With both our kids, we got through the Twos pretty unscathed. The Terrible Twos could (almost, but not quite) have been the Terrific Twos. Sunshine and Starlight both developed a sense of generosity (both materially, and in spirit) as they showed each other, and us, the humanity that is in all of us. Yes, there were tantrums, hard times. We battled through. When they were over, we congratulated ourselves at how well we handled it all. As parents, we assured ourselves, we were ace. We didn’t even know what we were doing, yet we were doing it so well. 

Only one part of that last sentence remains true. On both their third birthdays we said “Aren’t we lucky? I mean, everyone talks about the terrible twos, and sure there were moments, but that wasn’t so bad, was it?” (We always talk like characters from a novel, even if our lives could have been plotted for a soap opera). 

As Starlight hurtles through her third year, she leaves a trail of destruction behind her. Her personality has burst from somewhere and left its imprint all over our house and our lives and our spirits. 

Fit the first (and I steal this expression shamelessly from Lewis Carroll) began with our bedtime stories. We read a story every night, and I tried them once or twice on Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Sunshine was not a big fan, not right away. My copy is not a picture book. And as Lewis Carroll said in Alice in Wonderland: “What use is a book with no pictures in it?” Well, it turns out Starlight knows. She looks on half transfixed, half smiling at my amateur dramatics and ludicrous voices. She laughs unmercifully. Soon, we have a fight. Sunshine wants a better book. One with pictures. Starlight wants a funny book, one with voices. This book, that book. There is no winning Starlight over with a compromise. There is no more “us” or “ours”. There is only “mine” and “mine” (you need to imagine two voices saying “mine” there). Now we read two stories. 

Unfortunately, the Hunting of the Snark didn’t last long. Starlight’s (wilful) personality gathered strength and stubbornness. It also gathered influence from other sources. Namely Peppa Pig. And Ben and Holly. And all manner of other characters who Sunshine had resolutely “grown out” of and Starlight “grew in” to, the better to demarcate herself from her sister.

And so ends our early era of harmonious sharing. 

“That’s mine!” comes the cry from downstairs.

“No, MINE!” is the resolute response. The two girls are cry-screaming incoherently at each other. I am noticed in the room, then I am cry-screamed at by both of them.

“Now, you two listen to me,” I say. In control of little more than my voice, “you have to share. What are you fighting about?” More cry-screaming. Waving of pencils. I tell them to slow down. They each want the others’ pencil, but are unwilling to give up their pencil.

“This is LUDICROUS!” I tell them, “You need to learn to treat each other properly. Share. Love each other.” Come on everybody, it’s time to get together right now. More cry-screams, followed by higher-pitched cry screams as I remove both offending pencils. “Do you want me to put these in the bin?!” I ask, drunk on power over a five and a three year old, so drunk I don’t know what to do with it. “Now,” I say, buying time, “play something else. I’m not having this arguing!”

“But… but… Dadeeeeeee!” they scream “It’s MINE!” (they both speak of the other pencil – the one they don’t want. “Look” I say, thinking I have a chance to reason with them. “You want this one?” “Yes” says Sunshine, looking at her feet. “And you want this one?” “Yes, says Starlight, with one eye cast on the colour she wants, the other on the pencil that is hers.

“So,” I say, “why don’t we swap?” I cross my arms, to direct each pencil to the child that wants it. More cry screaming, and now they start shoving each other and grabbing for both. “That’s MINE!” and “I want that one!” is all I can make out through the clamour. 

I have no idea what is going on. Not long ago, they were too small to fight. Then, they were too small to fight me. Now, they are too small to care for my large, lumbering attempts at familial justice.

I try to calm them. Tell them to do their jigsaws. 

Apart from things that are mine, Starlight has also discovered ways that are mine. She pulls out a jigsaw and starts jamming pieces together. Sunshine and I look on, bewildered. Is this fury? Or does she not know what to do? I show her the box. “Look, love. See the picture? You have to try and make the picture…” I may be expecting too much. Sunshine was doing this jigsaw at 3, but that doesn’t mean Starlight can or should be able to.

“No.” she says.

