A Brave New World

There is one thing that dominates my life more than anything else at the moment, in terms of time spent and emotion invested and that is my 17 month old daughter.  She is my firstborn, and so she has the benefit of all of my attention without having to share with any of those pesky siblings.  It is not all roses for her though, she also has to put up with my utter inexperience and possible unsuitability for the job of being her father.  This blog is my attempt to recount the journey we have been on so far, as well as chronicling our life together as we grow older.  There are a number of other people who are important in her life, not least her mummy, but also a galaxy of friends and family who all help and support us in their various ways, some good, some unexpected, all wonderfully appreciated, but first and foremost this is our story, just me and the little bundle of dependence who came like a thunderbolt into my life.   
Many of you reading this you will probably recognise my stories, I can only hope that I am not the only one who found that the advent of their first child ushered in a brave new world in which all self-determination went out the window to be replaced by a feeling of total inadequacy at the task ahead.  I have never really thought of myself as a grown-up, working at a university and being a 'mature' student, will do that to you, causing you to think of yourself as roughly the same age as the people, in some case 9 or 10 years younger than you, that you are working and studying amongst, and so when the time came and it became obvious that I was soon going to be a father there was an inescapable feeling that this was probably happening to someone else, that illusion was very quickly shattered however, so here are some tales of my forays into fatherhood.