Ten More Things I’ve Learned as a Dad (2019)

^^^ That’s not me, by the way. I’m a lot less handsome than that.

Anyway, without any further ado, welcome to the sequel to my 2017 blog ’12 Things I’ve Learned as a Dad’.

Supermarkets can be the site of your greatest successes, and your greatest defeats

Supermarkets can morph from ethereal paradises into branded hell-scapes in the blink of an eye. Lots of things can influence this: your children’s mood and tiredness; their sugar intake; the ascendancy of Jupiter in Mars; black magic; the Hong Kong technology markets; how much caffeine/codeine/cocaine/morphine you’ve had in the past 24-hours, and how many times that day you’ve found yourself fantasising about jumping into a Ferrari and then immediately driving off a cliff.

What contrasts. One visit, you could be wheeling your children up and down the aisles like something out of ‘Well-Behaved Victorian Family Monthly’. They’ll be helping you put things in the trolley while sticking close to it, flanking it like undertakers accompanying a hearse. They’ll be smiling beatifically at old ladies and saying things like, ‘Mother, I do hope you’ll permit me to help fold all the washing tonight.’ Text-book.

The next visit, your kids are like Gremlins who’ve been fed after midnight. You’ll be trailing a Godzilla’s tail of destruction behind you as they duel their way up and down the aisles like Sith Lords armed with French baguettes instead of light sabres. They’ll be running for the exit like Olympic sprinters (necessitating a dangerous, high-speed chase throughout the supermarket); they’ll be jumping out at old ladies from behind off-brand boxes of Bran Flakes; throwing down police stingers to immobilise people’s trolleys; wearing raw chickens as hats; substituting live grenades for kiwi fruits in the fruit aisle; staging riots and taking people hostages. NEVER take more than one kid to the supermarket on your own. EVER. Unless you’ve got a ready supply of analgesics or hallucinogens. Because you have a lot of weapons in your parenting arsenal, but out in public, there’s one thing you don’t have, which leads us very neatly into the next ‘Thing I’ve Learned’…

Your kids know you can’t use your ‘smash glass in case of emergency’ voice in public

My wife and I have never, and would never, strike our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts, but that doesn’t mean that our house swells with the sounds of holy silence. Sometimes we have to shout. Sometimes we don’t have to shout, but we do it anyway, because we’re over-tired, because we’re human, because our sanity’s been worn down to a nub through having to ask the kids to put their socks on seventy-five-thousand times when we’re already half-an-hour late for something.

Shouting is always – well, usually – a last resort, though. You don’t want to use it so often that it either replaces smacking as a cruel and debilitating psychological punishment or loses its short-term effectiveness. Once that seal’s broken, though, it’s hard to put the red-faced genie back in the bottle. Especially since the genie might smash the bottle and attempt to stab you with the broken end.

But there’s a particular shout that all parents have: the ‘I Mean Business’ voice; the ‘Shit Just Got Real’ voice. It’s a shout that doesn’t last long, and need only be deployed once. It’s kind of like Jesse Custer’s Genesis power in Preacher. One boom, one screech, and the kids’ blood freezes in their veins, and they petrify like statues.

And you can’t use it in public. Your kids know this. Well, you COULD use it in public, but you’d look like a maniac, or the sort of person who beats and body-slams children. So you do the only other thing you can: grit your teeth into a smile and issue vague threats at your children in a high-pitched, passive-aggressive tone of voice, while occasionally turning to shoot an ‘aw shucks’ shrug at watching strangers, thinking to yourself: ‘I’m going to kill these little fuckers when we get home.’

Say it again, Sam

There are many aphorisms and clichés that sum up the experience of parenting, but there’s one that towers above all the others. No, it isn’t “F*** this, I’m going to max out my credit card and book a one-way trip to Mexico”. Good guess, though. It’s: “You can say that again!”

Because you can. You can say that again. You can say that again about 40,000 times at a bare minimum. And not just some things. All things. Every thing.

Being a parent makes you feel like a robot with its dial endlessly alternating between ‘emotionally dead’ and ‘rage’, and its speech circuits stuck on repeat. Or the composer of the world’s worst, most repetitive rave song – 2 Unlimited for the next generation: ‘Put, put. Put put put put. Put put put put. Put put PUT YOUR PANTS ON!’

