Sage

Before long, my eldest daughter will start school and my youngest daughter will start nursery. It feels like a landmark. They're not babies anymore. I'm not suggesting that we've finished parenting, but I think I've probably dragged this blog out for as long as I can get away with now. So I'm going to stop it. But before I do, I'm going to indulge my enduring dream of spouting pretentious wisdom, under the guise of imparting profound advice to be enjoyed in the future by my daughters.

Oh, how useful what follows will inevitably be to them. And how impressed by me you'll all be in the meantime. You'll nod slowly and go, "Hmmm," reassured and somehow invigorated by how bloody sage I am.

Ahem. Anyway:

Nothing is simple

There is a natural inclination in all people to see things in black and white; to see them as being straightforward: easily defined and in obedience of simple rules. 'Easily' is the key word here: water naturally flows along the path of least resistance, and humans naturally want their lives - including the ways they think about things - to be easy. So we reduce the infinite complexities of things down to a set of rules we can stick to, in the hope that the world we live in will oblige us by sticking to the same rules.

This is all my own amateurish conjecture, by the way. I've got no proof of any of this. I'm basing it on a simplistic reduction of things down to a set of rules. So it's either a brazenly hypocritical paradox or ironic genius.

The trouble arises when the world around us doesn't oblige, because it's not as straightforward as we want it to be. This creates insecurity, tension and conflict. Some people are so invested in their blinkered views that they get really angry when the subjects of their assumptions contradict them. This is why people whose assumption that their race is superior to another is brought into question overcompensate by treating the other race with violent or oppressive disdain. It's why companies with a lot of money invested in exhausting fossil fuels or producing carbon emissions spend a lot of money denying the existence of climate change, and on irresponsibly convincing others of this denial. And it's why people who have taken for granted their right to a comfortable existence are happy to watch their government scapegoat the most vulnerable members of their society when their economic wellbeing is under threat.

There is little you can do to prevent these tendencies in others. But you can do your bit by always thinking critically; always questioning your assumptions and being prepared to adapt them. This is easier if you avoid investing too much in your assumptions, financially, emotionally or otherwise. Stay on your toes. You may even find that others will be inspired to follow your lead. but most of them probably won't. Life's not that simple.


Nobody really knows what they're doing

Sometimes I get a bit down. Like a lot of people, I let things like self-doubt, paranoia and pride cause me to question my self worth, in relation to my perception of the worth of people around me. So, basically, I see other people as being really good at stuff and it makes me feel like I'm really bad at stuff in comparison. On particularly bad days, this perception is magnified to the point where I feel isolated in a psychological mire of incompetence. I'm the only one in my mire; all the other people are safely stationed on solid, self-assured terrain, getting on happily with their easy lives. And it makes me feel quite unimpressed with myself. It makes me sad.

But here's the thing: on good days I can tell that most other people have bad days too. Pretty much everyone gets a go in the mire. But there's an unspoken convention that you have to guard this fact from discovery; you must - according to this convention - always appear self-assured; you must never let anyone know you're anything but confident; you must let them feel isolated in their own, pathetic mire.

And it strikes me that this is silly. Because we're all left feeling isolated by an insecurity we all feel.

I hope you never have a bad day. But, realistically, you probably will. And when you do, be honest about it. It might help someone else who's having a bad day to feel better. And remember that, no matter how it might seem, you're not the only one. It might help you to feel better.

Nothing is really that important

You are one of over 7 billion people on the planet; one of eight or nine planets in the solar system (depending on how you feel about Pluto), the star at the centre of which is one of an estimated 400 billion in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way, in turn, is one of around 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. And don't forget that there might be an infinite number of universes.

So, in the grand scheme of things. that spot on the end of your nose doesn't matter as much as it might seem to. Try not to worry unduly about the petty squabble you had with your friend yesterday, or the latest Arsenal score*.

If all of this sounds a bit depressing, then you have misunderstood me. Or rather, I have failed to explain my point properly. When I feel stressed or anxious about something, I find nothing more comforting than the sense of perspective I gain from the thought process outlined above. Nothing quite takes the pressure off like an awareness of how utterly insignificant you are.

