Alec: the first two weeks

I realise that, by rights, I shouldn't actually have time to write a blog now that I have a two and a half week old baby. But the truth is that we bought him in the Shop of Quiet and Peaceful Babies and, so far at least, he has not proved nearly as much hard work as we expected. Alec is an eater and a sleeper. If he is not eating he is sleeping, and if he is not doing either of those two things then he might just be looking around and taking in the world for a bit before reverting back to one of the former activities. He doesn't cry unless he is hungry or perhaps a little bored, and although his waking hours are increasing more and more every day, so far he seems very content with the little life that he has been given. Neither are we sleep deprived (I know! Ignore what all the books tell you!). Because, with the exception of our first night at home from hospital, when everything was new and strange to him, we have not endured any sleepless nights. He sleeps from around 11pm until 4-5am when he wakes for a feed and then goes back to sleep until 8-9am. This is not a brag - I'm fairly sure that we have little or nothing to do with this blissful situation - and I am only too aware that this could all change at any moment. Babies are not known for their predictability. But for now, we are extremely happy parents, very much enjoying getting to know this tiny little human.

I can't say that we've done anything dramatically exciting during these first couple of weeks that would be of interest to anyone. But we've been getting out and about a bit, with a few walks nearby, a trip into Geneva for a walk and some lunch, a few errands here and there, and our first visit to CERN on Friday. Parenting seems to be all about timing and planning as far as I can tell. If I want to leave when he's wide awake he will grumble and be put out. But if I feed him before we leave the house he will be sleepy enough to be bundled up into his snowsuit and put in his pram, where he'll happily sleep for the next couple of hours, completely oblivious to the lovely places you are taking him. He has more or less slept through all of our outings so far, including the visits to see friends and their babies, some of whom have tried to persuade him that crying is the way to get what you want, but he is having none of it.

So, in summary, here are some of the things he likes:

Sleeping

Sleeping on Daddy

Sleeping in the sling

Sleeping on Mummy

Cuddles with Mummy

Bathtime

And some of the things he's less keen on:

Being bundled up in a ridiculously over-sized snowsuit

Being bundled up as a starfish

Apologies for the photo-heavy blog post this time, but it beats giving you the lowdown on the minutiae of nappy changes, breastfeeding and sleep cycles. For the record, babycare is, as Andy feared, mostly characterised by 'poo, milk and vomit'. But these delights are also served with a liberal sprinkling of laughter, cuteness and sheer awe, so it's not hard to enjoy the whole experience.

Tomorrow, we are off to La Thuile for our first nights away from home. Andy is giving a talk at a conference there and Alec and I have decided to go along for the ride. It might seem terribly bold to be taking our newborn away so early on, but it seemed preferable to me being left behind to deal with all the vomit and nappies by myself for a few days. And really all Alec desires in life is milk, somewhere cosy to sleep and not to be bundled up in inappropriate clothing. Although, unfortunately for him, La Thuile is in the mountains so both the over-sized snowsuit and starfish blanket are coming along too. Tune in next time for news of our inevitable decline into inconsolable crying episodes and sleep deprivation.

A brand new human being

I'm writing this from my hospital bed, with my 19-hour old son lying hiccuping beside me. Alec William Buckley came into the world at 4.17pm (Central European Time) on Tuesday 5th February, weighing 3.3kg (7lb 5oz for the old-fashioned types) and exactly half a metre long. We are biased, of course, but we think we picked a good 'un. He has my mouth, Andy's toes and an excellent grip which Andy believes bodes well for climbing. 

I don't think this is the right forum to give a gritty blow-by-blow account of the birth, but I'm happy to say that it was a largely untraumatic and surprisingly calm experience for us all. I had gestational diabetes during the last third of the pregnancy, which can produce big babies if not well-managed but fortunately didn't present any problems for us. That said, they don't like to let mothers go beyond their due date out here (in the UK they induce at 38 weeks more or less as standard) so I was induced on the evening of our due date - Monday 4th. Unluckily for me, the induction brought on very strong contractions immediately (whereas for many people it takes 12 hours to work) so I spent a very sleepless night putting up with one strong contraction after another, with absolutely no rest between them, much like the last phase of labour is supposed to be, and after 10 hours of this I was completely shattered. The only pain relief they offer here is an epidural - there is no gas and air option, or any other  drugs available - so when I was told that my 10 hours of contractions hadn't actually made any progress, I was very glad to accept it. What followed was just wonderful - I could feel what was happening but was able to rest throughout the day and when we were told, much earlier than expected, that it was time to push I was refuelled and ready. Alec came out 45 minutes later and Andy and I sobbed and sobbed. It was a wonderful experience that is making me teary again just thinking about it. 

