st centile for length.  This was no great surprise - Barry had already had to get the 6 - 9 month bag of clothes down from the attic a month early as she could barely fit into her Babygros.  It was just the length that was the issue - she was still OK with any outfits that didn't require getting everything from her neck to the soles of her feet into a single garment, but she did have to go into the next size of Babygros a month early.  She'll probably take after her father (6' 4") and end up towering over me by the time she's a teenager.

Eating solids.  This is yet another item for the 'so much more relaxed second time around' list.  With Jamie, I obsessed over following the WHO recommendations (six months!  Six months!  Not a day earlier!  Got that, neurotic new parents?  Six months!) until I actually read the report, realised they were based on bugger-all evidence, and moved on to obsessing over what I should feed him once I did start, feverishly researching the relative merits of different smushed vegetables and wondering just where the hell one got sweet potato in baby-sized amounts.  With Katie, I noted the approach of her sixth month-ness in passing, so to speak, absently made mental notes that I probably ought to be starting some solids some time soon, and, when she got to around five and a half months (close enough, I figured), handed her a few random pieces of food as and when I remembered to do so.  After I'd done this a couple of times, she tried tasting the piece I'd just given her (a broccoli floret, for the record), and was fascinated by the whole experience.  Hey!  When I put this object in my mouth bits of it come off!  And it has a not-milk taste!  Since then, she's had a go at eating bread, toast, rusk, courgette, banana, and plate (she had a very determined go at the latter before someone managed to point out to her that she was actually meant to be directing her efforts at the rusk sitting on it). 

I'm really pleased that she's taking to solids so well - I'd assumed she'd be one of the reluctant babies who just didn't want to know and took months to be willing to try anything.  This assumption was based on the always-unwise practice of comparing siblings, though in a reverse sort of way; she's been Jamie's opposite in just about every other way imaginable, Jamie took to solids really well as a baby, and from those two pieces of information I'd extrapolated a belief that Katie would drag her metaphorical feet on the matter.  It's good to know that this does not, so far, appear to be so; and I have hopefully learned my lesson about making such assumptions in future.

Being on a routine.  (For naps, that is - feeds she still has at any old time, usually often.)  I started this when she was three and a half months old, the week before I went back to work, largely because I happened to have a few days when I wasn't planning to do much else other than hang around the house and I figured that I might as well try putting her down for her naps at the standard baby times and see how she got on.  (For those unfamiliar with babies of the routinisable age, 'standard baby times' are - with usual disclaimers about variation between individual babies - a shortish nap two hours after wake-up time, a nap of a couple of hours at the beginning of the afternoon, and sometimes, for younger babies in this age range, a very short nap in mid-afternoon, with bedtime around twelve hours after wake-up time.  Different baby books give slightly different routines as examples, but that's basically what it boils down to.  A very nice summary, from Moxie, is the 2-3-4 rule - babies tend to be ready for their first nap two hours after getting up, then their second nap three hours after getting up from the first nap, then their bedtime four hours after getting up from the second nap.)

I read somewhere - probably Weissbluth - that, when babies start moving out of the phase of just eating and sleeping at all kinds of odd times of the day and night and into the phase of having a proper body clock and needing naps at fairly specific times, the development of their body clock starts in the mornings and only extends to the rest of the day later.  I was fascinated to see that this was exactly what seemed to happen with Katie.  She went into the morning and lunchtime nap routine like a hand into a glove - you could set a Gina Ford clock by her.  The mid-afternoon nap and bedtime were a lot more hit and miss for the next couple of months.  In fact, for some weeks the only predictable thing about her bedtime was that it would coincide with our dinner.  Given the variability in our dinner time, I felt this was quite an achievement - I still don't know how she managed it, but, no matter how early or late dinner was on any particular evening, it always seemed to clash with that crucial window between 'not yet tired enough to have much chance of falling asleep if put to bed' and 'tired enough to go into horrible meltdown if kept up' and I would have to excuse myself from the table to sit upstairs feeding Katie and trying to settle her.  I say 'trying' because she seemed to have a much harder time getting to sleep at bedtime than she did at naptime and, with a baby that young, I struggled to know when this was just due to her having difficulty dropping off, when it was hunger, and when she genuinely wasn't sleepy.  So I spent a lot of time going back and forth between nursing her more (and then changing her clothes when the extra milk that she hadn't, in fact, actually needed made her spit up) and trying to settle her without nursing, frequently ending up bringing her downstairs again just in case lack of tiredness was the problem (and, almost as frequently, discovering that this wasn't the case and that I now had an overtired and fractious baby to deal with).

