Author: Marcus

The Monty Hall Problem, and Vending Machines

Back in late 1995, I went for an interview at Cambridge University – specifically, Christ’s College. I’d applied to the college as one of the up to six universities that were allowed on an UCAS form. There was some debate as to whether I was Cambridge material – whilst my teachers thought that perhaps I had the smarts, they also thought I might not quite lack the motivation that a Cambridge student required. In short, I was lazy. Whilst I can’t comment on the former statement, the latter was (and is) most definitely true. I am incredibly lazy, and wouldn’t have fit into the Cambridge way of life at all 1.

During the technical interview 2, I was asked a question that I’ve subsequently come to realise is known as The Monty Hall Problem. The problem and its history isn’t worth duplicating here, but it’s worth saying that even during the mid-nineties, there wasn’t a universally accepted solution to the problem. The simple solution, which the interviewer provided to me in response to my slack-jawed, soundless staring at him, is counter-intuitive, and even threw my maths teacher when I returned to school the next day and drilled him about it. If I’d have been smarter, I’d either have known the solution, or otherwise been able to throw a number of questions/observations back at the interviewer – most significantly, as n (the number of doors) tends towards infinity, the probability of the prize being behind the other door tends towards 1. So with an infinite number of doors, the prize is always behind the other door. Mind-blowing.

But I wasn’t smart enough to calculate conditional probabilities or apply game theory to work out a decent answer. And that was one of the many, many reasons Christ’s College, Cambridge, decided to not make me an offer.

Like most modern, soulless workplaces, the office in which I work has a vending machine. It’s stocked with all manner of unhealthy crisp-/chocolate-based snacks, not to mention the odd flapjack or two. A nice lady turns up once a week to perform, amongst other tasks, a restocking of the vending machine. This is a two-step process: firstly, she checks all the remaining stock in the machine to see whether any of it is out-of-date; if any is, it gets removed and placed on the kitchen table for we office gannets to munch free-of-charge (depending on how precious you are about out-of-date produce). Secondly, she refills all the empty slots in the machine et voila, we have a fully-stocked, in-date vending machine.

Last time the vending machine lady came, she ended up leaving half-a-dozen packets of Hula Hoops, and a similar number of Bounties on the kitchen table. The Bounties were a day out of date. Needless to say, I risked it, and munched one of those bad boys down gratis. And that got me thinking. If we in the office collectively decided to not buy from the vending machine for a few weeks, and the vending machine lady acted according to her usual script, we’d end up every week with a kitchen table stacked with a selection of items from all the lines in the machine that had gone out of date. For free. We’d be getting free food from the vending machine, albeit a handful of days out of date.

But for this to work, we’d need to put some cooperative game theory to work, and all agree to not buy from the machine in the short term, delay our junk food gratification in such a way that in the longer term we’d all get a decent selection of free stuff. If someone broke this agreement and bought themselves a few flapjacks, say, there would be less chance that there’d be any out-of-date ‘jacks for all of us to enjoy FOC at the end of the week, post-machine-clearance. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment meets the Nash Equilibrium at the vending machine.

Of course, as no-one in their right mind can delay flapjackian gratification for the period of time required to put this to the test, this theory is untestable, unfortunately. Insert knowing, pithy comment on the human condition here. Which is a real shame, as a free flapjack tastes a thousand times better than a 70 pence one…

  1. As an aside, both me and my good friend and all-round good egg Matt applied to Christ’s that year. Our plan, should we both gain entry, was for us to each strap a Marshall micro amp to our belts, plug in our guitars, and race around the hallowed halls of the college playing dirty Weezer riffs. Fortunately, the college dodged this particular bullet by offering neither of us place. ↩
  2. There were three interviews: the first with a college representative, the second (the technical one) with someone from the engineering faculty, and the third with someone else who I’ve managed to block out, probably due to my messing up the interview particularly badly. ↩

2016 – A Media Review

If there’s one thing that this year’s paltry list of things I’ve watched, read, and to which I’ve listened tells us, it’s that having a baby destroys any semblance of free time one may have previously had. The numbers of books read and movies watched have dipped to levels so low as to be previously unheard of. (However, I suspect if you checked the graph for numbers of nappies changed or numbers of hours of sleep lost to calming a grizzly baby, the graph would be exactly equal in magnitude yet precisely opposite in trend.) Here, then, is the piss-poor list of media stuff I’ve consumed this year.

Movies

This year, I watched 52 movies, at a rate of one movie every 7.0 days, or 0.14 movies a day. This is down from 2015 numbers of 69-5.2-0.18, and a new low, taking over from 2012’s 62-5.9-0.17. The high remains 2003 at 186-2.0-0.51. Here, check out the latest graph:

movies-watched-2016

(Don’t worry about 2000 and 2001 – the data for those years is incomplete.)

