Hangin' in my cot

Sparkle eyes

Our album cover - very Iggy and the Stooges

Sittin' in my toy basket

A Bad Day

All baby books warn you about Bad Days with a baby. Normally they tell you to just take a deep breath and think of happier times and eventually the Bad Day will end. Or put your palms flat in a basin of water to calm down (yeah right).
Today was one of the worst I've had with Ari.
It started this morning when I stupidly gave him a catalogue to play with and he decided to chew off a big chunk and swallow it...resulting in thrown up breakfast everywhere.
This was followed by:
1. Ari putting his hands in bird poo in the backyard
2. Our local playground being closed for repairs
3. Ari not wanting to eat his lunch (AGAIN) and smearing risotto through his hair, onto his clothes, all the while wailing because, that's right, he didn't want to eat his lunch. Change of clothes No.2 and a quick hair sponge bath required.
4. Me burning carrots and nearly destroying a pot.
5. My computer's mouse and keyboard breaking down.
6. A can of tuna exploding when i opened it for lunch.

Today is honestly one of those days that if someone offered the chance to throw in the parenting towel, I'd be outta here!
Basin of warm water? Forget it! Gimme a big ole drink, please.

The calm before the storm

Yesterday Ari and I visited a friend of ours who is due to give birth to her first child in seven weeks.
Her excited optimism took me back to the final weeks before Ari's birth, when all I could think about was meeting our little person.
She also told me of people's negativity toward her about having children and I remember feeling the same frustration. No one ever seemed to have anything positive to say about it.
Now that I have a child, I can finally understand why people they say these things. It isn't to make you feel bad. I'm sure that it's a vain attempt to warn you of the vast chasm you're about to jump into, the line you'll cross and never return.
Just as you can never explain the euphoric feeling of seeing your child for the first time, you can't convey what it feels like to relinquish the little freedoms you now take for granted, the bone-weary tiredness that comes with night feeding or the drudgery that is being at home with a baby all day, every day.
How can you warn a person that life will never be the same again?
You can't. Because they'd never believe you...

The Right Time

Is there a Right Time to have a baby?
For us, it was when my hormones kicked in at age 29 and I was suddenly desperate for a child. It was entirely physical, like a little alarm bell had gone off inside me and suddenly all the babies in the world looked like heaven.
Rob, on the other hand, is what I call an Instant Father. I think he's been ready to be a Dad his whole adult life.
When Ari was born I was 30 and Rob 31. Compared to our parents, we're practically elderly to be having our first kid.
But by today's standards, we're spring chickens.
I look around at the parents in my area and they're all older than me. In our swimming class we'd have be the youngest parents there.
Spend any time in trendy inner suburbs like Fitzroy and Clifton Hill and you're not sure whether the people pushing the pram are Mum and Dad or Nan and Pop. Seriously.
People are waiting longer and longer to have kids for lots of reasons. We're settling down and getting married later and later. Finding a husband/wife is bloody hard. We want to buy a house/travel/achieve career goals before we have babies.
But there's a cost to all this. My friend Aljit is looking at having another baby very soon because she is 38, despite the fact her son is barely a toddler.
For this reason I'm relieved that we had Ari when we did. And for lots of others - we won't be 65 when he's 21. We'll be young and fit enough to keep up with him.
But having kids at 30 comes at a cost. My career has been interrupted in a huge way. We don't have many close friends with kids, so it's hard work to maintain a social life. Our pre-baby freedoms are gone.
So I reckon there's no Right Time to have a child. It's whenever it feels right.

A new baby

We have a new niece. Grace Edith was born on Tuesday afternoon and she's a lovely little poppet - a healthy 7lb 2oz.
Her older sister Elizabeth is staying with us at the moment and we're having heaps of fun. So far this morning I've had an imaginary picnic, complete with bananas, strawberries, jam and lollies (of course).
Afterwards our dolly picnic guests were all declared sick by our hostess Elizabeth, so we set off in search of a doctor.
After a fruitless search of the front door, ensuite bathroom and backyard, we grabbed our doctor's bags and set about performing the medical miracle ourselves.
A quick diagnosis of overeating, some Blistex medicine and bed rest later and our dolly crew were all back in fighting form.
Now it's off to the park for some swing and slide type action...