Going to sleep at bedtime.  The journey from the state of affairs described in the above paragraph to this particular milestone took place at my instigation, not Katie's.  After a couple of months of muddling along as described above, I felt it was time for a change.  Besides, her body clock development seemed to have reached evenings (at any rate, the chances of her seeming tired and irritable rather than pleased when I tried the bring-her-downstairs-again strategy were much higher than when this process first started).  So, when she was five and a half months old, I started what probably wasn't organised enough to count as sleep training, but comes to about the same thing; like it or not (she didn't), when it got to bedtime, she was now expected to stay upstairs and go to sleep in her cot.  I was quite happy to stay with her and comfort her through as much of this as feasible, though this did have to be balanced against the fact that I have another child (not to mention a husband who appreciates my occasional presence), and so I did often leave her for a few minutes at a time while I went downstairs to see how the other members of my family were getting on, but I tried to keep those periods brief.  When I was with her, I alternated between picking her up for cuddles, bending over the cot to snuggle with her, and doing other things like the laundry.  (Fold one T-shirt, pick Katie up, put her down, fold one T-shirt, pick Katie up, put her down...) 

Sure enough, after about a week or so of this, I had a baby who would mostly sleep through the evening.  (Well, she usually wakes up for a feed or two at some point - what I mean is that she'll sleep through the bulk of the evening, settling back to sleep quickly and easily after her feeds.)  I've always found this to be a far more important milestone in practical terms than the much-touted Sleeping Through The Night.  Although Katie isn't even close to sleeping through the night, that isn't even an issue any more - she's now old enough for me to take her into bed with me without worrying about increasing the risk of cot death (in the interests of public safety I had better point out that this is only true because both Barry and I are non-smokers and because I'm careful about doing things like keeping the duvet away from her, so don't try this at home until you've read up on safe co-sleeping), and so I simply do that and go back to sleep myself while she feeds.  But getting a bit of baby-free time during the evening so that I can do stuff like wash the pump parts and have a shower without having to juggle these activities with soothing a fretful tired baby - now that's a milestone I like.

Doing without Mummy during the day.  Oh, boy, did she not like that one.  For weeks and weeks, she screamed her head off nearly every afternoon when left with Barry.  (I work all day, but she seemed mostly OK in the mornings - she was obviously prepared to put up with a certain amount of my absence but by afternoon had had quite enough of that business and expected Mummy to put in an appearance again.)  This was, as you can imagine, just a mite stressful all round.  We stumbled on the solution purely by chance; we had some of those little cartons of ready-made formula and I noticed one of them was about to run out of date in the next couple of weeks and mentioned to Barry that he might as well use it up rather than waste it, and, thus, Katie had an afternoon and a following morning of drinking formula instead of the milk I'd been assiduously pumping for her, and Barry discovered that it made a remarkable difference.  She actually seemed happy without me.  So we bought a tin of formula and tried it a few more times, and, again, it seemed to work wonders.  So, now, she's on formula during the days that I work.  (Deliberate formula-feeding and leaving my baby to cry?  I look forward to seeing how much controversy I get in response to this post.)

One last mention-worthy milestone was discovered by Barry on the day after she turned six months, when he let her grab his finger and suck on it.  "She's got a tooth!" he exclaimed.

"Really?"  I stuck my finger in to investigate for myself.  "Two teeth!" I amended a second later.  Two teeth, poking through the middle of her lower gum.

So, that's Katie six months down the line from the day she emerged.  Toothier than on the day she was born, more than twice as heavy, with a body clock and a rudimentary collection of skills that she didn't have then. (And I finished writing this when she was only six and a half months!  Good going.) 

Braggin' on my kid

We got our copy of the speech therapist's report.  As measured by the test she did on his understanding of language (presumably the third of the three tests she did; for those who are interested, it's apparently called the Reynell Developmental Language Skills 3), he understood language structures at the level of an average four and a half year old.  This puts him just over a year ahead of his chronological age in language comprehension.

