Week Two

I had my first alone time with my son the other day. Not ‘pretend’ alone where there’s someone in another room but alone as in there is no one else in the house and there won’t be any one else for a few hours.

In the years to come, spending quality father son time will include all sorts of activities. Going for a drive, playing games, watching cartoons and all that good stuff. I’ve day-dreamed about what we will do on Saturday mornings and how I’ll see his personality develop and find out who he is and what kind of person he’s going to grow up to be.

This first time alone though? We can’t do much of anything really but there are a few things he’s gotten the hang of. He’s already beating me up. Just now he full-on headbutt me on the cheek. He can sometimes become the hulk when he’s hungry.

His bodily functions are working fine. He knows how to make full use of his nappy. I used to think changing a nappy would be a daunting task but like most things with the boy and I guess one of the tricks to parenting, you just have to do it. You have no other option especially after Rachel told me I had to do them and to stop whining about it. I think I have the knack for it now, I can do it pretty quickly in spite of the boy roaring in my face.

You think you have everything under control, nappy bag, wet wipes, replacement nappy at the ready. You summon the bravery to confront whatever has been deposited and just when you have cleaned him up, got him into the new nappy and you’re about to fasten him in, the fountain of pee begins. New nappy please.

He can stare into the middle distance. Sometimes post nappy change his face resembles that of a man who has seen too much. Like he’s just returned from the battlefield having seen his whole batallion blown to smitherines and he’s still coming to terms with how he ended up being the lucky one who survived.

The kid has a decent set of lungs on him too. He can turn his volume up to eleven when he really wants to. Most of the time it’s during nappy changes. It’s a pretty flawed system. He dirties his drawers, they need to be replaced but he despises the process of changing them. No matter how many times I tell him that if he stopped pooping in his pants so much I wouldn’t have to change him as often, he still continues to soil himself and then scream at me for having the gall to change him. Actually, when I think about it, maybe he’s rage peeing on me.

***

Visitors and general meltdowns prevented me from seeing Dundalk beat Shelbourne on Monday. I did see the first 45 minutes of the game in Derry but the 2^nd half was over shadowed by attempts figure out how to work our new Tommee Tippee machine.

He witnessed the first 45 minutes of Man Utd’s ill fated trip to Anfield. It was me who had the post nam/post battlefield thousand yard stare when that was all over. There are a lot of firsts in his life at the moment as you can imagine and I’m trying to, at the very least, mentally catalogue these firsts so that I can look back and remember how wonderful it was for him to experience things for the first time. He’s been in a lift six times. I’m going to try to keep track.

If its ok with you, I’m just going to ignore that his first United Liverpool game finished 7-0. I don’t want him thinking that he’s the reason it happened. He’s not the reason, I know he’s not, but if he’s anything like me, he’ll be mental and think somehow he actually did influence the outcome simply by existing in another part of the world.