Yesterday we went to Southampton and bought her her first pair of shoes. They’re dead cute (size 2-1/2 G) and pink, with a tiny little box and everything. We got them in the Clark’s concession within Mothercare and as a nice touch they even give you a Polariod picture of your little treasure with her first pair of shoes on.

Being naturally cynical, I assumed this would be an extra £2.50 at the till, but apparently it is gratis. Twenty quid for the shoes, mind you, but that’s by-the-by.

I think it’s mostly down to proportions. As an example, when babies are born their eyes and brains are a much larger percentage of their final, adult, size than the rest of their bodies. As a result, nature needs to make a baby’s head much larger in proportion to their bodies than that of an adult.

Here’s a demonstration: lift one of your arms above your head and notice where the fold of your elbow is. I’m guessing it will be slightly above the top of your head. With Lucy, however, do the same thing and the fold of her elbow barely passes the top of her ears.

I imagine that’s probably not the only reason, but when she looks this cute, do we really need to know why?

I giggled at how funny this wide smile was when hidden by the teat, which made her chuckle a big, wide chuckle. That made me laugh more. Which made Lucy laugh a proper laugh. Which was funny because she was still sucking on the bottle. So I laughed.

I laughed so hard that it shook Lucy. This made her giggle really loudly with a massive smile on her face, which caused me to laugh some more, and thus we entered a giggle loop.

We went on like this for about five minutes, Lucy and myself both in fits of giggles, each one causing the other to keep going. At the same time, though, Lucy was desperate for a bottle, which meant she was still trying to laugh and put the bottle back in her mouth at the same time. More entertainment.

* The phrase “giggle loop” needs to be credited to Jeff from Coupling.

She’s also at the age, though, where she can enjoy “rough” play: i.e. when Daddy is rolling her around on the floor or the furniture, but she’s actually in no danger of any injury. Stuff like:

1. “Throwing” her onto the sofa: I pick her up and hold her tightly with her back to the sofa and then shouting “boof” as I bump her into the cushions.
2. Rolling her over from her front to lying on her back: that’s dead easy to do, just make sure her head doesn’t flop about and she’s happy. Bonus points if you follow that up immediately by “chomping” loudly on her tummy. It’s too hard to do flip from back to front though, because there’s a chance her arms get twisted up.
3. Rolling onto the furniture: again, dead easy. She likes to stand holding onto the sofa with both arms holding onto the seat part for support. Kneel behind and to her left, with my left arm across her front, holding on to her right shoulder. Right hand under her bum and 1…. 2….. 3…. lift! Pick her up and as you do that, roll her right shoulder onto the sofa. Loves it.

But the joy of watching this ability to clamber around also comes a price: Lucy may not get hurt in all of this, but Daddy can.

One of her favourite things to do is crawl over to Daddy and try to stand up. Now the only thing handy to use as a support is Daddy himself, and if Daddy has shorts on, that means Lucy pulls herself upright using my leg-hairs for stability.

Other times when I’ve “taken one for the team”, Burnett-style include:

1. Thumbs and/or fingers in the eyes (several times).
2. With me on my back and Lucy lying on top of me, she’s held open my mouth at the sides with her thumbs (which hurts) and (unintentionally) dribbled directly into my mouth. That’s horrible because you can see it coming, but can’t do anything about it.
3. See (2), but replace the word “dribbled” with the words “been sick”.
4. Several solid kicks in the crown jewels. As she develops her leg muscles through walking, these become rapidly more painful.
5. A couple of solid head-butts to the nose.
6. Again, with Daddy lying on the floor Lucy was behind my head and decided to stand up, pulling herself upright with whatever convenient hand-hold was near. That’s my nostrils then: at the time I thought that hurt a lot…
7. … until she did it again a couple of weeks later, but this time also managed to scratch the inside of my nose with a fingernail – enough to cause a nosebleed. Now that one hurt.

Good grief, being a Dad is fun.

Katrina was changing her nappy, went into the bathroom next door to get some water for her, then turned round to find a curious-looking head poking round the door wondering what she was doing. It’s now time for the stair gates I guess…

In other news, she also started clapping today. Again, no real warning, just a sudden desire to wake up one morning with coordination substantially improved since the previous evening. It’s like she goes to bed pondering these things, then wakes up the next day to try out her new theory.

Obviously we are now encouraging her to do more of this stuff, so every opportunity it’s "Can Lucy clap her hands?". Of course she can.

