Lumpy

C is nearly a metre tall already. After two months at playschool, she can jog and climb with facility, eat with a fork or a spoon (player's choice) and realise when F is trying to take a toy away from her before it happens.

She loved the first few weeks of Trumman. V stayed in with her for the first few, then we slowly weaned ourselves out of the way. About a week after we did that, C cottoned on to the fact that mummy and daddy were leaving her behind, and started screaming miserably as soon as we went in the school gate. There's nothing that says thank-you like the look on a preschool teacher's face as you hand them a rigid, weeping child and scuttle cheerily off to work. Unless it's the look on a preschool teacher's face when said child then immediately shits itself.

"Gaafn," C says, waving a fork (Swe: gaffeln) at me. Her sister is Eyya, her shoes are Sues, when she's finished eating she wants to get dahn, dahn. Mostly she points with a muscular ferocity more suited to throwing darts, and snaps "Dare!" at whatever she wants identified, donated or transport to. "Wow!" she says when she's impressed. "Oh deah," when less so. My name, of course, she can utter smoothly and flawlessly, especially at 0245.

I served her leftover pasta this evening. "Oh deah, Daddy. Dahn, dahn."

-

I need to have a lump taken off my face. It's the encysted remains of a decade-old boil, delightfully, and therefore the medical equivalent of John Masefield's Box of Delights. The BBC adaptation, naturally, full of unexpected Wurzel Gummidges.

Calling anyone on the phone in Sweden remains a crapshoot for me. Unable to see the shapes of people's mouths or read their body language, I am deprived of two thirds of my comprehension.

- I have a lump on my face. I want it taken away, I said plaintively to the booking line. There was a longish pause.

- Oh, right, a lump, she said, sounding unusually happy about this. Well, we'll see what we can do.

The Swedish for lump in this context is knöl. The Swedish for Fuck, on the other hand, is knull. Retrospectively, I rest happy in the knowledge I brought joy to someone's morning.

-

F was told a while back to choose a soft toy from home that she could take to playschool with her and keep there. Bunbun was too precious and had caused problems by being left in the wrong place at various points, either at home during the day or in a classroom locker by night.

Parental pride! F chose the Cthulhu hand puppet I bought her when she was very little. Probably, in fairness, because she was told to choose one that wasn't too important, but rest on your laurels while you may, I say.

Double laurels, in fact, for F has started a spate of drawing. Neatly coloured and cut out parrots, mostly. But not all of her winged creatures are of this earthly realm. Iä! Iä!

Like a tiny Pickman.

Empty Den

"Daddy, I don't want to die."

Oh, good. F has cottoned on to the fact that mortality is a problem for us puny humans. Through various discussions about growing up and biology, she has absorbed the following information.

1. Children slowly grow into adults, and usually stop growing before they are twenty years old
2. Living things eventually die 
3. Death is, in general, a sad thing that people don't like

These three facts have combined into a superfact, much like a trio of tiny autobots becoming something much larger and ridiculous.

"When I'm nineteen, I will be so tall and big my head will reach the ceiling and then I'll die! That will make me sad, because I'll miss you, daddy."

It's been a few years since I revised my physiology, I know, but I'm usually more accurate a teacher than this. F can explain immunity to you, post-chicken pox, and was annoyed to learn it doesn't apply to the cold she's about to catch from C. She can, with a little help, write her name (although the letters are generally in whimsical positions and rotations about the page).

Although my first instincts were to dismantle the broad raft of inaccuracies on which her fallacy was floating, I found myself considering the deeper and sharkier sea of knowledge underneath it. I guess knowing the straight-up facts about death isn't exactly a high priority when you're three and a half. There's a reason Ladybird don't do 'Peter and Jane Do A Eulogy'. Instead, I reassured F that death was nothing to worry about and that she wasn't ever going to outgrow the roof, and she's not spoken about it since. Probably fine, then.

-

C started daycare a couple of weeks ago. She'd been looking forward to it after the sneak previews she got when she helped me go and pick F up. She's a lot more outgoing than her older sister was at the same age. She's already running off without a backward glance, glad to be free of her oafish parents for a few hours, and importing all the local viruses back to the home for closer study. Last Saturday after breakfast, she stood at the front door hammering on it angrily and barking impatient reminders to us that it was time to go now.