“What? No, look” I say, “the idea is to make the picture. Here, will I help?”

“No.” she says. “I want to make my own picture.”

“But that’s not how it works love. Look, let me help…” I say, putting two pieces together, dramatically pointing out how the shapes fit into each other.

“No.” she says. “I’m making my own.” she says, pulls my pieces apart, then jams one in beside another piece altogether. Sunshine and I look on. Sunshine is bewildered. I am scared.

“No” has become a popular statement with Starlight.

“Time for bed!” “No.”

“Tidy up time!” “No.”

“Starlight, can you bring in the…?” “No.” 

We speak cheerily enough in the sing-song tones of one talking to a three year old. She speaks like an old man in a corner of the pub who’s just been asked whether he’s ready to go home.

Every time she says it – this fragile child – we are bewildered. Where did she get this from?

Her new found personality is not all bad. She has learned to be kind of her own accord, which is a heart-warming (if strange) thing for any parent to witness. We are used to telling her to be kind. We are used to telling her how to be kind (share your toys, say please and thank you, give your sister a hug and so forth). Every so often, if her sister is upset or lonely, she will pass over her inseparable Pink Teddy, or offer a sweet or drink to cheer her up. Sunshine, like her father, can be stubborn in her misery, but Starlight will persevere. Sometimes, she gets through. 

Sometimes, we have to separate them again, as a fight brews. Of course, we are very proud of this side of our daughter. Generous, kind, giving.

Then, one day, while having an Alice in Wonderland party, the girls managed to spill juice all over the table and floor. As I came in, I found Sunshine trying to clean it up, as Starlight rubbed the liquid around with her hands.

“What are you doing?!” I asked. I had lost my temper. As Sunshine started apologising, Starlight jumps in, shouts over her:

“But Daddy. This is our house too, you know” Our threenager. We are sure Sunshine was the same, but still wonder How did this happen and what do we do now?

Since Sunshine started school, she has found God. In the classroom, in the schoolyard and then at home – like her father before her – she has dived head first into the stories and the parables and the mysteries of the Church.

As a lapsed Catholic, I’m a bit bemused.

As a one-time-considering-to-be-Church of Ireland, I wonder if we should change religion (trans-substantiation is a problem for me).

As a part-time-amateur-observer of human beings and doings, I think, well, religion is something hard wired into us. I first read this theory in a book by John Gray (a philosopher, not the Mars and Venus guy), and it made a lot of sense to me.

While I am agnostic (there may or may not be something or someone “out there” of a higher power, but either way, we cannot definitively prove it, and we are probably better off looking at this place and trying to make it a little bit better either way), I can’t deny Sunshine her beliefs.

For one thing (as John Gray the philosopher points out), denying religious expression – especially where there is religious fervour – leads to bizarre religious expression (fundamentalism, or a disregard of fellow humans and humanity in favour of the myths, parables and commandments of a religion).  And children have the greatest fervour for almost anything that interests them.

For another thing and this I do know – my kids are finding themselves in the stories they tell and are told. They exercise their imagination through these narratives. Starlight likes witches and the big bad wolf, Sunshine wants to know more about Jesus. But as they learn more about these stories and play more with the situations, we see them becoming more themselves.

So, we see our job now as that of guidance. Starlight – at 3 – is too young yet – she is manic for silliness and nonsense, and knows her own mind to the extent of knowing what she wants and does not want and acting accordingly (tantrums). Sunshine – now 5 – knows her own mind in a new way, she is discovering things about herself she didn’t know before, like she is discovering the world around her and further afield. The world of which we are not a part (with her friends, in school and so forth).

Her religious feeling is quite powerful to her. She prays. She knows her prayers before food, and she relates Christmas to the birth of Christ more so than receiving of presents or Santa.

I was the same at her age. It was a comfortable imagination through which to move. One of justice, of kindness, of equality. A world that was not around me. And alas, is not around my children. And while “reality” is important, it is simply the outcome of other people’s imagination – so why not let her forge her personality within an imagination where things can be better. I would prefer if it were a scientific world, one based on facts and evidence. One that did not carry an historical burden (of which she will not know about until she is older).

