Ok, I admit it, we've bribed her to stop crying...


There's so much to look at, she's gone cross-eyed. But frankly we can cope with a bit of permanent ocular deformity as long as she's quiet.

We took Amelie across town yesterday evening to see her Great Aunt & Uncle. They seemed to appreciate the visit, mainly because they needed some coaching on how to spell her name. They'd plumped for 'Aemilie' on the card they gave us, which personally I think is quite inventive. And with five days to go before we register the birth, we could still go for that. In the end Lisa spelt it out to them three times, they wrote it down, repeated it back to us, and finally got it right. At which point Lisa's Aunt said "So how do you pronounce it?". Sometimes I just wish we'd called her Susan.

But having established the name of our baby, Lisa's Aunt began reminiscing about the good old days when Lisa was small. She told me with great fondness of the time she'd bent down to pick up her little niece, only for Lisa to poke her in the eye, scratch the lens, and land her in hospital. She said she'd never forgotten it. I said I'm not surprised.

We left there after an hour with a generous gift of cash for Amelie, so with the sound of crying still ringing in our ears, we decided to head straight to Toys R Us for a bit of retail therapy. Amelie already has more stuff than I do, but if there's one thing she was lacking, it's a home gym shaped like a squashed snail. At least that's what I thought when we bought it. I've since discovered it's an adorable soft dragonfly plush mat with satin wings. It includes "crinkle, rattle, jingle and music features to assist baby's sensory development", which is obviously marvellous, but mainly we just want to distract the girl long enough for her to forget what she's crying about.