Dominic's morning routine

One of the many excellent advantages of the Easter break was that Matt was around to be full-time photographer in the morning rather than have to get ready for work. As such we now bring you photos of Dominic in full colour glory (and with the added bonus of demonic-looking red-eye in a couple of shots).

Here is Dominic 7am-8am, a photo essay.



A thoughtful Dominic considers the deeper questions of life, the universe and everything as he plays on the play gym. Unfortunately we were unable to get a clear photo of him using the caterpillar as a battering ram to smash the other hanging toys.



Baby push-ups - one of his favourite exercises as he endeavours to develop baby 'pecs o' steel'.



Pushing himself around on the Play n' spin.



A pause from physical exertion to have some personal grooming...



...and then read a book. (Dominic's current favourite is the excellent Usborne 'Hide and Seek Dragons' book. He likes to hold and try to turn the pages to ensure the appropriate amount of time is spent on each page.)



A brief moment of fist sucking ensues before second breakfast.



Then Dominic has a good stretch before returning to his workout.

Almost entirely about poo

One of the expected joys of parenthood is awaiting the event that will provide a humorous poo anecdote with which to regale others. Once parents have such material the story can then be trotted out to turn the stomach of childless friends and repeated annually at Christmases and birthdays to embarrass the child as they grow and mature. The first three months passed us by without us any remarkable poo action from our baby. Certainly there could be cause to comment on quantities or frequency of defecation from the lad but this appears somewhat lame and uninspiring compared to others’ tales of the time when the wee one unleashed a wave of excrement onto an elderly aunt or the neighbour’s cat.

However, Dominic decided yesterday that it was time to finally use his bodily functions to provide the material for such a tale.

Our ante natal group decided to meet up for lunch as we hadn’t really bothered in ages and other more organised groups made us feel our slackness acutely. One member had moved in her brand new home about two weeks ago and chose to host the event. We had a tour of the new residence once we had all gathered and it appeared to be to all present a lovely new flash house with copious amounts of space and all the modern conveniences the wealthy young family could want for.

After several minutes of making cute gooing noises and smiling at his baby chums, Dominic decided to drown out the chatter by unleashing a thunderous bout of flatulence. Such an occurrence might be considered rude in other company but at a mums and babies gathering it is pretty much the usual*. However, I detected a warm and wet sensation in my hand that allowed me to deduce that it was not merely gas that had erupted from young Dominic.

I asked to use the change table as the carpet looked nice and new so that even with a change mat I feared to disrobe the lad on it.

The change table in the nursery was quite a sight. It had the appearance and slightly smug demeanour of an elaborately decorated pink and white wedding cake. This change table somehow knew its place in life and its place within the centre of an exceedingly flash and overwhelmingly pink nursery.

However, the owners of this change table were sensible people. If one has a very fancy change table with a very pretty doily thing over the top, there are only two courses of action to prevent it becoming soiled.

One: never use the change table for any actual babies. Two: cover the top of the table in protective fabrics.

They had opted for the second option with considerable enthusiasm. The table was suitably shielded from coming in contact with any poo by the presence of a thick fluffy pick towel and on top of this lay a starched white cloth nappy. However, the sight of the pristine cloth nappy also concerned me; I had seen what Dominic can do to pristine white cloth nappies. So I decided to protect these protective surfaces with my own portable change mat and the unironed cloth nappy from my own bag. Having laid these out I felt I could safely put young Dominic down without the risk of unsightly stains.

Upon placing the lad down I noticed that the situation was dramatically worse than I had first suspected. The poo had not exploded though the nappy, but it had burst though both sides of his stretch and grow to smear itself over most of his hips, legs, my t-shirt and finally, splattering onto my right arm. I pulled out the packet of baby wipes and got to work. I cleaned up his legs and myself, carefully rolled up the bottom end of his stretch and grow so as to not spread further poo onto my son, and prepared a bag to put the devasted nappy into. I undid the nappy, not with the dark foreboding you might expect, but with the confident ease of a mother who has dealt with many a dirty nappy before. However, I was not ready for what lay before me.

Never before had I conceived of so much poo. I felt both amazed the nappy had been able to contain as much of it as it had and vaguely astonished that a baby could apparently excrete about 50% of their own body weight and not seem particularly disturbed. In fact, Dominic was smiling happily, delighted at his achievement.

