Notes on having a baby

I find it extraordinary that you need to pass a test to drive a car, but nothing to have and raise a baby. There should be exams!

For the baby, the transition from womb to world is as great as sea creatures evolving into land creatures – except it takes hours rather than millions of years.

A newborn baby is like a new computer without any applications or programmes. It's up to the parents, to a certain extent, to load what information they feel is best onto it.

Like in The Truman Show, she doesn't know for sure she's being watched, photographed and videoed virtually constantly by a multitude of people, but she may have a vague idea something's afoot.

As a baby she used to often look in the middle distance. After she was upset she used to lash out at something. Her eyes seemed to follow something invisible (to us) around the room. Babies can see things, good and bad things like angels and devils, perhaps, that, by the time it comes for them to talk, they have forgotten all about.

Breast milk for a baby is like a drug! It's like blood for a vampire! When the mother even just starts thinking of her baby… her breasts start getting hard and she produces milk. My only (crude) analogy with men is them thinking of a naked woman and getting an erection.

Crying and feeding is what she's really passionate about; everything else just seems to be filling in time between screams and feeds.

I had a great idea for a hovercraft buggy which hovers a few inches above the ground.

An inevitable thing we end up doing when having a baby is guessing what the little thing is going to grow up to be. Every little action the baby does inspires the parents (and grandparents) to fantasise about possible future abilities or careers. The baby starts walking early: he's going to be an athlete! The baby likes dressing Barbie dolls: she's going to be a fashion designer! The baby talks early: she's going to be a linguist! The baby likes looking at planes: he's going to be a pilot! The baby likes books: she's going to be a famous writer! The baby likes examining things: he's going to be a forensic scientist!

We all want our children to be special, and of course they are, but we want them to exceed at something, be better than other people, have better jobs and earn more money than we did. We try to put it to the back of our minds that they're probably going to end up living in Bromley, working in office admin on £14K a year.