"I've always said that if my son thinks of me as one of his idiot friends, I've succeeded as a dad."
- Phil Dunphy, Modern Family
Having a baby will make you an idiot.
Just the other day I was standing in a queue at a shopping centre, gently rocking from side to side. There was no reason for it. I had a basket in my left hand and my phone in my right. But there I was, lolling from left to right and back again. I was like a ship being shunted in large swells. If I'd been wearing a tight white T-shirt you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd escaped from some kind of psychiatric ward.
But I hadn't. It is just the type of thing that happens when you have a baby. I am so used to rocking Alice to sleep in my arms, that it's just what I do now, apparently. I rock. And not in the way I used to think I did in my 20s.
If you think you can be a cool dad when you have a child...you're wrong. You're always doing something spazzy.
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| No, Phil, you aren't...but none of us really are. |
You'll speak in the most ridiculous voices, make sounds that don't even make sense and pull the weirdest faces. Why? Just to try make your baby smile [or, to be more accurate, to try prevent them from crying]. You'll leave the house with a shirt with patches of spit, at best. Or it could be a weird milky spew-slash-vomit mixture. Or, if you're really unlucky, baby wee or poo. Those latter two haven't happened, yet, although I was wee'd on just last night.
You'll start being generally interested in bodily functions, and text messages like "has she taken a poo yet?" will become so frequent you won't flinch when typing. You'll praise her for dropping the Mother Of All Poos.
Alice turned four months old on Good Friday - and it's been the greatest four months of my life. Nothing can prepare you for it, no matter how ready you think you might be. I'm not talking about the bad stuff [although there is a lot of bad stuff, like the Screaming Hour]; I'm talking about all the good stuff, and how you can't ever be prepared for how much you'll love this little thing that you part-created, how you can't be prepared for the joy the little one will bring you and how you can't be prepared for something that will consume every part of your life in ways you never thought possible.
Our little girl is wonderful - and she's done some pretty cool stuff.
She's started smiling, a lot. She rolled over [although there might have been a little bit of help because Meg was sitting on the bed with her]. She did an actual laugh, but then got so freaked out at the sound she didn't expect herself to make that she might never do it again. She's been to Clarens on a holiday, surviving a 6-hour drive and wind-fulled dust storms in the process. She's started "talking" in those weird baby sounds I mentioned earlier.
But more than anything, she's turned her dad into the happiest fool in the world.
So in honour of her four months, here are a few gratuitous pictures from the last week or so:
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