Baby + 89

The transition from baby to little person is well underway. I am not sure when precisely it started, but I was aware of it on Sunday morning as I sat in bed holding our daughter as she smiled, grasped at the duvet, and made noises that indicated she was happy. For three or so weeks the emergence of her personality has been apparent, but episodic. There are now much longer periods of wakefulness in which she is happy to sit and explore the world.

I have found this a complete delight. My experience of the first weeks has been one of far less immediate contact than my wife's. There are, of course, good reasons why this is so, but only now have I felt that I am fully involved. What a difference a child's smile can make!

It is now fashionable, at least in London, to take a baby to see a cranial osteopath. Having suffered back pain, and having been successfully treated by a "manipulative healer", I should make it clear that I am very much in favour of this profession. I was therefore delighted when my wife found one who would manipulate our daughter, which he duly did. However, I am less sure that the benefit to my daughter is as great as that to her parents, who can now join bourgeois conversations about this important treatment. As we have also eaten at the child-friendly Gourmet Burger Kitchen (in uber middle-class Hampstead, where else?) with our daughter we are running out of boxes to tick. I do draw the line at prams with shock absorbers, though.

Baby + 85

Twelve weeks of parenthood looms. Or, to put it another way, tomorrow, Saturday, is the end of the first quarter. I would, were our daughter registered at Companies House, release an earnings statement or quarterly update. She is not. Snottie's Nurse will have to suffice.

The big news of the week has been Baxter's (the cat) disappearance for 48 hours. He is a creature of habit, so when he did not appear on Wednesday morning I was surprised, particularly as the Tuesday evening had been the coldest in London for 9 years. The day wore on, and still no sign of Baxter. By the evening it was apparent that something was amiss. I stood in the yard looking for him, but only in passive hope that he might be sighted working his way along the wall. We went to bed feeling very sad because we could only conclude that he had gone for good.

I wandered the streets around our flat on Thursday morning in the hope of finding Baxter. I would have been relieved to have found his body by the road as at least then we would know what had happened. I didn't find him, and at one point during the day I imagined him hopping onto my desk in the office. This may appear strange to non-pet owners, but it strikes me as perfectly normal to be concerned for a companion, whether he has four legs or two. And as a child it was through the death of our pets - guinea pigs, cats, dogs - that I learned about death, or more accurately the limits to life.

By the time I returned on Thursday evening Baxter had not reappeared. My wife had managed to find out that another cat had gone missing earlier in the week. It has been discovered in a garden with walls which were too high for it to scale. We agreed that it would be less threatening to our neighbours - 90% of whom we do not know - if they were approached by a woman, particularly as was it dark. With great persistence my wife therefore went from door to door asking if anyone had seen or heard a cat.

What happened next is not far short of extreme good luck. Standing on a roof terrace, my wife was shaking a beaker containing cat food. She had been doing this for a number of hours by that point with no result. As this occasion was no different, she turned to leave the roof terrace, only to be stopped by a very recognisable noise: Baxter.

I won't dwell on the rescue, which took some time, involved ladders, rucksacks, tins of tuna, and a kindly neighbour. The important news is that Baxter is home, and sleeps on the sofa next to me as I type.

The cold weather is making it difficult for me to persuade myself that a ride on the motorbike into the country is a good idea. The new bike has spent the winter in hibernation, apart from a few circuits of central London and a trip to change a tyre.

We are going to Norfolk in March with some friends - not on the bike (sadly). In fact, we are going to North Norfolk, one of my favourite places in the world. It is easy for me to explain my attraction to that part of the country. The way that the land merges with long beaches, and those beaches merge with the sea give the area a sense of magnitude that it is hard to match in Britain. On days when the sea is rough, such is the hostility of the landscape that it is as if one is trapped on the last dry land left to man. It is this quality that makes North Norfolk a wild place, untamed, and possibly not a place to be tamed. In that sense it is a frontier, with all of the mystery that this term conjures.

Baby + 78

As I type, perhaps no more than three miles from me a whale is being recovered from the Thames. It is an interesting commentary on our times that men and women have given up their Saturdays to rescue this wayward mammal. No one has asked, at least as far as I am aware, whether the whale wanted to be rescued. It may be that the whale new full well what he was doing, and only planned to swim as far as Hampton Court before returning to the ocean.

A hundred years ago he would have been fortunate to get past Rotherhithe, Limehouse or Bermondsey alive. Rather than becoming lamp oil his blood samples are being rushed to laboratories. Everyone is talking about him, of course. Last night I crossed Hungerford Bridge and a group of foreign tourists were interagating a busker about the whale. The Sun's headline captured the moment: Celebrity Big Blubber. Genius.

Our daughter is oblivious to the whale. I debated taking her to see him, but despite her increasing alertness, I think that she is not quite ready to play Captain Ahab to this Moby Dick. She did grab Mr Multi-Coloured Caterpillar today, which is the first time she has shown hand-to-eye coordination. Tennis before too long...

