Diary of a Desperate Dad

Lou Reed had a pretty clear idea of what a perfect day should contain.  According to that great singer, it goes something like this: “Just a perfect day, feed animals in the zoo.  Then later, a movie, too – and then home.”  In the Jackson family, today was meant to be one of those days.  It was even set to include our very own version of feeding the animals in the zoo: a trip to an Italian restaurant with our three kids plus my gran in tow.  But whereas Lou’s perfect day had a decidedly happy ending, ours was altogether more fraught and ridiculous, proving it’s impossible to predict how life with a young family is going to turn out on a day-to-day basis.

For the second day running, the fun and games started at 6am, with arguments about who really needed a wee the most.  On this occasion, the two-year-old won the much-coveted race to the toilet, sending the four-year-old into a fit of entirely disproportionate despair.  After six hours of on-the-edge behaviour from all three children, we finally managed to bundle them all into the car and head off for lunch with my gran.  And that’s where it all started to go badly wrong.

Already running slightly late, we turned up at the restaurant to be immediately greeted by a friendly waiter, who smiled and rather perceptively commented: “you must be Sam.”  I confirmed his suspicions.  “Your gran’s not here,” he continued.  “Her car won’t start.  So she’s phoned to ask if you could go and pick her up.”  Right, back in the car, to drive the two miles to her retirement village, leaving my wife to order anything on the menu that would keep our children’s feral behaviour at bay.  Ten minutes later, after battling the Sunday afternoon traffic, I’m there.  But crucially, she’s not.  Gran’s gone for a wander, it seems…

After walking around the retirement village for a bit and being given more than a few suspicious looks, I jump in the car to retrace my steps.  Patience is not something my gran is blessed with in abundance; could she have given up waiting for me and decided to walk to the restaurant, despite her dodgy hip and much-needed stick?

A mile and a half later, there’s still no sign of her.  I call my wife.  Her mobile rings.  I can hear it on the seat next to me.  This is not good.

Back to the retirement village I go, by this point convinced that Gran is either stuck on her stairlift or has jumped in a car with someone who looks a little bit like me.  The banging on her door and shouting through her letterbox wakes the gentleman in Flat 3, but she remains missing.  I’m just about to go and ask the warden for a key (by this point, I’ve convinced myself that I’ll have to start organising Gran’s funeral in a matter of hours) when the restaurant phones.  Gran has arrived – but my wife apparently has no idea how she got there.

By the time I return, this formidable octogenarian is necking a large glass of wine and recovering from what she’s since revealed was a two-mile trek on foot.  After berating me for not noticing her waving her umbrella from the cycle path she’d decided to walk down, we eventually tuck into lunch.  All is going very well until the two-year-old vomits her entire meal over herself, her mum, and the floor.  At this point, all I want to do is nick Gran’s wine and down the remainder of what’s in the glass.

After the inevitable clean-up operation, our day continued to get ever more bizarre and unpredictable.  I provided a shuttle service at the end of the meal to get everyone back to Gran’s flat – a place I genuinely believe may be hotter than the sun – where my wife and I were then encouraged to go through a pile of belongings she no longer wanted (but which she thought would be perfect for us).  My highlight was a VHS of my school jazz band in 1998; my wife’s was a used washing-up brush with food in the bristles.

On the way home, we had to call in on 91-year-old Auntie Jane (why did we agree to do this on the same day?  WHY?).  On arrival, she appeared to be watching some kind of soft porn video: a man and a woman, both topless, were lying in bed kissing, whilst some rather inoffensive piano music played underneath.  We were assured it was just a home video (well, quite) from the 1970s, which featured all sorts of family members performing in a play Auntie Jane had written herself, so we didn’t protest any further.

Once home, teatime involved the usual kids-based carnage, and we eventually got our little monkeys into bed a couple of hours ago.  What.  A.  Day.

