10 things I’ve learned about parenting this month

1. Brushing a two year old’s teeth takes a lot longer when they insist on you also brushing the teeth of their three imaginary friends.

2. I was delighted to hear our two year old son was recently “being a comedian” in creche. I like to think he’s inherited my sense of humour.

3. I recently had my hair brushed by our two year old son. Apparently he thinks that the look below is “really good”.

 

4. Our son has decided that he no longer likes vegetarian haggis…

5. …however, my Scottish dad pride has been restored by his love of baking shortbread biscuits (see below).

 

6. Our son ate several chilli and tomato oatcakes yesterday. I’m hoping this means he’s on his way to becoming a fan of curry (…a topic I’ve discussed here before).

7. Our two year old son still can’t quite pronounce the names of some local villages, especially the one whose train station is pictured below.

 

8. According to a colleague, the arrival of a second child is like the transition from walking a dog to owning a zoo.

9. Our son has decided he’s friends with 25 of the letters of the alphabet. He doesn’t know Y.

10. Even if a toddler looks tired and sounds tired, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re tired: “I’m not tired, it’s just a yawn”.

 

What have you learned about parenting recently? What do you remember about being the parent of a toddler? Please feel free to share your views on this post in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ page on Facebook. 

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

 

 

Our son doesn’t like haggis any more

Two years ago, I asked an important question on this blog: will our son like haggis? Haggis is traditionally eaten on 25th January as part of Burns Night to celebrate the life and work of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. Rather than serving up the traditional version of the dish that is composed of sheep’s innards cooked in a sheep’s stomach, I fed him a homemade vegetarian version that he enthusiastically (…and messily) consumed.

This year, we again ate vegetarian haggis to mark Burns Night but our son (who’ll be three in a few months’ time) wasn’t interested. I’d like to think that it was because we offered him a shop-produced form of vegetarian haggis rather than a homemade version, but I fear that that this may not be the case. Over the last year, our son has become a bit more fussy about what he eats. He still enjoys going out to a local tapas restaurant and sampling lots of different fruit, vegetables and cheeses but it can be a different story at home.

Last summer, I thought that his love of all sorts of different fresh fruit and vegetables was set to continue when he insisted on holding some broccoli while we went round the supermarket rather than putting it in the trolley (what folks here in the UK call a ‘shopping cart’). Despite the fact that he nibbled on the broccoli while we went round the store, he wasn’t interested in eating in at home once we’d cooked it.

If I took things to extremes, I could take our son’s refusal to eat haggis as a rejection of his Scottish roots. However, that would be going a bit too far. It’s inevitable that our son is going to have a different relationship with Scotland to me. I was born in Scotland and lived there until the age of 18, whereas he was born here in Wales.

By virtue of my wife being from England and my grandparents from different parts of Ireland, our son would technically be eligible to represent five different countries at sports such as football: Wales, Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I’d only be eligible to represent Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at football, but having lived in Wales since 2007 would seem to – theoretically – make me eligible to represent Wales at rugby. They’re unlikely to call on my services as the Welsh rugby team is pretty decent at the moment, but things might have been different in the 1980s despite the fact that I have played very little rugby.

Our son may no longer have the same interest in vegetarian haggis as he once had, but I’m pleased to report that he does like shortbread biscuits. Rather than just eating this Scottish delicacy, a few months ago he actually helped me to make some of these. As he grows up, it’s fun finding new things to bond over as he asks ever more questions about the world around him.

 

What did you think of this blog post? What traditions and foods do you like to eat or cook with your friends and family? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ page on Facebook.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve shared this post at the following parent blogger link-ups:

 

 

21 thoughts from my 21st month as a parent

Food, football and France. Read about these and more in my latest monthly collection of thoughts about being a parent…

1. Our son has got increasingly polite and sociable recently. Only last week, he helped to put out some rubbish and then said ‘bye bye wheelie bin, see you later!’.

2. The best thing about borrowing CDs of kids’ songs from the library to play in the car is that it’s usually time to return them just when they start getting irritating.

3. I think our son has inherited my dress sense. Here we are wearing matching outfits:

4. Within the last month, I’ve had a very proud moment as our son said ‘pêl-droed’ (football) for the first time.

5. Our son is still learning to play football, which probably explains why I won 15-0 in a recent game in our back garden. He is improving though, it was 28-0 to me the previous week.

