A face full of gastrovom makes the love go around

Wednesday was the first of my new daddy days, pursuant to a 4 day week. A poor Bear had been pretty quiet through the night. I strolled in at 7, excited about my new role, figuring she'd be in great sorts.

The smell of vomit hit me immediately. She'd actually crawled her way around the cot during the night and deposited about 5 separate, foul pools of vomage. I don't know why she didn't tell us, she must have been miserable.

The day progressed.

It was a joy being on Bear time. Beloved went off in the arvo on a photography course, a present from Bear and I. We hung out in the park, swung on the swing, slid on the slide (well, the 2 foot bit at the bottom, she's a bit small to come all the way down yet!). I chatted to other parents, it was nice.

Yet Le Bear was fusty. She didn't eat much and kept spitting it back at me. After Beloved came back, we were changing her when she made an 'announcement noise' and suddenly a big flood of vomit filled her mouth and started pouring out. At that point, she decided to blow a great raspberry. I copped a faceful.

I don't know if that's when I caught it. What I do know is that this is the gastro from hell. Last night Beloved had a horrible session of impersonating Linda Blair then, before I could finish laughing, I was hit with the same. Everything I had eaten and drunk for hours, there in the sink, mocking me. Blowing bits of broccoli and carrot out my nose for the next 40 minutes.

And so it kicked off. We each had about an hour's sleep all up. I took the first sickie in aeons, after nearly falling over when I got out of bed. And all day we've gone from being crumpled on the couch, to attending to Bear and some choke risk she'd started engunging, to feeding her, to grabbing short naps, to being crumpled on the couch.

How much fun can you have!? Both of us violently ill, a recovering Bear needing attention, all my work files buzzing around in the back of my head like blowflies. Our muscles ache, joints are sore, every 20 minutes or so we just completely flake.

If this is how the poor girl felt on Tuesday night and Wednesday, then she's made of firmer stuff than us.

The weekend's trip to Rutherglen is off. Misery loves whole familes apparently...

Hours drag at the Royal Children's

We did not cope well with the F word.

In the shower, le Bear waves her little reverse wave from her perch in Beloved's arms. They head off downstairs. I close my eyes and breath up the steam.

There are two thumps in quick succession and beloved lets out a sound that's neither shout nor cry but somehow both. Time stops. The water hangs in mid air around me. I shove the shower door aside and start running.

For a moment, there's a thought in my mind that hasn't yet congealed but it is surrounded by a mist of pure fear.

Bear starts crying as I turn the corner at the top of the stairs. I'm instantly relieved because I can see they are both ok. Beloved holds her, they are getting up.

Just a slip onto her bum. A Bear was held tightly, as she should be.

The crying doesn't cease immediately. She protects her leg, uses the other- clearly in some discomfort. But things seem to improve, and I go to work.

A bit later she's still a bit ratty, still not shoving with that leg when she commando crawls. Beloved calls. We agree, a visit to the GP just to be on the safe side.

GP says all fine, but perhaps, just to be sure, drop in on the Royal Children's.

I join them in the waiting room from work, with chocolate for Beloved and food for a Bear. The nurse thinks she's fine, but a quick once-over by the Paediatrician should confirm it.

He thinks she's fine, but an X-ray might be ideal, just to be sure.

We hold her down, wearing our heavy lead suits, and she has a cry on the X-ray table. Not nice for a girl...

The X-ray looks fine, says the Radiologist. I'll hand it back to the Paediatrician for a final check and you'll be out of here.

We wait a bit longer, chat to other parents. It's a sad place, the Royal Children's. A girl has damaged her eye falling in a cartwheel, somehow. She is the embodiment of pathos. I chat to her dad, not really saying anything useful. We shrug, and wait some more.

The Paediatrician walks in with the X-ray. A hairline fracture, he says.

We just stand there. Neither of us has ever broken a leg. A Bear isn't 10 months and she has a fracture.

It was a sad, sad night.

Meanwhile she recovers in days, without a fuss, and is charging around again as if nothing happened.

We hate the stairs. Oh how we hate the stairs.

Tsunami set to wash away dead wood

What is that pompous fool talking about now? A recession? If a recession was threatening to hit Australia, now, after more than a decade of Peter Costello being Treasurer, how could that possibly be a positive for him?

Is this a tsunami we had to have?

My thinking is that a tsunami of irritated voters threatens Costello and if I were he I would be ringing all my mates on Collins St hocking my CV around.

