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.

It's good to talk

They play together now, sometimes. Our younger daughter reaches out to touch the face of her big sister, who has consciously positioned herself so that this is possible. Personally, I don't really see what the object of the game is, but it produces gleeful laughter in both of them so, clearly, I encourage it. To see your children enjoying each others' company is more gratifying than any experience I can recall. Yes, even that one. But in a very different way.

This small but hugely significant development in my daughters' relationship also serves as a handy microcosm for the way in which a family is the sum of its parts. The collective's progress is dependent upon various individual achievements coming together. I concede that all this sounds a little bit communist at best, and pretentious at worst. Allow me to attempt an explanation.

Our youngest is now a whopping eight months old and her communication skills are gradually increasing. She makes more and more distinctive noises, the most common of which is along the lines of "Buhbuhbuhbuhb." Occasionally, this manifests itself as "Duhduhduhduhd," which I am happy to claim as a victory in the 'Whose Name Will She Learn First?' game. Nana won this game with our eldest by ceaselessly repeating "Nana" to her for as long as it took. I watched and learned. I have shamelessly copied Nana's tactics this time around, taking every opportunity to whisper "Daddydaddydaddydaddy" in my youngest's ear, in a manner which - taken out of context - could seem quite sinister. But, as any participant in the 'Whose Name Will She Learn First?' game will tell you, you do what it takes.

Regardless of the relative to whom she is referring, the really important implication of our daughter's verbal advance is that she is learning to make herself heard; to convey her thoughts and feelings, thus participating in the events around her rather than merely observing.

For her part, our elder daughter (rapidly approaching two and-a-half) has made a sudden leap of her own in the communication stakes. She regularly produces whole, coherent sentences. No longer do we need to seize upon every coincidental juxtaposition of two words or more in order to make this claim; our daughter now converses like an adult. But with less cynicism. And the occasional prepositional confusion. You can ask her a question and she will hear it, consider it, and then provide an informative and relevant response. Furthermore, she very often makes quite pertinent enquiries of her own. This is a double-edged sword: for every endearing "Did you have a good day's sleep, Daddy?" there's a frustrating "Is it breakfast chocolate, Daddy?"

On the whole, though, her increased ability to make her feelings known is a welcome sign of burgeoning maturity. This is further evidenced by her consideration of the prospect of sharing with her sister. Until very recently, our youngest could not even think about touching any toy in the house without being told "THAT'S MINE!" by a very possessive sister. The only variations were "THAT'S MUMMY'S!" or "THAT'S DADDY'S!" But our poor baby was never allowed to claim anything as her own. Until now. Her big sister has conceded two principles: firstly that she cannot possibly be using all of the toys at any one time, ergo some are free for the use of others; secondly, that she and her sister could conceivably play with the same thing at the same time, hence the delightful image this afternoon of daughter one entertaining daughter two in the sunny garden with the weird, purple, furry string on a stick thingy, the former spurred on by the encouraging burbling of the latter. Lovely stuff.

I would like to claim a role in this excellent development. However, my own communication skills seem to have regressed, in one involuntary but undeniable way in particular. When addressing my children I seem increasingly compelled to refer to myself in the third person. "Can you hold Daddy's hand?" "Daddy loves you very much." You get the idea. My poor daughters must be concerned that I am not in fact their Daddy, but a mere spokesman for a mysterious father they are yet to meet. I should stress that this is not the case.

I am at a loss to explain this phenomenon, but can only hope that it is one suffered by other parents the world over. Previously I had subscribed to the popular consensus that only arrogant pop stars and footballers fell prey to this affliction. But no.

Daddy does it too.

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.

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.

Self indulgent nonsense about getting older

Next week my eldest daughter will be a very impressive two years old. My wife and I agreed today that, as if to commemorate this landmark, she suddenly seems like a little girl rather than a toddler. I have no idea what the difference is. Maybe it's to do with the time she has recently spent with her slightly older Canadian cousins, four and - as of last week - three. (Those are their ages, not their names.) They and their parents have cunningly timed their visit to coincide with the two birthdays.

My wife made a magnificent, joint birthday card for our daughter and her cousin. We sent this card in to CBeebies and, lo and behold, they only went and showed it yesterday. On the proper telly and everything. I've spent the subsequent 36 hours repeatedly enjoying the footage, basking in shameless pride even though my only contribution to the card was posting it.

