The Parent Trap
As well as being the traditional time for looking back and taking stock, this January has extra significance for our little family. I'm now officially spending the next few months as a househusband whilst my wife is having a couple of weeks' holiday before returning to full-time work (and therefore beginning part-time motherhood). Because memories have a habit of coalescing into ordered chunks, we can neatly divide our daughter Charlotte's early life into two. Since this mid-October cutoff point, she has been genuinely delightful - smiley, playful, interactive and flirting with all and sundry. For the first six months, however, she was bloody horrible. Some caveats: of course she's still a grouchy little madam sometimes, and melts down with brutal efficiency when she runs out of food at mealtimes. And yes, those early months weren't entirely awful. I remember bursting with pride on Father's Day, and a pleasant summer period when we would visit Nationa