A Dad’s Day Alone With Baby

The unintentionally funny (and unfortunately true) story of one Dad’s day at home alone with his baby daughter.

I was trapped. I couldn’t move. There I was, literally pinned down on my couch. About half a metre out of my reach, arranged in a tidy and painfully tantalising semi-circle, lay my cell phone, my book, my magazine, and the television remote control. On my chest, snoring like an old farmyard dog, lay the cause of my temporary paralysis: Roxi, my eight-month-old baby daughter.

It had taken me the best part of 90 minutes to get her to sleep. I dared not wake her up again. And that meant sitting there, motionless, trapped beneath her small, snoozing figure until she decided to wake up. My only partner through this ordeal? Takalane Sesame… with the TV set to “Mute”.

Before my wife had abandoned me for a day of shopping, she’d left me with a list of instructions so detailed and so complicated that the timetable alone could probably have been used to help launch a major military operation:

09:00 – breakfast (three scoops cereal + 90ml formula)
09:15 – go for a walk around the block
09:25 – play with educational toys (instructions attached) And that was just the first half an hour. There were eight and a half more hours, spread across a baffling, seven-page itinerary.

Breakfast went okay. It would have gone better if I’d realised sooner that the recipe said “90ml” of formula and not “900ml”, but at least Roxi was still smiling. She smiled the whole way through our walk around the block, with the neighbours smiling back. By the time we returned home – at 09:24, bang on schedule – Roxi was giggling uncontrollably. And when I looked in the mirror above our couch, I found out why: I had a huge patch of Roxi’s breakfast smeared down my shirt. I changed the shirt, forcing an unscheduled alteration to the timetable that meant we’d have to skip past playing with the emotional toys, and go straight on to the next item… which was:

09:55 – make bottle (150ml formula); get R. to sleep – which sounds about a bajillion times easier than it actually is.

A full hour later, Roxi was still wide awake. I could tell she was tired (her eyes were red and she was crying her little lungs out), but she just was not interested in going to sleep. In desperation, I sat down on the couch, held Roxi tight to my chest, and started singing her Bob Marley songs. Miraculously, by the time I reached the second verse of “Buffalo Soldier” Roxi had dropped off to sleep. And there she lay for the next two hours. And there I lay for the next two hours.

By the time she woke up again, I had to throw our carefully pre-planned timetable in the trash. We muddled through lunch, making sure I didn’t end up accidentally wearing any, before heading out for an afternoon walk. Everywhere we went people smiled and told us how cute we were. Roxi was a babe magnet. We paraded around the neighbourhood, with Roxi happily sitting on my shoulders waving to all the neighbours.

But when we got home, her mood changed completely. In the last hour before my wife got home, Roxi crawled around moaning, groaning and pointing hopefully at the fridge. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. I really wished she could talk. When my wife got home, with shopping bags hanging off her like grapes off a Cape vineyard, Roxi was sitting next to the fridge crying at the top of her lungs. “What’s the matter with Roxi?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “She’s been like this for the whole afternoon.”
“Well, did you give her her afternoon bottle?”
“Um… no.”
“And what’s the timetable doing in the trash?”
While Roxi glugged down the contents of her long-overdue afternoon bottle, and while my wife sat on the couch glaring at me, I tried to muster up the courage to tell her that I was really tired and that my back was really sore.

But I thought I’d better not…

10 Rules For Surviving Full-Day Babysitting Duty:

1. Routine is good. Don’t be messing with the routine.
2. Don’t forget the child’s feeding time.
3. Switch your phone to “Silent” during nap time.
4. When the baby’s asleep in its cot, try to get some sleep yourself. Oh, and in-between, be sure to check up on the baby every five minutes. (Yes, you are expected to be able to do two things at once.)
5. Don’t dress your daughter like a boy. You’ll have people coming up to you weeks later asking: “So, how’s your son doing? You know, he has such a strong, masculine face.”
6. And while you’re at it, don’t dress your son like a girl.
7. Remember that young babies cry when something’s wrong. Older babies cry when they don’t get their way.
8. Do not, under any circumstances, feed the baby sweets. A 10kg infant on a sugar high is about as unmanageable as a 100kg drunk guy at a sports match.
9. Never let the baby out of your sight. Babies are incredible fast movers (especially the crawling ones)… and they have the habit of falling off the things they climb up.
10. Do not – repeat, do not – complain to your wife at the end of the day about how much hard work it was. Remember, she does this every day.