Dad Stuff

Ahh, nostalgia. I was drawn into a record store and was browsing the classical section when I was hit with childhood memories of the Dick Weir Show and happy Sundays lying in bed listening to Bad Jelly the Witch, Benny Hill’s Ernie, and Peter and the Wolf. What, I asked myself, could be finer than passing on a little of that bliss?

Unfortunately I was buggered if I could remember who composed the last of these, I rung Maire, who was able to supply the answer; Prokofiev. As it happened, I was in luck; the store had a couple of different recordings to chose from - well, sort of. One was narrated by Barry Humphries in his Dame Edna persona, so that was off the list. The second, a Naxos recording with Jeremy Nichols narrating, has been taking me back to that happy place all afternoon. I hope Ada enjoys it as much as I do.

Ada has been in fine moods in the mornings this week; positively hysterical, in fact. Everything is somewhere between merely amusing and hilarious:

Daddy, you’re coming to my cot. chuckle

Getting out of bed? Hilarious! Magnificant!

A book for the morning? Whatever you select will, I promise you, be the wittiest tome compiled for the edification of infants. I shall cackle at the turning of each page!

Getting changed into today’s outfit? Splendid! Undressing is amusing; dressing is a riot of pleasure! By the way, did you enjoy my clever prank of grabbing your glasses and hurling them to the floor? Was it not entertaining?

My squeaky chicken? Bravo! Tummy time? A delight!

Or, as my friend Ewen likes to say, common sense isn’t so common.

Heather has some useful and insightful things to say about the idea of freebirthing; to amplify one of her points—that part of the reason we get whacky ideas about the value of modern medicine is our magnificent safety—I present an excerpt from Pediatric Grand Rounds 1.19:

The London Bills of Mortality up to 1830 had documented a significant improvement in death-rates for the under-fives: from 1730-79 66.2 percent of the children died; from 1780-1829 there was a substantial drop to 37.8 percent.

To put that in more concrete terms, of the children I see most regularly, my own darling Ada, Lias, and Heather’s own daughter Rebecca, only one of them could be expected to make it to primary school.

I’ll take a double helping of the wonders of modern medicine, thanks.

We’ve been well served by a couple of baby carrying devices to date; as well as a car seat/pram hybrid, we’ve had a couple of front carriers; a front pack and a long winding cloth carrier; unfortunately Maire is finding these becoming too hard as Ada gets heavier, so we went shopping for baby backpacks and came upon the wonder of (New Zealand) engineering that is the MacPac possum.

My main concern with these sorts of packs is the potential to have the baby ride higher than my head, and thereby become a target for every door frame in the world; happily the Possum has an adjustable seat height that lets me keep Ada riding slightly below the level of my head.

Because it’s engineered with the same sort of rigid weight-transferring frame as a tramping pack it actually feels like I’ve got next to nothing on my back - there’s an odd gyroscopic feel that makes it a little harder for me to get off-balance than normal; Maire notices more weight, but on her legs rather than her back, which was the desired improvement.

The MacPacs get bonus points for accessories: a sun hood and rain cover that don’t prevent the kid from seeing the outside world, for example; this has been a bugbear of ours with a lot of the pushchair designs that seem to be focused on hermetically sealing (and thereby boring silly) babies and kids away from the world.