How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship

With a three-year-old in the house, everything is breakable. Or, at the very least, spillable. (The most expensive toys in the world can never be as interesting to a young mind as a big bag of uncooked rice that can be poured all over the kitchen floor.) Thus begin the Tidying Up Years. Valuable heirlooms, if fragile, are better off sold or kept in a safe or, possibly better still, stolen and claimed on the insurance. Parents of small children find it amazingly easy to fake burglaries, as their house tends to look like that all the time anyway.
 

How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship

PC no. 456: 'Oh, God they've smeared shit on the walls.'

Tearful householder: 'What sort of people would do such a thing?'
 
At a year old Junior is unlikely to talk, beyond the odd word like 'dog' or 'catamaran'. (So will be unlikely to give you away to the police in the scenario above.) But he or she can follow conversations and make the odd sound to fill the gaps. You can read simple stories to your baby, let it play with non-toxic crayons which it will eat, and encourage it to stand unaided for a second or two. Soon this baby will be a baby no longer, but a toddler. You won't be ready for that, either.
 
For the pressure does not let up. Once or twice in this blog I have used phrases like 'being past the worse which may have been interpreted by a few, sad, literal-minded readers as implying that everything calms down after a while. What I should have written, to maintain absolute accuracy, was 'being past a worst', because you are barely past one particular worst before two or three more start bearing down on you. 

Only Enforcer Dad, Absentee Dad and rarer beasts like Bigamist Dad seem to escape this process. The rest of us, mothers and fathers alike, must accept our fate. You start dreaming of alternative lives you might have led. You wonder what would have happened if you had had babies with that woman, instead of this woman. (Exactly the same, I guarantee.) You imagine yourself traveling light, with just a passport and an old rucksack, having wild new adventures every day, not missing home a bit. You remember happy nights in the boozer with all your other miserable single friends. You envy young people and the witless, doomed way they seem to drift through life.

Women think such things, too, or their womanly equivalents. But they are better at hiding it. That is to say, they are better at pretending that they have never even imagined that anyone could think such things, and that anyone who does is reprehensible to the point of criminality. The Tiredness Olympics were just one event. These days you are competing in a full decathlon.
 
Children change a relationship. How can they not? In the early stages of your relationship, your beloved's responses to you broke down roughly as follows:

• Love 14%.
• Amused tolerance 17%.
• Thinking of having your babies 23%. 
• Looking forward to changing your hairstyle, clothes, furniture etc. 38%. 
• Faint concern at the back of her mind that she can do better 8%. 

And after a year of parenthood:

• Sighs of disappointment 31%.
• Raging certainty that she could have done better 43%.
• Wondering what on earth she was thinking of 15%. 
• Contemplating adultery/divorce/murder 11%. 

And this is without you having done anything to provoke her. Or anything at all really. To find out more, you can check out How Does Having A Baby Change Your Relationship.

When Do Most Babies Learn How To Crawl

Mr Bad Example

And so for your final station stop on this Vermilion Books service, the first birthday party. Change here for Terrible Twos, Potty Training, Playgroup, Sibling Rivalry, Primary School, Pester Power and all stations to Adolescence. Please could passengers remember to take all their belongings with them, including the baby bath I suggested they get and which they now can't get rid of. On behalf of Vermilion Books I would like to thank you for traveling with us today, and we hope to see you again soon. First birthday party. We are now approaching first birthday party.

When Do Most Babies Learn How To Crawl

It has been a long haul. Most passengers preparing to disembark have aged visibly since the start of the journey, and all could do with a good night's sleep. A few will be heading straight for the station bar. And yet it is only 21 months since your baby was conceived, since that tiny sperm with your face crash-landed into your partner's huge angry egg. In the grand sweep of a human lifespan, this is no time at all. But to you, as you plant a single candle in the centre of your firstborn's cake, it feels like the best part of a decade.
 
Junior should now be crawling, if not walking. Parents can be in a hurry for their progeny to get stomping, but those couple of months on all fours should not be underestimated: they represent a significant stage in Junior's development. Babies cheer up enormously when they start to move. They will try standing up, and may do some nonchalant leaning against chairs, before falling over with the usual clunk. But it is crawling rather than walking that opens the world up to them. They will expend vast efforts trying to crawl. 

At first they will be able to crawl backwards. This is progress, although they don't usually want to go that way at all. Imagine that the toy you want is almost within reach, so you try and crawl towards it and end up further away than when you started. Admittedly, most of the rest of life is like this, but it's a hard lesson to learn when you aren't even a year old.
 
Crawling, though, means power over your own destiny. For the first time in your short life as a baby, you can go where you want. I am writing this sitting in a park. Not far from me a conspicuously foxy young mother has put her infant down on the grass while she talks on her mobile. Infant crawls towards another woman nearby. Foxy young mother doesn't want infant to bother the other woman, so she picks her up and puts her down a little way away, facing the opposite direction. Infant immediately turns round and heads back to the other woman. Foxy young mother gives up and carries on chatting on her phone. Infant and the other woman make friends. Infant has won. She gurgles wit pleasure.
 
Walking impresses adults more, but to baby, I suspect, it's merely the next stage. (Baby is actually thinking about running when it starts walking. When it learns to run, it will be more concerned with jumping.) At twelve months some babies will be walking, although not all. Boys tend to walk before girls, and younger siblings earlier than firstborns.
 

Crawling and walking change everything, as you would imagine. From now on you must always strap in Junior to the pushchair to prevent untimely escape attempts (such as when you are halfway across a pedestrian crossing or near the front of a long queue in the Post Office). Indoors, you will be thinking about putting all breakables out of reach. This is easily managed when baby is crawling, a little more challenging when baby is walking, and completely impossible when baby learns to jump and climb all over the place like a gibbon. To find out more, you can check out When Do Most Babies Learn How To Crawl.