But religion is the story she is forging her imagination through. And I think we can at least guide it to some extent so that she takes on the good of it – the community sensibility, the basic morality of reflecting on others’ situation in life, charity and doing unto others, etc – and we may be in a position to play down the darker sides – attitudes toward sexual morality, opinions on scientific matters and opinions on the way a country should work. If we were to deny her religious expression, someone else would surely control it. And then we would have no idea about the way she sees the world. Nor would we have an opportunity to help her better understand all the problems out there in that wider world as she grows older.

It is a brave new (old) world for me. I will have to put on my boots and my coat and bring the child to mass. Luckily for all of us, as I was the same, I remember the lessons, the mysteries. If nothing else, they will be useful to re-learn for interpreting Nick Cave song lyrics.

Since September, we have been learning. Sunshine started school. I learned that for most, this means coming into school with mum and maybe granny. The other people learned that for our family, this means coming into school with mum, little sister both grannies and Dad.

We stood in the playground, looking around at the other mums and dads and grannies looking around until the Child Raid siren went off. We confused our ways into the various classrooms. Parents studiously avoiding each other as the children pile into, crash off and swing around one another (parents will do all this later, in their cars). One plucky student welcomed us and indicated where everyone was sitting. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a uniform, and then I noticed she was the teacher!

Later that week, I had to go away for work. So the next morning, Sunshine asked for me to bring her in to school. So, in we went. “Good morning, good morning” I said as we passed the other parents, other children in the playground. It was quiet inside. I had Sunshine hang up her coat and bag. Said hello to her teacher. Sunshine and I made small talk as the teacher did her bits and pieces. “I wonder why nobody’s coming in?” I asked.

“Well, you’re meant to wait outside until the bell rings” said the only other child in the room. Wait. Teacher. Said the teacher. I’m sure I went red. When I was in primary school, we were told to go into our classroom and sit down and wait quietly for class to start.

“I… I’m… I’m sorry, I had no idea. Will we go out?” “No, there’s no need. But you know for future…”

“Yes, of course. Sorry.” to Sunshine I ask “Why didn’t you tell me?” to which both of them looked at me. It was, after all, her second day.

Well, with that bumbling start, things went downhill for a little bit. Sunshine comes home, a bit upset. Tells my wife no one will play with her. And the next day. And the next day. And one day, there are tears.

I assure them all it will be perfectly fine. I bite my nails, smoke cigarettes. I remember being the same, settling down later than the others. But then, I never was one for company. But is that why? Are my bland assurances simply leading her to be similarly introverted – is it nature or nurture that is at work here?

As my existential crisis unfolded, my wife spoke with the teacher and some other mums who encouraged other children to try and include Sunshine a bit more in their games. That was all it took. Sunshine made friends and played well with them. For now,  the heartbreaking spectre of her coming home, feeling lonely was over (I am sure this will happen again, as Dr Seuss wisely told us “I’m sorry to say so, but sadly it’s true that bang-ups and hang-ups will happen to you”) . So, as well as her lessons, she learned that sometimes it is hard to make friends, sometimes hard to be alone.

Starlight is learning the same, back home.  We have not been able to send her to a crèche, where she might meet some friends her own age. She knows some of the local children. But without Sunshine around, her best friend is her mum. She has started asking to “go for coffee” (which is her own code for going somewhere – anywhere – that my wife can drink coffee as Starlight eats a sausage).

She is also learning to make up her own games. These often involve jigsaw pieces or dolls or books and have a great deal of involved rules about who does what and when and how turns are taken; all made up as we go along. “Now, you go over there. And I…  I… I bring this over and you take it, then you go over there and…” and so forth. Games of strategy so involved, intricate and interminable, she will surely be a government minister one day.

“Daddy, boys like blue but girls like pink; but I like blue because we’re twins” says Starlight one day. Until that point, I thought all learning worthwhile. But somehow this didn’t seem right. I could explain the political and social ramifications of her statement to her, but she would see it only as involved, intricate and interminable. So I hold off.

