“Daddy, Where Do Babies Come From?”

My eldest son, Jack, 3-and-a-half, has been exploring the concepts of pregnancy and parenthood, acting out a series of scenarios with the aid of toys and teddies.

A few weeks ago he was carrying around the head of a Cyberman – a big, bulky, wearable, adult-sized head – introducing it as his baby, asking us to kiss it goodnight, even strapping it into his little brother’s buggy and shooshing us incase we woke it up. Adorable, yet also pretty surreal.

He then became attached to a rather more cuddly and anthropomorphic baby-substitute, an orange, squish-faced mini Tellytubby his little brother Christopher got for Christmas. He named him Shah. Cheers for the potential fatwa, son. At least you never named him… nevermind.

Sometimes Jack carried Shah around, cuddling him, cradling, passing him to us for short bursts of time before jealously grabbing him back again, like he was the proud and overzealous parent of a newborn. Sometimes he stuffed Shah up his jumper, and pretended to be an expectant parent. Last week he told us that the baby would come out of his tummy in ten weeks’ time, before plucking it out of this jumper seconds later with the ease of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, which we all felt was rather a slap in the face for those poor women forced to spend endless, agonising hours sweating and screaming in the delivery room, and then have to get their fannies and arses stitched back together.

I think we should have made this a teachable moment, and let him watch a particularly gruesome live birth on YouTube – right after we’d schooled the ignoramus on Iranian history and politics, of course.

In any case, a teachable moment presented itself a few days later. I had just finished reading him his bed-time stories, when he grabbed his bed-time teddy bear (Shah had been deposed at this point) and pushed it up his pyjama top.

“Dad did WHAT to you?”

“I’ve got a baby in my tummy again, Daddy.”

I smiled. “It’s good to pretend like this. It helps you learn things, and find out how things feel, and find out how other people feel about things.”

That being said, I made it clear that in the real world the only guys capable of giving birth are seahorses and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I went on to give him a bit more info.

“And mummies don’t carry the babies inside their actual tummy, where the food goes. There’s a special part that’s just for growing babies.”

Jack nodded vigorously. “And then they poo the babies out.”

“Not….” I began, talking more slowly and carefully as I began to realise where the conversation was almost certainly heading, “…really. They don’t… mummies don’t… poo babies out of their bum.”

I turned to look at his face. It was deathly still, though a little furrow was forming on his brow. I knew it was coming.

“So where do the babies come from, Daddy?”

Code red! Code red!

This was a pivotal moment. I knew that whatever I said next could have a profound effect on Jack’s personal and psycho-sexual development. Euphemism or truth-emism?

Do I tell him that babies come from the magical kingdom of Fluffington? That they’re emailed from heaven and printed on a 3D printer embedded in mummy’s crotch?

Or do I throw him a truth-bomb, break out charts and diagrams, and make him do join-the-dots pictures of vulvas and uteruses? Show him photos of big gaping fannies in such glaring, high-density close-up that it’s like staring into the jaws of the Predator? Do I talk him through what was happening that time he walked into the kitchen and found his mum bent over the counter in her dressing gown, and I told him she had a sore back and I was just massaging it better?

Ultimately, much like when Jack himself was conceived, I decided to have a quick, no-frills stab at it.

“Well, you know how we boys have willies? Me, you, baby Chris, all men.”

“Grandpa too, he has a willy.”

“That’s right, grandpa, too.”

“And papa. And uncle Aiden. They have willies.”

“That’s right.”

“And my other papa.”

“Yep.”

“And…”

I cut it short, so we didnt’t have to spend the whole night listing the names of anyone who’d ever possessed a penis.

“This is some hard shit to hear. Spark me one up, pops.”

“Well, ladies don’t have that.”

“What do they have?”

Good question. They have… they have a…

“Well, they have a… a vvvvvv…. a vvvvva….vvvva….vv…vvvvvaa….”

Why was this word so hard to say? I couldn’t seem to get my tongue around it (‘Stop your snickering up the back of the class there!’). I was beginning to sound like a man with a faulty chainsaw.

“Vagina!” I said with sudden force. “It’s called a vagina.”

“Fajina?”

“Vagina.”