The private healthcare system out here is also something to rave about, and although many people have balked at the idea that they will keep us in hospital for 5 days, I am feeling very glad about it at the moment. I have a lovely private room that is far nicer than many hotels I've stayed in and I'm being very well looked after (while paying for it of course!). As well as the cleaning staff who come and go and bring me fresh tea, the midwives who pop in every hour to check up on us, the flatscreen TV on the wall and the bottle of champagne in the fridge (!), my first post-birth meal, brought to me in the delivery suite, was a three-course bonanza that included sirloin steak and a patisserie style dessert. I think I'm getting crab salad for lunch today. The hospital also happens to be just a stone's throw from CERN so Andy can come and go from work while I'm here, and we can look out to his office building from our window. 

If it seems strange that I have the time and energy to write a blog post less than a day after giving birth, it's because of this wonderful care. Alec has been sleeping peacefully for most of his life so far, only waking up to feed and scrutinise his besotted parents for a few minutes before dropping off again. And with free Wifi in the hospital it's a great opportunity to catch up with people before the real hard graft - going home and doing it alone - begins at the weekend.

That said, we can't wait to see what the future will bring to our new little family unit. The early signs are promising.

Baby DIY: fitting an ISOFIX baby seat to a non-ISOFIX Ford C-MAX

Ladies and gents, I have a special announcement to make. It's not, I'm afraid, news of the arrival of Baby Buckley. No, he/she seems happy to stay cooped up inside for a little longer but is due to be served with an eviction notice on Monday. In the meantime, I am pleased to announce a special GUEST POST from none other than Dr Buckley - not me, the other one.

This is more practical advice than my usual rambling blog post, so if you're not interested in learning how to fit a car seat base to a car that doesn't want to be fixed with said car seat base, then you might want to stop reading right about now. Normal service should resume at the next installment.

Andy B writes:

Just the other day, Jo suggested that I might like to post a guest entry on this blog, since there have now been nearly 6 months of her point of view and perhaps I'd like to add some balance. I pooh-poohed the idea, since the things that occasionally cross my threshold of blogability tend to be technical: some physics, or maybe a programming/computing thing that I've recently made or found useful. But the minutiae of our lives -- who would be interested in that? (Oh, a lot of you... I stand corrected.)

But almost immediately, a technical issue worthy of report has appeared: the traumatic tale of how to install our first child car seat. Some time ago, Jo decreed after extensive research that we should get a Maxi-Cosi FamilyFit seat base to remain in the car and make exchanging the seat itself much easier. We had a quick indoor look at the seat base, verified that the seat clicked in nicely, and then as I am a selectively lazy sort (a badge of honour in computing terms) my plan was to install it while Jo was enjoying the Hospitality (sic) at La Tour.

Jo is less lazy (clearly due to underexposure to the programming semantics literature) and hence today I found myself being prodded down the stairs toward the car, carrying the aforementioned seat base for a more eager than intended evaluation of its suitability. As it turned out, this was probably for the best: I climbed into the back of our (second-hand) 2007 Ford C-MAX and immediately failed to find the expected steel mounting hoops of the ISOFIX system. It briefly appeared that we were the owners of a costly but useless bit of baby paraphenalia (and presumably not the last of those). But a bit of phone-based Googling made the situation seem less dire: in particular thanks to this helpful blog. It seems that C-MAXes, at least since 2006, have featured the ISOFIX mounting hoops, but that the original owner has a choice about whether or not to expose them by default. If they do not, as seems to have been the case with the original owner of our car, they will later have to be dug out of the upholstery.

