Wednesday 5 November 2008

Daisy.

In the two years since I became a dad, I've shied away from writing much about Daisy. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I'm horribly aware of James Lileks. The man's a brilliant writer almost all the time, but becomes unutterably dreary the moment he starts to write about his no-doubt charming daughter. One must always remember that one's kids are less interesting to other people than one might hope.

The other reason, as all parents know, is that, when Daisy does anything entertaining enough to blog about, it usually leaves me too knackered to blog about it.

Yes, obviously that was the preamble to some anecdotes.

My dad and step-mum like to buy Daisy toys which play loud awful music, blaring out nursery rhymes with mangled lyrics, secure in the knowledge that the racket will happen two nations and a small sea away from their ears. Daisy's second birthday was no exception, and we've got a buggy with a noisy dashboard in our living room, shouting at us over the sound of Peppa Pig DVDs.

The other day, this device started sounding even stranger than usual. One of its songs was playing very slowly and sounding downright odd. Daisy listened to this for a few moments, looking at it seriously. Then she reached out, turned the thing off, and turned it on again.

Two years old, and she already knows to reboot. I'm so proud.

She's developed a taste for pistachios, and we have some in the house at the moment. When they're around and she knows it, she will not let us rest. Our job — our purpose in life — is to shell pistachios.

So Vic tries to sit down for a minute yesterday and Daisy shouts "Ta ta! Ta ta!" at her, which, as any parent knows, means "Would you please go to the kicthen and bring me some pistachios, Mum?" or, more accurately, "Yo! Bitch! Kitchen! Pistachios! Now!" So Vic gets up and walks towards the kitchen, but, it seems not quickly enough for young Miss Fuhrer, who decides to speed the whole process up by placing both hands on Vic's bum and pushing.

Yeah, we know our place.

Finally, this isn't so much funny as just plain odd. Daisy's been counting for months now — seems to be a little ahead of the game on that front. She started, surprisingly enough, with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; then decided that 4 was her favourite number (we suspect this is due to Teletubbies) and so stopped having anything to do with 1, 2, or 3; then, for ages, she became obsessed with the number sequence 4, 6, 9. She's only just recently returned to normal counting. It was 4, 6, 9, 4, 6, 9, 4, 6, 9 for months. If anyone reading has any ideas about the significance of this sequence, I'd be very interested to hear them.

No comments: