7 Reasons

Tag: parenting

  • 7 Reasons That I Was Wrong About Children

    7 Reasons That I Was Wrong About Children

    Hello!  Marc here.  I have a confession to make.  I’ve been really wrong for a long time about something really fundamental.  When I was growing up, my stepfather would tell me that it “takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong”.  Usually before admitting he was wrong.  Well I’ve been very, very wrong.  Wrong enough to make me a giant.  Because I used to think that having a child would be among the worst things that could happen to anyone.  But now that I’ve been the owner of a child for the past six months (he turned half last Saturday) I realise that it isn’t.  In fact, having a child is bloody amazing.  Here are seven reasons that I was wrong about children.

    1.  It’s Not Difficult.  I used to imagine that being a parent was hard, but it isn’t.  When you have a child, you’ll soon discover that you’re playing all the time.  It’s amazing fun and it’s not at all difficult to do (in fact, it’s child’s play).  Everything you do in your life with your child is a fun game.  Teaching them to eat; teaching them to walk; introducing them to new colours and textures; changing a nappy, everything – however mundane – is a wondrous and fascinating experience for them, which makes it an intensely rewarding experience for you.  Earlier today, my son and I spent half an hour banging on a window from opposite sides at each other.  Half an hour!  It was great.

    2.  It Doesn’t Age You.  I previously thought that having a child was an experience that must surely prematurely age people as a result of the lack of sleep and the heavy burden of responsibility.  But it turns out that the opposite is true.  Spending most of your life with a creature to whom everything is new and exciting is a liberation.  It’s an opportunity to view anything and everything without the burden of your own experiences and prejudices.  It’s like seeing everything through a new pair of eyes.  If anything, I would have to say that fatherhood has made me feel and act younger.  Impossible as it may seem to anyone that knows me, I believe that having a child has made me more childlike than I was before.

    3.  Having Children Isn’t A Serious Business.  I used to think that having a baby around wouldn’t be much fun, but it is.  And even when babies aren’t being very entertaining, you can still have fun with them.  Earlier today, my wife left our (not yet mobile) son unattended in the living room for thirty seconds, so I snuck in and moved him to the other side of his play-mat.  “He’s moved!” She shrieked as she returned to the room while I dissolved into a fit of the giggles.  Once she realised that this was not the case, she laughed too.  Having a child around just makes our lives more fun.  It’s made us more fun people.

    4.  Having Children Is A Very Social Business.  I used to believe that having a child would hamper my social life:  That a child would have a similar effect on my social life to the one that the iceberg had on the progress of the Titanic.  But I was wrong.  Because we didn’t know many of our neighbours before, but now we know almost all of them.  And their many children.  We share toys, baby accessories and childhood diseases with them and our children go to play-group together.  If anything, our social life has been improved by having a child.  It turns out that he’s not an iceberg, he’s an ice-breaker.

    5.  Having Children Makes You Less Selfish.  I used to believe that having children would make me more selfish.  That I would resent the intrusion that a child would make on my time and would guard it jealously.  But it turns out that the opposite is true.  When I went to bed at 2am last Saturday morning and my son saw me and decided that he wanted to play, I didn’t mind a bit.  We played for two hours and it was great fun.  Then I put him into his cot and he rolled around and barked like a dog for a bit.  My wife and I just lay there listening to him and laughing.  I had to be up at 7am to climb a mountain. Did I mind the unexpected impingement on my time and the weariness the next day?  Not a bit.

    6.  Having A Child Does Not Make You Housebound.  I used to think that having a child would mean that I’d get to go out less.  But the opposite has happened.  I’m out all the time!  Weather permitting, we take our son to the park every day.  I’ve spent more time in parks in the last six months than I had in my entire life before we had a child.  I pretty much live in the park; I’m almost a part-time tramp.  As my son and I were playing on our mat the other day, a woman came up to us and said “It’s so nice to see a father spending time playing with his son.”  I smiled and told her that it was no chore.  And it wasn’t.  I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather have been or anything I’d rather have been doing than playing with my son in the park at that moment.  I’m always out these days.