I suppose this is positive? There's an acting job starting next week for me, and until it kicks off, I can actually sit at home by myself and get things done. That's a novelty, I can tell you. A lonely, echoing novelty that's lousy with guilt. After a few hours, I had to put Peppa Pig on and spill some milk somewhere in the house so I could clean it up and feel redeemed.

V and I actually had a day off together today, for about the first time since F was born, where we didn't have to book a babysitter to go out and relax a little. Floating semi-coherently round the spa, letting exhaustion flood out of me like sweat from a Trump campaign manager during a live broadcast, I couldn't help but feel I was shirking responsibility.

Tiny creatures on my shoulders, with the faces of my children, floated with me, mouthing "why, daddy? Why don't you like us any more?" as miniature tears sparkled down their cheeks. It countered the effects of the looped Enya album the spa was playing pretty acutely, I can tell you.

Could have just been the tiredness, mind you. A pulled pork lunch and some coffee down by the canal, and I perked right back up.

Homeland

Holidays. London feels like a foreign city to me now, which makes it very disconcerting when I recognise vast chunks of it. It reminds me of reading about that neurology trick you can do with a pair of prisms, forcing someone to see upside down until their brain corrects it. Perhaps if I survive the first few hours, I'll remember to look the other way when crossing the street again.

Everything is smaller and dirtier than I remember. Hotter, too, we've arrived in the middle of a heatwave. Strapping a baby to your chest and jumping on a bus is cheaper than the sauna, but somehow less replenishing.

Ten days of touristing to go.

-1-

London Zoo. F is about a foot and a half away from a ring-tailed lemur. It's squatting in the undergrowth next to the path inside the free-roaming enclosure, gnawing on the husk of some kind of fruit, eyes like tiny black marbles and the face of a wizened toddler. F makes an 'awww, cute' squeaky noise of excitement.

The lemur looks at her and makes pretty much the same noise back.

The two of them converse briefly before the lemur goes to pick and eat lice out of its friend's coat. Later that night, as part of an entirely different conversation, I ask F what she wants to be when she grows up, she says "ring-tailed lemur."

-2-

C's cousin H spots her across the room and shouts her name triumphantly, then launches herself into a huge, vigorous hug. The kind where you dig your heel into the back of the other person's knee in order to get extra purchase. C isn't quite able to provide the same kind of support as an adult, somehow, and over they both go.

Half an hour later, when Cousin H spots C again, C edges round to the other side of the coffee table and smiles politely.

Meanwhile, F and Cousin S are playing tigers under the same coffee table. A polite discussion is had with them regarding the correct use of fingernails during a playful scratch after I lose a small piece of my nose.

-3-

F wades deeper into the stream, leaving a turbid cloud in the water behind her. The cloud drifts towards the row of stones at the side of the pool, slowly dispersing through the gaps and being replaced by clear water.

The hedgerow swaying with murmuring bees, the brook chuckles and gurgles. We wade about with Cousin D and Uncle P, any skin not covered by the icy water sweltering. F catches some stones, a dead slug and much slime. D catches tiny shrimp-like things, larval stages of some beetle or other in their transparent early life.

I remember a lot of dam building from my own youth. Eternities of it, some afternoons, sluicing about in the river Tay during low summers or lurching round foresty streams with my trousers rolled up. Where has my energy gone? Why am I not crashing to all fours to lever up a boulder and plug that last gap? I just want to lurch home and avoid sunstroke. Staying up until two in the morning having a drunken conversation about the monarchy with Aunty R probably didn't help. My sweat is probably poisoning those poor water lice even now.

Happy all the same, though. Because F is.

-4-

"Ooowlou!" squeals C, pointing.

"Oh look!" I repeat after her. "Yes, that's a silver necklace in the shape of a human heart!"

The shop outside the Evolution of Man exhibition has gone all pseudo-victorian with its tat. Steampunk skull ashtrays and collections of empty specimen bottles to drink cold brewed coffee out of, through the fronds of your hipster Darwin beard. C is loving it. She slept through the earthquake bit earlier, wasn't too impressed by the gemstone hall (who is?) but this is a shop. C likes shops.

"Ooowlou!" she says again.

"Daddy, I haven't got one of these at home so I want one," F says, brandishing god alone knows what. A biro with a mangy peacock feather tail? A human cranium ashtray? A tea towel printed with a diagram of Huxley's arse? Memory fails me. Nothing anyone without a certain level of disposable income could justifiably want or need. That's not me. The only disposables I do these days are nappies.