6. Talking of football, one of my favourite things about being a dad is that it’s now a lot more acceptable to play football in the living room than it used to be.

7. Our son can make a bit of a mess at times, but is also very interested in using our hoover. 8. It’s sometimes hard to know when our son’s saying ‘mamma’ and when he’s saying ‘banana’. I hope he doesn’t end up sending a Mother’s Day card to a piece of fruit.

9. However, our son has managed to recently say both ‘granny’ and ‘grandad’ on Skype.

10. Our son has been introduced to some elementary human biology in one of the books he’s been reading recently (see below). 11. Our son is getting very enthusiastic about helping out with our two chickens. We’ll need to stop taking him out too early in the morning as he often ends up walking back across the garden towards the house shouting ‘look, eggs!’.

12. He is getting a bit more aware of noise though. When he comes back to bed after getting up during the night, he often shouts ‘QUIET’ just after coming back into the bedroom.

13. Not so long ago, I was somewhat disappointed that our son hadn’t really experienced playing in proper snow that I decided to make him a snowman out of play dough.

14. Thankfully, we did get some proper snow not long after I made the play dough snowman (…maybe there’s a link?).

15. As someone who teaches students French for a living, I was pleased to hear our son recently say his first French word. it was ‘voila’.

16. As our son is showing an interest in France at the moment, I’ve been telling him about how Marvin Gaye used to keep a sheep a vineyard he owned in the south of France. It’s quite well known that he’d herd it through the grapevine.

17. Our son may not be two yet, but he’s already decided that it’s time he has his own house (see below).

18. Our son recently told me off for lining up all his toy animals in order of size. Apparently it’s because he doesn’t like me critter sizing.

19. I’m glad to see our son showing an interest in healthy eating. When I got home from work recently he was taking this to a new level by trying to feed grapes to his toy giraffe.

20. Due to his interest in animals such as giraffes, we recently decided to make our bathroom look a bit like a jungle (see below). 21. Coming up with over 20 thoughts about parenting per month is getting quite challenging. I’m going to keep this feature going until our son turns two and will then be replacing it with a new format. Watch this space!

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a half as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+. Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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I have added this post the following parent blogger link-ups:

A toddler’s Christmas in Wales

As a child, I generally spent Christmas in Scotland with my parents and sometimes we went to see family in Ireland over the festive season. We also spent Christmas 1982 in California as we lived in San Jose from 1982-1983. As our son’s only 19 months old, we haven’t really got into a Christmas routine yet as last year was his first Christmas. Indeed, he was kind enough to write me a blog post about what it was like.

At the age of only 8 months old, our son was kind enough to write a blog post about his first Christmas…

Last year, we went to the south east of England to spend Christmas with about twenty members of my wife’s family. This year, we’ve decided to do things slightly differently. We moved to a new house just over three months ago and have decided to invite my parents and my wife’s parents to spend Christmas with us here in Wales as we now have a bit more space. The local area is rural and quite hilly and I’d go as far as saying that it can almost look like Narnia when it snows.

I’d really like there to be snow this year as our son is yet to have his first experience of walking in snow or building a snowman. That said, wet weather will be good too as I know that Santa Claus thinks that it helps his rain-deer. As you may have guessed from the last sentence, I’m quite keen on the British tradition of telling corny jokes at Christmas. In fact, I talked about this last year in a post entitled 5 things I like about Christmas in the UK.

In a lot ways, we probably don’t always have a very traditional British Christmas as my wife, son and I are vegetarian. Instead of having turkey, we often make a spicy nut roast with tomato chilli gravy. We do have the traditional roast potatoes and brussel sprouts, but I quite like to stir fry the sprouts with soy sauce, chilli and paneer (an Indian form of cheese). At work last year, my colleagues collectively decided to forego a traditional Christmas meal for our end of term evening out and instead had a fantastic Chinese buffet. Consequently, we had fortune cookies rather than Christmas crackers. As it happens, we’re going back to the same place for our pre-Christmas outing again this year.

