Six months ago we were told she was sharing the womb with a twin. This twin, tragically, didn’t have all the bits needed for life. It was a thing devoid of life, never having a chance. But Emily, unwittingly, was trying to help anyway. Her heart was supplying her twin with blood.

Her heart was doing the job of two, sapping her own life. There was every chance it would kill her.

Today, I know, I should be incredibly thankful.

Thankful to all the professional people who caught us and carried us to this point. Thankful to the amazing technologies that made it possible for Emily to survive and thrive. Thankful to an incredible wife who coped with not only with the emotional stresses of a difficult pregnancy but all the physical ones too.

How lucky am I?

This lucky…

There was one last large-ish worry left over from the complications with the acardiac twin; after we had the operation to remove the blood supply from the parasite twin, it was recommended that we get an MRI done on the live twin to check that there hadn’t been any brain damage caused by the operation.

It was a small likelihood, but it still played on our minds, especially as we had to wait several weeks for the scan, which could only be done at a hospital in Sheffield that specialises in the more sensitive scans required to capture images of a baby’s brain while it’s still in the womb.

It was a bit of a trek up to Sheffield, but the MRI was a relatively untaxing affair, and the results were available in no time at all. They confirmed what we’d desperately hoped: no visible brain damage.

It wasn’t until we’d got that news that we really realised how much it had been weighing on our minds, and the minds of parents and family.

The consultant conducting the scan was amazingly helpful and informative, he even emailed us some of the scans he’d taken, which I’d like to share.

In this first picture you can see the baby’s brain. It’s not yet begun to develop “folds”, but the consultant could see small wrinkles beginning to appear.

Different materials show as different shades. Liquids like the liquid in the eyeball shown as white, and harder materials like the lens of the eye show as black, hence the Simpsons-esque appearance of the eye in this pic!

This scan from a different angle clearly shows the placenta. At the bottom of the image, pressed against the baby’s back, you can see what remains of the failed twin, now slowly fading and being re-absorbed.

Amazingly, the MRI didn’t just take stills. Here’s a short video of our tiny baby, dancing in the womb.

I really shouldn’t think of you as human. But I do. I am a human. And irrationality is hard-wired. The “what if” thoughts. What if the bundle of cells had successfully split into two people? What if in 6 months time I was the proud father of twins? How would that have felt?

I would have loved you.

But, competing with those thoughts in my head are the cold logical thoughts that I know I should trust. You were never a “you”. You were an it. No more human than a tumour. A malignant parasite that was threatening to harm my unborn child. I watched you on the screen, saw you kick, making me simultaneously amazed and sick to my stomach. This thing with no life… mocking life. Making me see life where there was none. Making me feel guilty for wanting you gone.

I would have loved the child you never could be. I hated the thing you were.

Yesterday I sat and watched on a screen as a thin needle pierced the tissue giving blood to the parasite and steadily burn it into oblivion.

For a moment, a brief horrible moment, it felt like we were killing you.

We weren’t, we weren’t killing anything. The thing on the screen was never alive, we were just allowing it to stop growing.

The parasite I hated so much is no longer a threat. There’s a very good chance now that the pregnancy will proceed as normal and the healthy baby will be born at term.

I although I thought I’d never get to meet you, in a strange way I will. Your identical twin will have your face, your smile, your laugh.

And although you never existed, we will still mourn you. Because we’re irrational humans, and that’s what we do.

But in the big journey of life I’ve felt like I’ve been kept in a holding pattern. This is mainly due to the situation we found ourselves in of letting out two properties and renting ourselves. Jane and I both own 1-bedroom places which we were unable to sell due to the bottom falling out of the market three years ago, so we ended up renting out so that we could afford to rent a place big enough to take the three of us.

We thought, perhaps naively, that eventually we’d save a bit of money and eventually be able to afford to stop letting out our properties and sell them. But the trouble with juggling 3 properties is that there’s always something going wrong with at least one of them. We were exposed to expenses from all directions.

So, at the start of the year, I realised that enough was enough. The only way we were ever going to have our own house was to grasp the nettle and put our houses back on the market again. This meant risking losing both tenants and losing the income that was paying our own rent. But we decided it was now or never. If the worst came to the worst, we’d end up having to live in one of the properties we owned, squeezing a 3-person family into a one-bedroom flat.

The last time I put my house on the market I got no interest whatsoever. Hardly anyone even viewed it. I wasn’t expecting much more now.

