Panacea

Is there anything Christmas can't cure? Apart from indigestion, obviously. We went to Birmingham for Christmas to stay with my sister. Writing down the whole thing as one long best bit would be perfectly acceptable, I think. Much kinder to the attention spans of both audience and writer to do snippets.

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"My like flying," F tells me as we cruise from Munich towards Birmingham. She's by a window to my right, gazing adoringly at the face of Tristan from Tinkerbell on the iPad, eating M&Ms from a box with a light-up fan on top of it. It's about half-past ten at night, later than she's been up in the last year, and she shows no sign of flagging.

To my left, V has C buckled to her lap. C is fast asleep. She has screamed herself into this state over the first half of the flight, and is now comfortable. Only if V holds her still-whiplashed spine at an awkward angle, mind you, which also precludes V reaching any of the (vile) airline food we've been served.

Appropriately, I'm somewhere in the middle of their two states. Comfortable but not too comfortable, unable to read or relax as I usually might when travelling, not too tired but not too perky either. Also between countries.

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I get reverse culture shock. There's a strong urge to run in to Aldi and ask for things in Swedish.
- Kan jag få lite Marmite, as if that might get me anything other than odd looks and odder spread.

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"Uncle Poo Poo!" cousin S screams at me. I feign hurt shock, and she howls with laughter.

"Uncle Poo Poo!" F screams at me as well, laughing even before I react.

"I'm your daddy, not your uncle," I tell her sternly.

"Daddy Poo Poo!" both girls scream together. Then they drape blankets over their heads and pretend to be spooks until I go into cardiac arrest and have to be revived. This is done by the two of them jumping up and down on my chest, in the time-honoured manner.

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The Disney Store, Birmingham's Bullring shopping centre, early Christmas Eve. A bored shop assistant twirls a blue lightsaber and tries to avoid having to interact with any children. Hostile, hunched parents claw at piles of Big Hero Six figurines with sullen, frantic looks.

"Daddy! Look at this!" shouts F, who has found a Tinkerbell dressing gown. Or plate set. Or cuddly doll - I forget what it was exactly. Any sense of wonder is instantly banished by the news that mummy has bought what she came for, and we have a jolly good sulk for the next forty minutes.

Which is good, because we all get lost in the Bullring. V isn't sure of the way back to the bus stop, or not sure enough of it to prevent us all going in to the train station to ask at the info desk. There's a good pack of us, V, F, C, me, Farmor, Uncle P and cousins S and D. Riding on a double decker bus just to get here was the big draw, and that's been a big success.

The thrill starts to wear thin as we trek round and round Birmingham International, being sent in contradictory directions by various helpdesks and then by some joker in the street so determined to help he hangs up an incoming phonecall half way through the incomprehensible preamble to his actual attempt to send us in the right way. By the time we get there (thanks, Google maps), C is cranky and over-hungry, and only the application of Millie's Cookies stops F going fully postal.

Everyone has a long nap when we get home. Except the grown-ups, of course, there's too much wrapping and cooking and eating and catching up and waking children up from naps again to be done.

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"That is where Tristan lives! And that one is Tinkerbell's house!" F tells me. The homes in question are a pair of treestumps in the woods near Auntie R's house. We knock on them, but because it's three o' clock in the afternoon and the moon is up, F explains to me that the fairies must be asleep.

"We'll have to call again tomorrow when it's early," I tell her. "Come on, let's go home!"

Her face falls. "My not want to go home! My want to stay here!"

"I mean home to Auntie R's house," I tell her, and she lights up again, trots along happily for about three metres, then tells me her feet are tired and she's forgotten how to walk and can she have a piggy back.

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0300. F shunts me over the edge of the bed with both feet, using her mother as a bracing point. I manage to push myself back in by pushing off the inflatable Peppa Pig bed that F was loaned on arrival. F shunned it on the grounds that she's nearly three and can still throw incomprehensible tantrums until her wishes are acceded to. On the other side of the bed, C wakes up and shouts "Hi!" at V.

It's Christmas Eve. Nobody gets to sleep. F attempted to get me to go to bed when I tucked her in earlier in the evening on the grounds that Santa wouldn't bring me presents if I wasn't asleep. I hope that's not true, or I'm not getting anything off tonight's meagre slumber.

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C gets to play with Cousin H, who is about six months older than her and has just learned to walk.

"Dah?" says Cousin H, asking permission to poke C on the nose.

"Go on then," I tell her. "Gently."

Uncle M and I watch as the two tiny girls stroke each other's faces and babble at each other. C is thriving in an atmosphere of dozens of happy relatives, more desperate than ever to start walking and talking. Cousin H is clearly very interested in playing with such a small and manageable person,

We must have been like this as kids, at some point, I think, looking at my siblings P, T and R. Too small to know exactly what we were doing, but still forging relationships that last a lifetime. I'm quite tempted to go and poke their noses too.

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F opens her second present.

There is a three-fold process that plays out over her face. First, the realisation that this is a big doll, of the kind she loves playing babies with. Then that it is a Tinkerbell doll, and then that it is her Tinkerbell doll. Surprise, delight and pride chase after each other. Then she flings herself full-length on V and shouts "Thank you mummy!" before ignoring almost everything else other than the new Tink for the next two hours.

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When it comes to bedtime, I gently explain to F that in five minutes, it's time to go to bed. I'm reluctant, because she's probably going to have an explosive tantrum, especially because she's missed her usual afternoon snooze to watch Frozen with Cousin S.

Instead, she runs to the stairs and starts climbing, so keen to go and sleep she doesn't say goodbye to anyone. I have to bring her back to say proper goodbyes - we're leaving at 0230 in the morning, this is her last look at the assembled cousins and aunties and uncles and grandparents.

Cousins S, D and H get extra big hugs. Everyone else gets a cheery if general wave, and then she's gone, tired but very pleased with herself, carting her Tinkerbell up the stairs in one hand and dragging Bunbun in the other.

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The evenings are filled with Christmas games, teams and solo but always competitive. Mastermind, with proper specialist subjects (I get a mere one point on Space Marine Chapters, because I thought I'd chosen Space Marine Chapter Masters and panicked under pressure). Pass the Pud, with angry discussions about rules. Port. Chilli nuts. Stollen. Stupidly brilliant family jokes and rotten puns.

It's exhausting and stressful, but all in the right ways. There is no time to fret about car crashes or get into tired arguments about who didn't pack what in which changing bag or wonder what kind of job I'll be doing next month. It's all just pork crackling and wine glasses and wrapping paper and changing nappies and breaking up childish squabbles and eating the last mints and just being together as a huge, sprawling, happy family.

Bliss.

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"Isn't it nice to get home again?" I say, after we stumble in through the door of our flat. Eleven hours of delayed flights, trying to change both girls nappies in an airport toilet in Brussels with twenty minutes before the gate closes, endlessly popping ears and the final discovery that the baggage people didn't think we really wanted our pram at the other end. It really is nice to get home again.

F looks with some pleasure at her forgotten toys and room, then slumps on the sofa.

"No. My want to go back to Birmingland," she says. Well, you can book the flights, then, I decide.

Then we all develop the inevitable compilations of colds and coughs that international travel brings. I know I'm the only one equipped to actually have the genuine article, but the whole family gets so pathetic when we get colds that it really is a pandemic of Manflu. A Bloke Death, if you will.

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0530 the following morning.

"Paaba! Hiya! Upp!" C says clearly and distinctly. She's been lying and thinking about this for about fifteen minutes, and the look on her face when I obediently come and pick her up is priceless. It's a toothless grin about a foot wide, accompanied by delighted hand-jiggling.

Good, she can talk.

Yule

Christmas looms, unyielding. At six in the morning, I am often woken by F wandering in and asking if we can open the advent calendar door now. C likes the baubles on the tree and swipes at them like a cat if placed near enough. Outside, the streets are full of glowing chevrons, lit-up stars, jangling nets of lights and Gothenburg's traditional windy drizzle. Come January, it'll just be the drizzle.

We are better, as a family, than a fortnight ago. The car crash has receded. Both girls are fine, bar occasional screams in the night. No more than they'd have anyway, I think. V's whiplash is down to an inconvenient pain, worse when she laughs. My thumb can oppose once again, and therefore often does. You get used to doing things one-handed quite often with a baby in the house. Doing it with only one hand was quite the challenge.

Second-hand, I heard the account of the driver of the other car. He was on his way to work, of course, not speeding much by his own reckoning. Because he was in a hurry (his work was important, clearly, although not so much that turning up drunk was going to be an issue), he was indicating to other drivers that they should move aside by flashing full beam headlights at them. And then ramming them if they didn't? It's incredible, that this is his official, sober and collected statement. "I was driving really badly, officer, but it's okay - I was doing it deliberately."

We're going to Birmingham tomorrow, four hours of flights via Munich. C has been fighting our renewed attempts to get her to sleep through the night with an intense vigour. If I shift position by more than 2cm in the bed at 0400, she immediately gasps with delight and says "hi!" in a loud voice, indicating that I should leap to her side, feed her and then play bouncing games for two hours. At 0400, I generally have other ideas. C is not a fan of other ideas, they aren't hers and don't suit.

F is excited about the pending flight. "I love going on planes!" she told me earlier. "Hairclip Tinkerbell is coming with me when we go to Birmingland."

(Hairclip Tinkerbell is exactly what she sounds like, a hairclip featuring a Tinkerbell figurine. Tinkerbell remains foremost in F's hopes and dreams right now, and seeing her playing with a hairclip in lieu of more official ranges of toys has influenced our choice of Christmas presents somewhat. Particularly as it's a hairclip V found lying on the floor outside, brought home and washed.)

Last time we flew, F was just over one year old. We dreaded it so much that the actual event was a halcyon moment entirely free of our expected worries and seen in hindsight as full of clinking cocktail glasses and snappily dressed hilarity, like something from a Cary Grant film.