Just do what you want, really

So far, we have established that there are no rules, that even if there were nobody really knows what they are, and that even if they did it wouldn't really matter anyway. The logical conclusion of all this is that you should feel liberated to trust your own judgement in acting pretty much as you please. The caveat is that your judgement has to be good, and tempered by the knowledge that you may at any moment be forced to change the assumptions upon which your judgement is based. So tread carefully with this, and be realistic about consequences. But consequence is not the same thing as prohibition.

So if, for example, your boss at work asks you to do something you don't want to, then you simply do not have to do it. But keep in mind that you might lose your job. That might be okay, but if, say, you have children dependent on your income, this increases your moral incentive to keep your job. But it is still your decision. Basically we're talking about free will, here. It's up to you whether your reluctance to perform your boss' task outweighs the necessity to feed your children, although personally I'd go for the more conventional response to that dilemma.

Which brings me onto the second caveat: don't cause harm to other people in the course of doing what you want. Apart from being a basic tenet of being a decent person, this principle has more pragmatic applications too, which relate to my final suggestion...

Be nice

Bit of controversy here: I don't believe that altruism is necessary to a peaceful society. For the same reason that a state which distributed assets and services fairly would have no need for philanthropy, people shouldn't need to make any leap of faith - spiritual or otherwise - to be convinced of the need to treat other people well.

Rather, my slightly cynical interpretation of human nature leads me to the conclusion that people are more likely to do something for you if you do something for them. I describe this as cynicism but, actually, I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of. It's really just bartering, and I can't help feeling that if everybody saw the world this way then greed and selfishness would quickly become a lot less profitable.

If you do feel compelled to help others out of the goodness of your heart, then well done. Carry on. But in the more likely event that - as a human - you don't, help others because it serves your ego to be thought of as someone who helps others, or because it comforts you to know that you've increased the likelihood of them helping you in the future. The person you help will still have been helped, whatever your motive.

For example: if I'm brutally honest, I've shared all this profound advice with you mainly in the hope that others will nod slowly and go, "Hmmm," reassured and somehow invigorated by how bloody sage I am. But that doesn't mean it's not profound advice.

Thanks for listening.

*Actually, the latest Arsenal score is one of the most important things in the universe. But this is the exception that proves the rule.

Schools of thought

I was going to pack all this blog nonsense in. I was worried that I'd dried up a bit, so I was going to nip myself in the bud. I had just been putting off my final masterpiece post (masterpost?), not because I couldn't face the end, if I'm honest, but because I wasn't sufficiently confident that it would be masterful.

But hallelujahs and jubilations: I can defer this dilemma for a bit longer, because there has been a development! Like many parents of four year-olds across the land last week, we were informed by the council which school was to be graced by the presence of our child (the other parents were informed about their own children, you understand; not ours). This revelation - as well as its obvious implications for my eldest daughter - has taught me more about myself than I could have imagined.

A few months ago we conducted a logistically quite challenging tour of local primary schools in a diligent attempt to find the perfect place of learning for our firstborn. While we value intelligence, our main concern was always for the environment in which it is nurtured. Would our daughter be comfortable and happy there? Eventually, and not without some fierce debate, we settled upon our three preferences. Our third choice was a charming little village school, with classrooms inventively fashioned from old Victorian offices and a playing field down an inappropriately steep slope. It had its romantic merits, but was a bit rough around the edges.

Our second preference was another small, village affair. Small classes and clearly passionate teachers, shepherded by a refreshingly personable headteacher whose love of the outdoors served only to complement an impressively open-plan, modern building whose quality of light would leave even George Clarke at a loss for which walls to knock through. But it was very religious. I am very much not very religious. Neither is my wife.

Our number one educational establishment was a larger school, most similar of the three to the one I went to, many moons hence. Its academic record was very impressive but, more importantly, it seemed to foster a culture centred around children's all-round development. Despite the potentially overwhelming size of its population, this was a school which really cared about each pupil fulfilling their potential, in whatever direction that took. I felt at home there, and was confident that my daughter would. The parking provision was bloody awful though.

Although we live just outside the standard catchment area of our first choice school, it is still comfortably the closest of the three to our house. So I relaxed my way through the lengthy wait to discover our daughter's educational fate, confident that we would get our way.

