Tidy

I can see now, with retrospect, where I've never had a problem with tidying. Much to the frustration of many, clutter, dust and generally disorganised living space have never bothered me.

It's not that I actually like mess. It's just that until a certain level has been hit, one where you can actually feel the motion of the dust mites under your feet as they lift you out of what is now their room, I don't notice it.

Apart from anything else, tidying has to be one of the most tedious and irritating chores in life. There's always something more interesting or enjoyable to do. Unless there's something really really important that you really don't want to start, tax return sort of thing. Then tidying is great.

Now that my ankles are overrun by a much larger creature, tidying has gone way up in my great To Do list of life. I thought having my wife make sarky remarks about the dust bunnies rankled. Makes you feel like you aren't doing your share of the household tasks, especially when she's out earning all day. Having my daughter hand one to me with a faint frown, however, was much worse.

So I tidy, quite a lot. Especially in the kitchen. So much that F plays 'wiping tables like Daddy' when we're at the playground sandpit. Her attention to detail is excellent. She gives the appropriate sighs and grunts as she scrapes the table clean. And she puts the mounds of dirt on the table first, of course, so that there's something to wipe.

Here's my main gripe with tidying. It never ends. Once you've sucked the Sisyphus of dust up the hoover, it's only going to start coming back. And once you start looking for mess, you can't help but find it. A single one of my chest hairs reduces a clean bathtub to a dirty one. I walk over a clean floor, and I can almost hear the skin cells hitting the parquet. This is why I rarely started in the first place, to preserve my already feeble peace of mind. A thin excuse, I agree, but all I've got.

OCD seems like an easily acquired state of mind. I suppose this is for the best. F won't be wading in a sea of germs, even if her Dad is a bit twitchy and deranged. Speaking of which, I must go. The ceiling needs bleaching and I want to lay new kitchen lino again before the weekend.

Daddy's Little Helper

You get sort of inured to nappy changing after a while. Handling faeces becomes just another part of the day, a sort of ho-hum mental wallpaper task that you do without really thinking about. Meanwhile your brain can use the time for other, better, things, like planning what kind of kidney bean-based concoction your daughter can fling at the walls for dinner tonight, or whether or not you can get away without mopping the kitchen floor again today.

At which point, of course, some fresh hell will develop to wake you from your torpor.

F has decided that it is her solemn duty to aid in the wiping of her own bottom. This is most excellent in many ways, a real testament to her developing sense of altruism. In other ways, it's more similar to her recent discovery of how to use crayons. It's a very all-pervasive medium, shite. Long-lasting and attention grabbing. I can see why the UK government uses it in so many of their policies these days.

She likes helping. At least, she likes helping you do things. She doesn't like being helped. Usually because I get her intention all wrong. Shouldn't that sock stay on your foot, I might helpfully suggest. No, daddy, no, you are a bad person. Go away now. Or shouldn't you try and drink from the end of the bottle with the beaker spout on it? No. No, don't be stupid. I'm not trying to drink from it at all, moron, I'm trying to shake milk on table so I can draw with it.

F takes things in and out of the dishwasher. Or the washing machine. I brush my teeth at the same time as her. She grabs the handle to make sure I haven't missed my tonsils. Considerately, she will open doors that have been shut or shut doors you've left open. There is a high-level plan regarding air flow through the house at work here, I'm sure. Too high-level for me to fully comprehend, but still a plan.

Pushed for time when reading a book? F can cut your story in half, by helpfully turning ahead to the end, or even taking the book off you to read it herself, thanks, you're not doing the voices right, everyone knows owls sound like this: 'ming ming ming ming ming.'

Sandwich eating a real grind? Not anymore, with F! See the crusts you hated vanish under the table! Which isn't to say I try and feed my daughter the bits of my sandwich I don't want. There are no such bits in sandwiches, for one thing. And if there were, they wouldn't be the bits she asked for anyway. No, her taste in food follows one of two patterns, expressed by the following illogisms: -

F likes sweetcorn. 

I have prepared lunch with sweetcorn. 

Therefore, F no longer likes sweetcorn. 

F is enjoying her food

I am eating something different

Therefore I am no longer eating 

It's just amazing how much time we save together. 

Temper Fugit

Tell you who I hate. Peppa Pig. Her and her smug smug family who love everything.

Even if something goes wrong, feeling 'a bit grumpy' is the worst they ever get to. They live in a house with an endless garden, own a convertible despite two stay-at-home parents (who seem to have a nebulously Bohemian past involving ballet dancing and theatre) and conform to all the worst trends in stereotyping from adverts. Daddy's a bit clumsy, stupid and prone to overestimating his own abilities, Mummy is good at everything and ridiculously calm.

It comes in tiny, 5-minute episodes, perfect for a toddler's attention spam. Unless your toddler is F, who can happily sit through an entire season back-to-back every lunchtime. Often has to if you want her to eat anything, in fact. I've seen season 2 about eighteen times so far. One more Windy Autumn Day or Trip to Pirate Island and Pow, Zoom, straight to the moon Alice, one of these days, so help me. Perhaps Peppa Visits the Bacon Factory in a later season. I hold out little hope.