Our son has already been getting into the Christmas spirit and has been enjoying wearing his two Christmas jumpers. We actually let him wear them before December had started as we went to a Christmas market about ten days ago in the nearby town of Llandudno. Doing anything to mark Christmas before it’s actually December, such as putting up decorations, doesn’t really feel right but it was fun to take him out to the market.

As it happens, some of the students that I teach at university were talking a few weeks ago about how they found it irritating to see decorations up while it was still November. I had to break it gently to them that we were about to study a book whose first word was ‘Noël’. The novel in question was Azouz Begag’s Béni ou le Paradis Privé, which tells the story of boy who is born in Lyon to Algerian parents. The opening sees the boy talk in a jovial manner about his experiences of being from a Muslim family in France in the weeks before Christmas. As part of this revolves around the boy wanting his parents to get a Christmas tree, I decided to deliver the first class about the novel with a miniature Christmas tree and Father Christmas on the desk at the front of the classroom. It was still November, but I think my students let me get away with it.

Whatever you are doing to mark Christmas this year, and even if you’re not, I’d like to wish everyone reading this a great end to 2014 and a fantastic 2015.

I’ve written this post as part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs series ‘Christmas in Different Lands’. Click on this link if you would like to read more posts by parent bloggers about Christmas around the world.

What did you think of this blog post and what did you and your family enjoy most about Christmas?  Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups:

19 thoughts from my 19th month as a parent

It’s time for another monthly round-up about getting used to being a parent. This month, I talk about Skype, selfies and sledging…

1. Our son has been getting quite affectionate over the last month. He recently kissed the screen when saying goodbye to granny and grandad on Skype…

2. …and he’s also taken to grabbing people’s legs and saying ‘cuddles’.

3. Our son recently took his first ‘selfie’ (see below).

4. In order to try to improve the quality of his selfies, I’ve been giving our son a few tips…

5. ‘Monkey’ / ‘Mwnci’ has become one of the first animals that our son can say. I’m quite pleased he’s chosen one that sounds very similar in English and Welsh. He also does quite a good monkey impression.

6. Our son has been perfecting his ‘family fist pump’ technique in the last week. I was going to post a picture or video here, but the first rule of our family fist pump is that you don’t talk about our family fist pump.

7. Our son may no longer be a little baby, but we still have this balloon (see below) that one of his grannies bought for him when he was a day old.

8. For some time, it’s been almost impossible to try to eat an orange within the sight of our son without him coming over and insisting on having at least half. Now, he seems able to sniff oranges when they’re in our ‘going out’ bag..

9. Our son used to be quite scared by the hoover but now is quite excited by it. The line ‘let’s go downstairs, we’re going to do some hoovering’ has been used to coax him towards the living room recently.

10. My telling of dad jokes has resulted in a change to my official work address…

11. Toothbrushes and spoons generally don’t look alike to most people, but our son recently tried to use his toothbrush in order to eat porridge.

12. Our son’s recently been walking round the kitchen holding up a saucepan lid to his ear and saying ‘hello’. Perhaps it’s time to explain how phones work.

13. Our son’s enthusiasm for gardening has continued recently and we’ve thankfully managed to prevent him from trying to water the chickens again.

14. Having an 18 month old son means not staying up to watch the football highlights on Saturday night’s ‘Match of the Day’ but knowing I’ll wake in time for Sunday morning repeat.

15. I have been trying to get more exercise recently. Last weekend, I went out for a cycle and chased our son round two different soft play centres. I still feel that soft play centres often do a better job of tiring out children than parents.

16. Eating with chopsticks can be challenging for a toddler, but nowhere near as challenging as trying to drink a glass of water using chopsticks…

17. While I was writing this post, our son was walking round the living room with a pan from the kitchen. This has got me thinking: when is it OK to ask your kids to start cooking dinner at least once a week? 🙂

18. Our son had his first trip in a sledge this month. He was dragged around the living room in it by grandad and enjoyed it immensely.

19. When our son had a slight cold recently, we decided that he could still go to the play park but would have to dress up as a fisherman.

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first two years as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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I have added this post the following parent blogger link-ups:

Happy International Babywearing Week!

