Charlotte AKA Lottie, sporting a pink Rambo-style headband

We were babysitting today ((When I say ‘we’ I mean that I was also in the house but Jayne did most of the gushing and cooing and all of the feeding and changing)) , looking after the three week-old granddaughter while her parents went off to Ikea.  To say Jayne has been looking forward to this would be a something of an understatement.

The other day she was going to go to Hobbycraft to get paints.  Now I know that I don’t know much about babies, but even I know that three weeks is a bit young for messing about with paints.  I don’t know what age is right for that sort of thing but I’m pretty sure it is measured in months or years and not weeks.Anyway, Jayne went out this morning to pick her up and came back with so much stuff I thought we were adopting her or something.  I can’t believe how much stuff the logistic support for a small child  requires!

The first challenge was the buggy.  Frankie had very kindly shown Jayne how to collapse it to put it in the boot of the car but didn’t think to demonstrate how it goes up again at the other end.  There were a few phone calls, and I had a bit of a fiddle with it.  Somehow I got the thing unfolded but I’m not sure I could repeat the feat, and I suspect there is an easier way to do it.  One that doesn’t involve turning the thing upside down.

I took a few photos.

Later in the day we had to do something a bit weird.  Jayne had bought one of those kits where you can take impressions of a baby’s hands and feet in clay.  She spent a lot of time rolling this stuff out in its frame and then dangled Lottie over it while I tried to press her various extremities into the clay.  Couldn’t stop her clenching her right hand so the impression of that looks more than a little deformed and it looks like she has one foot bigger than the other because we had to have two goes at her right foot.  Got there in the end.

It wasn't all sunshine and smiles...

I’m not an expert on babies and, to be honest, not a big fan of them, if I was I would have made more of an effort to have one of my own at some point, but I am a bit fascinated by them, especially the tiny fingers and toes.  The nerd in me looks at a baby and nods appreciatively at what a lovely scalable design it is.   I still can’t get over a small person having a foot the size of my thumb.

Of course, the thing that is hardest to get used to is when Jayne shouts up the stairs “grandad come and have a look at this”.   It took a while to work out who she was talking to.