<pause for smug smile>

Since Sidheag asked: it seems that the signs of autism she thought he was showing during the assessment were problems with his social interaction - reduced eye contact and 'tendencies not to initiate social interaction or shared play'.  She also wrote, however, that his intellect will enable him to learn appropriate social behaviours and conversation over time.  Which is pretty much what I think, as well (hey, it worked for me...)  She's going to liaise with the nursery about using something called the Early Years Toolkit for social and communication difficulties, and get a colleague of hers who visits children at nurseries to do a repeat assessment in the autumn term.  I shall look forward to seeing what further complimentary things are said at that point about my brilliant son.

And the little one said...

Katie rolled from her back to her stomach twice this weekend (stomach to back is, of course, old hat by now).  The first time she got her arm stuck under her, and the second she ended up with both arms down by her sides and didn't seem quite clear on how to bring them back round in front of her, so I would not go so far as to say she's mastered the skill yet.  However, it's good to know that she can now, theoretically at least, rotate a full 360 degrees round her long axis.

This just in...

Katie rolled over!  She did!  She rolled from her stomach over onto her back!

I know perfectly well that this is a normal age-appropriate stage of her growth and development which bears no relationship whatsoever to future intelligence level, but I still have to say: What a clever girl!

Basket case

When I was pregnant with Jamie, I spent a great deal of time researching those lists that tell expectant parents what they need to buy and what they don't.  The latter was just as important to me.  I knew, because of all the reading I'd been doing, that parents and parents-to-be were major potential targets for advertising and liable to buy all sorts of stuff they Didn't Really Need.  Which, of course, was not good because it meant you were getting sucked into the trap of buying your child Things instead of giving them the time and love that they really needed (it was, of course, an either-or).  Since I'm the earner in the household and financial considerations were therefore going to limit my maternity leave somewhat, this had something of an immediate practical application as far as I was concerned - if I spent as little as possible on buying Things for my child, I would save money and therefore be able to afford to spend longer at home with him.  So, I was very picky when it came to spending money.

One of the things I decided not to buy was a Moses basket.  Sure, I could see that it might be a nice thing to have - but the books and lists I consulted agreed that it wasn't necessary.  After all, I would be getting both a cot and a travel cot (the latter being a necessity with grandparents who live far enough away that day visits would be impossible in the one case and impractical in the other), and that would provide my child with quite enough sleeping places.  Providing him with a third alternative that would only last a few months anyway appeared to be firmly on the non-essential list.  That settled that, then.  Didn't it?

My son, when he arrived, had something of a different opinion on the matter.  He had no interest in settling happily to sleep in either his cot or his travel cot despite the hours I spent trying to persuade him to do so.  I think that some of the people on the parenting forums I consulted for advice on how to get him to sleep may well have mentioned that buying him a more comfortable, snug sleeping place was an option worth considering, but, if so, it was one I firmly discarded.  After all, I had done my research on the matter and that must mean that I was doing things Right, so of course I shouldn't change course.  The books had assured me that I did not need a Moses basket.   Buying unnecessary items = frivolous materialism = Bad Motherhood.  Everyone who knew anything about such things knew that.  QED.  By gosh and by golly, I was not going to buy a Moses basket.

And by gosh and by golly I didn't.  I spent the first six months of Jamie's life carting him around everywhere in my arms during the day even when he napped, interspersed with bouts of trying to persuade him to settle in his cot for naps the way The Books assured me I should be doing.  At night I struggled on for two months of miserable long-drawn-out sessions sitting in a chair or hovering by his cot trying to get him to sleep, interspersed with increasingly long periods of falling asleep thankfully on the camping mattress I'd installed on the bedroom floor while trying to pretend to myself that I wasn't really co-sleeping (because, of course, that was another thing that I'd decided after reading all The Books that I wouldn't do) before deciding that the hell with it, I was officially a co-sleeper, and simply falling asleep with him on the mattress every night.  That last did at least make life easier, but the whole issue was still one of the major contributors to my less-than-blissful experience of the first few months of motherhood.  However, as you may have noticed, I am a pig-headed stubborn determined person; I stuck it out.  I made it through those months without buying a Moses basket.  I arrived triumphantly at the end of his first six months a Moses basket-free zone.  At which point, I thought to myself "Congratulations, Sarah.  You managed not to buy a Moses basket.  Which means you saved - what, £30?"