So the list for 2016 is as follows:

  • The Good Dinosaur
  • Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
  • Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
  • Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
  • The Martian
  • Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
  • Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
  • Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
  • The Last Patrol
  • Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
  • Zootropolis
  • Kingsman: The Secret Service
  • Captain America: Civil War
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
  • Garden State
  • Gravity
  • Deadpool
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  • Night at the Museum
  • Night at the Museum 2
  • Ghostbusters
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
  • Zootropolis
  • Straight Outta Compton
  • The Big Lebowski
  • Sherpa
  • Everest
  • The Walk
  • The Resurrection of Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts
  • Spooks: The Greater Good
  • Green Room
  • Kubo and the Two Strings
  • The Intern
  • The Nice Guys
  • Bridge of Spies
  • Steve Jobs
  • Frankenweenie
  • Citizenfour
  • The Big Short
  • 10 Cloverfield Lane
  • My Scientology Movie
  • Coraline
  • The Revenant
  • The Secret Life of Pets
  • Weiner
  • Concussion
  • X-Men: Apocalypse
  • Star Trek Beyond
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  • Elf

Yes, Rogue One is on the list twice, because I saw it twice. Yes, I’m counting it twice, because this is my list and I can do what I want (and also because I paid cold, hard cash for it twice). Highlights were: most definitely Rogue One (loved loved loved it); I love a good espionage thriller, and Bridge of Spies, with the always-watchable Tom Hanks was a pleasure to watch; The Revenant was brutal and brilliant; Kubo and the Two Strings had me weeping in the cinema; and The Last Patrol, the final part of Sebastian Junger’s war documentaries (following the brilliant Restrepo and Korengal).

If it had actually been released this year, my film of the year would have been The Martian. I loved it. It was smart, it was funny (Damon gots comedy chops, yo), and free of the jingoistic bullshit that similar “Let’s get our man back” films have. The science was refreshingly plausible, and the whole ride didn’t disappear up its own existential a-hole like, say, the interminable Interstellar. I liked it so much I even bought the t-shirt. However, given this year’s viewing of the flick was a rewatch, it can’t claim the title of my fave film of the year, so I guess we should raise a glass and toast Rogue One, which has that honour – for it is an honour – bestowed upon it.

Also of note is the boy and I working through the Star Wars and Harry Potter series. Whilst he loved all seven Star Wars movies (he’s not seen Rogue One yet – I don’t think he’s ready for it), he tended towards the prequels – there’s something about Anakin that drew him in, and he was more interested in his rise and fall than in Luke’s rise and non-fall in the original trilogy. I can only guess that that means my son is going to turn out to be a serial killer. And I totally forgot that Revenge of the Sith has some brutal crispy-fried Anakin scenes towards the end that are totally unsuitable for a five-year-old, and that I should have edited out. My bad.

The Harry Potter movies went down a treat with him too, most likely due to a younger, more relatable set of characters (if you actually can relate to young wizards, which I think most 5/6-year-old kids think they can). It’s only watching these films through a kid’s eyes that it becomes apparent that there are some scary things in there. Not the obvious stuff, like the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets (which is obviously fantastical), but the werewolf/dog animagus stuff in the already-dark, Cuaron-directed Prisoner of Azkaban, or the resurrection of the nose-less Voldemort in Goblet of Fire (it was the nose more than anything that got him). I know the films are 12/12A, and I know showing them to a 6-year-old is probably borderline, but I made sure we watched them during the day, with the curtains open and the lights on, the audio set to night mode to reduce the dynamic range, and frequent stops to reassure that it was all made up and in no way real. I’ll take the same approach when I show him Cannibal Holocaust this year.

Books

I read a hilariously poor number of books this year. That number was five. Five books in twelve months. Yikes. My excuse is that I usually read during my lunch breaks at work, but with Mrs S. being on maternity leave for most of the year, I’ve been heading home for lunch with her and child 2. Anyway, here’s the list:

  • When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow – Dan Rhodes
  • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne
  • Arabian Sands – Wilfred Thesiger

My BfaM and all-round good egg Matt bought me the Dan Rhodes book, and I loved it – despite being a massive fan of Dawkins, it was obvious that his obediently scientific and objective world view and borderline acerbic manner was ripe for exaggeration and skewering, and Rhodes nails it. I don’t get why The Dark Knight Returns is hailed as the masterpiece that it is – maybe it was ground-breakingly original and unique in the 80’s, but to me it was just confusing and dull. Hey-ho. The Neil Gaiman book was a 99p-er on sale on Amazon that I took a punt on and, not really enjoying the much-vaunted American Gods (yeah, sue me…), I didn’t expect much. I think that worked in its favour, as I ended up liking it quite a lot. The Harry Potter script was interesting – the story was a reasonably enjoyable romp, but perhaps I’m not sufficiently down with reading scripts to fully ‘get’ it in its entirety. Maybe a novelisation would help.