Don’t fear a din

When it comes to kids, the loudness of the noise they make is actually in inverse proportion to the size of the calamity that noise signifies. I’ll explain. When I’m downstairs in the living room I can sometimes hear a noise coming from my kids’ room above me that sounds like Thor and Godzilla wrestling in the heart of a neutron bomb. I’ll immediately dash upstairs in a fit of fear and fury, but when I arrive at their doorway, I’ll find that not a single thing is out of place. The room is perfect, save for a toy box that has been turned at a forty-five degree angle towards the window. Both kids are happy and unscathed. They turn to look at me like I’m Chicken Licken after licking eleven tabs of acid. A worry-wart. A nutcase.

The time to worry, I’ve learned, is when it’s deathly quiet up there. Silence means that they’re up to something. Something awful. Young kids can barely concentrate on a single toy or a task for more than a few moments at a time (unless they’re being hypnotised by our good old pal, the TV). Just about the only thing that can focus their minds is evil. Pure, unwashed evil.

So if you find yourself momentarily apart from your kids enjoying a few rare moments of peace, and you can hear nothing from the room in which they’re playing, get the fuck up there without delay. Run. Sprint. Teleport if you can. You’re about to be greeted by a rich cavalcade of danger and debauchery, the likes of which even the ferryman on the banks of the River Styx has never seen: the cat wearing lipstick; an ungodly amount of tampons glued to the ceiling; a ten-foot blue peeing willy painted onto the wall accompanied by the word BOOB in blood-red nail varnish; a duffel bag filled with unmarked fifties; a human turd sprinkled with sequins; a cow marrying a goat in an unofficial ceremony in your bedroom; a dead shark (also sprinkled with sequins); and a working prison complex made entirely out of wooden blocks and cardboard boxes housing some of the worst serial killers this country has ever seen.

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

My kids often use me as a climbing frame, usually with little warning or provocation. I only have to bend down to pick up a plate or squat down to tie my shoelaces and there’s a two-person stampede up my spine and across my head, the pair of them swinging off my neck like monkeys.

A few weeks ago, one of my eldest’s mighty gymnastic leaps onto my torso failed, and he accidentally kicked me in the balls. As I cautioned him about the delicacy of the flesh sacks it’s our burden to bear and the care that must be taken around them, my two-year old, who was standing next to us, suddenly shouted out: ‘LIKE THIS?’ before proceeding to whip his trousers down to his ankles and shuffle around the room screaming, ‘I’m an old man, I’m an old man!’ The eldest kid responded by laughing, and slapping his own face with both hands.

Yes, kids are weirdos. And, no, I don’t need a DNA test to prove their lineage.

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

Kids have the same fickle, mercurial relationship with food as Roman emperors did with gladiators. A favourite can quickly get the thumbs down for absolutely no reason at all, and you could find the fires and fury of hell thrown in your face for daring to advocate it in the first place.

Kids are insane. A child could eat potatoes, and only potatoes, every day for six weeks while wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I LOVE POTATOES’; they could sleep with potatoes instead of teddy bears; compose sonnets, odes and epic poems to the potato; they could even lobby to have their name legally changed to Kid Who Things Potatoes are the Greatest, and you still might put a plate of potatoes down in front of them at dinner time to find those potatoes come soaring at your head accompanied by the scream of: ‘POTATOES? WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT I LIKED TO EAT SWOLLEN GROUND-TUMOURS? GET THEM OUT OF MY BLOODY SIGHT!’

I’ve witnessed my 2-year-old violently changing his mind about his own choice of breakfast cereal literally within seconds. Cheerios he said. You’re sure, I asked? Yes, he said. Positive? I asked. Yep, he said. Absolutely water-tight on the cereal front there? I asked. Uh-huh, he replied. Cool, I said. Here’s some Cheerios.

And then there was some Cheerios all over the living room table. ‘I WANT CHOCOLATE HOOPS!’

It’s madness incarnate. I’ve always found it funny that a kid can go off eating a particular kind of meat, plant, vegetable, fruit or pulse, but never seems to lose the taste for crisps or chocolate. You’d never hear them exclaiming: ‘A MILKY WAY?! JESUS CHRIST, DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING MILKY WAY KIND OF A KID TO YOU? WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE?’

