One year on, second time around


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It’s a year since Butterball Destroyer, our second daughter, sprang into the world. She’s grown quite some in that time, as well as changing her hair colour from dark brown to light blonde (working on disguises already?) and, despite being grumpy for the last week with a cold, has been remarkably cheerful for most of her life so far.

I begin to worry that Destroyer is too violent sounding a name for her, and in our sleep deprived existence we’ve begun to look for other nicknames. La Serpiente, currently incapable of (or unwilling to) pronouncing Fs and Cs properly, calls her Bantessa, and for a while I ended up referring to our littlest as Pancetta, but that corrupted itself into Cheddar, and it’s quite possible that by the end of the week we’ll be calling for Young Cheesy instead, like she’s the world’s worst dairy-sponsored rapper.

I also worry (I worry a lot, this is the lot of a father of small children) that we’ve stunted her development via our choice of stroller. Young Cheddar has been consigned to the lower deck of the 2-child stroller for most of her time on the planet, which has limited her interactions with random passers-by. We blame this for her slow progress in learning how to wave, and possibly her slightly disappointed glare at many of the things we say to her. My wife, meanwhile, thinks that if we teach her sign language it might delay her speech development.

Then again, if we delayed her speech development, we might miss out on clangers like this conversation of La Serpiente’s that I overhead this afternoon:

“My mummy has boobies. Does your mummy have boobies?”
“No.”

Ah, out of the mouths of babes, etc etc.

In between worrying, we had to celebrate, so Young Cheddar (see, the more often I write it, the more normal it appears (right?)) had a bowl of spaghetti to eat, chased down with chocolate cupcakes, which she smeared over her hands, over my lap, and over anything else she could get close to, like the sweetest dirty protest you ever did see. Aw, bless. She’s had a few presents – some books, a small unicorn and a wooden fork-lift truck, to inspire in her a career as a literate longshoreman who believes in mythical animals. YOU CANNOT FAULT MY LONG TERM PLANNING, YO.

This was in marked contrast to La Serpiente’s first birthday, where we went to a Mexican restaurant with unfortunate decor, latterly the subject of my longest ever post. Are we getting better or worse at parenting, I ask?

Tomorrow she’s going on her second boat ride, which means I need to slink off to sleep as soon as I can. I’ve had my daily holiday beer, and tomorrow is Canada Day, so I guess I need to prep myself for further celebrations. Better to get some shut eye.


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