Tomorrow we have to change in an unfamiliar airport with one child apiece, whilst suffering from some kind of combination cold and nausea bug. We depart at 1900 for a midnight arrival, to maximise the sleep disturbance. I hope C loves going on planes too, for all our sakes.


Thank-you, in passing, for all the good wishes expressed on Facebook and elsewhere, it is much appreciated! Thanks also for continuing to read this blog, and I hope you all have excellent Christmasses. Christmassi? Christmatrix? Yeah, I like that last one, we'll go with that.

Crashing

We spin out of control. There is no slow down of time, just a frantic scrabble and blur outside the windscreen. The lights of the lorry I was overtaking, then the barrier on the central reservation. Things slam into the car from outside. The wheel and I wrestle. I am screaming "No No No", F is crying, C is screaming, V is cradling her in the back seat.

We aren't spinning any more.

We are in the middle of the motorway, facing back the way we came. Shocked traffic is coming to a halt behind us. There is a wrecked car not far behind us, a sprinkle of smashed parts all over the tarmac throwing long shadows in the headlights of the stopped cars.

We are okay. Are we okay? There is red stuff on V's face, F's legs. People are running up, alien silhouettes in the stark light. I can't open my door. C is still screaming.

We can all talk. My thumb hurts. F wants to know if the car crashed. V is shaking and crying. A Danish man is asking if I'm okay in heavily accented Swedish, a nurse called Elin has come to see if we're okay. Everything smells of petrol.

A fat man in his middle age, eyes wider than an owl's, rushes up. The Danish truckers flank him.

- It's all my fault! Who was in the car? Children? he asks.

- Yes, two, I tell him. He grabs my hand, clutches and shakes it, then backs away. His face is caving in, swallowing itself in misery. The Danes follow him.

We are okay. So we sit and wait for the emergency services. People sporadically come to make weird attempts at small talk. The first Dane asks about living in Sweden, he's thinking about moving there. A man in red and yellow overalls tells me twice how lucky we were. I know, I think. I was screaming no because I thought that was it for us, for my family, and I didn't want it to end like that. It wouldn't have been fair.

F rides with me in the ambulance. They are taking us to the nearest town, Varberg. The last I see of the tangled car, as I step out over a blood-like pool of oil, is C being cradled in the arms of a fireman. Her round face is lit up with the flashing blues of the ambulances. She looks interested.

F is interested too, the ambulance is exciting.

"Was the crash my fault," she asks me, still worried about the fruit salad incident earlier in the evening.

"No! Not at all, it wasn't you at all," I tell her.

"Was it your fault, daddy? Because you were driving and you aren't very good at it."

"Don't talk to the police later, okay?" I say.

It wasn't my fault. That owl-eyed idiot was drunk, the Danes saw him throwing a flask into the ditch. I was driving at the speed limit to overtake a lorry, doing 110 in the outside lane, and there was no warning, to time to evade, just a blaze of light and a crunch and shove and terror.

The policeman tells us in the emergency ward, where we're being checked for minor injuries, that they'd already had reports of him driving like a lunatic before he hit us. He's been arrested, he had insurance, we will hear more from them all shortly.

This is our society, one where it is okay to build and buy and drive cars capable of easily exceeding our legal speed limits. Where the only thing preventing you turning that car into something as lethal and indescriminate as an automatic weapon is a polite expectance that you will be responsible. Where we could collectively decide that is not okay, but we'd rather protect the rights of the rich to have expensive toys.

Life in the West regularly sickens me. Sweden, with it's more active Socialist government, is a vast improvement on my experience of the UK, a country governed by the rich for the rich, where money is the defining characteristic of self-worth, societal value and use, where our elected government (and make no mistake, we elected them, they are our fault) would rather bomb foreign countries than look after the infrastructure of their own. Pathetic.

Excuse me venting, I am extremely angry. Also scared, relieved, amazed and surprised. F and C are perfectly alright, a little shaken up but now moving straight on to the next adventure. I have a big red plaster cast on my left hand (F chose the colour for me), with torn ligaments in the thumb. All that red stuff in the car turned out to be raspberries, scattered by the collision. It feels vaguely inappropriate to find this as funny as I do.

We have to get a taxi home at midnight, the hospital can't help us with transport. So at 1230, we are driving back over the scene of the crash. I watch as the skidmarks roll past and try not to wince every time cars overtake us.

I am alive. All four of us are. Phew. Roll on Christmas.

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V wanted to write something too - here's her take on the accident:


I usually don't write very personal things on my FB page but this will be the exception.

Last night my family and I endes up in a car accident on the big E6 high way between Varberg and Gothenburg. We are all very lucky to be able to talk about it.

About 19:00 last night my husband, my two small children and I were on our way home after a day of major christmas shopping for all the kids in the family... The car came out of nowhere...

My husband had just over taken a big lorry when we saw a bright light coming through the back window and then *bang* we got hit from behind and started spinning, hiting the rail, I leant over my youngest daughter's car seat who was next to me in the back, and I could see everything in slow motion. - My husband desperatly trying to get the car under control and my oldest daughter flung around in her car seat in the front passenger seat. I was convinced that we would not make it.

The car stopped and there was a moment of utter silence, then I heard my youngest starting to scream, I could then also hear my oldest starting to cry followed by my Husband checking how everyone was doing - door flung open and I could hear lots of voices asking us if we were hurt, how the babies were doing and lot of bright lights, the driver of the lorry, a Danish lorry driver started covering us with sleeping bags to keep out the cold when... a man turned up by my husband repatedly saying "Det var mitt fel! Jag körde för fort!" (It was all my fault! I was going to fast!) All very surreal - the man tried to shake my husbands hand. 

When the man walked back to his car the Danish lorry driver said we were very lucky and that the man had been drinking and speeding (drinking while driving too)

This is the point I want to make - Drunk driving. Such a respectless thing to do. Your not only putting your own life in jeopardy but also everyone on the same road. It doesn't matter if you're a very safe driver if others aren't. 

Back to Hell

Ah, Ullared!

Such a name, brimming with promise and redolent of exotic spice. Like distant Samarkand or Marrakesh, a thumming hub of commerce where merchants vend their wares with a flourish, producing magical lanterns or bales of finest silk from the tea-scented depths of their vibrantly-coloured tents, ready to haggle over an ivory chess set or a crystal hookah as they match wits with equally cunning customers.

A mad scrum of pensioners with trolleys. Cut-price velour tracksuits and bulk-buy crates of deoderant, fought for tooth and nail by families driven psychotic by the low-ceilinged fluorescent lights and smell of over-heated diner kebab. An endless maze of aisles. The lowest circle of hell, the one Virgil chickened out of showing Dante round.

For two hours, I lay at the bottom of the slide in the children's play area, cradling C as she angrily tried to get away and follow F. Every two minutes, F would first throw Bunbun down to me and then crash into my thigh moments later, cackling like a fiend. Similarly dead-eyed parents littered the nearby benches. When the zombie apocalpse begins, it will start in some urine-streaked ball pool, where the border between half-life and brain death is already so weak.

We needed Christmas presents, so we borrowed Mormor's car and made the two-hour drive out. Ullared is nestled in a set of low wooded hills out in the countryside. The view from the Lekland window, when not obscured by screaming toddlers, was something like the landscape in Deliverance.

Returning to the carpark at five thirty, we discovered the battery in the car was dead. Had I left the lights on? I was pretty sure not, cars are such hostile territory to me I'm more than usually careful about my dealings with them. Was it the arctic gale howling over the carpark, freezing the acid? Was it the sheer perversity of Ullared, determined to keep us there forever in obediance to F's wishes? She wanted us to sleep in the playroom, and cried when we said no.

V found a man who could recharge the batteries with a portable generator, five minutes before he would have gone home for the day. The cost was her stress levels, already high after I'd asked to keep the time spent shopping shorter than optimum.

That set the mood for the drive home, V and I mostly silent except to growl unreasonably at each other about food (I don't count hotdogs from a crap grill as dinner, but I'd also forgotten to pack enough hot water for C's third bottle, so my bargaining position was a little weak).

Swedish cars are mirror images of a normal UK car. Whenever I change gear, I automatically punch the door next to me first, groping for a stick that isn't there. I mutter a constant mantra of 'drive on the right, drive on the right' as I go, terrified that I will forget. After F, sitting in her child seat up front next to me, tries to fill my ear with unwanted fruit salad on a narrow corner, I lock down totally into a driving trance, eyes and mind only for the road.

About half an hour later, a drunk man ploughs into the back of the car at 200 kph.

Just a Trim

So I had a vasectomy last week.

Funny thing to write about on a public blog. I found myself feeling slightly defensive. Why write about it? Why wave the poor clipped buggers about in the public domain, where nobody wants to see them?

Various reasons occurred. Some of the same reasons I was having it done in the first place - men taking reproductive responsibility in the modern age, brag brag, I'm middle aged and have quite enough children already, oh, I don't know, have you seen the list of side-effects on the male pill? Reading that made me consider sawing the little chaps off by hand as a viable alternative. Honestly, hormones, don't mess with them.

But mostly I'm going to write about it because it's funny. A funny thing to go through, at the very least. And I'd never miss a chance to write self-deprecating snark on the best of days. The worst of days are always getting posted.

- Hello, I'll be your surgeon, lie down, whoops, there we go, that's the worst bit done, said the surgeon in one smoothly-flowing introductory sentence as he flipped me on to my back, whisked away my clothes and rammed a three-inch long needle into both sides of my groin and nutsack. And then he smiled nicely and trotted out, leaving me lying in stunned agony. Although in (vas) deference to his skill, the agony receeded very quickly, and I didn't even notice I'd bled all over the bed until the nurse came in to slap a label on my wrist.

He was a glib man, alright. All through the proceedure, he kept popping up over the curtain they'd erected over my nethers to grin and ask me questions about acting. Disjointed isn't the word. One minute he'd be wondering who my favourite director is, the next he'd be rummaging around with the exasperated air of someone trying to find car keys in a crowded handbag and coming up with half a pack of gum for the third time in a row.

