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?

You would not believe how little sleep I get, and I get a lot more sleep than my wife

It is 10:55pm and my one year-old daughter has just, finally, fallen asleep. I know with relative certainty that she will be awake again, screaming, within an hour or so, and also that there will be nothing that I can do to remedy this situation; that burden falls entirely upon my heroic* wife. I hasten to add that that this injustice is of our daughter's choosing, not my own. She will accept nothing but her mother's unconditional company for hours on end. Invariably we end up with her in our bed, where she prefers to lie horizontally, ensuring that my wife and I are left with an inch or two each in which to seek comfort and sleep in vain. I usually endure a lot of kicking as well. But at least the screaming stops.

She has never been a good sleeper, but the situation escalated a few weeks ago when, like just about everybody else in the country, we all contracted a nice bit of norovirus. Cue a few days of spectacularly horrendous vomiting, diarrhoea, headaches, stomach cramps and general near death experience. Our youngest appeared at first to have suffered slightly less than the rest of us. But her affliction soon developed into a succession of nasty colds, made all the worse by the relentless period of molar growth upon which her mouth decided to embark at the same time. All of this, coupled with her being at just the right age to develop some separation anxiety, would be enough to make anybody struggle with their slumber. For our daughter the increased sleeplessness became a habit and is now a pattern, to which we have had no choice but to resign ourselves.

When our older daughter went through a similar phase, we solved it (with what only now seems like relative ease) by following the textbook to the letter: letting her scream it out, before learning to get herself to sleep, free from dependency on any parent-shaped psychological crutches. This is not so easy the second time around, because we feel duty-bound to minimise the screaming of our youngest in the interests of our eldest (who is actually remarkably good at sleeping through all this). So, ultimately, we relent every night, despite knowing that this is really prolonging the problem.

Our latest tactic is to remove her dummy on the grounds that it exacerbates her aforementioned dependency on psychological crutches. I believe I have discussed previously the growing need to go cold turkey on the dummy anyway, and people who know about these things say that it can be surprisingly helpful in solving the sleep problem. So far it has merely meant that, when she inevitably did awaken, it took my wife longer than ever to becalm her. Eventually she brought the little insomniac downstairs, where of course she cut off any recriminations at the pass by slipping immediately into her extremely cute daytime persona. Despite my best efforts I was delighted - having only recently arrived home from work and missed bedtime - to spend some time with her. Nevertheless, I am preparing myself for another night of being kicked in bed by those cute little feet.

Having said that, it's now midnight and she's still asleep.

I really must go to bed.

*I read a passage of David Foster Wallace's semi-autobiographical novel The Pale King yesterday, in which the protagonist describes an inspirational lecture he heard as a student. In this speech, true heroism is defined as persistence in the mundane, uncelebrated commitment to the detail of their duties displayed by all the quietly diligent people of the world. Apply this to parenting instead of accountancy and my wife is the greatest hero of them all.

Slightly untoward

I was greeted, upon my return from work the other day, by the joyous news that our eldest daughter had observed to her mother that "Daddy has a sausage bum." I may have to start wearing pyjamas, although the damage is really done now, I suppose, if indeed it should be considered damage. My immediate reaction to my wife's tale of how she had proceeded to teach our daughter the words 'vagina' and 'penis' was to recoil slightly in middle class shock. Only slightly. This is slightly untoward, my instincts told me. Then I remembered about my liberal, open minded credentials and thought about it a bit more. It's no more naughty - or indeed less admirable - than a two year-old learning the words for arms, fingers, or small intestines. I quickly decided that I am proud of this development.

When she realised that I had been made aware of the leap in her anatomical knowledge, our daughter proudly listed all of our mutual acquaintances to me, noting in each case who had which. Most of them she got right. I expect this is how all the best surgeons start out.

