Rearing 'The Whirlwind'

Last week my wife was ill.  This is a distressing event at the best of times, but as she was also pregnant, experiencing stomach pains, unable to sleep and not desirous of food we were a little more worried than perhaps we needed to have been.  She is well on the way to being better now but for a week she couldn’t really get out of bed.  This meant that I had to take some time off work to look after N while she was incapacitated.

o_O

In the end I spent 4 whole days with her and came away with a renewed appreciation for my wife and a hearty dread of ever having to look after my daughter for an extended period of time without proper adult supervision ever again.  It was a grueling four days of playdough, crayons, playdough and crayons, stickers, stickers being unpeeled from crayons, stickers being unpeeled from walls and tables, playdough being scraped from the table, quick run in the garden, lunch, sleep, playdough, Ivor the Engine, tea, bath, all of which took us to about 2 in the afternoon.  I’m pretty sure when she grows up N’s wrestling nickname will be ‘The Whirlwind.’

The illness was the reason why I was dispensed to do the shopping with N which led to the joyous incident that I wrote about in this post.  It was also the reason why nothing domestic seemed to get done in our house for pretty much the entirety of last week.  I just about kept on top of the washing up, but if you are expecting me to have managed to tidy up after each day’s wrecking ball type activities, or done those jobs which are mysteriously being added to the kitchen notice board, I’m afraid we need to have a little chat about your expectation levels.

Each evening after ‘The Whirlwind’TM  had finally been put to bed (which is a blogpost all of its own) I would curl myself into a little ball wondering how much mileage there was in calling in a storm chaser to supervise my daughter for a day.  

And yet my wife somehow makes it all look very effortless, like the moment of complete stillness achieved by Pele in the build up to That Goal, or the moment of time-slowing brilliance exhibited by Joe Montana for The Catch.  She is the area of effortless yet effective calm in the middle of my daughter’s daily imitation of El Nino.

It just so happens to be our anniversary today and there’s really only one thing I want to say.  Thank-you.

Water, Water, Everywhere

In the year 480 BC Athens was in trouble.  Xerxes I had defeated the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and had turned his attention to the next obstacle, the men of Athens.  In response to this threat the Athenians did the only thing a Classical Greek person would do.  No, not run, or fly the white flag, they turned to the Oracle at Delphi.  When the envoys had arrived and as they walked in, they would have read the words inscribed in the wall of the fore court, ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν,’ gnothi seauton, which would have commanded them, before they went in, to ‘Know yourself.’    

This phrase was debated endlessly by men in antiquity, even Socrates weighed in on what he thought it meant, but basically it seems to have been an injunction to understand your own limitations in the face of the god Apollo, the god who was the power behind the Delphic oracle, and to accept his words without question.  Those of you who have read any of this blog before, particularly the DIY parts, or who have read the ‘About me’ page (go and have a quick look now if you want, I won’t go anywhere), will know that I am quite familiar with a number of my limitations, mostly because they are illuminated on a daily basis by my wife and my daughter, mostly my daughter.  Such an illumination took place today when N and I went shopping.

Much A-Doing About nothing

My life currently feels like it is a television show being hosted by David Dimbleby, and not one of those nice ones where people are driven around in horse-drawn carriages to open parliament or get married at Westminster Abbey.  No, my life currently feels like David Dimbleby is hosting and moderating a debate in which members of the audience get to fire questions at me non-stop until either I crack or they fall asleep.  So far it has been rather more of the former than the latter unfortunately.

I'm Not a Pear Either

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You know that feeling?

Yeah, that one.

The one where you’ve not been somewhere for a long time and now you’re a bit scared of going in?  Or where you’ve not seen someone for a while and you’re just a little bit nervous of seeing him, in case they’re not the same person anymore, or you aren’t?

I feel a bit like that right now.  My blog is very much foreign territory to me at the moment.  I very rarely look at it (N probably wouldn’t even recognise it if I checked on the stats like she used to) and when I do it is with one eye closed and my face scrunched up in case I find that it has actually given up on me and disappeared.  So far I’ve been in luck, but soon it really will just up and find someone who will look after it better, so I really ought to put something new there.

Unfortunately I can confirm that the lack of blogging hasn’t come about because of my vastly improved fatherhood skills, those are still struggling to get out of first gear.  I haven’t committed any real howlers recently, like feeding N a meal solely of peas and sweetcorn, or playing chase with her so excitedly that she got scared of me and I had to spend twenty minutes cuddling her before she would play again.(1)  Nothing like that has happened in the last couple of days, which means I must be learning, although my general level is probably still novice. 

Lack of blogging is simply down to lack of opportunity, but today N came out with a statement which I just had to blog about, and so here we are again, and I really think that this could be the start of something wonderful.

But back to N.  Now I will readily admit that I am not a lot of things.  I am not an artist, of any type or description.  I am not good at DIY (see here and here for examples of my particular ineptitude in this regard).  I am not over 30.  See?  There are lots of things that I cannot claim to be, some of them I would like to be, though I don’t ask for much, I would just like to be able to paint a picture without people having to ask what it is, and if I could just learn to hang a picture I would be happy for days.  Some things I am not, however, and I haven’t even thought about it, which is where N comes in.

