Another World

15st 10lb, 8.0 units. Walking round like a zombie all day after The Boy started throwing up in the early hours, even though I responded in my usual, selfless, hands-on way by retreating to the spare bed well out of earshot in the annexe above our garage. The fact that he has slept for around 12 hours per night for months now has clearly lulled us into a false sense of security. This morning Mrs H was even moved to question the wisdom of putting herself through all this again by having another baby. Perhaps rather late in the day to begin thinking about that, I reflected.

The Boy was deemed unfit to go to nursery so I was commissioned to stay at home and play with him while Mrs H went to the dentist to have a tooth filled. It was all going quite well, with some gentle puzzle-solving and book-reading (I doing the reading, he listening – he’s not that much of a prodigy), until he decided to hurl himself head-first over my prone body on his nursery floor. He enjoyed it so much that he decided to do it again, this time while holding one of his books, which promptly clocked him in the eye and left a nasty red mark on his cheek and forehead. He didn’t cry much. In fact, I have to admit that he seems considerably more stoical at 26 months than I am at 57 years.

After Mrs H returned, jaw numbed, we drove him to his grandparents’ and went to our respective desks, where we each pretended to do some work. We were glad to get away again shortly after 5. Unfortunately The Boy wasn’t glad to see us, and responded to the idea that he might like to go home by grabbing his mother’s spectacles and chucking them onto his grandparents’ stone-flagged patio, where one of the lenses shattered rather impressively. He agreed, during the subsequent discussion, that this was a very naughty thing to do. I don’t remember ever attempting anything quite so heinous in my own early childhood, but feel sure that some form of physical chastisement would have followed if I had. But then they also regularly gave me addictively orange-flavoured Junior Aspirin, so I suppose I just have to accept that it was Another World and they did things very differently there.