This is just one example of the rapid changes in maturity recently displayed by both of our young ladies. Not all of them are as desirable as being able to identify the owners of willies. Twice in recent weeks, our eldest daughter has found it necessary to bite her little sister's hand. Quite hard. On each occasion she refused to apologise, giving us no choice but to invoke the Naughty Step. Except, in our slightly unprepared case, it was less of a step than a nice comfy sofa. Consequently, the threat of staying there until she said sorry was somewhat less than sufficient. Besides which, she's a stubborn one.

We recognised our duty as parents to make her fully aware of the seriousness of her offence, which meant that we had to shout at her a bit. It is unimaginably difficult to direct serious wrath at someone you love so much, even when the cause was her having inflicted pain upon someone else that you love equally hugely. In the end, you're left with the paradoxical motivation of shouting in the hope that it will prevent you from having to do so again. Complicated stuff, parenting.

The bitee, meanwhile, has been making her own steady progress through life. She now has at least one molar taking up room in the depths of her mouth, with more almost certainly imminent, judging by the amount of time she spends screaming rather than sleeping at night. The succession of nasty colds she has suffered has not helped, but the number of weeks since anyone in our house had a decent night's sleep is increasing beyond any sense of fairness.

As if by way of apology, she has also mastered the art of kissing. She does seem to favour the slightly awkward mouth open technique more often than not, but she knows what she's doing, and she enjoys it for the unpretentious display of affection it is. Besides kiss chase, her favourite game is very much hide and seek. And it's so easy to keep her happy playing this. I hid behind the same curtain at least a dozen times in quick succession the other day, but the unbridled glee on her face upon finding me each time was undiminished. I'll miss that when she develops a sense of repetition. It's quite a nice view out of that window. She has also become very adept at running away when she's been naughty, but it's one of those things that you forgive because it's so cute. Perhaps I should be worried that she has already learnt this technique of manipulation.

But my favourite, recent advance has undoubtedly been our two year-old's new ability to recognise, in written form, her own name and also, bizarrely, the word 'zoo.' I have chosen to overlook the fact that she insisted this morning that the word 'moo' was also pronounced 'zoo,' and remain immensely proud of her burgeoning literary skills. All the more so after I heard a father telling his daughter off in a bookshop the other day for liking books too much. "We're going to have to stop all this reading," he warned her in all seriousness. It was like witnessing a prequel to Fahrenheit 451.

Now that really is untoward.

The daily grind

For many people, it's the scraping of nails on a blackboard. For my wife, it's the scraping of knives on dinner plates: a phenomenon I frequently - albeit unintentionally - cause. Everyone, it seems, has their own, personal trigger for becoming a shuddering slave to crawling skin. I once witnessed someone flee a room because an egg box was introduced to it, such was her morbid fear of touching such ovum containers.

My own nemesis is the feeling of dry, untreated wood, of precisely the kind they use to produce complimentary spoons in a well-known chain of sushi restaurants. I genuinely cannot have dessert there without borrowing some children's cutlery from one of my daughters. My wife openly and quite correctly mocks me for this, so I scrape the children's cutlery on my plate. I don't really. They serve food on plastic dishes there. Maybe this is why.

There is one excruciating agony upon which my wife and I do agree. Our youngest has, after several tiring weeks of trying, produced two top front teeth to complement the bottom ones which emerged a while ago and now sit proudly clear of her gums. Our delight at the hiatus in the sequence of sleepless, screamy nights that this development promised, has quickly been tempered by our daughter's new habit of grinding her new teeth against her older ones.

AAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH etc.

What makes it really sinister is that you hear it before you see it. Scrape, scrape, scrape. 'What's that curious noise?' you may think to yourself, glancing enquiringly around the room in search of its source. The terror rises gradually as it dawns on you that the youngest of your beloved family is thoughtfully sliding her lower jaw from side to side against her upper jaw, happily oblivious to the abject mayhem caused by her actions. The realisation of the cause of the noise - like a vicious kazoo, made of knives, inside your brain - seems to increase its volume until you simply cannot bear it.