We were sat eating our tea and N was entertaining us with little morsels of her Cowardesque wit when she came out with a pearler of a one-liner.  “Daddy is not silly.”  This might not seem funny to you, bordering on downright dishonest as it does, but the best was yet to come.  “Daddy is not orange.”  This was delivered in the sort of voice one might associate with announcing that it was raining again, or that Nottingham Forest had dropped another three points.  A totally reasonable, unsurprising statement.  And suddenly I saw myself in a new light.  I had never really thought of myself that way before but she was absolutely right, she had struck right to the heart of the matter.  I am not, in fact, orange.  It was a revelation.

I still don’t know where it came from.  We hadn’t been talking about oranges, we have no oranges in the house, our walls are not orange, and I don’t think N has recently become acquainted with David Dickinson.  It was just a bolt from the blue, not orange.

Welcome back everyone.  It’s nice to be back and as with all of these things, there really was no reason for that feeling.  I’ll try to make sure I have no reason for it again.

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(1) Both of which I have, unfortunately, done in the past.

Long Time, No See

No.  It’s not been that long.  You must be mistaken.  How could it have been so long?  Well.  You see.  There was this thing, and then that other stuff happened, and then the dog ate the laptop, which all conspired to mean that I couldn’t possibly blog.  Sorry.  But hopefully this will mark the resurgence of the blog.  A strict new regime will be implemented, which will mean that I will be able to blog at least two out of every three blue moons, which will be a vast improvement on the current schedule I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, onwards and upwards.  Who’d like to hear about my holiday?  Good.

Those of you with very good memories will remember that we went to Wales.  The Pembrokeshire coast to be precise.  And that I thought it was a fabulous week.  A week by the seaside can’t really go wrong can it, unless it pours for seven days solid, but happily it didn’t, and so we were able to go on the beach every day.  Which led to one particularly memorable incident.

I’m no photographer, but I do like to take photos.  However, my photos tend to involve landscapes and empty beaches.  This holiday B said perhaps it would be nice if I took photos with people in.  This sounded good, but it turned out I couldn't really be trusted with that responsibility.

At least I got the bag in the picture, that's something, right?

I’m pretty sure B was there when I took the picture, but somehow she managed to evade the cold glare of the lens.  It wasn’t long though before I managed to pin her down and take this, quite stunning, perfectly framed picture of the top of her head and the bottom of my face.  I can feel the Turner prize winging its way to me as I write this. 

There is no truth to the rumour that I don't actually have eyes

(The inclusion of this photo was entirely against B’s better judgement.)

Whilst my wife and I were struggling with complex ideas like aim, and point and click, N had taken one look and decided that we were really not the parents for her.  She turned her back and strode purposefully across the expanse of sand, desperate to put as much distance between herself and her clowning parents as possible.

Excuse me captain, are you going my way?

I’m not convinced that she hadn’t decided just to dig her way out of there, note the spade she is gripping onto.  Happily, it didn’t quite get that far and we were all united again eventually.  This time I managed to get a photo of all of us.

Mummy, we'll never make sandcastles if you keep filling the bucket with stones.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad is it?

Holidaying

Holidays change everything.  Routines are out of the window.  Cosy little rituals which you have developed with your child for months are out of the question.  The comfort of knowing where everything is and needs to be out back is just rendered totally out of the realms of possibility.  OK, maybe the last one is a little over the top, but I had to make it fit with the others.  Things definitely get harder when you’re on holiday, even just down to the fact that the rooms are laid out differently so you now can’t creep past the child’s bedroom door to get to your own room without the child immediately being aware of you and its eyes, like piercing lasers, suddenly locking onto you while you have the sinking feeling of knowing that the supremely tired child is not going to go back to sleep for another hour. 

A Triumph

On Saturday I went to Triumph Live with my dad.  Now I am no motorbike enthusiast, in fact, I’m not even really a motorbike lukewarmist, I can tell one end of a motorbike apart from the other, mainly because it would be a very brave design choice to put the handle bars on the back, but that is about as far as it goes.  I am a big fan of standing around people as they look at engines and nodding sagely when they talk knowledgeably about sprockets and cam shafts and the occasional carburettor but I couldn’t tell you anything about those things, I wouldn’t know what they looked like never mind what they actually did.  I can be part of a conversation like that whilst not actually following a word of what was being said.  I can point out the windscreen washer fluid inlet funnel, because it has the cool picture on it, and I know where the oil goes because I feel I should, but more than that and I am not the man to help you.  So I was mildly interested to go and see some motorbikes, but i didn’t actually expect to really understand what was going on, especially as part of the day was to go round the Triumph factory, a place that I was expecting to confuse me from the moment I stepped in.  In my head, as I prepared myself to go in I knew that this was going to be a trip in which my ego was going to take a bit of a beating.

It was brilliant.  It was so brilliant that I ended up taking almost a hundred photos which for me is like a normal person taking about a thousand.  This really was something quite wonderful.  There were explanatory plaques and stands, some incredibly intricate machinery and one wonderfully excited father.  The fact that I really hadn’t got a clue what was going on was more than made up for by my dad who was charging around like a small child who doesn’t know which present to open first.  It was like taking my daughter round, I kept having to stop myself from reminding him that he couldn’t touch anything.

Anyway, there were a few things that I really wanted to show you, so I shall now proceed to bombard you with photographic evidence.