For a long time I thought I'd aim for my first sprog at about 40; I'm a fairly highly-strung and pernickety person, but I am getting more mellow with age. Somehow my aim was to be fairly mellow, but not too ancient to do all the things that a daddy (apparently) has to do, such as take his daughter to football, son to ballet, pets to vets, etc...
There have been bad bits, like seeing Jean in pain giving birth (though with enough presence of mind to tell me to go and get some food rather than faint) and seeing Ellie in distress when she has banged herself or is teething or ill. And getting up lots of times in the night is not great, but it's not terrible either, and it feels good to be able to comfort her. (As of 12 months Eloise seems to be "sleeping though" from 7pm to 7am.)
There have been funny bits which would have been bad but for a bit of father-mellow-ness, such as the initial squirty-poo nappy-changing-on-the-bed incident (lesson: don't hold baby's butt up at 45 degrees unless you wish to prove your school physics that that's the optimal initial trajectory for distance!).
And there have been lots and lots of good bits, such as her first word "Sidney" (our cat's name) at age ten months clear to me in a different room, her all-round cheerful disposition and smiles and her happiness when she masters new things like holding her beaker to drink from at six months, her regal wave to point at something she wants or is interested in, ...
I need LOTS of beauty sleep (it's not working yet!) and I get lots more sleep than Jean though not much of it unbroken... In our case Jean is a lark and I am an owl, and so Jean tends to get up with Ellie (6am-ish, which would half-kill me) and go to bed early, while I can get lots of peace and quiet for work up to the early hours.
At 12 months, with Ellie becoming much more mobile (and on the verge of walking), we're starting to have to safety-proof the house and I'm having to do some DIY (which an old art teacher of mine would have diplomatically described as "not his forté"). This means covering the wide gaps in our stair/landing balustrade and fitting safety gates at least at the bottom and top of the stairs, and possibly on other doors such as my study/office and the kitchen. The safety gates look easy, but there's some measuring/cutting/manly stuff required for the landing. Where's that book of "how to suddenly become a good dad without trying" that I assumed everyone was given? Maybe I missed it amongst the SPAM...
At 14 months it is becoming important to safety-proof the house more: she nearly climbed/fell out of her cot today so we must actually make the landing railings child-proof ASAP. She also managed to push her chair over backwards at the kitchen table (something that most teenagers still haven't learned to avoid), giving us all a huge shock. And she has another cold! She's also become quite confident toddling around in the last week or so, and is barely crawling any more: what a lightning change!
At 18 months another small-but-vital part of my induction to fatherhood: a friend came round to collect something and we were chatting at the door, when Ellie appears and hides behind the door out of shyness for a while and then emerges to study my friend a little closer, safe because of daddy!
At about 19 months Ellie went through a vocabulary explosion, but what has also been interesting is some subtle changes in the way she prounounced some words by month 20 that she already had by month 18. For example, "pe-wee" (penguin) gained a subtle trailing 'n' to become "pe-win", and "bar-wee" (banana) became "bar-bar". I'm still puzzled by her fixed choice of word for water: "oof-ay" or "uff-ay"! Also at 20 months "mummy" and "money" became distinct, and she can count a little: "one, two, four, five, si-even, nine, thirteen" was one morning's distinct variant. At 21 months Ellie is managing to put "ing" on words such as "walk" and "eat" and "do" and is beginning to compose words such as "mummy daddy" for "mummy and daddy"; grammar will be along soon. (She just fell and hurt herself and announced "I want daddy!") She can also just about count to five now, and is good at recognising common colors such as blue/yellow/green/red/black/white. Ellie has grown on average at about 1cm per month since her first birthday; maybe half that rate at the moment. At 22 months Ellie is starting to say "um" as a placeholder when she is thinking of an answer, rather than remaining silent as before. She's also starting to say "thank you"; getting the hang of possessives such as "mummy's", "daddy's" and "yours"; and starting to use more complex verb phrases and compounds such as "line up", "washing hands" and "brushing teeth". She's also using comparatives/sizes such as "like" and "big" and "tiny". And we had our first conversation on the 'phone where she responded to several questions from me. At 23 months her typical utterances are 2 or 3 words long, and some of them are complete sentences by luck. She's having slight problems with pronouns saying "feed you" when she means "feed me" because she's copied what we've said to her, eg "Shall I feed you?" Coming up to her second birthday, her sentence fragments are getting longer, she has the imperative tense down pat, and is aware of her impending birthday.
Ellie's new trick for turning 2 is negatives: "mummy's swings" and "not daddy's swings" to emphasise which park she wants to go to for example. Shortly after her birthday (on Boxing Day), after warming her up to the idea for a few days, we took the side off her cot to allow her to get in and out by herself: she did apparently fall out once onto the duvet we put down as we found her sleeping on the floor at one point, but she was fine! (Whoops! She fell out about 3 times the next night, and a few on following nights, but was getting back in...) She also was able to jump with both feet off the floor on Christmas Eve. She's also now saying "nappy" instead of "pappy" coined from ~18 months. Ellie also walked nearly half a mile back from the local park with her mum!
25 months: "Sissie [Sidney, our cat] sit Ellie's bed," plus longer sentences "I don't know where the other one is," showing the intentional stance "Little baby [not] like swing," and starting to use "I" routinely...
26 months: grammatically more complex sentences such as this one with a subject, object and indirect object: "Cat hid fairy under rug." Using words such as "on" "in" "under" but still not using "and"; thus "Mummy daddy wake up." rather in the style of US headline writers. Also starting to say "sorry".
27 months: starting to use "and" purposefully and correctly. Can recite/'sing' chunks of books and nursery rhymes phonetically with reasonable fidelity. Can take off socks and shoes (she's been able to do trousers for a while).
28 months: while playing and pretending to be going to visit her nanny, she announced loudly that hated phrase into her toy mobile phone: "I'm on the train at the moment."
30 months: it's possible to have fairly detailed and abstract exchanges for example about what she will do tomorrow in painting classes. Ellie is 93.5cm standing (75th percentile) and 13.6kg (50th percentile).
31 months: Ellie's using 'to do' as an auxiliary for negatives and past tenses (ie without having to learn all the irregular parts!) eg: "it didn't be a lion", "they did just [only] go down", "there didn't be ..."
32 months: Ellie can pretty much dress and undress herself, is more-or-less potty trained for the day (has the odd accident, two weeks in), and has been moved from her cot to a full-size single bed in her new room where she suddenly looks so small again! She's also getting the hang of a few more irregular tenses, etc.
33 months: at this age I believe that she's meant to be able to name one colour and put together sentences of 5 or 6 words... rather than her ten-or-so 'colours' (black, white, gold, silver, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown), and rambling stream-of-consciousness monologues with multi-word subclauses!
34/35 months: Ellie's been really good dealing with the arrival of her brother Morgan; essentially no jealousy nor other bad behaviour, and maybe just a few extra toilet-training 'accidents'. She's making understandable mistakes with irregular verbs (eg "I comed home") and other complex parts of grammar such as use of he/his/him, and these are more evident as Ellie is more adventurous with her speech.
3 years: she was greeted with a breakfast table covered in birthday presents! In fact she had a nasty night before, coughing so badly that she was sick, but other than being upset at the time, she didn't complain or "act up" once. Mind you, we've had a little back-sliding on the toilet-training somehow... And in January she had her first day in (state-funded nursery) school!
Damon
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