Fancied writing down a sort of diary type malarkey, so here it goes.
Naomi
Ah bruv, she's gorgeous.
said an early 20s Asian gentleman in Mr Cod when I was picking up chips the other night. Naomi was in a sling, a sort of chest rucksack where the baby faces the same direction as you, turning me into a Power Loader from Aliens. I thanked him and gave credit to Kate.
Naomi is now 15 weeks old and I can't imagine a world without her. Every few days she begins a new phase of development. Two weeks ago she started trying to do sit ups but couldn't lift her head. Now she can just about control her head, even if it is a wobbling affair. Naomi has moved from baby babbling to communicating with raspberries and blowing bubbles and loves to smile. On Monday I worked from home and Kate managed to make her laugh for the first time by making silly woofing noises. To my chagrin, I can only get a smile out of her. Her first word was probably "NnnnnING!" which means "sort this shit out or I'm going to go postal". We sometimes call her Ning as a retraction of Naomi Lang.
Naomi is a big baby. She's now moved into the clothes aimed at 24 to 36 months and she has lovely little chubby legs and hands. Given that she pukes 2 or 3 times every time she feeds (10 times a day), that's a surprise. Some babies are just pukey. She doesn't get upset any more than you or I would spit.
Sleeping has entered a pain in the arse stage where babies find it difficult to get off to sleep and then fight going into REM. It means that I head to bed around 12, having given as much support as I can and Kate comes up to bed between 2 and 4. Although we have all the kit to do bedside cot sleeping, we co-sleep right now, which means that the baby is between us. The press say it's dangerous, the NHS have jury out, NICE won't comment, the NCT say it OK in bed with specific requirements (which we follow). The danger is about something called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which is a sudden neurological failure that happens in babies up to 6 months. They don't know the cause but there is a small bias toward people who co-sleep. Annoyingly, the data isn't detailed enough so it's unknown if it is the cause.
6 months (24 weeks in baby terms) is the point where mortality rates drop off a cliff, so I'll admit being nervous until then.
People say that Naomi looks like Kate. If I'm honest, I can't see any resemblance with babies. Felix definitely had my skull (poor Kate) but I couldn't see resemblance. All babies look the same to me!
Her temperament is a sunny one. She's very smiley and does that intense concentration thing that Kate says is something that Felix and I do. I wonder if that means she will end up being a critical thinking type. It's fun to wonder.
I can't tell if this is easier than with Felix. I don't really like doing comparisons because Kate and I are different people now. With all we've been through, we're much closer than when Felix was born.
Felix
Seven and a half years and not dead yet. Felix is a very bright little nerd. His favourite things at the moment are Minecraft, watching YouTubers and going on bike adventures.
Yesterday I introduced him to Minecraft multiplayer online gaming on something called Mineplex. You don't need to faff with mods, the games are all made with game rules and command blocks. He's also played FPS on Kogama, which runs Unity3D in the browser. It's pretty good fun but it's difficult to join a server instance together. I've had to explain stranger-danger stuff to him, which he understands. He's now learning the pitfalls of making friends on servers that don't have a friend system.
We have our own Minecraft Survival Realm that we play on together. Felix loves to "talk Minecraft" where we discuss what our plans are and how we might help each other. He likes to gently give me tasks, which is hilarious. It's like having an agile programming stand up when walking to and from school and over dinner.
We've limited his computer use to 4 hours a day, which I strech to give us a break. That sounds like a lot but he spends some gaming, some building and some coding using scratch and Hour of Code.