Invariably this results in screams of defeated anguish from one or both of her parents. And she sits there smiling at us.

I'm thinking of pulling her teeth out.

Girls behaving badly

I always secretly imagined that the so-called 'terrible twos' were a myth perpetuated by parents who simply weren't doing it properly and proposed this behavioural phenomenon as a justification for the screamy results of their shortcomings. I was incorrect. In my defence, my unspeakable arrogance was only subconscious; I didn't even realise I thought these smug thoughts until recent events caused me to stop thinking them.

Our eldest is now a couple of months past the portentous two year barrier. Until about a week ago she remained an angelic paradigm of good behaviour. Mild encouragement was always sufficient to bend her to our will. And our will was always performed with joyous enthusiasm. Disobedience never crossed her mind, because she wanted to brush her teeth/get in the bath/have her nappy changed/tidy away her toys/get dressed in sensible clothes. We thought we were safe from the epic tantrums suffered by all the bad parents, because we naively gave ourselves credit for what now appears to have been an unusually long run of good luck.

It was as if someone flicked a switch in her brain one night. She transformed that suddenly from our harmonious little co-operator to some form of demon. I have considered calling in Father Merrin. For the past few days, each of the above activities - the peaceful completion of which was previously taken for granted - has been an horrific trial of such a magnitude that Dick Cheney would have thought twice about inflicting the ordeal upon a terror suspect. After last night's bath time, I was genuinely shocked not to see our neighbours' houses go up for sale this morning; their disappointed scowls directed at us as they hammered their accusatory For Sale signs into the ground, like nails in the coffin of our community's approval of us and our child-rearing skills.

Maybe I was being a bit dramatic. This last battle had left me in such a state of despair that I was developing outrageous fears about the causes of the sudden change. A recurring theme seemed to be an aversion to getting wet, leading me to concoct theories about OCD, or even worse. We've all seen Cujo, haven't we?

My wife, although as devastated and bewildered as I by these events, was able to calm me down somewhat. At worst, we would have to come to terms with the fact that even our inimitable parenting skills were susceptible to the inevitability of a two year-old pushing the boundaries: the terrible twos. At best, this may simply be the manifestation of a mysterious, otherwise symptomless illness. Unable to adequately express her pain, discomfort or frustration at such a malady, our daughter may simply be allowing it to leak out as misbehaviour.

Or it could be a competitive reaction to the extra attention her younger sister has been receiving of late. For the last four or five days, our youngest has had an ominously high temperature. We have pumped her full of infant medicine at every safe opportunity over this period, but this has served only to keep the inferno at bay. Again, any ailment causing this has resulted in no other discernible symptoms; she has remained relatively cheerful throughout, despite managing even less sleep than usual (and consequently imposing the same sorry fate upon her parents). Neither of the doctors we have consulted has offered any suggestion for the cause. I think this is because of the global medical conspiracy which dictates that no GP may simply attribute a medical symptom to teething. Any parent will tell you that the imminent production of new gnashers can cause a fever. Any doctor will be conspicuously silent on the subject.

Nevertheless, after some 100 hours of this fever failing to go away for good, neither would the alarm my wife and I felt. So it was an immense relief today to see normal figures registering on the thermometer with more consistency. Whatever it was seems finally to have abated. Still no more teeth, mind you. Maybe the doctors are right.

Now. Half way through writing this post, I took a break to assist my wife with tonight's bathtime ordeal. It was with some trepidation that we made the long walk up the stairs to face the impending, splashy peril. And, lo and behold, it was like a bath-related dream. Our eldest's smile barely left her face as she splashed around like the last week had never happened. I looked on happily as our youngest slept peacefully in my arms and contentment washed over me. I'm welling up a bit as I write this. It does all rather lend credence to my wife's theory about our older daughter's shenanigans having been a consequence of our younger daughter's illness, and the attention it demanded.

