Category: baby

L’arrivée du petit

Baby’s first holiday

Nathan's first experience in a swimming pool

For the first time since we left in early 2003, we went back to Morocco this summer on holiday. We took Nathan with us which made travel logistics all the more difficult. Flying with a 10 month old baby is tiring, since he has to be occupied all the time. On the way out he was sleepy but couldn’t get comfortable for a long time, and whined much to the delight of the other passengers.

On arrival, our rental car was a new Renault Dacia Logan – the car that’s been in the news, being a budget vehicle which costs around 5000€ / 6000$ new. It was a disappointment though, since we expected a Laguna (a much nicer car…). Still, there was plenty room in the boot of the car for luggage including the pram and air conditioning, which made it a reasonable car for the trip.

A lot of things have changed in Rabat, where we used to live. The development of a big new marina on the Bou Regreg estuary in Rabat is under way, and plans for a lot of new holiday apartments on the coast road south of Rabat are well advanced.

We stayed just south of Rabat; for the first week we were on the beach with friends, and for the second just back from the beach in a house with a swimming pool in the garden where Nathan is pictured with me and his red clockwork paddle boat, which ran around on the water much to his amusement.

It was also the first time Nathan had seen sand and the sea. He met his great grandmother, his maternal grandmother, his uncle and a few great-aunts, uncles and cousins. He’d just started crawling before we left, so he was around everywhere grabbing hold of things he shouldn’t have, and pulling himself up to stand and walk himself around whilst holding onto things like a table or chairs. His favourite pastimes were trying to move plastic outdoor chairs as far as he could before getting stopped, and crawling along long corridors in the houses we stayed at.

With the two hour difference between Rabat and Paris, it was hard to get back into the regular sleep routine with him. He’s back to normal now though, and it all seems like too distant a memory already.

A tube in the nose, the poor boy

Nathan with PH testing nasal catheter

Nathan has often had a little cough and been “bunged up” in the nose. He’s already on special anti-regurgitation milk and takes Motilium before, and Gaviscon after meals.

Our paediatrician suspected a gastroesophageal reflux and so I took Nathan to a clinic in Boulogne (15 miles away, but an hour’s drive due to heavy traffic 🙁 ). He had a tube put through his nose with a sensor to measure the acidity level just above his stomach, and had to keep it overnight (he wasn’t particularly happy about it, see photo). A little box recorded the PH at regular intervals, and this was put into a little baby backpack so that we could carry it with him.

To stop him from pulling the tube out, he had his elbows bound – at the clinic – with the latest high tech solution: cardboard tube from a loo roll, kitchen paper and medical tape. You can just about see the one on his left arm in the picture.

The clinic phoned back yesterday with the results. He’s within the normal range for the tests, so there’s some other reason that he’s regurgitating. It could be that it will gradually fade away. In any case, the results are great news! Levels of acidity that are too high would mean special treatment and a lot of worry. I’m still wondering what it is that’s causing him to cough and regurgitate from time to time, but at least I know it’s linked to a medical issue with acidity.

Sleeping Like a Baby

Nathan Asleep on the Sofa

After my last post was published, I learned from my email reader timezone definition that the official name for the zone here is now Romance Daylight Time which sounds particularly apt for Paris in the spring. I’ve moved back to PINE for email, one of the first mail readers I ever used back in 1993 is still available and going strong. Better still, it hasn’t changed much in look and feel. It’s still text only and efficient because everything can be controlled by keystroke combinations.

Pictured here looking a lot like I’ve felt over the last few days, Nathan took time to adjust to daylight savings time. You probably don’t want to actually sleep like a baby, by the way.

Nathan is now eating some solid (well, puréed) food and is down to four meals a day. His hair is getting lighter — much to my delight — as he’s looking more like I did when I was a baby. His latest toys are getting noisier – he has a piano toy with five keys that plays nursery rhymes and classical stuff like Pachelbel’s Canon in D and Für Elise by Beethoven. You can also play your own melodies on it, but with five keys you’re a little bit limited in scope.