And all this in Swedish, I might add. The Swedish word for scrotum is the rather beautiful pung (fully, testikelpung, lit. a testicle pouch). Beautiful but misleading. Onomatopoeiacally, it sounds like a bronze potato, something that will bounce resiliently with a metallic chime if dropped. Do not be fooled, real testes do not possess this quality. Onomatopoeia is a dubious concept on the whole, I reckon, as might be expected from a word that sounds descriptive of the place my semi-house-broken toddler occasionally urinates.

I reeled home. Still entirely numb, my testicles felt like they reached my knees. It was like walking with a large velvet pouffe in my trousers. Later, as the drugs wore off, I discovered the large velvet pouffe had been stuffed with broken glass. Optimistically, I was booked to teach an evening drama class to some teenagers. This, I cancelled. You can't improve someone's acting whilst lying curled up on the floor cradling your crotch. Not with much aplomb, anyway.

Obviously, both my children wanted nothing but to sit in my lap and bounce up and down for the next five days. And they both cried when I wouldn't let them. Rather you than me, my dears. The excuse I settled on was that I had sore legs, and the doctor had told me to rest. F appreciated this, C was less convinced. A daddy that cannot dandle you is a poor sort of creature, a sort of beakless toucan. Without the main attraction, it seems cruel to keep the remainder alive.

In the week before the op, I was wondering if I was going to have psychological fall-out. On top of any potential hideous scarring, operational mispractice, etc, etc, you know. Like any idiotic near-forty-year-old male, I was of course most concerned with my percieved masculinity and whether it would be dented. Sterilisation, not being able to have children, that's a touch drastic, isn't it? One of those vital definitions of life, removed from the list.

Meh. I've done my bit for my selfish genes. Hair shirt spartan that I am, I actually feel more manly for having had it done. Yes! Behold, I'm still this macho despite having neatly scissored testicles! GASP IN AWE! Or so shouts the brute in my hindbrain. The rest of me is quite happy to move quietly on and not mention it again. That's clearly not the rest of me writing this blog and linking it to Facebook, is it, eh? Good old hindbrain brute. He's handy with the old social media.

I don't know. People don't seem to talk about vasectomies very much. We're either too polite or too scared. Moving to Sweden has made me far less of either of those. Or possibly made me a lot more stupid, which could be mistaken for rude bravery in the right light. Apologies if you're finding this terribly distasteful. And then well done for reading on this far. It's okay, there aren't going to be any pictures.

Anyway. Scarely a week later, all was back to normal.

As normal as bald balls can be considered, that is, especially when still rather colourfully pigmented from the bruising. Peachy, let's say. A testament to the skill of that sunny surgeon. Now, the only reminder of that brief pain is seeing F sporadically hobbling down the hallway, playing the 'sore legs' game, mimicking my now-vanished tender gait with a precise eye.

If only she knew.

Red in Gum and Nail

C can nearly walk, talk and sleep overnight. How did this happen? I've barely blogged about her at all in the last three months, beyond glancing referrals in the background of the ongoing war of potty training. She ought to have the common courtesy to stop developing when I'm distracted.

Mind you, I'm relatively secondary in C's order of things too. Mummy is ahead of me, she gets coos and smiles where I tend to get furious screams because I'm slower with the bottle deployment.

Top of the list is big sister F.

F tells it like it is. She plays the headbutt game properly, where you lean in and bump foreheads and say "bump!". Mummy and Daddy are all cotton-woolly about that one, they don't commit to the bump.

F waves slices of cucumber during dinner and says "Greeny greeny greeny greeny!" Mummy and Daddy are all, "hey, no, sit quietly and masticate your gruel correctly." They don't understand how it is in the real world. They don't get the problems that a baby faces on a day-to-day basis, not like big sister F.

She's learned, from F, that parents need to be bullied in order to function at peak efficiency. Take no nos for an answer. If ignored, redouble your howls. A sleeping parent deserves neither sympathy nor mercy. It's a dog-eat-dog-or-possibly-formula-until-you've-got-teeth world out there, and only the stroppiest survive.

I have tried to learn from F's example. If I too could receive looks of unconditional love from the recipient of a poked face or yanked forelock, I reckon life could be so much easier, Perhaps if I steal peoples' toys, I'll make more friends and get more jobs.

Or maybe C is just waiting to declare an all-out war of retribution until she's cracked independant walking.

Changelings

I don't have a daughter F any more. She's gone, vanished and replaced by something new.

Before I startle anyone into panic, this isn't a sudden dark turn for the blog. No developmental illnesses, no terrible accidents. No, this is far worse. This is Disney.

If I call F by name at the moment, she tells me "No, actually, I'm called Tristan." Tristan refers to himself in the third person, suspiciously similarly to F's general habit, and doesn't do things like eating up all his food at lunchtime, tidying his toys or sleeping in his bed. Tristan sleeps in the Pixie Dust Tree (F's castle) on a sheepskin rug.

Tristan isn't even called Tristan in the original movies. Disney's Fairies series, starring Tinkerbell, also feature a Dust Elf who makes sure the other elves get their daily dose of fairy dust. He's called Terence in the English version, Tristan in the Swedish. Not sure why that translation got made, V says Terence would be harder for Swedes to say. No great loss, it's not perhaps the most whimsical of pixie names. Up there with Nigel the Cleaning Fairy or mischevious tax sprite Arthur Jones.

But it gets worse, worse than having an alter ego F can hide behind when she feels ornery (95% of the time).

As a child, I was hooked on Disney too. I was Mickey Mouse. Similar woes betided those who felt I might not actually be that entity, I'm sure. Chief of those was that I decided everyone else in the household needed a Disney Character to be referred to as, and Dad got the roughest end of the stick when I decided he was Pluto the dog.

I am well served. I am now Tinkerbell.

Pit Boss

"Mummy, did you cook this food?"

"No, Daddy did."

"Daddy, I don't like you anymore."

Just like that, the reign of Daddy as favourite parent is finished.

F has learned a number of new skills over the last few months. Chief amongst them is the way you can play two parents against each other. She didn't want to put her winter boots on this morning, she wanted her trainers.

"You can't splash in puddles with those, they aren't waterproof," Mummy told her.

"Daddy says they are," she said. True enough, I did say that. They are mostly waterproof, too, just not as much as her boots are. Mummy and I had a nice discussion about this, with F standing behind us both rubbing her hands together and saying "good, good!" like a tiny blond Emperor Palpatine as she tried to put the trainers on again.

And she lies! She lies like mad. Who taught her that? Is that on the curriculum at förskolan? She's supposed to sleep with all the other kids after lunch, and she's been fairly resistant to playing along. That's meant having snoozes when she gets home, or she gets catastrophic around 1600.

Half a minute after her teacher told me she hadn't slept again today, I was officiously informed "Daddy, I have already snoozed just now so I don't need to snooze at home, so don't worry about it." She adds 'don't worry about it' quite a lot to statements at the moment. It makes her sound even more like a Mafia boss than usual.

"I am closing my eyes," she'll tell me when she's supposed to be sleeping, even when I'm looking directly at her and can see that she isn't. I suppose I should be glad even if she fibs like a politician, she can't yet do it efficiently.

Parents who balk her demands are told not to look at her, or sit next to her, or talk to her. Or she goes to another room to (e.g.) pick her nose, so that we can't see when she carries on heedless. She's outright triumphant when she gets her way and cripplingly miserable when she doesn't.

Not that we're any better, really. We flip between bribes and threats, cajoling and bullying just as much as she does, so it's not that hard to see where she gets it from. Best of all is seeing that C has already grasped the basics of these modes of behaviour. As I type, she is on the floor by my feet in her bouncy chair, cooing and grinning when I look at her and growling and shouting if I break eye contact for any reason at all.

That's the parental mode, right there. Obey or face my wrath, but treats if you obey quick enough. Good to know the lessons are being picked up.

The Saga of the Saga

When I was a teenager, I went on an outdoors activity holiday with the church youth group. One of the activities we got to take part in was a raft building challenge. The lakeside youth supervisors put us in groups, gave us a big pile of raw materials and oars, and told us the winners would be the team who paddled their raft the round the buoy in the nearest bay in the quickest time.

"That looks awesome," one of my teammates told me as I constructed flotation hammocks out of empty water barrels and blue plastic twine. "That looks really solid, we should win no bother."

He was wrong. I couldn't really tie knots. I was just winding the rope round itself into impressive-looking gnarls. As the barrels popped free and floated off mid-way round the course, my teammate took me to task for their weakness. "But you told me they looked awesome," I said, aggrieved. "It's your fault you didn't check them."

The relevance of this to my recent acting job, Njal's Saga, is what I learned on that holiday, namely that it is pointless throwing blame around when your raft is already disintegrating.

The premiere would have been last Sunday. It got postponed. The last minute crisis meeting earlier this week which was set up to try and get the fractured cast back and talking about how to fix the show got repurposed, also at the last minute. Instead of discussing the next step, it was announced that the meeting would actually be a rehearsal of some of the original material we'd had to abandon weeks ago, and that anyone who didn't like it didn't need to show up.

Half the cast gave up at this point. I'd been trying to keep an open mind, but that was the last straw for me, and I gave up with them. Not gave up, technically, seeing as I'm released on full pay, but that's splitting hairs. It feels like I gave up, a bitter feeling, although I'm probably justified to have done so.

I don't really know how to start explaining how we got to that point, really. I got the job about seven months ago, after auditioning for it. A fairly elaborate audition, in Swedish, for which I sang, did stage combat and learned an Anglo-Saxon poem. I was very excited that I got the job, not least because I love the Icelandic Saga that the play was going to be based on. I also had got a job in a foreign language, and would have (finally) some kind of showcase to invite casting people to.

