Performance review

This is the first quarterly performance appraisal for Mummy and Daddy, as reviewed and reported by Alfie.

Anticipating and reacting to baby’s needs

Mummy: Satisfactory. Mummy is generally able to identify my needs and offer an appropriate response. She occasionally reacts to a specific demand with non-specific comforting, in the form of a cuddle. These cases result in temporary relief, followed by significantly more urgent demands.

Daddy: Totally hopeless. Daddy seems to think that my pacifier is the answer to everything. He insists on going through the same tired procedure every time something goes wrong: ignoring me in the hope that I will stop complaining; repeatedly offering the pacifier, with increasing levels of annoyance and desperation; grudging cuddle; grudging cuddle while rocking or bouncing; grudging cuddle while standing; grudging cuddle while pulling faces or singing. These measures are pointless when all I need is a change or a bit of food.

Entertainment

Mummy: Good. Mummy always has plenty of times for games.

Daddy: Must try harder. Some of the funny faces and noises are quite entertaining at first, but they get stale after a while and I’d rather just sit quietly and watch the fish. Also, you’re using my toys wrongly: that butterfly thing is fun enough when I get to play with it, but it’s utterly terrifying when you flap it in my face. This must stop at once. Finally, and most importantly, no more singing. For the love of milk, I can’t take any more karaoke Bon Jovi.

Comforting

Mummy: Exceptional performance. Perfect cuddles every time, guaranteeing comfort. There’s no place I’d rather be.

Daddy: Unsatisfactory. It’s not very comforting when you’re clearly desperate to get me to shut up. Know your limits: sometimes only Mummy will do.

Feeding

Mummy: Good. Patient and gentle. Adept at identifying and dealing with wind.

Daddy: Unpredictable. On the one hand, Daddy often helps me reach new, delicious feeding volumes. On the other hand, he sometimes pushes me beyond my comfort zone. On such occasions, I am sure to provide timely feedback by vomiting violently all over him. Also, stop watching the TV over my head and pay proper attention to me. I’m not fooled.

Changing

Mummy: Generally OK. Gentle and entertaining. However, Mummy seems not to have learned that I’m quite likely to wee on her during a change, even though I’ve been trying to train her for months now.

Daddy: Failing grade. Usually hides in a different part of the house during a change, making his distaste obvious. Worse, when Daddy is left in charge, he often waits for extended periods while profusely denying that a change is even necessary.

Transport

Mummy: Good. A skilled and comforting pram pilot and harness-wearer. Sometimes flounders when putting me into my car seat or pram.

Daddy: Satisfactory. He has been known to jokingly let go of the pram on an incline. He worryingly thinks that it’s a good idea to fit the pram with headlights and a horn; let us hope that this is another putative “joke”. In the harness, he needs to recognise that he is far fatter than he believes, and therefore he must remember to loosen the straps sufficiently to avoid smooshing my face between his man-boobs. However, credit must be given for his discovery that I can keep warm while in the harness by putting my feet into the pockets of his hoody. Daddy also seems to attract the attention of little old ladies when out and about, and they are all obsessed by finding out how old I am. While I recognise that this is not Daddy’s fault per se, it does mean that trips out with Mummy are more efficient.

Faint praise

After Mummy’s stay in hospital, she thanked Daddy for “running the household” on his own. This sounds very impressive, until you realise that Mummy and Daddy’s house is not Downton Abbey. Here’s what Mummy really meant. For a period not exceeding eleven days:

  • Daddy did not burn the house down.
  • Daddy drove Mummy’s car without crashing it.
  • All outstanding household bills were paid on time (by Direct Debit).
  • Daddy correctly identified the differences between the washing machine, the dishwasher, and the oven. No plates were accidentally washed in the washing machine or, probably, at all.
  • Daddy became a very popular customer of Ruby’s Chinese Takeaway.
  • Daddy got out of bed before midday at least half of the time, and sometimes he remembered to shower. He changed his clothes at least once.
  • Daddy didn’t always stay up all night watching repeats of RudeTube.

