too hot
I am too hot. They are TOO hot. We are TOO HOT. IT is TOO HOT. IT IS TOO HOT. Turn on the hose.
A-Dad
A Dad talking about parenting. Based in the UK....
Latest posts
Attention monster
At times my youngest is the picture-perfect child, loving, funny, and kind, but turn the picture over and there is an attention monster, a psychic vampire, never wanting 2 minutes of your time when an hour will do. This hunger for parental interaction, like so much of my youngest’s personality, is something that I recognise from my childhood. It is a hunger that leaves an empty feeling when the…
Emotion Island
A lot of my blog posts are about my eldest. Mostly because, with him, I am experiencing parenting at the edge – he is the one cutting the path into the jungle of life; I am just trying to keep up. The other reason he features so heavily is that he runs hot with emotions. The path he is cutting is not a smooth one, but a path torn with teeth and fingernails. So, when, on the way home from school,…
Punishing sadness
Our eldest would never stay sat on the naughty step. When our beautiful baby started to exhibit tricky behaviours, we didn’t know what else to do, so we’d take him to have a timeout. But he didn’t just sit and reflect on what he’d done like he was meant to. Instead, he’d get up and run off and then refuse to come back. We’d end up dragging him back again, and again, until the argument became about…
The ticker
I never expected, when I passed him the plastic-wrapped pack of pitta breads, that he would explode. But that was what an ex-housemate did around 20 years ago. After that we had a conversation about his mood and emotions, and while I have lost contact with that friend, what he said has stuck with me. He described his mood like a ticker. It would go: Happy | Happy | Sad | Happy | Sad | Happy |…
A narrow path
Man on Wire is an amazing documentary about a charismatic French man, Philippe Petit, who secretly walks a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. I remember watching it and just being so absorbed that my whole body was tense when he first stepped out onto the wire with a balancing pole but no safety line, a huge crowd of New Yorkers below. I was thinking about that…
A kiss doesn’t help
Dropping the boys off at school my 7-year-old caught his arm on his bike. It was a tiny scrape on his arm, not even a scratch, but enough to complain about and so, on instinct, I kissed it. “Kisses don’t work,” he snapped back. Of course, it is just another step towards independence, a good thing in the long term, but I just never thought that these steps on that path would matter to me like they…
The little candle
He came out covered in wax. He was 4 weeks early, a tiny ball of life burning so brightly. At a concert the night before my wife had reported him kicking inside her, dancing to the music; by morning he’d danced his way into a midwife’s hands. Then, we got trapped in the hospital system, a bit of jaundice, some feeding troubles, and lots of learning; how to hold, how to change a nappy and what it…
Making waves
It’s been 6 years but I, a boy from the Midlands, am still not used to living near the sea. My kids are right at home at the beach and from my eldest’s first steps, all he wanted to do was run straight at the sea as if to embrace it. I would “rescue” him as he splashed through the shallows, swishing him high into the air. We would laugh as we turned around and around on the wet sand, only for him…
I nose, I know.
It starts with a “What’s your name?” then, “What is this?” and finally “What am I holding?” then the punchline, “Daddy nose nothing!!” which he says giggling uncontrollably. My youngest had been going through this routine for a few months now and I’ve dutifully been shocked at this outrageous slur. Until yesterday, when he repeated the punchline “Daddy nose nothing… Daddy KNOWS nothing!!” with a…