“Vagina….” And then, inevitably, he said: “Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina.”

At that moment, as if summoned by the magic of the word itself, a voice boomed from the hallway outside: “He’ll be running around his nursery shouting that all day tomorrow now!”

“There’s nothing wrong with vaginas!” I shouted back at his mum, conscious that the word vagina was beginning to lose all meaning through repetition.  I turned back to Jack. “See, it’s called a vagina, but it’s sort of …a hole, that ladies have. Boys have willies, girls have holes. That’s how the baby gets out.”

He nodded, seemingly satisfied. I quickly changed the subject before the questions became any more technical…

A few days ago I came home from work to find Jack holding Shah again.

“Hi Shah,” I said.

“It’s not Shah. It’s Lou-lou.”

“Oh. What happened to Shah?”

Jack shrugged. “He died in a fire.”

I dare say it won’t be long before we’re having the death talk.

Vaginas have got a lot to answer for.

Kids say the funniest *@!#ing things

We were all in the living room. My partner, Chelsea, and I were sitting on the couch alongside our eldest son, Jack, 3. Meanwhile, baby Christopher, 1 today (Happy birthday, Chris!), was loping around the floor somewhere, scanning for toys. Yes, he lopes. He can’t walk; he doesn’t crawl: he simply lopes, balancing on one arm and swinging his body around as he weaves and circles towards his target, his movement styles a mix between a disabled French bell-ringer and Golum from Lord of the Rings.

Today’s topic of discussion was language.

‘Jack,’ said his mum. ‘Tell daddy that new word you invented today.’

Kids love to invent words, don’t they? We were on a family holiday earlier this year, in the exotic Scottish seaside resort of Girvan, and while Jack and I were out for a walk Jack we passed two stone lions positioned either side of a set of stairs. I pointed to them and asked, ‘What do you think their names are?’

‘Entie and Fooamie,’ he asserted, without any hesitation.

I nodded. ‘The one on the left is definitely a Fooamie.’

Back on the couch, Jack looked confused.

‘You know, Jack, that word you told me earlier today,’ his mother said again. ‘You remember.’

He thought for a moment, and then his face lit up with the force of his recognition. I smiled. This was going to be adorable. What was he going to say? Flubbalumptious? Labbabbachook? Skoonsh?

‘Arsehole!’ he shouted.

I laughed. Or rather a laugh shot through my lips like a bullet. My laugh emboldened Jack,  spurring him on to fill the room with arseholes. My laughs responded by upgrading into sub-machine-gun fire. This spurred Jack on even more. He was a demon drawing power through an inter-dimensional portal: the power to say ‘arsehole’. By now we were all laughing. Even baby Chris, who’d loped towards the din of our laughter, and hauled himself to his feet at the base of the couch, and proceeded to moo-hah-hah like the world’s tinies evil genius. Chris was just mimicking, of course, like a mini-Predator playing back Billy’s laugh at the end of the original film, but his laugh, our laugh, and the multitude of arseholes, all combined to create a laughter vortex/timeloop from which none of us could escape.

We eventually had to do some damage control.

‘Bet you weren’t expecting him to say that,’ said my partner, rubbing a tear from her eye.

‘Where did he hear that?’ I asked. ‘Neither of us use the word ‘arsehole’.’

‘Arsehole!’ shouted Jack.

‘Jack!’ we both shouted back. But we couldn’t really give him a row. After all, this Pandora’s Box with nothing but arseholes inside had been opened by his mother.

My partner explained that Jack had heard the word weeks ago from, as he described it, a ‘big fat lady’ who was coming out of the toilets in our favourite ice-cream parlor. Chelsea had tried to convince Jack that he’d misheard, and that arsehole wasn’t even a real word: a hard sell in a world that contains Piers Morgan.

‘What are some real words?’, we asked him, in a bid to distract him and lead him away from profanity. The three of us shouted out random words, the only link between them their innocuousness.

‘Paper!’

‘Leg!’

‘Submarine!’

‘Toothbrush!’

‘Goldfish!’

‘Carrot!’

‘Hedgehod!’

I couldn’t resist it.

‘Arsehole!’

‘ARSEHOLE!’ Jack screamed with delight.