The wait ended a few days ago, and it seems my confidence was somewhat misplaced. Our daughter has been offered a place at the religious school. It was only at the moment of discovery that I realised how much my complacency had screened my fear of this outcome. I was struck by profound disappointment. Why couldn't she go to the closest school? We almost certainly did more research than parents who had got their way, I arbitrarily decided; we should be rewarded for our efforts. Could I live with sending my child each day to a place which works on an assumption I believe to be wrong?

After 24 hours or so of this outraged pomposity, a wave of acceptance washed unexpectedly over me. My parents are religious and I love them; I even have regular and rational conversations with them, on a variety of subjects. I have friends and colleagues whose beliefs span a wide range of deities, all without jeopardising my respect or affection for them. I was brought up in a religious household, attended Sunday school once a week and dutifully sang hymns in school assembly every day, yet I have successfully made up my own mind about all this business.

And that's the crux of it: my issue with religion is that it perpetuates itself through the assumed inheritance by children of their parents' beliefs. Well, I'm proof that this is by no means always the case. Besides which, I'd be a hypocrite to enforce atheism upon my own offspring. This is why I want them to draw their own conclusions as I have mine. And I can hardly claim to be encouraging this if I start censoring their influences. So I'm focussing on the lovely, open-plan building with its big windows and the open-minded headteacher and the obvious, friendly enthusiasm of the staff.

And I'm kind of looking forward to it.

Who's the Daddy?

It's been exactly 1,410 days since I became a father. This completely arbitrary milestone has given me cause to reflect upon the effect parenthood has had on me. I can think of no other occurrence in someone's life that has such an impact on the way they live it - either for practical or philosophical reasons - and I'm certainly no different.

The practical alterations to my lifestyle (e.g. forgetting what the inside of a pub looks like) tend to be borne of necessity, and may last only as long as the circumstances that require them. But there are other differences in me which, I think, are entrenched. I'm a new man. Here are some examples:

Crying

The list of films I can't watch without my eyes leaking is an awful lot longer than it used to be. It was basically just It's a Wonderful Life before. Now it would be easier to document things that don't make me cry. Recent examples of things that do include Shrek, Pacific Rim (seriously), and that thing on the internet about the schoolboy who overcomes his stutter. When they clear Iranian airspace at the end of Argo: that set me off good and proper. That is a very tense film, to be fair. I hope I haven't spoilt it for anyone.

Also: absolutely anything depicting a child in jeopardy.

Exclamation marks

I used to be a strict advocate of the theory that an exclamation mark is the written equivalent of laughing at your own joke. I would tut smugly at the merest sight of such garish punctuation, with a vehemence I now reserve only for those who confuse 'lose' with 'loose'. Or 'their' with 'they're'. Or 'its' with 'it's'. There are loads, actually. But the point is, I am now entirely unperturbed by exclamation marks. I even use them myself on occasion, although I often put them in brackets, so I can reserve the right to have been doing so ironically, should the need arise.

I struggle to find a direct link between fatherhood and the softening in my attitude towards this or any other form of punctuation. But I am in no doubt that it, like my increased propensity to weeping, is a symptom of a softer, more sympathetic outlook upon life. It could be that being the father of two girls has encouraged me to engage more readily with my empathetic side. Or it could be the lack of sleep.

Either way, I must still insist that the use of more than one exclamation mark in a single instance is unforgivable. Even if you are a PE teacher(!)

Functional insomnia

Until she was about nine months old, our eldest daughter was really rubbish at sleeping. Then we got tough. A week of us just pretending she wasn't screaming like an angry demon with a stubbed toe in the next room, and she finally accepted that she'd need to learn to settle herself down. Boom. Problem solved.

And not before time. I had started to go a bit mad, fulfilling various cliches to do with being a confused and forgetful zombie. And things were an awful lot worse for my wife, whose share of the nightly burden had been greater. But now we could return to a sensible, coherent life, having bravely helped our daughter to overcome her issues.

