Groundhog Day

Time flies when you're having fun. Or at least when every day seems a lot like the last.

Master M is now a tad over one month old, and during the past 2 weeks has stretched 3.2 cm to a whopping great 57.5 cm long, and added an arm-bending 500g to now be 4.73 kg - both still in the 50-75th percentile range. So doing quite nicely thank you very much.

He's also lost a lot of his acne (so he's once again the cutest baby on the block) but this is countered somewhat by the fact he's also lost most of his hair. We didn't realise till we looked back at some of his photos from when he was a wee (weee) whipper snapper - chalk that up as another reason to keep a blog. (How young can that male pattern baldness thingy come into play?)

He's also now officially; Michael Henry Watkins. Yup.. forms signed, sealed, delivered and ticked off by the family assistance women in the medicare office (where they oohh and ahhed just like everyone else as Master M slept blissfully away in dad's arms). He's now irreversibly locked into...
**The System**.


The downside of this is that, of course, he can be tracked for ever after and will never have any real privacy in this wonderful e-world of ours, and will surely be barcoded and microchipped before he's 20.

The upside is... the gummint give Mum and Dad the one-off plasma TV allowance! (i.e., A payment of over $4000 just for popping out a sprog - surely the biggest boost to JB Hi Fi's bottom line ever...) And then there is also the immunisation allowance (bummer, only a set of golf clubs/$300) and the child care tax offset (of another $4000, which is still a cupla grand in the bank/a new wave board for AB, next tax time).

All up, this boys a nice little earner.

Now of course much of the above is just one great big barrel of John Howard pork, but hey, thats whats great about democracy. They offer you (your own, lets face it) money. You say "thank you very much". Then you vote the bastards out anyway. (Surely if we sold democracy this way to, say, Iraq, the war would have been over years ago...)

The lad, of course, has no idea about any of this. All he wants is a(nother) drink. And hence to give Mistress P a little distraction from the Groundhog Day that is early motherhood, we've done some expressing and Master M has now suckled his first silicon nipple. No Pamela Anderson jokes please (though Mistress P is comparably pneumatic); we're talking bottle feeding here.

For dad this was quite an experience as Master M sucked down almost perfectly his weight-in-kg*165 /number-of-feeds-per-day amount. (i.e., about 100 ml). There certainly is an intimacy involved in the whole feeding process that you don't get any other way. Though admittedly, this feeling may change at 3am when he also smells of poo.

For mum though, its just a relief to have some of the shackles removed. Granted the bottle feed has only occurred once thus far, but the mere fact that it can be done is morale boosting enough, and dads been booked in for future duties.

Apart from feeding (and washing and changing and...) Mistress P has also spent her daytimes, now that AB is back at the salt mine, visiting and being visited by numerous people, mostly fellow mums. And one of the new highlights of the week is the parents club, which has now truly become mothers club as almost all the hangers-on (i.e., the hubbies) have been banished back to work.

And true to prophesied form, it has quickly become a hotbed of discussion about a) hubbies, and b) sex. Sometimes both at the same time. On the latter topic it appears that only some have had it and most haven't, but that half want it desperately and half (heres the hubby bit) are beating their betrothed off with the biggest stick they can lay hand to.

Then (for one member of the latter half community) the biggest conundrum of all raised its ugly head:
"His birthday is coming up - what do i do?!"
(...we checked the fine print - conjugal birthdays aren't actually in the marriage contract. No, seriously...)

So thats been the last week and a bit.

Bigger, longer, richer and with fewer zits. (Just don't mention the hair.)
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