Within a week of me putting my house on the market, amazingly, we’d found a buyer. We’re not at the stage of exchanging contracts yet, but things are really looking good.

Today we put in an offer on a brand new house being built in an ideal spot for us, and it was accepted within the afternoon.

Things are really starting to move quickly. It makes me wonder why everything seemed so hard before. It also makes me wonder if everything is too good to be true. I’ve not stopped worrying just yet.

But, really, things need to move a bit quickly, because in September this person turns up…

That scan was from Tuesday. The house offer was on Monday and we paid our deposit today… so yeah, busy week!

We took him to see his grandmother today. While I was carrying him into her kitchen, he looked over my shoulder and waved his head from side to side, going “ttich, ttitch”.

I followed his line of sight and found he was looking at a clock on the kitchen wall. He’s always been fascinated by clocks, particularly the one in his other grandma’s front room. She always holds him up to it to let him see it chime, and makes a “tick tock” sound while waving her head from side to side. Sometimes Tom vaguely mimicked this, but I always assumed he was just copying his grandma. But, amazingly (to me) that’s now embedded in his little synapses: when you see a clock you wobble your head and go “tick tock”.

What’s even more amazing (to me) is that the clock in one grandma’s front room is nothing like the one in his other grandma’s kitchen. The kitchen one is shaped like a fat bird, with large out-of-shape numbers and spindly legs. The other one is an austere wall clock with a plain white face and roman numerals. In the family tree of clockness, they’re occupying opposite corners, and don’t really talk much other than at weddings and funerals.

In Toms head though, they’ve been successfully grouped and classified as “things you go ‘tick tock’ at”.

As if to prove the point today, Tom also added Mah-mahs to his repertoire of classified objects. Mah-mahs are the big birds you get in ponds and feed bread too. They’re called Mah-mahs because that’s the sound they make. You might think they go “quack quack”, but if you listen as Tom has, you’ll realise they really go “mah mah”.

We took him to a duck pond today, and Tom started mimicking the sound they made as the ducks rushed to see us. It was difficult to tell if he was just making the sound because he was hearing it. So, when we got him home I showed him some pictures of ducks, and sure enough, they were Mah-mahs.

And the pictures of clocks were “tick tocks”, together with the essential wobbly head.

This probably sounds like an over-enthusiastic dad marvelling at some tiny thing that every single baby does. In a way, I suppose it is. This isn’t Tom even speaking really, in that he’s not repeating “proper” words or sentences.

But he is moving towards speech, inside his bonce are now cells that can abstractly link “a thing that looks like a clock” with a combination of noise and action.

I am an over-enthusiastic dad marvelling at each new little thing. But if that’s not marvellous, then I don’t know what is.

Actually, it’s okay to listen to advice from other fathers, as long as you remember that:

• 75% of it won’t be relevant to your situation.
• 20% of it they will have made up just to frighten you.
• 5% of it will be true, and relevant, but so scary you’re better off not knowing until it happens.

Definitely, whatever you do, don’t buy a book on fatherhood. They’re just not worth the stress.

My wife went through a spate of buying books about pregnancy and motherhood. She found them reassuring, because she’s one of these people who takes comfort in knowing as much as possible about what to expect and what can go wrong. I’m of the opposite camp. The Ignorance is Bliss camp.

(Actually we don’t really have a camp, it’s more of a muddy hole in the ground covered in a tarp. None of us fancied going to the lecture about making proper camps.)

The trouble with books about parenthood is the information they impart basically falls into two categories: Things That Should Happen, and Things That Shouldn’t Happen. The first category is stuff like “crawling, talking, breathing”, the latter stuff like “turning green, smoking, head revolving Exorcist stylee.”

“By month eight,” a parenting book cheerfully announces, “your child should be reading small books of French poetry, occasionally looking up to exclaim sagely ‘ah! so true!’ and gaze wistfully out of a window”.

I look over at my son (who’s engaged with opening and closing the wardrobe door, each time with a yelp of surprise that, even after the 500th repetition, it still contains The Inside of a Wardrobe) and feel more than a little like a failed parent.

They do say in the book that these developmental milestones are just for the “average” baby. But I don’t want to be told that my son is below average in anything! It just makes me feel bad.

The other problem with reading the milestones is that, for me, they totally ruin all the surprises. I want to be totally amazed every time my son does some little new thing, I don’t want spoilers.

