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 National Trust properties while carrying Charlotte in her sling, keeping her occupied.

All babies start off as lumps until they develop sufficient mad skillz to move about and grab your valuable stuff unaided. Our problem was that unlike the offspring of our friends from NCT and elsewhere, Charlotte has a severe case of FOMO. Never content with sitting still for longer than a few minutes, she would whinge relentlessly unless she was being carried and jiggled. Even then, her head would be bobbing around like Oleg the sodding meerkat, desperate to take everything in. Naturally she would refuse to sleep properly in the daytime, despite her being perfectly capable of doing so at night. And not forgetting that brief period when she'd figured out how to roll from her back to her front but not in the other direction, and she'd maroon herself on her tummy and start bawling EVERY FIVE FUCKING MINUTES.

Something happened to turn her away from the dark side. Maybe one of those developmental leaps we read so much about and tried to ascribe to any period of bad behaviour, when in truth she was probably just being grumpy. Whatever the case, she is now behaving like a proper baby and the future finally looks bright, although my long-imagined dreams of quality father-child sport-watching afternoons on the sofa have probably gone down the khazi.

And so we come to the next big family dilemma - whether or not to subject ourselves to another little "bundle of joy". For the first six months there was no decision to make, and we had to try very hard not to laugh in people's faces when they enquired about it. Now, of course, Charlotte is mostly great and our long-term memories are already beginning to play tricks on us by fading out a large percentage of the tedious and/or horrendous early days of parenting. As our old friend Admiral Ackbar would say (SPOILER ALERT~!: Rest In Peace, soldier):

For Becky and I there are other factors in play. In my head I always wanted more than one child, if only because I grew up with a brother and whatever his faults (okay, and mine too) I couldn't imagine life without him. Meanwhile, Becky as an only child never felt like she was missing out by having no siblings, and has pointed out repeatedly that we would be far better off financially without another tiny black hole to drain all our resources. 

There's also the age factor. Couples who met in their teens or twenties and started their reproduction earlier than us would surely be better equipped to deal with the energy-sapping broken nights and early-morning rises. 

Ah, say the old wives, but a horrible first baby will always be followed by an easier second one, and vice versa. Certainly, if they could guarantee that Baby Gould No. 2 would be lovely and placid and go down for naps like a normal child, we would almost certainly take the plunge again. But: we’ve also read and heard plenty of baby horror stories. Bouts of colic that last for what must feel like forever. Being woken up every hour, on the hour at hideously unsociable times. 

Looking at it this way, the slightly scary truth is that Charlotte could have been a whole lot worse. Would we really want to trade a healthy little girl whose long, stressful days were usually followed by a full allocation of sleep for a monster who would nap brilliantly then keep us awake all night? And would a baby who sits quietly lump-like not in fact be really boring? Every child of course represents their own unique part of humanity's magical tapestry, but that’s no bloody help when we’re trying to decide whether the comfort of having two people to look after us in our old age would be worth putting ourselves through the baby-rearing experience again. 

Only time will tell.