Hugh's The Daddy

It was a day of “ooh, don’t they grow up fast” and “he’ll be bringing girlfriends home soon”, and that was just me. Luca has just celebrated his first birthday. I say ‘celebrated’. In fact, Luca toddled and cried and cooed and created carnage in much the same way as he does every day. His mother and I were the ones doing the celebrating, with a bottle of cheap bubbly and a large chocolate gateaux.

Oh, and a party. Luca invited 11 (count ‘em!) of his little friends round in the morning, with mums as extra, and together we all sang happy birthday, watched as Luca threw his presents around, and munched – like the Hungry Caterpillar – through a selection of chocolate-coated goodies. After that, I made best use of the chaos created by the bubble machine (have you seen one? It’s like blowing bubbles through a machine gun - fab) to sneak off upstairs and hide for a couple of hours. One baby is a handful. Eleven babies all together in one small room is bedlam in nappies.  

So Luca is one year old, and a very lovely, happy, wonderful, brilliant, perfect, livewire little boy. He babbles and coos and has recently started taking the odd wobbly step on his own (though you have to be right there to catch him when his drunken progress ends in a face-first fling towards the floor). He has three teeth, five footballs, and a fondness for eating toilet paper. He is a little person with a huge character and we could hardly wish for more in our son – though we could certainly wish for more time in bed.

How things have changed. A year ago we brought home a tiny premature mouse with a wisp of golden hair and a cheeky glint in his eye. And we’ve had a year of panic, exhaustion, anxiety and love. He’s lead us a merry dance, with his funny intolerances and anti-social hours and determination to wring every bit of energy out of himself and us before finally dropping to sleep. But he’s ours, and he’s lovely, happy, wonderful, brilliant and perfect.

 Did I say that bit already? Oh well. For these smitten parents, and for this very doting daddy, it really is worth repeating.

Well, we got married (and a week of last minute panic explains why I haven’t posted for a while). Luca is now the legitimate son of parents whose relationship has been sanctioned by law. He can rest secure in the knowledge that, should his mum and dad ever want to part – and the chances are slim, we like to think- they’d have to pay money to lawyers to do it, which means they probably never will. 

As my regular reader will know (hi mum!), I had resigned myself to the idea that Luca would probably ruin the day for everyone, by not sleeping at the right times, demanding our full attention, being overtired and bad tempered with in-laws and friends, and by acting like the perfectly normal, temperamental baby he is. I’d wondered out loud why on earth we’d decided to get married now, when we could wait a couple more years and get married when there was considerably less chance of complete disaster. I hoped that by expecting the worst, we would be pleasantly surprised if the day was just a smidgeon better than that.

And in the end…it was great! Forget the happy couple, Luca was the star of the show, cooing at smitten relatives, smiling for photographs, and giggling through the service. He played and babbled while his parents sipped expensive cocktails afterwards, and slept through the best part of the wedding meal. We’d deliberately spread the celebrations over two days in the hope that Luca would be good for at least one of them, but at the party next day he amazed everyone who knows him by making it two good days in a row. By the end of it all he was a bit overwhelmed, and a bit clingy with his mum, but all in all the little lad had done us proud.

Of course, like the foolish optimists we are, we’re now planning all sorts of ambitious outings and celebrations. Maybe we’ll have a little party for his first birthday? Maybe we’ll go on a belated honeymoon in September? Maybe Luca is now of an age when we can do pretty much what we like in confident expectation of his complete cooperation?

Hmm, maybe. Or maybe Luca was giving us this one, as a little reward for muddling through most of his first year without too much trauma. But when we’re discussing all these things and getting excited about the possibility of parties and holidays, I can’t help but imagine the smile playing about his lips, and the glint in his eyes, and the sentence that he whispers to himself, so softly that we never hear: “will they never, ever, learn.”   

One of the little known advantages of having a baby is that, although your days may feel longer, more stressful, and more likely to end in tears, it does make you appreciate the little things.

Now this blog is often little more than a soppy love note to my brilliant, wonderful (not to mention difficult, mardy, uncooperative…) son, so you probably think that, by little things, I mean the smile that plays around his lips when he first spots me in a crowded room, or the way he’s taken to staring in astonishment at the wonders of nature (or at least pigeons). But I don’t. Not this time.