-5-

We go to Hamleys. Part of me never comes out.

-6-

H and E are playing vigorously with F, who is doing her best to keep up with the two older children despite being tired, too hot and massively overstimulated. Round the back of the Naval Museum in Greenwich is a cafe, where V, S and I sit and chat as C smears cake and ice cream over her face happily.

Their game is tickling. Having established that I am ticklish, they are chasing each other around by the long terraced fountain beside the cafe poking each other gleefully and trying not to let their shrieks become screams.

It's very good to see old friends again. S and her husband I along with their children H and E today, CC from drama school the day before, Clara's godfather J for the first time and the CMDEB family unit (families look like items from the Christmas Honours list in my shorthand. Commanders of the Militarily Distinguished Empire Brigade, all of them) later in the week. People I now cling to contact with via Facebook or Whatsapp, instead seeing regularly as I'd like. So many children, alarmingly energetic miniatures of their parents with the same traits, the same smiles, all new purpose and (generally but not exclusively, and certainly compared to me) more hair and better waistlines.

F later recalls this as her favourite favourite moment of the week. "I was so so happy," she says, "playing tickling by the fountain. We should get a fountain like that for our house. We can have it outside the balcony." I notify the local council on our return to Sweden.

-7-

Melted ice cream on the Southbank. People grabbing cheeky pints from the Founders Arms, then chugging off along the river in motor cruisers. A tired round of applause for the anticlimactic end of some hyperactive street performance. Someone selling the world's smallest kite at the end of the Blade of Light bridge. London, as sweaty, boisterous, dangerous, swarming and cheerful as I ever remember it, a wonderbox of nostalgia and a paean to going home all at once.

V pops into a shop, a Tesco somewhere on Poultry. For fifteen minutes, I juggle both C and F, trying to get them to sing or guess the incoming bus number. Nearby, someone plays dance music at a boggling volume. The sky is mostly blue, but filtered through dust, fumey heat and ominously tarnished clouds, it fits over the city like the lid of a dry well.

Moments away from tantrums, V arrives, then the no. 8 bus. F is furious that someone is sitting in her seat (top front) and somehow makes them get off early through focussed venom. "I can see everything!" she declares, proudly.

-8-

In the back garden of my aunt and uncle M&M's house, F and C play with a tub of water and a now-antique toy. A red plastic hippo with paddling feet, wound up by pulling a duck on a string out of his mouth. In the bath in Sevenoaks, against a tiled vista of an exotically white sanded beach and years ago, he would swim down the string and eat the duck. Three of his feet are missing, but none of the essential joy of his existence.

Later, walking along the Greenway as we come back from the Olympic parks, C starts singing along with us, copying the words and music as best she can. One of those toddlery approximations that sounds like garbage and makes you feel like you've birthed Mozart. Bje-dje-djoy-zhoy-zhoy-zhoydjizyoy!

-9-

A last day. Exhausted after over a week of thundery sun and childbearing, I stay at home to watch Ceebeebies with the girls as Mummy goes to John Lewis. F likes seeing new cartoons in English, especially ones she knows in Swedish at home. Tree Fu Tom gets extra yoga-powered support here, and she bemoans the fact that she won't be able to watch the Lingo Show in Gothenburg.

C attempts the stairs, when she isn't attempting the oven, the bins or the back garden. She strips cd cases from the shelves and hurls them at the walls, laughing delightedly. If she sleeps, F wakes. If F sleeps, C wakes. Neither of them seem to enjoy any food that isn't ice cream any more. "I don't want to go home to Gothenburg," F says, "I want to have my own room here with stairs and a rainbow quilt."

I will miss London too, fiercely on occasion, but probably not for several months.

-10-

C points up and says "Oh luh!", her face transformed by wonder. It's her house! She lives here! In ten days, she's survived chickenpox, seen various new worlds and modes of living and probably eaten at least one fridge magnet because I'm sure there were seven not six when we arrived in Bow. And she's taller, more confident and much more chatty, not that she was doing badly in any of those stakes when we left. Travel broadens the child, it seems.

Borta bra, hemma bäst.

