Being a dad in the house

Dear Dave,

Thanks for the sympathy over the home improvements. The kitchen should be finished any day now, though.

Probably.

Bear in mind that the foreman who told me this also said he'd have some guys round here first thing last Friday and they didn't show until half-past two. Yesterday he promised to arrive at lunchtime but failed to mention the other two workmen handily scheduled to turn up three hours earlier in the ten minutes I absolutely had to be out of the house in order to take the kids to school.

As such, I'm not exactly going to hold my breath until the work is completed.

In the meantime, we're all surviving being cooped up in the lounge with piles of displaced oven dishes. For now at least. Who will drive who mad first? I think it may actually have become a competition.

Example:

What do you call it when you tip out a skip full of uncooked, impoverished entrances?

A poor, raw door pour.

All those words have the same 'or' sound for me. They all rhyme. For Sarah, none of them do. The kids are somewhere in between. Arguing over pronunciation kept us busy for a while.

Yes, we're definitely losing it.

That said, I did get a bit of break on Saturday. Sarah got the kids' breakfast while I slept in and then I took Marie to a birthday party for one of her friends. I got to sit and chat to adults while she amused herself on the softplay. Then, in the afternoon, I put up shelves while Sarah looked after the children. I was still busy at teatime, so we ordered pizza. By the time I was finished, Marie was already in bed.

It was an unusual day. Having the kids around but not being in charge of them (or even really seeing them much) was odd. It was different from the times Sarah has taken the kids away for the weekend in order to give me a rest. Those occasions have been more like a brief return to the days before parenthood and I've slipped happily into the armchair with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. On Saturday, however, we were all living our normal lives but the children weren't my problem. In ten years of being a housedad, this has almost never happened before. I had to deal with them for half an hour here or there but mostly I got to watch them pass by every so often and overhear their squabbling whenever an album ended on my iPod.

Strangely, I kind of missed them.

I suppose I got a taste of what many dads must experience on a regular basis. I didn't think much of it.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

PS As I suspected, Marie has succumbed to Lewis' persuasion and decided to become vegetarian too. I wouldn't have cared but she made up her mind during her friend's party. Suddenly she wouldn't eat the cocktail sausages. Half the sandwiches were out of the question too because they contained meat. Then she turned up her nose at the rest of the sandwiches because they had bread in. The nachos were refused for being too crunchy. She wouldn't touch the apple for no other reason I could make out than that she was on a roll by then.

She had to make do with a slice of pizza and some raisins.

Shortly afterwards, one of the helpers at the venue arrived with a tray heaped with bowls of ice-cream. She got the kids to shout how much they wanted it. There was much leaping and screaming from every child but one. For some reason, the helper chose to serve that child first.

"I don't like ice-cream," said Marie grumpily.

The helper tried to give her some anyway.

"Are you sure you don't want any? I'll put it here and..."

"I DON'T LIKE ice-cream."

Marie can be awkward and goes through all sorts of phases and fads but she's not kidding when it comes to ice-cream. She's tried it plenty of times and has always hated it. I had to step in. "She really doesn't like it."

The helper looked blank. Encountering a child who didn't like ice-cream was clearly a first for her. After serving the other kids, she wandered off in a bemused fashion with the spare bowl, muttering to herself.

Thankfully, if there's one thing I can cope with after ten years of being a housedad, it's other peoples' confusion. I just shrugged and ate Marie's sandwiches.

Catering for everyone

Dear Dave,

Yeah, I know how you feel. With children in the house, trying to come up with a menu that keeps everyone happy can be difficult. The only way I think I could manage it would be to serve pizza and fish fingers every day (including for breakfast).

I used to dream of the day I could make one big vat of food, ladle it out onto five little plastic trays and then sit down for a traditional family meal in front of the TV. No fussing over individual dietary foibles, no cooking one meal for the kids and another for the adults, no having to wash up two or three sets of pots. I've given up on the whole idea, though. For starters, Sarah doesn't get home in time to eat with the kids most days. Rather than reheat the childrens' left-overs, I might as well make something fresh when she gets home. That way, we're not restricted to what the kids like. This is quite significant because Fraser won't eat anything with sauce and Marie won't eat anything she hasn't had before. Options that please everyone are limited.

Things have actually got a little more tricky in the last few days, thanks to a computer game called Harvest Moon which Lewis has been playing. In it, he gets to own a little patch of land, cultivate it, raise livestock and generally work hard in order to own a slightly bigger patch of land. I thought it would appeal to his latent farmer genes from my side of the family and help him understand his heritage. I expected him to learn the cardinal rules of agriculture:

1. Nothing tastes right without a sprinkling of pesticide.
2. Anything can be fixed with a combination of duct tape and binder twine.
3. Never stand directly behind a cow. Ever.