I quickly mopped up as best I could and somehow got the overflowing nappy into the bag taking care not to let it lean to either side as that could had been catastrophic. I thought I was almost done in the cleaning up when disaster struck. With a sudden and ominous sound prophesying war, a mighty fountain momently was forced from the Dominic and a flood of poo surged forth. Without a nappy to slow down the coursing river of poo, it ran in all directions on the change mat threatening to make it way beyond my own protective borders onto the change table. Dominic giggled in sheer ecstasy of his work and began to kick his legs out of pleasure causing not only his feet to become covered but he was now also splashing his poo about to splatter on my arms as I desperately attempted to block the poo.

Just when things could not get any worse, they did. For Dominic decided the only thing that could possibly increase his enjoyment of his glorious achievement was to starting peeing. A mighty stream of urine burst forth in a triumphant arc celebrating his work. Tearing wipes out of the packet like a maniac, I managed to cover the offending organ and soak up the majority of the pee but alas enough liquid had already spilt onto the poo-covered mat to start their own little streams that would trickle their way off the mat onto the table as well.

So scores of wipes and sacrificing the remaining clean fabric of Dominic's stretch and grow, the mess was somehow cleaned up. I bagged his clothes and the unfortunate change mat, and changed Dominic into some clean clothes. Picking up Dominic, I surveyed the damage. There were prominent stains on three sides of the starched white cloth nappy and alas the poo had found its way past the towel onto the pretty pink layer of the table. On the bright side, it hadn’t breached those perimeters and made it onto the new carpet.

Cringing I peeled off the dirtied layers and trotted off to ask where the laundry was. It was too early to pretend like another baby had done it. Our host was very gracious and understanding, even though I doubt whether any baby in the history has ever managed to make such a prodigious mess without being terribly ill or possessed by some sort of demonic entity.

Oh dear, he has just woken up and is now sitting on my lap being adorably cute to try to guilt me into censoring out tales of his poo. Well I’ll post this but spare him from telling it at Christmas. I’ll probably have something much better by then.

* When it is the babies farting. I believe etiquette dictates that whilst it is OK for young mothers to get their breasts out in order to breastfeed, motherhood does not provide one with right to burp, fart, drool or spill food out of their mouth that is afforded to babies.

Oh and here is a cute picture.