This morning, someone mentioned to me how lovely it was that Sunday can still be a day of rest.  Next Sunday, they’re having my kids for 24 hours – and I might see if they’d like to hang out with a few of my elderly relatives for the afternoon, too…

Sometimes, as a parent, it’s easy to think you’ve got everything under control.  ”Well, this isn’t as tricky as people make out,” you smugly say to yourself, as your kids play happily together and you can, for once, actually see your living room carpet underneath the mass of naked (and therefore slightly demonic) dolls and little pieces of feet-destroying Lego.  Those rare moments of domestic bliss are what you cling to for the majority of the time – because unfortunately, any parent who tries to convince themselves that their life is anything other than hideously chaotic is lying through their teeth.

Since becoming a dad, one of my observations has been how quickly the definition of what’s normal changes.  Before having kids, I wouldn’t have taken kindly to someone walking into the bathroom while I was sitting on the toilet.  Now, it’s become entirely commonplace for a toddler to be attempting to make a den with the loo roll while I’m trying to use it for entirely different purposes.  Similarly, there was once a time, not all that long ago, when I’d think it more than a little strange to wake up with more than one person lying next to me in my bed.  Nowadays, I’m lucky if there’s any space for me at all by the time it gets to 4am.  So it was with a slight sense of trepidation that we booked a holiday away with friends earlier this month.  Has our definition of normality changed so dramatically that our family habits are now not fit for consumption outside our own household?

Thankfully, our Easter trip was a resounding success – even though the idea of two families going away together is one of those things that’s meant to permanently ruin a friendship.  When I was little, it’s not something we ever did, and there are plenty of nightmare stories which suggest my mum and dad were wise to avoid trying to play happy families with other people.  I remember them tentatively trying it once with a family who lived over the road, just for an evening.  We played the board game Scattergories; they expressed amazement that we might win a round against them, given that they went to private school and we didn’t.  They weren’t invited back.  Another horror story I once heard involved two families with young kids going on a summer holiday together.  The parents clearly had different ideas about how to spend their evenings: one pair wanted to relax and leave the washing up until the morning; the other basically wanted to deep-clean the apartment each night and lay the table for breakfast the following day, with no speck of dust left visible to the naked eye.  Not only did they not return for a holiday en masse the following year, it seriously threatened the health of their friendship in the long-term (and for the avoidance of doubt, can we please agree right now that the family who couldn’t be arsed to do the washing up were 100% in the right?).

So, what are the must-haves for any holiday with another family?  Firstly, it’s no use booking a break purely on the basis that the adults get on marvellously well.  If the kids can’t stand each other, you’ll all be miserable.  Secondly, you have to be genuinely willing to let your friends tell your kids off if they’re being irritating.  Holidays are too short to worry about whether it’s your own child you’re disciplining, or if the little monster in question actually belongs to someone else.  Next, it’s crucial to embrace the idea that you don’t have to DO EVERYTHING TOGETHER ALL THE TIME AND KEEP SMILING BECAUSE ISN’T IT JUST SO LOVELY AND FUN TO BE ON HOLIDAY TOGETHER!  Sometimes, it’s not.  We all need our own space.  Spending every single waking moment with my own family fills me with enough trepidation sometimes, without having to factor in someone else’s wife and children – and I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.  And finally, if you have high expectations about the amount of quality time you’ll all get as adults in the evenings, think again.  Chances are, there’ll always be at least one child who’s either being a nightmare or having a nightmare, and you’re more likely to find yourself pouring the Calpol than pouring the wine.

Anyway, our holiday was great fun, full of laughs and happy children and an awful lot of swimming.  We all fed our kids far too much chocolate, rejoiced in being up ridiculously early most mornings, and went to bed very tired but very content.  Our next challenge will be half-term with the grandparents in May.  Wish us luck…

I have a confession to make: occasionally, I find newborn babies to be quite boring.  I realise this is a terrible thing to say, as someone who is currently in possession of one myself.  But let’s face it: all babies really do is eat and poo.  They don’t even sleep much.  And whatever their parents proclaim, most babies look exactly the same.  That’s not to say I’m not over the moon to be a dad to little ones, or that I don’t love them (I cried like a baby, appropriately enough, when each of my three children was born).  Let’s be honest, though: kids only really start getting interesting from around a year onwards.  Before that point, it’s a pretty hard slog.  Yes, you love them like crazy; yes, you feel so unbelievably blessed to have these precious people in your life; but it’s still exhausting and, often, unrewarding.