I’ve wanted to read Arabian Sands since finishing A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby, a book for which I’ve previously expressed my love. The last few paragraphs of Hindu Kush catalogue the protagonists’ encounter with Thesiger in the Hindu Kush whilst they’re inflating their air-beds for the night. Thesiger calls them a pair of pansies for partaking of such comforts. Reading up about him, it appears Thesiger has every right to hold that opinion: Arabian Sands is his account of his time crossing the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia, a number of times. It chronicles in great detail his trips to map out previously uncharted territory, his relationships with a number of Bedu tribes, and the unbelievable hardships he suffered on his travels. Whilst there’s a lot of names – tribes, tribes folk, Wadis etc. – that have a tendency to go in one ear (um, eye?) and out the other, his terse writing is a wonderful catalogue of a way of life and of a people that, even at that time, was in real danger of disappearing, with the advent of technology and the interminable hunt for more and more oil. Not the easiest read, but worth it.

Hopefully, 2017 will give me more of a chance to read, so I’m hoping this list next year will be greater than a measly five books in length.

Music

Yowzer, this’ll be a short section. I bought precious little music this year, but of the few I did buy, here’s my irrelevent verdict:

The new Metallica album, Hardwired… To Self Destruct, is far better than I expected it to be, after the St. Anger and Death Magnetic. In fact, I totally dig it. Deal with that. The new Helmet album, Dead to the World, is as disappointing as the last few have been – momentary glimpses of genius (riffs, solos, lyrics etc.) are subsequently sullied by Page’s shitty vocals. I can’t even say I’ve listened to the new Weezer (The White Album) and Deftones (Gore) records enough to pass comment on them. Same with the new Dinosaur Jr. (Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not) and Neurosis (Fires Within Fires). There’s a new Planes Mistaken for Stars album out, Prey, that no-one told me about and so I haven’t listened to that yet. I hope it’s great. The Baroness album, Purple, was last year, right? Shame, that’s a great album.

Yeah, I don’t have much to say about music this year, as with most years of late. Read into that as you will.

 

So there you have it. In brief summary, I liked Rogue One, and the new Metallica album, but didn’t read many books. To be honest, that was just about all I needed to write, rather than 1500 words of self-indulgent waffle. Perhaps I’ll do that for next year’s review, then. You’ll just have to tune in then to find out. Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Child 2, Weeks 6 & 7: The Hunger Games

I remember way back when, in the dim and distant past, when Thing 1 was a few weeks old, someone – maybe a health visitor, maybe a friend – told us that kids have growth spurts at ‘the threes’ – three days, three weeks, three months, and three years old. Actually, it may not have been ‘the threes’. It may have been ‘the fives’. Or ‘the sevens’. Well, it was some natural number, but the point remains the same. At certain periods of your kid’s upbringing, they’re going to be putting on weight and increasing in height at levels previously unseen, and as a result, they’re going to be HUNGRY, INSATIABLE BASTARDS.

For us, this hit during week six. Thing 2 was unbelievable. He was constantly hungry. He’d breast-feed for half-an-hour on each side then, instead of flopping off into a milk coma and sleeping for two hours, he’d be angsty and unsettled and root and root for another shot of milk. We’d make top-up bottles of formula to try and calm his rampant hunger, of which he’d take 3, 4, or 5 fl. ozs. He’d guzzle milk and formula at such a rate that his brain didn’t even get chance to receive the signal from his full, full belly that he could stop his fevered sucking, and he’d just continue until his steady possetting signalled that we should pry the bottle from his lips. Maybe, just maybe, after all that milk (and a hearty burping session) would he settle long enough to succumb to sleep. Until two hours later when he’d wake up in another hunger frenzy and the whole cycle would start again.

And this was reflected in his weight gain. He put on over a pound a week for a couple of weeks, slowly moving up the centiles. And he looks better for it, too – he now better fills his crinkly little baby face quite nicely. As we hit the end of week seven, his hunger has abated slightly now, and we’re back to a slightly more normal routine, although we still use a bottle of formula (usually 7 fl. ozs., most of which he drinks) if we really want to knock him out for a sleep, in a way that a breast-feeding session doesn’t. I ‘eagerly’ await the next growth spurt for more of the same ‘fun’, although I have no clue whether that’s going to be a five, six, or seven months…

