4703/17362
It was my turn to look after the baby for the day and I am finding my time with my daughter incredibly rewarding. Much more rewarding than working. And I feel increasingly tempted to give up all day time work so I can hang around with this cheerful, gurgling idiot. I think I might feel differently when she can move around, and that’s not far away. Although she tends to go round in a circle when she crawls, she also moves backwards at the same time and with a couple of rolls thrown in she can get a small distance already.
But for the most part, when I am out, she is safely ensconced in a pram or a high chair. I took her out for lunch today and carried on with my patented parenting technique of remaining lightly drunk through the whole child-rearing process and had a beer and a three-course meal, which felt both decadent and deserved after three hours of tricky solo parenting (Phoebe had been asleep for half that time). All this time in my life I have wasted sitting in my house, largely failing to work, when I could have been playing, singing, drinking and eating and then coming home to watch quiz shows (which my daughter seems as fascinated with as I am). She particularly likes Pointless as she enjoys clapping along with the audience, but if I can start her learning countries like Djibouti and Nauru at this early stage, then surely it will only be a matter of ten years of so before we can go on as an unbeatable team and I finally win that coveted trophy.
Of course I have to keep working in order to keep my baby alive and shod and to buy all the booze I will need to keep the beer goggles topped up so that this whole experience seems like a wonderful dream rather than the shit-filled nightmare that it actually is, but I do regret all those days I spent in the house with the curtains drawn failing to experience anything other than ennui, when I could have made myself a little friend who I can (so far) easily beat at Tipping Point and pull faces at over some lobster spaghetti. I shared a smile with a couple of mums with their babies in the restaurant. We knew we’d hit the jackpot. All you suckers going out to work and us parents are out getting lightly sozzled and eating pasta. It’s literally that easy.
It's important to only get lightly drunk, as remember, you're in charge of another life, but I think mild drinking is actually safer than no drinking at all, because if you're squiffy you take your responsibilities for child care much more seriously as you're aware of how badly you'llbe judged if your child has an accident when you're pissed.
Of course, I am partly joking (but only partly) and there’s lots of tough stuff to put up with: (I was up all night with her because she was teething, (but to be honest, stroking her stomach at 2.15am, trying to comfort her to sleep is still rather lovely, especially when you succeed) she loves clawing at my face and mouth and slapping me in the face and even though I am pretty patient the shouting and grouching can be tough to cope with at the end of a long day. But she makes me appreciate my life and how lucky I am and gets me out of the house and doing stuff and meeting people. I think I am quite a rarity where having a baby might make my life a bit easier and more sociable, but that is entirely down to me having having WASTED MY LIFE.
And I have to give special mention to my cat Liono, who is quite shy and suspicious of people and usually runs a mile from anyone pestering her. She seems to love Phoebe and hangs around her a lot of the time, even though her reward is getting her tail pulled and her fur yanked out and her eyes clawed at. Phoebe loves the cats but doesn’t understand that they are real (or maybe that her toys are not real) and can experience pain (same with her dad in that case) and so it’s amazing that the cat receives the over-enthusiastic love from this baby in the spirit it is intended.
