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.

The story of the little infection that didn't know when to go away and leave us all alone.

Apologies, oh legion of readers, for the delay in bringing to you this latest installment of amateurish, self-interested, baby-related philosophising. The past month has been - if not traumatic - then at least trying for me and, probably to a greater extent, for my wife (I am still to decide whether the disproportionate burden-bearing on the mother's part is a product of nature, a society which is still more misogynistic than we care to admit, or simply my instinctive tendency for evasive apathy. But this is a debate for another day). Most of all, this has been a hard time for our daughter.

Since you last heard from me, she has suffered a continuous series of persistent, albeit non life-threatening ailments. There have also been notable triumphs, more of which later. Bad news first.

One development which, I suppose, falls under the headings of both pain and progress, has been the notorious ordeal that is teething. One of our daughter's middle bottom ones (Like many otherwise reasonable people I'm no great fan of dentistry or its practitioners, and am thus unaware of technical tooth terms) was the first of many candidates to make the breakthrough a few weeks ago. The legendary distress caused by this is, it turns out, of the kind that has to be witnessed first hand to be truly appreciated.

Relentless screaming for two solid days.

And if there's one thing the past month has taught us, it's that our daughter is a trooper. When she fulfills my vicarious prophecy of becoming a professional footballer, she will be the one who pioneers not diving and rolling about like a cheating coward. When our daughter screams, it really hurts. My advice is to use Anbesol and Nurofen, and to have an amazingly patient wife. Still: only nineteen teeth to go. And I could never have predicted the magnitude of the paternal pride evoked by the merest glimpse of the little flash of white in her smile.

But all this has been no more than a distraction from the real ailments. Shortly after having her last jabs about a month ago, our daughter's right ear began to extrude a worrying volume of waxy gunky gunkwax. Also, we observed, it smelt like a dirty bin. After allowing a day to establish that these symptoms were not likely to eradicate themselves, we made the first of many subsequent trips to the doctor, who swiftly confirmed our suspicion that our daughter was suffering from her first ear infection. This was to be tackled by her first course of antibiotics.

To cut a long story short, four further consultations with irritatingly alternating doctors, and four courses of antibiotics, and now one of ear drops, are yet to vanquish this infection. Initially its symptoms consisted of more screaming, as well as frenzied rubbing of the offending ear which often nearly amounted to its removal. The sleep patterns which were previously just starting to emerge were immediately abandoned in favour of not really ever sleeping at all.

Mercifully, these symptoms have largely subsided in spite of the infection's stubborn refusal to do so itself. However, multiple courses of medicine have caused their own problems. All of these events have transpired, I suspect, to make me grateful for having learnt as a child to spell diarrhoea (If you think I've spelt it wrong, then go and live in America). In addition to the gushing poo (accompanied by stomach cramps and what my wife affectionately refers to as "sore undercarriage"), this medical onslaught may or may not have been responsible for the eye infection which our daughter has now also developed. So her five month old body is currently being bombarded with antibiotics, ear drops and eye drops, each three or four times every day.

One could argue that it's best to get it all out of the way at once, a bit like having twins. Except of course that these maladies are not finite: the chances of their recurrence are unaffected by any previous suffering. And the difficulty we have discovered is that, when your child is suffering in several simultaneous ways - and has yet to learn any of the languages that you speak - it's very difficult to work out what the problem is and how to solve it. I think the doctors have the same trouble.

In spite of all this, I have been genuinely amazed at our daughter's resilience. Of course I am aware that many children and their parents suffer far, far worse, and I am eternally grateful for every healthy aspect of my daughter's physiology. But nevertheless, she has put up with an awful lot recently, and still found time for plenty of happiness and achievement.

Between all the screaming and discomfort, our daughter has discovered and perfected the art of rolling over. Once agin I am overcome with pride as she thrusts her weight determinedly to her right, always bravely confronting the struggle at the last with the inconvenient obstacle caused by her right shoulder. More often than not now, her momentum is sufficiently judged to overcome this hurdle, leaving her lying satisfied on her front as she raises her head to meet you with a look of triumphant glee, another epic undertaking complete. She also sat up unassisted for a good ten seconds the other day. However her failure to repeat this feat has led us to reluctantly conclude that it was a fluke.

Her co-ordination in general is rapidly improving. She can remove my glasses at will in one swiftly executed movement. This might be more irritating than impressive if she didn't always agree to give them straight back. And her ability to harvest huge clumps of my chest hair will no doubt ensure my qualification as a metrosexual before the year is out.

This co-ordination has also helped with her burgeoning talent for eating solid food. She now knows more-or-less how and when to open, close, chew and swallow. And then dribble and smear. Maybe there is room for improvement, but I think weaning will soon be feasible.

I commented to someone the other day (during one of those mutually smug "Oh yes, I also am a father, aren't we excellent" chats to which I am now privy) that the second two months of fatherhood were much easier than the first two. Well, the fifth has been the hardest yet. But also the most rewarding.