Wind of change

My wife is now over seven months pregnant. Even my own forgetfulness is now helpless in the face of the overwhelming evidence of impending baby. The bump has, in recent weeks, dramatically increased its protrusion, into both the space immediately in front of its host, and our collective awareness. And my wife is forced to withstand increasing discomfort. She is now less mobile, and suffers from extreme fatigue and aching whenever she attempts to overcome this. She is relentlessly pounded from within by an ominously active daughter-to-be, who seems to have run out of space in there, and demonstrates this with sharp, angry elbows. She often chooses to do so throughout the night, which would hinder anybody's sleep.

None of these symptoms are unusual in the latter stages of pregnancy. Indeed, my sunny (and, potentially, slightly insensitive) outlook leads me to conclude that my wife's suffering is slightly less than while she was incubating our first daughter. Slightly.

One less common consequence of this gestation has been the terrifying magnification of my wife's sense of smell. Under normal circumstances she can give a police dog an olfactory run for its money, able as she is to identify any given scent at a hundred paces. I have often marvelled at this sensory skill, but now it has become tinged with an uneasy tension. For if I so much as break wind in the same continent, I know that I have caused in my beloved an unpleasant nausea, which will more-or-less ruin her day.

Let me be clear: my wife is very much the victim of this phenomenon; I am the wrongdoer. But with each such occurrence I cannot help but feel that I would have got away with it, if it wasn't for those pesky nostrils.

So I must learn to restrict the odours I create, which means restraining my liberal attitude to flatulence. Such are the myriad ways in which parenthood can change you.

Bigmouth strikes again

It is, perhaps, not as well documented as it should be that I can fit the big end of a pint glass in my mouth.

On Tuesday, my 16 month-old daughter opted to fit an entire slice of bread into hers.

All of which lends itself rather nicely to making a heavily contrived Smiths reference.

That is all.

The name game

I am very pleased with the name we chose for our daughter, and I believe my wife agrees. It came to us fairly quickly, and we reached an instant accord regarding its suitability. It is not too common, but not so unusual as to provoke accusations of snobbery or - worse - pretentiousness. To get away with such maverick child labelling you have to be either upper class or a veteran of eighties pop culture.

Two other naming obstacles, around which we skirted with effortless panache, are less well documented. You can't name your child after anyone you have ever known, unless you are certain that you will love the original holder of the title, to a degree that transcends the threat of awkward sycophancy, forever and ever. And you must avoid at all costs using a name already claimed by a friend for their child. This is copying, and will certainly be frowned upon by your friend who may, with some justification, construe your decision as one which dilutes the cherished identity of their beloved. Nobody wants that.

Our daughter's name follows all of these rules and, furthermore, it suits her perfectly. Of course we are bound to perceive the moniker in terms of the person with it that we have known so well for 16 months, making this a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, being as objective as I can, I do think that its phonetic implications match her character and appearance. We made the right decision.

And so to round two. One again we have been tasked by our own fertility with devising an appellation which meets all of the above requirements while pleasing us and those whose opinions we value. And once again I believe we have come up trumps.

Yet I can't quite shake the feeling that we're suffering from difficult second album syndrome. I've been unable to overcome my fear of telling people our choice. What if others associate the name with an unsavoury celebrity whose attachment to it has passed us by? What if they see it not - as we do - as the paradigm of beauty and elegance with just a bit of an edge but, for example, as the epitome of malevolent evil?

I have no more reason to worry about these possibilities than I did previously. I'm sure, in a couple of years, we'll be as happy with our selection as we are now with its predecessor. But I can't fully commit to it. I think that perhaps we're the victims of our own prior success at naming. We've set the bar very high where previously there wasn't even a bar, if you see what I mean.

This is difficult. I should have just insisted on Smorgasbord and Juxtaposition.

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.

Hot air

I've been lucky enough to have had some memorable experiences in my life.

I have gazed over Manhattan from the top of the Empire State Building. This was breathtaking. Although it was a bit foggy.

I have seen Arsenal play Barcelona at Wembley stadium. The cheating, diving Catalans won, but it was still a dream come true.

I have awoken beside my wife-to-be on a beautiful, sunny morning, surrounded by the stunning panorama of a Norwegian fjord. I was overwhelmed by the serene beauty around me.

I once rescued a drunken, disabled man who had fallen into a dark, deserted ditch from his mobility vehicle, breaking it in the process. I pushed him home on it, over a very steep bridge. Mobility vehicles are really heavy. He expressed gratitude as only the truly inebriated can, and I found it all very rewarding.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the... no, that was someone else actually. But the others were all me.