Which is why I can now safely resume my unspeakable arrogance.

What's inside me?

Have you seen the film Alien? Even if you haven't, I'm sure there's a scene in it which has wormed its way into your consciousness. I'm talking about the bit in which John Hurt (I think) enquires in a quite exasperated tone as to what's inside him. The answer is rapidly forthcoming when an alien bursts through his chest, in a manner which is at once horrifying and slightly funny.

My wife cannot now help but fear the same fate befalling her at any moment. Logic, biology and the scans we have had all serve to reassure us that she contains a nice human of our own making, rather than an evil alien which will grow up to bleed acid all over the intergalactic colonialist scientists of an unspeakably bleak future.

But the nice human is clearly attempting to make a similar exit from its host. From within my wife she pounds away like a cat in a bag with increasing frequency. That these movements seem more deliberate and calculated than in previous weeks adds to the sense that she is a very mature foetus: ready to come out and face the world any time now.

I spend much of my spare time watching my wife's tummy in bewilderment at this show of force. And my wife finds this form of entertainment increasingly painful, as in fact she now finds most things. Medication for a previously undiagnosed thyroid malfunction has ensured that she is in much better physical condition than when pregnant with our first daughter but, nevertheless, discomfort is now a constant companion. She has for the last week or so been coping with the disadvantage of a head between her legs. A full night's sleep is a long-lost friend of hers who has neglected to visit for some time.

All of which considerable inconvenience has led to a ridiculous sense of relief that, soon, my wife will repeat the single most painful experience of her life. She will undergo physical trauma which is literally inconceivable to me, even as I watch it first hand. And, preposterously, I'm quite looking forward to it - not because I'll then get a few weeks off work - but because this will represent the climax of eight or nine months of escalating discomfort. Once this has happened, my wife can begin to heal, sleep and become human again. Then all we have to do is raise two children. So maybe the sleep bit will have to wait.

John Hurt didn't know how lucky he was.

Baby when the lights go out

I used to quite like a nice power cut. I think they appealed to my cynical, luddite side, offering as they do a taster of the bleak aftermath of some cataclysmic event.

One day the modern world will be undone, I would reassure myself, stripped bare of its electricity and its convenience-determined arrogance. And on that day, the cream will rise. Triumph will belong to the ones who never saw the point of an iPad; the ones who have neglected to clarify their career goals; the ones who - without a single glance at Wikipedia - remember facts about science and grammar. Well science will be useful, anyway.

The ones who had their priorities right all along will be vindicated when the power runs out. So I would reassure myself.

But, after last night's "network incident" in our part of the world, I am forced to admit that parenthood may have caused my priorities to change somewhat.

A sweltering couple of days, hot on the heels of a stressful week at work, had left me, not to mention my heavily pregnant wife, drained and eager to get our overtired daughter to sleep so that we could just sit and have a bit of telly time before bed. At around 8 o'clock I finally turned on the relaxing evening lamp in the corner of our living room, and was about to do the same to the television when the light disappeared and everything stopped.

The adjustment to our entertainment plans that this necessitated was soon overcome. As Ones Who Have Our Priorities Right, we were able to rediscover the art of conversation with relative ease. I even dared to feel a relaxing sense of novelty. But this was not to last, because the only way we had been able to make our daughter's bedroom habitable was by rescuing our electric fan from the roof, aiming it at her cot and turning it up to eleven.

It was only reasonable, then, that our daughter should awaken and make known her dissatisfaction at the fan's abrupt cessation. Eventually we succumbed and brought her downstairs to inhabit our dark, quiet world. The novelty of this world had already begun to wear off when, some time later, we surrendered ourselves to bedtime.

Our daughter's room still a furnace, our only option was to take her to our slightly cooler boudoir with us in the hope that we could keep her sufficiently calm until fan capabilities were resumed. But the thing about our daughter is, she knows when she's on bonus time, and she enjoys it. Thus a prolonged period of diving around joyously but quite violently on our bed followed. And that was just her. Well, mostly. Eventually this bout of activity began to subside, as mine and my wife's fatigue became contagious. With great relief I believed that we may all yet salvage some sleep from the night.