So it was useful to find that not all was lost, if a little intimidating to have to chop into our precious car and hope that we wouldn't mess it up. We could pay a Ford garage a hefty fee to do it for us or, according to the blog above, buy a ~£30 kit and perform the seat surgery by ourselves. It seemed clear. But the more we looked at the blog instructions for using the kit, the more we wondered why a kit was needed at all. The separation of the hoops is defined by the ISO13216 standard, or more practically by holding the seat base to be mounted up against the car seat. We prodded the seat and could feel the hoops just under the surface: easy! And, to cut a long story short, a few cuts through the material were enough to mount the base quite adequately... and to my mind more neatly and less invasively than with the plastic wells that come in the Ford conversion kit. The end result is shown to the right.

So, having successfully made this bold and frugal leap into the unknown, it seems responsible to document it a little and hopefully help some others to do the same. Here are a few instructions... with apologies that the instructional photos were actually taken in reverse order, the idea of documentation having arisen after the seat was installed.

Step 1. Prod the seat to make sure the ISOFIX mountings are there before starting any cutting. I don't guarantee that they are, but a good firm prod with your finger halfway up the lowest bit of "upright" fabric (hard to describe, but there is a different-coloured "ramp" of seat fabric at the bottom before the curvy vertical, back-supporting bit starts. Following the photos from the Spinage blog post we anticipated that the hoops would be in-line with the seams on the horizontal part of the seat, and indeed this was the case.

Step 2. To make sure that everything will be ok, and to identify exactly where to cut the fabric, it's best to compare the discovered hoop positions to the separation of the extending yellow mounting bars on the FamilyFix seat base (see the photo to the right). This gives some indication of the correct height at which to make the cut, too.

Step 3. Cutting! I initially made a tiny hole just big enough to insert a thin screwdriver and make sure that I could really find the ISOFIX hoop. (When I made the second hole this seemed like overkill and I didn't bother.) This first cut is the emotional crux!

When I was happy about the position via the
screwdriver prodding, I cut a bit more until I could get a finger into the hole and feel the mounting hoop directly, cf. the photo to the right. Then just extend the hole into a vertical slit: there is no need to actually remove either covering fabric or foam padding.

Make sure the slit is long enough and at the right level for the yellow bar to be inserted: best to explicitly test it. You'll have to cut through a bit of internal foam padding, too: no special technique required.

Step 4. Compare to the bar separation on the seat base again, and cut the second hole at the appropriate position. The mounting hoops are each several cm wide, so the correct separation of the two holes is more important than the exact position of the cuts.

The resulting cuts are shown to the left: not beautiful, but also a lot less intrusive than the plastic sockets that seem to be the only substantial content of the "official" fitting pack.

Step 5. Connecting the base: nothing special to report here! You should have two slits with the right separation, so extend the yellow rods from the seat base as far as they will go. I think it's a good idea to check how they work first: push a screwdriver or similar into the clasp on the end of one rod, to act as the ISOFIX hoop, and the lock should snap shut. At the same time the ratchet mechanism should reverse, so that the rod will now retract: this is how you get a snug fit against the back of the seat. Neat engineering! To release the lock (useful to know before you end up inadvertently attached to the car), you have to pull out one bit of the ratchet lock and push in the other part: it's impossible to describe just in words, so check the little manual.

When happy, just insert the two yellow rods in the seat slits (cf. right), push back and suddenly everything should lock in and slide up against the seat back as in the photo to the right. Wiggle/lever from side to side to get maximum tension (I think this is what a cryptic instructional diagram is suggesting) and you're done. Tada.



Releasing the support leg

Ok, that's almost all you need to know, and certainly all that's specific to cutting a 2007 C-MAX to expose the ISOFIX mountings without paying for silly kits. Just one thing that seems worth mentioning: how to lower the support leg on the FamilyFix base. We spent a good 10 mins in the car pressing the special grey squeezy buttons on the sides, operating the "status check" button, etc. etc.  In the end this trivial Yahoo Answers response was the key: just give it a good pull. No need to put your feet on it, but grab it by the end away from the pivot and don't be afraid about breaking it. It's not locked in place by any clever mechanism but just a plastic clip that's a bit stiff. The final setup (sans baby seat) is shown to the right.

PS. While trying to work out the support leg issue, I happened across this FixYa site on which several people were asking the same question (without getting a good answer). I feel honour-bound by peurility to highlight another question in the same section, the wonderfully innocent, double entendre-less "Where can I get a replacement sponge bit for inbetween the childs legs? Mine fell off and I can't find it". Ah. comedy gold.