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

The pattern to keep in mind when thinking about your own children’s sleeping patterns is the kind of pattern made by a spider that’s trying to make a web while off its tits on a cocktail of sulph and crack. The end result is less a web and more a Dr’s signature scribbled on the back of a spinning washing machine during an earthquake. By all means try to discern shape and meaning in that pattern, but be prepared for that sulphed-up spider to leap from one of the 957 points of its web and sink its fangs into each of your eyes.

Right. Hang on just a second. [disengages ludicrous analogy mode]

Maybe you’re one of those people whose child sleeps all the way through the night without rouse or rancour from the very first day of its life, and if you’re one of those people then I hate you and wish you an agonising death, ideally involving mentally-deranged ostriches with PTSD. My advice to you is to stop reading this amusing article immediately and proceed directly to ‘Big Malky’s Ostrich Death Arena’ just off the M8 at Cumbernauld. See how long you can bury your head in the sand before your arse is kicked off by seventeen angry flightless birds.

For the rest of you mere mortals, you need to know that lack of sleep – or a torturous and broken drip-feed of sleep – isn’t something that’s necessarily confined to the first year or so of your child’s life.

You could be a caffeine-infused wreck – more eyelid than human – for anything up to five years. It’s worse if you have two or more children. You could very well have one child who sleeps through the night, but any gain in hours spent blissfully unconscious garnered from that cherubic child could be wiped out by the other, or others. My kids are 5 and (almost) 3 now. We co-slept with both of them when they were babies, which was beautiful and magical and reassuring, but the co-sleeping, once started, never ends. Even though both boys go to sleep in their own beds in their own room, I still wake up every morning with seven-eighths of my body dangling from the edge of the bed, and a child’s foot up my nose. And our 3-year-old still wakes up at least once through the night, usually to have a good cry to himself.

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

None of us parent in a vacuum. We bring our own tiredness, moods, worries, hurries and anxieties to the job. Great. So do our kids.

Their little brains are still growing and changing, overloading their minds and bodies with impulses, emotions and information-flows they aren’t yet equipped to process. They feel things, but they don’t often understand why they feel them, or know how to deal with those feelings. This broth of feelings, this contest of emotions, is a recipe for mental breakdown, depending upon what ingredients are in the mix at any one moment.

That broth can bubble over at any moment. You can wake up in the morning, skip down the stairs and greet your children with a sunny smile, have that undiluted love beamed right back at you, wrap your arms around them and squeeze them tight, and bound over to the breakfast table ready to start the day with a clear head and an open heart, but within three minutes you could be balled up on the floor smashing it with your fists and wailing like a bereaved Middle Eastern mother, as fire and rubble and regret erupt all around you.

There’ll be one kid in the corner covered in milk and wallpaper paste screaming ‘NOOOOOOOO’, while the other one’s on the table sacrificing a goat while aggressively chanting ‘IMHOTEP! IMHOTEP’ over and over. ‘Why?’ you sob, as a swirling inter-dimensional portal opens up next to you and demons crawl out and start eating the house. ‘Why??….’

Ten minutes later you’ll all be under a blanket on the couch cuddling and eating crisps, watching Paw Patrol, and the demons will be complaining because they’ve seen that one eighty-five times before.

I’ve often came home from work at lunchtime to find my wife staring through a wall, with the ashen, dead-eyed countenance of a woman who’s just witnessed a multiple murder – or else is planning one.

Frayed and frazzled nerves, especially when shared and subjected to the same child-shaped stresses, make arguments more likely by a factor of ninety-one… THOUSAND MILLION. While stress-fights are difficult to avoid, I’ve learned that it’s best to try. Just hug them. That’s the best thing to do. Hug them and have them hug you back. Hold each other. Close your eyes tight and hope for the best.

If you’re raising kids alone, then hug yourself. In fact, give yourself a medal, you brave, mental bastards.

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

I’ve long been fascinated by serial killers and violent criminals. I’ve read scores upon scores of books about them, watched countless interviews with convicted wrong-uns on YouTube, and devoured a whack of drama series and documentaries on the subject. I was a fan of sick, murderous bastards long before Netflix made it fashionable. As a consequence I feel I’m armed with enough specialist knowledge to spot the early warning signs of having a psychopath on my hands.

