The Parenthood Paradox

Blake is 1 week old, and I’m starting to understand the bizarre paradox of children.

When broken down into its constituent parts, it’s terrible. You are constantly working – if you’re not feeding, changing or trying to settle him, you’re washing up, tidying or any of the other hundred things that need doing to keep the house running properly.  Your reward for doing all this is that you’re puked on, crapped on or or weed at.  Any spare time between cleaning your baby, yourself or your house is taken up by fretting that you’re not quite doing any of these things right, or searching through books or the internet for ideas as to how to be better.

So, at any given time, parenthood is horrible.

However as a package, it’s great.  I can only imagine that there are a wild cocktail of hormones which are being pumped into my bloodstream to make me look at his cute face, all wrapped up in a towel with ears – and forget everything I’ve had to do to get to this stage.

The mornings are getting tougher, though.

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We registered Blake’s birth yesterday.  A very simple process, done at the town hall, which took all of 15 minutes. We actually felt it was frustratingly, bafflingly simple.

I can’t get a permit to park my own car outside my own house without visiting the Town Hall, in office hours, with 2 utility bills, or 1 bill and 1 bank statement. Note that Mobile Phone bills aren’t acceptable because of some unknown reason, and Sky+ bills aren’t acceptable because “they prove you own the house, but not that you live there.”  Whatever that means.

However, you can register a baby with nothing except your names. You just rock up and say your names, and address, and BING! the Baby is yours.

I can only imagine there are some hidden verification processes behind the scenes that have assured them we’re not weirdos who have just found a random baby and registered it as our own.

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We’re not shy of getting out and about, so we had lunch on the terrace at Piccolino’s Italian Restaurant yesterday.  At the moment, we can be 100% confident that if we give him some milk, he will sleep… which gives us at least an hour’s grace period. So it’s not quite as daring as it sounds, but when we told inquisitive diners he was a week old, they looked completely shocked and told us we were very brave.

I still think we’re in the “calm before the storm” period – Blake has a pair of lungs on him, but so far he’s only really used them when he’s hungry, or pissed off at you for making him cold by daring to change him.

Over the last 2 days we’ve seen a new type of cry, however – the post-feed/pre-sleep cry.  This is far more difficult to quell, because we don’t really know what’s causing it.  The main suspect is gas, but even after long periods of burping he’s still very fractious and unsettled, and prone to bursting into convulsive screams. It’s a bit of a mystery so far – and all we can do is try different things like Infacol, Dentanox, different bottles and so on.

I suspect it’s like when you take your Alfa Romeo to the  garage to complain that it won’t start when it’s even slightly cold, and the mechanic says “they all do that, sir”

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See you later.