Getting it all wrong

We split at the supermarket. Beloved and Bear headed home for a feed, I went in, with my pottering mother, on a mission to buy just two things- muesli and cat litter stuff. Half an hour of pottering later we emerge laden down with random items.

I got the wrong muesli. They didn't have the preferred brand (Lowan Tropical, since you asked) so I picked up something that looked nice. I mean, it is birdfood and all, is there a difference? Oh, how I've learned about birdfood, sorry muesli, this evening.

It was wrong, all wrong. It has clusters that dissolve too quickly. It is too high on simple sugars. It's made clear I've made a major stuff up and this will need to be rectified by beloved going herself the next day.

I'm a failure.

So, after I drop my mum at a random church we found for her, hidden away between a couple of quiet suburban streets just where you expect a huge brick monolith to be planted, I head back to the Supermarchet for round B.

I painstakingly read the contents of each and every muesli packet there is. I make sure the leading contenders have no nuts (in case we then touch Bear), are called muesli, look completely like birdfood with no novel features like clusters, and have markedly less sugars than what I bought before.

I note in the process that what I bought before has less sugars than almost all the 'proper' mueslis, but, mine is just to do or die.

I get the rolls royce. It's the better part of $10 for a tiny pouch. I cannot go wrong.

Scroll down...

You know it's coming...

Just about there...

I fucked up royally. This muesli has a code word in the title. Apparently bircher is lithuanian for 'needs soaking overnight or in the microwave like some sort of lumpy porridge.'

Do I give up? What do you think? I'm actually so far past my wits end generally, covering a 1.9 FTE load at work, trying to keep up with what's going on at home, that I just coast on from issue to issue. Flatlining. Not at my best.

This corner of the Planet too Lonely for some

Met by a roar of indifference, Lonely Planet has caused a quirky individual cultural icon based in a struggling suburb in a small nation in the South to be swallowed up by a vast British media beast:

Lonely Planet, which is famous for its international travel guides, is being sold to BBC Worldwide by founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler, and advertising magnate John Singleton who became a shareholder in 1999.

Cue vaccuous weasel-word tripe:

'Joining BBC Worldwide allows us to secure the long-term future of our company within a globally recognised media group,'' the Wheelers said in a statement. ''In our discussions with (BBC), we felt that BBC Worldwide would provide a platform true to our vision and values, while allowing us to take the business to the next level.''

De da da da. They can publish 500 titles but can't come up with a sentence free from inane jargon to explain their decision. I mean, the next level? Does Maureen want to be Secretary General of the UN?

With significant operations in Australia, the US and UK, Lonely Planet publishes about 500 titles including specialist activity guides, shoestring guides and phrase books in various languages. The company also produces and develops factual programming for international broadcasters through Lonely Planet Television and online.

Times are tough.

I know, I'm not making any real point, they're entitled to do whatever they want and no-one has any dignity in business. It's just a shame.

They lead their field, they are already global. They have built so much out of their warehouse digs in Footscray and are an exemplary Aussie start-up and exporter. Despite the considerable handicap of not being based in one of the two nations who think they are entitled to completely dominate most aspects of publishing and the media, they've managed to go round the world and back and completely change travel publishing. If they can't stay here, how can anyone?

Hey Tony and Maureen, would it be that hard to drop the drivel and just say "we did it for the money"?

Baby Gaol

We has it.

Baby Bunting at its most literal. Bear rode around in her Bjorn, facing out from me, her willing mule, flapping her arms, kicking her legs, cackling every time mum turned around. Kids everywhere, some even smaller than a Bear.

I followed my girls around as we saw gates, playpens, toys, clothes and strollers. I kept an arm around her, smelled her hair, enjoyed, as always, the mere being there a part of things. Strollers are $200 or more a pop but the good stuff's free. And dads can't afford to take anything Saturday for granted.

Pleasure in simple Friday finishes

A Bear already sleeps when I get home.

Beloved kisses me, comes in close. We hold for a while. Lie on the bed, tempting sleep. My suit goes into weekend hibernation.

Easing the door open so a girl doesn't wake. A girl needs her sleep. She is there- one arm out and one behind her head. Dreamings of posings. I fust with her growing wisps, cup her entire head in my palm, tell her daddy loves her.

I'm sorry I didn't manage to catch the last dad train. I'm here now.

Many things happened and I can tell them to you says Beloved, and in her words I return to the family fold, become part of the day, no longer lost. She found wine and fish. I drink, rolling the flathead in cayenne, ginger and flour. She eats the liquorice I bought her from the sweets shop in the station as I awaited the already too late.