Last year, we marked International Babywearing Week by visiting the nearby village of Sling with our son in a sling. A year on, we’re still carrying our now 18 month old son in a variety of different sorts of slings and we now live several miles closer to the village of Sling after a recent house move.

I’ve found myself blogging about babywearing several times over the last year, which reflects the fact that slings have come to be a lot more than simply a sort of ‘hands-free kit’ for carrying our son. As I’ve said here before, they have really helped me to bond with my son and helped to me to comfort him and get him to sleep on several occasions.

Here’s a look back at my own babywearing highlights of the last year:

An obvious place to start is our visit to the village of Sling to mark last year’s International Babywearing Week. To add an international dimension, I also discussed babywearing around the world thanks to the input of a great range of parent bloggers who are part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs group.

Looking back a year on, I cannot believe how much our son has grown since the photo on the left was taken. We still carry him in slings from time to time, but this now officially counts as weight training.

One of the places where I’ve often taken our son in a sling is our local supermarket and I wrote about this in a post earlier this year called Shopping with our son in a sling. It may seem like a mundane weekly activity, but it has also become a semi-regular weekend father and son bonding activity which allows my wife to take a break while we head out on a little expedition. I’m not sure if my parents took me shopping in a sling when I was a baby – the photo on the left seems to suggest that they tried to dress me in handknitted clothes that went with the shopping trolley.

Over the last year, I’ve also enjoyed sharing experiences of babywearing with fellow members of Sling Dads UK, a group that promotes babywearing among fathers.They also organized a Sling Dads Family Camp this summer, which led to me writing a post about Camping with a toddler. This post is the most popular one that I’ve written on this blog so far.

Over the last year, babywearing has really developed from being a way of getting out and about with our baby son to one which has provided a great form of bonding with him as he grows older and more aware of the world around him. Slings are a crucial tool when it comes to getting him to sleep in the evening when my wife is out. Finally figuring out how to get our sleeping son out of a sling and into his bed without waking him was one of my proud parenting moments. Most people probably manage to this before their child is over a year old, but I certainly wasn’t one of them.

I have at times wondered where my love of babywearing has come from. In some ways, it’s definitely due to my wife being very keen on slings. However, a photo that I discovered at my parents’ house when preparing a blog post entitled Like father like son suggests that the true answer may be that it’s genetic. As the photo below shows, my dad also carried me in a baby carrier back in the late 70s and early 80s. As I’m fast asleep in the picture, it looks like I quite enjoyed it!

What do you think of babywearing and is it popular where you live? Have you ever carried your children in a sling and did your parents use baby carriers when you were young? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parent blogger link-ups:

18 thoughts from my 18th month as a parent

Muppets, moving house and making animal noises. Read about all these and more in my latest monthly collection of thoughts about parenthood.

1. I may have been singing too many Muppets songs to our 16 month old son. His answer to ‘what does the cat say?’ recently was ‘mahna mahna’.

2. Despite his confusion about what cats say, our son has been getting quite good at doing animal sounds this month. His sheep and lion sounds are a bit similar but he’s getting really good at doing ‘moo’ sounds despite the relative lack of cows in our area.

3. I’m not sure if our son wants to follow in my footsteps but it certainly looks like he wants to walk in my shoes (see picture below).

4. Our son recently helped to unpack a whole bag of shopping. I’d put in on the floor while I opened the fridge door and he then handed me all the items one after another without me even asking. I hope that this is a sign of things to come!

5. Helping to wash the dishes is another thing that our son did this month. He managed to combine this with helping to wash the kitchen floor at the same time.

6. Our son’s helpfulness this month has also included playing a role in organizing my new office.

7. Our son’s gradually starting to understand technology although he does sometimes put the television remote control to his ear and say ‘hello’…

8. …and he also seems to occasionally confuse cutlery and technology. He recently put a plastic fork to his ear and said ‘hello’.

9. Our son has been enjoying feeding corn to our chickens recently. He’s also occasionally tried to feed them clothes pegs recently, but they’ve turned their beaks up at them.

10. In the week before we moved house, our son started making chicken noises in the kitchen while he was sitting in his high chair. He’d noticed one of the chickens peering in the window and seemed like he was trying to say hello. I like this progress towards multilingualism.

