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.

So sing I to Tom as he bounces on my knee, smiling so broadly his eyes become little upside-down half-moons, like an extremely chuffed Pokémon.

It’s funny the fragments of nursery rhyme, stories and nonsense verse that resurface when you have a small baby to entertain. The Galloping Major song popped into my head unbidden after 30 or more years gathering dust in a brain cupboard marked “not really relevant to adult life”. Jane admitted she’d never heard it before, and looked up the lyrics on the internet. It turns out it was written in 1906 by someone called George Bastow, but Google couldn’t impart any further information.

We did find there were a lot more lyrics than I’d remembered. This is a general problem, most of the stories I stored away as a child are now badly degraded. For example, I dredged up and began telling Tom the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears last week, and suddenly realised it was missing the entire ending.

I got to the bit where Baby Bear had discovered Goldilocks still sleeping in his “just right” bed, and then drew a blank.

Did Goldilocks just run off? It seemed rather anti-climactic. The more realistic ending to a tale involving a small girl trapped in a room with two extremely large and powerful mammals (who are well known for violently protecting their young) didn’t seem particularly likely either, even for a children’s story.

But perhaps that’s why I’d blanked it out, the ending being too traumatic for my tiny mind.

I should really make the effort to look up the ending to the story, but really it doesn’t matter anyway. At this age, Tom would be quite happy if I read him the back of a cereal packet, as long as I did it with lots of silly noises.

So we’ll probably stick to the new ending. Intoned in a sing-song voice it works fine: “and Daddy bear swung his huge paw, tossing Goldilocks across the room like a rag-doll. Oh yes he did!! She crashed heavily into the bedroom wall – CRUNCH! – and landed in a lifeless heap on the floor. Poor Goldilocks! The bears then ate her – NOM NOM NOM – and all agreed it was a lot nicer than porridge any day! The end!”

Besides, rather than trying to remember ancient stories handed down for generations, I’ve found it a lot easier to recount tales that had a far greater impact on my young mind. The other day Tom really enjoyed the story of Luke Skywalker and the One Bear, Two Robots, and Alec Guinness.

In my version, Han shoots first.

You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson, wouldn’t you?

Thomas didn’t actually turn up until lunchtime on the day after that; and it had been, I can honestly say, a very long night.

Jane started the process of being induced on the Thursday morning. The drug they gave her didn’t do the trick, so she had to be put on a hormone drip in the evening. As this meant a night being constantly hooked up to machines and monitors, it basically threw out of the window any chance of the water birth that Jane would have liked. But, all along our guiding plan had been “whatever’s best for the baby”.

They encourage you these days to write a “birth plan” to tell the people involved how you’d like things to go. To my mind they’re pretty pointless, though. Either things are going swimmingly, in which case the mum’s in a position to dictate exactly how things should go without recourse to a written sheet, or there are complications, and it depends very much on what the complications are as to how they should be tackled.

Jane had an idea of a pre-printed flowchart that would allow you to describe what you wanted to happen in each eventuality, but as our midwife explained, there are so many eventualities that the flow chart would end up looking like a sea urchin trying to knit a map of the Underground. The flowchart, basically, is in the midwives’ heads, in the form of years of training and experience. The best birth plan is to say to the midwife “I want a healthy baby, and if at all possible a healthy mum too, what can YOU do to make that happen?”

Which is what we did, once things started departing from the script.

Jane was taken from the maternity ward to the delivery suite. Top tip: if you come into hospital to have a baby, never unpack your bags until the baby actually turns up. It’s not like a hotel, and the bed they give you when you check in isn’t yours until you check out. Half an hour after we arrived in the suite, the bags we’d left in the maternity ward arrived, all packed up again. Except whereas Jane had packed them with a sense of order, the nurses had packed them with merely a sense of urgency.

The contractions soon became so intense that Jane was in a great deal of pain, and although the gas and air was making her the life and soul of the party, it wasn’t helping with the pain itself. Jane asked for an epidural. She knew she was in for a marathon night, and didn’t want to greet the baby after hours of agony. I didn’t either.

The long night began. The hormone and epidural drips started to do their jobs. All we could do was wait, and try to sleep.

The steady thumping of the baby’s heartbeat was as gently lulling as a train slowly clacking over tracks, and equally disturbing when it suddenly stopped. The foetal heart monitor occasionally lost the signal, and while we knew this was because the baby had shifted inside, it was still worrying enough to jar me out of sleep each time.