She falls asleep. A Bear still sleeps. I sit down before the computer and Chairman Mao leaps from the bed to my lap with barely 3 steps in between. He purrs, falls asleep. I complete sentences where I can. Minh, the princess, purrs deep in a blanket. Sometime around the start of this paragraph it became Saturday.

Forget ye not the Battle of Midbogan

Forget the polls. Howard remained in pole position until he conceded that he'll retire next term. An astonishing move from a political veteran, one that marked the moment when Kev's nose broke out in front and Labor really became odds-on favourite.

Still not by much. Forget the chatter, this war will be decided over a few Midway-esque battles in conservative marginals. And they're still marginal.

Vampyres, father and daughter

A Bear has one of her vampire teeth coming through. A sharp razor's edge can be felt when stray fingers are grabbed and stuck in the finger sharpener. She's waking a few times a night, with stuff to say about it and all.

As for her dad, I'm down a tooth but walking around with the constant seeping taste of blood in my mouth. The stitches are holding, so far, and Dr Lisa seems to have done a pretty tight job, but it's far from comfortable. I'm slightly high on codeine, and at work I'm finding I have to beware of that old medication-tourettes issue, as I just can't be bothered niceing things up for people at the moment. Roll on Friday, roll on...

Torn out by the roots

Tomorrow one of my wisdom teeth will be torn out by the extremly chipper and forthright Dr Lisa, Oral Surgeon.

In a week where I am also travelling to Canberra it is hard to decide which will be the highlight. Probably the former, because the drugs will ensure that while the surgeon shoves her knee into my chest and yanks at my mouth with a pair of pliers, I will be dreaming of a land of clouds and guitars.

Androgens Redux

Shortly after the wonder that is a Bear entered our life, I was, you may recall, a complete psycho. A flood of hormones overtook me and I experienced something I can only theorise is nature's way of ensuring that the male gets eaten by the sabre tooth while mum and bub make a getaway. My eyes were a little wild. Beloved hid the larger kitchen implements.

Anyway, 8 months on and I'm (reasonably) sane again. Then a couple of weeks ago there is a discussion, a friend is over and she is talking about her partner who is a little prone to getting into argy bargy and coming away with a red noggin. Lovely chap, may I add... not at all an aggressor, just... prone. Red noggins. Moving along.

The conversation moves onto an incident I'd all but forgotten, where beloved was in our (then small) car when some duelling-banjo trash slammed into her, clearly in the wrong as you tend to be slamming into people from behind, then proceeded to abuse her and accuse her of being at fault.

When she was in fairly late term, extremely obvious, pregnancy.

The fact that there is such subhuman trash scraping its inbred 3 toed feet around our society can sometimes escape you. When it does you relax in the assumption that we've moved on from being chimps thumping each other with rocks. Indeed, when you have no responsibility other than yourself, and are blessed with a quick tongue and fairly good endurance in a chase, you can probably wrangle your way free of almost any situation.

But what if you're on the road and some throwback is threatening violence, and directing it at your wife? Your little daughter?

The lump of offal referred to above didn't actually do this, but the discussion threw some switch that kept me up half the night. I know it will sound like the most regressive male tubthumping, but while being a husband certainly brings out some protective instincts of its own, being the father of a daughter is gut-churningly terrifying when I stop to think about it, and I'm overwhelmed by the sense that I'm not equipped to protect her.

In a society that, for all its pretence to progress, is still phenomenally violent:

Police said the man and his 32-year-old wife were admiring a silver-coloured Hummer - a large, US-style four-wheel drive - outside Kings car park on Flinders Lane, between Spencer and King streets, about 5.30am (AEST) when they were set upon.The man said "I love your car" before he was attacked by up to six people, with at least one brandishing a metal bar. "The victim was severely beaten and left unconscious," Detective Senior Constable Brett Hampson said.

??!! The perfect crime, they all concluded as they sped away in their SILVER HUMMER. Why, there's 5 in my street alone, they'll never be caught! Moving along...

A dad knows he'll never be some Marvel Comic superhero capable of trussing up all the bad guys then changing back into his suit and dorky glasses. A dad will just be the dork in the suit and glasses. But he hopes, at minimum, that if he has to get eaten one day he'll last long enough to let those he loves escape to higher ground.

Or be able to pull a fallen bookshelf off them, or haul them off the edge of a glacier, or out of a sinking car. OK, that's a bit Marvel-esque. But I'm starting with a modest, simple objective.

