Page 107 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Sorry, we’re babysitting for an hour while Joel goes to the dentist and Bianca has a physio appointment,’ Hayley says. ‘I was hoping she’d be gone by the time you woke up.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say. I’m not going to implode in Birdie’s presence. Well, I might if she keeps crying at this volume. Hayley stands up and starts pacing, bouncing and shushing in a rhythmic way.

Birdie is not enjoying any of it.

I sit on the couch and watch Hayley pacing.

‘There’s a position you can hold babies in that makes them stop crying,’ she says after a minute. ‘I heard a girl at work talking about it.’

‘A position?’ I repeat. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

‘Can you look it up?’

‘What am I searching exactly?’

‘Doctor’s one magic trick position to stop baby crying. Something like that.’

‘That sounds like a scam headline that I’ll click on and then they’ll somehow have my bank details.’

‘Just type it in!’ Hayley sounds like a woman on the edge.

I search it, and she’s right, there is a video of a man weirdly lying a baby face down along his forearm.

‘This baby looks smaller than Birdie, you have to hold her on your arm,’ I say.

‘Doesn’t matter, just show me,’ Hayley says. Her tolerance for baby crying is lower than mine. And mine is pretty low.

She holds Birdie in the magic-trick position, and it seems to both enrage her and give her more power. She sobs and screams and flings herself around.

‘Should we call the mums?’ I say.

‘No,’ Hayley says. ‘Absolutely not.’

She’s right. They’d never let us live it down.

‘Can you hold her for a sec?’ Hayley says, after a few more shushing and jiggling laps of the room.

‘No,’ I say.

‘Please. I just need to get Luke.’

‘Where is he?’

‘It was his idea to babysit so he better be here somewhere.’

‘Okay. Fine. I’ll hold her.’

Hayley passes her into my arms. ‘Is her neck still an issue?’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Does she still have a floppy neck?’ This is all I know about babies, really, that their heads are too big for their necks, and can snap. Or, not snap, but their heads need to be supported. And there’s a soft spot too, on the top of their head. Everything above the shoulders is risky, basically.

‘No, she’s okay, she’s not a newborn anymore.’

‘Oh good.’

‘But you still need to, like, support her body.’