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.

Landmarks

Our house has seen more landmarks than an open-top bus in the last few weeks. Our older daughter celebrated her second birthday a few weeks ago. We had an ambitious, albeit casual party, which involved inviting my wife's extended family and my own to our unsuspecting house for the day. It all went rather well, really. Not content with spilling into the garden, we decided to redistribute the whole clan to the park in town where an uncle and cousin of my wife's run a miniature railway. This made for excellent family fun, threatened only by the painful logistics of getting all the cars out of our road in the necessary order. My wife's expertly crafted Gruffalo cake was devoured in record time, unlikely friendships were forged between distant cousins and a good time was had by all.

Our daughter has commemorated her new, older age by demonstrating increased intellectual prowess. Her alphabet recital now verges on perfection. She sings it as follows:

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H...J, K, L, Ememma P, Q, You, S, Teedees, Doubles, Y, Zow, Z. Now I know my A, B, Six, Next time won't you sings? Yay!"

Clearly, this is a vast improvement on the more common and predictable version you may have heard previously. What makes it all the more special is the unconfined delight with which she performs it. How much gusto do you put into your alphabet?

My wife and I have nervously enforced another development upon our eldest. The cot in which she has until now spent each night has been discarded in favour of a big, shiny, children's bed. This was a sudden and risky manoeuvre on our part but, much like the ambitious birthday party, it seems to have worked. She has taken to the new bed with commensurate ease; never questioning the transition or contemplating sleeping badly as a result. Pride and relief are competing to be my reaction to all this. She makes an excellent two-year-old.

Not to be outdone, our younger daughter turned 0.5/half/six months today. She will soon inherit the cot vacated by her sister. She is not quite ready to do so yet, but does have numerous other achievements under her belt. After months of deceptively suggestive drooling, her first tooth finally emerged last week. It's a bottom middle one, which in my opinion is the optimum first tooth location for maximum cuteness. Yesterday it was joined by the other bottom middle one. A cliche about London buses would not go amiss here.

Her other, major new talent is rolling over. Now. It most certainly is not a competition. But, for the record, she reached this milestone a couple of weeks later than her sister had. However, in our eldest's case the milestone was reached after a long and strenuous journey. This time around, it seemed relatively effortless. After a couple of trial runs a few weeks ago, over she went. It was as though she had always been able to complete the move but had simply chosen to wait until that moment. As if to reinforce this impression, she left it a few weeks before repeating the trick yesterday, when she went into overdrive.

Now she rolls over more than a Euromillions jackpot and quicker than Nick Clegg at a cabinet meeting when David Cameron has suggested privatising something else. Down Nick. Good boy Nick.

I digress. Our daughter practises an entirely more positive and admirable form of rolling over and, furthermore, she eagerly brings up her knees each time in readiness for the next stage: crawling. I'm sure it will be some time before this skill is mastered. In a selfish way, I hope so.

I need a rest.

Remember when our baby was just a baby?

We're snowed in. We've decided to fend off the cabin fever by entertaining ourselves with video footage we made of our daughter in the summer, on a camera borrowed indefinitely from my wife's brother.

Although I'm aware on some subconscious level that babies grow and change at a phenomenal rate, it's easy to take these changes for granted when they occur in someone you study with great interest every day, thus viewing the developments incrementally. But having finally seen the footage from around four months ago, I'm struck by the differences in my now nine month-old daughter. I now have some sympathy with all those distant relatives who, upon meeting me once a year or so in my youth, would make astounded declarations concerning my own metamorphosis.

The outstanding revelation from July's footage is that I'm wearing shorts. And nothing on my feet. This is of course completely irrelevant, but merits a mention due to the stark contrast it represents with the foot or two of snow we're currently trapped by.

As for my daughter, I owe her an apology for underestimating the bountiful head of hair she now sports. Although still modestly covered in comparison to some of her more hirsute contemporaries, she is now a veritable lioness in relation to the Duncan Goodhew look she was working back in July. The one tuft she then had on the back of her neck was also distinctly more auburn than it seems now. Duncan Goodhew crossed with Amy Pond from Doctor Who, perhaps. On the swimmer scalp scale, I'm probably an Adrian Moorhouse, so this is a subject close to my heart. I'm relieved, therefore, to see this evidence of my daughter's progress.

A large proportion of our summer recordings consisted of our persistent efforts to get her to roll over. Seemingly endless attempts to capture this simple movement bore little fruit only four months ago, with the rare successes greeted by delighted whooping and hollering by all present. I do distinctly recall the epic nature of this challenge, but we've moved on. Our daughter can now reach any ground level location she chooses with nonchalant ease. Indeed, she is well into the mischievous, exploratory phase loved and adored by exhausted parents everywhere.