One thing all babies have in their favour, though, is that their needs are very simple.  A bit of food, the occasional nappy change and a roof over their heads is all that’s required.  Despite this, the marketeers would have you believe that you’re at risk of being arrested for child neglect if you don’t spend your hard-earned cash on a whole load of baby-related tat.  And this week, the idea of must-haves for newborns reached a new nadir with the announcement that Aston Martin have teamed up with Silver Cross to create “the most exclusive pram in the world.”

The Silver Cross Surf (Aston Martin edition) will only be available in Harrods – obviously – and will have all sorts of luxury features including “air-ride suspension” (eh?) and a certificate of authenticity, something that will obviously be of great use when trying to lug the thing into the boot of the car or cart it onto the bus.  Further design details included to tempt the cash-rich clowns who’ll buy this product are its suede-lined seat pad (how do you clean the vomit off that one?) and its fully reclining seat – factors which, according to a Silver Cross spokesman, means “this really is a must-have for the most fast-paced lifestyle.”

Must have?  MUST HAVE?  I’ll tell you, Mr Silver Cross Spokesman, what a must-have is: breast milk.  Honestly, have a word with yourself.

It’s an extreme, obviously – but this kind of nonsense is one of the things that just makes me look forward to my little ones getting past the baby stage.  A couple of months ago, on the day I went to collect my wife and Child Number 3 from the hospital, I nearly got a parking ticket because someone had turned up on the ward, camera in hand, to try to flog us a ‘photo memory pack’ there and then.  Dazed and knackered, we ended up just letting the woman take a load of photos, benignly agreeing that yes, it would indeed be lovely to get a photo of our wedding rings entwined around our newborn’s face – and of course, you’re absolutely right, eighty quid is such a small price to pay for such a precious memory.

So, although most of us won’t have the spare cash to waste a couple of grand on a pram, it’s still easy to end up frittering away your hard-earned money on a whole load of other nonsense that, let’s be honest, most little ones won’t even notice.  What’s more, just as all babies are strikingly similar, the one thing you’ll discover about all prams is that no matter how much they cost, you’ll still never, ever be able to get the sodding thing to steer in the right direction when you’re running horrendously late.

There are many things that get the thumbs up from me when it comes to growing up as the eldest child in a fairly large family.  As the first of three boys, I was lucky enough to always get clothes from a shop rather than a sibling, be the first one to try out all sorts of new experiences, and embrace pretty much every rite of passage before my brothers.  There were some down sides, too, though: I’m not sure I’ve ever quite understood quite why my mum felt the need to keep my umbilical cord in a childhood photo album, for example.  It was only thrown away about three years ago, and I was lucky enough to witness this ceremonial disposing of what looked like a piece of small gristle nestled in between pictures of me as a baby in my cot.  My mum apart, I don’t think any of us mourned the loss of that particular part of my anatomy from the family archives, and nor do I feel its continued presence up to that time will go down as a particular highlight for me when it comes to the benefits of being the first born.

Having said that, I suppose it’s quite nice that my mum kept such a comprehensive record of my first few months.  I’m not sure my brothers can look back on such a detailed account of their early years.  In fact, by the time the youngest one came along, he was lucky to have any photos taken of him before the age of about five, let alone enjoy a chunk of his cord being kept in perpetuity for all to see.  Me and the middle one have often tried to convince the youngest – known to us all as ‘the runt of the litter’ – that this lack of attention stems from the fact that my parents love him much less than they do us.  “You do know you were genuinely meant to be a girl, don’t you?” remains a favourite taunt to this day (only ever in jest, you realise).  And now, I’ve personally discovered how difficult it must be to give all your children the same level of attention, especially in those first few weeks after their arrival into the world.