There was a two-day workshop earlier in the year. One of the actors who came to that fell mysteriously ill after the first day, after we'd worked on some pretty bizarre material. He never came back. Someone else got drafted in a couple of weeks before we were due to start, before anyone had seen a finished script. He asked for one and got one, and told me later he looked at it, had no idea how it could be performed, and said as much to the director.

"We'll improvise our way through it," he was told.

Rather than try and list all the subsequent amazement of the rehearsals, here are some highlights.

• Hearing the play described as a 'Rap Opera' based loosely on the Sagas, rather than the sword-and-axe renactment I'd sort of hoped for
• On being presented with the musical score, finding out that half the four-man cast couldn't read music and that one of us couldn't really keep time
• Being told on the first day to recreate the opening scene of The Magic Flute as a basis for later improvisations. Not any old Magic Flute, either, the Ingmar Bergman film
• Being asked to set fire to full boxes of matches on the plastic-coated floor of the stage as part of an improvisation
• Reading the script, along with the writer's introduction, where he explained he'd started by taking some of the most violent bits from the saga, stripped them of any characters or descriptive narrative, and then decided that was actually all he needed to do and stopped working
• After the first week, learning that the guy designing the costumes and set was going to be doing a directing course in Oslo instead, at a point where the set and costumes had yet to be announced
• After the second week, hearing that we were going to be wearing liederhosen and performing Njal's Saga on a set suggesting German submariners 
• Not seeing the director in rehearsal for more than about four hours during the first two weeks
• Realising that after those first two weeks, almost all of which had been spent working on the music, that we still couldn't sing the highly stylised and abstract score
• Never having more than about four hours sleep a night for the first four weeks, thanks to baby C back home
• Watching two of the actors actually waterboarding each other in lieu of working out blocking for a scene about violence, and then watching the director agree that this was useful work
• Being asked to attend a marketing meeting in which we were asked to produce marketing ideas, seeing as the production team didn't seem to have any
• Watching the daily changes to the rehearsal schedule, but never either sticking to the times or getting a breakdown of what we were expected to rehearse on a daily basis
• Spending three hours at home trying to learn a song which had neither notes nor text, but in which I was to raise and lower a spear (later replaced with a frying pan, later replaced by just my arm) in time to an irregular but horribly precise rhythm for five minutes, and realising I still couldn't do more than fifteen seconds of it accurately
• On the return of our costume and set guy, the announcement that the set would be a golden kitchen bench and our costumes would be just boxer shorts, because the play was now set in Valhalla
• The foodfight (which some of you might have seen on Facebook), and the three hours it took to clean congealed flour, eggs and milk off the floor afterwards with tools including coal shovels and fish slices. Because we're actors, dammit, not bricklayers janitors.
• Once the kitchen was installed, the four-week struggle to have any of the kitchen knives properly blunted, during which we worked with them anyway
• The answer 'we'll prepare food' being used by the director as a catch-all answer for every single query on blocking, textual analysis, underlying thematic concept or request for emergency work on any scene
• Hearing that despite being nearly naked, we'd be preparing food with the working stove on the set and then feeding it to the audience in the interval, even though they'd have watched us writhing about on the hob and slapping each other with the ingredients beforehand
• After four weeks, trying to do a runthrough of the play and managing about twenty-five minutes of hideous, unperformable, unwatchable garbage, most of which consisted of marking the beginnings and ends of scenes we hadn't yet adequately rehearsed, during which one of us cut a toe on broken glass that had been left on set
• The many, many tearful and miserable arguments about what could be done to redeem this mess
• The discoveries that pay was late, or not quite what was originally advertised, or already paid out to other cast members (all since resolved properly and surprisingly amicably, it must be said)
• The astounding introduction, with two weeks until the premiere, of a second and entirely new director
• Delaying the open dress rehearsal so that the design team could finish stapling the set together
• The exit of the new director, three hours before the premiere, on being told that the now-functional piece she'd managed to salvage wasn't going to be performed on the grounds that it the production team didn't feel it was appropriate for the theatre 
• Knowing that I loved the source material, but not a single recognisable scrap of it was going to be included in this play

It mostly sounds funny, reading it back. It wasn't at the time, I can assure you. Even for Fringe theatre, this was chaotic and broken in a way I've never experienced. And I've worked on some shitty gigs, let me tell you - the Hamlet with Two Hamlets, The Albuquerque Dust Storm Macbeth, the pilot episode of Man Versus Monster Truck. A four-hour George Bernard Shaw play that he never intended to be performed on stage, just read aloud to educate his Christmas guests, of whom I can only imagine there were none.

This was a new level of bedlam, the kind that leaves you dazed and doubting your own abilities to comprehend the world, as though you've just been hit by a tornado and haven't quite realised you're now four hundred miles away with a length of copper pipe transfixing your skull.

Actors are lovely people, on the whole - generous, cheerful and hardworking. They also generate drama, that's one of our functions. Put us in a calm and empty room and you'll eventually get the root of all drama, conflict. Putting four of us into an imminent catastrophe and hoping that we'd sort it all out on our own, well, that's like trying to pacify a psychotic tiger by slapping it with raw steak.

Strangely, for all the fury and horror the job brought, I now feel fairly calm and empty. There is no point in staying angry or trying to hold people to account. It would take too much energy, energy I now lack, and this isn't the right forum for it anyway. The raft collapsed, we all nearly drowned, some of us made it to various shores. Better to get on with enjoying life than dwelling on the disaster.

Today, I watched the actual premiere. It was oddly like attending my own funeral, seeing a show I'd worked on for six weeks open from the front row. It was also pretty good - strange, abstract and stark, and certainly not the same as the last time I'd seen it. Two of the original cast have stuck it out, in the end, and I have enormous respect for them. Also for the Icelandic composer, who had endured seeing his score mangled by incompetents for two months before coming back and taking over. Even a leaky raft benefits from a good helmsman, I think. See it if you're in Gothenburg and free for an evening, the cast and composer deserve your support.

As for me, I'd been questioning my staying power in terms of a career in acting even before this started. Funnily enough, though, I feel a new resolve. There's no point in stopping trying to be an actor that I can see, although I am certainly investigating other lines of income right now.

I am, however, utterly certain that my acting career cannot possibly sink any lower than this, and I shall eat not only my own hat but the entire hat section of every costume department the world over, before I ever admit to being proved wrong on this.

Excelsior!

Top Five Top Five Lists

Things C Currently Likes
1. Sitting upright so she can see things
2. Mango paste, of the 'secretly mostly rice paste for tiny infants' variety
3. Chatting to people so long as they hold their faces 30-50 cm away
4. Her big fluffy apple rattle with the caterpillar inside, a flea market find of V's and therefore (typically) the cheapest thing we've ever bought her
5. Big sister F

Things C Currently Hates
1. Being tired
2. Being put to bed when she's tired
3. People who move away when she's chatting to them
4. The noise of daddy blowing a raspberry (new today, provoked instant tears)
5. Not being put to bed when she's tired

Things F Currently Likes
1. Tingeling. This is Swedish for Tinkerbell, if you've ever wondered. V and I must read the entire hardback book version of the Disney cartoon about said fairy every night without fail. I have come to believe that every time I do so, the psychic backwash annihilates two to three hectares of Never Never Land.
2. Daddy's ridiculous beard. "It makes you look fluffy, daddy!" Yes, that's precisely why I grew it. To increase my fluffiness. Bah.
3. Trainers. "I can run really really fast in trainers, because I'm really good at running."
4. Saturdays. Most days, F lies in bed when she wakes up at 0700, calling one of us by name repeatedly until that person cracks and runs screaming out of the flat, leaving the other parent to fix breakfast. On Saturdays, the day of the week when F gets to have sweets, she lies in bed shouting "Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!" perhaps on the grounds that then Saturday will fix her breakfast and it will consist entirely of gummi worms.
5. Little sister C. "She's puking on Daddy!"

Things F Currently Hates
1. Sauce. This is a catch-all for any kind of interference with the purity of her pasta. Plain pasta, a dash of olive oil and a touch of salt in the water when cooking, and that's fine. Or macaroni stewed in milk. Anything else will be carefully picked off each fusilli by hand before consumption, even if you try calling it gravy instead.
2. Loud noises, which is apparently one of those things that half raises a developmental red flag for midwives. C can sleep through the hoover, F can't abide it and never has. It's a slightly erratic phobia, though, I think to do with remembering being upset by deafening roadworks or unexpected DIY drilling in the middle of snoozes and how you get sympathy by holding your hands over your ears and looking sad.
3. Having her hair washed, because water sometimes gets in her eyes when you rinse. She loves baths, but starts a screaming tantrum every time we get to this stage. So far, shower caps, use of the shower head, use of an elastic head protector that looks like a rubberised choir boy's ruff, getting her to look at the ceiling, covering her eyes with a flannel, getting her to close her eyes and buying her swimming goggles have all failed to clear this hurdle. V won't let me shave her bald, either, so I don't see how we're getting round this other than with filthy hair.
4. Daddy's ridiculous beard has been trimmed. "No! I didn't want that to happen," she said tearfully on being presented with something actually resembling a human face rather than a lot of brown water weed in a strong current. And it's true, I'd been telling her it was going to happen for over a week and she kept telling me not to.
5. The end of Saturdays. "It's not the end of Saturday yet," she says anxiously every so often during Saturday, one hand protectively clutching her sweet tin. And then she weeps inconsolably when it's bed time and the beloved day is done. Dentists are going to love her when she's older.

The Best Things About Njal's Saga, the Viking Play I've Been Working On
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4.
5.

More on that ominous silence soon...

Nautical Terms

More glorious late summer. Sun warm enough to bake with slanting in through the trees over Skansen Kronan, heat-dazed tourists lining the sides of Haga Nygatan and desperately sucking aid from the expensive boutique ice creams sold there.

There is a lovely corner of Haga, not far from our house, where there's a little triangular flower garden dedicated to the famed Swedish botanist Linneus. F and I were taking in the afternoon sun and admiring numerous examples of A. mellifera and B. terrestris as they went droning about their daily chores. There were lots of them. A full gamut from A to B, in fact.

