4576/17505
I like to think I am an awesome hands-on father, but I think today was the first day of Phoebe’s life that I have taken sole control and been in charge of her care for 24 hours. She’s four months old tomorrow. So I am just as crappy as most dads after all. No hold on, I’ve checked, most dads have set the bar way lower than that. I am still storming it.
And I have been doing nearly my fair share overall. We’ve been trying to get the balance right. It’s tricky as we’re both self-employed and trying to write, but two hours on and two hours baby care hasn’t really been working - I have got nothing much done in writing terms beyond my blogs and Metro columns (I’ve hardly even played any snooker for goodness sake) and maybe the best option is for us to take it in turns. And as I had been out podcasting yesterday, today was my turn. And after waking up seemingly hourly through the short night (though largely due to my bladder rather than my child), I was up at 5.30 to cope with a happy and energetic baby. I don’t think anyone else in the world could wake me up this early by shouting gibberish and pissing themselves and expecting me to deal with it without me being annoyed, but somehow that bright early morning smile makes all of this OK. I am pretty certain she is an evil dwarf who has cast a magic spell on me. Nothing else makes sense.
I realised long before I had a baby that babies aren’t capable of loving their parents and that they are just parasites tricking us into thinking they love us so we will give them food and presents. But I think my particular parasite might have broken protocol and gone from pretending to love me to actually loving me. We had loads of fun today. You might think I am being an idiot and she’s tricked me good but I think it might be like the robot in Ex Machina who actually falls in love with the guy she is trying to trick (I assume, I only saw the first three quarters of that film).
I did the lot: took her to the doctor (all good), took her to a cafe, sang songs as we walked through the street (I ended up singing George Michael’s Faith, which she really liked, even if it’s not really appropriate material for a father/daughter singalong), fed her, bathed her and put her to bed. Stupidly I didn’t then go straight to sleep to catch up on missed zzzs, but I went to my attic to make some more Kickstarter reward T-shirts and then wasted more valuable sleeping time loading the first 30 designs on to the website. I hope one day someone will reassemble this collection to display in an art gallery, but for now they will scatter to the four winds. If you’re one of the 70 or so lucky winners then try and guess which one you might end up with. They will be randomly distributed. No dibs. Though clearly some are better than others. But even the ones that are better are only better in comparison.
