All tingly and quivery with pride

I am still a little bit hopped up on brain excitement chemicals; my hands a definitely less steady than usual and I am finding it difficult to concentrate.

Despite that I am writing this down now while it is still fresh in my mind. Before I forget what it really felt like.

Today my wee darlin' Marila took her first unassisted steps. To put it simply, she walked.

I know this is something that almost everyone, barring illness, or injury, eventually figures out how to do. Its easy, just one foot in front of the other, even the most intellectually challenged of our species figure it out eventually, what is the big deal, eh?

Well the big deal is, it was my wee girl, and it was her FIRST steps! Her first steps! For me, and I suspect for all decent mums and dads anywhere in the world, seeing your child take her first steps is a wonderful, ecstatic, jump for joy experience.

And it is one less thing to worry about. Phew, she can walk, she has teeth. Now only talking to go and we have a reasonably normal child on our hands.

It is by a considerably large margin the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the 9 months and 10 days since she was born and possibly only second to that in my whole life.

Well, it  definitely makes the top five anyway. I remember being pretty excited the day I got my BMX.

This is how all went down.

She was holding on to the back of the sofa while I rummaged about in her mum's red bag looking for a toy or something to occupy her and when I turned around she was half-way across the sofa towards me, and here is the important part, she wasn't holding on to anything!

My fragile, sleep deprived brain nearly exploded with excitement before crashing down into the dungeons of doubt. Did I really just see what I thought I saw?

I hastily picked her up, smothered her with love and kisses and placed her back at her starting point for another go.

With only a little waggling of her, oddly appropriate, toy caterpillar she let go of the sofa and took three quick, tottering steps towards me before falling over on her face. Don't worry she didn't hurt herself. We moved two sofas to face each other so that she can play in the middle without falling off anywhere but the ends. Gives us a little more chance of grabbing her before she executes one of her graceful swan dives into the unforgiving tile floor.

I supremely relieved that all those bumps on the head don't seem to have stunted her intellectual development, nor have they made her afraid of trying dangerous new things like letting go with her hands and walking. Did I mention she walked today? Don't seem to be able to think about anything else.

Her mum was in the bathroom for the first five or possibly six steps of her daughters life but not to worry. When she came back into the room, the wee darlin' pulled herself erect and promptly demonstrated her new skills for her mother, adding another three steps to her lifetime tally.

Of course her mum wanted to see it again, perhaps harbouring the same doubts as I had just banished and we managed to promt her, with more toy waggling, into another tentative two steps, which is, incidentally, how we captured the above photograph.

After that, the star of the show seemed to get bored of the whole thing and went back to crawling. She wasn't nearly as excited about the whole thing as her mum and dad were.

In fact you might say, if you were inclined to use bad puns, that she took it all in her stride.

The perils of standing

And how to enjoy your coffee.

My seven month old daughter recently learned how to stand up by herself.

I was washing dishes or performing some other fatherly duty in the kitchen when I heard my current favourite sound, her giggling, coming from the direction of the living room. I looked around and there she was; standing up in her bed, holding on to the side, grinning triumphantly at me.

After the initial gushing rush of pride and other mushy emotions the ominous worm of horror started to slither rapidly up my spine.

I was realizing that for the foreseeable future I am going to have to watch her more closely than my dog watches people eating biscuits!

The floors in our house are tile so standing up unassisted comes with a vastly increased risk of falling and possibly damaging her incomprehensibly cute* face or highly intelligent brain (all fathers think this).

Of course, she's been crawling for a while already. She has a passion for danger rivaled only by base jumpers and people riding their moped to the shops here in Thailand.

Literally thirty seconds ago Lin interrupted my creative flow, shame on her, with the worryingly shrill question, "What's that in her mouth?" to which I replied, rather more shamefully, "I don't see her eating anything." Lin then stuck her finger in Rila's mouth and lashed it about like one of those games they used to have in arcades where you tried to pick up a toy with a big metal claw on a wire, and produced, almost entirely unlike one of those machines, a large piece of plastic. I helped by standing looking dumbstruck, worrying and being amazed at the size the thing she'd managed to conceal in her tiny, delicate, mouth. A tiny mouth which is currently producing an disproportionately high decibel level of wailing misery at the loss of her potentially deadly chew toy.