The garden is also decorated with little concrete sailing boats with triangular metal sails. Not quite sure why, maybe Linneus did a lot of travelling by sail? I thought most of his journeys were on land, but I'm not an expert on his doings. Wikipedia tells me he went round the Gulf of Bothnia as a young man, which I guess is hard to do with dry feet.

Anyway, F was sailing one of these boats (as captain, of course. I was helmsman, Bunbun was AB, just to maintain that line of jokes) perched inside the sail, with a foot either side of the cut-out interior. She was gazing formidably into the middle distance, eyes set on either some disappearing French ship of the line or on the mysterious cities of gold, I forget which. It was a very particular look, anyway, one I have come to recognise with a heavy heart.

"What are you doing, F?"

She gave me a slightly shifty look. "I'm just sorting Bunbun out," she said, bustling abruptly to life.

That there was evasion being practised was discovered by two sets of natural phenomenon. Chanelling Carl's spirit to aid my botanic skills, I noted that

• the smell of privet had been displaced by an altogether earthier smell, as of night soil, and
• the air was suddenly thronged with multiple specimens of C. vomitoria seeking nourishment

Further investigation showed that following this foul wind, the boat now had brown sails.

I took F home (she needed showering), and then like any good citizen, went back out with a roll of Torky and some Ajax to restore the fragrance of the garden. Swabbing the poop deck indeed. Good to have both defaced and defaeced a public monument in one fell afternoon.

Misapprehension

The end of summer has arrived. As the leaves start going yellow and brown, so do the Swedes, lapping up a skinful of sun in advance of the winter. The streets are full of tall, lithe, tanned blondes. It's like walking through streets populated by vanilla ice cream cones.

I knew that using the word 'willy' would come back to haunt me.

Potty training is still hit and miss, but the hits are slowly going up in number. I was only on the receiving end of one number one and two number twos this week (the latter both courtesy of C, of course, and both delivered pre-0600). "I weed on Daddy!" F announced in horror as we relaxed on the balcony last week.

"You did," I said, masking my equal horror with paternal calm. There wasn't much else to be said.

As a result of this, F is frequently found roaming round the house semi-clad. She can take trousers off and on now, a simple step up from knickers, and in the late summer swelter is quite proud of the ability. As all of us are no doubt aware, roaming around a house naked tends to lead to a certain amount of self-inspection. For me, this is a nervous glance at my gradually swelling paunch in the mirror as I hastily pass, anxious not to catch its eye. For F, it's the marvel of her genitals.

"This is my bottom," I heard her announce to V the other morning, somewhat inaccurately referring to the other side of herself. "Daddy doesn't. He has a funny bottom instead."

"Yes, that's right," V told her. "Boys have those."

"He bought it at Willys," F went on, "when he was little."

As a gag, this works best if you're Swedish and understand that Willys is a supermarket chain, so I apologise for botching it for everyone else. I'm very tired, what with rehearsals in a black box theatre all day and then immediately having to hit the dettol and floormop beat the minute I get home. The heat is disagreeing with me, I find myself staring out of the window and into the middle distance for long minutes, only to discover I'm facing the wrong way and gaping moronically at interior walls instead. I believe this is called introspection.

Comparisons

C is about twice as long as when we first met now. Not literally, just, well, I don't know, just that she's been growing a lot. There is a person there in the bouncy chair, rather than a protoplasmic red blob of screams.

She is chattier than F, and already much more social. C likes loud noises, like washing machines, hoovers and her older sister. Lucky, that. F used to scream in horror if you tried to clean the flat, or if you woke her up by being noisy. C will occasionally scream with horror if the flat is otherwise too quiet, or if you leave her alone in a room for any length of time.

F did weeing on people, C does her hosepoops. C wants to be wrapped up in blankets even on stifling summer days, F didn't like getting too hot. F was much quieter when she was tiny. C chats nonsense quite a lot already, as well as making an amazing array of alien grunts, hisses and pops. It's like having a talkative snake in the corner of the room.

Can it be that not being the sole focus of your parents' attention is actually good for a baby? C seems very cheerful and calm, less nervy than F. Better at grabbing your attention, perhaps, seeing as she has to compete for it. She smiles a lot, and waves and babbles hellos when she's at the height of her awakeness cycles.

Maybe she just seems cheerful and calm compared to F, who is currently often sulky and argumentative. She threw milk over the kitchen twice last week, because she wanted something else. She's learned to say sorry after such behaviour, but finds it outrageous that you might still get a punishment even after apologising.

They get on very well together, luckily. F was blowing long raspberries at C over breakfast today, something she usually gets reprimanded for (unless they're really funny ones, then it's hard not to join in. Consistency as a parent is a tough line to walk). If C finds it hilarious, who are we to disagree?

V and I are far more tired than we were with just F around. Even if C is up to six or even seven hour blocks of sleep, she has timed her wakening shouts to the deepest parts of my sleep. There's that magnificent feeling at 0230 when you stagger out of bed and into the nearest wall, wondering why you are mobile, what awful catastrophe has triggered your instinctive panic this time.

Then you open the nappy and discover it.

A Light Evening's Entertainment

We are camping for the first time. Because we spent some money puchasing things like bed rolls and mosquito repellant, and because the world is at best a perverse and cruel place to live, this of course means it has rained solidly for a week. It is raining heavily now. It will rain tomorrow, and quite possibly never stop again.

We are on Daftö, an island in the North West of Sweden, sharing a four-man sommarstuga with V's family (a total of ten people). It's an attractive holiday destination, V described it as the Swedish equivalent of Brighton. Yes, if Brighton was in the Outer Hebrides. Or an attractive holiday destination. To help save space in the tiny cottage, F and I are going to sleep in a tent near the door.

F has not slept in a tent before.

F has not slept in the same room as her parents for over a year.

F is quite excited.

2000 - We say a final night night, and sing Little Cat, traditionally our 'close of business' bell toll.
2005 - Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
2015 - We say a final night night, and sing Little Cat, see above.
2030 - There are some flies on the ceiling. Daddy shoos them away.
2035 - 'Flies and Shooing - A Short History'. A fascinating tour of this age-old pastime in which we explain how flies are shooed, why shoes are not the same thing and touch on the mysterious providence of flies in tents.
2045 - 'Flies and Shooing - Continued'. The practical half of this delightful talk, featuring a chance for the audience to shoo flies themselves
2050 - We manage to kill the last of the flies, peace reigns. We say a final night night and sing Little Cat.
2055 - Goldilocks and the Three Bears, second sitting.
2100 - 'On Rain' commences the next in our series of natural history discourses, in which we consider puzzles that have fascinated the curious since antiquity - What noises does it make? Why doesn't it rain inside? Can you see it from here daddy? and Why Rain?
2120 - Goldilocks and the Two Bears, third sitting.
2125 - 'Reflections', where we remember the day that has passed. A meditative talk for those of tranquil and calm mood, focussing on the precious memories the day has brought, like when we nearly went to McDonalds in the shopping centre on the way here and then didn't instead, or the elderly selection of toys discovered in a mouldering paper bag at the summer cottage we're sleeping beside. Sorry, lying inside a tent beside.
2135 - Shirley Hughes' 'When We Went To The Park', a recitation from memory.
2140 - Julia Donaldson's 'The Gruffalo', a recitation from memory.
2145 - Goldilocks and a Bear. There once was a little girl and the baby bear said 'and she's still here!' The End.
2146 - We emphasise that this is night night and sing Little Cat in a cautionary tone.
2150 - 'How Tall is Your Tent?' An all-new interpretive dance piece. You'll be amazed at where the sleeping bags end up!
2155 - This is definitely the last night night and look, daddy is a bit grumpy now but still somehow willing to talk about the health benefits of a good night's sleep in a reasonable tone of voice. Semi-reasonable. Repercussions are explained as a concept, in case they need to be used.
2200 - If you don't go to sleep, we won't sleep in the tent, okay?
2205 - Bunbun is upset about something and cannot sleep.
2210 - Bunbun can't stop crying because Bunbun doesn't like tents and doesn't want to sleep in one any more. The rain outside redoubles.
2215 - I get dressed again, put F inside her sleeping bag and carry her like swag to a nearby caravan, on loan from the cottage's owners. Uncle D and Cousin V are sleeping in here. Like any well-maintained elderly holiday caravan, there is a welcoming atmosphere of humidity and mould that beckons one inside like a decrepit hooker. Nevertheless, F has never slept in a caravan before and is quite excited.
2220 - After running back through the rain to collect my sleeping bag and running back to the caravan to install it, I realise I have left my mobile phone in the goddamn tent. The rain outside redoubles.
2225 - We growl night night and sing Little Cat very quietly because D and V are sleeping just over there and we can't wake them, okay? Now go to sleep.
2235 - There are windows in a caravan, did you know? And you can see out through them. And drum your fingers on them to make a noise like rain. It goes 'pitter patter pitter patter pitter patter pitter patter', Daddy, did you know? I don't want to sleep, Daddy, I want to play! Play with me, Daddy! I write a new musical called 'Wishing I Was Sisyphus', featuring the number 'I'd Roll That Boulder Over My Balls (Before I'd Have Another Child)'
2240 - We sing Go To Sleep Now Or Else, traditionally our 'Close of Business' bell toll.
2245 - Requests for a final round of Goldilocks are quashed.
2250 - F discovers you can make another kind of pitter-patter noise without drumming your fingers on the windows, because that's been forbidden. You can do it by lying on your side and running your feet up and down the caravan walls.
2255 - Or up and down Daddy's back.
2300 - F starts stroking my face and cooing at me in an attempt to engage a fond paternal reaction and a commitment to more play.
2305 - F takes a firm double hand of beard hair and attempts to tug a fond paternal reaction out of me.
2306 - F strikes me hard in the bridge of the nose with the heel of her hand in a last-ditch to get the old fond paternal reaction thing kickstarted. Repercussions commence.
2310 - D and V are probably not sleeping, although I nevertheless invoke their names as reasons that howling is not acceptable right now. Does Bunbun want to go back to the tent? Because Bunbun is going the right way about it. The rain redoubles.
2315 - Daddy is cross, do you understand? You must go to sleep. Right now.
2320 - You are being naughty, F. You are bad.
2325 - In lashing rain, I carry my screamingly repentant daughter across a pitch-black quagmire to the dubious shelter of our tent before her misery wakes D and V again. In our absence, a deep pool of water has gathered in the outer porch. Fortuitously, my trousers absorb it all before it can do us any harm. I have remembered my mobile phone this time, but still need to go back and get my own sleeping bag. The rain quadruples on the way back.
2340 - F tearfully apologises once more, sings Little Cat in a tiny voice and goes to sleep.
0200 - I wake up, expecting to have to change and feed C, and then lie awake for two hours listening to the rain trying to nail the tent roof to my face, occasionally twitching as mosquitos brush my face.

