A lucky break

I’ve been travelling a lot with work recently, which is good from a work point of view but tough from a family point of view. I was in New York for a fair bit of last week, and it was doubtless sod’s law that my departure coincided with Oscar getting his first serious temperature.

I’m sure that more seasoned parents would deal with a 40 degree temperature in their stride, but the first time it’s scary. In O’s case it came on completely without warning: one hour he was seemingly completely fine, and the next we was burning up and lolling about, all limp and sleepy. The following day I had to fly off and my wife was left to hold the fort. The first night was hell, I’m told (and I was told, as I arrived at JFK at 9pm, which was 2am in the UK – when C called me to say she was having a hell of a time – I think she just wanted to call someone and the only person who’d be up at 2am was me!)

Anyhoo he was all better by the time I returned on Friday, although by this time both C and I were coming down with something. Sheesh!

So what’s the lucky break?

Well, I was due off again (to Stockholm this time) on Sunday morning – so just 48 hours in the UK – and the luck break was that in that period O decided to do his first unassisted standing-up thing. Twice!

The little chap is growing and changing so fast that with the period of heavy travelling I’ve been doing, I’ve been really worried I would miss out on something really cool. I’ve heard so many stories of people being told on the phone, or when they got home from work – “oh, you’ll never guess, little X took his first step/spoke his first word/teased his first cat/etc today.” So there’s at least one small milestone I haven’t missed out on!