Baby + 74

Such has been the trauma of the duck drowning incident that I haven't ventured near a bath since Baby + 64. I have, of course, showered. Not to have done so would have been anti-social. For the record, I have also cleaned my teeth, although I am not sure why my dental habits should have been affected by the duck crisis. This said, I am told that there are people who can sense changes in the weather with their teeth, so it is not implausible that my mouth may have reacted badly.

I read an interesting article recently by the late, great Peter Drucker. It is an article about management, but many of his suggestions apply to the domestic environment.

He poses three key questions to managers: What are my strengths? How do I perform? What are my values? These are excellent questions for the worker, particularly for someone who is paid to develop others. But are they also useful for parents?

If so, they may be useful questions for two reasons.

First, all parents have different strengths (a fact that seems to be overlooked in many parenting tracts, where a one-size fits all approach is adopted [the same is true of diet, get-rich-quick, or self-help books]). What I do well is very different from what my wife does well. If we were sensible we would agree a list and divide the responsibilities for our daughter's upbringing accordingly. (Note to self, I think.) At present, she would be the CEO. I have a consultancy role, although an odd one in that I am charged for my services.

Second, it seems to me to be vital to try and understand how a child learns and how it performs. Our education system, for the most part, presupposes that children learn in the same way. This is clearly not correct, and whatever societal pressures exist to succeed in formal education, this is not, nor ought it to be, the measure of someone's worth. As such, failing to understand that a child cannot learn in a classroom would seem to me a failure to address one of Drucker's key questions. I hope I have the wisdom not to put my daughter in a position where she is compelled to learn in a way that is alien to her being.

Underpinning this analytical approach is, of course, love. Without love I would hate to think where the application of Drucker's suggestions would lead. So as the antidote to modern management theory we are reading Why Love Matters.

The ducks may not float here, but we make up for it in other ways.

Baby + 64

This post has a single theme: ducks.

I have pondering whether to name this post, and, if so. the name it should be given. A quick canter through some authors has given me some ideas. The mystery of the yellow duck (Conan Doyle); The canard conundrum (Robert Ludlum); Oh, why do all my friends have the right duck but not me? (any chick lit author); London ducks (Martin Amis); Duck's end (E M Forster); or The sum of all ducks (Tom Clancy).

Amusing suggestions, no doubt, but none capture the pathos of the tragedy at McMahon Towers - the place where the ducks don't float.

The story is simple. Last night I bathed my daughter. There is nothing unusual in that, and for a good few minutes we splashed around happily in the lukewarm water (a concession to baby, but also to she with the elbows which must be obeyed). After this jolly immersion I introduced the ducks. To be precise, I introduced Mr Red Duck, Mr Yellow Duck, and Mr Large Yellow Duck. Until that point they had sat watching proceedings, doubtless amused at the human's ineptitude in water. But now it was their turn, and in they went. Shock! Horror! Crisis! Mr Large Yellow Duck sank (he has a large hole that does little for his buoyancy, it must be said), and Messrs Yellow and Red duck flopped onto their sides, and had they not been plastic I would have suspected foul play, or perhaps alcoholic debauchery. Indeed, had they not been plastic they would have required rescue.

The failure of the ducks to bob about on the bath water has hit me hard. I was expecting to introduce my daughter to the duck/swan appearance problem: how the calm presence on the surface is sustained by furious paddling beneath the surface (which is true of many things in life, and thus an important early lesson for any child). This lesson will have to wait, or I will have to spend an evening working the on the flotation of our plastic friends such that they are able to bob about as ducks are supposed to do.

Not that our daughter was too aware of the unfolding farce. I suppose that her interest in these matters is yet to take root, so I won't force the issue, for now at least.

Baby + 58

I must confess to feeling guilty for not updating Snottie's Nurse over the Christmas period. I have no excuse. I have had more time to spend on Snottie's Nurse over the last week or so than since our daughter was born. I blame the disappearance of the structure of the working day, which - because I seek to balance time lost at work by spending it on "useful" activities - compels me to "do things" before it is time to sleep. In short, I haven't shown any self-discipline, and the gap between this update and the last evidences this point.

It may be that this break allows me to do justice to the big change that has occurred in our lives since 23 December. I have thought about how I can summarise this change without reliance on cliche. I don't think I can succeed, though, and the best I can do is to record that we have been joined by another person over the last ten days, a character who has presence in her immediate environment, and therefore our lives.

The manifestation of this shift to sensory being is the way our daughter's eyes follow people around a room. I assume that this means that she is now able to distinguish humans from their surrounds. I am also taking it to mean that she expects to gain a reaction during human encounters, and this is pretty much clear from her excited response to attention. A smile usually follows a smile.

I think that she is also now responsive to sound. During a two hour journey, any noise from the cat (who is a good barometer of the quality of a given road surface) gave rise to a cry from our daughter. This made for a strange chorus, but was an interesting experiment in inter-species communication. Sadly, the cat explored his limits about three years ago, and the best has most definitely come from him.

I wonder when our daughter will realise that she won't get much conversational change from the cat?

C1, the video-on-demand channel we are fortunate to receive, is showing the BBC's very good series The Monastery. I saw the first episode during the summer, but missed the subsequent episodes because of our holiday. I watched the second episode today. It reminded me how thought-provoking I had found the earlier programme. Further details at http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/monastery/