When he was three, Ted Bundy surrounded a sleeping female relative with sharp knives, all pointed towards her body. It was a most unsubtle augur of the young man’s future hobbies. The worst my wife and I have woken up to is a cough in the eye, or a shat bed, so we’ve already aced the Bundy Test.

We’ve always had pets, too, and in a house with trainee serial killers, the pets are the first to go. Our current cats, then, are rather like pit canaries. Mercifully, both boys are very loving and gentle with our furry lodgers, beyond the very occasional bit of monster-roaring in their direction, so that’s another test passed. Phew. And we haven’t yet found the disembodied head of a hitch-hiker in our fridge, so that’s also reassuring.

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

Despite all the headaches, heartaches and lack of sleep, having kids is still the best thing in the entire world

It really is. And I think that speaks for itself. My kids are absolutely bloody fantastic, and they make me smile and cry with happiness, and beam with love and pride, more times a week than I could count. It makes all the murderous rage worth it.

Co-sleeping Kids 2: The Sleepquel

That's a really cute picture, but either those two people have the tallest baby in the world, or that child's going to suffocate!

That’s a really cute picture, but either those two people have the tallest baby in the world, or that child’s going to suffocate!

Baby number two is on its way this November. Many of you may remember that my partner and I were poised to embark on a mission to encourage our two-year-old son, with whom we co-sleep, to sleep in his own room ahead of his brother’s arrival. You can read all about that, and how we felt about it, here.

Well, it’s taken many months of patience, tenacity and tough-love, but I can report – with just over a month to go – that our mission has been… a complete and utter failure. We still wake up, each and every morning, with that smiling, tuft-headed little creature lying right there next to us, smiling over at us and issuing a few foul-breathed good mornings before ordering us out of bed. We tried, people, we really, really tried.

Prior to, and during, the transition, we played it perfectly, doing everything by the unofficial child-rearing handbook: we bought him bedsheets and duvet covers emblazoned with things that he loved (in this case Thomas the Tank Engine), and made a big deal of how awesome his room was, and how lucky he was to be snoozing in his very own big-boy bed. We became like a couple of drug-addled children’s TV presenters – the Krankies on crack, the Chuckle Brothers on ching, the Singing Kettle on ketamine – with eyes as wide as our maniac fixed smiles, a pair of howling lunatics striding and emoting our way around his bedroom.

“OH, THIS IS A BUH-RILL-IANT BEDROOM, MUMMY, I WISH I COULD SLEEP IN A BEDROOM LIKE THIS.”

“OH, YES, DADDY, ISN’T IT FAN-TASTIC? IS THAT… IT CAN’T BE… IS THAT THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE?”

“OH YES, YES I THINK IT IS! THIS IS A-MAZING! THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME!”

“I’M SO BLOODY JEALOUS! SHALL WE SING A SONG ABOUT IT NOW, DADDY?” “OH CAN WE, MUMMY? CAN WE?”

I’d just like to add, for the avoidance of doubt, that our son was present at the time.

chuckle

That first night, his mum crammed her pumpkin-esque pregnant belly into that tiny single-bed alongside him, and lay stroking his hair until he drifted off to sleep. Minutes later, she tip-toed through to our bedroom and whispered a cry of victory. I’m certain there was also a high-five involved.

Well that was easy, we thought. Maybe he’s going to be cool with this after all.

Sometime around 1am, the door to our bedroom swung open with the force of a fearsome gunslinger bursting into a wild-west saloon. Our son stood blinking in the beam of light cast from the hallway behind him, his hair standing up in nutty-professorial clumps. He wore a puzzled frown as he surveyed the half-dark around him, sooking sternly on his water cup. We sat up and watched him. He seemed certain there’d been an admin cock-up in the bedtime arrangements. “You surely didn’t mean to leave me behind, mum and dad. I’m not mad, just… disappointed.”