Having a baby is expensive (and other obvious things)

I’m planning to start writing product reviews. Eventually, my eloquent writing will attract the attention of people who want to give me free stuff. My metamorphosis from tired new parent to shiny homeworking lifestyle blogger shall be complete.

In the meantime, I’d like to address three aspects of parenthood that we were warned about in advance, yet have failed to avoid.

A baby is inefficient

Of course, we’re excited about having a baby. We want to get the very best for him. Which means buying more toys, furniture and feeding equipment than he can possibly use, and clothes that he’ll grow out of in a month.

But that’s not the whole story. Having a baby is inefficient. Food is wasted – his and ours. The house is heated much more than it would have been for just the two of us. Journeys take longer as we work out where to take regular stops. The washing machine is constantly in operation.

I first realised the inefficiency of the whole baby routine while making up infant formula from powder. The manufacturer, not to mention the NHS and WHO, provide very strict hygiene instructions for this. Milk must not be stored and must be made up as required. To do this, one litre of water must be boiled and allowed to cool to exactly 70°C. That’s for any volume of feed. Baby needs a 60ml top-up? Boil a litre and wait for half an hour. Never mind if baby is screaming for those thirty minutes.

I’m planning to measure our household fuel consumption in comparison to last year and will provide an update once we have some meaningful data.

A baby is a huge marketing opportunity for some companies

As an expectant parent, we were encouraged to sign-up for a couple of quasi-official support schemes. The most well-known is Bounty – so ubiquitous that our midwife warned us not to carry the unopened pack conspicuously if we didn’t want people to know we were expecting yet. The quid pro quo is this: they give us a pack containing a handful of vouchers and free samples, and we give them our email address. Presumably the NHS gets some fee, and in return lends them a degree of respectability. Bounty will also visit every new Mum in hospital with a further pack, which happens to include an essential government form, bolstering the image of them as an official service. In fairness to Bounty, they do have a robust code of conduct, and they aren’t the only ones trying to gather this data. Another is Emma’s Diary, lent a similar respectable face via an endorsement from the RCGP.

We used a one-off email address and therefore have perfect evidence of how far our details have been propagated. We obviously don’t mind the occasional special offers from the likes of Mothercare, but a number of the retailers seem only tangentially baby-related. We receive about forty emails every week, excluding those which are stopped by our spam filters.

There are helpful weekly email bulletins from several sources, Bounty included, that target first the pregnant mum and then the new parents. The emails tend to count down to the baby’s nominal due date, and then start counting up. This is obviously an extremely blunt approach: how many babies are actually delivered on their due date? So for four weeks after Alfie’s birth, we were receiving multiple emails telling us how excited we must be getting, and what would happen next. In the week of his due date, we received a handful of automated congratulatory messages.

There is no subtlety or sensitivity to this. I shudder to think how some parent just discovering that their new child has special needs would feel, when faced with a message welcoming “your healthy, bouncing baby”. I also worry that some parents will find the generalised information on the baby’s development more concerning than comforting. All children will grow at a different rate and so it’s not always going to be helpful to suggest that a child “should” be at a particular stage of development.

You don’t need half the things that people are trying to get you to buy

Some baby products are unnecessary, we know that. We’re doing pretty well with the setup we’ve got: a good, rugged pram / car seat from Mothercare; some nice nursery furniture; a comprehensive Tommee Tippee feeding and sterilising set that offered exceptional value. We’ll occasionally be tempted by some luxury items for us (photo prints, say) or for baby (toys or clothes). We’ve resisted buying some of the more obviously exploitative items (3D-printed models of the foetus, for example).

There’s a big push towards personalised baby Christmas gifts at the moment, so I’d like to finish this post with a special shout out to a company that, in my view, hasn’t really thought through their offering at all. In fairness to the company and because I can’t afford to be sued (I’m not yet a shiny homeworking lifestyle blogger), they shall remain anonymous.