The lovely irony is, of course, that this is still the best night's sleep I've had in two months.

Shitstorm

What? A month gone by? Already? But I only just went to sleep. Five minutes ago. And it's your turn to write the blog anyway. I did it last time.

C has advanced to sleep blocks of four hours or so. They usually come in the late morning and afternoon, and then she is starrily wide-eyed as the evening rolls around. Come ten pm, there's nothing she wants more than to be carried back and forth from room to room, brightly staring at the walls. Heaven help the man who stops gently narrating this journey, or tries to sit down for five minutes. Or doesn't anticipate whatever the next twist in her demands happens to be.

Meanwhile, F is beginning to grasp potty training. Once she realised that you can't just wee wherever you happen to be, she decided to sit on the potty all the time, scooching it noisily from room to room so she could be near the toy of the moment. We explained carefully that the bathroom was really where the potty lived, so she decided she would live in there for a while and that we'd stay in there, to 'help' her.

So we explained that we'd help her sit on the potty, and maybe even read her potty training book through once ('The Princess and the Potty', a classic of the genre), and then we'd come back once she was done. Every time we went out, there was a cry of "Hjälp!" So we'd go back, and be presented with the book again, because she needed help reading it.

The next escalation was to say we would only come back in if she was ready to come off the potty. And then we bribed her out by eating biscuits noisily in the next room, and gradually she accepted that you could go round the flat in knickers. Every five minutes, she's been proudly patting herself and declaring "There's no poop or wee coming!" like a scatological town crier. Three o' clock and all's dry.

F settled in on the potty again this afternoon, with Bunbun, and after the book was duly read, we got on with feeding C. "Bunbun needs help!" F shouted through, this being the latest gambit to get us back in. Bunbun can't read the book by herself, you see, and F can't read it to her properly yet. I went to talk myself out of this, but only because C needed changing after one of her colossal hosepipe blasts (luckily contained in the nappy this time). I'm not a total pushover to toddler wiles. Just about 45% or so.

"Bunbun is doing a Daddy Stare!" F told me from her potty as I switched nappies on C. "Look, pappa! Look!" Daddy stare is family code for blank-eyed gawping at the middle distance, often slightly cross-eyed. It predates C's arrival, so I can't even hide behind exhaustion. I'm just pretty vacant these days. Wondering quite how F was manipulating the rabbit to produce this effect, I turned to look.

Over my shoulder shot an inch-thick metre-long cable of electric brown squirty poop, courtesy of C. It landed squarely on F's head, coating her, the potty and the bathroom carpet in an unhealthy dose of goo, and leaving an almost perfect silhouette of big sister on the wall.

This was awful.

F was in shock almost immediately, shivering and retching. I was on the brink of tears as a result, V rushed through to help in a panic. C was in the blissful state of abdominal calm that a recent voiding brings, but that didn't last. If we were all screaming, she wasn't going to be left out.  F wailed the greatest tragedy of all the loudest. "Bunbun! It went on BunBun!"

Perhaps one day we can look back and laugh on this, the fateful day C completed her poo-hosing of the whole family. For me and V, the greatest shame is that both of us felt the urge to get a camera to immortalise it.

Fifteen minutes of showering, screaming and scrubbing later, Mormor and cousins A and L arrived to play, and luckily this proved enough of a whirlwind distraction that everything got forgotten fairly quickly. Now, in the calm of the evening, I find myself reliving that explosive moment of delivery like something from a war movie. There are still orange-brown spackles on the shower curtain, and indeed, my soul.

Bunbun, it should be noted, was washed and tumbledried by V with perfect timing for bed. She seems fine, outwardly. Perhaps her mental scars run deep.

Namely

What? That was a whole month? Already? All I remember is about three or four hours worth of screaming, all of which seemed to be happening at about three in the morning. I may have slept for the rest of it. Either that, or my brain isn't working properly because of sleep deprivation. Although that could just be the sleep deprivation talking. Apologies, one paragraph in and I'm already rambling. There's too much going on in my head to be coherent, and all of it is the equivalent of insane monkeys trapped in a cupboard and biting each other.

The baby's name is C, after some discussion. I realise that my stylistic use of capitals isn't terribly helpful here, but there you go. Even F took this on board after a couple of weeks - she's not much of a one for naming things, usually. Her rabbit is called Kanin ('rabbit' in Swedish, although BunBun in English at least), the baby doll C gave her as a getting born present is called Baby. "The baby must love me very much," she said, on getting this last item.

(She has also, in passing, picked up V's tendency to refer to stuff she's temporarily forgotten the name of as 'thingy thingy', as in 'hand me that thingy thingy over there'. F uses this for anything she doesn't know the name of yet, which covers a lot of ground. If I ask her what she's doing in our room after a long, suspicious silence, and get "I'm going to put the thingy thingy in the thingy thingy" as an answer, it doesn't really leave me much wiser.)

I vaguely recall the three months or so after F was born. These shadowy memories are only present because I wrote about them at the time, in this very blog. Without that, I'd have nothing. Unravelled care sleeves and nothing else. Quite a few parents of multiple kids told us during the pregnancy that having more than one kid doesn't make a big difference, it's not really much harder. This can be put down to the same brain damage, it's utter cobblers.

It's no more worrying, that's fair. I'm not suffering extra night terrors as I imagine roaming bears devouring my young, for example, in the same way I did when F was born. I have a rough idea of what's normal for an infant, which way up to hold it, how to change a nappy without barfing, that kind of thing. So I'm no more stressed than I was before.

I'm doubly exhausted, though, which helps nobody. V and I grouse and snap at each other as we lurch through the days, each sourly jealous of any rest the other gets (at least, I speak for myself here - V may be too tired to care). Everything feels like it's always your turn to do it, even if it's clearly not. This is particuarly irrational in my case when it comes to breast feeding.

C is sleeping in two to four hour bursts, mostly. Broken nights are tough. Getting pooped on regularly during them is even tougher. C can poo clear across a room, in a stream like a WWII flamethrower. She's sprayed me out in public. She's replastered the bathroom at 0400. I want to wear a butcher's apron when I go to change her, but I'm afraid it might send the wrong message as a parent.

She sleeps between us in the bed, she's made it very clear she doesn't like being alone. So I've been woken by a stream of milky vomit being deposited into beard in the middle of the night. It's a sadly depleted beard, I had to trim it for a job earlier in the month. This is a lucky escape, I think. It was rancid enough without yoghurt stalactites being added to the mix.

As F is now on her summer holidays, we can't really rest while C sleeps in the day, as we could when F was little. Instead, we  cook unsauced pasta one more time because that's what F wants for lunch. Or pretend we're going to clean the house properly ever in our lives again, that kind of thing. Or sit on the floor and play Playmobile People Go to Hospital.

I do, at least. F is still very much the Pappagris. V isn't allowed to help, show affection or (sometimes) talk without permission. Actually, neither am I, but I'm also the go-to parent for any problems that might be ongoing. This is tiring, even if it's also endearing. V only gets the tiring end of that stick.

F is very fond of her little sister, at least. Hugs and kisses all the time, especially when C is asleep. Screaming Ambush is one of her favourite games right now, that's another great one to play with baby during afternoon nap time. C doesn't mind in the least, she's clearly interested in F already. She'll scream blue murder if I can't warm up a bottle in under two minutes, but F can bellow 'YAAAARGH' at her out of nowhere and she just gazes intently, as though filing it away for later use.

F's favourite bit at the moment is nappy change. She knows babies get angry when you change them, so she comes to help sooth C. Mostly by shouting "No!" at her to try and defuse the situation, but the intent is there. She's religious in her attendance, though, perhaps because of a renewed interest in bowel movements.

Yes, we're doing potty training again. Because we're bloody idiots, and not cleaning up enough crap at the moment, clearly. Some mild successes so far, after a limited start which needed three dress changes in twenty minutes. F has taken on board that grown ups don't wear nappies, but is quite cross about it. Doesn't see the point, maybe.

She insisted on following me to the toilet this afternoon to watch. "What are you doing now?" she asked. Well, I'm sitting uncomfortably whilst waiting to poo, thanks. How are you? And then came one of those dreaded questions.

"What's that hanging down underneath daddy's tummy?"

Say penis. Go on, daddy, say it. It's not a bad word, it's an anatomical label. Nothing to be ashamed of, not even yours, and a usefully clinical term in later life. May as well start with it.

"Er, well, it's a willy."

Not even 'my willy', you massive copout. Just somebody's willy, that happens to be hanging about under your paunch. It just wandered in here and hopped into your lap, did it? Or maybe you're looking after it for a friend. Idiot.

F considered this intelligence and then laughed. "Ha ha! It's funny," she said, and then wandered off. So much for pride.

At least the name has stuck with her. Names in general, in fact. Now C is offical nomenclature, she's started naming her toys. This has begun with her smurfs. She's called one of them Adolf. Okay, Adolf after Starke Adolf, the strongman in Pippi Longstrump, but all the same, it's not an auspicious start.