Since last month, I am the proud owner of a total of three children – and I’m acutely aware that the little one is already being slightly overlooked and forgotten about.  She just seems to have slotted in to life as the youngest one already, and has no option but to go with the Jackson flow.  Just this morning, I parked the car in Tesco and wandered off to do the shopping, only to be reminded by my wife that it might be a good idea to get the baby out of the car.  I’d genuinely forgotten she was there (after all, compared to her brother and sister at that age, she’s a very easy child who doesn’t seem to feel the need to make her presence known every couple of minutes).  I hadn’t even bothered to park in the Parent and Child space because I genuinely thought I couldn’t really justify it without the aforementioned child in tow.  A little later in the day, when booking a holiday on the phone, I panicked when asked what my youngest daughter’s date of birth was, quickly realising that “a few weeks back, when it was quite icy” wasn’t specific enough.  The fact that, by contrast, I could recite not just my eldest’s date of birth but the precise time, too (16 minutes past 7 in the evening, since you ask), made me feel more than a little guilty.

I recently read a quote from a mum who seemed to sum all this up perfectly: “When I had my first child he had his own face cloth, my second child shared his brother’s face cloth and my youngest had the dish cloth.”  In our house, no one has a face cloth – we tend to just tell them to wipe their face on their T-shirt because we can’t really be bothered to go and find a flannel.  But anyway, from now on, I think I should do a little more to make sure that Child Number 3 gets as much focus and attention as Child Number 1.   I’ll be fairly conservative in my approach, though – you know, take lots of photos, go off on the odd day trip with my youngest on her own to make her feel special, and so on.  And when they look back on their childhoods in years to come, whatever they think of my parenting or the levels of favouritism shown towards them, there’s one thing they’ll all share: a distinct, categorical lack of any gristle-like substance in their photo albums.

Ten years ago, if someone had told me that I’d be married with three children before I turned 30, I’d have either scoffed with derision or rocked in my chair with fear.  It’s funny how life turns out: I never particularly expected to have all my kids this young but, now that it’s happened, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

One of the reasons I’m really pleased we started a family when we did is because of how absolutely exhausting it is.  Thankfully, my wife and I are both relatively fit and healthy – but still, being a parent is completely knackering.  Now that I know what’s it’s like, the concept of waiting until I’m older, creakier and more haggard before having children is by no means a more attractive proposition than the situation I find myself in today.

And so it’s with a sense of bizarre fascination that I viewed the news that Peter Stringfellow, already a grandfather four times over, is to become a dad again – AT THE AGE OF 72.  If I find it exhausting to get up and change nappies at the age of 29, how on earth is this septuagenarian going to cope?  Well, according to an interview quoted in today’s papers, he’s not too concerned on that front: “I know it’s going to be tough so, of course we’ll have nannies – a night nanny and a day nanny and a holiday nanny and an aeroplane nanny.”  Well, quite.  We’ve all been there, Pete.

On second thoughts, maybe the challenge of having young children isn’t anything to do with age.  Perhaps it’s actually down to how much help you can afford.  But still, when you have a young baby, there’s only so much you want to pass on to others – don’t you think?  Even if I had the wealth of Mr Stringfellow, I’m genuinely not sure I’d want to use it to pay other people to look after my kids (although I do like the idea of an ‘aeroplane nanny’).  Admittedly, it’s completely exhausting getting up in the night with a child who’s in urgent need of a glug of Calpol, but it’s also all part of the journey of having little ones.  You haven’t really done the whole being a dad thing until you’ve had to give a presentation to a load of your colleagues despite only having 90 minutes’ sleep.  And when, two minutes before that presentation, you realise that your two-year-old evidently covered your arse in Weetabix before you left the house, it’s even more of a challenge.