This hasn't come to pass, however. In the game, the creatures are cute and fluffy. The sheep produce wool, the cows output milk and the chickens lay eggs. There's no mention of hotpot, steak or drumsticks. Having his own menagerie of farmyard animals has turned him vegetarian.

Eating bacon in the house has become something of an ordeal. It's much harder to enjoy it with a mournful eight-year-old looking on, sorrowfully muttering, "Poor pig..."

This now means there's rather a wide range of attitudes to meat in the family. Lewis is at one end of the scale but Sarah has already drastically cut down on her intake in order to reduce her carbon footprint. Marie, meanwhile, has never really liked meat much anyway. She'll eat sausages and the odd bit of sliced ham but that's about it. I, on the other hand, grew up on a cattle farm. I don't eat as much meat as I used to but I'm not going to say no if I'm offered something succulent - even if I once knew its name and used to watch it walk past the lounge window on a regular basis. Lastly, Fraser will eat pretty much any dead animal as long as it's roasted and I tell him it's chicken.

The chances of me finding anything that everyone in my family will eat actually seem to be going down. Often, I have to make five different variations of a meal. Otherwise, we'd end up living on nothing but fresh fruit, pizza and cheese sandwiches. (Although I should point out, Sarah's cheese sandwich would include salad, Fraser's would have the cheese on the outside and Marie's wouldn't have cheese at all. For myself, I'd be left with the crusts and whatever was in the fridge that needed using up. Yogurt butties, anyone?)

Never mind. At least everyone still eats fish fingers. Apparently they don't really count as meat...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

Another reason to walk

Dear Dave,

We don't have a car. We live in the middle of a city and don't like driving, so there's no point really. The closest guaranteed parking space to most places we want to go is our own driveway. We might get soaked walking to the sports centre if it's raining but when we get there, we've had enough exercise to allow us to turn around and come straight home - thus saving both time and money. We can also look annoyingly smug on any occasion someone starts talking about carbon footprints.

Not having a car does reduce out shopping options, however. When buying groceries, I like to go in person to squeeze the produce and spot the weekly bargains. Whenever I've tried ordering food online, I've found it time-consuming, frustrating and strangely unsatisfactory. This means that, without a car, I'm limited to a selection of small, local supermarkets. They stock everything we could possibly need but their merchandise isn't hugely varied. Pasta comes in three shapes, two sizes of packet and one colour. The main choice involved with fish is whether it's coated in batter or breadcrumbs. Pears are available in two varieties - 'Take It' or 'Leave It'.

That said, having grown up on a diet of the sort of dubious stew reserved for those families with a cattle herd and a desire to cut down on veterinary bills, I'm not too fussed. Besides, even after fifteen years of living in town, having any shops at all within walking distance is still something of a novelty.

I did have a glimpse of how much more is possible the other day, though. Since the school holidays have been dragging on a while now, I made an effort to get the kids out of the house. I decided we'd go for a long hike and investigate the huge superstore that lies just beyond the normal reaches of our travels.

The children weren't thrilled at the prospect, complaining for most of the way. It was too hot and too far. Why were we going anyway? Where was it? What did we need? Why couldn't I go on my own once Mummy was home? What was...?

All at once the whining stopped. It was a long time since we'd been and, as we entered, we were transfixed. It wasn't merely huge, it was enormous - a veritable cathedral of consumerism. The aisles were so long that the curvature of the Earth meant we couldn't see the far ends. Every inch was crammed with brightly coloured packets of tastiness. There were 503 types of pasta and I couldn't find the pears amongst all the tubs of fruits so exotic that I didn't know their names.

There was choice beyond the bounds of my imagination.

Oh, and as an added bonus, every so often the stacks of delicious treats were interrupted by a shelf of toys or electronics.

We wanted to buy everything. It was like we'd peeked from behind the Iron Curtain and found ourselves staring into the window of McDonald's. Ronald himself was beckoning to us, holding out a heaped tray of Big Macs and the biggest cup of fizzy nectar we'd ever seen...

I couldn't help wishing the store was closer to home or perhaps even that we had a car. Then I could have stocked up any time on any number of delicacies from jellied Bolivian fruit bats to spiced Malaysian crab bites. My eyes glazed over and I stumbled forward like a zombie, mesmerised by the bounty laid before me.

