I have been intending to write this for such a long time. We are long past a toddler now and have a daughter who is exceptionally proud of being a pre-schooler. What has happened is that a child has taken up a lot of time and then in the small amount of free time I’ve got, I’ve been trying to cram in the amount of stuff I used to do pre-child into about 10% of the time I used to have to do it.
Time seems to go way faster than you can imagine with a child. Every time I’ve seen a parent say something like “How have I got a teenager??!” previously I’ve thought “come on mate, you’ve had 12 years of getting there. It should be obvious.”
Now I have a child, I can fully appreciate that I might wake up one day with a 20-year-old daughter and no idea how it happened. I can’t believe I’ve got a 3-year-old. In some ways time seems to go slowly – mainly when they’re onto the 5th tantrum of the day and you’re just wishing it was bedtime – but in others it goes so far.
There are always so many small little developments that you celebrate with a child. Almost every day they can seem to have learned something new, and you think that they’re just trundling along, not growing up too fast.
Then you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, add up all the things that they’ve learned and then see how much massive development that they have made and how much they’ve grown in such a short space of time. And that’s when you’ve suddenly got a 3-year-old child without realising it.
And I really don’t want her to grow up so fast – there are so many cute things that I will miss when she’s grown too old for them. For example, when we’re walking somewhere and she is holding my hand – or rather one of my fingers – it’s so cute. I don’t want her to be too old to do it, but at the same time I also want her to continue to become more grown up and more independent
One of the things I hadn’t realised before coming a parent is the sheer variety of Feelings that you will have.
Obviously, there is the difficult side of things – for example the frustration that you seem to spend 25 hours a day trying to persuade your child to put food in their mouth or to go to sleep – but then there’s so many moments of joy.
One of the best feelings is when your kid comes up to you and gives you a massive hug of their own volition and for no reason.
And as much as there’s times when she annoys me by not doing what I want her to do, there are also definitely times when she is annoyed by me and makes it really clear, so at least we are annoying each other equally.
Spending more time with my daughter is a lot more tiring because she is a lot more active. When I last wrote about her, she was basically only just moving about. Now she is running everywhere excitedly, but also really keen to learn and it is more enjoyable and more engaging but also more tiring mentally. Then when she’s in bed, I try to do all the things that I need/want to do which are also mentally draining and then I’m zonked and ready to go to bed at 9pm – something that my wife is fundamentally opposed to, although she can probably realise by my tetchiness that I need my sleep!
She now has her own little world as well. Just after she turned one, she started nursery, which has been amazing for her development. She has lots of friends there and she loves telling us about them and what she’s been up to. It’s really weird that she already has this world that we’re not a part of. I definitely wasn’t ready for this but am so pleased by how she has adapted to it.
However despite the fact that we now send her off to work doing colouring and riding around on bikes, both my wife and I are still able to spend a lot of time with her. We each work 4-day weeks and spend a different day just hanging out with the little one, and the fact that we are financially able to do this is the best thing and I am grateful for it every day – even the super grumpy days.
My top tip for parents of toddlers – never ever throw away food that they say they don’t want to eat, because whether it takes 30 seconds or 3 hours, they will change their mind and decide they want to eat it!