Which is when the hitherto unnoticed Loud Kazoo Bird kicked off outside, soon to be accompanied by his friend the Car Alarm Bird. Together they traumatised us with a sustained, surreal and frankly terrifying cacophony. At this stage I concluded that I had at last been driven beyond sanity, and have no further recollection of the night. Logic dictates that I refuse to countenance the possibility that I fell asleep. Next thing I knew though, there were unnecessary lights on and it was time to go to work. As I crept silently out of the front door I noticed the reassuring hum of an electric fan emanating from my daughter's bedroom.

My wife has since discovered that the ridiculous symphony which had tormented us the previous night was created by mere starlings. I urge you to look the phenomenon up on an internet which I have now stopped dismissing as an overrated and unnecessary luxury of an arrogant modern age.

Dad pride.

Our daughter is over seven weeks old now. Already I struggle to remember when she wasn't here. Really I should have been more diligent in documenting her progress through life, because many of her developments have been and gone.

By way of apology, I hope that you will accept this list of Excellent Things My Daughter Can Do:

Change colour. They say babies like routine. One of our daughter's is to cry and cry and cry until she goes purple every evening. This is not fun, but it does seem to clear her sinuses (see below). Also we have recently discovered that bathtime can be an effective and enjoyable antidote to this.

Genuinely smile. After weeks of getting willfully overexcited about the facial expressions babies make when they fart, we are now certain that, under the correct jiggly conditions, our daughter does actual, proper grinning. And there is nothing more rewarding to look at.

Grow. She puts on over a pound a week on average, and is already over a stone. Most supermodels weigh less than this, which somehow means that I can proudly tell people my daughter is better than a supermodel. She actually is more beautiful than any I can think of.

Withstand an horrific illness. I think our daughter is just coming to the end of her suffering, caused by the worst cold ever conceived by biology. I know it was this bad because I gave it to her. I feel very guilty about this, despite not really having been able to help it. For over a week, our daughter was unable to eat and breathe at the same time. She barely slept as a result of the frequent panic caused by her respiratory troubles and, I suspect, very hurty sinuses. Mercifully, although still snotty, she has noticeably brightened up over the past few days, so is hopefully over the worst.

Press-ups. Our daughter has always been a big fan of lying on her front, on mummy or daddy's chest. When she finds herself doing this with her arms underneath her, her usual inclination is to lift herself up and gaze curiously into whoever's eyes she is confronted with. Should these eyes be yours, you will find it impossible to resist saying "Ahhhhh", and being very impressed by her strength and stamina: she can stay up there for hours.

Stand up. Almost. Obviously it will be several months before she doesn't need some guidance and assistance, but our daughter can very nearly support her own weight on her legs. Some killjoy told me that this is perfectly normal and therefore unimpressive, but I think it's one of the more amazing of her achievements.

There are, of course more. But I have to go to work.

A bit up and down. And up.

I've been putting off writing this, because I don't know where to start. At the risk of rendering the phrase "resorting to cliche" a cliche, I shall have to resort to cliche in describing the past few weeks as an emotional rollercoaster.

In hospital

Despite her impressive size, our daughter was technically over three weeks premature, so the first five days of her life were spent in hospital. They let her mum stay there with her, of course, although this meant that I was left alone to look after myself and the house. I had my first taste of life as a busy person as I struggled to get to grips with the washing machine, the dishwasher, the oven and, for the first time in years, sleeping in solitude. All of this while trying to spend every permissible minute at the hospital. By day two I was being told off for falling asleep in my wife's hospital bed. Apparently that's frowned upon.