It was at this point that I started to realise that building Moses baskets up in my mind into the symbol of all things materialistic and of Bad Motherhood in general had, just possibly, been the teensiest bit excessive.  Perhaps they might have been more constructively viewed, instead, as something that would make my life somewhat easier in return for a sum of money that I would, now that I thought about it - maternity leave or no - have found quite piddlingly affordable.

Of course, the nice thing about having a second child is that you actually get to do all the stuff differently that you wish you'd done differently with your first.  So, when I was pregnant with Katie, I did what I should have done long before and bought a Moses basket.  It didn't even cost me £30, as it happened - I just went to the local NCT sale and bought one there second-hand.  As far as I can remember, it cost me £12, plus another £2 for the stand (I hadn't originally planned on buying the stand, but for that price I figured it was hardly possible for it not to be worth it).

And it was brilliant.  Katie settled down in it perfectly happily, although I don't know how much of that the Moses basket gets credit for - I think she's just better at falling asleep than Jamie was at this age.  But it was so convenient.  It took up a lot less space next to our bed than the cot did, and when she got sleepy during the day I simply carted the basket downstairs, parked it in a shady corner of the dining room, put her down in it, and got on with doing some of the many things that are more easily done without one arm being occupied by a baby, knowing she was comfortably within earshot and checking on her when I went past.  It was all just so relaxed, somehow.

(By the way, the stand did indeed come in useful too.  As well as saving me a fair bit of stooping, it was somewhere handy to hang those old cloths you always need to hand when you have a spitty baby, thus saving me from having to grope round drawers or the floor for them in the middle of the night.  And it was something to prop my toes on as I sat on the edge of the bed for night feeds.)

This, of course, couldn't last any more than anything in parenthood can.  Within sixteen weeks, the tiny baby who'd looked so lost in the basket when I first put her in it had almost doubled in size and practically filled it.  While we probably still had a few weeks before she started exploding out of it Incredible Hulk-style, my maternity leave was about to finish, and we knew that free time to get anything done would be hard to find once I was back at work; accordingly, on the last weekend of my maternity leave Barry took the chance to put the cot back up next to our bed.  So the Moses basket has now been relegated to the aforementioned corner of the dining room.  It's still used for the occasional afternoon or evening nap (I put Katie in it while writing part of this, as it happens), but its days are clearly numbered, and they aren't very large numbers, either.

Katie made the transition like a little trouper, looking temporarily bewildered at suddenly finding herself in a cot but settling to sleep there almost as willingly.  And, now that she's managed to keep breathing for a whole four months, some of that without me hovering over her, I feel quite happy to tuck her up in the cot for naps and head off to distant parts of the house with the baby monitor in hand.  However, I still found it quite a wrench when the cot went up and I realised that the Era Of The Moses Basket had, for practical purposes, passed.  This was, of course, worsened by the whole Last Child Syndrome - the knowledge that every phase you move out of is gone for good, never to be revisited.  I will never again settle a tiny new baby comfortably into that snug basket so handily next to my bed. 

And I feel sad about saying goodbye to the Moses basket.  For one thing, now we have a great big clunky cot filling up all the space next to my side of the bed, which is something of a nuisance.  But, more than that... the Moses basket has once again become a symbol.  A symbol, this time, of how much better motherhood is second time around.  A symbol of the fact that, this time, I've found my way to being the relaxed, laid-back getting-on-with-life mother that I meant to be when Jamie was a baby but somehow lost sight of in the anxious scrabble to Get Motherhood Right.  A symbol of the fact that I've finally got it the only 'right' that counts - right for me and for us, not bothering too much about what The Books say but doing what works for this family.

Addendum

In writing about Katie's three-month-oldness, I forgot to mention one milestone - she can now hold a rattle for a few minutes (or, at least, has done so on one occasion after I'd been through several rattles to find one that she seemed easily able to hold).

As passionate as my desire is to have every one of these details recorded fully for posterity, I do have to admit that that isn't really much to base an entire blog post on.  So I shall pad it out a little by also recording that, on Thursday, Jamie and Katie had their first conversation with each other.  I cannot comment on the discussion topic as the conversation was conducted entirely in loud squeals which I had a bit of difficulty translating, but I am pleased to report that they both seemed to find it fascinating and highly enjoyable.

