Baby Milestones

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Hello everyone!

The Milkmeister is now ONE YEAR OLD which is a) insane and b) really quite predictable if you know how a calendar works. She is doing all the things she’s supposed to do:

  • Walking, in tiny little baby steps*

  • Blowing raspberries on your arm and looking mischievous about it

  • Dashing up the hallway on all fours, waiting for you to chase her, and cackling maniacally when you do

  • Producing recognisable words (dog, duck, flower, star, and Dada. Rude that I, the person who takes her on exciting outings and purchases her interesting snacks, am apparently less Worthy of Naming than a DUCK.)

*update: in the 6 days since the MM officially became One rather than Fractional, she decided that walking is great, and now she just toddles around everywhere, and to this I say What The Fuck. Where is my tiny potato who would lie on her back and be entertained by scarves for half an hour? Who is this little person who has opened the door to the pantry and carefully unpacked a thing of 100 mini cupcake cases all over the kitchen floor? Why are there three bottles of food colouring and a duplo flower in the dog biscuits? How did the cocoa make its way into the crockery drawer?

Why did I not do any babyproofing?

On a side note, did you know that the term “blowing a raspberry” originates from the Cockney rhyming slang ‘raspberry tart’, meaning ‘fart’?

 

pfft

 

I learned this from a podcast called ‘Something Rhymes with Purple’ which is about language and is very good. If you like words and want to know where the term “the dog’s bollocks” came from I can recommend it.

 

sometimes I, TOO, DO RESEARCH ABOUT WORDS.

also what the fuck is a basic ‘bottom burp’ style fart?? is not every fart, apart from the very unusual, a “classic ‘bottom burp’ style fart”?

why do farts have a ‘style’? it’s not jazz.

…wait is it jazz? bum jazz?

wake up babe new word for fart just dropped

 

OK sorry that was a lot of digressing. Back to the main bum jazz.

At one year old, the MM is also doing some things she may not be supposed to be doing:

  • Walking directly into the doorframe while carrying a shoe in each hand and a small wooden knife in her mouth

  • Roaring like an angry bull when the next piece of smoked salmon is not delivered into her hands and/or gaping maw within an appropriate timeframe

  • Dipping a chip into sauce, eating the sauce, then deliberately throwing the chip across the room and dipping her hand into the sauce instead

  • Throwing up directly into my mouth (just once, but once was enough)

  • Squaring up to a swan when we went for a peaceful time feeding the ducks.

In her defence, when you go to feed the ducks you get MOBBED by ducks and swans and small ducks that I believe are called scaup but can’t be bothered looking up.

 

THIS LIL’ FELLA

 

I just sort of throw crackers about so everybody gets some, while the MM leans on my leg and watches in fascination.

This week, she saw a large black swan that had been eating crackers out of my hand - very enthusiastically and with a touch of aggression, like how you eat a souvlaki when you’re drunk - and was immediately taken with him. MM, who loves birds, decided she wanted to pat the swan and approached it with gusto. The swan reared back and hissed, as swans do. MM was delighted by this and - politely, some might say - hissed back at the swan. As I was bracing for the inevitable peck, wondering whether it would be faster to snatch the MM out of the way or whack the swan across the beak, the swan RETREATED!

MM’s first win in battle. Brave baby.

 

the real question is why you would want to pat this evil-looking bastard to begin with.

 

Anyway, with this Milestone Birthday, in today’s Mommy Blog of the Year* we will be discussing… Baby Milestones!

*what? a mommy can dream

 

just to be the baby that walks 500 miles to throw up IN YOUR MOUTH

da da da da! da da da da!

 

Baby Milestones are things your baby is meant to be doing by a certain age, and if they aren’t you whip them off to the doctor’s, and the doctor says “well, while she was technically supposed to roll over yesterday, that isn’t really how babies work, call me back in a month if she has yet to roll.” Then said baby promptly rolls in the doctor’s office and all of you look like chumps.