    7.  Children Do Not Make Everything Messy.  I used to dread the effect that a child would have on the interior of my house.  I thought that all of the gaudily-coloured accessories and accoutrements that are needed for children would clutter up my house and make it a (more) horrid place to be.  But they’ve improved it.  We’ve got owls on the walls and windmills in the garden.  In fact, we’ve got owls everywhere.  But I like owls.  Now I get to buy really fun and interesting things to decorate the house with instead of sobre and tasteful grown-up stuff.  Our house is much nicer now and we’ve got a crocodile on the upstairs landing!  Who wouldn’t want one of those?!

     

  • 7 Reasons To Be A Father

    7 Reasons To Be A Father

    This piece is entitled 7 Reasons to be a Father.  It is not 7 Reasons You Fathered a Child, we all have our own reasons for that, often involving a combination of beer and lust or – for the less fortunate – calendars, timetables, fatigue and oh God, it’s bloody sex again.  This is a plea to bring back into popular usage the title Father.  It’s important that women read this too, as it’s mostly from them that children learn how to address their fathers.  I’m printing this piece out and posting it all around the house when I’ve finished it for my wife to see because I, more than almost anything else, also wish to be addressed as Father.  Here’s why.

    A portrait of a Victorian father with a new baby

    1.  Fathers Have A Day.  Dads and daddies don’t have a day, but fathers do.  It’s called Father’s Day, and it’s a whole day devoted to the celebration of fathers.  Less formally titled male parents have nothing similar to Father’s Day.  The nearest thing they have is Daddy Day Care, which is a film starring Eddie Murphy from 2003, made a mere eighteen years after he ceased to be funny.*  If you want to be celebrated, you have to be a father.

    2.  It’s Not Mentioned In The Phrase “Who’s The Daddy”.  I have an irrational hatred of the phrase “who’s the daddy” that borders on the pathological.  I don’t know why people ever need to say this (actually, it’s usually bellowed, boorishly) but they do.  I dislike this phrase so much that my (fortunately resistible) desire on hearing it is to beat the sayer around the head with the nearest sturdy but moveable objects to hand – which today, would be a large beige parasol and a teacup** – while saying “who’s the father“.  This is problematic as the best known user of this phrase is Ray Winstone (in the film Scum), and in terms of people you’d be ill-advised to assault with a beige parasol and a teacup, he’s right up there with Sebastien Chabal and the hairy-armed woman from my local branch of Superdrug.  If more people used the word father, I’d be in less danger.

    3.  It’s Your Duty. While my son and I were playing our version of peek-a-boo that bears the catchy name, Where’s Father? My visiting mother-in-law looked at me aghast.  “He can’t call you Father” she said, “that sounds horrible.  Fathers are remote and distant”.  While I agreed with the first part of what she said (he can’t call me Father.  He’s a baby.  He usually refers to me as Agoo-Agoo), I wholly disagree with the latter part.  Fathers are not remote and distant; bad parents are.  Father is just a name associated with another age when the social norm was for parents (especially male ones) to be more distant from their children.  Were all fathers cold and distant?  No.  Were all of these men bad parents?  No.  But they’ve been tainted by the modern distaste for the word father.  Don’t we owe it to people who will be forever associated with the word father to reclaim the name, to show that being addressed as father and being a good parent are not exclusive?  Yes.  I think we do.  Being addressed as Father, rather than as Daddy could be seen as performing a civic duty.  A very untaxing one at that, which is by far the best sort.