The other major change Thing 2 has exhibited during week 7 is he’s finally giving something back, after seven weeks of selfishly taking our time, attention, money, and food with nary a nod in our direction. Yes, the kid is finally starting to smile. Now I’m not going to fall into the trap that naive new parents (and I include my five-years-ago self in that group) do when they mistake a grunting, gurning, attempting-to-push-out-a-turd grimace for baby’s first smile. No, these were genuine smiles, which is heart-warmingly awesome. Coupled with the odd bout baby babble, which certainly makes a pleasant change from the constant whinging and crying, having Thing 2 in our lives is finally starting to feel like a two-way deal. Even my Dad, the bestest father and grandpa the world has ever seen (in my most biased opinion), admitted that he found babies quite dull and uninteresting until they actually gave something back1. And I can see that. Whilst I obviously love Thing 2 unconditionally, some of the early work can seem incredibly arduous and thankless when you’re dealing with an mewling, pink lump. But when you start getting reactions from them, especially ones that can be construed as positive, everything changes. It’s now a game for the whole family, a task taken on with relish by Thing 1, to try and find the stimuli that make Thing 2 smile. Is it a tickle under chin, or a rub of the forehead? Or is it entirely random? Half the fun is finding out.

So weeks six and seven are all about development. The kid’s growing (and hungry with it), but not just physically – emotionally, he’s starting to respond, and to attempt to interact with us, in his own basic way. I’m trying to appreciate these early days, where the babbling is quiet and infrequent, as if he’s anything like his big brother, we soon won’t be getting a break from his incessant jabbering, singing, joke-telling, and nonsense talking from daybreak through to the evening. Mmm, stereo babble.

  1. Sadly, my Dad didn’t make the arrival of his second grandson, passing away only a couple of months before he was born. There’s precious little that makes me more sad than the thought of Thing 1 only having had five years of his Grandpa’s time, and Thing 2 never even crossing paths with him. ↩

Child 2, Weeks 4 & 5: NOT ANY MORE

It would appear that the sole purpose of weeks one through three of a newborn’s life is to lull the unsuspecting parents that This Is How Things Are Going To Be. For the record, this isn’t how things are going to be. The rules have changed. So little Timmy-Bob slept 18 hours a day, woke only sporadically for feeding, then drifted off again for more slumber, for most of the first three weeks? NOT ANY MORE. THIS IS NOT HOW IT’S GOING TO BE FROM HERE ON IN. Aw, cute little Bimbleflop used to make that adorable little scrunched up crying face when he soiled himself whilst quietly feeding. NOT ANY MORE. HE’S GOING TO BE A CRYING, SHITTING MACHINE FROM HERE ON IN. You and Fudgella got into a nice little routine, did you, where she’d wake just once in the night, at around 4 a.m., for a nice feed, a bit of bonding time for mother and daughter, before drifting off again for three more hours? NOT ANY MORE. THAT SHIP HAS SAILED, MY FRIEND. IT’S NOW SHITTING AND CRYING AND THEN SOME MORE SHITTING FROM 3 a.m. UNTIL MIDDAY.

Yup, things change after week 3. I had the best intentions of writing a weekly update of Thing 2’s development, the highs and lows and general day-to-day life. The first three weeks were regular enough, and without too much trauma, that I found the odd hour here and there to write. NOT ANY MORE. I’m back at work now, after three weeks paternity leave, and the time I’m now at home is spent firefighting the latest arbitrary and without-precedent behavioural quirk from Thing 2. He used to love sleeping in the carrycot in the lounge. NOT ANY MORE. Despite being in the deepest of slumbers, as soon as his back touches the excessively-comfortable mattress in the base of the carrycot, that’s it, game over – it’s screaming time. It would appear that his mutant X-Man power is detecting Mamas and Papas carrycots with his back, a power of dubious merit when it comes to saving the world alongside Wolverine and Professor X, and even less so when it come to MY WIFE AND I HAVING FIVE MINUTES GODDAMN DOWNTIME IN THE EVENING.

He’s now taken to not settling after his 7 p.m. – 8 p.m. feed. Previously, he’d happily flop off after his milk, eyes rolling, tongue lolling, ready to be put down for a nice long snooze until the 11 p.m. feed. NOT ANY MORE. It’s all tears and tantrums and anger and poop (oh, so much poop). This means pacing around and shushing, hunting for a clean dummy, or making up a top-up bottle of formula, hopefully something to calm him down, or distract him long enough from his shouting so he succumbs to sleep. Given we don’t get the opportunity to get our tea until after he’s settled post-feed, it can be 9.30 p.m. or 10 p.m. before we eat. That gives us about an hour or so before the cycle starts again, with a feed, and pacing and pooping and pleading. An hour a day downtime doesn’t leave much free time, after the pots are washed, the washing’s folded, and one of us has been to the late-night Tesco for some more nappies. A quick cup of tea, maybe one of the 48 episodes of Eastenders we’ve got backlogged on the Sky+, and that’s the us-time for the day. ¡Ay caramba!.