But I thought that - rather than regale you with tales of two of the three most endearing girls I know - I'd spend the rest of this post talking about me.

It will surprise any young people that know me, but it occurred to me this evening over dinner, as I subjected - nay, treated - the eardrums of my family to a nice bit of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, that I used to be pretty cool.

The melodic Welsh britpop reminded me of the time I toughed it out in the moshpit while the Super Furry Animals triumphantly performed the best live song ever conceived: Man Don't Give a F***. I saw the Strokes live the week Hard to Explain was released. They were supported by the Moldy Peaches. I used to be one of those people who scour the NME every week for the most promisingly obscure new singles, before bounding eagerly into HMV every Monday to buy them, only to discover that my slightly cooler friend had already bought the solitary copy they stocked of each one. But I always bought them the week after. Together, my slightly cooler friend and I ran an indie night which packed out an admittedly 'intimate' venue week after week for a good couple of years. And they were a good couple of years.

I was an art student. I read some Baudrillard. I used to make my own T-shirts. My wife and I would occasionally watch French films. We weren't married then, but that's not really relevant - I'm just being factually accurate. I had my nose pierced. I more-or-less wore the same woolly hat every day for three years. I could go on. By now you should be picturing a young man pretty close to the cutting edge. And, like all cool people, I was arrogantly dismissive of any form of mainstream culture. "Music fascism," my wife-to-be quite accurately called it. I used to loathe all chart music for its unimaginative pursuit of popularity, which blinded it to any notion of creative integrity.

But now things are different. Now I don't even know any chart music. I don't recognise most of the songs they play on Radio 2 anymore, let alone its more irritating sister station. There's a boyband called One Direction. For at least a year I laboured under the illusion that they were called ID. It is quite a misleading logo. The last film I saw at the cinema was Avatar. I basically have just three T-shirts on rotation, and they're not even homemade. It's been several years since I wore a woolly hat for an unhygienic length of time, or a nose ring at all.

It's not all bad. I read a lot of books, although I must concede that that this pastime is influenced by my being Assistant Manager of a big bookshop. The other week I went to see the misanthropic, highbrow comedian Stewart Lee with my friend (who is still cool). We were sat right at the front. I laughed a lot (in fact I literally nearly wet myself, although that was largely due to poor judgement on my part), but was it as cool as being right at the front for the Super Furry Animals?

The interesting thing thing about my retreat from the cutting edge, though, is that it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I listen to the young people talking about the interesting things and manage to convince myself that I'm above all that; I transcend culture. How have I arrived at this point? It could very well be because I'm old and boring before my time, and smug enough to paint this as a crusade against pretentiousness. But I prefer to think that I enjoy and relish fatherhood so much; I take such pride in the role and its associated responsibilities, that I actually yearn to live up to the cliche. A major aspect of this cliche is that I must be embarrassingly clueless about culture.

In other words, I have deliberately denied myself the pleasure of listening to ID, or indeed knowing what they're called, so that I can fulfill my responsibility for becoming the love-to-hate figure of fun required of their dad by all children. Without such a parent, a teenager's psyche cannot develop normally.

I am a cultural martyr. This is my birthday present to my daughter.

Don't worry: I've also got her some toys and stuff.

Leisure

In a rare moment of decisive clarity, I resolved about a year ago take my oldest daughter swimming. I had no intention of excluding my younger daughter, you understand: it's just that she didn't exist at the time. I think swimming is an extremely useful skill to learn, as well as being a good, wholesome activity for a parent to share with their children. I have fond memories of struggling heroically out of bed in my youth to spend occasional Saturday mornings at Riverside Ice & Leisure with my own Dad.

All of which adds to my sense of shame that it was only last week when this dream was finally made manifest. I have had some time off work with no real commitments to fill it, so my wife and I decided that we would devote as much of each day as possible to just having a nice time with our daughters. High on the list of ways to achieve this was a trip to the local baths, as I believe they were known in olden days. So last Thursday, having procrastinated for twelve months, we suddenly agreed that the time had come. Within ten minutes all four of us sported the swimming costumes which had been gradually and optimistically acquired over the past year, and we were out the door within ten minutes.