Still, F likes it, so that's okay. And it's still better than all the dubbed animated garbage on Barnkanalen. Pipi, Pupu and Rosemary, for example, a show that is two-thirds title sequence to one third pabulum. Made worse by the fact that the credits are the same as the intro song, just played backwards. And what the hell is quiz show Amigos all about? It's like Shooting Stars, except you can see how confused the studio audience is.

F is a whisker away from walking now. When we go to the park, she points folornly at the other children rushing about. But she doesn't quite trust herself to let go of things yet, not for more than a second or two. It'll happen, probably when we're not looking. She's sly that way.

While I was cooking her dinner last night (fish fingers and chips, total disaster, she hates both of them), she managed to climb into one of her toy chests unaided. I came back to find her happily playing with a giraffe, balanced on a large pile of building blocks, all still inside the chest. Rare to find such enthusiasm for putting things away in a child, I reckon.

For everything she likes, though, she reveals a pet hate. The top three of these is probably

• - being helped unasked
• - being told not to do something she was enjoying
• - fish

So for example, if I take the fork off her to put a mouthful of tuna pasta on it, partly to help her eat it and partly to stop her waving it like a banner at a Brazilian street party, I could expect a furious tantrum immediately.

Funny things, tantrums. It's very hard to tell between a genuine agonised scream and a massively fake one if you haven't seen what caused it. Somewhere between absolute fury and utter misery, full commitment to the emotion, arriving in a second and vanishing just as fast. Must be very tiring for her; I know I find them exhausting. I also know I'd love to have that kind of emotional access in my acting.

But there aren't that many, and she's usually fairly quick to accept that she isn't allowed some things. Mostly she plays, either boxes by herself, or reading, piano or throwing the ball with me. And if now and again a sly hand comes creeping round the edge of my computer screen to press caps lock, a pair of big, innocent blue eyes somewhere behind it doing their best to look entirely unconnected, then it's quite hard to mind all that much.

Which is the tough bit, really - I know she's genuinely interested in what's inside the power sockets and is really upset when you discourage her pokey inquisition. Or that she can't have any coffee because it's too hot and (until you brainwash yourself as an adult) tastes vile.

But some lessons are best learnt second hand, after all, and it's up to me to stomach my reluctance at being a vendor of such antique wisdom without complaint. It certainly beings a new appreciation for what your own parents must have gone through first time around.

Eating Out

It took less than a week of Daddy's Dinners before we decided to have some meals out. Perhaps I shouldn't have put peas in the chicken pie after all. They're on V's unwanted poster.

But chicken pie should traditionally have peas in the gravy, I feel, and I thought F should try them. She did, she liked them and ate them like a grown-up. Unlike a grown-up, V rolled her eyes at hers before hiding them under a corner of pastry and offering them back to me as a portion of left-overs I could eat for her. That was mild compared to her reaction to the buried quarters of boiled egg I'd concealed in the pie. That went something like this.

Anyway, eating out (in all fairness) was really nothing to do with my continued experiments in cookery, I'm just being petulant for the sake of it. We'd taken F to her first dentist's appointment and were having lunch in a cafe on the way back. F's favourite food is whatever you're having. The less she's allowed to have any, the greater her desire for it. I believe this could be accurately described on a graph of some kind, but I'm not the chap to assay such mathmatical shenanigans.

Sitting on a high-back sofa between me and mummy, F cheerfully ate bits of bread, some surprisingly spicy coriander humous (not much of that, it looked nicer than it tasted) and quite a lot of chicken pasta. And then a pouch of fruit puree, which she can drain like a vampire in under a minute. As well as water from an actual glass, a feat she considers a great game to undertake. After that, she bounced up and down along the sofa back, flirting with other customers and pointing at the lights, cooing and squeaking happily.

She likes eating out. She likes going out generally, she has an inquisitive mind. I nipped out of the flat to throw the bin bags down the rubbish chute the other morning, and turned to see F crawling down the hall towards me at a rate of knots, chortling maniacally to herself. I took her back in, she sat crossly on the ground, thought for a moment, then waved goodbye to me (as she does to people who are leaving) and started hammering at the front door in a bid to get it to open.

Foolishly, we thought this might mean it would be okay to take her with us on a date night when our babysitter had to cancel at the last minute, ill.

Ah, foolish parents, how ill-advised.

Lunch in a brightly lit cafe full of other children is a far cry from dinner in an intimate mood-lit fish restaurant full of sophisticated diners. Much later in the day, for one thing, so F was that much more tired and grumpy.

She ate all our bread, then refused V's fish burger and couldn't try my spicy prawns.  She liked the mermaid stained glass light above us, but she didn't really like much else about the place. I mean, you couldn't even go and try the food on the next table or throw the salt shakers on the floor or drink mummy's beer. Or anything, really, I mean, what was the point?

The waitresses were great, bringing straws, highchairs and extra napkins without us really having to ask. We'd eaten fifty quid's worth of excellent fish in a rather sprinted forty minutes, with F crawling up and down us like a column of army ants in a nappy all the while. We capped it off with a massive tantrum as we tried to ladle her back into her winter overalls.

I'd hoped that a romantic dinner could be replaced with a fun family meal out with all three of us. Optimistic. We should probably really have stayed in and saved up for another night instead. Nothing ventured, nothing wasted, so to speak. I'm still glad we tried, though, it helps us know for next time.

And the prawns were excellent, what little I recall of them.