So, in conclusion, weeks 4 and 5 are tough. You’re forced to adapt your techniques and routines to your kid’s ever-changing quirks and idiosyncrasies, in a similar fashion to having to modulate the Enterprise’s shield harmonics in response to a Borg attack. Unlike the Enterprise, though, there’s no Q to help you out in the darkest of Borg-related times. It’s just you and your Worf, sorry, wife, as much patience as you can muster, and repeated chanting of second-time parents around the world: “It’s only a phase. It’s only a phase. It’s only a phase.”

Child 2, Week 3: The Witching Hour Begins

Newborns seem to sleep almost constantly for the first couple of weeks. Sure, they wake up sporadically to feed, scream, and shit themselves, but it’s mostly sleeping, up to 16 or 18 hours a day according to the NHS. Enjoy it while it lasts, because at some point (and this point was week 3 for us) your child will become a figurative bile-spewing ball of rage from the hours of 19.00 until midnight-ish.

Yes, as sure as long, sleepless night follows weary, endless day, your child will turn into a monster in the evening. Begun, the Witching Hour has. There’s neither rhyme nor reason to the child’s ire and distress. He can be clean, well-fed, tired, and making all the right noises about wanting to be put down for a sleep, yet as soon as his head touches the mattress, his back arches, his eyes scrunch, and out bellows a cry of ear-splitting proportions that the only conclusion you can reach as to the reason for this feral howling is that someone must have just stabbed him directly in the eye with at least a couple of rusty bodkins.

He mustn’t have fed properly, you say. Let’s give him another ten minutes on the ol’ boob. He settles happily into a bonus ten minutes feeding, before flopping off quite contendedly for at least 15 seconds, before suddenly and inexplicably realising JUST HOW TERRIBLE EVERYTHING STILL IS AND HOW MUCH THIS NEEDS SCREAMING ABOUT.

Ah, must be a soiled nappy after the last, bonus feed, you naively think. A quick change later, and he seemingly happily relaxes on your lap, eyes closed, for at most twenty seconds before the grim realisation of THE HORROR OH THE HORROR OF EVERYTHING OVERWHELMS ME AND I MUST SHOUT THIS TO THE WORLD.

You work through your mental my-baby-is-crying-what-could-it-be checklist at this point. Hungry? Nope, fed and bonus fed. Dirty? Nope, changed just now. Tired? Quite obviously. Over-tired? Possibly, but there’s sod all we can do about that. Hmm, maybe it’s colic. Yes! Colic! That one-size-fits-all label that explains this terrible, terrible, occurrence. You search the medicine cabinet for something suitable. Calpol? Shit, he needs to be two months before he can take this panacea. Gripe water? Nope, needs to be a month old, and we’re only in week 3. Infacol? Yes, Infacol! Oh, medicine, how I love thee, with your combining-small-bubbles-into-bigger-bubbles-to-make-them-easier-to-burp mutant power! Swiftly, you administer the medicine, and it seems to work, temporarily. Mr. Hyde recedes, and Dr. Jekyll reappears. Things seem to be going in the right direction. His eyelids are getting heavy. His breathing settles. You decide to put him down in his crib/moses basket and utter a silent prayer to $DEITY to please let this be the day where the kid falls asleep at a time that allows you to get your tea before midnight.

You gingerly place him in his bed, tuck a blanket round him, slowly back away from the crib, leaving a lingering hand on his chest for a few moments, and whispering an ever-quieter shush, all to calmly let him know he’s not alone, he’s safe, and he should embrace the welcoming arms of sleep. You’re almost there. Your hand moves away from his chest. The shushing stops. You stand up, partner next to you, and breathe a (quiet) sigh of relief, smiling at the imminent prospect of sating your hunger with whatever reheated remnants of last night’s dinner makes up tonights feast.

But no. Life has a different plan for you, sir (or madam). Because right about now, he realises that hey, that lovely warm body I was pressed against only a few minutes ago has gone, and that scent of Mum or Dad has been replaced by the scent of the washing powder-du-jour impregnated in the crib sheets (or the smell of milk sick, cos that’s just how it happens some days when you’re just too tired to change the sheets). AND THIS IS A THING THAT MUST BE SHOUTED ABOUT, INCREASINGLY LOUDLY, AND POSSIBLY FOR A GOOD FEW HOURS.

Y’see, the Witching Hour is a problem you can’t really win. It’s Kobayashi Maru. The only thing you can do is try to limit the damage the whole escapade inflicts on you before the feral beast in front of you finally exhausts himself from five straight hours of screaming and falls asleep, legs akimbo, in some particularly inconvenient place, like in the middle of the lounge carpet, or under the dining table. You only notionally win; the victory is Pyrrhic. You scoop them up delicately, under fear of partner-inflicted death should you wake them up now they’ve finally dropped off, place them in the crib, and try (and often fail) to refrain from commenting upon how cute they are when they’re asleep. Because you know exactly how cute they didn’t look, only half an hour prior, whilst spitting and howling at you like a cornered alley cat.