“Wait. I have pink shirts, and I’m a boy, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re a Daddy. I don’t like boys. But I like Daddy. Here…” she says, stuffing a jigsaw piece into my mouth (in a parallel, but synchronous existence, she is the Mummy and I am the baby).

“But not all boys like blue and not all girls like pink. I mean. Look at all the other colours! Who likes green and yellow and purple?”

“Sunshine.” she says, without batting an eyelid. “Now, I’ll be the baby.” she says, very matter of fact. “I’m worn out from you.”

“I like black myself.”

“Goo goo, gaa, gaa” she says, in a frighteningly exaggerated staged baby-character. “I like black too! We could be twins!”

“Are we twins?” I ask “because we both like black?” I am curious that we have gone from being twins to “could be” twins.

“Noooo” she says, annoyed, “we can’t be twins because you’re a Daddy and I’m a little girl”

“Ah, I’m the Daddy…”

“NO, YOU’RE THE MUMMY” at this point she gets upset, so we quit our philosophical treatise and also the Mummy and Baby game.

Thursday evenings is dancing night. After Sunshine’s Irish dancing, after I drag my work-worn carcass across the threshold, Sunshine teaches Starlight and I about Irish dancing. It has become a regular part of my keep-fit regime with hopping and skipping and flailing limbs and keep- your-arms-down! I can’t keep up. Starlight can, but she cheats – making up her own rules again – with hop, skip, scuttle across and back, spin, skip hop.
Then one day my wife says “There’s a fedge next week.”

“A fedge?”

“No, a feis”

“Fresh?”

“Feis”

“Fesh?”

“Feis”

“Oh, a feis. Great.”

We go. It’s on at the school, which is cold of temperature and light. Parents go in, studiously avoiding the other parents as the children bustle their way through to the hall where the lower limb flailing will be done.

Sunshine is up in a group with some other children, and is partnered with her friend from down the road, which is good. Then the dancing starts. It’s like Goosestepping: A Warning from the Future, as the children swing their knees, drawing feet from ground level to forehead level and back to ground level with a slight thud in time to music as the teacher speaks lightly, delicately counting rhythm and saying things like “…and turn…” then “…and swap…” and so forth.

Starlight is dancing beside us, in the bleachers (well, seats collected from around the school), trying to edge her way out to the stage area. I grab her and bring her back to me. But of course, it is ultimately useless. They are ever dancing away from us, with all these things we’re all learning about ourselves and everything else. Ultimately useless, yes. But right now, I pick Starlight up and hold her on my knee until Sunshine gets her prizes (like the caucus race from Alice in Wonderland, all had won, and all must have prizes). Then we all go home.

It will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that, often mums and dads have very different opinions as to how their little one is growing up. This was clearly illustrated in our house one day, back when our Hazel was about six months old, when my wife Ev arrived from town carrying a book entitled How to solve your child’s sleep problem.

“Um, she has a sleep problem?” I asked.

Her response was that, yes, Hazel did have a sleep problem. Didn’t she need the dummy to go to sleep? And didn’t this mean that, if she woke up in the middle of the night, one of us would have to get up and restore the soother (which always popped out when she fell asleep) so she could get return to the land of nod?

Yes, that was all true. But did it mean that she had a “problem”?

I wasn’t so sure. In fact, if my wife wasn’t flat-out addicted to sleep herself, I’d suggest that she wouldn’t have viewed that state of affairs as problematic either. However, in the interest of a happy household, I acquiesced. We would use the methods of Dr Richard Ferber, for it was he who wrote the above book, to “cure” Hazel.

That said, neither of us was in a rush to be cruel to our baby so the start date for the plan’s implementation kept being put back. Our hand was eventually forced by Hazel. She developed a love of sleep crawling. Yes, sleep crawling. She’d start to wake up but, while still not fully conscious, would set off crawling around the cot. I guess she was looking for her dummy. This would generally end with her banging her head into the side of the cot! It sounds funny but it did mean that not only would she now be awake but she’d also have a sore head. This signalled the end of us bringing her into our bed to get her back to sleep – what if she woke up before us and crawled off the bed?

Finally, as she approached her first birthday (D-Day in the world of Dr Ferber), we took some deep breaths and gave it a go.

