Meet the New Boss

Bit of a weird first week back, really. Mostly for that usual reason, the part of your brain that immediately denies you've ever been away and stitches the events and experiences of your travelling self into some sealed internal pocket of memory. So Keswick feels like a pleasant hallucination, and even though I'd lived in this flat for all of five days before leaving, it has established itself as 'home' and therefore 'normal'.

F, however, is quite an altered wee beast.

She weighs what feels like three times more. This is a clear exaggeration on the behalf of my atrophied baby-carrying muscles. A midweek trip to the midwife revealed that she's only put on about 300g or so since I last hefted her. But it's all solid muscle. She packs a punch. Also a kick and an occasional accidental headbutt.

She can crawl. Pretty fast, slamming her hands down as she goes. Her approach is heralded by platching slapping noises, a bit like the plungers of a human fly sprinting up a plate glass window. She can also haul herself to standing on any handy surface - tables, chairs, daddy's trousers. This last particularly when daddy is cooking in the kitchen or trying to write at his computer.

She points at things and wants to be told the name. She can trace the words in the books I read to her, or if I'm not there to read, trace them herself and babble nonsense appropriately. She asks to be passed things at breakfast (usually inappropriate things like coffee or knives). She can beg with puppy dog eyes, and even the heart-rending words 'pls, pleees!' if heartless daddy won't let her type on the laptop or use the TV remote. Her vocabulary is tiny but expanding. She can play peekaboo (tittut in Swedish) with a blanket.

She can whistle. Is that even normal for toddlers?

She has very definitely crossed the rubicon that divides babies and toddlers. Not a proto-person anymore, but a small and often frustrated one instead, delighted and desperate to express and communicate in equal measures.

She's still the same person, though, very recognisably. It's more as though she's come into a sharper focus, an impression I also get from her garbled chatter. Another few months and she'll be explaining in great and exact detail what I'm supposed to be doing and how quickly, I suspect.

After a mere week back home, I have been groomed speedily back into dadhood. Once more I sport the badges of my trade: -

• toothpaste/inotyol stains on all my shirt lapels
• haggard face
• limited and erratic personal grooming
• Can recite the Gruffalo by heart
• inability to stay awake past 2100
• ability to walk about, make bottled milk, change nappies, etc without conscious thought
• blazing sentimental pride in all she says or does regardless of comparative banality