Thinking about family and the little boy growing up, I wrote an article “Childcare and the Telescoping Family” for publication at Urban Semiotic. You might enjoy a trip over to that blog, whether it’s to read my piece or the other excellent posts there.

Once a Dream, Now Ubiquitous

Or getting a WiFi connection.

When I was still at junior school at less than 10 years old, we got our first home computer. It was a ZX81. With 1Kb of RAM, adverts at the time of initial launch in 1981 said it could run a nuclear power station. Since installing a WiFi card in our Freebox – an ADSL box which brings TV, Internet, and a cheap phone line on which I can call fixed lines for free – I can sit anywhere in my flat and be connected to the Internet sending email to friends around the world.

Following the ZX81 we had a BBC Model B, a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64, and then an Atari ST. Our first PC was an 8086 with just 128Kb of RAM and a single 5.25″ disk drive with 320Kb storage. Each new stage was a leap forward for home computing, but most of it (until I started programming on the PC and the Atari ST) was for games.

As I look at Nathan at just 5 months old, I imagine how old he’ll think I am. His first memories of computing will be several gigabytes of storage in your pocket on which you can watch video and that you plug headphones into. Those little gadgets have more power than that which Sinclair marketing touted in 1981 as being enough to run a nuclear power station.

Everything will be on DVD (blu-ray, probably) and cassettes and vinyl will be museum material. Computing is gradually making its way into our daily lives, whether we like it or not. Maybe we don’t have wearable computers (yet the iPod is a fashion accessory) but many of our cats and dogs have an RFID tag implant to identify them.

Once I used to dream of having a powerful computer. Now I have more computing power in my pocket than my dream computer of some 15 years ago. I used to send 3.5″ disks by post to other people in England. Now I can transfer the equivalent of 100 of those disks in about an hour, to anywhere in the world, from outside on my balcony.

New Fujifilm Finepix E900 Zoom

Nathan crawling - almost - on the sofa

After some time without a digital camera to speak of, I finally took the plunge and bought the Fujifilm Finepix E900. It’s a 9 megapixel camera in the “serious amateur” price and quality range.

I learned the technical side of photography when I inherited my grandfather’s old 35mm reflex camera. It’s a Prinzflex with an old screw-fit lens thread which meant any lenses I bought for it were all acquired second hand whilst hunting around old camera shops. Having that camera encouraged me to read a few books and familiarise myself with the notions of aperture, shutter speed, film speed and depth of field. Then I started taking loads of pictures, but I hated waiting for development (and the cost) when only one out of every fifty or so photographs were actually any good. You have to take a lot of shots and analyse what’s good about the photos you find most pleasing – it’s rarely the subject that is interesting. It’s all about trial and error.

I’ve always wanted a serious digital camera. A few years ago on a low budget I bought the cheapest camera with an LCD screen that I could find. A lot of the photos on this site were taken with that camera, but it really was a point and shoot box. Nonetheless I could shoot a lot of photos and delete everything I didn’t like immediately. Most of the time that’s actually enough for web quality photos and experimentation. Some of the shots I took with that camera, like the ones on this post, or an early photo of Nathan with Mummy, are actually quite good.

Investing in the new camera allows me to mix the technical aspects of my old Prinzflex SLR and the convenience of digital. Like most midrange digital cameras, you can control shutter speed, aperture and with the E900 even a simulated ISO rating. Fujifilm make their own CCDs for these cameras and they claim – and seem to have shown to me so far – that they can treat natural lighting settings really well. The key point for me is that the shutter delay is very short: when you press the shutter button, the picture is taken almost instantaneously. My previous digital was very slow to actually take the photo after you pressed the button.