Mothers' Day 3/3

Sunday the 31st, B was born.

(B still stands for Baby, we're still at an impasse on names, which means F is currently right after all - she's being saying it would just be called Baby for months.)

Just to add dramatic weight to that, it was Swedish Mothers' Day. It was also Uncle J's birthday, F's Godmother L's wedding anniversary. Brooke Shields was born on this day, people, it has cosmic significance.

June 1st, we got the news through to F.

We did phone her several times on the Sunday. In Mormor's care, she'd gone out to Lek och Buslandet, a soft play area. We got to hear Aunty M asking her to come to the phone, and we got to hear the screamed response ("NO!") several times, and that was it. However exciting a new sibling is, it isn't a trampoline. There is no comparison.

But she did understand. We've been explaining it to her for ages, and she's interested and excited. If her priorities aren't quite ours, that's okay. She is only two and a half. Even so, she understood about the baby. When I woke her in the middle of the night on Saturday to explain that she had to go to Mormor's house now because the baby was ready to come out, she was confused.

"No, Daddy, babies must grow and grow and grow first," she told me, rather pityingly.

"Well, it's done that already, and now it's ready to come out," I said.

"Pop?" she said, because that's the sound effect we do at the relevant stage in her book. It's a good book, as kids' books go, but the pictured bursting amniotic sac does look like a cheery balloon. It's been hard to know how much F has taken on board, and not entirely reassuring to discover she thinks childbirth and Cheggers make the same noise.

"Yes, pop," I said. V threw me dark glances. "We're going in Mormor's car," I added, because F was still dubious about going anywhere with a man with such a poor grasp of the basics of partuition.

"Let's go!" she said brightly, hopping out of bed. She likes cars.

And then suddenly it was Monday afternoon, and I was waiting with her downstairs from the maternity ward. V was feeding B, and I was trying to prepare F for her first encounter with her new little sister. I'd done this in three stages, which I'd like to record here as a template for all parents:

• Bought her a Kinder Surprise containing a toy car that in turn contained a toy plane, both of which represented a significant choking hazard for a newborn
• Fed her the chocolate egg so she got hyperactive and then pooped herself vigorously
• Dropped one of her shoes on her face while changing her so that she got a fat lip

When Fathers' Day rolls around again, I may go presentless.

"Here's your little sister," we told F, as V came out of the lift.

And she jumped up and down and laughed, and looked at B's tiny pink toes, and wanted to hold her hands and hold her up she could teach her to walk, and told us that babies could only sleep and eat and poop, and everything else she's learnt from her book. All retained, all understood, and all very happy.

V and B should be home before this post airs. I don't doubt F's joy will get patchy in places. Hell, I'm sure V's and mine will - I dimly remember the nappy-ridden early days of this very blog, and I am in no hurry to repeat them.

But we will, and we'll find something shiny and worthwhile in amongst all the crap, as one always does in life, and F will be helping us do it, just as she does every single day.

Mother's Day 2/3

Room number ten in the delivery suite, Östra Sjukhuset, has seen some heavy use over the years. Much of it by us.

Some twist of luck got us back to the exact same place that F was born in, two and half years ago. I was looking out of the windows at the same tired portacabins that still seemed like a temporary solution for building works, with the same moss and permapuddles on their asphalt roofs. No sprinkles of light snow this time. The Gothenburg summer may be crap, but there are limits.

Once we'd got over the deja vu, installed V and spread our stuff over the chairs and window ledges, I went straight to sleep.

I'm a very supportive husband, okay? I wanted to help V relax, so I set a good example. If she wanted to squeeze my hand during her labour, I felt having hands as limp as a stress ball would be helpful. And okay, she might have been working full time through the labour to support our family whilst carrying another whopping baby, but I was tired too. I had to stay up late writing this blog, for example. About once a month. So I deserve my rest.

I'm only mostly joking, is the sad thing. I wasn't as stressed about this pregnancy, partly because it almost never quite felt as real. Some of that was about it being unexpected, some of it was knowing a lot more about what to expect. Some of it was even that I speak a lot more Swedish this time, and wasn't trying to guess if the midwife just said 'twins' or not.

And reading that back to myself, I just want to clarify that 'not being stressed' isn't the same as 'not being fussed' or 'not giving a stuff'. I gave a big stuffy fuss about it. I was worried and apprehensive and in partial denial about potential complications, and all the rest of the horrific gnawing worry that accompanies parenting. Or that is the entirety of parenting, if you want to be negative about it. At no point are you not worried. There is always something to fret over, some dark doom waiting to encompass you. Something real and plausible and all too nearby. I get that, I have the fear. I have it right now as I type, I certainly had it in spades in Room 10, a room only a single digit away from being filled with rat-in-your-face hats and uncomfortable truths about human nature and jackboots.

I just did all of that stressing while asleep. In a really uncomfortable chair that's given me a really bad back. I'm also a victim here, let's not forget.

V was amazing. She powered through labour in what felt like no time, and made it look relatively easy. Even compared to being asleep in a chair. I managed to wake up for the last couple of hours, and saw a lovely fuzzy purple creature arriving. She's got spiky red-blond hair, same colour as V, but no name yet. You never really know how worried you are until it all dissolves in a wash of love for your wife and new and existing daughters.

This was Sunday, a few days ago (this bag of news is entirely catless, the news that we have a second daughter arrived on Facebook before we managed to leave the hospital). However advanced F's iPad skills are, however, she can't use Facebook yet. So there was someone who was yet to find out.

Mothers' Day 1/3

My family is over from the UK! And Malaysia. International clan, the Hoggs these days, so a full family get-together is a pretty rare event.

F was very pleased to meet her family from abroad. After the first rather suspicious meeting, where she said no a lot and went off to play alone, she was happily sprawled on her Uncle P's knee for an endless repetition of a tickling rhyme.

Dot dot

Line line

Spider crawling up your spine

Tight squeeze

Light breeze

Now you've got the shiveries

New one on me, that. New one on F too. She's just starting to get back into trying new things, after several months of adamant repetition of routines.

We had a big family meal out on Saturday night at a good steak place. F was excited about this until we got there and it turned out that 'eating at a restaurant' translated as 'sitting at a table being boring'. She almost liked the salad bar, because it was arranged a little bit like her favourite pick'n'mix sweet shop. But a lame version, where the broccoli wasn't even gummi. Only swift production of mummy's iPad saved the evening from becoming a tantrum.

And even then, her eyeline gradually emerged from Youtube videos about playdoh as she realised everyone seemed to be having fun without her. By the end of the night, she was running up and down a row of benches with Uncle D at one end, howling with delight. Swedes don't do howling babies in restaurants all that much, they're too reserved. The plaited family at the next table would have looked horrified, except that to display the emotion would have been to admit that something was wrong. So kudos to them.

We went home, put F and the super pregnant and tired V to bed, then I went out to the pub to meet most of the others and watch the cup final. Was it a cup final? I don't know, football isn't really my thing. Arsenal Villa were playing, I think, possibly against United. United Airlines? United Arab Emirates? United Nations? Google hasn't helped me here. Anyway, Fifteen seconds after arriving and greeting the others, my phone went.

V's waters had broken, please could I come home again.

Nothing to Report

No news on gender, weight, name, etc, etc - none of that. The baby is still dormant, by which I mean it's taken a vow of restlessness which V is obliged to go along with. Occasionally it kicks her hard enough in the middle of the night that she kicks out as well, like some kind of giant puppet. So I get kicked by proxy. Nobody wins in this arrangement.

Not much to write about over the last month, then, as the days are increasingly full of waiting for its arrival. Plenty of preparing instead. Some of it is mental prep, lying around doing nothing at any opportunity as if stocking up on rest and sleep might remotely work.

The rest of the preparation is shopping. Blankets so tiny I cannot believe F ever fitted inside one. An assortment of plastic teats, straps, rings and bottles. Hilariously overpriced toys. We spent some time today trying to pick out a doll for F to play with, the present with which we'll try to assuage her inevitable attention jealousy.

"Which one of these do you like?" we asked her.

"I buy the baby new clothes!" she told us proudly, ignoring both dolls and holding up a toy shopping basket before loading it up with doll outfits from the rack. Doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl, then, as long as you can use it as an excuse to go shopping.

We got a new sofa, so mummy has a place to sprawl during feeding sessions or general exhaustion. F went from being very excited about the new sofa to being very excited about her new sofa to being very excited about her new trampoline over the course of an hour. Once she'd split chocolate on it, she had clearly taken it for granted and stopped talking about it altogether.

Still hard to gage F's understanding of the baby. We read her a book about a new baby arriving in a family today, which she listened to with close interest. "Did you like that book, Freja?"

"That mummy had no clothes on," she said, rather concerned. Still on the clothes, then. Priorities all sorted.

James' beard remains well. The vistigial remnants of James are still lodged amidst its proud roots, and it hopes to soon move on to pastures new. 

Incoming

So, yeah, a couple of posts back I alluded to the fact that V is pregnant again. Left it hanging there, actually, unmentioned since.

Part of this is natural hesitancy - you don't necessarily want to go enumerating unhatched chicks, so to speak, especially in the weird pseudopublic realm of the internet. I wouldn't want to have to explain it hadn't actually worked out on Facebook, leaving people no easy way to use their Like buttons.

The other part of it is being busy. This post is therefore All News, All the Time. Other than the first bit, obviously. And this bit, where I'm over-explaining it.

FAQ

How pregnant is V?

V is extremely pregnant. People keep stopping her in the street to tell her she is definitely carrying twins and wonder if she'd noticed. That, or they just can't squeeze past her, we aren't sure. Along with random joint aches, sleepless nights and savagely variable hormone levels, this means she is in a really super mood and would definitely like you to tease her mercilessly. After all, you don't really need both arms, do you?

When is it due, then?

The baby is due to arrive round the beginning of June, according to medical professionals, so not that long left to go.