First quarter

Katie is three months old today.  It hit me a few days back that this was actually a quarter of a year, which somehow sounds much older - the thought that my baby has lived through an entire quarter of a year of extrauterine life is mind-boggling.  Then again, it's also mind-boggling to think that this time last year she was just a twinkle in our eye.  I know it's a hopeless cliché to say that the time has flown past, but what can I say?  It's flown past.

She will crane her head and shoulders forward when she's in her bouncy chair, trying to sit up properly.  She will swipe at objects suspended in front of her with an adorable look of puzzled concentration on her face as she tries to figure out this new experience.  She coos and gurgles and squeals. 

I've spent the past few days sorting out the 3 - 6 month clothes, not before time - she has been bursting out of her current ones for days now.  I've hardly been able to do the poppers up.  Today, I finally stored them away.  Good god, was that ever a nostalgic moment - all those outfits that she looked so adorable in, most of them ones that Jamie previously looked so adorable in, and I'll never put any of them on a baby again.  I put a couple of my favourites on her this morning to get some last photos - the personalised T-shirt Emms made for Jamie, the pink romper suit and stripy top that my mother-in-law gave me before she was born and that comprise the first girly outfit I put on her, among all those hand-me-downs of Jamie's.  That one was far too big for her when I first dressed her in it - now she fills it.

I was pleasantly surprised to find just how much I enjoyed these months, this time around.  Having my first baby left me with the general impression that the first six months are the bit you endure in order to get on to the better bits.  Well, to a large extent I felt that way about the first two years, but the first six months left me struggling to remember that the appropriate response when someone has just become the parent of a newborn is in fact "Congratulations!" and not "Oh, well, never mind - you only have to hang in there for six months before it starts getting better."  I'd hoped that this time, what with having had some practice, I'd dislike it less; but I hadn't expected to enjoy it as much as I have.  It's amazing what a difference it makes to have acquired the ability to ignore any parenting books that tell me to do things an entirely different way from whatever way is currently working perfectly well for me.  And, of course, to have a baby who stops nursing at the end of a feed and who settles well to sleep when she's tired.  And to live in a house I like in a town I like, with a few friends around.  Granted, the past few months have sometimes been exhausting and overwhelming, but then so were the few years before that.  All in all, it's been a lovely time.

However, with the exception of the wrench of putting away the first lot of baby clothes, I haven't felt any nostalgia at all for the newborn stage.  Which is quite something, considering my astonishing ability to get nostalgic over the ending of some the most hated stages in my life.  I suppose it's because all the good things about the early months - the cuteness, the cuddliness, the gurgles - persist into the next period of babyhood, so I don't feel I'm losing anything except the steep learning curve and frequent night wakings.  (It would be an exaggeration to say I'm losing those, unfortunately, but they're definitely less pronounced as time goes by.)  Besides, the longer this parenthood thing goes on for, the more interesting it gets.  I'm passionately impatient to get on to the next stages - the stages of watching Katie learn how to do things and of seeing her own interests emerge.  Being a parent is more exciting than Christmas.

What Katie Kaffrin did

My sister, championing the cause of little sisters in general, has asked why Katie doesn't yet have her photo on my About page.  The reason is that this would mean sacrificing the photo of someone else in the family, as I don't, as yet, have a photo of the four of us together.  I keep meaning to get one when relatives visit, and somehow we've never yet managed to get round to it.  I swore I'd get it done on Wednesday when Barry's parents were here, but I went to the breastfeeding group in the morning and then when I got back they'd gone into town and then when they got back it was time for his mother to open her birthday presents and then Katie started one of her spit-up marathons and by the time I managed to get her to stay in one outfit for long enough to get downstairs it was time for Jamie's lunch and then Barry was doing something else... you get the picture.  (Or, rather, you don't.)  Anyway, I'm holding out for a photo of the four of us together before I change the one that's there now.  If it's any consolation, I have at least now updated the bio to mention my second child's existence, although it may or may not say something that the comments policy got considerably more writing space than she did.

Anyway, in hopes that it will provide at least a partial substitute, here's a post about her.