Poxit

We're flying to London tomorrow. C of course has picked today to get her first few chicken pox. She's been toying with us for the last ten days, having little mild fevers here, tiny pink blemishes that might just be heat rash there. Now the blisters have emerged under her hairline, over her forehead, down her back. I hope Ryanair mix antivirals into the aircon during flights. Surely they're that focussed on the comfort and wellbeing of their passengers.

It'll be nice to be back in London. Probably. Unless I have to explain racism to my children or avoid stampedes of quitting political leaders, as the papers lead me to understand is apparently the norm now. Kind of like Pamplona, is how I see it, only with more bullshit.

I listened to the new PM's inaugeral speech, talking about bringing all that lovely equality for Brits regardless of their social situation that her party has failed to produce for the last eight years. At least she didn't claim we were all in it together. It would be nice to believe it's all going to come true, I would really like to see that happen. But beware the ides of May, I suspect. 

Anyway. Bring it. Bring the infectious diseases. Bring the travel misery, bring the embarrassment of being a Brit in another EU country right now, bring the rain, the cancelled flights, the delayed trains, the closed museums, the missing zoos - bring it all on. I will take it on the chin, swallow my displaced teeth and smile through the blood. 

Raaa. 

Leave of Absence

We booked three days of holiday a few months back, a family trip to Astrid Lindgren's Värld over on the other side of Sweden. Not really a holiday for us, exactly, seeing as staying in a tiny holiday cottage with both of our kids, Uncle D and Cousin V wasn't likely to be restful exactly.

With the relentless inevitability of, say, a British politician being shit, F developed chicken pox the minute we got on the train.

There's no development after that punchline. No topping that. Any vestige of relaxation melted away in a wash of febrile temperatures, weeping blisters and crazed tantrums. Exhausted after three days away in a giant playpark during the worst illness she's yet had, F's crowning scream was on the platform of Katerineholm station. A car gently tooted as it left the carpark, maybe a last farewell salute to someone. F went off like someone electrocuting a Wilhelm Scream.

So if you're feeling disappointed that there was no blog post last month, you can cram it. Sorry. There is no mental health left for creativity here, just ringing ears, aloe vera balm and the certainly knowledge that C, who was licking F's feet this morning, will be doing exactly the same in around ten days.

Astrid Lingren Värld is lovely, by the way, a benevolent haven of polite Swedes in orderly queues and well-kept miniature villages. You should all go there. I feel there is probably an 'alternative to Brexit' kind of joke in there, but I'm far to miserable about that particular spectacular immolation of credibility to attempt my own.

Bad Dad

Another relentless month, in which many things have conspired to make me feel like a lousy dad.

-

"We're taking C to the doctor today, F, she has to have some injections. You'll get to play in the waiting room if you like."

"Can Bunbun come?"

"Yes, if you want."

"Will the doctor kill Bunbun and cut holes in her?"

What? What the? Will the who do what and cut which in the why, now? Where has that come from? What desperate horror have I inadvertently exposed my daughter to, that she thinks the doctor is going to prosect her rabbit?

F has asked this in the most deadpan, apparently unconcerned way imaginable, along the lines of 'can I have ice cream on the way home'. As flabber ghasts explosively through my head, I'm also of course trying not to react in any way that might make this nightmarish question get worse. Lids must be kept upon.

"No, I shouldn't think so. Why do you ask?"

"I'm going to leave Bunbun at home."

And that's all she says. I'm left to stew, disturbed.

- 

"See you on Monday night!" I say cheerily, tucking myself up on the sofa. C still doesn't usually sleep through. Movement in our bedroom triggers screaming, as though we're raising a faulty burglar alarm. Because I'm getting up early in the morning to fly the UK, I'm kipping on the couch so that I won't be leaving V with an angry baby.

Except that of course I am. For three days. So I can gallivant around Brighton and Milton Keynes, working and playing and catching up with friends for a few days.

That's not the part that makes me feel like a bad parent, the leaving for a few days for mostly frivolous reasons. (And work! I am going to work too! A film job!) The part that makes me seethe with guilt is the part where I'm looking forward to it so goddam much it hurts. Two nights where I might get a full night's sleep. Three days where I won't have to pretend to be Anna from Frozen and do the awful American teen accent that F insists on me attempting.

One precious precious weekend away from my family, and I'm so happy I could just poop. What a wretched louse.

-

C wants to walk. C can actually walk, she's got all the relevant tools for the job. Strength, balance, coordination. Feet. It's just that it's much easier to do if there's a parent holding your hands.