However, V has a history of defying professional medical opinion, to the extend that any part of her medical history could be considered more like propaganda than factual reporting. This has included deciding on her own (new and more interesting) symptoms for illnesses and a marked immunity to advice. F was early, this new baby is already beyond huge, and it's not impossible it might turn up within the next month.

Does F know she's going to be a big sister?

Yes. She says hello to Mummy's Tummy in the morning and pats it cheerfully, in the manner of a medieval peasant touching a hunchback for luck. She is aware the baby will sleep in our room and sit in the new baby chair in the kitchen, but has been keen to stress that it will not get in her bed or be allowed to use her toys.

F has helped us pick baby names, by screwing her face up to our entire list of suggestions and shaking her head vigorously. "Well, what should we call it then?" we ask, and she shrugs and says "Baby" as though this were patently obvious to any but the most gurning simpleton. Similarly, the baby will be neither boy nor girl, "just a baby".

Are you all very excited?

Yes. Also quite stressed, occasionally in mild denial or frankly completely oblivious to what on earth the fuss is about. Second time in, there's been a marked drop in the levels of starry-eyed hope and a sharp increase in flashbacks to three am nappy changes. I can almost smell the meconium.

What are you doing to prepare for the new arrival?

Stressing, I just told you. Also buying things from Blocket (a second-hand site a bit like eBay), rooting around in the cellar for F's old clothes and wondering if vasectomies can be applied retrospectively.

What else is going on right now?

F has emerged from her Pippi Longstocking phase and is now into reading letters and making things with playdough. Mostly she makes caltrops, which (for those of you less au fait with fantasy wargear than I) are multi-spiked metal shards scattered on the ground and used to hobble charging cavalry. Playdoh is by far and away the most efficient material for the contruction of caltrops ever created by man. It also makes excellent, if rather eye-catching, patches for carpets, trousers, etc. Personally, I've gone off it.

V is somehow still working full time. I've passed another language exam and am now learning SAS-G, which is what six-to-ten year olds learn. At this rate, I'll be able to communicate at my mental age before the summer, because mentally I'm about twelve.

What the Christ is that on your face?

I have a part in a play about vikings, an adaptation of one of the Icelandic Sagas I love so much in fact, that starts rehearsal in a couple of months. I'm very excited about it, as I'll be performing in Swedish (probably). I auditioned in Swedish too, but decided that wasn't hard enough and translated the piece I did, famous Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, specially for the occasion. I only wish I could accurately portray the looks on the faces of the audition panel as I hammered through it with my most enthusiastic foreign acting. I also had to dance (never pretty), demonstrate my acrobatic prowess (I did a handstand) and swordfighting skills. The latter against myself. With a mop.

Regardless of this impressively insane experience, my lazily untrimmed winter beard went on to swing me the role. I was asked to keep growing it and I'm now about eighty percent facial hair by body weight*, much of which is just inside the corners of my mouth. I keep seeing movement in my peripheral vision. When I whip round to see who's creeping up on me, I find my coiling sideburns, sieving the air for nutrients like the tentacles of a hungry anenome.

*The other twenty percent is a claggy accumulation of egg yolk, herring bones and the mockery of bypassers.

Har du sett min apa?

We had a Pippi Longstocking month last month.

Bit of a departure for F. If she sees real people on the telly, she usually wrinkles her nose up and denounces them as being a 'mummy program', by which she means Dr. Phil, CSI Denver or whatever other generic daytime crap is chuntering on in the background while V does something else entirely.

But Pippi somehow passed this acid test, and we had several marathons of watching all of it back to back. And singing the theme song, which is now a bedtime staple. V called F 'my little firecracker' the other morning. "Ne-Hej!" said F loudly and angrily, as she does if you call her anything other than her proper name or do anything before she's told you to do it. "But Pippi is a firecracker," we explained, and then she grinned widely and accepted her new title.

Pippi, whose surname is actually Långstrump, is a peculiar rolemodel for children. F quite quickly understood that you shouldn't really jump up and down on top of tables, eat birthday cake for breakfast or jump off the edge of buildings. It's funny when Pippi does it, but not in real life. F realised this quickly because Daddy was extremely fast in giving serious explanations of gravity, nutrition and other science facts, as though Open University was using the show as a teaching example - "Let's just pause the action here and think about what Pippi is doing for a moment. If you consider the acceleration of a free-falling body in normal atmospheric conditions..."

It's a great bit of old telly, though, made in Sweden in the 70s with brilliantly duff special effects. Proper heritage stuff. The nearest equivalent I could think of was the old BBC Narnia adaptation, the one where Aslan was a motheaten sock puppet and the Beaver family was the Talking Animal equivalent of putting on Blackface.

F's favourite episode of the whole series was of course the one with the worst possible connotations in English. It's where Pippi, idly considering some of her treasures one morning, comes up with a strange new word. She decides to use this word for everything until she finds the thing it really means.

The word in question, sadly, is 'Spunk'. It's quite hard to stay deadpan when the episode is riddled with classic dialogue like 'all the best sweet shops sell spunk', 'oh, what a sweet little spunk!' (to a baby, as well) or 'Don't you know it's dangerous to drink spunk?'

But it's stay deadpan or explain to F why I'm sniggering, and that's a conversation for a later date. When she's, say, in her mid-thirties.

Food Waist

Sorry for the long pause. It's been, in some ways, quite a tough month.

Something about the end of winter - I've become more Swedish in that sense. When the first rays of spring sun come out, I'm not standing askance and looking wryly at the desperate Swedes standing pathetically out in them, almost lapping at the air to extract the warmth. Rather, I'm there with everyone else, strung out like sun-tolerant vampires and feebly glad to have made it through the dark months. Instead of struggling through another bitterly cold, gloomy day, you can wash up on the shore of spring for a bit, and take a breather.

F continues to be a bit over two. Last year, she was pretty cheerful most of the time, easy-going and playful. Now, she's either like that but ramped up to about thirteen and extremely insistent that I join her, or she's lying bonelessly on the carpet, screaming. She lies in bed in the morning saying "Come on, Daddy! Open the door!" even though she's quite capable of getting out of bed and doing it herself. She'll demand specific foods, then shun them if they're produced.

Given that I have the heart and soul of a labrador, it's not really surprising that I eat everyone's leftovers at home. This is starting to tell, rather, especially at the moment when F's appetite is pretty capricious. If I cook fishfingers for lunch, I have to try and guess how many she might eat, factor in how I want, then cook the total. There's always one more than I can comfortably eat, maths is not my strong point. I feel a little heavy these days.

Even though I balk at eating, say, a half-platched bowl of yoghurt containing soggy Special K, I still feel terribly guilt throwing it out. But what else can you do? Sack after sack of perfectly edible grub is tossed either down the hatch in the hallway or the one in my face. Neither feel like good solutions.

To compound this, F has decided sharing can be fun.

"Please can you pass the blueberries," I asked her at breakfast.

"Lots and lots!" she said, and kept passing big, mildly crushed fistfuls to me and sniggering.

I know I shouldn't complain. But V did more or less the same last night. It was National Waffle Day (how I love Sweden) yesterday. V's appetite is a bit all over the place right now, so she ate half of one, then tossed the rest over to me. I must have looked a surprised, because she explained that she didn't want it slightly defensively.

"You don't have to eat it," she said. Of course I do, you've put it on my plate! Don't you know what happens to people who don't clean their plates? They get no pudding! That's what I was thinking, anyway. I couldn't say anything, there was too much waffle in the way.

And why is V's appetite all over the place, you might ask? Ah well, there's a thing.

Här kommer en till.

Pappagris

I seem to have become indispensable.

F's morning chorus starts with vague murmurs that gradually mutate into a two-tone cry of "Mummy! Daddy!" like a clingy ambulance. That doesn't mean she's awake, though. If you fall into that trap, you get crossly told "Nej! Sleeping," as she rolls over and pulls a stuffed bear over her head.

You know when she is awake, because the two tones become one. "Daddy daddy daddy, daddy daddy. Daddy! Daddy daddy. Pick up." Then it's mummy's turn to roll over and go back to sleep, and I can go and make breakfast.

Daddy must also come and play. And hold her hand. And this morning, come and watch her watching the iPad. And run and get her paper and crayons. And get a glass of milk. Daddy must not, on pain of screaming death, be on the computer, talk to mummy, fold laundry or do cooking until instructed so to do.

It's sort of fun being in demand? Up to a point. That point being the point at which you need to do any chores, or even (god forbid) entertain yourself in any way. There's only so much rapt beholding I can manage before even the joy of seeing toy cars being repeatedly extracted from a smurf mushroom house palls. Five minutes, in all honesty, is the absolute maximum, and that's when it's still seven in the morning and I can stare into the middle distance for weeks without seeing anything.

It's certainly not fun seeing how rude F is to V at the moment. "No! Vill inte ha mummy! Mummy is bleh!" is a typical rejoinder to an offer of a kiss or a cuddle. She can be pretty chilly for no reason to either of us, but V definitely gets the worst of it. There's nothing much behind such vehement rejection, no more than there was behind the expertly executed right hook to the jaw she gave me last week. She tearfully went straight to the naughty chair all by herself when she saw my face after that particular stunt, which rather tore the heartstrings out of my ire. Canny wee lady, her.

Knowing that she just hasn't got the hang of the polite no just yet doesn't help it feel less personal, though. And her polite yes is no better. Asking her if she'd like some breakfast gets the most sullen sounding 'yeah' I've heard from anyone outside their teens. Then you have to dash through the obstacle course of her wildly flip-flopping demands (Butter on the bread! No butter on the bread! Milk! Red milk, not blue! In the other glass! With the pink bib! Too slow - give me yoghurt now!) to make sure she eats anything.

Luckily it's balanced with occasional displays of extremely generous affection, which leavens what might otherwise be bitter bread. "Mmmmm, nice warm daddy," for example, with a big pressing cuddle. Or "I'm stroking mummy's hair," whilst curled up on the sofa. So if it's tough work right now, at least it's very rewarding.