The leisure centre we went to seemed to have had its pools designed with families in mind. One small, standard pool with the usual depth and corners and whatnot, was off limits; in use by school children. Adjacent to this was a larger, roundish affair, whose depth increased from zero to lots in direct proportion to the ages of its intended occupants. It was essentially a manmade beach with grown ups (who take their leisure seriously and do not wish to be disturbed by children or their parents) at one end and children (with parents) at the other. Having briefly exhausted the third option - a cold, shallow toddler pool featuring two slides, whose only contribution to our day was to provide our eldest with an unwanted introduction to having her head under water - we took up a position in the fake beach environment.

My wife assumed control of our eldest while I was happy to be left holding the baby. We both bobbed around with our respective charges until we settled upon depths of water with which all concerned were relatively comfortable. Our original child is just old enough to have developed a healthy sense of suspicion about her environment. As such she was the more nervous of the two at this new endeavour. After a number of worried minutes, during which the rudimentary concrete animal heads provided a necessary distraction, she eventually came to terms with being in the water, to the extent that I look forward to furthering her aquatic education.

Our youngest turned out to be a natural. Less perturbed by any awareness of danger, she baulked at first at the temperature of the water, but then quickly recovered a sense of relaxed nonchalance. Before very long she was leaning forward in my arms and instinctively kicking her legs behind her. I was struggling to hold on to her. This must be how the young Ian Thorpe's parents felt. I should clarify that my daughter's feet are in quite satisfactory proportion to the rest of her body. I wonder if Mr and Mrs Thorpe were worried about this when he was four months old.

After relative calm had remained for a while we decided that we should quit while we were ahead. Our strategically positioned towels were quickly employed to keep the children warm on the trip to the changing rooms. Upon arriving at the leisure centre we had been impressed by the provision of family changing rooms. These turned out to be slightly larger cubicles with a handy 'bench' (or 'low shelf') running along one side. It was after returning to the changing room that the thermal inadequacy of the towels was revealed. This was when the screaming began. Initially it was our youngest daughter wailing at the sudden drop in temperature, but her volume was quickly subsumed by the increasingly panicked exclamations my wife and I exchanged as we struggled to get everyone dried and dressed in clothes which we COULDN'T BLOODY FIND.

Seriously. My first piece of advice to anybody attempting a similar excursion is to ensure that your post-swim bag is packed in an extremely well organised fashion. You must be able to instantly retrieve each nappy and item of clothing in a meticulously pre-ordained sequence. This is the only way in which you will avoid a level of anxiety which threatens to overshadow any fun you may recently have experienced. We just about escaped this stressful fate, thanks in no small part to our older daughter, whose worry at the situation was visible in her eyes, but which she somehow suppressed in order to offer us an exemplary - if somewhat uncharacteristic - display of calm. By following her lead we were able to get dressed, warm up a bit and escape unharmed, still able to describe our morning as an enjoyable success.

With careful planning we may even repeat it. In a year or so.

Pop!

Last night my wife was on bath duty with our older daughter, while I undertook the regular evening ritual of attempting to keep our youngest's wailing volume low enough to leave the local constabulary untroubled. Not that my wife had the easier task, you understand. Our house has recently been home to more germs than a damp petri dish. One of many unfortunate consequences of all this illness is that our eldest is a bit fragile at bathtime.

This hour in particular, in recent days, has often played host to screaming competitions between our daughters. One beautiful and precious young lady invariably sets the other off before shrill escalation follows, until someone literally screams herself to sleep. And this is made all the worse by the sickness and the sensitivity which has been rife around these parts.

So it was a pleasure even more immense than usual last night when I heard the standard cacophony of competitive misery replaced by the sound of raucous laughter from the bathroom. My wife's mirth was being shared by our daughter, both of them guffawing away with uncontrollable joy, heads tipped back as happy tears streamed down their cheeks. It was a few minutes before my wife was able to convey to me the cause of this gleeful interlude.

Our daughter had been indulging in another of her recent favourite bathtime habits: attempting to individually burst each bubble in turn with her finger while commentating thus: "Pop! Pop! Pop!..." Clearly this is a somewhat futile activity but my optimistic, paternal pride sees it as evidence of an ambitious and diligent nature. On this occasion, as she turned to stretch for a very specific bubble at the other end of the bath, a humourously substantial volume of gas escaped from her bottom. In my preferred parlance, she done a guffer.

Please do not insult my wife's integrity by assuming that this alone was the cause of her amusement. No. Our daughter reacted to her little accident by looking up at her mum and, after pausing with perfect comic timing, adding one further "Pop."

You had to be there.