    4.  The Name Father Lends Itself To Formality.  If you ever ask a child what their dad has been up to, the answer is never good.  It’s usually, “Daddy drank too much and fell asleep on the kitchen floor.”  Enquire after a father, however, and surely you’ll get something more formal and considered: “Father imbibed injudiciously and was importuned adjacent to the pantry” or “Father’s club won a tournament of association football and, on his return to the familial abode, he was so awash with joy and hubris that he swooned in the scullery”.  The more formal account of your character and your recent occurrences will give everyone a much better impression of you.***

    5.  Father Is Right For Our Era.  It’s been a trend in recent years for children to be named more traditionally and formally and Britain is now teeming with Samuels, Lilys, Lottys and Benjamins.  With superb irony, there was even a flood of Noahs two years ago.  What better fit for the era then, than to be known as Father?  Can you imagine any conversation beginning “Hephzibah.”  “Yes, Dad”?  No of course you can’t.  Gary has a dad.  Jeremiah requires a father.

    6.  The Word Father Is Synonymous With Excitement And Adventure.  The word father is redolent of suitably-attired men drinking port in their oak-panelled libraries; of men that had rounded the horn six times afore the mast when they were scarcely twenty; of men that invented telephones and telegrams and multitudinous things that don’t begin with tele; of men that built vast industries where once there had been nothing; of men that – with scant regard for the peril they placed themselves in – explored and charted the world that was their plaything; of unreconstructed men that sallied forth to ride atop elephants and take pot-shots at tigers whilst clad in crisp linen; of men that reposed languidly – though impeccably – in the leather armchairs of their clubs and in the saloons of well-appointed hotels; of men that wore a panoply of hats – tall and short, soft and hard, cloth and silk – for every occasion, but never indoors; of men that marched long in shambling, hobnailed ranks to their capital when their families fell hungry; of bewhiskered men that shrank their world, bringing far-flung and wondrous exotica and ephemera to and from all the ends of the earth; of men that unsealed newly-received missives at their breakfast tables with a silver letter opener and a flourish; of good men whose reliability, indomitability, solidity and sheer bloody ability went unremarked upon though thoroughly remarkable; of men for whom adventure, discovery, conquest, knowledge, power, expansion, great works, boundlessness and greatness were commonplace.  Those men were fathers.  And dad?  Dad drives to B&Q on a Saturday morning in his people carrier, puts up shelves in the afternoon, drinks crap lager while watching Britain’s Got Talent in the evening and then falls asleep at night during Match of the Day.  And Saturday is the highlight of his week.  Being a father is so much more exciting.

    7.  It’s Rare.  There just aren’t many Fathers out there so you’ll stand out.  This has other benefits too.  Should you find yourself in a beer garden populated by the balding, the pudgy, the badly-attired and the bloodshot of eye, observe what happens when a child calls out “Dad”.  Everyone stops what they are doing and looks around, certain that their progeny is in urgent need of their attention, only to discover that it’s the child of someone else who then announces to the assembled company that they have done a big plop.  If your child calls out “Father”, you’re likely to be the only person that looks around so it’s not just more individual, it’s more sociable too, as no one else has their conversation about how much of Match of the Day they missed last night when they dozed off disrupted, and no one gets to hear about the big plop.  Except you.

    So, who’s the daddy?  Who cares?  Who’s the father?  It’s me.  Indubitably.

     

    *Oh God.  I’m old enough to remember when Eddie Murphy was funny.  This is a truly horrific watershed moment.

    **Note to self:  Sit near more manly objects when writing.

    ***This may be fanciful.  Learning to crawl up the stairs would be more efficacious.

     

     

     

  • 7 Reasons Blackout Blinds Are Surprisingly Effective

    7 Reasons Blackout Blinds Are Surprisingly Effective

    My wife and I are trying to train our child to recognise the difference between day and night at the moment and the latest weapon in our armoury is a blackout blind: a blind which prevents any light coming through the window.  This, we not unreasonably thought, would prevent our six-week old son waking up at 5am when sunlight streams through our East facing bedroom window and would help him get into a settled routine of sleeping at night.  So far, it has proved effective (after a fashion).

    a black gif.