Ah, it takes me back...

My sister-in-law is about to have her second baby - in the same hospital Ari was born. The baby's impending arrival has already brought back so many memories of that first tumultuous week of Ari's life.
Though at times it was confusing, frustrating, painful, exhausting and frightening, the overriding memory I have of our time in hospital is overwhelming joy. Rob, Ari and I were in this amazing love bubble that no one could touch. Our delight was palpable. We were in awe of the little man we had created and every thing he did was magnificent.
Rob still wells up when he talks about the night his son fell asleep on his chest. He says it was one of the most wonderful moments of his entire life.
Now our little baby is a little boy...

Cursed

It's official: since having Ari, my Shopping Karma is officially shot.
I can't believe the run of bad luck I've had this year.
For the first time in about as long as I can remember, I've had purchase disaster after purchase disaster.
It all started when I bought my first pair of post-baby jeans - they "gave" like crazy and were quickly so baggy I had to wear a belt to stop them from falling down. I didn't have the heart to take them back.
I bought a t-shirt that looked fantastic in the shop, only to find that when I got home, it was so short it barely reached my waist. That went back.
Then this week it got really out of hand.
I bought a hat for Ari - waaaaaaaaaaaaay too small for his noggin'.
Bought a dress for myself - tried it on at home and the zip broke.
Then today I wore the new sandals I'd bought last weekend - and after only an hour's wear they broke!
This is getting ridiculous. And when you have a baby and no car, it's really, really time consuming trying to return all this stuff.
Above all else, it's really annoying when stuff you buy breaks instantly.

Post script: Our brand new baby monitor clagged it on the weekend. Yowzer...

Crawlin' man

Ari can crawl and already our lives are changed.
It's amazing to watch how a baby learns to do stuff. For weeks and weeks Ari struggled with crawling, but kept collapsing on his tummy, arms and legs a-flailin'.
Then he made his first tentative steps and can now crawl across a room. He's no commando yet, but once he finds his momentum there will be no stopping him.
This has introduced another fun activity to my already busy day - saying "NO!" a hundred times as Ari tries to play with his new favourite things - power cords.
Particularly enticing is our blue ADSL cable.
I don't really want to cage things off in our house, so I'm trying to drum into the boy that no means no and there are things he's not allowed to touch.
Every day we start again and go through the same procedure. When do babies start to learn stuff like that?

Leaps and Bounds

Yes, it's the title of a wonderful Paul Kelly song.
But it's also what Ari's been doing this week - going ahead in leaps and bounds.
He stagnated there for a bit, but in the space of about three days he started:
1. Saying mama, nana and baba
2. Bum jumping - strange, but funny to watch
3. pulling himself up onto things
4. sort-of crawling a few steps;
5. pushing himself from lying down to sitting up. Even in the bath; and
6. sitting up on his knees.

What's in a name?

Last night at a BBQ for our Stuart and Kate (our lovely English rellies who are visiting Melbourne), my mother-in-law explained that Ari's name meant "lion" in Hebrew.
Yes, it does. But the way we arrived at Ari's name is a lot less, well, meaningful, I guess.
Baby names are hard. We wanted something that was not too plain or common, but not so unusual that it will haunt him for life.
Boys names came rather more easily than girls names, so thank goodness we had a boy on that front.
Our first choice was Rishi, an Indian name, after an American guy we met travelling in Italy. Rob and I always loved the name, but in the end we ditched it. Maybe our next boy will be called Rishi...
We also loved Lasal, but given a colleague of Rob's boy is called Lasal, we thought it a bit too close to home.
Then one day at work I was reading The Australian's Strewth column and saw an amusing little item with a photo of NZ actor Russell Crowe and a baby.
At that time, a photo of Crowe's son Charles was still proving elusive to the media, so the pic did the rounds of media outlets with many thinking they'd hit the jackpot. However, it was just a pic of Crowe with a fan's baby at Perth airport. And the baby was called Ari. I liked the name immediately. It was strong and simple, yet slightly unusual. But not unusual enough to be too weird. Rob agreed and so our son - thanks to Rusty Crowe - is called Ari.