Middle-class Motherhood

I had my first session of the growing baby course at the Plunket centre today. It seems that parenthood these days requires a lot of courses - ante natal, baby and you (first six week course) and now this. This course is run by Plunket rather than the local Parents' centre so it has the rather dubious distinction of having no charge. I thought the fact it was free and run by Plunket meant that it would have somewhat more of a melting pot attendance. The previous courses had been peopled entirely by white, educated, well-off 30 somethings (on the whole, there were a couple of late twenties and early 40s) who seemed to have fairly recently moved to Kapiti to breed*. The complete lack of diversity in age, class and culture I feel is somewhat sad, and hopefully not representative of the current 'mini baby boom'. I fear what classrooms will be like in 13 years time if only the yuppies breed. Imagine 30 young faces peering out of their designer outfits as they sup on organic cappucinos with their iPod booting out whiney cafe pop songs whilst bitterly debating the failings of their summer holidays in timeshares on the Gold Coast. I arrived a little early and as I sat in the Plunket room watching the other mothers arrive, it dawned on me. This course was going to be the same too. In fact I already knew about half of the mums there from previous courses and yoga pregnancy classes! As I and the fifteen other mums sat around and, as we were instructed, introduced ourselves by stating name, baby's name and what job we had in our 'former lives'**, it seemed that this was not going to be a diverse group in any socio-economic terms. A PR consultant, an editor, another teacher, an accountant, someone who ran a dental recruitment agency, a salon owner etc. Looking around the room was equally disturbing. In front of every woman's seat was a neat little car capsule with a Lamaze stuffed toy danging down from the handle. Designer nappy bags stuffed fill with pump bottles of water, and everything that could possibly be needed for any baby situation from a change of clothes to hypoallergenic wipes and powders. Wide-eyed babies from 7 weeks to 6 months sat on their mothers' laps in their trendy baby warm outfits (that everyone was secretly happy about because the hot summer had not allowed for the wearing of fuzzy rompers and jumpers). The mums wore their non-maternity jeans, quietly smug to have got their post-baby bodies (or should that be 'not former-life bodies') into normal clothes again and sat around telling each other that they were looking good***. The weird thing was that the course didn't really seem to provide much in the way of useful information. It just seemed like the facilitator was getting people to discuss what they already knew about parenting. I had hoped that some expert knowledge would be passed out but sadly not. Then the facilitator recommended some Baby book and everyone's ears pricked up. I realised the sad truth. These women, like me, had desperately been searching for 'the secret'. It is like as soon as you get pregnant part of your brain sets out on a epic quest to find the Holy Grail of being the perfect mother. You try to assimilate as many books, advice, magazines, and parenting programmes as possible to arm yourself with all the information necessary to conquer motherhood. All our lives we've been led to believe that you can excel at anything if you just study enough, or practise enough or try hard enough. Our education system and our professional lives are based around the notion that knowledge and practise will lead to us being able to master any new skill. We are convinced that there is nothing we can't go on a course to learn how to do, or read a book to gain knowledge on, or even google to find the answer to a question. Then you have a baby and there is a whole industry on writing baby books and parenting advice, there are so many toys, equipment and gadgets to buy to help with every imaginable baby issue. You apply the same strategy that you have for everything else in life. You read every book, buy the toys that claim to stimulate and aid your baby's development, you even listen to the advice handed out by your parents, friends, midwife, plunket nurse and even the little old ladies that come up and gurgle over your baby in the supermarket. But, there are two laws that dictate everything to do with babies: 1. Everything you ever do will both be the WRONG thing to do according to some books, advice and little old ladies and simultaneously be the RIGHT thing to do according to other books, advice and, occasionally, little old ladies. 2. Any technique you use to deal with wind, crying, breast feeding, sleeping etc will probably work brillantly on some days and fail miserably on others. There is also a third that sometimes applies that whenever you tell someone that your baby has a good sleep routine, or sleeps though the night, they will immediately stop this behaviour. So I guess this is why there are all these courses attended by women who have already probably read dozens of books on babies and, at the end of the day, have perfectly successfully looked after their babies for months already. It is because no matter how many things you buy, or how hard you try or what advice you follow, there are some moments on some days when no matter what you do you feel like you're failing to be the parent you want to be. That can be very difficult to cope with if you are a person who has always been success in their career. It's not that being a full-time mother isn't rewarding or fun, most of the time it is both joyous and it does feel like you have achieved something extremely worthwhile every day. But when, for whatever reason, your baby is crying and it has been a difficult day, you do find yourself wishing you had read just one more book or gone on one more course that might have contained a suggestion of what you could now do that would magically calm your baby down and restore your confidence and enjoyment of motherhood. So even though part of me shudders when I see 15 SUVs crammed into the small Plunket car park, I'll continue attending this seven week course. Apparently we even get a certificate at the end of it, and maybe they might even finally reveal the much-sought secret of being the perfect parent. * I am coming to believe that Kapiti is mostly populated by former urbanites who move to start a family or retire, in some rare cases both. ** This is an apparently hilarious joke whereby you refer to your life before you had a baby as your 'former life' and, if you really want to have the room in hysterics, your 'past life experience'. *** Immediately after giving birth 'looking good' means that you don't look like you have just crawled out of a 5 km steam tunnel to escape a zombie attack only to be mistaken for a zombie at the other end and been beaten to within an inch of your life with a baseball bat****. After that 'looking good' means that you seem to have lost weight. **** I not sure why my brain likens the 'beautiful miracle' of giving birth to surviving a zombie apocalypse but it does. I suppose I imagine that if I had to face a mass of zombies it would take a similar level of endurance to survive, and that, hopefully, one's instincts and hormones would take over in the same way as they do during labour, and you'd find out that you are tougher and kick more ass than you would have thought. Although realistically, I'd rather give birth again than face a zombie attack. Other people I care about would suffer in the zombie attack for one thing and the whole world around you would change into a dark, squalid, derelict place filled with horror and despair. Hmm, actually spending several days after the birth in Wellington Hospital wasn't entirely unlike a post-apocalypse experience.