    1.  Fitting.  As the member of the 7 Reasons team that is competent at DIY I envisaged that there would be no problems installing our blind, and I was almost correct. It was incredibly simple to fit, with only a bit of light drilling required.  And it was simple right up until the moment  – while I was balanced precariously atop a step-ladder – that everything went dark.  Not just dim, you should understand, but dark.  Preternaturally dark.  Darker than spending a dark night in the darkest room of the Prince of Darkness wearing a sleeping mask.  Darker than anything ever.  There was no light.  “Help!”  “Help!” I called until my wife came up the stairs and opened the door, flooding the room with light from the hallway.  “It all went dark”, I explained to a sceptical wife who couldn’t comprehend – or didn’t believe – that something as insubstantial as a piece of material could block out all light.  I climbed down from the ladder with my reputation for DIY prowess, if not my dignity, intact.

     

    2.  Baby’s Bedtime.  In the evening our son fell asleep before we expected him to and, rather than look a gift horse (or a sleeping baby, which is a very similar creature to a gift horse) in the mouth, we decided we would put him to bed right then.  We gingerly carried him up the stairs and swaddled him in his cot.  We began to sneak out of the room and paused to close the blind on the way.  Everything went black.  We couldn’t see a thing.  We partially raised the blind again so that we could find the light switch and turned on the light so that we could see the door and find our way out.  This woke the baby.  Bugger.

     

    3.  Mummy’s Bedtime.  Eventually, we were able to get our son back to sleep and, quite soon after, my wife snuck up to bed.  I have little idea what happened, but after a couple of minutes, from my position in the room below, I heard a loud bang, followed about thirty seconds later by the noise of the baby crying.  Then I heard the sound of my wife trying to placate the crying baby with a cuddly toy, before my parental selective deafness kicked in and I returned to what I was doing.

     

    4.  Daddy’s Bedtime.  Eventually, the baby became quiet again and, having spent the remainder of a fascinating evening reconfiguring the 7 Reasons W3 Total Cache plugin and our email servers*, it was time for me to go to bed.  I went up the stairs and changed in another room, so as not to disturb anyone.  Then I snuck across the landing into the bedroom and closed the door noiselessly behind me.  Where once there would have had been some residual light filtering through the blind to aid my navigation across the room, now there was none.  I knew roughly where the bed was though, and I took several tentative steps toward it before stumbling over something and letting out an involuntary scream as I lost my balance and landed in a heap on the bed.

     

    5.   “AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” Shrieked a lump in the bed from beneath me as, in the pitch darkness, a screaming and unknown assailant pounced on her.  I groped around for the switch to the bedside light and, finding it quickly, turned it on.  I looked behind me to see what was on the floor.  “Are you drunk?”, the now slightly calmer lump in the bed enquired.  “I fell over an owl,” I replied.

     

    6.  “WWWWAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!” Said a tiny voice from the other side of the room reacting to the sudden light.  Eventually we were able to get him back to sleep.

     

    7.  Sleep.  I was unaware of what occurred during the remainder of the night.  I have since been told that the usual cycle of the baby waking up and requiring feeding and changing carried on unaltered by the loss of the light.  I was told that this morning when, after what I can only describe as the most blissfully tranquil sleep of my life, my rather tired looking wife shook me awake and informed me it was 11am and that we were going to be late for our lunch appointment.  “But it can’t be”, I replied, “It’s still pitch black”.

     

    So there you have it.  Blackout blinds do work, and you can use them to lull the unsuspecting into sleeping longer and later.  They just don’t work on babies.

     

    *I had hoped to watch a couple of episodes of Bergerac.  We sacrifice a lot for 7 Reasons.

     

  • 7 Reasons to Ignore What People Tell You About Babies*

    7 Reasons to Ignore What People Tell You About Babies*

    Either I’m missing something or our six day old baby is defective.  I was brought up to believe that parenthood was a living hell and that newborn babies were the worst things in all of existence.  But, so far, and I hope I’m not tempting fate here, it isn’t and he isn’t.  Doubtless there’ll be times when he’s poorly – or we are – and the going is really tough, but the babygeddon that I was led to believe I should expect as a new father has yet to materialise.  I’m beginning to suspect that people have been lying to us.

     

    It isn’t like this.