That was just with crawling, no standing involved.

Other dangerous toys she gravitates towards include plug sockets and electrical cables, particularly the one behind the fridge that she can't quite reach; the bin, which she can now open and grab the rubbish inside and the dog's face. The poor mutt has been putting up with a fair bit of hair pulling and eye poking but then its entirely my fault for holding my child within reach, something which I am going to have to stop doing despite the fact that she loves it.

Another break from writing there thanks to some minor interruptions followed by Rila being woken up by some inconsiderate git hammering next door. Hammering, at three O'clock in the afternoon, what's he thinking?

After a fair bit of walking up and down and rocking back and forth she has gone back to sleep. I have microwaved my coffee for the third time since beginning this blog and am ready to proceed. One of the many things parenthood teaches you is that microwaved coffee really isn't all that bad. I prefer it to cold coffee anyway. The secret to enjoying microwaved beverages is to always let them get cold and microwave them even on those rare occasions when you don't have to. This strategy will help you to forget what they're supposed to taste like. After a few months of parenting I was frequently knackered and desperate enough for a hit of caffeine that I'd have snorted ground coffee powder if it was the only option available to me.

When other parents complain of being tired I will no longer snort derisively as I may have done in my pre-fatherhood days. I will be empathetic and offer them a comforting cup of triple espresso and a large dose of amphetamines**.

So parenting so far is an intoxicating mixture of joy and exhaustion, pride and anxiety.

If you are pregnant or planning for it please remember that all the dire warnings your parents, grandparents and other experienced breeders gave you are true. They weren't trying to scare you, put you off or have fun at your expense, well not too much, they were simply speaking from experience.

Many of you will discard their sage advice along with the last of the condoms but you'll come crawling, or stumbling, exhausted, back to them soon enough begging for help.

There was a lot more I intended to include here but Rila's awake now and requires my undivided attention. This blog will have to go out as is, unedited, without proof reading and...gotta go, she's trying to eat the air-con controller.

*Incomprehensibly cute only because she is approximately fifty percent made of me and not because a face that adorable is beyond human imagining. 

**Only kidding about the amphetamines there, in case anyone thought I was serious. The espresso however would most likely be gratefully received. 

How to fall on your face and give someone else the headache

The worst moment of my daughter’s life so far was probably the day she fell on her face. It was certainly a horrible moment for me.

I was watching the cricket on my computer at the dining table and she was sleeping peacefully in her pram. Her mum was on the sofa dozing right next to her. It was all very peaceful. Suddenly, there was an awful noise like a wet splat, a short delay and a mournful, agonized, yet slightly muffled wail shattered the tranquility. Somehow the wee one had managed to wake up unobserved, wriggle right off her buggy seat and smack , not arse first, oh no, face first onto the tile floor. I jumped up from the computer and my girlfriend from the sofa and we almost collided trying to get to the baby as quickly as possible. She wasn't really hurt at all, just shocked but she cried with a timbre of terror we had never heard before. There was no blood or bruises but it was still a sickening experience.

We worried for hours about brain damage, concussion and all the worst case scenarios. The baby was back asleep within twenty minutes or so. Of course, we obsessively kept checking her to make sure she was still breathing. We argued about waking her up to make sure she wasn't in a coma. It all seems a bit silly now but I bet I am not the first parent to react irrationally when their precious offspring has been injured or had an accident.

Needless to say we always make sure she’s securely strapped in whenever she’s in her pram now.  Back then she didn't move about much and I guess with the naivety of new parents we had not thought she needed to be strapped in.

She hasn't had any major incidents since that one but then she’s only three months old, so she hasn't too much time to get herself into trouble.