Add to that the regular monitoring to measure Jane’s pulse, blood pressure, temperature, level of “block” (basically how far up her legs the epidural was working, measured by how hot a bag of ice felt at various points) and level of dilation; sleep was out of the question. It all became a rather surreal experience. Strangely, I kept having to remind myself why I was there, what the point of it all was.

I wandered the corridors of the hospital, which I know well from my day job but seemed strange and alien at night. For example, the staff-only canteen area (where I stopped for a cheaper bottle of coke) had changed from a light and convivial coffee lounge to a dark dormitory with the shadowy bodies of overworked junior doctors snoring on the couches.

By the morning Jane had dilated enough to enter the next stage: pushing.

The epidural meant that she wasn’t going to feel the pain so much, but it also meant she wouldn’t be getting the uncontrollable urge to push. The midwife explained that she’d have to learn to push.

She soon got the hang of it. Timed with each contraction, she began to push.

And push. For two hours.

The baby, despite Jane’s new-found skills, was refusing to move much. He “turned a corner”, according to the midwife, but he still had a long way to go.

Jane was exhausted and in a lot of pain, despite the epidural. An anaesthetist was sent for, and arrived full of the cocksure bravado that seems to be an essential personality trait for that career.

“So I hear that this baby is coming out of the sunroof?” he asked, smiling.

“Not necessarily!” said the midwife. But it felt like an unspoken truth had finally been said.

While the anaesthetist busied himself with the epidural drip, the surgeon arrived and had a brief feel around.

“I’m sorry, this baby isn’t coming out by itself. We need you to sign a release for a caesarian.”

Jane couldn’t sign fast enough.

Things suddenly got incredibly busy. I was sent to put on theatre blues and joined Jane under a tent in the operating theatre, the business end hidden from us both. A crowd of attendants concentrated on preparing things while the anaesthetist explained that if his knock-out juice had worked properly, Jane would feel nothing more than a sensation that someone was “doing the washing up” in her innards. If it hadn’t worked, then it might be a lot more painful and they’d have to knock her out.

Jane reported a pain like someone pressing hard on her pelvic bone. The local anaesthetic hadn’t worked. It was time for a general anaesthetic to put her under while the sunroof was opened. As my only job in the theatre was keeping Jane happy, I was surplus to requirements.

I was ushered back into the empty delivery room where we’d spent the night.

24 hours of tension, a sleepless night, worry, panic and stale adrenalin suddenly rolled over me, and my stiff upper lip deserted me somewhat. I noticed one thing through the tears: as we weren’t going to be using the room any more, someone had hastily packed our bloody bags again.

I sobbed. I knew things were going to be all right. Jane was in safe hands, the baby was healthy, he just needed to get out. Things were going to be okay, I told myself. I just didn’t want to listen.

I made a couple of calls to both grandmothers to let them know what was going on, which calmed me down a lot. After I hung up, there was a knock on the door. It was the midwife, with my son.

My beautiful, perfect son.

I held him in my arms and he opened his crystal clear eyes and looked, fleetingly, into mine. I’ll never forget that moment.

An hour of bonding later and we were reunited with mum, and for the first time ever, we were a family.

I love it when a plan comes together.

What they don’t tell you is that it’s all a load of bollocks. Jane’s waters broke about yesterday lunchtime, and she didn’t even twig. It wasn’t until about 23:30 that she returned from the bathroom saying “we need to go to the hospital”. I’ll spare you the gory details as to why we knew her waters had broken, suffice to say it would have all been decided a lot sooner if I’d have had a set of Pantone colour swatches for comparison purposes.

Very early this morning, the hospital confirmed that the waters had broken. So, I thought, the baby comes now, yeah?

No, apparently not. We got sent home with a explanatory leaftlet (it’s very hard to leave a hospital without an explanatory leaflet) and told to come back in two days, if the baby hadn’t decided to turn up of it’s own accord.

So, whatever happens, I’ll almost certainly be a dad by tomorrow night.

I think that fact will sink in in about… ten years.

People say “get all the sleep you can”. I’m not sure how that works. Can you store sleep in some kind of central reserve and call on it at a later date? If so, can I have some of the sleep I deposited as a teenager?

In another way, if life, work and common decency allowed it, I could happily lie in bed and sleep until the baby gets here. At least I’d feel committed to something.

I’m useless at the moment. I can’t engage at work, and feel a bit of a spare part at home now that more-or-less everything that needs to be done has been done. There’s a sort of end-of-term feel, but the teachers won’t tell anyone when the last day actually is.

Which is a shame, because I wanted to bring in a toy.

I just want this bit to be over so we can get on with the next bit.

I know I’m probably going to regret saying that.