Then we had another daughter. After several months of similar nocturnal problems with her, we reluctantly concluded that we would be unable to pursue a similar solution. Allowing her to scream it out would serve primarily to awaken her sister's hard-won, peaceful slumber. So, in desperation to keep our youngest quiet - thus preserving the success we had achieved with our eldest - we began bringing her into the comforting security of our bed. Here, she would settle happily and sleep as well as her sister. Unfortunately, her favoured position in our bed was a perpendicular one which enabled her to kick me and headbutt my wife throughout the night. Still no sleep for the grown-ups. Cliche zombie lifestyles were resumed.

Two years on, this situation has changed in no way whatsoever. Our youngest daughter still spends half of most nights in our bed, where we sacrifice our own rest and comfort so that she can enjoy both. We have only ourselves to blame. And yet, on reflection, we seem to have been surviving; living ostensibly normal lives by day. I have always been a person who values my sleep. If you had told me four years ago that I would play a significant role in raising two children, be vaguely competent at a mentally and physically demanding job, and do other things like shopping, decorating and writing an entertaining blog - all on just a few hours' sleep a night - my incredulity at your preposterousness would have known no bounds.

But here we are. I guess this is simply a good example of people being more adaptable than they think they are. Or more deluded than they think they are about how adaptable they are. I'm too tired to tell which.

Whatever the opposite of vanity is

Much as it pains me to say it, I used to be a bit vain. I should clarify that, in my considered view, there are two distinct forms of vanity: there are people with an unpleasantly high opinion of their own appearance; then there are people whose preoccupation with their appearance stems from the opposite - an obsessively low self-image. I was very much in the latter category. I would spend a lot of time looking in mirrors. Squeezing spots, sucking in my belly, that sort of thing.

Now, I don't really care. It's not that my opinion of my physical appearance has improved particularly (although my new jumper does seem to suit me quite nicely). It just doesn't seem very important. Mirrors occupy my eyes much less frequently. My choice of clothes occupies my thoughts less frequently. I now have a curious, burgeoning pride in my stomach's slightly convex nature.

Of course, this could very well be just a consequence of ageing: I'm in my mid-thirties now, so perhaps I'm learning to accept the limitations to my beauty now that the decline is increasingly inevitable. But I know people my age who go for runs! Even when nothing is chasing them! Draw your own conclusions(!)

I think this change in my priorities has more to do with time. I spend less of it looking in mirrors because I have less of it to spare, what with all the parenting.

Seriously though: you should see me in that jumper.

Courage

I had an argument with a man in a car park the other week. He had deemed putting his car in an actual parking space to be excessively inconvenient. So he had positioned it horizontally, a few yards behind mine. Unfortunately for him, he finished doing so just as I wanted to depart. In my car. A task made quite difficult by this man's selfish actions.

Unfortunately for him, I'm a Dad now. I deal with stuff. I step up. I have grown used to expressing my reservations about the inadvisable actions of others. So I politely explained to this gentleman why I felt that the inconvenience caused to me was not justified by the convenience he had awarded himself. He disagreed. In years gone by, I would never have been sufficiently courageous even to reach this point in negotiations, but the new me pressed home my point with assertive and incontrovertible reasoning.

As I conducted the awkward eleven-point turn necessary to get my car out around his, I reflected proudly that he was probably feeling quite guilty indeed by that point. It had been obvious from the way he walked away from me.

Who's the Daddy?

Repetition, repetition, repetition

It's been a while. Again. I think the reason I'm less prolific than was once the case is that, the longer my parenting experience continues, the fewer surprises it provides. If I were to describe it as thoroughly as I used to I would be at grave risk of subjecting you, my army of dedicated fans, to repetition. And nobody wants that. And nobody wants that.

Please don't infer that I'm unhappy about the predictable nature of my family life; children are big fans of routine and I'm something of a variety-phobe myself, if I'm honest. It's just that it doesn't make great reading. I could, for example, describe the horrors of the fever our youngest daughter has suffered for the past three nights, which has seen her temperature come within a sweat bead of 40 degrees celsius on each occasion. We've spent the early hours of the last two mornings plunging her hastily into a cold bath, in desperate and, mercifully, successful attempts to stave off hospital visits.