Peter Stringfellow isn’t alone when it comes to famous older dads: Paul Weller fathered twins at the age of 53, David Jason became a dad for the very first time at the age of 61, and Des O’Connor also had a kid at 72.  It must be odd for your child to start growing their own teeth at the same time that you’re losing yours, and there’s something strange about having a baby in the full knowledge that you almost certainly won’t live long enough to see them into adulthood.  But who am I to judge, eh?  All I’d say is that I’m very thankful to have had kids in my 20s.  I still feel woefully unprepared and horrendously under-qualified – but I doubt I’d feel much different if I was half a century older.

“My parents had a really sweet tradition when we were growing up,” commented a friend of mine one day.  It was some years ago now, and we were talking about what our respective childhoods had been like.  “Very often,” he continued, “after my mum had finished her bath, she’d call downstairs – and my dad would go up to help dry her back.”

LONG PAUSE

“He wasn’t really drying her back, though, was he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, her arms aren’t particularly short, are they?”

“No…”

“So, they were getting up to something else in the bathroom, weren’t they?  How many times a week would he ‘dry her back’?”

“Oh, about two or three….”

The look of complete horror on his face at that moment of realisation, when it became clear than his randy parents had fooled him and his siblings well into their teenage years with their bathroom charade, is something I’ll never forget.

The whole issue of parents and sex is one that’s likely to provoke a reaction – especially when it comes to the thought of your own parents (yuck, obviously).  But as a sleep-deprived dad of three, the main thing I genuinely wonder is how, as your family grows and your kids get bigger, any parents manage to get away with it without being caught.

My wife still vividly remembers a family holiday to visit her grandparents in Scotland – she must have been about eight at the time – when she was sleeping on the floor of her parents’ room.  “I lay there, wide awake, honestly thinking my dad was having a heart attack.”  He wasn’t, obviously, but there was certainly something else going on with an altogether happier conclusion.  In a similar vein, a mate of mine recalls growing up in a house where, very often, a large wooden trunk was placed in front of his mum and dad’s bedroom door every Saturday morning, preventing him and his his siblings from unexpectedly running in.  Subtle, it’s not – but it certainly must have been effective.

Once kids are part of the mix, finding any time for romance is quite a challenge.  And nor is it always a priority, either.  I remember a mum friend of mine once saying that when asked what she wanted for her birthday, her instinctive response was “a chance to do a poo on my own.”  With two under-5s in tow, her birthday wish-list no longer involved flowers, chocolates and naughty underwear: she simply wanted a moment’s peace without a toddler standing barely two feet away, pulling all the loo roll off.

Right now, with a baby under two weeks old, I think it would be fair to say that long, lazy mornings in bed aren’t exactly an option – so my wife and I won’t be investing in a wooden trunk any time soon.  By contrast, though, just up the road from us there’s a lady who has two children, with an age gap of just under 11 months between them.  So it’s clear that some people are at it like rabbits barely days after having a baby – which is strangely commendable, I guess, as well as being deeply puzzling.

Finally, you’ll notice that all my anecdotes have been related to other people’s parents.  That’s because mine have never had sex, never will, and would never want to, anyway.

Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael: move over.  There’s a new Jackson Five in town and, although this bunch doesn’t yet have the same back-catalogue of chart hits to its name, it’s definitely headline news – well, in our house, at least.  The reason?  This time last week, “the present Mrs Jackson” (as she’s always delightfully referred to by a colleague of mine) gave birth to a beautiful, slightly shell-shocked baby girl.  A girl who, according to my mum, looked like a frog when she was born (nice).  To be honest, she wasn’t wrong – but then, who’s ever looked their best whilst having their photo taken close-up on a mobile phone, 13 minutes after appearing from the womb?

Having had two kids already, both of whom took many hours to arrive, my wife was in no hurry to get to the hospital last Sunday evening.  She understandably didn’t relish the chance of whiling away most of the night in the Royal Surrey, so we stayed at home for the first couple of hours of labour.  By the time we actually arrived, I was mildly concerned that we may not get any further than the car park.  Thankfully, though, we did make it to the delivery ward, albeit no thanks to an unruly wheelchair that clearly wanted to lead us down the adjacent corridor to, rather alarmingly, the Chapel of Rest.  But all was well in the end and, an hour later, Daughter Number Two (a.k.a. Child Number Three) was on the scene.