My humble aim, for a Bear's first birthday, is to put on 3 kilos of the working stuff. No cardio for me, no samba dancing cross training, no techno yogalates. For me it's leg press, dips, bench, lat pulldowns and a routine that nods to Bulgarian weightlifters. I don't care whether it is noticeable on the aesthetic front, as long as I know I can shove something heavy away from me.

I'm serious. Stop laughing. Even beer consumption, incredibly, may experience some slight reduction in pursuit of my Spartan goal...

So close bear, you can do it

Le Bear is almost crawling.

Well I don't know what the step before crawling really is, but this looks about right. She gets onto her forearms, puts her head down, sometimes grunts, and raises her butt into the air about a 2cm, wobbles up and down a fraction, then collapses to the ground.

After a couple of shots at this, with dad going "whoop whoop, c'MON bear you can DO IT" in teh background, she switches to one of her other moves- the 360 rotation or the why-not-backwards-instead push-slide.

Fun.

No news is good news, and currently I am enjoying the short periods of play we have together, knowing soon I will be on a 4 day week and no park in Northcote will be safe from our collective insanity.

Her eyes are huge, her cuddles go for 10 minutes at a time. A dad's heart is not currently fixed in this world.

Weekly gay bashing

While I'm posting, a couple of days ago I swear I read that Howard was proposing to pass laws rendering illegitimate any children adopted by gay couples overseas. Anyone heard more?

I see this one sneaking up, suddenly being out there, suddenly being rubber-stamped by the ALP, and I'll be in the biggest crisis of my loyalties since Tampa. I have never been able to discern a single, rational thread within any argument put forward by those who verbally abuse, are intolerant of, or want to restrict the rights of anyone with a slightly non-mainstream sexual orientation. Where are the right's libertarians when you need them?

A Bear, a Bear Market- what's to do but stay put?

We made a decision tonight, and in the resolute spirit of that decision I hereby proclaim: the house search, for now, for at least a sanity-restoring little while, is over.

We came, we saw mostly crap, we attempted to conquer by bidding exhorbitant amounts of money on more than one occasion. This has not worked. It is not, for now, meant to be.

The sense of disappointment is modest, but the relief is a rush like coming to the surface of a pool after holding your breath. To have been earning well, yet in constant fear of money, of being broke, has been just plain lousy.

Searching, in itself, was interesting. I've developed a fascination with the design of the humble family home that I wouldn't have predicted. They can combine the artistic and practical, there is no other human concept like them. And we've learned a good deal, things to watch for, how to do it better next time, whether in 3 months or 3 years.

But the first thing we've learned is this- until we can buy something that isn't an unrenovated latrine in a suburb we want to live in then we are happy to contribute to the landlord's super.

He's a lot nicer than the bank manager.

A Bear agrees. I discussed it with her. Perhaps I'm allowing my own preferences to cloud my interpretation of her response, but what I heard was 'yes daddy, I want you to be fiscally free to go part time so you get to know me before I'm in kinder'.

Thanks Bear, noted, agreed. Sweet little cherub, we already have everything we could ask for in this world.

How to be a perfect parent

...the accumulated wisdom of my observation of others and receipt of their generously-offered advice...

Buy a $1700 pram that Choice says is unsafe for kids. Sneer at anyone without one. That'll make you look smart.

Don't wake baby up if she is sleeping past her usual getting-up time, that's just cruel, waking a baby. Like flailing them with a cattle whip, but far worse.

Don't sing them songs you like, or anything with more than 2-3 words or notes. If you do you are just being selfish. Everyone knows kids exposed to complex music and melodies grow up musically retarded. It says so in this book right here by Dr Foncilot Krunt who lectures at UCLA.

Take lessons in parenting from wound up tightwads who shout at their kids twice per minute.

Your kids need a big backyard more than they need you. Commute an extra hour, you're only working 10 hours every day and missing bathtime at the moment.

Still on the music thing, here's further proof, if only they hadn't been exposed to so much adult music in early childhood Prince, Mozart, and Bjork might have become famous musicians, instead of. Stuff.

If a baby cries there's something wrong with them.

A bit of chub on their cheeks at 6 months and they are going to be fat and have body image related unhappiness. On the other hand having rude relatives who call people fat will not ever give a girl body image issues.

... and final wisdom dawning...

People who make uninvited rude comments are always the last to work out why they don't get many visits.

Grouchy rants aside, a Bear is doing very well, she has a huge smile and the biggest eyelashes around her great blue eyes that a proud dad has ever seen. Beloved and I are well. Still sans house. C'est la vie....