And you know that, in approximately 18 hours, you’ll have it all to go through again. Reassuring yourself that it’s only a phase – it is only a phase, trust me – helps you cope to a certain extent, but the only real way to deal with the Witching Hour is grit your teeth and suffer it.

Or gin. Bottles of the stuff. Morning, noon, and night.

Child 2, Week 2: It’s all about poo

Prior to having Thing 1, some friends of ours who already had kids remarked to us that their conversations, since the arrival of their kid, were dominated by discussions of poo (to qualify, the child’s). Colour, shape, consistence, frequency, smell. Laugh at them, we did, with our naive, we-won’t-be-like-that, soon-to-be-new-parents ways. But boy, the joke was on us. There’s virtually nothing in the early days of having a baby that takes up as much of a parent’s time as faecal analysis. A newborn wends it way through a spectrum of wildly different turds, with each day seemingly heralding an exciting new plop to contend with. The early-days, black tar ones sure are fun, what with their ability to cling to a baby’s arse like, well, the proverbial to a blanket. We then get the transition through dark green (what’s with that?), to brown, to mustard yellow, replete with fake seeds. There’re colours in between that I’ve missed out, but I think that’s because I’m repressing the horror of it all.

So week 2 has been all about poos, and constitutions, and nappy rash. The transition through the array of stinky messes has brought with it a good dose of nappy rash. According to our health visitor, exclusively breast-fed babies (ahem more on that later) can have up to a dozen soiled nappies a day, which is exactly what we’re finding. The poor lad is red raw down there, necessitating the reappearance of the equal-parts awesome/awful Metanium cream, a substance that has the power to both heal the most tender of back-ends, and also to permanently stain any fingers, clothes, towels, walls, and cats that may come into even the slightest of contact with it. So the Metanium has been liberally applied, and things are improving in that area (though our fingers are now permanently yellow).

Feeding has become quite regular, too, though an apparent growth spurt towards the end of the week has meant Thing 2 is one hungry child. To sate his increasing hunger, we resorted to giving him a bottle of formula for the 23.00 feed a couple of nights (please, don’t tell the health visitor). We made up 4 fl. oz. of Aptamil, of which he took nearly three, and subsequently slept like, well, a baby, for about 4½ hours. Result. Well, almost. The formula seems to give him dodgy guts – not just the immediate increase in wind from bottle-feeding, but discomfort and gripes a few hours after the fact, too. Liberal application of Infacol seems to do the trick, but it’s not pleasant for the poor kid, and failing to get the gas out of him and his stomach settled means that he usually has a crap nap, and then before you know it YOUR WHOLE DAY IS RUINED. Standard.

So we’ve just about survived week 2, though it’s been two steps forward, and one back. Routines taking shape, poos on the change, but increased hunger sated with the odd bottle of formula has led to dodgy guts and a sore arse.

Our friends were truly right. It is all about poos. Sigh.

 

Child 2, Week 1: Survival

It’s been five long years since there’s been a newborn baby in our house. Five long years where I’ve managed to forget most everything I previously knew about having a newborn baby in our house, and that wasn’t much to start with. But boy, is it ever all flooding back.

It all started with a planned C-section on Wednesday. This one went much more smoothly than Thing 1’s emergency C-section five years prior, off the back of being two weeks overdue, and six days of failed induction. That one was not a pleasant experience – exhaustion, pain, nausea: I experienced it all (arf). This time was a much different affair. We turned up at the hospital at 7.30; by 11.30 we were the proud parents of Thing 2, a boy, and by 15.00 the following day, we were home, bundle of screaming, pooping, joy in arms.

The brain is a clever old thing. It’s got the one-up on us at all times. I have  evidence: if our brains allowed us to remember what torture it is bringing a newborn home, and the ensuing first few weeks, we’d never do it more than once. As it is, our brains subtly drop those terrible memories of sleepless nights, black tar poo, and milky vomit (oh, that smell…) from our data banks, allowing us to drift back into those first few weeks with blissful thoughts of strolls in the park with the new arrival; fun mornings at the coffee shop, tiffin and latte in hand, marvelling at how peacefully the youngling is sleeping; and gentle nights, broken every three hours or so for a gentle feed, and a peaceful return to sleep for everyone.

No. This is not what happens. No, no, a thousand times no. Don’t believe what NCT tells you. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you that “little Fifi Trixabelle slept five hours last night, woke for a 15-minute feed, then slipped right back off to sleep for another four hours,” because they’re lying to you. Maybe it’s some misguided idea that bringing up a child is a competition and that admitting that the first week or so is pure survival is some kind of weakness that makes these people trot out these nonsenses.

