I’m sitting here in the lounge, at 6am, with my laptop open. Two things to note here – once upon a time 6am was more of a going to bed time than a getting out of bed time, and actually it’s really like 7am because the clocks went back an hour last night. But I’ve been up for an hour anyway.

So, three weeks after the birth of Kolya, we’re starting to find something of a rhythm. It’s different to around the same stage with Conrad, but not in the way Kolya is, but how we are. In fact it’s remarkable looking at my notes from Conrad at the same age it feels identical. Constant feeding, a fussy period (which I assume is the digestive system settling down) which is now waning, a tired mother, and a tired father. But the big big difference is that he’s our second child.

And that’s massive, because suddenly there’s very little spare capacity. The first few days especially were tricky because we came home on the Friday, meaning that we had two days where we had both a toddler and a newborn to deal with. The change unsettled Conrad, and Kolya is just like newborns always are – no sense of day and night, and constantly hungry. So Kolya would wake, cry loudly, and then Conrad would react with concern and a surprising desire to help. He couldn’t, of course, and that just led to tears from him also.

Once that first weekend was over, we were able to drop Conrad off at nursery which meant that daytimes were just like 17 months ago. In the evening and night it was a touch trickier, I’d collect Conrad, bring him home and, essentially be like a single parent for the night. I would feed Conrad, play with him, bathe him, put him to bed, calm him down if he woke in the night, get up before him if possible to shower and dress, feed him breakfast, play again, then take him to nursery. In effect this pattern is mostly the same a few weeks later – the difference is I’m back at work, so after dropping off Conrad I go to work. Although I don’t usually pick him up, once I’m home I’m mostly kept busy dealing with him until he’s asleep. Then I have about 1.5hrs before bed which is mostly domestic duties and jobs and supporting Romana and Kolya.

No Complaints!

That may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not.  I’m sharing because it’s stuff nobody tells you about before you have children, and what it all means is that suddenly you put great store by being organised.  Spending five minutes looking for your keys isn’t really a problem when you live alone.  Spending five minutes looking for your keys when you have a crying child in hand really is a problem.

Of course, with tiredness, mistakes happen.  On the second weekend I’d left the car door’s unlocked overnight and an opportunist helped himself to our satnav.  I didn’t need it and that, coupled with a few stressful incidents in the days following left me drained and misanthropic.  In the end, while Conrad was at nursery I retired to the garage, got the power drill up, and put up some shelfs, reorganised the comms cabinet, and generally got some pent up testosterone out of my system.

The Main Course

But I know that many of you don’t visit to read my tales – you visit to see pictures of the babies!

Here’s a set from the past couple of weeks, including an afternoon where quite a few friends dropped in to see Kolya for the first time.  Enjoy!

At 3.6kg, 55cm and with a head circumference of 35cm he’s a tad heavier than Conrad, but the same length.

We’re now very tired, so I’ll just say a big thank you to everyone on Facebook and Twitter who have thanked us, our friends and family for presents, and to Gordon who came and babysat Conrad at very short notice.

Romana was a trooper, and left only a small bite on my arm! Both are doing well, with Kolya turning out to be a hungry and confident little feeder.

Obviously, being his first time there, it was an interesting one for him, with the new smells, tricky forest floor and odd noises. He loved it!

I forgot my camera, so all shots were taken on my phone – apologies for the relatively poor quality.

Last month we enjoyed a number of visitors.  One family to come were Adrian and Ania, Igor and Mikolaj – this is great for Conrad as he loves other children, with Igor being four years and Mikoaj nine months old.

In fact, it’s hard to describe the delight from Conrad when he’s got a four year old to play with.  At times he’s clinging onto the legs of other children and not letting them move anywhere, which may come across as a bit needy.  I hope he grows out of it before he’s 18.

We all went together to the Blue Planet aquarium.  This was Conrad’s first time in such a place, and it was great to discover that young children go free.  And he loved the colours.  I suspect he was a bit bemused by a lot of it, however, but he did appear to have a great time.

The beach we went to was Crosby beach where Anthony Gormley’s Another Place is installed.  This is one hundred statues in the image of the artist.  It is, in essence, a statement on the massive ego of some artists but, as the tide corrodes the iron statues, probably reflects on its fragility too.  That’s my arty bollocks approach to it anyway.