It is early morning at work as I write this; a slow day, obviously and I am considering getting a strong coffee from the wee Italian American man’s café up the road. Mornings are not my favourite time of day right now. The dog usually wakes me up around 7 am crying, not to get out, I’m certain but because she is lonely hanging out in the living room by herself. I drag  myself reluctantly, or sometimes in a murderous rage, depending on how little sleep I have had that night, from my comfortable corner of the bed, show her some love, or give her a look that says ‘just about any meat tastes good in a curry’ and let her outside.

Even though I desperately want to crawl back into bed with girlfriend and baby, carefully so as not to wake either one, I don’t. Instead I shuffle zombie-like into the shower and try to shock myself into wakefulness with cold water. I get dressed and go straight to work for around eight or so.

A familiar story to most new dads I am sure.

I have it easy compared to many. My commute is only ten minutes on a moped, door to door. A close friend of mine used to get up at five, do some work at home, help with baby duties and then still have a one hour commute to a full day’s work. He and his wife live in a big city with no parents or close relatives nearby to help out. They both work full time. Their daughter is now three years old and they are brilliant parents but how they got through that first year or so, I am finding it difficult to comprehend. I admire their perseverance.

The tiredness is having an effect on my usually placid, easy going personality. I am becoming quick tempered and irritable. I don’t want to do anything when I get home from work except eat, drink tea and hopefully watch some sport if it is on. I don’t want to do any sport myself and haven’t been to the gym in three weeks. I was trying to get fit before the baby came along but that’s back on hold.

The last thing I want to do is exercise. My dad and his tennis playing retiree mates warned me about putting on weight in your thirties, metabolism slowing down, joints seizing up, back pain, bad eyesight and on and on.

Excuses for laziness and copious amounts of beer, I thought. Keep fit, keep at it and you never have to get fat. They should know that better than anyone, I thought. After all they’re still playing a decent game of tennis and are now mostly in their sixties.

But perhaps they have all just put the early days of parenting in a shiny rose tinted corner of their brains? Perhaps middle aged spread is not caused by your metabolism slowing down. Perhaps your metabolism slows down because after you have kids you are too tired to do any exercise. Your bad back comes from carrying around little humans in awkward positions and your joint pain comes from sleeping in a contorted tangle at the very edge of your, quite large, bed for fear of waking up your fledgling family.

I was contemplating some of this last night as I lay on the sofa watching the last Ashes test on Crictime.com, a fantastic website for those of you who live in a non-cricket watching country, like me in Thailand. I was having some fairly dark thoughts, almost as dark as England’s debutante spin bowler who was being spanked all over the ground for copious amounts of runs by a hitherto low scoring Aussie batsman. I had finished my tea and biscuits and really didn't want to try and get up from the sofa to make more when my girlfriend said, ‘here hold your girl for a minute.’ My first reaction, I am ashamed to admit, was not one of paternal tenderness but more along the lines of bloody hell I am trying to relax here and now I have to hold a tiny child that will probably start screaming as soon as her mum leaves the room. 

This is the cheesy section so my world weary, cynical friends may want to skip this bit. When the wee angel was dunked unceremoniously in my lap it was like all my troubles sloughed off into the ether. Nothing else existed in the world except the big eyed, rubbery soft,  bundle of joy and perhaps and sideways squinty eye on the cricket score. 

As my daughter balanced on my knee

Her eyes transfixed on the cricket;

A wonderful feeling came over me

And England took a wicket.

So kids, next time your dad is tired and grumpy and doesn't want to play with you just remember. It’s your fault; you should be nicer to him. Go make him a cup of tea. Oh, you’re only three months old? Well, just keep your voice down a bit then, he's trying to watch the cricket. 

When the purveyors of coagulated milk protein proclaim in that smug, know it all, holier than thou voice they have that fatherhood is tough you know but it's worth it; instead of punching them repeatedly in the face, in my mind, like I usually do, I will be secretly agreeing with them. As much as I tried to disguise that sentence it still smells like a large chunk of Stilton left over at the end of a day's picnic in the sun.

In conclusion, the ups outweigh the downs and I love cheese.

If you managed to read this far here's a reward.

Yes, it's a picture of me covered in poo.