Some random Dad-like thoughts

A year ago, things were starting to seem a little more… ‘real’, with regards to this whole baby-lark.

Claire was, by then, heavily pregnant and carrying the warning label that she could plop-out a baby anytime.

As daft as it sounds now, for someone like me that has had absolutely nothing to do with babies (ever), this was a shock waiting to happen.

Blissfully unaware of what would be happening from one day to the next, little did I know how things worked, when they would happen and the consequences of them happening.

I know that we had been to the antenatal classes and all that, but that was the driving *theory* lesson that I took before I started to learn to drive. Knowledge? Out. Learn by experience? Most definitely, in.

Everything turned out well though. A year on, Jack’s doing great. He’s keeping us on our toes and although he does like a routine, nothing ever seems to be set in stone with him. Some mornings he wakes up early, around 5:30-6:00am, and then some mornings, like the other morning, he was still fast asleep at 7am, and had to wake him up so that we could take him to his Grandparents house whilst we went to work!

It’s good fun being a dad though. I can’t speak for Claire being his mum, obviously, but I enjoy it. Poo-y bums, I don’t. Playing with the toys and teaching him things, yep.

My folks still have our Scalextric set from when we were 7 or 8 years old (blimey, 22/23 years ago!!) but I’m not allowed to have it until our Jack (and any others we may have) are old enough to play with it. Same for the train-set, but I wasn’t as keen on that as I was Scalextric. (I had a red Ferrari, similar to the one in Jack’s photo flashcard – coincidence? no.)

I remember when we were kids, my dad was always playing with our toys too. I’d build the Lego Forklift Truck that I had for Christmas or my Birthday, to wake up the following morning to find that my dad had “did an A-Team job” on it, making it an armoured forklift truck that was then 4x wheel steered instead of 2x. I didn’t mind too much afterwards, but seeing the thing you’d spend hours building be ‘pimped’ like that wasn’t funny. But it is now, and I' can’t guarantee that I won’t do the same to Jack’s Lego-equivalent!

It’s true what they say, though, in terms of your body gets used to a change in sleep patterns, and surprisingly, you can function on 4 to 5 hours sleep if you need to. That’s not to say that you’re not useless at work the next day, but hey.