Nine megapixels means that I can print big enlargements and they should look very clear. The argument that actually swayed me to allocate the extra budget compared to the 5 megapixel Nikon I was looking at is that even with about half as much zoom, you grab the same information: I can crop out a lot of image and still be left with a 5 megapixel shot. This goes for macro photography too: at almost twice the distance from an object I capture as much detail as an equivalent 5 megapixel camera.

Some other advantages of the Fujifilm E900 are excellent video capacity: it can film at 640×480 resolution @ 30fps which is close to analogue NTSC TV resolution (if you compare with these video resolution specs) and not far from PAL or DVD resolution. You can add audio notes to your snaps as a reminder of conditions, names of places, etc. You can crop photos on the camera itself. This is very handy – you can cut out unneeded stuff from the edge of the frame and save the resulting image at lower resolution, freeing memory for more pictures. The E900 also boasts RAW format, automatic and manual white balance, and comes with rechargeable batteries and its own charger. There’s a review here with some good examples of photographs under different conditions.

At only 250 pixels wide you can’t really see the quality of one of my first photo experiments – Nathan crawling – especially because I compress the images quite a bit too. However, you can see how the colours look very natural even though this photo was taken with flash. The focus is very crisp, and the detail in the cushions is totally clear at full resolution.

So now I can really start experimenting.

Four Months!

Nathan with Grandad late January

Today Nathan turns 4 months old. Here’s a recent picture with his Grandad taken as a test with a webcam, so please excuse the quality.

I’m wondering what you call a date four months from birth. It’s not strictly an anniversary since that has a root from annus in Latin, meaning year. It’s kind of a four-month-from-birthday but I’m not sure if there is a proper grammatical way of saying that. There is a lot of debate on this topic amongst linguists (perhaps they are more correctly termed armchair internet linguists, but I could be wrong) around the invented word menseversary (from Latin mensis). So, happy fourth menseversary Nathan!

Oh, and it’s also Saint Valentine’s day too, so kisses for all you lovers out there. Let me know if suddenly some amazingly romantic thing happened to you today.

Quick Nathan Update

Nathan back to his smiley baby self

Nathan’s doing fine, he’s back into his usual routine again. He’s still nursing a slight nagging cough, but it’s mostly in the morning that he coughs now. He’s eating well and smiling and gurgling a lot (as in the photo), which is a good sign. For the last couple of nights he hasn’t woken up coughing in the middle of the night – even though he got back to sleep quite easily previously – and he’s back with his Nanny during the day. He’s looking forward to seeing Grandma and Grandad this weekend (well we’re projecting our emotions onto him since really we can’t tell what he’s thinking :-)).

Thanks to all of you who asked about him!

Return of Bronchiolitis

Nathan and Mummy in Hospital

Nathan had a regular appointment at the respiratory physiotherapist this Wednesday. He’s been having treatment for a cough and blocked nose. I’m sad to say he’s relapsed and the physio said we should take him to the emergency department at the local hospital as he had become very blocked up. So off we drove and took him into the emergency ward.

The emergency ward took us almost immediately into the emergency paediatric section. As he’s only 3 months old – as of yesterday – he was given priority since breathing difficulties are much more serious the younger the child is. The doctor was kind and we were taken up to the regular paediatric ward after initial treatment by hospital staff who reassured us. The diagnosis was that he’s had a second “attack” of bronchiolitis and he needs respiratory help for a while. He’s been on regular oxygen mask treatment – they add drops of medicine in a breathing mask which vapourises a mix of oxygen and drugs to help him breathe – about three or four times a day. He’s also being treated by the suction of excess mucus from his nose, mouth and trachea.

The key signs of serious problems seem to have been overcome: he doesn’t have a high temperature, his blood oxygen saturation is normal, and he’s eating properly but the poor little fella is still quite blocked up and has rasping breathing tones. He could be in hospital for a few days more, I’m really hoping he’ll start to clear up a bit over the next couple of days. As you can see, his Mummy is being a diamond and looking after him by staying with him most of the time he’s there. I’m off there now.