Silly Mummy, Silly Daddy

I was at a bit of a loss for what to write today for many obvious reasons.

Not that I haven’t got lots of ideas on the go but more that I felt the need for something light.

Being a blogger means that I get to read lots of great stuff by other bloggers and it just so happens that a particular post by a dad blogger made me spit out my ham sandwich today and laugh out loud several times.  All as I sit here on my own at the keyboard.

The post has provided me with the much needed light-hearted inspiration that I was looking for.

And like any blogger on a Monday afternoon I have managed to spend the rest of the day giggling to myself whilst writing this post and taking a trip down Memory Lane.

I recently wrote about celebrating 10 years of parenting and how wonderfully rubbish we have been at getting The Kid to her 10th birthday.

Having read Bad Dadu’s post about attending the NCT class with his wife made me think back to our own days of new parenting.

Thank god we can laugh.

Being a new parent can be fraught with difficulty but in our case I think we have to concede that we made our own luck.

A recent airing of some baby videos were testament to the fact that we had our ‘new parent voices’ completely off-pat which made for very cringe-making moments as The Kid howled and fell off the sofa watching us try to carry out parenting in the early days.

It’s a wonder that she has turned out so well really.

The voices that we used by way of communicating with her and each other while caught up in this new baby bliss were quite frankly wrong.

We drew the line at me calling Iron Man ‘daddy’ and he calling me ‘mummy’ but we failed to realise that our squeaky ‘coochy coo’ voices were far, far worse.

I assume you know the voices that I mean if you are a parent.

Generally, a child will go on to speak to her dolls in this voice all being well.

It generally involves saying hello in numerous different ways with a bit of tickling under the chin.  It is generally reserved for babies, dolls and I suppose people that don’t talk back.  Thank goodness.

Or maybe it’s just us.

The thing that really stands out to both of us is how incredibly stupid we were.

Being clean out of ideas on how to do anything normal was our normal and that was about as good as it got.

But there is always room in the world for a trier as my dear old dad used to say.

So, when faced with needing a passport photo of our precious bundle we did my dad proud and had a bloody good try.

We went through the various motions of trying to prop our baby against a blank wall.  The fact that she very foolishly kept sliding down the wall and laughing (whilst still looking like Charles Kennedy) didn’t stop us from trying.

Of course, we’ve still got the photos because it just so happens that we have about a million photos of every single moment of the poor child’s life.

These photos are proof that we obviously tried this on more than one occasion (clock the different outfits).

Oh the shame!

Enough OK!!

Realising that our efforts were fruitless, we then engaged in a very logical exercise involving a sheet, a photo booth and the local supermarket.

I’m not sure who can take credit for this idea but it basically involved sitting in the booth with a sheet over our head whilst holding the baby.

This was fraught with problems as the person covered by the sheet couldn’t actually see where the camera was and whether her face was in the correct position.  Let alone whether she was smiling or wearing a hat.

This involved the other one trying to judge from the outside whether the face was correctly aligned.

We carried on though.  Several attempts.  Took it in turns even.

I really cannot remember to this day whether we even laughed at the time.

What I do remember is Iron Man emerging from the photo booth with the sheet still over his head and me making a comment that he looked like a ghost.

On reflection not only did he look like a ghost but we were also doing this in full view of the Sunday shoppers in the local Sainsbury.

We saw nothing wrong with this and I can remember just feeling frustrated when the photos dropped down the chute and The Kid was peering in from one corner looking a bit scared.  She was also sitting on the lap of a nutter wearing a sheet over their head.

I would share these pictures but their whereabouts in unknown.  A wise man may hazard a guess that they are on the Sainsbury staff room notice board.

I think we must have attended a few counselling sessions after this because we somehow found ourselves in a camera shop where they took baby passport photos as part of their day job.

If my memory serves me well, I think Iron Man and I probably made reference to the fact that we wish had known about this earlier.

Note the continued sense of humour by-pass.

Five years we had to live with that passport.

Silly Mummy.

Silly Daddy.

You know what I mean?

So I have to thank Bad Dadu for his wonderfully funny post and for the inspiration to sift through the Memory Box.

Do have a read of his post Come for the biscuits, stay for the friendship.  In fact, while you are there it’s probably worth reading a few posts as he is a really, really funny guy.

Maybe not whilst eating a ham sandwich though.

And if you are in further need of a smile, have a root through your old video footage.

You may not recognise yourself!

Nicky