Katie is now eleven weeks old.  Well, actually nearer to twelve weeks for now, but for some reason I felt kind of a pang over never having put it in writing that my daughter was eleven weeks old and wanted to grab that particular moment while I still could.  She hasn't been weighed for almost a fortnight (I'm going to get her weighed again this coming Monday when I take her in for her second lot of jabs), but she was 11 lb 11 oz then, so extrapolation from the rate at which she's been gaining so far means that she is almost certainly over twelve pounds now.  This, according to parenting folklore, is apparently some kind of magic age at which babies start sleeping for longer periods of time.  I haven't seen any particular signs of that over the last few days (particularly not last night.  Sheesh) but I am awaiting further developments with interest.

She's longer, too.  Length is no longer routinely measured at the check-ups, due to the general inaccuracy of trying to measure a baby, but I measured her last night out of curiosity and it seems she's 23 inches.  That's a gain of four inches since her birth, if I'm correctly remembering what the midwife said her birth length was (annoyingly, I didn't realise they hadn't written length in the red book until I'd already handed back my maternity notes and could no longer check).  I can tell she's longer - nursing her in my accustomed position in the living-room armchair with the laptop balanced on the arm for easy reading is becoming increasingly hazardous, as I have to be careful she doesn't kick the thing off.  When I carry her cupped in my arm, the way I used to carry Jamie - my hand cupped under her bottom, her body lying along my forearm - her head no longer nestles comfortably into the crook of my elbow but spills over to partway up my upper arm.  I don't carry her that way very often anyway, as she gets heavier - more often I have her propped up on my shoulder, balanced there with one arm, where she can peer over, bright-eyed, or curl her head trustingly into the curve of my neck when she falls asleep.

Jeff Vogel, author of The Poo Bomb, wrote when his daughter was this age that he didn't agree with the term 'quiet alertness' and thought 'lucid dopeyness' would be a better description of his daughter's waking non-feeding non-crying moments.  Well, in your face, Vogel - your daughter may have been lucidly dopey, but mine is alert.  She looks at the world with fascination, drinking it all in.  Interestingly, she appears to have a particular predilection for bookcases.  That's my little girl, all right.

She waves her arms and legs in huge jerky swings that inspired Barry to speculate on whether they're attached to a big wobbly spring in the middle of her.  She put concentrated time, in the past few days, into trying to grab the flowers on her grandmother's jumper and the pictures of strawberries on our tablecloth (and took it in good part when, mysteriously, she couldn't manage either of these endeavours).  When I pull her from lying to sitting by her hands, her head comes right along with her now, not lagging at all.  When I hold her in the air face down in the Superman flying position, she can hold her legs straight out behind her.

She loves it when somebody comes and talks to her, or echoes her gurgles back.  She rewards such attention with a massive smile that almost eliminates any need for other light sources in the room.

That, according to Open Office's word count, is 617 words about her, which, according to traditional exchange rates, should account for marginally more than three-fifths of a picture.  I shall work on getting an appropriate picture up, but hopefully that'll fill the gap for now.

Nursery

"What are we doing today, little one?" I asked Jamie as he fitted the last of the shapes into his shape sorter.  "Can you remember?"

Jamie screwed up his face in concentration.  "Mummy... is... um... showing..." he hesitated.  "Little baby!" he finished with satisfaction as it came to him.

"That's right!" (Well... close enough, anyway.)  "I'm going to go to the birthing centre so that the midwife can listen to the little baby in my tummy, and check it's OK."

"Birthing centre."

"Yes.  And... do you remember where we're going after that?"

More concentration.  "It's... um... um..."  I got ready to step into the breach, as this level of hesitation normally translates into a "don't know" - not a phrase Jamie has mastered, as he is unflagging in his optimism that if he can just hang on long enough the word he seeks will magically come to him.  Thus, we get quite a few sentences that stall half-way through, never to be resumed (as well as some others that are continued in unarguably non-specific ways: "It's a somesing!" "I sink it's a sing that is like... um...")  But on this occasion, waiting paid off; Jamie's face lit up.  "Nursery!" he announced.