But my point was that this is not the first time I've detailed an ailment suffered by my youngest daughter. Her considerable abundance of qualities does not include her immune system. She's got a bit of a reputation for it. So no: I won't talk about that. She's been much better today actually, despite still suffering from the kind of rasping cough you'd expect from an ageing stoner. We'll see.

One development which is very new to us is the prospect of sending our eldest to school. She's not due to start for close to a year, but we must decide upon a shortlist of preferences for exactly where she starts within the next couple of months. What's curious is that nobody tells you this stuff. Without a conscientious nature and a helpful sister, this crucial requirement would have remained unknown to me. But fortunately I have a conscientious nature and a helpful sister, so I have spent a large amount of my recent spare time researching and phoning local schools. But there must be people who lack both of these advantages. How are the venues for their children's early learning decided? It's a sinister mystery. Anyway, I've sought advice from teachers and parents I know and I've made various appointments to be treated to guided tours of the more promising schools. I have behaved like a grown-up.

Tomorrow, I fear that this mask will slip. For the first of these appointments looms large, and I feel exposed and under-prepared. What do grown-up, prospective parents wear to school tours? What questions do they ask? Does it relieve or increase the awkwardness caused by the ridiculous, fledgling moustache they are sporting, if they explain that it's for charity? In theory, it should surely be the schools that feel a need to impress the parents, rather than vice versa. But we're told that places are at a premium, so the pressure's on.

I seek consolation in reminding myself that I have always claimed proximity, rather than ambition or attainment, as the primary consideration for primary school. But now the decision has advanced beyond the hypothetical, that conviction will be tested. Perhaps hidden pride is the exposure I'm really afraid of. We'll see.

As with all of these parental fears, we can at least take solace in the thought that experience will make this situation easier the second time around, when it's our youngest's turn. Thank goodness for repetition.

The stoics

Sometimes, I affectionately refer to my youngest daughter as 'Snuffles', based on the fact that, as a baby, she always, always had a cold. I suspect that most parents have these slightly embarrassing nicknames for their offspring. At least that's what I tell myself. I also tell myself that plenty of them are a lot worse than 'Snuffles', which has the added benefit of being quite accurate at the moment.

I spent a delightful morning with her yesterday. We really bonded with each other on the way around Asda, I felt. All was happiness and joy in the Youngest Child compartment of my brain. So imagine my dismay when, upon returning home from work yesterday evening, I found her sprawled helplessly on the sofa, drowning in a steamy lake of her own snot. She was not literally drowning, but the sense of alarm I expect you felt when you read that may just approach the heartbreak I experienced as I discovered my daughter's plight. She could barely breathe. Each violent sneeze provoked a panicked and tearful response in her. Her temperature has remained much higher than it has any right to be throughout the disrupted, uncomfortable, spluttery and mucusy night.

What is remarkable though is that, in spite of all this suffering, she has stoically retained her mischievously positive outlook on life. She woke up smiling this morning, imploring my wife and I to give her a tickle. Anything for a laugh. She's out now with her mum, buying dinner to make later for her Great Grandad. Admittedly, my wife will probably be doing the cooking, but just to contribute to such altruism in the face of her germ-based adversity is nothing short of heroic. And completely foreign to me.

I have, however, had to display some stoicism of my own this morning. I'm doing it right now, in fact - I'm only writing this as a distraction from my anguish. I have previously spoken at length about the troubles our eldest has had with separation anxiety when dropped at nursery. Usually my wife - who works from home and, frankly, is above me in our children's affection hierarchy - does the dropping. She understandably finds our daughter's distress quite distressing.

I have a day off work today so, to give my wife a break and to see whether the change in dynamic would help our daughter, I did the nursery run. I stayed with her for a little while, as my wife has taken to doing, to ease her in gently to her morning away from us. After half an hour though, my daughter had shown no sign of detaching herself from my side. As I finished reading what was quite an entertaining Bob the Builder book to her, one of the nursery nurses asked her if she'd like to go and play outside with her. After some desperate persuasion from me and every other adult in the room (whose collective concern for our situation was touching) she agreed to venture outside without me, but not before casting me one last, desperate and insecure glance. "Don't leeeeeeeaaaaave meeeeee," said her mournful eyes.