No, by little things I mean the ten minutes I can grab behind a locked toilet door with the sports pages. A year ago, this was routine. Now, it’s blissful. Nichola talks about the joys of a shower that lasts more than three minutes, and how she savours every warming, soothing jet. Her friend mentions the wonderful moment when her baby falls asleep and she can wander up the street scoffing a bag of chips without fear of interruption. Oh yes, we know sophistication round our way.

There are loads more. I had a coffee in town on my own the other day. It was a revelation. There was no chance that Luca would chuck a teaspoon at the burly bloke in the next chair, or decide to escape the evil parents who are keeping him prisoner by crashing head first through the window, and I savoured every sip.

 Even telly seems better, and most of it’s rubbish. But you get to see so little (and what you do see is so often accompanied by the sound of cooing, crying, or a full scale tantrum) that a decent, uninterrupted  drama or documentary becomes an almost hypnotic experience. Drama? Documentary? Who am I kidding? From Wednesday, I’ll be watching every Big Brother like every other brain-addled parent, because an hour of mindless drivel at 9pm, after Luca is tucked up in bed, seems – right now – like the pinnacle of relaxing entertainment.       

Nichola and I are getting married in a few weeks. It’s a small, family-only do in the local registry office, with a bit of a party in the upstairs room of a pub the next day. We could have done the whole £15,000 country house hotel thing, with speeches and Champagne and individually hand crafted bridesmaid dresses, but quite frankly we have better things to spend our parents’ money on.

The other reason we quickly eschewed the idea of doing anything fancy is that the love of our lives, our absolute pride and joy, would almost certainly have ruined it for everybody. When you have a baby who likes nothing more than to throw food at you, it’s probably not a good idea to spend £800 on a wedding dress.

It might not sound all that romantic, but we are approaching the happy day with a sense of almost joyful resignation. We are assuming that Luca will catch one of his endless colds two days before, and that we’ll wake on the morning of our nuptials after precisely two hours sleep.

We are pretty certain that our darling boy will then spend the ceremony crying, or at best throwing bits of rice cake and banana at the registrar. We’re equally confident the party will be a complete nightmare, with Luca spending five hours demanding to be walked around the room by his parents, all the while kicking a slowly disintegrating chicken drumstick and sneezing on our friends.

The more we have come to accept this likely fate, the less stressed we’ve become. If our wedding is just a smidgeon better than the apocalyptic scenario we’ve discussed as length, and if we get the odd ten minutes to speak to our guests and throw down a vol-au-vent, it will be a roaring success. We are going into it with such low expectations that the possibility of a pleasant surprise is quite high.

So why are getting married now at all? Why not wait till Luca is a bit older (like 24)? Good questions, to which the answer is that I’m not quite sure. I think it has something to do with the confluence of reasonable finances and a ‘if not now then when?’ attitude. And it’s true that eight months ago, when we first agreed to do it (none of that down on bended knee stuff – Nichola agreed to get hitched on the condition I lobby the Government to bring back the Married Couples’ Allowance) we assumed that by now we’d have a far easier and more cooperative baby. How wrong we were.

 But even if our worst expectations come true, we can comfort ourselves with one thought. Imagine how much more disappointed we’d be if we’d spent £500 on flowers and arrived in a chauffeur-driven limo?

Nichola (to Luca): Aren’t you a cute boy?

Me: Thanks very much, nice of you to say so.

Nichola (to Luca): Would you like a lovely rusk?

Me: No thanks, I’m still full up from dinner.

Nichola (to Luca): It’s nearly seven, time for your bed young man.

Me: I’m 37, I’ll stay up till eight if I want!

Nichola (to Luca): Would you like a lovely pear?

Me: No, one would be just fine.

Grandma (to Nichola): Oh, isn’t he strong, he’ll be pulling himself up soon.

Me: Actually, I’ve been doing that for ages – I can walk and everything now!

Grandma (to Luca): Say mamma…Mamma…Ma-ma, Ma-ma.

Me: “Mamma”. Do I win a quid?

Nichola (to Luca): Isn’t daddy a complete prat?

Luca (with his eyes): I couldn’t agree more.

 The moral: when you have a baby, any sense of humour you may once have possessed goes straight out the window.