Over the last week, I’ve been reminded again of some fairly key rules about childbirth – and even made a few new observations along the way.  In no particular order, my Top Ten are:

1. It’s never right to share with anyone the details of how many stitches your wife had to have after the birth.  No, honestly: DON’T.
2. Unless it’s your own child, a baby is a relatively boring thing.  To quote our four-year-old son, “Dad, is she ever awake, or does she just sleep the WHOLE time?”
3. When considering if and when to make small talk with the midwife, you should apply the Taxi Driver Rule.  In the same way that it’s clichéd and inadvisable to ask a taxi driver if he’s “had a busy night so far?” or “just started your shift?”, so it is futile and pointless to pose similar questions to the woman who, at that moment, has most of her forearm inside your wife because she’s trying to ascertain whether or not she is fully dilated.
4. No matter what your politics, everybody should love the Labour government at least a little bit for the fact that, in 2003, they introduced paternity leave.  For dads, a world without paternity leave does not bear thinking about.
5. The smell of a baby’s head is, without question, the finest smell in the entire world.
6. When you have a newborn baby, you should completely lower your expectations of what you can manage.  Frankly, if you remember to put clothes on at all, you’ve achieved something, let alone actually getting round to washing, drying and ironing anything.
7. No matter how funny you may personally find it to refer to your wife’s “breasticles”, now is really not the right time to make that joke.
8. Despite what other people may tell you about it being a lovely moment of bonding with your newborn child, the dad-based ritual of “cutting the cord” is a completely gross experience that should be avoided at all costs.  Ask yourself: have you ever enjoyed cutting a bit of gristle?  Quite.  It really is no different.
9. In the first few weeks after the birth, you may well wonder whether you’ll ever get another night’s uninterrupted sleep in your lifetime.  Don’t worry: it does happen.  But it takes about two years, at least.
10. Becoming a dad is, without doubt, the most humbling, scary and “wow, what’s the meaning of life really all about?” moment you’ll ever experience: guaranteed.

On Wednesday, the joys of paternity leave become nothing more than a memory for me – almost certainly for the very last time.  So, before the madness of work returns, I’m going to enjoy these next two days.  And, much as I have high ambitions for my kids, I think I’ll leave it until next week before I get them to rehearse our tribute versions of I Want You Back and ABC.

In the nicest possible way, I’m looking forward to Monday morning already.  Does that make me a terrible dad?

All day, I’ve been trying to work from home.  And I can confidently conclude that it has been a disaster.  With the snow affecting my trains and the bad weather only due to get worse during the course of the day, I concluded first-thing that I really would be better off staying put.  After all, I had a stack of award entries to write along with a script for a big concert we’re putting on at work in a few weeks’ time, so it wasn’t as if I didn’t have enough to do.  What’s more, with the eldest child at school, things would be fairly quiet at home, and with my wife now very pregnant I really didn’t relish getting “the call” in the midst of London transport chaos.

So, up I got, bright and early, ready to make a start before the kids had even had their breakfast.  I was just about to get cracking, when my phone went off.  “Upon advice from the local education authority, the infant school is closed today.”  Right.  Okay.  Well, I’ll quickly get him out of his school uniform (he’s quite keen on school at the moment and was dressed and ready to go before 7am) and find him something else to do.  Then, I can get started.

For the next two hours, I sat at my Mac with a two-year-old clambering on my shoulders and a four-year-old asking “can we build a snowman yet?” approximately seven times per minute.  Then, my wife took them out for a coffee with a friend.  “Great,” I thought.  “I’ve got an hour and a half to get stuff done.”  The front door had barely been shut for a few seconds when the phone went.  It was my mum.  Wanting to speak to me.  On the home phone.  She didn’t even know I was at home (“Oh!  Why aren’t you at work?” was her first question), so why on earth she’d phoned me here at 11am remains a mystery.