And then I left.

Another nursery nurse approached me with disconcerting urgency and informed me that my daughter was having the most delightful and carefree time in the garden, and that now would be my best chance to escape. (Escape? I was having fun!) I hovered indecisively by the back door, unsure whether to defy the advice I had just been given by going to bid my daughter farewell, when I was intercepted by yet another nursery nurse, who assured me that she would say goodbye on my behalf. The message was clear: it's better this way. They all seemed pretty sure, so I reluctantly took their advice and made my pitiful, cowardly exit.

But they didn't see the look in her eyes. I feel like I've betrayed her.

I'm no stoic. I think I might be the bad guy.

Crawkward

Bless me Blogger, for I have sinned. It's been two months since my last post.

Sorry about that. Bit of writer's block, or something. In fact, I think it's more to do with my altruistic desire to be relentlessly entertaining; to always provide new and original excitement. And the truth is, our parenting lives have been relatively stable recently. Not entirely without incident, but not sufficiently dramatic to awaken my sharing impulse.

Also, I read an article in the Guardian a while ago - one of those provocative opinion pieces designed to get people all riled up and generate furious debate in the comments section - bemoaning the phenomenon of 'sharenting': the practise of enriching the lives of others by flooding social media with evidence of your offspring's shenanigans. "Stop imposing your joy upon others," it commanded. I was ever so satisfied with my smug rebuttal of this theory. "I've got thirteen followers who disagree with your complaint, Johnny Guardian Journalist," I bravely proclaimed (to myself), "Thirteen!" Seriously, though: I'm firmly of the belief that any subject under the sun is of potential interest to somebody and therefore merits writing about. If you don't like it, don't read it. I refuse to read things I'm not interested in all the time. It's easy. Having said all that, I'm a sensitive soul, so perhaps it's no coincidence that I've had a bit of a 'sharenting' hiatus ever since.*

Also, we got Netflix recently, so I've been really busy.

Whatever the reason/excuse for this hiatus, I feel that the time has come to draw it to a close. Here, then, is an exciting summary of What We're Currently Concerned About in Our House:

Poo

Our eldest has long-standing issues with her evacuations. Since being potty trained, she has been through alternating phases of being an accomplished toileteer on the one hand, and suffering from an abject fear of any form of faecal expulsion on the other. There have been weeks when her powers of retention caused her serious physical trouble. There was an anal suppository involved on one occasion. There was some screaming that night.

This is the stuff the 'sharenting' haters object to, isn't it? Oh well. Stop reading then.

Hello?

Good. I'll continue.

Even now, with the suppository days hopefully consigned to the past, we do occasionally have to break out the Lactilose to keep things moving. Only this afternoon I endured half an hour of hysterical anguish from my beloved daughter, because she successfully pooed in the toilet. It was a textbook excretion, yet this left her devastated. Personally, I'll always be a boy who thinks poo is a little bit funny, but our daughter is in danger of having a serious psychological issue with it. I sincerely hope it's a phase which will end naturally, and soon.

Rejection

When our first daughter was a bit younger, she used to have a strange reaction to my having time off work. Or, rather, to my going back to work at the end of it. I would be punished by her for my rude insistence upon returning to spending all day out of the house. I would arrive home each evening, only to be shunned by her; forbidden from demonstrating any assistance or affection. All this would mean sadness for me and hard work for my wife. Mercifully, our eldest is now three, going on sixteen, and her subsequent maturity means that she has no such unreasonable reaction to the ends of Daddy's holidays anymore.

Unfortunately, our youngest has filled this particular niche effortlessly. I recently had a week off work which inevitably ended. Thus, no longer will she treat me to a kiss goodbye in the morning. When I come home in the evening she imposes a restraining order upon me, punishable by screaming if I encroach upon her three metre safe zone. I can't pick her up, fetch her anything, even look at her without high-pitched admonishment. It breaks my heart but I stay strong: I know it's really a form of indirect affection. It's just very, very subtle.