Then under the “Things Your Child Shouldn’t Be Doing”, the books delight in doing stuff like listing the symptoms of all the myriad rare genetic diseases you should be looking out for. This merely induces in me a state of hypochondria by proxy… what if that mark above his eye isn’t a scratch, but the first signs of the onset of a horrible skin wasting syndrome named after the only two people who ever had it?!

It’s all rather upsetting, and I’d much rather be safe back in my muddy hole under the tarp.

Actually, I’d much rather be totally clueless, but handily have a wife who’s read all the books and knows pretty much exactly what to do. Which luckily is what I have. Ignorance with instant knowledge on tap, that’s true bliss.

The trouble is, once you actually have a child, you realise that you don’t have much of a chance to sit back in rapt wonder as your progeny’s intelligence unfurls before your eyes. You’re too busy at the coal face, helping, teaching (or at least trying to) and cleaning up the mess afterwards. Great leaps in understanding either pass too quickly to catch, or too slowly to notice.

The only real way you notice how things have changed is when you take your child’s current intelligence and abilities for granted, and then they suddenly and effortlessly exceed them.

Take the other day, when Tom learned about the Persistence of Bananas.

Little babies live in the naked now. As far as they’re concerned, things that happened then have nothing to do with what’s happening now, or what’s going to happen. Objects only exist only while they’re within their field of vision, and after they’ve gone they might as well never have existed.

Until they develop the concept of persistence. The idea that things like mummies and daddies and balls and teddies can go away but still exist to return at a later time.

It’s hard to know when Tom started to twig this, but he has. Especially with bananas.

The other day I was feeding Tom a banana, taking small lumps off with my fingers for him to delicately take between thumb and forefinger and then indelicately shovel into his cake-hole. About half way through he lost interest and merrily crawled off to find something to creatively destroy (as is his wont). I assumed that he’d had his fill of bananery goodness for that day and, without much thought, polished the rest of it off.

A few minutes later he crawled back again, and clambered up my knees, grinning. I grinned back, and as I still had it in my hand, showed him the empty banana peel.

I’ve never seen anyone’s face sink so fast or so far. He immediately burst into tears. Even a fresh banana couldn’t console him.

My little boy had developed a Theory Regarding the Persistence of Bananas, and had confidently wandered off, safe in the knowledge that the banana would still exist. Only to return and cruelly be proved wrong. I felt really awful.

But, at the same time, amazed and proud. It was a tiny insight into a brand new mind forming. The most complex thing in the universe, tenaciously wishing itself into existence.

And there’ll always be more bananas.

While it would be nice to keep his banana-smeared mitts completely off my expensive gadgetry, but Tom is remarkably persistent, and I’m basically a big softy, so it seemed easiest to track down some iPhone apps that were suitable for well-supervised baby play. Here are some of the best that I’ve found.

Bab Bab Lite
The “lite” represents the free version, the full version has more features but I found the basic functionality of the lite version perfectly adequate.

Bab Bab basically turns your iPhone into a baby rattle. Three shapes float around the screen, and shaking the iPhone makes them fly around, sparking vibrant patterns and musical chimes when they collide. The shapes can also be moved with a finger, making it a fairly tactile experience as well.

Everything about Bab Bab is delightfully Japanese, from the cutesy graphics to the bamboo-like clunking sound of the shapes colliding. It’s too simple to be entertaining for very long, and I’d question the sanity of letting a baby really shake an iPhone which is liable to be bouncing off the pavement a few seconds later, but it’s a great way to distract a little baby for a short while.

Peek-a-Bouncer
This is the iPhone version of one of the many baby games available on the excellent Kneebouncers web site. The Kneebouncers are a collection of friendly looking animals, all rendered in saturated primary hues. The idea is very simple, touching the screen causes it to open like a pair of curtains, revealing a random Kneebouncer who says “peek-a-boo!”. Releasing the screen closes the window again.

Great for babies who like playing peek-a-boo, but I found that Tom had trouble holding the iPhone in a way that wasn’t touching the screen somewhere, thus keeping the window permanently open. It would be nicer if the app used the iPhone’s multi-touch functionality to work out what the babies hands were doing and react accordingly.

Talking Carl
This isn’t really an app designed for babies, and I actually downloaded it for my own amusement but found Tom loved it. Talking Carl repeats back everything you say to him, in a squeaky high-pitched voice. It took Tom a little while to work out what was going on, but now he has little shouting competitions with Carl, each trying to out-squeak the other. Tom also likes the way Carl reacts to being prodded with a finger; different animations such as Carl laughing when he’s tickled and crying “OW!” when you poke him in the eye.