Pics, then…

I’m posting this tired, so I’ll say little and just share some recent photos:

It’s hard to believe that almost a year has passed since we got to welcome Conrad into the world.  In that time he’s grown from a tiny newbie into a crawling, climbing trouble seeking charmer.

Obviously, every parent believes their child has unique qualities whilst also being the most beautiful in the world, so I won’t say that anything about him makes him unique.  They almost certainly don’t.  But his qualities certainly make him entertaining and good, if sometimes frustrating, company.

His desire to turn things on, then off, then on, then off, then on again, can be infuriating.  The fact that even if he’s playing quietly with himself I have no chance of firing up my laptop as it immediately becomes the most fascinating thing in the room.  It has lights, a screen, and lots and lots of buttons.  You might as well shout “ice-cream!” in a school playing ground – it would have a similar effect.

So we’ve clearly ascertained that there’s a definite geek in the little fella.

He’s also quite the mountaineer and has already successfully scaled Mount Staircase in one go.  It does mean we can’t leave him unattended in the hallway any more, but that’s fine.  We could childproof the house more, but we’re reluctant to go too far that way.  Yes, it’s more work for us, but I think in the long run it pays off – he has plenty of very safe play space at nursery.

We’ve also learned that tiny shifts in diet make big differences in babies of this age.  He mostly eats solids and had been enjoying up to five smallish bottles of milk a day.  But by jove, the nappies were getting nasty, and it was starting to cause some uncomfortable looking nappy rash.  A few internet searches later and we discovered that just a bit too much milk can cause issues.  So we dropped about 210ml a day from his diet (varied, he rarely finished a bottle) and over just three milk feeds a day.  Hey presto!  Normal, healthy nappies.

We take him swimming weekly which he enjoys hugely, though I’m still uncertain about whether he enjoys the underwater bits.  However, it’s seen as important as a way of teaching babies how to react to being in water.  Evidently it’s safer that way.  Can’t wait until our holiday in Spain soon to see how he reacts to Mum’s swimming pool.

And then of course, the  other news – baby number 2 will be coming in the first week of October 2011!  I’ve popped a scan in below.

It’s sunny and I have to go and Get Stuff Done, so that’s it for now.  Hopefully the next update won’t be so long in coming – I’ve heard the complaints from family in far away places.  My apologies!

Update: I was informed that there weren’t enough pictures – then I remembered a memory card I’d forgotten to unload, so I’ve added lots more images.  The order’s a little janky, I’m afraid, but the date range covers January-April 2011 and some pictures are from before he started crawling.

Here’s some pics:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu6dDNt5li8[/youtube]

Here’s a set from the past two months – enjoy!

A bit of guitar.

August.  I was sitting in a taxi.  To my left, in the back of the taxi, the Honorary Consul to Arica – a wonderful man called Joaquin Alvarez.  Behind me, receding into the distance, was what, until about six weeks earlier, was my father’s favourite bar and pool hall.

In front of me, in terms of time, at least, was a rendezvous with a mariachi band.  In another day or so I’d be laying to rest my father in a coffin that was, for no clearly explicable reason, wrapped in fake fur.

Born at 11:53 am on the 12th of May 2010

To the Hospital

May.  Another car.  Another black one, for that matter – my Skoda.  A couple of hours earlier Romana had announced, with a fair degree of certainty, that labour was starting.  What we didn’t know was quite how fast it had got going.  It was only because I’m the kind of geek who likes to measure things that we knew that the baby was definitely on its way soon.

Now, on the way to the hospital, Romana in the back (for the extra space to move, really) and myself driving – gently, and trying not to reveal my anxiety.  Every two minutes an increasingly anguished yelp as another contraction started.  Even the walk from the car park to the maternity unit proved almost too much as we were so close to the birth of our son that had we been as casual as the midwife we called then we’d have been close to a home birth – and not a good one at that, as it turned out given he was going to come into the world half strangled by his own umbilical cord.

An hour later, Conrad popped into our world.  A bit purple, bloody, and full of noise and vivacity.

Family

February.  Sometimes you get an e-mail in the middle of your working day that just makes you stop in your tracks.  This was one of them.  After six months of trying to build up the courage to contact my estranged half-sister, she found me.  I had the letter ready.  And she just got on with a simple email from this website… “I think I’m your half-sister.”