We fell about laughing again. Chelsea had no choice but to punish me, banishing me from the room just as we would banish Jack if his behaviour ever crossed the line.

‘Daddy, you go and stand outside in the hall for a couple of minutes and think about what you’ve done,’ she said with a smirk that she hid from Jack.

Off I went, head bowed, feet shuffling.

‘I want to go with Daddy!’ shouted Jack.

‘You can’t, Jack, you’re a good boy, only naughty boys get sent out of the room.’

I opened the living room door just as Jack’s brilliant little brain found a solution to the problem of not being naughty enough to accompany me on my exile.

‘Arsehole!’ I heard him shout.

Fifteen seconds later he was standing next to me in the hall, a proud smile on his face. We high-fived.

He’s a clever wee arsehole.

The Muppets and Beyond: The infuriating ways our kids absorb TV

When I was a toddler my mum said the only thing guaranteed to bring me – and by extension her – a modicum of peace was The Muppet Show. For half an hour each week, the Muppets and their unique brand of noisy, vaudevillian anarchy turned my eyes into swirling portals of obedience.

When my son Jack came along I wanted to forge a common tie between our childhoods. With that goal in mind I set about Muppetifying his existence with the fiery-eyed zeal of a bat-shit Baptist preacher. I was a maniacal man of the cloth, a felt-obsessed fundamentalist with a Henson-sent mission to introduce our son to the all-consuming love of frog almighty.

Muppet DVDs flooded into our flat, all manner of movies and TV specials. Manah Manah became the official nonsensical anthem of our little kingdom of three. As Jack grew older, and gained the ability to toddle and teeter, the Muppet Show’s theme song became a siren’s call, a piece of music with the power to draw him from wherever he happened to be in the house straight to the feet of the TV, where he’d stand bent-kneed and bopping, beaming with born-again-glee and clapping his hands.

It was around this time that his maternal grandmother bought him a Gonzo stuffed toy, which instantly became an extension of his little hand. Jack guarded it like a junk-yard dog, not permitting even so much as a brief separation to allow his mummy to wash the grimy, big-snootered blighter. Piggy, Kermit, Animal and Fozzy soon followed, forming a full Muppet menagerie, but Gonzo steadfastly remained his favourite. He had a book chronicling all of the Muppets from the 1950s to present day, and he could identify the vast majority of them if you said their name.

I bought the Muppet Movie sound-track on CD so we could listen to the gang during car journeys. If ever wee Jack was grumpy and tired, even wailing and screaming from his car seat, it only ever took a few strums of Kermit’s banjo (careful, there) to snap him into contented silence. I swear that the Rainbow Connection was like a dose of aural ketamine.

I’d often sit next to Jack in his room bringing his Muppets to life: doing the voices, making them interact with him. This proved so popular that he’d frequently insist, on pain of tantrum, that those five fellows accompany us everywhere we went in the house, narrating everything as they went. My throat started to feel like a cat’s scratching post. It got to the point where I couldn’t even make a cup of tea without having to engineer a squabble between Piggy and Kermit, or make Gonzo do a death-defying leap from the top of the biscuit cupboard, Jack standing there silently scrutinising the performance, ready to chime in with a Waldorf and Statler-style putdown should things take a dip in quality. I was eventually held so thoroughly hostage by my kid’s imagination that I feared I wouldn’t even be able to go for a shit without Kermit announcing it as an act.


Jack’s mum hated The Muppets. Not straight away, but familiarity very quickly bred contempt. What was nirvana for our son for her felt like being Guantanamoed inside a giant clockwork orange. “You did this to us,” her haunted eyes seemed to say each time they met mine. “You’re the reason that I have to watch puppet pigs singing Copa Cabana eighty times a day, you bastard.” It wasn’t long before she was pig-sick of Miss Piggy, couldn’t bear Fozzy bear, wanted Beaker to beat it, Gonzo to begone, Scooter to scoot, and Kermit to fuck off.

She soon got her wish.