For little Hazel, it must have been quite a shock. With no warning that anything was afoot, apart from the fact that she was given her bedtime bottle 30 minutes beforehand (because Dr Ferber had told us to), we simply put her into her cot and left the room. I’m sure her state of mind could, at that instant, have been summed up using a bit of text lingo: “WTF?”

So she cried. She cried because she was tired. She cried because she wanted her dummy. She cried because she wanted her parents back in here right now with an explanation and IT BETTER BE GOOD. But we couldn’t go back in. At least not until Dr Ferber told us we could. The delightful Dr Ferber’s method is basically a cold turkey programme to get a baby off their soother addiction. The plan only allows the parents to re-enter the room at specified intervals. For example, on that first night, we had to wait for three minutes before we could go back in.

Ev was first up for this tour of duty and went back in after those long 180 seconds had passed. Even when you go in to see your baby, you’ve got to restrain yourself to just reassuring the little one that you’re still there but you must not (under all but one circumstance, more on that later) take the child up, or help them to get to sleep, and Ev did what she was told. She was back out in about 10 seconds and the clock was started again. This time we were to wait for five minutes.

After that visit, the next interval set was for 10 minutes but, I’m glad to say, it wasn’t needed as she nodded off before then. So she’d fallen asleep in about 12 minutes. That wasn’t bad for a first night, we decided. Maybe Dr Ferber was on to something!

Alas, were it so simple.

The following day was a nightmare. For a start, Dr Ferber tells you that, if the child wakes at any time after 6am, they are up for the day. Our little lady woke up at 5:55am and, while I was tempted to take the good doctor exactly at his word and let her go back to sleep, Ev decided we were getting up.

The surely sadistic Dr Ferber also told us that we weren’t to alter Hazel’s nap schedule, even if she did get up at 5:55am. Theoretically, this should have meant that she was really tired by bedtime that night but, in actuality, it meant we had to deal with a cranky zombie all day. A cranky zombie who couldn’t even enjoy her naps because, of course, there were no soothers to be seen there either.

By the arrival of that night’s bedtime, the cranky zombie was, if anything, over-tired. She found it very hard to get to sleep and was crying well after we’d waited five minutes, then eight minutes and even another 12 minutes. As bad luck would have it, a pair of family friends called in for a visit that evening and so we had to explain that we weren’t really being callous, as we ignored the screams coming from the baby monitor. Their opinion of us can’t have been helped, either, when Hazel cried so hard that she vomited.

And thus we arrive at the one circumstance in which Dr Ferber will allow you to lift your child out of the cot. He even has a section on it in his book so it must be one of the risks you run when using this plan. So we changed her, and the sheets, “quickly and matter-of-factly” and put her back into the cot. Thankfully for all concerned, she fell asleep quite quickly after that.

We took it one day at a time after that, sometimes stretching Dr Ferber’s rules a bit here and there, doing whatever it took to help Hazel through this change. Thankfully, the plan did work, although it was a gradual process.

There were a few blips. We’ll never forget one particularly bad night when, all excited after playing with her visiting cousins, it took her over 40 minutes to stop fighting the tiredness. By the end, she wasn’t the only female crying in our house.

Our experience that night was one of the low points. It’s a bit tough going through a process that you believe is good for your child only to end up being emotionally flipped around, feeling like you’re actually being selfish and cruel to them.

However, night by night, the time it took her to get to sleep did diminish and now, about six weeks on, she falls asleep within 90 seconds of being put into her cot! Dr Ferber told us it would take a fortnight at most. In this he was wrong. In a lot of other ways though, we feel he is right. Hazel never wakes us during the night any more as, presumably if she does wake up, she simply rolls over and goes back to sleep herself. My wife is particularly happy with this fact.

So was it all worth it? It was tough but, yes, I think so. I’m also hoping that listening to that much crying now will immunise us against the tantrums she’ll undoubtedly be throwing for the next, what, 15 years.

