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.