So, this week, I accidentally called a woman’s baby: ‘Hagrid’.
To explain…when I very first posted about this parenting stuff, I suggested that all babies are indistinguishable and that they all look like Ross Kemp. (What I actually said was that all babies look like one of the Mitchell brothers.. if you’ve got an ugly baby.. its Phil).
Anyway, after eight months I’ve started to be able to distinguish between the babies at our drop-in health clinic. Only thing is, I don’t know their names.. So, just in my head, I use nicknames..
There’s one baby that’s always chewing on his mum’s clothes, I call him ‘The Moth’, there’s one kid that looks a bit like Jeff Goldblum who I call ‘Jeff’. And, there’s another that, for some bizarre reason, is always dressed in army camouflage trousers.. I call him ‘Delta Force’.. you get the general idea.
The thing is, there is one supremely hairy baby who I got into the habit of thinking of as ‘Hagrid’. (I’m not proud of it).
Anyway, as I walked in this week, in a sleep deprived state, saying hello to everybody, I accidentally blurted “hey Hagrid”..
Shit.
The mum just stared at me.. I did try get and away with it by saying “Oh, er.. I call him Hagrid, y’know just because he’s such a big strapping lad”.
Hagrid’s mum raised an eyebrow:
“Actually, ..she’s a girl.”
Oh, for f*cks sake.
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Man vs Baby’s Matt Coyne is from Sheffield, South Yorkshire. In September 2015, Matt’s life was turned upside down by the arrival of his son Charlie. After three months of parenthood, he logged on to social media and wrote a viral post about his experience of having to live with ‘a furious, sleep-murdering, unstable and incontinent, breasts-obsessed midget lodger’.
Following this, Matt created Man vs Baby, which now has over 360,000 followers. And has written two Sunday Times bestselling books based on his parental triumphs and disasters, the first entitled: ‘Dummy’ and the second ‘Man vs Toddler’.
He has also written for The Guardian, The Telegraph and GQ Magazine.
Matt lives in Sheffield with his son Charlie, his partner Lyndsay and a Jack Russell terrier with ‘issues’ called Eddie.
