Week 26 — Half A Year, Moving House
My son is exactly half a year old. Where the fuck did that time go?
Now he’s sitting up straight, he’s grabbing things and holding onto them with relative ease, he’s laughing and responding to my voice with confidence, he’s well over a stone in weight, and he’s now almost completely unrecognisable compared to pictures of him at birth. My son is utterly different from what feels like only yesterday, it’s going too quickly. It’s difficult to keep up with his rapid developments, even if they seem as trivial as holding onto the wrong end of the baby spoon and smearing liquefied food all over his face.
The speed of time, it would seem, has been turned up to 11 since I became a dad.
My son has discovered the well established baby activity, the Art of Foot Chewing. He’s been using his feet as anchors for a while now, holding onto them as if his pudgy life depended on it whilst trying to maintain a sitting position and not fall over (FYI, when he DOES topple over he looks like a Weeble and it’s shitting hilarious! He doesn’t cry, he just looks bemused that at one moment he can see his parents and the next he can only see his fat feet in the air beneath the underside of the table). It was only until the other day, however, that he decided to bend over double, towel-style, and place his dog-fluff covered toes firmly between his gums just to see what they tasted like.
They taste like dog, little one. No wonder you gave me a nasty face after that.
So we’re packing up the house now because as grown up parents and adults of a certain age we’ve bought an actual house that will be actually ours! That means a front door, banisters, a utility room, walls that aren’t made of thick card, and all the other bits that go with a decent sized house will be ours next week! But packing all of this up with a 6 month-old baby is quite difficult, and I’ve got the easy job of, you know, going to my job.
It’s during the packing process that you realise just how much crap you can accumulate as a human being. Why do I still have a toastie maker covered in a thick carpet of mould? Why do I still have two shirts with grease marks on the collars? Why does my wife have a thousand dresses? And while we try and get rid of all of this physical arse we also attempt to pack up boxes that I nicked from work with the stuff we actually want to keep as we move along with our lives. But this means packing whilst juggling a very hungry, very bouncy baby that is so active he now performs the actions to his Jumperoo in his sleep!
One by one, we pack up the boxes and prepare to set sail on the next voyage. It’s difficult to think that our son will never remember the house he was made in, the house he spent his first six months of life in, and all we’ve got are precious pictures to show him. He’ll love the new house but where we’ve been is important, too.
As you can tell, there are many things this week that have made me rather thoughtful as a dad.