Milestone

Dot writes: today for the first time I put Prawn into a 3-6 month size babygro. It was a Dunne’s Stores one (their sizes are small) and it was slightly baggy, but this is still highly significant. He wore it for about five minutes before doing one of his world-destroying poos, whereupon I had to [...]

Getting it Wrong

Dot writes: this morning in the supermarket Prawn started to cry and I had to pick him up and cuddle him. A passing old lady made appreciative noises (me: ‘yes, it’s a boy – yes, he is cute, isn’t he’) and suggested that he was too hot. She was right: I’d put him in his [...]

The Terrible Fear

Dot writes: on Friday night Ken was away and it was just Prawn and me. I don’t know if it was Ken’s absence that did it, but Prawn’s normal routine completely collapsed. He normally goes to bed with us at about ten and has two night feeds around three and five. On Friday he fell [...]

Curses! Eco DVD stuck in mac!

Ken writes: I foolishly put last Saturday’s Independent’s free give away DVD in my mac despite the warnings against doing just that printed in small type on both the disc and the sleeve it came in. The problem comes from the fact that the DVD is half the standard thickness and doesn’t properly engage the [...]

A post about poo

Dot writes: parents get unavoidably interested in the ins and outs (chiefly outs, one hopes) of poo. Baby poo is not exactly fragrant but it is much more acceptable than, and quite different from, the adult variety. Whereas adults piss and shit, babies poo and pee. There is something kindly and harmless about the words. [...]

Weighty matters

Dot writes: just a quick note to record that today Prawn weighed in at over a stone! 14lb 13oz or 6.725kg, including two layers of babygro and a nappy. After that week in England of nursing him in funny places without all my normal cushions and so forth my arms were killing me, and no [...]

Peak Shifts and Smiley Faces

Ken writes: why do nursery toys and furnishings have ridiculous smiley faces or cartoon faces on them when they could have something edifying like portaits of famous people (or realistic human faces at any rate)? Wouldn’t a child learn better how to recognise people if it had representations of real faces with real features?
Probably not, [...]

Caesareans

Dot writes: as Prawn has grown my attention has turned to issues of baby-care and development – I’m holding off on writing a big post about poo, dear readers – but this last week has brought me back to yoga and so back to birth stories. The first mother-and-baby yoga class started with telling our [...]

Hugh on his travels

Dot writes: I promised some pictures of our recent trip to the UK and here is a selection. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.
We broke the journey from Holyhead to Norfolk both coming and going with a visit to our kiwi friends David and Zoe, who currently live and work in Keele. Here they [...]

Fright

Dot writes: it’s not good to glance at the snowsuit from which you have just extracted your sweet, milky son and see blobs of bright, fresh blood. Especially when you’d callously ignored his crying as you shoved him into said snowsuit and into a car seat in the rush to arrive (late) at your first [...]