It was a traumatic moment in our household last week, when my wife's maternity leave came to an end. Due to the combined effects of winter and breastfeeding a voracious baby boy, Teresa hadn't been out of doors much for the past four months; and she looked like a hedgehog emerging from hibernation as she set out for the office, blinking in the harsh light and trying not to get killed crossing the road. I'd make a joke here about how prickly she was, but she's standing near me with a breadknife, so I won't.
I felt like I'd been hibernating myself. Later the same morning, I was loading the children into the car en route to the creche when I met a neighbour.
"This gets very complicated when you have two," I said to him. "Two?" said the neighbour, shocked. I don't know which of us was more embarrassed; and even allowing for the fact that he's a member of the same sex as me, and therefore could have attended the birth and still forgotten, it's possible we never got around to telling him. It's been that kind of winter.
The really traumatic bit about maternity leave ending, personally speaking, was that I was left in sole charge of the household every morning. I work too, of course (You're entitled to your opinion - Ed), but the hours are more flexible; so it's usually preferable for me to get the kids up and ready.
Women, as a rule, make childcare look easy - no doubt because as a gender they've spent thousands of years perfecting it, sometimes at the expense of other skills such as - excuse me while I place my head on this block here - parking. My wife even insists on co-ordinating the kids' clothes, where possible; whereas it's as much as I can do to co-ordinate my main body parts at 10 in the morning.
The fact is, for an average man, dressing and feeding two small children is a massive logistical challenge. I don't want to exaggerate about it, but I'd say it's on a par with organising a Papal visit to the Holy Land (which of course was the other major organisational feat of the past fortnight).
On the plus side, though, the experience has been a chance for me to get to know my son, who had spent most of his life up to then draped across his mother's lap, like a comfort cushion (one that makes slurping noises). Every couple of days, he'd stop feeding and she'd hand him to me for some male bonding. He'd smile and I'd feel proud, and then he'd puke on my shirt, and by that stage he'd be hungry again, so I'd hand him back to his mother and I wouldn't see him for another day or two.
The thing is, when you have two children in quick succession you have to specialise; and while Teresa was tied down on the Eastern front, as it were, I'd been busy making sure our first baby didn't feel neglected. (I like to think my work has paid off: Roisin is still only 20 months old, but she has developed a very mature attitude. Indeed, she's only too ready to lend a hand in the mornings, doing useful little things like slapping the baby on the head to help him wake up, and so on.)
But since the maternity leave ended, I've had a chance to get to know Patrick in ways that don't always involve having to wipe myself off afterwards. And I'm just proud as Punch of how he's turned out: how handsome he is, how charming, how he can pee way up in the air, and just everything.
It wasn't an easy winter. Having one baby is child's play, I've decided, but having multiple kids (and I doff my cap to you advanced parents who have three or more) is a different matter entirely.
As I've noted before, babies are like unions at CIE: when one of them has a grievance, there's a one-cries, we-all-cry policy. Minor disputes can escalate very easily, and at 3 a.m., the temptation is to give in to whatever the demands are - entry to the parental bed being a typical one. It goes without saying that this can put serious strain on the social partnership agreement (that's enough of the industrial relations metaphor - Ed).
The millennium celebrations passed in our house in the midst of just such a dispute. Neither of the children should have been up that late in the century, of course, but they were. And at the stroke of midnight, they were between them producing more noise than the bells of Christ Church, while Teresa and I glumly watched the celebrations from around the world on television, wondering where all these people got baby-sitters.
Yes, it was a hard winter, but the worst is past. The evenings are getting longer now and so are the new baby's sleeping times. Summer is on the way and all's well.
It would be even better if we lived in Scandinavia, of course, where you get maternity and paternity leave until it comes out your ears. As things are here, we've worked out that after paying for two kids in our (excellent and worth every penny!) creche, Teresa will be working mainly as a personal favour to the Minister for Finance.
And then there's the trauma of delivering the new baby into the hands of professional child-carers, which takes getting used to. The first day I dropped Patrick off, I searched his features anxiously for signs of concern, but I couldn't find any. Being neither hungry nor sleepy at the time, it's possible he was just in between thoughts, although maybe it's as well for me that he couldn't express himself.
If he was experiencing emotion, after all, it might have been relief at being in the hands of people who, unlike his father, had certificates to prove they could look after him.
