Moments when time stands still
TIME does curious things when you have a newborn baby.
It’s as though it is continuously warping, sometimes travelling at lightspeed, others at snail’s pace, and often at both simultaneously.
A hungry scream can feel like it goes on for days, when in fact it’s only been a couple of minutes.
The proximity between what I can only assume are the loudest set of lungs in Nottingham and my ear canal is presumably to blame for that.
How such a tiny human makes such an enormous noise I have no idea, but I can say with full confidence that there is nothing at all wrong with her vocal cords.
At other points hours gallop. These are usually when you need a bit of leeway, like when she’s finally gone to sleep and you’ve got to clear up the carnage from when she was awake.
So many times I’ve thought ‘but you’ve only just gone to sleep’, only to check my watch and find three hours have passed and I still haven’t got round to wiping that little patch of sick off my trousers.
I took her for a walk in a baby sling the other day and happened upon a game of cricket at the park, so I leant on a lamp post for a bit and we watched cricket together.
As I was explaining some of the finer nuances of fielding positions to her - she already being well briefed on the fundamentals - I was getting lots of friendly hellos from passersby, and one couple literally nudged each other and pointed.
About half an hour later - or half a day later, I can’t really be sure - I realised the flies on my trousers had been completely and conspicuously undone the entire time I’d been out of the house.
I guess I’ll never know how many of the smiley sympathetic faces were because I was explaining the silly mid-off position to a cute baby, and how many were in pity that a grown man was so tired he could barely dress himself properly.
For all the speeding up and slowing down, what I’ve longed for most is the ability to stop time altogether.
Interlaced into the mayhem, and mired in the fug of sleep deprivation, are those amazing moments you just never want to end.
It’s not the big lifeachievement type of events that get me, but the minutiae, those tiny details that in the big scheme of things are irrelevant, but in the moment can stop you in your tracks.
Those are the times you just want to drink it in, and remember every detail.
Those are the bits I’ll look back on in 30 years, as I wonder where the time went.