Love that stripey suit

I'll have that hat

Extreme close-up. 9 months

Nappy snow

When Ari was a few months old, I was alarmed to discover weird crystals in his Huggies nappy one day.
A quick check of Baby Love told me these were entirely normal - they were in fact bits of the stuff they put in nappies to make them absorbent and were totally harmless.
But are they?
Recently, every single time I changed Ari's nappy, his little bum was covered in this nappy snow and it seemed to be giving him nappy rash (but then again, it could have been his teeth doing that).
I jumped on my favourite baby website, Essential Baby, and discovered that this had happened to heaps of other mums. And it seemed they were all using Huggies crawler nappies.
Was it a bad batch, I wondered? Should I stop using Huggies nappies?
I called Huggies and they told me this was entirely normal, the nappy snow was harmless, but thanks for bringing it to their attention, and here's a bag of nappies for your trouble.
But I decided I'd try another brand of nappy anyway, just to see if there was any difference.
After reading many favourable reviews, I settled on Safeway's new home brand nappy. No Nappy Snow to speak of, but they felt stiffer, more cardboardy, and didn't seem to hug Ari's bum as well. Maybe I'd bought them too big, who knows?
But all this got me thinking about nappies and how we choose which ones to use.
They are expensive little buggers, so you have to feel like you're getting your money's worth. I've been told Aldi's brand of nappy is very good.
Let the debate begin!

Baby books

A pregnant friend recently asked me about the merits of a baby book called The Contented Little Baby Book.
I heartily discouraged her from reading it, as I have since dubbed it The Contented Little Baby Nazi.
Like any wide-eyed first-time mother-to-be, I embraced the ideas perpetuated in this book - strict baby routines. They were gonna work for me, then I could be in control of my life and everything would be juuust fine. Right?
When Ari was born, I tried to follow them to the letter and nearly lost my mind when the baby wouldn't fit with the schedule - there must have been something drastically wrong with Ari because he wouldn't go to sleep/eat/whatever on time.
Nobody told me before I had a baby that all babies are different - which is something this book fails wholeheartedly to acknowledge.
I searched for the "what if your baby won't go to sleep at 7pm" section of the book, only to find there wasn't one. Great.
If anyone asks, I only ever recommend the two baby books that have been any help to me - Kaz Cooke's Kidwrangling and Robin Barker's Baby Love.
Baby Love is a wonderful reference book - if you don't know how to sterilise bottles, or what sort of solid foods your baby should start on or what a nipple shield is, then it will have the answers. It's straight forward, non-judgmental and most importantly, Australian.
Kidwrangling is informative, funny and refreshingly realistic. No rose-coloured view of the baby world, just plain, honest information. Kaz tells it like it is, and thank god she does.
She acknowledges that being a parent does suck sometimes. She has a whole chapter on coping with depression and baby blues, with real quotes from real-life mums that I often re-read when I need to know that I'm not alone.
And she will forever be in my heart because at a time when every single "expert" was telling me to wake my baby for feeds (and I knew deep down in my heart I shouldn't), Kaz told me not to wake a sleeping baby. I'll love her forever.
In the end, it all comes down to what suits you when it comes to baby books. If you must read them, I say only read a few. I have found that too much information creates unrealistic expectations and overloads you with a million theories.
Yes, it's important to be informed. But it's also important to trust your instinct and your heart.
You know more than you think...