Louise had her belated work Christmas Do last Thursday. After putting the boys to bed, I embraced having a few hours to myself and enjoyed something of a one-man party. I rustled up a hearty batch of oven food, chucked a couple of items of clothing on the floor without reprimand, and basked in the luxury of watching football on TV rather than hunched over my phone while The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills takes precedence. As far as I’m aware, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is not live and can be watched on any device at any time, but it has dominated our living room almost every evenin ..read more

We were on an early flight meaning 3.30 am alarms to peel two sleeping children out of their beds and bundle them into an Uber. Ordinarily, there is nothing good about being in a twilight taxi aged 35 but this was our first trip abroad since 2017 and I was in terrific spirits. Sadly, this was quelled as we arrived at Leeds Bradford Airport to see an unfathomably long, snaking queue to security. Joining us at the back, a man in a tracksuit was livid, swearing quite a lot, then saying he was willing to pay “up to £35” to jump to the front which seemed an oddly specific limit. He eventually storm ..read more

On New Year’s Eve, we went to York for a day out. The boys were delighted to be on a train, hammering on the windows and shouting with delight every time we went through a tunnel or saw a sheep. For our next family outing, I’m booking return tickets to Carlisle. No need to get off. After a short silence, Joshua slung out a question that caught me off guard. “Daddy?” “Yep?” “If a man marries another man, does he turn into a frog?” “Hmm… um, no.” “Why not?” “Don’t worry about it now, son. Hey, look at that sheep!” Perhaps I’ll print off the slides next time we have equality and diversity trainin ..read more

“I think we should take the guinea pigs to Kent for Christmas,” Louise said. “Absolutely not, that’s ridiculous.” “Oh, come on, they will get lonely.” “Can’t my parents just come over and clean them out?” “Andy, your dad is clearly scared of them.” It was difficult to argue with this. I went to Pets at Home and bought a travel box.  I am warming to the guinea pigs despite the fact I’m sneezing considerably more frequently since their arrival. I hadn’t, for some reason, considered that owning animals who spend their lives eating grass and rolling around in hay might trigger my hay fever.&n ..read more

Jacob wakes up at 5.30 am every day without fail. Could he not, at least, have the courtesy to push it back to 6 am? I can psychologically deal with a new day starting at 6 am. Anything earlier tends to result in a morning of intermittent visits to the biscuit tin, at least one avoidable disagreement with Louise and a decent amount of time spent sitting down with my head in my hands, sighing.  Ever the team, Louise and I take it in turns to do the sunrise shift. On my watch, this usually involves sitting Jacob in front of hypnotic YouTube videos of an anonymous hand playing with toy digge ..read more

While Jacob was asleep, I took Joshua on a creepy-crawly trail, which was good fun, although I felt I’d let him down by failing to find anything more interesting than some woodlice and a worm. As everyone opened their pots at the end, I found myself silently resentful of a muscular dad who had captured an enormous slug and two rare beetles for his son. “Why didn’t we find anything good, Daddy?” Joshua asked me. Given my recent form, I’m surprised I didn’t burst into tears. When we got back, Jacob was still asleep, but Louise had not taken the opportunity to have some downtime, instead arrangin ..read more

The morning before we set off, we took Joshua to his first swimming lesson. At the start, parents were instructed to move away from the pool and, as we watched him bobbing around with his armbands on, looking a bit frightened, I felt a lump in my throat and my eyes starting to dampen. This was the second time this happened in a week; over dinner a couple of nights previously, he’d said he was going to miss his friend who has moved to pre-school and I nearly sobbed into my fajitas. “Pathetic, isn’t it?” I said, trying to explain myself to the mum of a fellow swimmer. However, as I was saying it ..read more

A week after returning from Suffolk, we went to Filey for a long weekend with my family. I’m aware that going on two holidays in short succession is not deserving of sympathy but, with the crumbs from the boys’ A14 food fight still speckling the back seats, this did feel a bit soon to be reloading the car with travel cots, blackout blinds and buggies, and clambering back in. Hello, Dacia, my old friend. Obviously, Filey is nowhere near as far but the standstill traffic from near York was predictably soul-destroying and my attempts to kill time by watching football on my phone resulte ..read more

It takes a long time to drive from Leeds to Suffolk. A really long time. The first half was fine; Joshua and Jacob slept for most of it and a Spotify playlist I’d made weighted (arguably too heavily) towards early noughties RnB classics boosted the holiday mood. Post-Peterborough, though, was a different matter. The boys remained very much awake, playing a game which involved little more than throwing food at each other and screeching and Louise abruptly turned the radio off as I sang along to Nelly, indicating that she was no longer enjoying this particular Ride Wit’ Me. Inevitably, on the fi ..read more

It was our fourth wedding anniversary recently - our “Linen Anniversary.” Linen doesn’t scream out good times, does it? To me, it brings back harrowing memories of working in a hotel for minimum wage while a moustached manager berated my inability to fold bed sheets and suggested I should, perhaps, pursue an alternative career path. Anyway, undeterred by its underwhelming title, we celebrated in style, child-free. To kick things off, we went to Chevin Lodge for a spa morning where we had massages and, like an ageing alcoholic millionaire, I sauntered around wearing a sparkling white bathrobe ..read more