And yet it was only last week that I had what was, hyperbole notwithstanding, the single most satisfying experience of my life. As I settled down to a bit of Tweenies on the old telly box, I optimistically picked up my daughter and placed her on the sofa beside me, before awaiting the inevitable frustrated scream of protest at my impudent attempt to dictate her movements and influence her affections.

But, instead, something remarkable happened. My daughter snuggled up beside me and relaxed comfortably under my arm to enjoy Max's highly entertaining report from a hot air balloon festival. And she stayed quite happily like this for the duration, very much in the style of a tiny little grown up who loves her daddy and is not afraid to show it.

Now this is why I got into this parenting lark.

Then, as the credits rolled, she gave a frustrated scream of protest at my impudent attempt to dictate her movements and influence her affections.

Holiday

Our daughter has just returned from her first ever holiday. We went too. As did my parents who, incidentally, are her grandparents. And we all had a rather nice time. Far from manifesting our fears over her ability to sit happily in a car for five hours, or to sleep in a strange room three hundred miles from home, our daughter had the time of her life, and was impeccably behaved throughout. Well, near enough.

Furthermore, the change of scenery seems to have accelerated - or at least highlighted - her development. It was only shortly before we went that she had finally mastered walking. But tottering around our dining room table is a far cry from the determined sprints she repeatedly made towards the open staircase in our delightful holiday retreat. Or, conversely, from serene strolls in the Cornish countryside to which she took with mature and eager aplomb last week. I'm assuming that an aplomb can be eager. And mature.

Her conversation seems significantly closer to taking place in English now. She is still to learn many real words, but has at least redoubled her efforts to invent her own. These efforts now centre around the Two Syllables Game, in which she lists endless pairs of phonetics which are apparently randomly chosen, yet delivered with decisive conviction. "Dada, uh-oh, ahblig, findoo, woodum..." This can go on for ages, and is surprisingly entertaining. Especially when her arbitrary stylings coincide with my schoolboy sense of humour, as they did the other day when she declared: "Dick-yes." My wife and I have now taken to using this phrase as often as possible. But not in polite company.

Interestingly, within 24 hours of our return home, another curious development in her speech suddenly took place. She woke up on Monday having decided that "Mama", "Dada" and "Nana" were now to be referred to as "Mummy", "Daddy" and "Nanny." We're all agreed that this is a welcome modification.

It's a truism that changes in a person are more easily noticed by those who see the person less often. This, of course, is why you probably spent your youth being intermittently subjected to confirmation by your grandparents that you had grown. As someone who sees my daughter every day, the changes in her are too discrete to cause me much of a surprise. But I have come to appreciate the delight with which other relatives - who aren't fortunate enough to have quite such frequent access to her - greet her every development.

What I hadn't realised until now was that a change of scenery can have a similar effect. The changes in our daughter over the past week seem all the more pronounced even to us because - although, clearly, we spent the week in her company - we weren't seeing her in her usual environment. So her abilities at walking and talking as demonstrated in our house were separated by a week from those displayed before we left.

Does that make sense? I shouldn't really watch TV while I'm trying to express vague ideas about notions I haven't quite clarified.

The aftermath of sneezing

"I just sneezed," exclaimed my wife a couple of days ago, "And I didn't do a wee! Woohoo!"

This, apparently, marked a rare triumph in the existence of a pregnant lady. All but the most fortunate are condemned to endure a small but disappointing leak, which serves as an unfortunate counterweight to the well-documented joy of sneezing.

Ever the opportunistic - but sensitive - chronicler of such affairs, I immediately asked if my wife would mind my relating this event to the interweb. She gave not only her generous permission, but also the suggestion that I include the following advice:

Ladies: always do your pelvic floor exercises.

Thus I discovered the purpose of pelvic floor exercises.

In other, less intimate news, the physiotherapy mooted as the solution to my wife's troublesome pelvis has been rejected, on the advice of her midwife, in favour of a chiropractor. His modus operandum seems to involve frequent but brief appointments, during which he quickly makes everything a little bit more painful than it was. I'm sure he's just playing the long game. It does seem to help with the aftermath of sneezing, at least. My wife is otherwise keeping rather well, and continues to astonish me with the level of productivity she maintains.

Our daughter has been consolidating her abilities at walking and talking. She can now traverse great distances and has begun planning her assault on Everest. She is also more chatty by the day. Happily, approximately 95% of her conversation currently consists of the word "Dada." I shall enjoy it while it lasts. Just a moment ago, she also commemorated my annual shorts-wearing day by delicately and lovingly kissing my knee.

Which was nice for everyone.