As for Thing 2, things started out OK. He seemed liked quite a sleepy baby, so the first 36 hours passed without much incident. There was a lot of breast-feeding, and a few dirty nappies, but no semblance of a routine – everything in the first few weeks is on-demand (I’m a big fan of routines, but the first few weeks certainly isn’t the time for that). But babies can sense complacency. They can smell it on a naive parent. Just when you think that things are going nicely, BAM, it’s sleepless nights all round. The second night of being home, Thing 2 was up from 20.00 until 23.00, then 1.00 until 4.30, and only managed three hours sleep after that. Ick. We were exhausted, but it’s important to recognise that this is to be expected in the first few weeks. Newborns don’t respect the time of day, or whether you desperately need a shower after three days of slumming it in your tracky-Bs, or please-dammit-stop-crying-whilst-I’m-on-the-crapper-this-is-all-very-off-putting.

So the first week thus far has been survival. We’ve had a couple of good nights,  where he’s slept for two three-hour chunks, with feeds at either end and in the middle of those chunks; a couple of average nights, where it’s been every couple of hours feeding; and a couple of truly terrible nights, where he’s been up for hours at a time, unconsolable from messy nappy after messy nappy (and yes, I’m so enjoying the full spectrum change of poo colours from black tar to mustard (with seeds) to salmon paste), longing for a feed.

But we’ve survived. We’ve even been out, albeit only to the supermarket (for more nappy bags, natch). And I think that’s all you can ask for in the early days. We’ve been notably less uptight with Thing 2 than we were with his older brother at the same age – a combination of perspective that this is all just a phase that will pass, and that we can’t just drop everything to pander to his whims immediately, as Thing 1 still needs taking to school, or to karate, or his book bag sorting, or his tea making etc. – with the exception of trying to shield Thing 1 one from his new younger brother’s nighttime caterwauling. One crying child in the middle of the night is bad enough. Two would be a disaster.

So, the first week in summary: newborns create a lot of noise, smells, and mess, and your life might well be bordering on the terrible for this first week. They will, however, melt your heart a thousand times when, with a clean nappy and a full belly, they nuzzle up to you whilst you’re cuddling them, or gaze up at you with slightly crossed eyes and a quizzical expression that says, “Dad, I have no idea where I am, or what’s going on, but would you mind holding me and loving me and never letting me go?” And you’ll answer yes, yes, a thousand times yes, and you’ll pull them a little closer to you with a satisfied smile on your face.

Competition Schmompetition

There’s something about being a parent that brings out the competitive nature in people. Whether consciously or subconsciously, a whole heap of comparing and contrasting goes on whenever a critical mass of parents gather. At an early age, it’s about whether your child has started weaning before or after other kids. A little later, it’s potty training – there’s always a kid in your group that is walking its way onto the potty at 18 months, when your kid is still exploding in a shower of piss and poop all over itself at two-and-a-half years. At school, there’s always a parent that can’t wait to tell you the advanced level reading colour band that their child is on, when your child still can’t spell her name.

We’ve encountered this with Junior. There have been plenty of areas throughout his first five years where, if those areas were compared in isolation against other kids, he’d have been seen to be behind. He didn’t walk until 18 months; in fact, he didn’t even really crawl until he was 12 months. He couldn’t be bothered – people brought him things which meant he didn’t have to move. I can appreciate that level of economy and efficiency. There was a long period of time where, even though he was potty trained, he still wet himself, mostly due to him being very much involved in an activity and not being mature enough to know to break away from that and go to the loo. This took a long period of time to overcome. At five, he can neither ride a bike, nor swim. Many times we’ve been at the park practicing on our stabilisered steed and a kid perhaps half his age has zoomed passed, training wheel-free, usually helmet-less (don’t get me started), whilst we, once again, get into an argument about him not trying hard enough to pedal. There are kids in his class whose writing we see on the classroom walls that could be the hand of a 10 year old. Perfectly formed, perfectly sized, perfectly aligned. Junior still can’t get his ‘b’s and ‘d’s the right way round, and tends to end a sentence at least 5 cm lower down the page than where he started.

Solely taking this things, and comparing Junior to his peers, he would seem to be developmentally at the back of the queue. Especially when parenting is jam-packed full of people who are never more happy than when comparing. But there’s two things to remember:

  1. The things your kid doesn’t do very well is only half the story. There’re myriad things he does that would put him at the top or thereabouts when comparing him to other kids. Which you shouldn’t do because…
  2. Comparing kids is a terrible, and terribly inaccurate, imprecise, thing to do.