11. I recently carried out a parenting experiment to see whether an episode of Raa Raa The Noisy Little Lion or coverage of the live televised debate on Scottish independence would get our toddler son to sleep. Two episodes of Raa Raa weren’t enough, but he was fast asleep after half an hour of the independence debate.

12. Our son took a very ‘hands on’ approach to helping to pack boxes before we moved house (see picture below). I recently wrote a blog post about this entitled Moving house with a toddler.

13. This month, I have learned that the way to get our son out of the bath without him crying is to let the water out of the bath and then lift him out.

14. When I stood on one leg at a bank machine, our son looked a bit puzzled. I tried to explain to him that I was checking my balance.

15. Our son is getting much better at steering his toddle truck. A few months ago in our old house, he’d just push it forward and cry when he bumped into something and couldn’t push it any more. He’d then wait for someone to come and turn the toddler truck around so he could push it some more.

16. Our son decided to get up at 7am to watch coverage of the Scottish Indepedence Referendum results with me. I’m glad to see him taking an interest in politics at such a young age.

17. On way home after three days at a conference, I discovered one of our son’s little red socks in my trouser pocket.

18. It was a lot easier when I was writing posts such as ‘7 thoughts from my 7th month as a parent’ 🙂 Anyway, I’ll see if I can keep going with these posts until our son turns two.

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a half as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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I have added this post the following parent blogger link-ups:

Being a Scottish Dad

On 18th September 2014, could be an historic day for Scotland as the country’s inhabitants are today voting in a referendum that could result in Scotland becoming independent from the United Kingdom. As a Scot who now lives in Wales, I’ve been asked about how this vote will affect by relationship with the country in which I was born and brought up. Indeed, I’ve been interviewed about this matter in Welsh on Radio Cymru and on television channel S4C.

Ultimately, I don’t think that the result of the referendum will have a major impact on how I see Scotland. It will always be the country where I was born and brought up and I am sure that I’ll always enjoy returning there. As I have lived outside of Scotland since 1998 and got married and become a dad in Wales, our son is likely to have a very different relationship with Scotland to the one I have. To get a flavour of what Scotland means to me as a parent, here are some blog posts that I have written about being from Scotland and sharing Scottish culture with our son:

First family trip to Scotland This summer, we went to Scotland as a family for the first time. In this post, I explain what it was liked visiting places that had been part of my own childhood.

Will our son like haggis? Read this post to find out about vegetarian haggis and what it means to me as a Scot living outside of Wales and what it symbolizes.

A Scottish dad’s thoughts about St. Andrew’s Day I wrote this post to coincide with St. Andrew’s Day (30th November) last year and discuss my own relationship with haggis.

Seamus Heaney, haggis and Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau Shortly after the death of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, I wrote this post in which I discussed having Irish roots, growing up

Have you ever been to Scotland? What sorts of traditions from your childhood do you try to share with your kids? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

I’ve added this post to the following parenting blog link-ups:

Moving house with a toddler

Due to moving house, I’ve taken a bit of a break from blogging recently. Now that we’ve been in our new place for just over two weeks, we’re feeling settled in our new abode even if we haven’t quite finished the unpacking yet. Our son seems to be enjoying having a bit more space inside and out in which to run around and appears to be fascinated by our garden shed.

In years to come, I’m not sure what – if anything – our son’s going to remember of the house that we recently moved out of. It’ll always  be a special place for my wife and me as it’s where we got engaged and also the place we took our son home to after he left hospital. It may well be that our son will only really become familiar with our old house through photos that we show him in coming years rather than memories of what it was like.

We’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks surrounded by boxes. First of all, we spent a lot of time packing things up at our house and then we had to unpack them all at our new house. Our son seemed to like playing in the boxes and even played a small role in helping with the packing. Preparing for the move was made a lot easier thanks to several of our friends looking after our son or taking him out while we got on with tidying up our old house.

Think we’ve packed everything, but where’s our son gone?

Our son can be quite helpful around the house at times and often likes nothing more than to walk around with a little brush and sweep the floor. As the picture below shows, he’s also been kind enough to help me tidy my office as well recently.