He staggered to the foot of our bed, tossed up his water cup, and quickly clambered after it, shuffling and snuggling himself into the crook of his mum’s arm. What could we do? We knew we should have picked him up and plonked him back down upon Thomas the Tank’s ever-smiling face, repeating the process hour after hour, night after night, for as long as was necessary until he’d adjusted to the new reality. But what the hell. It was a transition. This was only the first night. Let him sleep, dammit. Let him have one more night… Weekend. Just one more weekend. Okay, a week. A fortnight! Just a fortnight, mind. Oh, hell, let’s just let him have a clean month, goddamit.

And so now, every night – any time between the hours of midnight and four – that stern little face, with its crown of bed-head, struts or slinks into our room, and jumps into our bed.

future

The future??

Sometimes we hear him crying from his room, and one of us goes through to console him. Now and again we can placate him with a bonus bed-time story, during which he’ll happily drift back to sleep, but hours later he’ll always be back, creeping into our room like a tiny foggy-eyed ninja.

Sometimes a story just won’t do. More often than not, when I respond to his cries and whimpers in the late evening or dead of night, I’ll extend my arms to give him a comforting cuddle, only to find his little arms locking around my neck like clicked-in seatbelts, his legs propelled upwards by his full strength and weight to perform a similar fastening trick around my torso. “Mumma,” he’ll say, nodding and sniffing back a tear. “Okay, wee guy,” I’ll say, carting him back off to our bedroom – because I’m a big soft shite and I hate being apart from him anyway.

Because we’re enablers of the worst kind, we always leave on a dim night-light in his bedroom, and the light in the hallway; like lights on a runway guiding him to a soft landing on our bed. His stealth tactics have improved to the point where we don’t often realise he’s with us until we wake up in the morning. Either that, or our brains have adjusted to the new reality… which wasn’t really the way this was supposed to work: he was supposed to adjust to our new reality, wasn’t he?

Four weeks to go…

MORE PARENTING/PARENTHOOD ARTICLES

Co-sleeping kids: banished from the bed

Happy Father’s Day… to me?

On the horror of taking your child to hospital

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-play Warehouse

Flies, Lies and Crime-fighting Dogs

When people take pictures of your kids

Co-sleeping kids: banished from the bed

cosleep1A benchmark is looming in our lives, one I’d guess most parents have already reached by this stage in their children’s development. My little boy is nearly two, and since birth he’s shared our bedroom with us. For the first couple of months he slept in a Moses basket by our bed. After that, he graduated to a special stilted extension that clamps on to our double-bed on his mother’s side. Most nights he’s to be found spread-eagled across three-quarters of the total available area, forsaking his own little jutted corner and pushing his mum and me to the outer fringes of bed-space and beyond. Often my knees dangle over the spongy precipice of my side of the mattress, a faint sliver of duvet tugged sparingly to my body, an arrangement that brings warmth to a mere one shoulder and half a leg.

And I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Except now we have to.

Baby number two is arriving this November, and the bright torch of cosy snuggledom will have to be passed down from the eldest sibling to the newest. This makes it sound like a noble act in which my son is a willing participant. My language masks the fact that our son will probably interpret his relocation to his actual bedroom – or ‘the toy room’ as he surely thinks of it – as banishment; his position at the maternal breast usurped by a shrieking, snivelling little upstart with nothing in the way of special skills beyond the amazing ability to shit, sneeze, piss and cry all at the same time.

A random toddler, somewhere in the world, exhibiting that famous toddler scowl.

A random toddler, somewhere in the world, exhibiting that famous toddler scowl.

My son no longer breastfeeds. I guess his mum’s pregnancy hormones and a concomitant change in the composition of her milk convinced his taste buds that it was time to move on. He still stares at his mum’s breasts from time to time, with the same look on his face that you or I would wear if we spotted someone in the street with whom we were positive we’d once passed an evening, many years ago. Sometimes, when we’re all lying in bed for story time, he slips a hand down his mum’s top, buries it in her cleavage and says, ‘Comfy in there.’ (That’s my boy!) Then he’ll fall asleep, a fond look written across his tender little features somewhere between peace and triumph.