Jack began to refuse or reject items from The Muppets’ TV canon time and again to the point where I stopped offering them as an option. They receded from his day-to-day life, and then started to fade from his memory. Eventually, if the muppets appeared incidentally on some random TV show, or he caught sight of them in a book or magazine, he’d narrow his eyes and scrunch his face up, in the manner of a middle-aged man passing someone on the street they thought they kind of half-remembered from their school days. “Muzzy… Gruzzy… em… Fruzzy! That was his name. Fruzzy Hair. I think he used to sit behind me in English class.”

I’d like to think that in the months and years that followed the waning of Jack’s love for the muppets – as his obsessions evolved and expanded – that his mum actually came to retrospectively appreciate those felty little fuckers, and even kind of miss them. After all, if you’re going to be forced to watch something over and over and over and over again, ad infinitum, then you at least want that something to provide a dung-tonne of variety. And you can’t get much more varied or multifarious than a TV and cinema universe with so many crazy creatures that it makes Game of Thrones look like a two-character Alan Bennett play.

Still. Toy Story was Jack’s next great love. His mum was happier with this. Great movies, right? All three of them. Brilliant movies. You ever watched three movies twenty-five-thousand times? I don’t care if those three movies are home-movies of your own kids being born. After a few consecutive cycles you’re going to be reaching for the baby thermometer and stabbing your eyes out with it. “There’s a snake in my boots! Yes indeed there is. I’m going to use it to fucking strangle myself!”

A little bit of desperate IMDBing heralded the happy news that there were three five-minute shorts and two half-hour specials featuring Bonnie’s (nee Andy’s) gang that we could add into the movie rotation, but even then the novelty quickly wore off (although that scene in the Halloween special where the Pez dispenser pukes in disgust at the sight of the iguana boaking up a toy arm makes me laugh every single time). I even considered sending Disney a begging letter. “Please, please, please, please, for the love of God, hurry up and make Toy Story 4 so we can have one day, JUST ONE DAY, of watching those son-of-a-bitch toys doing something unexpected.”

If you’ve got, or ever had, young kids you’ll know how futile it is to try to counteract their brief but all-consuming obsessions.

“What do you want to watch today? Postman Pat, Ice Age, Count Duckula?”

“Woody and Buzz.”

“Madagascar 1, Madagascar 2, Madagasca…?”

“Woody and Buzz.”

“Oooh, how about How to Train Your Dragon?”

“Woody and Buzz.”

“I’ll give you a million pounds to watch nothing.”

“Woody and Buzz.”

… “The Muppets???”

The worst was yet to come. YouTube is both a blessing and a curse. I credit it with teaching Jack the alphabet – or at least expanding, reinforcing and cementing what his mum and I taught him – and making him more proficient with numbers, but there was a time when he fell in love with a series of videos by a kids’ content-provider called Chu Chu. As in, “I think I’d rather Chu Chu my own arm off than watch another second of these asshole videos.”

Chu Chu is an Indian company that produces Pigeon-Street-style animations of cherubic, rosy-cheeked white kids singing in stilted, weirdly-emphasised English with an Indian twang. Jack watched it so much I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gone to school sounding like Apu from The Simpsons. Chu Chu bring all of your favourite nursery rhyme classics back to life, just like this one, you know, the one about your Dad chasing his son through the house in the dead of night because he’s going to eat all of the sugar raw… I mean, what the hell IS this shit?

To be fair to Chu Chu, 18-months to 2 years after Jack’s first exposure to their inimitable brand of transatlantic nursery-rhyme stylings we still sing the Johnny Johnny song, and the semi-bhangra version of ‘No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed’ is still our favourite.

While Jack enjoyed a series of micro-obsessions with Thomas the Tank Engine, Puss in Boots, Peppa Pig (that plinky-plonk theme tune is my Manchurian Candidate-style trigger for mass murder), Paw Patrol (one day I will kill you, Rubble, you big jawed arsehole. And why do the people in that town call on dogs for help instead of the fire brigade or the actual bloody police?) and various others, he’s now got a broad and sophisticated palate of televisual tastes. Which is code for ‘we probably let him watch too much television’.

But still no Muppets.

I picked up his little brother Christopher the other day, who’s too young to watch TV but certainly old enough to appreciate its bright and noisy charms.

“I think it’s nearly time we had a chat about the frogs and the pigs, young man.”