I try not to worry about milestones because every baby babies at a different rate. At seven months, out of the six similarly-aged babies in antenatal group, Milkmeister was the biggest and most talkative, Boromir* was the only one that could crawl, Sneezle** was having two solid meals a day, and Hotpot*** had eight teeth.

*not his real name
**not her real name
***surprisingly, her real name! just kidding no it isn’t

The Milkmeister has been good at hitting her milestones, but here are the few that she didn’t bother with:

Startling at Loud Noises (2 weeks), Waking at Loud Sounds (6 weeks)

Me on Day One: “I will bring home a baby, and the baby will sleep on me at 3am while Taskmaster plays in the background and my husband and I cackle at something completely inane because we are so tired and our brains are gone, and also there will be a Labrador who barks every time the neighbour’s security light goes on.”

Me on Day 14: “Oh no!! Loud noises don’t seem to bother this baby!”

 

oh no!

 

Rolling Over (4-6 months)

The Milkmeister is a solidly constructed baby. She’s a bit more person-shaped now, but for a few months she looked like André the Giant, but shorter. This is good, you want a nice solid baby (although I did refer to her as ‘beefy’ once at antenatal group and everyone was SCANDALISED).

As a result she took a while to learn how to roll over, but so would you if your thighs were that big compared to the rest of your body. Her top half would go over just fine, but she couldn’t get the momentum to get the rest of her chonky little self to follow.

(Also honestly I just think she just couldn’t be fucked. With so many other interesting things going on - scarves to bat at, trees to observe, labradors to listen to - why would one bother to roll about?)

I wasn’t too stressed about this. I said - again at antenatal group - “She’ll get the hang of it! It’s not like she’s going to be an adult who can’t roll from her back to her front” and one of the women cheerfully informed us that her husband can’t do a forward roll, despite being a fully grown adult who has tried many a time. Hmm.

He is not particularly beefy.

Responding To Her Name (6 months)

I can confidently say that at 6 months old the Milkmeister had no idea what her name is. I was deeply concerned about this Missed Milestone, but it turned out to be a failure of parenting rather than a failure of baby. I mentioned it to my sister (a nurse with years of experience working with children) and she said, “Just keep using her name as much as possible.”

Oh!

Oh.

 

oh!

 

I realised that I used the MM’s Government Name exactly twice a day: once when I woke her up (“Good morning, Actual Name!”) and once when I arrived home from work (“Hello, Actual Name!”) The rest of the time it was this sort of carry-on:

  • “Come on, Milkmeister!”

  • “We’re off, Moozle!”

  • “How do you doozle, Miniature Moozle?”

  • “Ah, the Minimoo!”

  • “Ahoy, Moozlepot!”

  • “What you doing, Pot?”

  • “Let’s go, Little Buster!”

  • “Ah, Tiny Bus!”

  • “Aha! Onebaby!”

So at this point it’s fair to say that she probably thought her name was Moozle or Bus or, at a push, Pot.

Understanding ‘No’ (6 months) and Clapping Hands (6 months)

The Milkmeister didn’t do either of these things until at least 8 months. Ahhhh! Oh no! Off to the doctor!

But again, being a spoiled baby she didn’t hear No an awful lot, and I don’t run around the house constantly slapping my paws like a lunatic.

 

BABY SEALS NEVER MISS THAT MILESTONE.

 

But don’t worry. While she may not roll around the carpet like a rotisserie chicken, shouting “No” and clapping as she goes, the Milkmeister already does a bunch of the 15 month milestones, and also she can do a plank which is a) ridiculous, I can’t do one and b) not a milestone, but whatever.

I’m afraid I have reached the end of the content for this blog but I don’t have a nice tidy way to wrap it up. Sorry chaps! If it was a work email I would say Kind Regards, or Cheers, or perhaps Have a Great Weekend.

But it isn’t, so here’s another picture of that bastard swan.

 

i suppose he was quite a nice swan really. perhaps i will start signing work emails off with him.