So crawling is mastered and, although she still can't walk unaided, she can really get about in her baby walker thingy (we call it her car, beacuse it's vaguely car themed and easier to say than "baby walker thingy"). She's up and down the living room like Nigel Mansell, with the one exception that her development is yet to include moustache growth. The few seconds a day when we dare to take our eyes off her, we spend laughing heartily in the face of mere rolling over.

Sadly, the conflict which results from our refusal to let her march head first into every solid object and sharp corner, no matter how inexplicably inviting they are to her, has resulted in the evocation of a less desirable sign of maturity: the hissy fit. In July things were so much more agreeable. Granted, she would cry all night long (which she now does a little bit less. A little bit), but the days were a blissful mix of silent curiosity and giggling. I'm sure nostalgia has clouded my memory of this somewhat, although the video seems to back up this assessment. Now though, if I so much as save her from caving her head in on the coffee table, I am met with screams of protest which might be construed by a lesser man than myself as ingratitude.

Other changes we had failed to fully appreciate include the gradual re-proportioning of her body. She still has enough reserves of fat to get her through this cold snap, but in July she was more of a tummy on legs. This of course is good news: we can extrapolate this development to confidently conclude that our daughter will turn out to be a healthy size and shape. Not that she's not now.

Teeth are quite easy to count, so we have maintained a more tangible awareness of her progress on that front. The first couple were still a novelty in July. Now she has eight. They are big, white and sharp. And she grinds them, which makes my skin crawl. But she seems to enjoy it.

All of this goes to demonstrate that, no matter how attentively you observe and admire your offspring, it's impossible to keep track of every detail. So thank goodness (and my brother-in-law) for the video camera.

We really must recharge the battery.

Big and happy.

Once again (projection of my issues with the colour pink onto various straw men aside) I have been remiss in my reportage of my daughter's unwavering development. For this I apologise. Here's what you've been missing:

She continues to grow at a mightily impressive rate. At just over four months, she is now over 18lb, a weight usually recommended for ladies twice her age. Not to suggest, of course, that this is a bad thing: her growth seems lately to be focussed upwards more than outwards. The best description I can muster of my daughter's current length is to say that, when I hold her under her armpits and extend my own arms fully above my head, she can quite comfortably backheel me in the face. This is an ability which she happily exploits at every opportunity. I should probably take heed of my wife's pleas for me to stop holding her like that.

In a further, very significant development, our daughter has four imminent teeth. Two middle ones at the bottom and two canines (alright then: vampire teeth), one on each side at the top, are very much visible just beneath the surface, albeit yet to break through. This stage has been reached over the past two or three weeks, and I'd have to say that - apart from slightly more frequent grumbles, a lot of dribbling, and a propensity for putting any available object into her mouth, she's taking it all rather well. This would appear to indicate that our daughter is made of strong, resilient stuff. Excellent news. Sadly though, this does weaken my claim that my impassioned and heavily dramatic reaction to any affliction I suffer is somehow hereditary. I must instead conclude that it is because I am a man.

Perfectly timed to coincide with the tooth growth, has been our daughter's introduction to real food. Early attempts at baby rice met with amusing but disappointing results, as eager curiosity failed to overcome the confusion of a novice, and the rice dropped unchewed and unloved from a tongue unable to reconcile itself to the new flavour. And the small, heroic quantity that ran this gauntlet and made it to our daughter's stomach was not treated well when it got there, as her nappy was soon to discover.

Gentle perseverance, however, has resulted in some progress. One day last week, my wife introduced further rice to our daughter's mouth, and PING: something clicked. Or should that be pinged? Anyway, the eating instinct suddenly kicked in as she chomped gummily away on the solid(ish) stuff, before despatching it throatwards with the nonchalant efficiency of a seasoned professional. Only today, our daughter enjoyed her first sample of butternut squash: an experience to which I think she beat me by about twenty years. I should clarify that these have only been tasters: our daughter is still breast fed, and will hopefully remain so for a good couple of months. And I should reiterate my immense gratitude and pride in my wife for her steadfast commitment to this.

Our daughter's personality is also flourishing. She graciously takes pity on her father and knows just how to make him glow with joy, pride and other cliches. Upon seeing me after any significant absence, her brow wrinkles at first, before recognition and delight compete to spread across her face, jointly manifesting themselves in a beaming grin which I defy anyone to improve upon. Another preeminently lovable habit of hers is to squeal for all she's worth as a demonstration of happiness. In combination with seeing the unbridled joy on her face, this is absolutely adorable. Regrettably, without visual confirmation it sounds like the blood curdling scream of a Wes Craven protagonist at the climax of her panic. I dread to think of the conclusions our neighbours must draw from the noise, with the sinister accompaniment of our satisfied laughter in the background.

But she's just happy. Which means that everything's OK.