Once my quick chat with her was done and dusted, it was time to truly crack on.  And I did make some progress – honest.  So much so that at lunchtime, I even managed to stop for 20 minutes to try and build the much-requested snowman with the kids.  We had a lovely time at first – although it very quickly went from this:

To this:

To this:

Afterwards, I attempted to take various phone calls from the office and elsewhere, all the while trying to give the impression that everything was calm and focused here, and that the emails I was sending hadn’t been typed with one finger.

A typical Friday night in our house will involve a curry, Homeland and a bottle of wine.  Tonight, after my complete failure to do the working from home thing, it’s going to have to involve a Mac, a pile of award entries and a to-do list of stuff I was hoping I’d have tackled by now.  Ditto Saturday night.

Much as I love being with my family, right now I’m quietly looking forward to Monday morning.  If nothing else, I can at least be pretty certain that no one in the office will try to climb on my back while I’m writing an email.

Tonight’s starter for ten: is there a good time to have a baby?  By my reckoning, any new arrival in your family is a hugely exciting prospect – but would it be wrong to suggest that having a newborn in the summer is an easier option for all concerned?

Our two kids were born in July and August respectively.  On both occasions, the conditions weren’t exactly Mediterranean but there certainly wasn’t any need to de-ice the car before driving to the hospital.  Now, though, as my wife approaches the 38-weeks-and-counting stage of her third pregnancy, we face the prospect of navigating that journey in positively Arctic conditions.  The other day, I rang her and shouted “The Daily Mirror’s got a headline that says THREE WEEKS OF SNOW!”  It probably wasn’t the most caring way of flagging up the impending weather conditions but, to be honest, I think her main concern at that moment was that I’d become a Daily Mirror reader.  Since then, the reality of the situation has hit home.  This morning, we woke to a blanket of the white stuff in our little part of Hampshire.  To say that my wife looked fairly unimpressed at the idea of doing the school run in the snow with two kids under five, both of whom wanted to travel there via the universally-loathed mode of transport known as the scooter, would be putting it mildly – especially when Child Number One suggested building a snowman on the way.

Anyway, if its daily somersaults and kickboxing in the womb are anything to go by, our baby is itching to make its presence known as soon as it can, even if its official estimated time of arrival isn’t for a fortnight yet.  So, I think I need to be a bit more prepared, not just for the journey but for the fact that I’m about to become a dad again.  But so far, all I have is an old cassette box to scrape the ice off the car windscreen and a packet of Minstrels in case my wife is hungry on the journey to the hospital.  She, meanwhile, has packed her hospital bag and washed about five loads of baby sleepsuits that were already clean anyway (I didn’t question her logic, honest).  I know there’s a mountain of books about how to prepare for the arrival of a baby – but they remain on the shelf, untouched (except for the chapter about what sex is like during pregnancy which, without a shadow of a doubt, is the one every man turns to first when picking up a parenting book.  And if your husband says otherwise, he’s LYING).

I’m not going to panic too much, though.  You see, I might not quite be there yet with the car maintenance, but the experience of having had a couple of kids already has taught me a few basic dos and don’ts when it comes to how to behave when your partner is pregnant.  The first is to never, ever tell her that she’s massive.  The line “Wow!  You basically resemble Mr Greedy from the Mr Men now!” is never, ever advisable.  No, really.  Equally, if you’re ever tempted to suggest that, at the late stages of pregnancy, you give her…lady garden…a trim, don’t do it.  Obviously, you’re trying to be caring, considerate and very 21st Century Man, but it’ll only end in tears.  Believe me, I’m never going to attempt to pursue a career in horticulture after that particular experience.  And finally, as I may have mentioned before, when you finally make it to the hospital, try to avoid walking into the wrong delivery room.  Having to deal with your own wife’s labour is challenging enough, without having to inadvertently witness someone else’s.

Anyway, those are my little tips.  Yours are very gratefully received – and if you know anywhere in rural Hampshire that’s open 24 hours a day and has plenty of de-icer in stock, do let me know.  It might come in handy sooner than expected.