I'm well aware, though, that I had the easy role in that first week. My wife's recovery from the most harrowing physical ordeal of her life was spent in a cubicle defined only by a blue curtain which didn't quite go around her bed and our daughter's tastefully soulless perspex cot.

Our daughter initially had quite nasty jaundice, which meant that she had one thing too many in common with David Dickinson, was a bit sleepy and not consistently bothered about feeding. To add to my wife's understandable distress and confusion (as well as my own), one nurse in particular seemed psychotically determined for there to be something seriously wrong with our daughter. Every movement she made was met with a gasp and a knowing look which promised us bad news. At one point this nurse even contrived for us to be led fearfully into a private room, in which a team of paediatricians told us that the nurse's observations compelled them to test our daughter for Down's syndrome.

I don't intend to pollute this blog with negativity and recriminations, but I have to say that this nurse was the only person to "observe" any symptoms relevant to such a diagnosis, and I therefore hold her solely responsible for the unnecessary life changing fears we went through in the days before the test results came back negative. I never discovered this nurse's name, but she is very definitely in the wrong job. The one good thing I can say about this little episode is that it taught me never to take your child's health for granted. Only a week previously I had had such little appreciation of the impact on a parent's outlook that can be caused by the slightest doubt in this respect. I certainly appreciate it now, and would urge any parent to be constantly grateful for all of the things that are not wrong with their child.

Homecoming

Five days after the birth, I brought my daughter and my wife home at last. I'm not sure what kind of fanfare I expected, but the event felt somewhat ant-climactic. We were inundated with cards, presents and visitors during the following week or so - all of which were lovingly intended and gratefully received. My wife's mother and mine were respectively virtually and literally ever-present, and I'm not sure we would have coped without them.

But despite all of this, the second week was, if anything, more difficult than the first. Nothing can prepare you for the profound effect sudden sleep deprivation and a dramatically increased weight of responsibility can cause. Somebody remarked to me that "Nobody tells you how hard it is", and at the time I eagerly agreed. But in retrospect I think that people do try to warn you, and you just don't listen, because you stubbornly believe that your love for your child will overcome any threat to your unbridled joy.

By the end of the second week I was seriously starting to doubt this assertion, and feeling increasingly worried about my wife's physical state (her old foe, SPD was refusing to let the excruciating pain in her pelvis abate), and both of our emotional states. And you can't really tell people that you feel depressed when you have a two week old child. It just seems ungrateful.

Don't worry: everything's going to be ok

Almost literally overnight, everything seemed a bit better. I don't know whether we started to get more sleep, or whether we just got used to less sleep, but suddenly I could understand what people meant when they said you had to really appreciate these early weeks of parenthood.

Every sound our daughter made; every inadvertent grin or glance in my direction - without wishing to resort to cliche - now felt like a cherished gift. I lay in bed one morning with my daughter asleep on my chest, my wife lying serenely at my side, and the sun shining through the window, and I had one of those moments (which only a year ago I would have found nauseating) when you're pre-emptively aware of your own future nostalgia.

With each passing day my wife and I get a little more confident; a little more trusting in our daughter's ability to breathe without us watching; a little more proud of her increasingly beautiful features; and a little more attuned to the nuances in her grunts and grumbles. I think we're quite confident now that the three of us are going to make a rather nice little family.

And any worries we had about our daughter's feeding now seem frankly laughable. During her stay in hospital, she lost 7% of her birthweight (9lb 7oz. Seriously), and had already started to claw back this deficit by the time she came home. Eight days ago she weighed in at 10lb 1oz. Yesterday she was up to 11lb 4oz. One of the midwives remarked that my wife must be producing gold-top. I think it's clotted cream. I want some.

In the hospital they give you a little red book, intended to be your child's health almanac for the remainder of eternity. Towards the back of the little red book is a chart on which to plot your child's weight during his or her early weeks, months and years. Our daughter is literally off the scale. In twelve years or so I imagine this pattern would cause some upset, but for now this is excellent news.

Hurrah.