We’ve very happy to have this chunky little boy. We think his chubby cheeks and his little round arms are just adorable. He’ll naturally lose some of this fat as he gets older, but we honestly don’t want him to. My wife and I haven’t talked about it much, but I suspect we’re on a mission to fatten him up as much as possible.
I don’t really understand this fascination with blubber. I certainly didn’t think it was particularly cute before becoming a parent. Before we had our baby, I remember meeting our friends’ fat babies, and sure I think they’re cute now, but back then, I really had to stop myself from asking, “Isn’t he a bit fat? Is this normal? This won’t be a problem later? Did the doctor say anything?”
When a proud parent introduces you to his or her fat toddler, what are you supposed to say? All these are correct answers: She’s cute, She’s bright, She’s so well-behaved, She has a lovely smile, She looks just like their mom. If it’s a boy, you could maybe say he’s going to make a great rugby player.
I always say something nice, even though the thought going through my head often went, “How’d a fitness freak like you end up with a little fat kid?” I just didn’t understand it. You really couldn’t blame me. I just wasn’t a parent.
And then we had our baby and all of a sudden, fat was in. We couldn’t get enough of it. The fatter he got, the more adorable he looked. Not only him, but all babies. I pitied the parents of skinny babies. I thought every parent deserved a fat little bundle of joy. The doctor monitored our baby's weight, height and head circumference. I never remembered how tall he was or how big his head got, but I could always remember his weight. We found ourselves happily announcing. “He was a little skinny the first two months but he’s put on four kilos by now.” The lactation consultant mentioned that formula-fed babies started really putting on weight at about six months, so I half-joked about the possibility of switching to formula at that point. That earned me some cold stares.
As long as we’re talking about babies, fat is desirable. I mention this because nobody ever told me these things and from all my previous experience as an adult, fat is not good. People go to great lengths not to gain it. Whole industries are built around helping people lose it. But that kind of thinking has no place in the world of babies. If someone came up and said, “What a chubby boy!” – that’s a compliment. If they were Chinese, they might even go a step further and compliment your child-raising abilities.
And if you thought parents were obsessed with fat, you should meet some grandparents. One friend told us that her in-laws were complaining that their grandson had lost a little weight. I really didn’t know what to say. The boy was playing in front of us and his arms looked like they were made of jelly rolls. Another friend wanted to borrow our boy to show her mom that fully breast-fed babies could still be fat, which worked like a charm. From that moment on, her mom was all for breastfeeding.
When our boy started crawling, we were heartbroken with his weight loss. Well, he hadn’t lost any actual weight, but he did get a little leaner. He’s still a chubby baby by all accounts. He’ll lose even more fat when he starts walking. We haven’t given up the battle yet. We might be able to fatten him up a little more before that happens.
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I’m completely out-of-touch with today’s music. The Souldoctor just showed me a video of her singing backup for Leona Lewis. I’d heard of the name before, but I had no idea who she was or what she did. This is not a reflection on her abilities or popularity. It’s just that I’m a bit of a musical dinosaur now.
I started to realize this when I looked through the songs I have in my collection. In the back of my head, I always thought bands like Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Green Day and The Offspring were kind of new-ish until I do the actual calculations. The first time I heard their songs were all like some fifteen years ago, at the very least. And I’m not even that into music. I never collected the bragging right for following any band from the time they were small and unknown to the time they hit the mainstream. When I look at the history of The Counting Crows or Sugar Ray or the Goo Goo Dolls or Len or Blink182 or Hootie and the Blowfish, I’m shocked at how long they’ve all been around. These guys are old! And the fact that I’ve stored them in my brain under “new-ish” reminds me not only that I am old but I’ve done very little with my life in the past twenty years.
On the airwaves here, you can listen to a variety of stations but the only ones I seem to listen to are Lite FM and Red FM and then only some of the songs on these. The other buttons on the radio are programmed to 988, Hitz and Mix but I only go through these to complete the channel surfing ritual.
I used to look at people who are stuck in the 60’s and 70’s and think how does it happen? Do these people just decide, “This is it for us. 8-tracks, bell-bottoms, and 13 albums by the Beatles. We have everything we need here. You folks can move on if you like. We’ve staying put”, or is it more like something that naturally happens to everyone when we reach a certain age?
I cannot answer for other people in my generation, but I certainly do seem to be developing a taste for music that I would have considered dated when I was young. Some Dylan, The Faces, and Rolling Stones have crept into my music collection in the past three or four years. I always liked the poppy Beatles songs but in the past ten years, I’ve started to appreciate their later stuff too. I don’t know what’s going on here. I’d like to think I’m broadening my horizons. There certainly are some classics to be found over the decades, but the 80’s seem to be a big void for me. I admit I still have a few Canto-pop songs from this era but many of these singers are either dead or retired now, so they are golden classics now. As for Debbie Gibson, Tiffany and Rick Astley – I don’t know. Those were my awkward teen years. They’ve got some time to serve before being elevated to classic status. I’m sure a time will come when I’m ready to look back and laugh at those years. Maybe when I’m eighty.
