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Our baby is taking after her mother in almost every way, which is only a good thing. Like her mum she is long-limbed and is, I guess, going to be tall. Perhaps we will next have a short, stocky boy and if so I can only pass on my apologies to him in advance. Your only way out of that disaster is to be funny and I wouldn’t wish that hell on anyone.
But Phoebe has grown so much in the ten weeks she’s been around. She’s been sleeping in a Moses basket (which just seems to be asking for trouble - look what happened with the original Moses basket). When she was born she was just about half the length of the basket, but already her feet touch the bottom and her head grazes the top and it’s time to upgrade to a new bed. She has a full-size cot in her room, but for now we want her to sleep in the same room as us, so just in case we hadn’t spent enough money already we had to buy an intermediary cot this week. Which meant I had to build it/put together the flatpack furniture.
Fatherhood hasn’t turned me from a DIY dunce to a handyman, but necessity is the mother of constructing flatpack furniture and I have certainly become more practical than before. You’re faced with lots of challenges and not much time as a dad and so you just have to get on with stuff. And I am doing better at this sort of thing than I did in the past when time was my own and I had little impetus to change. After the debacle of putting together the bed for the nursery and the other cot, today’s rather more complicated construction went off with almost no hitch. I did put all four sides together without realising that would mean I couldn’t slide in the bottom, but that just meant undoing four screws and trying again. I hardly even got grumpy with my wife. And the cot swings like it’s meant to, and the mechanism that prevents it swinging works. It’s slightly terrifying as it feels like not all that much is holding it up and all responsibility for the stability of the crib ends with me. But Phoebe was grumpy in her tiny Moses basket (perhaps worried we were going to launch her downstream) and immediately settled down and went to sleep in the cot. I am smashing it as a dad. As long as Phoebe meets no other men she will continue to think that I am the bee’s-knees.
Monmouth tonight and a late surge in tickets saw over 125 in. It’s a great theatre - the oldest working theatre in Wales (as I joked “it’s over 5 years oldâ€), run by enthusiastic staff and a fitting and enjoyable end to two months of fairly full on gigging. I realised with excitement that I only have one tour show between now and the 7th May. So although it was a long drive home, it was good to be going home for a proper long stint. Thanks to all those of you who’ve come to the tour so far - less than
20 chances to see the show now, including
the DVD record at the Bloomsbury on 15th May. That’s selling well, but it would be ace to sell it out and it’s always a fun night. Or if you’re camera shy or having an affair then you can see the show on the 14th at the Bloomsbury, when it’s not being filmed.
