Tag: Baby

Unadulterated Stream of Consciousness

Tristan, my 7 month old son,  is now getting to the stage where he can almost crawl. He makes up for his lack of conventional mobility by flinging himself in the vague direction of his intended target, which can be funny at times, and terrifying at others, depending on where he is and how high that is from the ground. This new development has combined almost seamlessly with the burning desire the little man has to copy the grown ups. Lately, this resulted in him throwing himself forward to get from his positions between his mother and I on the couch to next to me, whereby he began to type by banging his open hands on the keyboard. Trying to remove the little so and so only resulted renewed and even more determined efforts to get at the laptop.

With Christmas looming on the horizon, I find myself looking forward to it more than recent years – not that I don’t like Christmas – because I am now responsible for creating a Christmas experience for someone else, who has no preconceptions of what Christmas should be. Admittedly, at 8 months, he won’t remember this one, but it will be good practice nonetheless.

For me, the main attraction of Christmas is in the imagery. I was always drawn the Dickensian scenes of old Victorian houses covered in snow, and the reds, golds and greens of traditional Christmas decor. I can’t actually remember when my focus switched from presents to trimmings, but it’s been that way for a long time and, when it comes time to get the Christmas tree out, I tend to go a bit overboard.

I’m tired now, and am going to go to bed. I wrote this random stream of off-the-cuff-fluff because I’m trying to keep in the habit of writing everyday and, today, it seemed that no matter how long I stared at any of my currently ongoing writing projects, I couldn’t switch my brain into gear. So I opened up my blog and typed, and what you see is what I wrote.

Good night.

Big hands big hands big hands!

I took this photo a few days ago and, like a lot of photos, didn’t look at it immediately. Such is the foundation of so many “photobomb” incidents. Read more…

20 week scan

Ultrasound image of the unborn child of John Bullock and Sallie Parker

Today I am off work. The reasons for this are two fold; someone needed to be home for the Sky engineers who are, as I write this post, fitting all the gubbins needed for high definition television to our house, and my beautiful girlfriend and I had an appointment at the hospital this morning for the 20 week scan of our baby. The importance of this day can best be summed up by a conversation Sallie (my girlfriend) had with a colleague at work a few weeks ago after mentioning that I had Tuesday off. Obviously these weren’t the exact words, but it went something along the lines of;

Sallie: “Well John’s booked the whole day off so he could be in for Sky to come fit HD, but he already had the morning off for the 20 week scan.”

Colleague: “Oh yeah, are you excited?”

Sallie: “Yeah, we’ll be able to record the programs we usually miss.”

Obviously her colleague had meant excited about the scan, and the impending prospect of being a parent, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one in the relationship who’s thoughts aren’t 100% baby orientated… though it sometimes feels as thought people think I should be.

Anyway, the scan went well, other than Sallie’s increasing discomfort over the very full bladder she was required to have prior to the scan; we were called in only ten minutes after our appointed time, but it must have felt like a few hours for Sallie. I can’t imagine having the ultrasound thingy pressing on her lower abdomen made things any better. We found out that, in addition to looking like some kind of weird prehistoric animal buried in strata, the aforementioned baby is a boy… probably (they’re “never 100%”) and that everything seems to be normal, though we can tell he’s a hyperactive little bugger from the amount of moving about he did during the scan. And when Sallie’s eaten. And when she’s sleeping. And when my head is near her stomach.

This now settles a lot of question marks over baby related thinking. Things like which gender of names we can consider are greatly reduced… by half, in fact, and we now know that clothes of a feminine nature are out, until he’s old enough to make his own choices at least. It doesn’t make the choosing of a name any easier as, even with half as many names to choose from, I have absolutely no idea what I would call a boy, though I seem to be fairly clear on suggested names I don’t like.

So, here we are at 20 weeks, the baby is fine, it’s male, and we have Sky High Definition.