Family is important.  It’s easy to lose sight of that.  We missed nearly thirty years together, because some people think it’s better to avoid pain than to stand up to it.  That’s not true.  Always face your pain, your fears.  Stand up to them.  You can’t beat them by hiding from them – they’re like the worst enemy, one that knows your every weakness.

Work

May.  I’m standing outside the hospital on the phone, trying to work out what’s going on with a project.  But it’s a sign – because until this point business had, largely, been about just two of us working away on projects.  We didn’t need to get stressed about dealing with others.

And in the space of 2010 we went from two members of staff to five, along with a couple of contractors normally working for us at any one time.  This is a good thing, but with any sort of success comes new strains.  This is always the way.  That it came at exactly the same time as baby Conrad was just bad timing, but the advantage is that at least he shouldn’t need to go hungry in the future.

This and That

So I find myself looking back on a year of extraordinary moments.  Because my father died I spent an evening with a Mariachi band, eating burgers and laughing at their jokes.  I stood on the greatest salt flats on the planet.  I met amazing people.  And curiously, I probably took the greatest risk with my life that I could have done by travelling hundreds of kilometres on Bolivian dirt tracks.  I got trounced at pool by a man who, evidently, made a living doing nothing more than finding people car parking spaces in return for tips.

Conrad being born is, of course, the top moment.  That and watching him develop.  A baby at 0 months is, to be quite brutal about it, not up to much.  It can only communicate in one very simple way and it’s up to you to work out whether that cry means hunger, discomfort, cold, or tired.  But just seven and a half months later you have a clear personality – a little human who enjoys laughing, wants to walk (regardless of any actual ability in that area) and is desperate to talk.  You can’t imagine how much laughter and joy a baby does bring to your life until it happens to you.

Of course, babies are demanding.  It’s a bit like having a very drunk friend that you want to keep alive, but who never ever sobers up.  He just lies there, wetting himself, shouting, and demanding regular food and drink.  You try to walk him on his wobbly legs, but that soon gets tired.  That’s what a baby is like.  But unlike alcoholic friends they improve with time.  At least, until they become teenagers, but everyone knows that.

My father’s death was in a way closure for me, but full of regret that we couldn’t reconcile our differences whilst he was still alive.  But now at least I know what he was doing, that he didn’t die entirely alone, and that he had a life of sorts – even if it was a somewhat poor and ascetic lifestyle.  He died far too young, of course, as a result of his malnutrition and lack of personal care – so I’m not saying it was in any way a good life, but up until his last week it wasn’t an awful way for him to live.

Bye-Bye 2010

So, goodbye 2010.  It’s been good knowing you.  I won’t forget you.  And to everyone, I want to wish you a wonderful 2011.  Let’s look out for one another and do what we can.  We have the ways, so let’s use them.

We decided to visit Paris in order to catch up with our friends there.  Romana and I both lived there, her for years, and me for just under a year.  We love the city, and we miss it.  Time to introduce Conrad to the city.

There are no touristic pictures in this gallery, but I hope I’ve captured the feeling of the week.  There was socialising, there was even a party.  Conrad wasn’t actually too impressed.  Once bistros and bars got noisy, so did he.  At least we can take him there now – a few years ago they’d have been full of smoke and it wouldn’t have been a good thing to do.  Same applied to parties… he just didn’t enjoy the noise and wouldn’t settle easily even in a relatively quiet room.

Still, it was all great until the moment our old VW Gold had an alarming brake failure on the steep entrance to an underground car park.  Thankfully, all cars have split brake system so you’re never left with absolutely no brakes.  At least, not immediately – you just have to press hard.  And the comedy ‘STOP’ sign illuminating on the dashboard didn’t help my mood.

We’ve been back home for a week now.  The car’s still in Paris!  I’ll go and collect it soon, then take it straight for trade-in!

So a bit about Conrad, for family members…

He’s turning into a little charmer when he’s in a good mood (when he’s not, he goes evil) and seemed popular.  He’s starting to sit unsupported, wants to stand when you pull him into sitting position, and adores playing “Where’s Conrad.”  The last is great, just going out of sight with a smile on my face can get him excited that a game’s about to start.

And so to the gallery – the pictures selected are there to give a flavour of the trip.  Plenty of technically dodgy stuff in there!