Yes, indeed.  Jamie has now reached the exalted age of almost-three, and that means he's eligible for a place at our local nursery school.  I'd booked him in for one session a week, and that was the morning of his first one.  For the previous week, I had been taking every opportunity to work in comments on the many toys and books that would be available to him there, as well as clarifying such issues as the fact that Daddy and Mummy would leave him there with the teachers but return to pick him up in the fullness of time, and the requirement for sitting on the floor with the other children when it came time for the teacher to read a story (something I suspected would be more likely to present a difficulty than any separation anxiety).

I had, a little sadly, resigned myself to missing the experience of dropping him off and collecting him on his first day; as much as I liked the idea of being there for it, taking a half-day off purely for that reason seemed excessive.  Fortunately, it turned out that by sheer luck superbly impeccable forward planning I had conceived my second child at precisely the right time for one of my infrequent routine antenatal appointments to fall due that same week; I asked for one on that morning, and got it.  There were, of course, limits to how far I could stretch that in terms of time off work, but I could quite feasibly fit in the drop-off before having to head back to work and thus be there for half the experience, at least.

So, I got him into his lovely new nursery T-shirt and filled his special nursery cup (with a button you can pop to make the lid spring up, and 'Jamie' in fat yellow letters on the side against a background of colourful squiggles and stars) with diluted apple juice, and we headed off to our first stop of the day.  I'd planned to use our visit to the birthing centre as an opportunity to talk to Jamie about the fact that this was where Mummy would be staying overnight after the baby was born, but I'm not sure how much of this he took in - he was far more interested in the Wordsearch book he'd found in the pile of magazines.  Letters!  And a number at the top of each puzzle!  And a number on the front of the book to say it was Book 2!

"Book Three!" he sang out.  (He's a huge fan of the whole concept of counting.  Give him a number, any number, and he'll start counting either forwards or backwards from there.  Or, alternatively, tell you which Mr Men book corresponds to that number.)

"Well, no.  This is Book Two."

"Book One!  Book Zero!"

The appointment itself, when I was called through, was the standard-issue blood-pressure-urine-dip-check-heartbeat routine, with a minor counterpoint of Jamieness in the background.

"So... how many weeks are you now?"

"Twenty-eight, I think."

"Number 28 Mr C'yumsy!"

"So, how are you feeling?"

"Absolutely fine, thanks."

"Mummy got a S'yinky!"

(Mummy would, while we're on the subject, totally and unequivocally recommend the Slinky as a keep-children-quiet-in-boring-situations toy.  Preferably one of the plastic ones, as I suspect the metal ones would not be great for teeth if chewed.  I bought this one for £1.25 in a souvenir shop while staying with the in-laws over the Bank Holiday on the basis that it might keep Jamie occupied for at least a smidgen of the long car journey home, and it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, keeping him fascinated for all the time not accounted for by "Baked potatoes!"  I'd recommend keeping the box it came in, as well - putting it back in the box and taking it out again turns out to be a minor but important part of the distraction.  I had passed it to Jamie to distract him from any thoughts of wrecking the joint during my appointment, and it was once again working well.)

"Have you brought a urine sample?"

"Yes, I've got it here."

"Nursery!  Nursery!  Nursery!  Nursery!"  (Hmmm.  You think he might have been looking forward to the nursery session somewhat?)

Despite his obvious impatience to move on to the good part of the day, he was actually very well-behaved during the appointment.  He busied himself commenting on life in general as above, swinging the Slinky, and bouncing round the room, and responded quite well to being pulled away from exploring the bins or jumping on the scale.  He was very interested indeed in the process of blood pressure checking and blood-taking (I'd forgotten that I was due for a blood count check at that session), leaning against me and demanding "What's dat!" (and joggling my arm somewhat, which did not make it easier for the midwife taking the blood).

The midwife and I both agreed that everything appeared to be going fine, and I packed the S'yinky back into the box, and was informed indignantly that Jamie wanta do (by the way, did you know that it matters which way up a Slinky is put back in its box?  No, neither did I, but apparently it does - "Wrong way up!" Jamie informed me, extracting the Slinky and righting matters), and we got everything together and made it to nursery to discover that in spite of reading the bumf half a dozen times I had somehow managed to completely misread 9.00 a.m. as 9.30 a.m. and thus bring him in half an hour late.  Fortunately, Jamie is young enough to be completely oblivious to such maternal howlers.  I have two years to get my act together before he starts big school.

