Practice makes perfect

Maxine's step-sister Jackie and her fiance Sean stayed with us this weekend, with their 7 week-old son, James.

I realised that it was probably the longest sustained period with a very young baby that I have experienced. It makes you realise that there really is no warm-up period - when your baby is born, you are right-in at the deep end (unless you do much baby-sitting before hand I guess, but nobody seems to have trusted us to do that :) )

Needless to say, about 90% of the weekend's conversation was about babies. They didn't pull any punches. "Anyone who says it isn't bloody hard is a liar" is the gist of what they said. A difficult birth and severe colic hasn't helped in their case.

He cried quite a bit, on Saturday night, and then again on Sunday night. It didn't bother me too much - I was able to tune it out quite well, but I could see how 7 hours of it would get pretty iritating.

At one stage I was nursing him, and he was lying contentedly in my arms. After a while, he started to cry. I resisted the usual instinct to immediately return him to the parents, as I have done in the past in that situation. I realised I wouldn't be able to do that soon. After ten minutes of trying to rock him, and put his dummy in, with little success, I knew I had a lot of fast learning to do, come October.