School

I may previously have discussed the problems our eldest had with separation anxiety when she started nursery school. She loved the environment, the staff, the other children, the activities; everything. But she could not abide spending five hours apart from Mummy three times a week. It was extremely traumatic. After a few weeks, there were signs that this terror was beginning to subside. Then she broke her leg. By the time she had recovered it was nearly the end of the term, so we opted to wait until the new term to restart the arduous process of settling in.

The new term starts next week.

I'll level with you: we're a bit scared. But we understand that this development of independence is precisely the reason we must persevere with nursery school. For it is but one year until she'll start at Actual Proper Compulsory School.

This, of course, means that Mummy and I have our own hurdles to overcome. We must do research. I've spoken to a couple of teacher friends about how to choose a school for your child and they were very helpful, suggesting that we use websites and Ofsted reports as a starting point, before taking them with a pinch of salt and arranging to have a look around some likely establishments. The feel we get for them then, I'm told, will be the most reliable factor in finding a place whose educational ethos most closely resembles our own.

But do we even know what our own ethos is? Without wishing to get all political, I'm very much of the opinion that primary school should be about engaging children in the ideas of curiosity and exploration; equipping them with the tools to learn happily and meaningfully when the serious stuff starts at secondary school. It should not be about test-oriented memory training. Recent developments at the Department for Education, however, seem to suggest that schools which share my way of thinking are not at all de rigueur. They should be more de rigour, according to Michael Gove, the despicable idealogue who has somehow been given responsibility for this sort of thing. All of which fills me with more trepidation at the thought of embarking upon this necessary research than my daughter is filled with at the thought of going back to nursery next week.

Sorry. I get a bit carried away sometimes. That must have read like one of those provocative opinion pieces designed to get people all riled up and generate furious debate in the comments section.

*Perhaps I'm being some sort of snob, but the word 'sharenting' itself riles me up. I'm instinctively wary of the 'Brangelina' style conflation of two words. It's just a bit crass and awkward. Or 'crawkward'.

Words

My youngest daughter can talk like a good'un nowadays. She stubbornly refuses to put together more than two words at a time, but I'm confident that this has more to do with her well-developed sense of mischief than with any lack of verbal ability. She takes a cheeky and obvious pleasure from gently winding up her loved ones: smiling exuberantly, for example, as she denies obvious truths, such as her own name, to her sister; enjoying the mild frustration this causes, but sensitive enough to avoid overstepping the mark. Usually.

My benign pride compels me to conclude that it's the same sense of mischief that causes her to refuse our suggestions for three-word sentences.  So "Water!" is yet to advance to "Water please Daddy," but it's because she won't, not because she can't.

Why am I so confident about this? Well, I'm strongly encouraged by the size of her vocabulary. She employs an efficient dual-usage system for some words, as I seem to recall her sister did at the same stage. I think we can all learn something from this. For your pleasure, and/or evidence, here's an enjoyable glossary:

Bubbaiii

Goodbye; goodnight; so long, suckers.

Daddy

Daddy; any man (usually) with glasses and/or only a modest coverage of hair on his/her head.

Disoooooaaaaaaaaaar

Dinosaur; anything with teeth.

Dum-dum

Dummy.

Dummins

Doc McStuffins (Disney character. Not my favourite. Not anyone's favourite, except perhaps for my daughters).

Elloooooooooo

Hello.

Fock

Fox (I know. We're working on it).

Horses

Glasses; horses.

Mine

Any toy or foodstuff that somebody else wants.

More

I'm hungry.

NO!

No; I wish to annoy you at great length, for my own amusement. I can do this all day long, you know.

Nottar

Water.

Paintball

Paintball; pumpernickel (don't ask).

Phone

Phone; anything rectangular which can potentially be held near an ear.

Poopoo

Poo; guffers (an inability to distinguish between these definitions has caused us to waste a large number of nappies)

Scissors

Danger; fun.

Sorry

It may or may not have been an accident and I cannot guarantee that I won't do it again. But I'm really cute.

Tangled

Rapunzel (you'll get this if you've seen it).

This is but a selection of her favourites. There are more whence these came. Every day I am surprised and impressed to discover the rapidly growing number of things for which she already knows the right names. But I had a late night last night and my memory is not at its best.

I'm trying to think of a witty summation to finish with, but I can't find the words.