Don’t compare your kids. The window where kids learn their basic life skills – let’s say from birth to five – is such a small window in their whole life that to worry that your child is seemingly six months behind some other child is just nonsense in the grand scheme of things. Your child can’t walk at 18 months? Don’t worry, she will. Give it another few months. If you’re worried, go see a doctor. Otherwise, continue to guide her, and she’ll pick up. Sweat ye not, insecure parent. Your child can’t write his own name properly in year one, whilst his peers can? Relax, it’ll come. Practice with him, and he’ll get it. If you’re worried, speak to his teacher. If they’re concerned, they’ll help you out. If they’re not, you’re free to go.

There are so many things when raising a child that can be causes for concern, stress, and worry. Anything in the first five years or so that results from your child comparing badly against the development of one of his peers is not one of those things to get concerned about. Unless a health visitor or doctor or teacher is sitting you down and having the “We need to talk about Junior” speech then relax, you and your little one are fine, and it’ll all come together in the end.

Previously on Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad…

Hi, and welcome to Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad. I’m your host, the eponymous M-AD, and if you’ll indulge me for just a moment, I’d like to set the familial scene for you.

  • I’m the M-AD in question, a late-thirties software engineer, married for eight of those years to…
  • Mrs M-AD, my wonderful, beautiful, wife, with whom I currently have one child…
  • Junior, a five-year-old boy, just into Year 1 at school, and soon to be older brother to…
  • The as-yet-unsexed (um…) Junior Junior, due in January, 2016.

We’re a two-car, north-of-England, semi-detached kind of family, which by my reckoning make us fairly average.

So why Tales of a Middle-Aged Dad? Well, a couple of reasons, really:

Firstly, we live in age where the entirety of the knowledge of the world is available to use 24/7 (well, unless the WiFi goes down, perish the thought) at the touch of a button. The internet is a fantastic, democratising, force for good. It gives everyone who wants one a voice, a voice with which they can scream, laugh, and lecture to the rest of the internet-dwelling world. For we parents, this resource should be neither overlooked, nor under-utilised. Many times have my wife or I turned to the internet for answers or advice about whatever bizarre, unforetold predicament Junior has found himself in, whether medical, behavioural or other. Usually, you can be reasonably sure to find another lost soul on the internet who has suffered the same outrageous fortune as you have, and will handily provide a solution for removing Play-doh from noses (answer: carefully, with tweezers, or by nose-blowing. Caution, I am not a doctor, so go see one), or whether you can give a child both Calpol and Nurofen at the same time (spoiler alert: probably not). However, there are times when your predicament proves to be somewhat unique, where there isn’t a pre-existing answer out there on the internet, ready and waiting for you. This blog is to add our family’s experience to the mix, to hopefully be that answer for some other frantic parent Googling “Should my child’s poo be orange?” (I don’t know the answer to this, I’m afraid – try Googling it.)

Secondly, this is a little bit of a backlash against the Mumsnet-type fora, where raising children appears to be a competition. If it’s not DD learning to swim at 12 months old, then it’s DS being potty trained at 6 months and oh isn’t your child maybe there’s something wrong with him. Raising a child isn’t a game or a challenge. It’s a long, hard, enjoyable, wonderful slog, that will make you cry and laugh in equal parts for most of its duration. If you’re not crying and laughing in about equal parts, then I’d say you’re doing something wrong.

So that’s the reasoning behind this self-indulgent little corner of the internet. If I can write about my experiences as a fat Dad to soon-to-be two kids, and that writing in any small part helps or reassures some other fat or thin Dad or Mum, then I’ll be content.

And with that, I’m off to Google orange poos. Not a problem now, but forewarned is forearmed.

Review: Pact Coffee – Santa Ines Natural

This fortnight’s Pact Coffee delivery is Santa Ines Natural, from Brazil.

They say:

Flavour: Cocoa Powder, Baked Apple, Toffee
Sweetness: Baked Fruit
Acidity: Malic (Apple)
Mouthfeel: Creamy

We say:

Smells like burnt wood in the bag, tastes a bit bitter when brewed (with an Aeropress).

Let’s look at their list: I got none of those flavours, not the cocoa, not the apple, and certainly not the toffee. The sweetness was only accurate if the baked fruit was lemon. I have no idea what a malic acidity feels like, but for me it was keener than the apple they claim. And there was no way the ‘mouthfeel’ was creamy. It was thin, maybe watery. If that’s a valid mouthfeel. Which it probably is, given that everyone just seems to be making shit up left, right, and centre.

One point of note is that this batch was noticeably more difficult to Aeropress – the resistance of the plunger whilst plunging was much greater than previous Pact coffees, despite me consistently specifying ‘Aeropress’ as the required grind setting. Maybe they accidentally turned the grinder dial round a notch too far and ground the beans too fine, and I’m now paying for that with a slightly bitter, difficult-to-plunge coffee. Who knows.