Max is 6 months old. They have gone quite slowly from my vantage point. It is getting harder and harder to remember life without him. My memories are more full of happy times with him, and his mother too obviously. It is not sweetness and light every minute of every day, he can be tricky and the amount of work that has to be done to look after him is huge. But it is mostly sweetness and light.
He is a very happy baby. He smiles with very little provocation and gurgles and cheeps in the most delightful fashion. We have loads of games that we play with him, songs we sing and he's healthy and well. He can entertain himself and is progressing along all of the baby scales, graphs and charts that we can find, and we really have looked!
This weekend marks a big milestone in the family life. Ciara returns to work and Max goes to the creche full-time. He has had three sessions there already. The first was for one hour and he was the very model of a care-free baby. The second was for two hours and he was wonderful for the first hour and a half. Then the lovely edu-carers in the creche tried to feed him a bottle. He seemed hungry but in reality as it turned out he was just tired. Bringing him to the creche had knocked out his morning nap and he was not ready for this. He went nuts. The poor staff were doing their very best, but they just didn't know him yet and he didn't know them. We arrived and he was upset so we were upset and the aforementioned poor staff desperately explained how this can happen and how its ok (they had noo need for desperation, we are very impressed with them). He slept for three hours that afternoon and all was well. Of course this happened, sure it was bound to and thank God it happened on one of the short days rather than in the middle of a long day. Then on the third day all went according to plan with a bit of upsetting and a lot of happy play and crucially a long bottle feed and spoon feed from the staff. Mother and Father very pleased.
The other trial this week was of the bike. It was a windy and a bit wet of a morning but the bike made it in 28 minutes, door to door. There is still some tweaking to do on the set up of the bike in the morning, this should only take a few minutes but can take up to ten. I am reminded of the Full Metal Jacket training for assembling a rifle, I will have to practice hard and get it down to two minutes. The difficult part is the rain cover. There are two long poles that have to be disentangled and assembled and then the cover stretched over them and then zipped up. All the while Max has to be smiled at and reassured that the floor of the garage is not his new home.
Solid feeding is going very well but he has not put on much weight in the last month. This may be due to his very zealous approach to the jumperoo (bouncing toy - that he loves) or it may be due to several million other factors but if he ever hopes to play for any of the Munster, Clare, Leinster or Dublin teams he will need a bit more flesh on his bones. So we are carefully and steadily increasing his food intake. He is rising to the occasion and certainly the breakfast quantity has doubled in the last two weeks.
As I write it is Sunday morning and we all go to work tomorrow! Preparation is key and I expect that we will all sleep in our day clothes with our shoes on with our packed lunches clutched in our hands.
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