My Little Classifier.

It's an hour before noon, when Bobby will wolf down his lunchtime cheese sandwich and some grapes. Just time for a little walk down the stream. So it's back pack on from a ground start, with no help, in one of those precarious manouevres that's one day going to go badly wrong and end up with Bobby on the ground, and out into the autumn sun. The stream springs from the limestone about half a mile away. The water is crystal clear and, to my mind, drinkable. I do drink it, in fact, though I fall just short of encouraging my children to, what with run-offs of fertiliser when it rains or the chance that some dog shit has found its way in further up. I love having this stream so close. Observing how it changes through the year. Paddling in the cold healing stuff. Watching Anna catch Miller's Thumbs and occasionally a tiny Brook Trout in the cheap nets I bought recently. Observing the growth of the weed, the changes in the stream bed, the sudden muddying after rain fall that clears within hours, and the rampant water cress. Seeking out larvae beneath the gravel. Dipping Bobby's feet in. Helping Grace back up on to the parapet of the bridge so that she can leap into my arms, and again, and again. How I love to share my fascination with all this with them, how I hope they'll be open to it and not turn away from my Daddy-in-teaching-mode tone that sometimes bores Anna. A pied wagtail - see its tail wagging up and down. A yellow wagtail. A heron. And what are those birds with long tails, a little flock chattering to each other as they skitter along the hedgerows by the stream? I just have to know so I shall follow them downstream, Bobby on my back, to get a better look. Later I'll google the description to see if I can find a name for them. Ah-ah, says Bobby, pointing and I see that he wants blackberries. This is our new ritual. I pick them and pass them over my shoulder to his waiting fingers. He scoffs them as fast as I can supply them. Black - Berries, I say slowly. Black. Berries. And amazingly, he echoes my sound as best he can - Ack Erries, he goes, though not as precisely as that. I thrill to his parroting instinct. That's three syllables, impressive for 15 months, but I would say that wouldn't I. Better still, as we move away from the black berries, he stops saying Ack Erries, which means he's linked the sounds with these shiny black buttons that pepper the hedgerows round here at this time of year. He is naming, so I return to pick more, so I can be thrilled at his achievement once more. Black Berries, I go, instinctively cementing the tag. Ack Erries, he goes. And so we go on calling to each other, but quite who is copying who now I'm not sure. Call, response. Name, echo. The mirroring of behaviour, but who, Mr Neurologist, is mirroring who? One, two, three, I chant ritually as we saunter home. Now counting has no meaning for him yet, it's just mimicking sounds as far as he's concerned. Later the idea of quantity will come. In the meantime I am reminded forcibly of my father-in-law's aphasia, and the effort he puts in to ponderously repeated one-two-threes in a tone that's unnervingly similar to the one I'm using with Bobby. And he replies, slowly, one-two-three, sounding just like his Grandpa. The difference being, one is an act of budding neural integration while the other is a heroic struggle to restore the stroke-ravaged neural pathways of his speech centre. Opposite ends of life.

Water Cress Soup

I LOVE stars, says Grace. And so do I. Tonight they're phenomenal. Moonless, with The Milky Way pushing through. How I love to share the wonder of all this with my children, to hold on to the naive awe that I felt when I was a boy, which has never really left me. Look at all the shapes, Grace says. Ah.. the shapes. Therein lies the story of our species, but not tonight darling. Earlier we went for a walk down the stream, to the little stone arched bridge where water cress grows. I've noticed that it flourishes twice a year, now being the second time. I take off my shoes and socks and step into the crystal clear water that I like to drink. Brook trout dart away at our approach. Grace paddles, gloriously fearless of the squidgy bank and the watery life that lives there. The cat has followed us so we have to make sure he knows when we're returning otherwise he'll get lost again and I'll have to come out and call for him at midnight. Cats get a bit silly when they're too far from base. This one does, anyway. It's dusk. The shadows are lengthening. Autumn cool. I grab a large bunch of water cress to make soup with later on. Before going back to the house we pick half a jug full of blackberries.

Tidiness

I'm not the tidiest of people. But lately, as I've tackled the flotsam of dirty plates, crumby breadboards, jammy knives, half opened cans of tomatoes, old teabags, and so on, and so on, that seem to wash up several times a day on our kitchen work surfaces, I've begun to understand tidy people a bit more. And as I've picked off the clutter, bit by sticky bit, and a semblance of space and order has momentarily returned before some child dumps a cereal bowl or the cat leaves muddy paw marks, I've even found myself wondering whether I'd develop OCD. If life was finally to become little more than a losing battle against dirt and chaos why not embrace the challenge and become obsessive about it. Wipe your feet. Don't spill it. Clear your things. Whose is that!? Give me order in the chaos. Give me back some control before I finally capitulate to the onslaught of stuff.

Intensity

Good or less good to experience the intensity of your young children's emotions? Sometimes may be better to gently switch off, but what may be missed or misunderstood in doing so?

A Wedding

Here are most of us - at Emily's wedding 22 August in Hawes in Wensleydale. I'm the one in the blue tie. I'll leave the rest to your imaginations. The fifth washing machine is hidden on his mother's shoulders. You can see all the others clearly.

Cold Turkey

Something wrong here. Leaving our bed regularly in the middle of the night when 15 month old still waking gorgeous boy comes in. Can't sleep with the snuffles and restlessness. Then Grace comes in an hour later - once or twice a week. Must sort this and soon. Given that he's not ill or hungry we should not let the screaming get to us. Make him aware of our presence close by but don't lift him up, they say. This is a four nighter. How do you even contemplate it when you're nodding off at the wheel and aching in every joint already? Cold Turkey, for all of us.

Where's North?

Walking back the through the village to our house Grace, 4, suddenly asks 'Where's North, Daddy?' I'm usually good at unravelling concepts for children but this one is hard. I wave my arm vaguely across the fields to our right where rain looks to be pressing in to ruin our day. 'Over there, where those clouds are. Do you see?' 'Can I go there?' 'Not really darling. It's a direction.' Hopeless. 'You remember how I told you that we live on a giant ball. Well when we walk up that ball we're going North.' Still no good.