Breastfeeding was the main reason we decided to co-sleep, to make night feeds easier for mother and child (and, let’s face it, for Daddy too). I say ‘we’ decided. That’s not strictly accurate. My partner outlined the kind of mother she wanted to be, and I gladly and wholeheartedly supported it. I’m thankful every day that I was blessed to have children with a woman whose methods, which I’m sure will earn her the label of ‘new age mother’ or ‘hippy chick’ in some people’s eyes, hark back to a more mother-centric time. Had she decided to bottle feed and move our baby to his own room within a few months, I’m sure I would’ve supported that, too, but I’m grateful that she was able to open my eyes to the alternative; an alternative that I fast accepted as the definitive. That being said, I recognise that all mothers and couples have different stresses, commitments and priorities in their lives that don’t always easily accommodate the ways in which we’ve chosen to approach parenthood. I’m just glad we were able to find a way that works for us, and makes us all happy.

Even though my son’s suckling days – for both sustenance and comfort – are over, his continued presence in our room is about so much more than nurturing or convenience. It’s a gift. Each morning I wake up to find a little face smiling at me across his mother’s tummy. He’ll shout ‘Morning time’ and clamber over her legs to nuzzle in between us, cradling my face and giving me a big wet kiss on the lips. More and more frequently, as my fear of rolling over in my sleep and crushing him to death has subsided, I’ve woken to find him nestled in to the crook of my arm, and get to watch his tiny, delicate chest rising and falling, a series of soft little susurrations issuing from his lips. When I wake up, he wakes up, grabbing my hand and telling me, ‘Mon, Daddy, mon, morning time’, before sliding himself off the bed and demanding I follow him. The thought of not seeing his face in the fresh seconds of each new day, of not knowing he’s safe and with us – I mean with us, right with us – fills me with a suffocating sense of dread. I know he’ll only be a few feet away in another room, just along the smallest hallway in the world. I know we’ll all adapt and adjust as a family and nothing will be lost or broken. But still. My boy. My team. We should be together. Always. Even when we’re all snoring and farting in bed.

Whenever I do this, my last thought before drifting off is always 'Please don't let me kill the baby.'

Whenever I do this, my last thought before drifting off is always ‘Please don’t let me kill the baby.’

Because the vast majority of people in the Western world don’t co-sleep with their children – having the luxury of space and surplus bedrooms – our decision to do so is often greeted as if it were some weird new-age aberration. It amuses me when baby boomers and their elders scoff at co-sleeping, or somehow think it’s an unhealthy form of coddling, given that most of them grew up in one-bedroom tenements where they had to share a bed with eighty members of their extended family.

I know what you’re thinking, though. Conjugals, right? I guess there are a lot of husbands and partners who would baulk at the idea of co-sleeping with their kids for that very reason. Isn’t sharing your bed with a tiny human an impediment to sex with your partner? Well of course it is. But so is having kids in the first place. Besides, not having a bed to rely on forces you to make better use of things like walls, tables and washing machines. I’m conscious that the previous sentence makes it sound as though my life is an uninterrupted cavalcade of adventurous humping, when that may be over-egging the pudding somewhat. A child is a living reminder of death: your actual death, and the steady death of your recreational sex life. A lot of the time we’re too tired after long hours absorbing and deflecting the time-hungry hyperactivity of our unbowedly kinetic little human. Or else find that our supplies of sexiness and reservoirs of randiness have been depleted by the wiping up of one too many jobbies, or the fifty-sixth recitation in a row of Jack and the Beanstalk. Now that’s a passion killer. Especially when you later find yourself shouting out ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’ at the point of ejaculation.

The next few months are going to tough for the three (soon to be four) of us, but we have to do what’s best for Jack and the new baby. We can’t risk the safety of our newest arrival if Jack decides to  object to the sharing of his domain, and we can’t subject Jack to a screaming wake-up call every two to three hours when his little brother or sister wakes up to feed. We’re going to have to help Jack adjust to the new reality in stages; make it seem like the bold, empowering and exciting journey towards independence that I guess, in many ways, it is.

Perhaps I’m worrying in the wrong direction here. For me, the only thing worse than the thought of my son being upset by his impending move is the thought that he won’t really give a shit about it one way or the other. And it’ll be me waking up at four in the morning with a heavy heart and a halted tear, creeping through to his room with a blanket and a pillow, begging to be close to him.

MORE ARTICLES ON PARENTHOOD

Happy Father’s Day… to me?

On the horror of taking your child to hospital

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-play Warehouse

Flies, Lies and Crime-fighting Dogs