Embarrassment.

That’s taking your baby daughter’s sweater off at your Literary Friend's place to discover she’s wearing a shirt that says “Daddys Princess”.

I could tell by my friend's gasp that they were quite shocked.

I wanted to crawl under a couch pillow and hide.

Goddamn Chinese sweat shop workers!

You’d think they could get a little thing like an apostrophe right.

D-Girl: “What doing, daddy?”

D-Man: “I’m putting my tools away, honey.”

D-Missus: “Can’t you be a bit more imaginative? Pretend you’re doing something else.”

D-Man: “OK. I’m stripping my gun down, in preparation for an assassination attempt on the head of Shell Oil”.

D-Girl: “Me help, daddy?”

D-Man: “That’s my girl.”

D-Girl (aged 2yrs 9months) is going through this cute phase where she walks around looking at her palm and pretending she has a pet spider. She strokes it. Plays with it. Sings it songs. Bathes it.
Puts it in her mouth. Chews.

Today she was walking around, chatting away to her hand.
I asked her how her spider was. She informed me that she wasn’t holding a spider. That she was in fact holding a hippopotamus.

I pointed out that perhaps a hippopotamus was a little big to fit in the palm of her hand.

To which she sighed, rolled her eyes and replied: “It’s a baby hippo.”
And walked away.

D’uh.

Silly daddy.

It’s a great relief that D-Girl is now pretty much day-toilet trained.

Although I have discovered there is a down side to this development.

Like seconds after I’ve sat down on the throne, only to have D-Girl come in and go “Hurry up, daddy – my turn!”

D-Man’s next house is d-finitely having two bathrooms.

Note the previous use of the words “pretty” and “much”.

I was having a bath with my two girls tonight, when…

D-Girl: “I go wees, daddy.”
Daddy-Man: “Gone? Or want to go?”
D-Girl: “Gone.”
Daddy-Man: “Oh. Christ. Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”

Still could be worse.

You know what I mean.

Freak out.

You know how it gets quiet sometimes, like when the birds and tigers disappear right before a tsunami or meteor strike?

That’s how it gets around home sometimes. And you know D-Girl is up to something.

It was suspiciously quiet, so I went monkey hunting.

I eventually found her hiding in a cupboard, eating cough lollies, which she got from God knows where.

Which, as you can imagine, freaked me out.

What if she’d gotten her hands on something more serious?

What if she’d instead found the heroin and mistakenly thought it was cocaine?

Try explaining that to the authorities.