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About two years ago, before Max was born, we were at a friend’s baby’s first birthday. It was a wonderful poolside party with lots of kids. My wife remarked that almost every kid we met that day had a party trick. One little girl could dance like Mr. Bean. She was absolutely adorable.
Max knows almost no party tricks, but my wife did manage to teach him to clap when he’s happy. We had also taught him to wave earlier, but he rarely does it now that he’s learnt to clap.
Then, about a month ago, he started head-butting furniture wherever he went. That was a very painful week for us. It was like he was trying to teach himself some sort of Shaolin Iron Head Kungfu. I seriously considered getting him a helmet, or at least have him wear a hat throughout the day.
Luckily, as his motor skills developed, he stopped hitting furniture so much, and we could see what he was trying to do. It’s not easy to describe, but he does this forwards and backwards thing with his head and he goes “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” You can see him doing it on this video. We thought it looked like headbanging, so that’s what we called it.
Last weekend, we were at a full moon party and Max was the only toddler there, so naturally he was showing off his crawling and walking (with support) prowess to everyone. Then the thought came to my mind that he had a new party trick. So I said “Max, headbanging, Max. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” As always, he obliged.
One friend said, “That’s not headbanging. What have you been teaching him?” and gave me a dirty look. I wasn’t sure what he meant until later he was telling his wife “Max was going like this,” and started thrusting his hips suggestively. I thought he was having us on, but the next time we got the little guy to do the headbanging, I realized how he had to move his hips back and forth to keep his big head in balance, and what the whole movement would look like to some.
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While on the topic of words, I looked over my wife's shoulder while she was on a motherhood forum the other day. I couldn't make head or tail of what's being said. It seemed like every third word was an acronym.
My wife came up with this list to help me figure it out. It's a bit too much work for me, but I thought it might be useful to other readers.
EBM - Expressed breast milk
TBF - Total breast feeding
AF - Aunty Flo (Menstruation)
CD - Cycle Date
DC - Day Cycle
DPO - Day past Ovulation
EDD - Estimated Due Date
TTC - Trying To Conceive
O - Ovulation, ovulating
BBT - Body Basal Temperature
OPK - Ovulation P Kit
MS - Morning sickness
BD - Baby Dance (Make Love)
PCOS - Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome
MC - Miscarriage
2WW - Two week wait (before testing, not always 2 weeks)
BFN - Big Fat Negative (pregnancy test)
BFP - Big Fat Positive (pregnancy test)
EWCM - (we're not sure yet, so will update later)
Post up if you find we've missed out anything. I'm quite sure there's many more.
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Don’t ask me if the baby has said his first word yet. The truth is - I don’t know. He might have. As you can imagine, we’ve been looking forward to the event with great excitement but it’s really not turning out as clear-cut as we had imagined. In our naivette, we always pictured he’d be babbling nonsense one day and then he’d say something crisp and clear and we’d all clap and rejoice and that would be the end of that.
Before the baby was born, a friend was telling us how her three-month-old girl was greeting everyone “Good morning” and “Good night” in Mandarin. It was difficult to believe but when we became parents, I think one of the first sounds our boy made (I don’t remember when, but he couldn’t have been more than six months old) was something like “Aaaaooowww” and we were jumping up and down with joy because the proud-parent babelfish in our ears translated that as “Hello”.
Months went by and, despite great efforts to recreate the conditions of that day, we didn’t manage to get another hello out of the baby, so that has been dismissed as a fluke. Since then, the baby has been making many new sounds and once in awhile, we get all excited because some of these sound like words in one language or another.
Here are a few suspects that spring to mind.
“Papapapapapa.” At first we thought he was calling Papa. Then we realized we never taught him to call me papa. As far as we can tell, it’s just gibberish.
“Weh weh weh weh weh.” Again, another of his first sounds. Doesn’t sound like anything but I thought I’d mention it since he said it very often at one point.
“Oooo. Oooo.” If I remember correctly, he says this when he’s pointing at things. This was still during his repeated-syllable stage but he’s gotten more sophisticated since.
“Ah jeh.” A few times he said this in response to me asking him “Okay?” I’m still not sure if he was responding to me, repeating my words or mocking me. We’re monitoring this one closely.
“Dahd Dih.” My wife is convinced he’s calling me daddy. I won’t say I’m 100% convinced, but I figured there’s no harm in me responding positively to it every time.
“Mahm Mah.” I tried to convince my wife he’s calling for her but she quickly realised he only says this when he’s upset. We now agree this is his way of saying “Help!” or “I’m not happy!”
“Caterpillar.” Okay, not really. I think it was something like “dadumeewa” or “ameneena”, or… you get the idea - correct number of syllables, vowels more or less right but consonants all over the place. We were all on the way home in the car and I was telling my wife I’d read him his favourite book (“The very hungry caterpillar” by Eric Carle but we just call it the caterpillar book) that night, and that’s when he said it. My wife kept going “Caterpillar! Max, caterpillar. Max, say Cat-ter-pil-lar” and surely enough, he said it again.
Since then, that word is mentioned a few dozen times each day in our house but not once by the baby. However, if you understand how new parents behave and appreciate the intricacies involved in forming four syllables with a little toothless mouth, you would not be surprised that my wife has made it official that caterpillar is our baby’s first word. Just don’t argue with her.
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