Jamie headed straight in to check out all the toys, pleased that we'd finally gotten to the point of the day, while Barry and I had a quick chat with Zoe, Jamie's key worker.  I explained his predilection for reciting large chunks of Mr Men books while engaged in doing other things (I thought it might be useful to her to know the likely source on those occasions when he's muttering something to himself that appears to bear no relation whatsoever to what's actually going on).  She gave us a two-page form to fill in on the subject of Jamie's likes, anxieties, family situation, and other pertinent information, and an invitation to a "Learning to Learn" evening in two weeks' time where we apparently get to find out a bit more about how the nursery are doing things (or rather, I do, having called dibs on attending the evening while Barry gets lumbered with the babysitting again - hey, he gets to do all the dropping off/picking up and get any associated regular low-down from Jamie's teachers, so I figure it's only fair if I get some of the nursery-related fun).  Another staff member managed to distract Jamie from playing for just long enough to identify the sticker with his name on to stick on a drawer for his stuff, and Barry got him to pick out another sticker with his name on to stick on the flower on the wall to show his belated presence here - a system they have at this nursery to let the children register themselves, with help from a parent, as they come in.  Jamie had by now found the paper and felt-tips, the toy oven, and a little toy cup that he could practice drinking out of, and was going great guns.

On the off-chance of him actually stopping playing long enough to notice at any point that we were gone or to mind about it, I crouched down beside him to let him know that the scheduled parental departure was now about to happen and that, as previously stated, Daddy would be back at lunchtime to pick him up.  It is possible that he may have devoted a nanosecond's worth of time to taking in information about such irrelevant-to-the-playing-situation parental vagaries, although he gave no outward sign of it.  And then Barry and I headed off, looking proudly back at our wonderful big little boy so happily and confidently exploring this new stage in his life.

..............................................................................

As you can imagine, I was longing to hear every detail of Jamie's nursery experience.  Unfortunately, I knew this wasn't likely to be an option; Jamie doesn't really do narrative.  I did try (and I realise that when I type all this out it does sound a bit shine-a-bright-light-in-your-face, but I promise I was gentle and tactful about it):

"What did you do at nursery today, little one?"

(No answer)

"What toys did you play with at nursery?"

(Indecipherable mutter)

"Did you have a story?"

"No."

"Did you get to play on the slide?"

"No."

"Did you show Mummy your painting, little one?" Barry asked, coming in at this point.

He hadn't, of course.  The painting, which was propped up on his storage unit at the side of the room, was an impressive study in blues, pinks, and purples (My Son's First Painting!  Hooray!).  I inquired eagerly as to whether the staff had made any comment about Jamie's day when Barry picked him up, but it appears not - just the painting in his folder.  So I resigned myself to never getting to know anything more about the subject.  But, rather to my surprise, when I talked to Jamie again about it that night as I put him to bed he was rather more forthcoming.

"So, today you went to... nursery!  What did you do there?"

"Washed your hands and had a snack."  (He still hasn't got the hang of pronouns - he uses 'you' to mean 'me' and vice versa.)

"What did you have for your snack?"

Concentration.  "Sticks an'... apple an' 'nana."  Which did indeed correspond reasonably well to what I remembered of the menu from the day I took Jamie along to check the place out ('sticks' being breadsticks).

"And what else did you do?"

"Painting.  And Play-doh."

"Really?!  What did you do with the Play-doh?"

"Made a s'eep.  An' a pig."

I was elated.  This has got to be more information than Jamie's ever given us about any previous experiences.  The Big Snowball didn't get this level of detailed recounting.

On top of that, we have one further detail from an unexpected source.  Apparently, when Jamie got in from nursery, he declared that Tinky Winky and Po wanted to look at the picture, and arranged them in front of it accordingly.  Then he squatted down and thrust his face between theirs for a few seconds, looking at it himself.  When he straightened up, he declared to Barry "Tinky Winky says maybe you painted dat with your hands."

Barry also thinks maybe he painted dat with his hands, based on the state of his hands when Barry picked him up; but it's good to have it confirmed by such an august source.  Maybe I'll hear a bit more about Jamie's adventures when I go to this Parents' Evening in two weeks.  In the meantime, I look forward to any further dispatches that Jamie or Tinky Winky might choose to share with us.