Now she’s starting to move herself, she’s begun sleeping in a position which I think is reflective of the fact about 10% of her DNA is snail. Somehow she can turn herself from back to front (which is de rigeuer for a baby her age) and then wriggle her knees up to her chest, tucking in the elbows and putting her head on her hands. As I found out today she can do all this with hardly a brushing of the bed sheets.

What you’re left with is a curled-up baby with her bum in the air looking for all like world like a snail in profile. Because she’s lying on her front though, she’s dribbling onto the bedding, which means that as she moves around the cot, there’s a distinct trail of baby drool left wherever she’s been.

As I say, part baby, part owl, part snail.

We went out on Friday and bought a high chair, got home and eagerly began to assemble it. Luckily I’m the sort of dullard who reads the instructions completely before assembly and discovered at an early stage we were two bolts short. It was too late to pop back to the shop, so first thing Saturday morning I went and picked-up a replacement. That went together much better and Lucy’s first lunchtime of solids commenced.

She took the food surprisingly well – the independent little thing wanted to feed herself with the spoon, which I guess is a good thing. She seemed to enjoy it, but pulled some really funny faces. We began with the standard first food of pureed potato. Not too much, and nothing complicated, but it’s a recommended place to start. Obviously there was food everywhere, but when you’re expecting that it’s not really a problem.

All seemed OK, so we did the same for tea that evening. Unfortunately by bedtime she had developed a rash, which by midnight has manifested itself into swelling around the face. After a couple of calls to NHS Direct and the emergency doctor, we decided to stay awake and keep an eye on her for a while. By morning things weren’t any worse, but they weren’t any better either, so we went to the Southampton walk-in centre for some advice.

We saw a very nice GP whose best suggestion at the cause of the problem was what we’d already had a fairly good inclination of: Lucy is allergic to cow’s milk. When pureeing the potato, we added a small amount of milk to smooth things out and this appears to have triggered something. We haven’t had this officially confirmed yet, but it’s a fairly likely culprit.

Lucy, however, has been an absolute angel. She doesn’t seem to have noticed any of the problems or extra fuss over her recently and has been going about her usual business as a baby quite happily. Her demeanour hasn’t changed at all and appears to be oblivious to what’s going on around her.

One thing which regularly grabs her attention for significant lengths of time is the clown letter-shapes we’ve stuck on her door.

For some reason, she will rest on my shoulder, staring at them. Occasionally, she will make a grab towards them. Now they’re quite nicely made and slightly unusual, but surely everything for a small baby is unusual? Sometimes I wonder why, but at others I am thankful for them: it usually distracts her from crying when she needs feeding for long enough to get a bottle made up.

Partly because it looked really comfortable and partly because it would be good for more than 6 months, we chose the Britax First Class Si Ultra car seat for Lucy. It’s a "group 0+1" unit, which means it’s suitable for babies from birth to 18kg, which is about 4 years of age. It has a "newborn insert", which is basically a lump of padding which stops little ones (i.e little 7lb babies) rattling around underneath the harness, even when fully-tightened.

Now that she’s passed the 5.5kg stage we’ve removed the newborn insert, which now means she looks lost in the car seat. It’s not going to be long before I’m adjusting it again though…

Due to inclement weather, I went along to baby clinic with Katrina and Lucy today. Despite several disappointments in the past (actually, make that disappointments every time we’ve seen one), today was really good. The clinic woman was very pleasant, seemed to show a genuine interest in children (surely that’s a requirement to joining up?), and offered useful advice without being downright condescending.

My main beef with the health visitor people is that they appeared to be simply passing-off old wives’ tales as medical advice. Take for example the large patch of dry skin across Lucy’s forehead during weeks 3 to 6. It came up really quite nasty-looking, but was nothing serious – only really a cosmetic issue because it didn’t bother her in the slightest. You would assume a reasonably common complaint with a tried-and-tested solution. Apparently not.

The first advice we were given was from a midwife, who suggested the use of olive oil. Being parents for less than three weeks, we dutifully basted our daughter twice a day. That is, until the health visitor suggested we just use plain water. OK, let’s try that. That lasted a week, then another health visitor suggested the use of baby lotion. Independently, Katrina spoke to one of her friends (another health visitor), who recommended E45 cream. Four people, four different solutions. We ended up using baby lotion and it cleared, but whether that was simply due to clearing itself in the goodness of time or the BL actually helped we will never know.

The check today went well and all is good: a 5.30kg (11lb 11oz) baby who’s giggling, smiling, and holding her head up fine.

By the way, it’s going to be raining tomorrow – the health visitor told us. She saw some cows lying down in a field this morning.