The Little Red Hen
One of the first apps I downloaded for Tom’s sake, this little animated storybook is very well executed. With The Little Red Hen, you can choose to have the story read to you (by a cute-sounding little girl with an English accent) or you can read aloud yourself. Each page has a limited amount of interactivity; click the hen and she clucks, click the cat and she meows, etc. Nothing ground-breaking but just the right level of interactivity for a little baby to understand and enjoy.

Things tend to head towards entropy rather than away. It’s easy to make a pile of wires and broken plastic out of a Macintosh, but it’s a lot harder to make a Macintosh out of a pile of wires and broken plastic. Equally it’s quite hard to turn a McFlurry back into its constituent… whatever the hell it is they make McFlurries out of. But you get the idea.

Ancient peoples tended to take big scary natural processes and anthropomorphise them; make them human. Or, more accurately, make them gods.

Thus you had the Gods of Thunder, and the gods of the sun, and the seasons, and the floods. Each job given to a vaguely humanoid personage, so we could blame them for why everything is so crap all the time. The ancient equivalent of a cabinet minister.

The ancients didn’t anthropomorphise entropy, probably because entropy hadn’t been invented back then. They didn’t have McFlurries, for starters.

This is all going somewhere… I think I may have fathered the God of Entropy.

I realise that this is a major claim, but I have proof.

Ever since Tom has been able to move of his own accord, he’s shown a single-minded determination to destroy. Not just chew things, or bash things, or drop things on the floor. I understand that all babies do that. Tom seems to be far more dedicated.

If you make a pile of blocks, he’ll immediately knock it over. If you make a pile of blocks on the other side of the room, he’ll immediately crawl across just to knock it over. He doesn’t do it with a squeal of delight, or any kind of emotion at all. Just a certain grim workmanlike determination. Because it’s his job. Because he’s the God of Entropy.

He has a general dislike for anything being on top of another thing. Our coffee tables are now merely bare centerpieces to the piles of magazines, letters and books strewn around then.

Pass him a toy while he’s seated in a high chair, and within seconds he will have dropped it on the floor, gazing bemusedly over the side to see where it’s gone. Jane claims that he’s simply “testing gravity”, but I’m pretty sure even Issac Newton only lobbed a few things on the floor before he got the hang of it, and he bloody invented gravity!

Tom chucks stuff on the floor because gravity is his friend and weapon. Because he’s the God of Entropy.

Jane and I were admittedly never the tidiest people before Tom came along. But even we stare in wonder at the share scale of untidiness he can muster in a few short seconds of unfettered access to, say, a sock drawer.

It’s because he works at the untidiness. Because, I’m pretty sure now, he is the God of Entropy.

The worrying thing, and I hesitate to tell you this, is that entropy is insidious. Scientists tell us that you can always do work to restore order, but you can never quite get back to where you started. A little bit of energy is lost to entropy forever.

Eventually, entropy will destroy the universe.

I may have fathered the doom of Mankind.

He’s cute though.

I know people say that these early months and years fly by, but now, as they’re happening, it doesn’t seem that way. With a constantly changing and growing little boy to add texture and depth to the months, they seem to have stretched on forever. This is the longest year of my life. But in a good way.

What prompted me to think of this was earlier we sat watching videos from Tom’s early days and weeks. They’re strange and haunting, each cry and noise from that tiny Past Tom make me catch my breath, even though it was less than a year ago. He’s so helpless, so fragile. It’s hard to believe we went months with a little package that barely registered our existences, compared to the rocket-powered inquisitive squiggle monster we have now.

Seeing the videos of Past Tom is also almost heartbreaking. Strangely, I find myself seeing it like Tom is as he is now but frustratingly squeezed inside a smaller, less able, copy of his body. It’s hard not to think of it like Current Tom has always existed fully formed inside that little package, and has just been waiting for the brain and body he’s been put in to catch up and allow him to fully express his personality.

If that makes any sense whatsoever?

Of course, I know it doesn’t really work like that at all. And Current Tom is a mere fraction of the person he will become. But there’s sort of an innate Tom-ness about him. Like some Platonic ideal of what a Tom should be, which he’s slowly growing towards. I don’t have any idea, really, what it will be like, but I’ll know it when I see it.