Then I stopped. For some reason, I wasn't going anywhere. I looked down. My basket was already too full to lift. The kids had taken advantage of my distraction to pile the thing high with sweets, chocolate biscuits and small, plastic effigies of Dora the Explorer.

I was suddenly very glad we don't have a car. I've always thought that the maintenance costs and lack of exercise would make me poor and fat. I was wrong. It's the amount of luxury shopping we could fit in the boot that would do it. Witnessing the basket at my feet made me see the truth of that. I didn't dare think what value of fattening foodstuffs we could have packed into a trolley and then stuffed into the back of a people carrier.

I forced the children to return all their finds to the shelves and we settled on a single bag of pear-flavoured spaghetti (in breadcrumbs) as a souvenir of our trip. Then we walked home.

It rained...

...but I didn't get wet. The water merely evaporated the moment it touched my happy, righteous glow...

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.

I can make you thinner

Dear Dave,

It's that time again.

I've locked away the biscuits, put the crisps out of reach and stopped buying chocolate.

Yep, my belly's going to pot and I need to act now. I've reached that age. The age where I can no longer just shovel any old lump of sugar-coated deep-fried lard into my mouth and hope to get away with it. I need to resist the siren call of the chocolate digestives. I wouldn't be the first man I know to wake up one morning only to discover they were fat and bald.

Having said that, I'm actually quite looking forward to the going bald bit. Obviously there will be some initial comb-over uncertainty. Is it there or isn't it? Then enough will fall out, the trauma will pass and I'll shave off what's left. I'll be able to buy some funky hats. No more shampoo and conditioner each morning - just a quick polish and I'll be away. I could even grow a beard and pretend my head's on upside down.

Yes, bald I can live with. Fat, not really. It's not so much my overall weight it's just the feeling that I'm developing jowls that might quickly grow and merge to become a third chin. It's not worth thinking about. You may even not be thinking about it. You're probably munching away on some deep-fried sugar-enhanced lard as you read this, secure in the knowledge that you're that little bit younger than me. Still, I'm going to give you my top tips for not turning into the dad from Family Guy anyway. One day you will thank me - the day you wake up merely bald.

Essentially, the secret to losing weight is to eat less and exercise more. It's not much of a secret really - it's startlingly obvious. Unfortunately, it's also not much fun. If anyone else reckons they have a better secret, however, then chances are that it's expensive, nonsense or bad for you in the long term. It may even be all three.

I don't know about you, but I'm running round the place constantly already. I don't have time or energy to exercise more. This only leaves eating less.

I can't be bothered to count calories. My theory is to eat the same food as always at meals but have smaller portions, while cutting out the biscuits, chocolate and cake inbetween. (Actually, it's Sarah's theory but it's a good one so I'm stealing it). The major downside to this theory is feeling a bit hungry most of the time. I can't imagine it's possible to lose weight without feeling hungry most of the time, though. Drat.

Cutting out lots of things entirely is much easier to monitor than allowing yourself a little bit of everything. Don't cut out all the treats, however. I know from experience that this just isn't sustainable. Going cold-turkey on chocolate, biscuits, crisps, cake, Sam's left-over sandwiches, doughnuts AND beer at the same time is too much to ask of your body and sanity. Keep something to look forward to. (Hint: Beer). By the way, it's worth cutting out the left-overs even if you're not trying to control your weight. Sam's two-and-a-half. What are the chances of him not having a stomach bug or a minor cold? Anything he's touched or breathed on is a potential biohazard. Incinerate those sandwiches and bury the remains.

Don't go crazy on the dieting. Eating nothing but watermelon for a month is all very well but it's not going to help maintain your new weight once you get there. I know I'd spend the entire month dreaming of the big binge I could have once it was over. Eating the same but a little healthier and a little less is the way to go. It's slow, though. (But even minimal exercise to give some semblance of muscle tone to my sagging stomach can make it look like things are progressing faster).

Oh, and don't drink coffee as a distraction from feeling hungry. That never goes well...

There are, of course, other ways to lose weight. The most effective in my experience is to catch chickenpox. I lost a stone in ten days by that method a couple of years ago. This is, however, a one-shot deal and has the unfortunate side-effect of causing you to shed scabs for a couple of weeks afterwards. The extra hoovering involved is a definite disincentive.

Another alternative is to not sleep. Once the new baby arrives this will almost certainly be your default method for keeping your jeans loose. The extra calories you'll need to stay awake all night will mean you'll be able to eat a steady diet of Mars bars, cake and Sugar Puffs without piling on the pounds. The poor nutrition won't be awfully good for your general health but you'll be too busy hallucinating to care.

Make the most of it.

Yours in a woman's world,

Ed.