The advertisement starts promisingly enough:

You have had such a magical year and what better way to celebrate than with your Baby’s first personalised letter from Santa.

I get it. A bit of fun for Grandma to read on Christmas morning, and we all have a chuckle, and then we seal it in the baby box, ready to embarrass Alfie on his 18th birthday in front of all his mates. So what do we get for our money?

Your letter will include personalisation details such as your child’s name, friends name, home town, achievement, age and many more.

I’d be slightly annoyed if a personalised letter didn’t include the child’s name. However, he has no friends (he’s a baby); and his biggest achievement to date was in his nappy two days ago.

Each of our letters have their very own story, allowing each child to receive a different letter making it unique to them.

A choice of 12 with a bit of personalisation is slightly stretching the definition of “unique”, but OK, whatever.

All our letters are individually posted to each and every child in a festive envelope from the North Pole.

By “North Pole” they mean “Bristol”. And by “individually posted to each and every child”, I assume they simply mean that they don’t require the baby to collect the envelope in person from their nearest Post Office.

Your baby will also receive an exciting text message from Santa on Christmas morning.

I beg your pardon?

Could this be your baby’s first text message? Santa loves wishing every child a Merry Christmas and on Christmas morning your baby will receive a text message direct from the North Pole.

<sigh>

As an erstwhile software engineer myself, this absolutely reeks of them having a tool and not knowing what to do with it. What use is a text message from Santa, even one direct from the North Pole? I’m certain that the baby won’t want to see it. And I can’t wrap it up and put it away for posterity either.

In praise of the NCT Mums

This week, I gatecrashed the regular coffee catch-up of the Mums from our NCT antenatal class.

Listening to the labour “war stories” and the baby-rearing tips being shared, I was humbled. I realised that these eight young women may well be struggling with being parents for the first time, but they are nonetheless going to be excellent Mums. They have actively sought to be well-informed and well-supported, and I am certain that this will extend to the way they nurture, educate and raise their children.

In most human endeavours, to become an expert in a field – a surgeon, say, or a fighter pilot – requires years of study and thousands of hours of supervised practice. Being a first-time parent is like being handed a scalpel after a handful of medical seminars, with the additional challenge that your family and the whole of society is judging you on your technique and results.

The media today seems to be relentlessly anti-parent. Mothers are too often deemed selfish and demanding (or worse, lazy), raising feckless, entitled brats. This is absolutely not so for Ranja, Emma, Hannah, Lauren, Anna, Gemma, Tamara and Amy. They seek to learn, to do the best they possibly can, and to help one another. I hope they will continue to do so, and I hope all the Dads are as proud as I am.

Thanks are due to Costa Coffee at Gloucester Metz Way, who have been very accommodating and supportive of the group.

Updated to add: One common feature of parenting blogs seems to be the blogger’s feelings of inadequacy in comparison to all the other perfect pushy parents and their precocious offspring. So it’s also refreshing and heartening that the NCT Mums will readily share their failures as well as their successes. Mutual support, not one-upmanship.

Alfie’s impressions

  • Lamb
  • Hedgehog
  • Seal pup
  • Scottish wildcat
  • Chipmunk (or possibly hamster)
  • Puppy dog
  • Truffle pig
  • Pony
  • Donkey
  • Gorilla (new today!)
  • Hungry zombie
  • No Face from Spirited Away
  • Tyres of speeding car on concrete multi-storey car park
  • Air raid siren

Alfie’s repertoire is expanding all the time, along with the capacity of his lungs. I fully expect to publish an updated list in due course.

Happy first month

Alfie is one month old today. He’s already changed so much and is doing very well. He’s starting to explore the world and to meet people too. In the next month, Mummy and Daddy want him to put on more weight and to develop his eating and sleeping habits a bit further.

No longer a newborn

Second milestone of the day: Alfie has been discharged from the midwifery service. It’s sad to see the last of Chantelle – who has been one of Alfie’s biggest fans, and a great support to Mummy – but we’re all delighted by the progress that Alfie has made.