Hoping…

The day our daughter Hazel was born, the hospital midwife warned us of the dangers of ‘nipple confusion’. Stop tittering at the back! The theory went like this: if you (the mother, obviously) are trying to breastfeed and you give your new baby one (just one!) bottle feed, there’s a chance that they will prefer this easier method of milk delivery and reject your milk production devices forthwith. We bought this one for a while but it turned out, in Hazel’s case at any rate, that there was no confusion. Our girl liked milk – wherever she could get it! She could go from boob to bottle, and back again, without seeming to be the least bit concerned. Just so long as the milk flowed, no questions were asked.

So far, so good. After a few months though, it’s one of your parental responsibilities to introduce the little one to food. Looking back at it now, I don’t know why this one is overlooked when the Top Ten Parental Responsibilities list is drawn up. Everyone knows about toilet training, helping them learn to walk and sleep training. But no-one seems to factor in helping them to eat. This is strange, when you consider that it’s one of the first things you actually have to teach them. They arrive into the world with an instinctive desire to suck down milk and sleep, but they need to be taught ‘how’ to eat.

Our Hazel’s first taste of solid food didn’t really look all that solid. It was a mash of various vegetables, depending on the day of the week. Interestingly, this phase actually expanded our culinary horizons – I’d never tasted Butternut Squash before but Annabel Karmel recommended it, correctly in my opinion, as a tasty treat in her Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. At the risk of gaining a reputation for always writing about books, I’d like to take a minute to mention this one.

This is a lovely cook book which even comes with a hardback cover, so Hazel could play with/chew down on it if she felt the urge. It’s also got little happy and sad faces on each page so you can mark off whether your little VIP liked the dish. In the early days, when we were making anything and everything, this was useful as otherwise I’m certain we’d have ended up making a meal just before we realised that we’d done it last week and she hated it!

In this initial period, Hazel only refused one meal. She absolutely would not eat mashed green beans. She took one spoonful and then clamped her mouth shut. This was a surprise both as it seemed totally unlike her and also because of the fact that I hate green beans too. It’s a bit of a strange thing to have inherited, a detestation of green beans, but at least she has an understanding parent who won’t judge her too harshly!

Since then, Hazel’s food has gradually become less mashed and more lumpy. These days her favourite meals include Irish Stew, Sole, Spaghetti Bolognese and she’s also keen on sampling whatever’s on our plates. This can be a bit of a drawback for her parents, of course. Sometimes I find myself sneaking off into the kitchen for a quick snack, before she cottons on. If I succeed, I eat my sandwich in peace. If I don’t, she’ll be there smacking the palm of her hand down on my knee, demanding a piece of bread crust – at the very least!

The eating of solid food proceeded, obviously enough, at the same time as she started to produce teeth. Teeth are great, they help her to eat. However they also help her to chew anything that takes her fancy. Judging by the sheer number of things we find her sticking into her gob, it must be an interesting, perhaps even pleasurable, experience. Hazel’s mantra must be: “Sticks and stones may break my bones BUT they may also be very tasty.”

The teeth, of course, arrive randomly and are accompanied by howls of pain. We’ve been lucky as the teething pains haven’t really disturbed her sleep too much but they do turn our placid little girl into a howling dervish in the evenings. “Who are you and what have you done with our Hazel?” we ask.

Returning to food, lately we have run in to a slight problem. By now, she should be getting the hang of feeding herself. She should be able to sit in her high chair and get through a small meal, using her hands to lift the pieces of food. Our problem is that Hazel decided the high chair wasn’t cool about two months ago. Don’t go thinking we can put her into a regular chair! She’s only 15 months old after all. So now she gets most of her meals standing up, sitting on someone’s lap or sitting on the couch (watching TV). The last method is the only one where she’s guaranteed not to get bored and wants to leave but it does make us feel a little uncomfortable, as we’re doing our best to keep TV watching to a minimum.

She also isn’t very hungry in the middle of the day. Our plans for three main meals in the day have proven to be a bit of a failure and, if I can get her to take some yoghurt or a banana at lunch time, I feel like I’ve achieved. However, this disinterest in some meals doesn’t mean she’s wasting away. The opposite is the case, actually. Whenever my wife Ev’s worried about her not eating, I say “Look at her!” “If she was a chocolate bar, she’d be a Kit-Kat Chunky.”