    1.  “It’s hard, it’s really hard.  It’s awful.  You won’t sleep for the first three years and then when you do, he’ll wake you up within five minutes just to spite you.”  Blimey.  Okay, so we need to feed and change him regularly day and night, but we seem to be getting loads of sleep.  I actually feel guilty.  I’ve begun stretching and pretending to yawn to make other parents feel better.  “Oh, it’s absolute hell” I tell them in agreement, while wondering what all the fuss is about.  Will it be possible for my wife and I to survive on only eight hours sleep per day each?  Only time will tell.

     

    2.  “He’ll scream for hours for no reason.” No, there is a reason.  In the case of the changing-table-screaming, it’s because he doesn’t want two giants tearing all his warm, protective layers off and attacking his bits with cotton wool every time he smells funny.  I wouldn’t like it either.  Nor would you.  Fortunately we have worked out that we can distract him with the Poo Donkey; which is the donkey that comes and takes away the baby poo.  (Not related to the father that takes the piss).  Thank you, Poo Donkey, if it weren’t for you, the baby would still be screaming every changing time.  Babies do scream for a reason.  It just takes a bit of working out what it is.

    All hail the Poo Donkey!
    All hail the Poo Donkey!

     

    3.  “You’ll never be able to go anywhere ever again.” Yes we can, and we have; every day.  We’ve mostly been to Boots, Mothercare and the doctor’s surgery and we have to take a bit more stuff and it takes us a little longer to get ready, but we’ve been perfectly mobile.  Okay, we get a few minutes of pushchair screaming which we don’t have a donkey to sort for us yet, but, with a bit of determination and preparation, a tiny child seems to be no obstacle to doing anything.  I sense that only our own inertia would be.

     

    4.  “Boys will wee absolutely everywhere, on everything.” Yes, and babies are the same.  Fortunately though, fast-hands can protect you from this.  Yes, my nephew (also a baby) has managed to wee in my sister’s mouth and eye on more than one occasion, but this – I am sure – can be attributed to her having the spatial awareness and lightning reactions of a morphine-addled sloth listening to a tuba (throughout my sister’s childhood, the cry of “catch” was almost always followed by a sharp and unexpected blow to her forehead).  For those of us with superhuman awareness and reactions (or even with human awareness and reactions) it is not difficult to place a hand between the source of the wee and the thing you want to protect from it.  Sadly, my wife’s coat (on the back of a door several feet away) was sacrificed in the learning of this.  But so far, we have not drowned in wee.

     

    5.  “There’s poo everywhere and you’ll spend your entire life cleaning it up.” No there isn’t, it’s conveniently contained within nappies, which – at this early stage – are not unpleasant to change (even for someone as squeamish as myself).  Let’s say he does six poos per day and it takes five minutes each time to clean and change him.  That’s only half an hour per day.  The BBC have just axed My Family, so there’s half an hour.  Now all we need is for them to axe EastEnders and Holby City and that’s a week we can spend dealing with shit, rather than watching it. Or we can just turn it off (the television, not the poo).  Half an hour is not difficult to find.  Half an hour is not all day, and half an hour every day is not an entire lifetime.  For some people it’s not even an entire lunchtime.

     

    6.  “Newborn babies are really cute and their tiny little hands and feet are gorgeous.  Awww.  Sssswwwweeeeeettttt ickle babies. Do do do do do do do”.  No they’re not.  Our child has feet almost as large as his mother’s and fingers so long that he could probably play the piano if he could reach it.  Or if we had a piano.  Our son also has a hairier arse than most builders.  Not all babies have tiny hands and feet.

     

    7.  “The baby will take over your life.” Yes – okay I have to concede that there may be a point there – and 7 Reasons apparently**.  Expect us to have wrested some of it back from his evil clutches by next week though.  Jon and I can take a baby in a fight.  We’re not scared.  Bring it on, you big baby!

     

    *Don’t listen to me either, I expect that everyone’s experiences of parenthood are just different and we shouldn’t imagine that what we have undergone will be universally the same for others.

    **We will be putting the baby away soon and normal service – rambling on about biscuits and France – will resume shortly.