We’d just got to a point of semi-ish peaceful sleep, a time when the mornings were a delightful explosion of smiles, practice chuckles and the days sleepy and calm, even the dreaded evenings were getting progressively quieter; of course there was the odd moan, bleat, sure, but everything was just getting, well, better. This aligned with our having an improved understanding of what was upsetting him, we knew he was pissed cos he hadn’t pooed, we knew what is was, and that was okay. Hungry? We got the hungry cry and acted on it. Yep, look, he’s tired, we know. We know everything…
Having said that, you know why they may be crying most of the time, you can’t be sure all the time, babies get annoyed for other reasons, you may be holding them in a way they don’t approve of, perhaps they’re a little hot/cold or maybe they’re just uncomfortable. Our kid has doubled in weight in 4 months, the very physicality of rapidly expanding flesh and bones has got to hurt, but these are resolvable things that occur in relatively short phases, and anyway, we’re on top of all this shit, well, we were.
A few days ago something else started, this sort-of elongated warble that would regularly rise in pitch and volume until, as of yore, this huge mouth would bust out of his dear little face and eat all that was tranquil and subtle. This time, though, the sound couldn’t be quelled so last week after almost a day of this we came to the awful conclusion that it may be premature but, yes, he was teething
The timing couldn’t have been more desperate as we were about to undertake a five hour-round-trip to see the fam for my niece’s birthday, most of it on a bus. I used to love travelling by bus, especially if I won top nearside seat at the front… But now I was confined to that little space by the doors where all the wheelchairs and old-people seats are, the outskirts of the downstairs backspace where the infirm and feeble gather to mutter and wheeze on their miserable little journeys to the post office or hospital -or to visit some decrepit relative without consequence of its state of living or passing. Did I mention it smells? If I didn’t I did just then.
I don’t want to harp on about this but why would anyone elect to sit in this part of the bus if they didn’t have to? You can’t see anything save lots of traffic and queues of pissed-off looking people. Go upstairs and it’s all bright and lovely, you can see for ages too, and you get a unique perspective on the city -plus you can see all the weird crap people chuck onto the tops of bus shelters. It’s a win, win up there.
Having suffered the bus in that awful little space for well over an hour we arrived at Waterloo. Getting to the platform required us to walk in the opposite direction of the designated platform in order to get a medieval lift down to ground level before walking back through a sea of pushy, shovey arseholes. We scrambled on board the train and located facing double-seats and a clean table within, NetworkSouthEast Nirvana. But of course, the little fellow’s pram doesn’t fit in the fucking aisle does it, so we spend 30 mins stood outside the bog instead watching a succession of rugby men entering to park their Egg McMuffins’ before repairing to their seats post-flush sans the whoosh of the hand-dryer.
Once we’d arrived at our destination we were met by the folks who didn’t notice me having a paddy as I attempted to collapse the pushchair as they were too busy loading the kid into the baby seat amid a sea of grandparental coo’s as I turned the air blue outside. The missus wasn’t impressed; she was even less impressed five hours later (now full of vino collapso following a jolly afternoon with the family) when I attempted to re-construct the pushchair in order to make the miserable journey back to the smoke, I just couldn’t make it lock despite violently struggling with the infernal thing, indeed, it took me so long to get it secured and the boy back in his buggy we missed the train, though this later aspect was aided and abetted by a ludicrous, convoluted journey just to get the correct platform.
It’s not until you’re in charge of a buggy (or a wheelchair for that matter -god help them) that you realise how unfriendly the world is to anything other than spritely, fully functioning humanoids. Having spent time plodding about London with a walking stick due to my fucking spine I always knew this to be the case but that was small beer in comparison to being fully responsible for an egg-fragile baby mercifully sleeping in his pram. Take the journey to the platform, it took no less than three different lifts and half a dozen piss stinking adjoining walkways -each juncture without instruction regarding the appropriate floor/direction- just to get us to the place of departure. It took a lifetime of swearing just to stop me from having a massive heart attack.
Fortunately, the kid slept all the way back home, an identikit version of the one we’d undertaken a few hours earlier but in reverse. Of course, when we got home we were rewarded by hours of screaming, this aspect was made all the more painful on account of some recently administered news from mum. That afternoon, in between drinks and barbequed sausages she informed us in no uncertain terms that the boy wasn’t teething, he was just a bit tired; we’d know all about teething when it happened, she said, believe you me.
Bollocks.
motohed 