Selecting Toys For Infants And Toddlers

Mothers who stay at home to look after their children start to wonder whether their minds are going. 'Oh for some adult company!' sighs my girlfriend from time to time, giving me the sort of look that wakes it clear I don't count. Women who used to work full time, especially in high-powered jobs, become convinced that the loss of these jobs turns them into morons. What they never notice is that the men in their lives, the ones going out to work every day as usual, are also turning into morons.
 

Selecting Toys For Infants And Toddlers

It's babies wot do it. You go to the playground for the first time and you look around at all these wonderful contraptions they now have, the huge climbing frames and rope bridges and long slides and sandpits, and what do you think? Do you think, 'Wow! My baby is going to love playing in this when he/she is a bit older?' 

No, you don't. You think, 'They never had playgrounds like this when I was little.'
 
Then you go to the toy shop, ostensibly to buy something for your infant, or maybe to avoid real shopping. You try and look around the shelves with a baby's eye. Would Junior like this? Is that too old or too young or too expensive? This lasts twelve seconds, for that's how long it takes you to find something you want to buy for yourself. 

For me, it was one of those ruinously expensive Brio wooden railway sets, which I bought for my daughter before she could walk. After you get the basics there are some terrific accessories to collect: junctions, bridges, stations, level crossings. Eventually your child will be old enough to play with it, but you will probably have moved onto something else by then.
 
(As with so much in this blog I thought I was the only person who did this, until I started asking around. Several dads told me of the cheap pseudo-Brio tracks you can buy at Tesco. One showed me a great little three-point junction he had picked up somewhere on a business trip.)
 
'When I became a man I put away childish things.' Now we are buying childish things again, and playing with them. Fathers used to be distant, slightly scary figures who had fought wars. Even today, some dads feel the need to be jaw-droppingly pompous, although I think we can recognize this as a lack of confidence as much as anything else. Join in, or keep your distance and your dignity? It's not that hard a choice. Better, I believe, to acknowledge that the infantilisation of parents is a natural process. You can only play with your child if you know how to play at all and if you have forgotten you can learn again.

It is funny that we spend all those years in our teens and twenties trying to be cool learning to put an adult face on, to be men who maybe don't smile much and certainly try and show no weakness if we can possibly help it. Work culture punishes weakness mercilessly, most male peer groups do. Babies render this invalid. You cannot be cool or authoritative or scary with a blob of baby puke on your tie. Hey, and there's Lego and roller-coasters to come. This is the true maturity, I believe: the reaIisation that all your formerly held notions of maturity were completely immature. Go on, have some more pud-pud. Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate, wibble wobble wibble wobble, jelly on a plate ... To find out more, you can check out Selecting Toys For Infants And Toddlers.

How To Speak Baby Language

A few old nursery rhymes incorporate jokes that only adults will understand. That's because they are not jokes as such, but archaisms whose meanings have changed over the centuries and have now become unintentionally funny. For instance: 

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.

How To Speak Baby Language

This much we know. Crown, as you will explain to your toddler in a couple of years' time, is an old word for head and not the heavy bejeweled thing kings and queens wear. It is in verse two that the trouble starts. This is the original unbowdlerised version:

Then up Jack got, and home did trot, as fast as he could caper, to old Dame Dob, who patched his nob with vinegar and brown paper.
 
However many times I sing this, it still makes me laugh. I don't think I found it that funny before fatherhood.
 
The more you hang around small children, the more like them you become. Childishness turns out to be catching. With luck you will grow out of it, but probably not before your children do. You can either accept this, or you can have a big sulk about it, and go to your room without any dinner.

If you don't believe me, consider for a moment the area of your body south of your nipples and due north of your pubes. In our previous lives as adults we called this our stomach, or if we drank beer, our belly, or if we were doctors or fitness fanatics, our abdomens. Now it's our tummy. Kingsley Amis called this word 'insufferably arch' but then he wasn't a parent in the first decade of the new millennium. It is indeed a horrible mimsy cutesy word, and we all use it.
 
Now consider bodily functions. In this blog, for comic effect, I have generally used words like shit and piss and vomit, as I did before I became a parent. Notwithstanding that most parents swear less anyway, because they don't want their child's first word to be 'cocksucker', you will veer away from shit and piss in normal conversation, towards poo and wee. 

'Have you done a poo then?' you say to the baby as you prepare to change another nappy. The answer of course is 'Yes, you twat,' although happily the baby can't say that yet. The baby could add, 'Why are you talking in that ridiculous tone of voice?' because however hard you try not to, you do speak in a particular way to your infant. This baby voice is slightly higher pitched than normal, slightly slower and more clearly enunciated, and slightly more patronizing. This is the way you might talk to a dog, or elderly upper-class people on holiday talk to waiters.
 
Words themselves begin to mutate. Some acquire inexplicable echoes. 'Eat your pud-pud.' 'Let's change your nap-nap. Ah, it's a poo-poo.' Extra vowels attach themselves. 'Come on, let's put on your vestie.' The other day I tried to tempt my son with the promise of a 'bathie'. Is this really supposed to sound more appealing than a dull old bath? One father I spoke to admitted that in his house 'pants' have become 'panters', which must be a bit worrying.

BASlL: Out walking, with or without children, I now say 'l'm doing to do wee-wee bush' rather than 'I'm going for a pee in those bushes.' My wife thinks I'm lucky not to have been arrested.

Then there is the swaying to the music. Every parent does this when comforting their child. Only this time you are not comforting your child, there is no music and you are standing at the checkout in the supermarket paying for the weekly shop. Everyone is looking at you the way they look at loonies. You would look at you as if you were a loony, too, if you could. To find out more, you can check out How To Speak Baby Language.