One of the best things about being in a new house is having more space for our son to get his toys out. At our last place, the living room space could feel quite small when he had his ball pool out. Now, we can keep the ball pool out in our living room and not worry about it getting in the way. That said, he has recently been spending a bit of time walking around our new living room with a measuring tape as if he has some grand plans to make a few changes.

It’s also great to have larger garden where our son is able to run around and have fun in the open air. He’s recently had a lot of fun feeding corn to our two chickens Dorothy and Myfanwy. Until recently, he’d normally drop the corn just outside the chicken run but just this weekend he’s actually managed to start throwing the corn into the run. Our two chickens are grateful for this improved standard of catering provision.

For the first few nights after we moved, our son seemed to sleep less well than normal. This involved a triple whammy of not going to bed as early as normal, waking up during the night and getting up really early. Part of this might have been due to teething or having recently caught chicken pox (…not sure whether Dorothy or Myfanwy is to blame). He’s now sleeping a lot more and seems to be quite happy despite having chicken pox. We’ve got our fingers crossed that everything will be back to normal soon as we get used to life in our new house.

Have you ever moved house with your kids? Do you remember moving house when you were a child? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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17 thoughts from my 17th month as a parent

It’s time for another monthly list of thoughts about parenthood. This month’s compilation covers topics such as food, children’s television and monkey impressions.

1. Our son is currently conducting an experiment. He’s trying to find out how many blueberries he needs to eat before he turns into a blueberry himself.

2. Today I got slightly annoyed while watching a television programme for kids as a shape singing ‘I am a rectangle’ was clearly a cuboid. I tried to explain this to our son, but I’m not sure if he understood.

3. I think it’ll probably be a few years before my son and I have problems telling our shoes apart.

4. 16 month old son has been walking around front room touching his nose and going ‘beep’ recently.

5. My son and I recently managed to keep ourselves entertained for about 20 minutes just by throwing a green sock at each other. It was a very enjoyable 20 minutes.

6. Our son’s been getting to know our two chickens a bit better recently and enjoys collecting the eggs from the chicken house (see picture below).

7. I think our son had even more fun running around a furniture shop recently than he did last time we took him to a soft play centre. I think we’ve now discovered a new local free outing option for families for toddlers. Local parents – let’s try to not all go to the same shop at the same time, OK? 🙂

8. Despite being 17 months old, our son still hasn’t worked out that it’s best not to try to eat porridge using his hands.

9. I really don’t want to be an overly competitive dad but I recently convincingly beat a five year old in a game of ‘Guess Who’ despite trying my best to lose.

10. Our son has a lot of bath toys, but his favourite one at the moment is a light blue plastic spoon.

11. We’ve cut our son’s fringe twice but he hasn’t had a proper haircut yet and his hair is getting quite long at the back. Given that he has quite a few tie-dyed baby grows, he could soon end up looking like an early 1990s Andre Agassi.

12. One of our son’s favourite things at the moment is climbing up steps. Sometimes he puts on his frog trousers and hops all the way from the bottom step to the top step.

13. Our son is getting good at copying animal noises and I had a real proud dad moment when he copied my chimpanzee impression.

14. Working at home is a lot harder than it used to be now that our son is getting so active. His new tactic is to start putting his toys on the table next to me when I’m busily working away. He recently tried to distract me with a knitted dinosaur while I was in the middle of marking a dissertation.

15. I have now decided to put 50p in our son’s money box any time that I swear while he is within earshot. I hope that this doesn’t make him rich and that he doesn’t try to get me to swear in order to receive more money from me.

16. Our son recently got really excited about a new dustpan and brush that we bought. Goodness knows what he’ll do if we get a new hoover.

17. It’s not just the dustpan and brush that our son’s fascinated by, it’s also our paintbrush and paint rollers. We’re going to be painting the front of our house soon, so maybe he’ll help us out 🙂

What do you mean I’m too young to be allowed to help paint the house?

What do you think of this post and what do you remember from your first year and a half as a parent? Please feel free to share your views in the comments section below or on the ‘Dad’s The Way I Like It’ pages on Facebook or Google+.

Remember that you can also subscribe to this blog by entering your e-mail address in the box on the right of the screen and also follow this blog via BlogLovin. There’s also now a Pinterest board for this blog as well, so please feel free to pin this post if you’ve enjoyed reading it.

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