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Back to the family with a bump and my teething son waking me up at 3.30am and that was pretty much the start to my day. Got the kids through breakfast alone and then my wife woke up and I went back to bed. This is what I’ve been missing.
But I was glad to be back amongst my tiny tribe. The baby was hard work, but the eldest was mainly just all kinds of fun today and continues to amaze me with her progress. We sat together as she filled in a book where she was writing numbers (on top of diagrams of numbers, but still) and later we found an old brick in the garden and buried it together. She declared that a daddy brick and wondered where the mummy and Phoebe and Ernie bricks were. Which was sweet. If she hadn’t just disposed of the corpse of the daddy brick under some leaves.
My son is crawling like a mini commando now and trying to grab everything and eat it. How did the human race ever survive this far with these suicidal babies. He’s struggling a bit with the pain of teeth breaking through skin (another thing that shows if God exists that He is a total fucker - what an exquisite detail of unnecessary torture that was, no wonder he was happy to see His son nailed up) so he’s not quite as smily as usual.
My wife was out tonight with friends so I had to do their dinner and bed and bath times alone too, which I like to pretend to my wife is pimpsy, but it’s even easier than that. No, it’s a tough job, especially with a crying infant. And father.
But I did it and neither of them died and though it did mean leaving the three year old watching telly as I put the baby to bed (and always returning to find her standing somewhere that she shouldn’t be, looking a bit guilty) I still enjoyed it.
Tonight Phoebe wanted to go into Ernie’s room so she could appear on his baby monitor. Having just got him to sleep I was reluctant to risk it, but she was insistent. And then wanted to watch me go in and then for me to watch her go in. I indulged her this far. She would have carried on all night.
I like to indulge her though. I know you’re not meant to. But then again, I am not entirely clear why not. She wants to live life and try stuff out and experience things. Having failed so many times to live in the moment, I don’t want to pass on my curse to her.
Tonight we read
Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman (which unbelievably might be the first Neil Gaiman book I’ve ever read). It was weird and fun and my daughter had questions. This is all good.
And she went to sleep straight away too.
A night in, even if on my own, was very welcome. I had a couple of beers and reflected on how pimpsy parenthood is. But there’s still two and a half hours of the day to go and a near certainty that my boy will wake up in the middle of the night.
But this, I realise, almost too late, is what life is about.
As long as you’re a bit tipsy.