In the spirit of tough parenting, I have plonked her in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by her favourite toys and as many soft edges as I can create with throw rugs and pillows, and left her there. I'm trying to block out the caterwauling she's doing, shrill little screams that quickly turn to furious sobs. I'm hoping against hope that she's going to get impatient and just get up, pull herself up on a table edge and get to it. I know she can.

Part of this is because I have to work, trying to finish a redraft of some medical writing stuff that needs to be done by tomorrow morning. No more than two meters away, C roars her fury at me.

The spirit of tough parenting is a stupid spirit, I decide. And I can do the writing by staying up late tonight. Save draft, get up, coo benignly - stop dead, because the cartoon about animatronic aeroplanes that she likes has just come on and now she's perfectly fine.

Is it bad to deliberately neglect her (okay, not neglect, that's daft to claim - I'm right next to her, and if anything was actually wrong I'd be falling over myself to put it right) in order to 'help' her to improve her motor skills? Is it bad to try and work when I'm supposed to be taking care of her? On a scale of bad to bad, where exactly do I lie in all this?

-

"What are you doing, F?"

Mealtimes with F still take around an hour. You have to retell Frozen between mouthful one and mouthful two, you have to settle a tantrum about, er, well, nothing, you have to sit pleading for about half that time trying to get her to just finish whatever you served now that it's a congealed, fermenting crag of brownish glue. It's agony. I resent having to spend my time like this. Genuine, heartfelt resentment, of the kind that turns into tumours in later life.

I do it on average twice a day without the slightest hesitation because, well, I guess I just like tumours or something.

Today, F is eating having spaghetti bol. She's got a great big mouthful of it, most of which is still dangling. Swinging her head from side to side in slow, mournful sweeps, she's lashing her plate with the pasta and groaning fiercely. Why did I think I could raise children? She's three and a half, surely she should be able to eat normally by now?

"F! Come on! What do you think you're doing!" I snap, close to a tantrum myself after fifty minutes of this.

"I'm being Cthulhu," she explains patiently, almost a little hurt, and points to the rest of the food with her fork. "I'm devouring all these people."

Okay, I'll let us both off for now.

Abandonment Issues

Exhaustion kicks in. For two days, I am fairly useless unless the task in hand is sleeping. It never is. Nobody ever says "Daddy, can you sleep for ten hours?" The pillows never require test driving, the duvets are all broken in.

C is starting to sleep more consistently, merely waking for a nine 'o clock and five in the goddamn morning o' clock feed. It helps that she's getting mobile, dragging herself round on the floor. Or our bed, usually using our eyelids as handholds. This reminds me, I must trim her nails. My face looks like I've been washing it with a puma.

V is working a show schedule for most of the week, which means she has some mornings off. So I get to crash heavily out on the sofa for one of them, after doing the breakfast routines and dropping F off at playgroup.

God, it's bliss. I haven't had bonus sleep for months. Grunting and shambling is all I'm good for at the moment, everything seems too much. V shakes me awake to say she's going out to the spa after a while, and we'll meet up and do lunch later. I think that's what she says, anyway. It may equally be a dream about how my acting has won a Pulitzer during the Battle of the Somme, I'm not entirely clear.

My phone wakes me - something confusing about a voice job next week. The house is too quiet. V and C are out, I potter about fretting whether I understood the time and date in the phonecall correctly and trying to clear my fluffy head. Once I'm somewhere round the 80% functional mark, I head out to find the family.

V is at the local spa, signing up for a card. "Where's C?" she asks me as I come in.

"I thought you had her?" I say.

We look at each other for a second or two, then I sprint home in a mad panic.

Yes, I left the baby at home. Some of V's message didn't quite get through to me, namely the part where she told me C was asleep in her cot. The empty pram by the door didn't register.

She's fine, of course, happily lying in her cot enjoying the peace. I'm not. I'm rattled. All my parenting skills are immediately called into question. If something as basic as remembering to bring all the family along is beyond me at the moment, what else might I screw up? Correct sealing of nappies? Raw chicken for dinner? Instilling a functional sense of moral and spiritual responsibility that will see them through the nightmarish complexity of today's neoliberalist dystopia?

More sleep would probably help. Luckily, I'm too busy stressing about how tired I am, so I can't have any.