Who's The Daddy: Rewinding to the noisiest, happiest days of our lives

Filmed on a whirring camcorder on actual tapes in the summer of 2002, when Daughter #2 was born and Daughter #1 was two-and-a-half, nothing prepares you for the shock of seeing them again when they were little.

Okay, your house looks like Toys R Us, only even more disorganised, and you both look like you’ve been awake for 36 hours straight, but to see your kids in a way you haven’t seen for nearly a quarter of a century knocks you off your feet.

The Boss is currently transferring all our old tapes into digital, a process that sends my anxiety off the scale because tape has a nasty habit of snapping and getting chewed up.

But when she flicked on the old JVC with its (at the time) revolutionary little screen that flips out, and said “Come here and look at this,” everything went woozy for a few seconds.

There was Daughter #2, a few minutes old, in hospital, in an exhausted Boss’ arms. Then in the next scene, the grandparents turned up to visit, and all of them have not been with us for quite some time. To see their faces and hear their voices for the first time in years took the air out of your lungs.

Then back home, with Daughter #1 genuinely transfixed by her image in the two-inch camcorder screen, and asking “Can I see me?”, as it zoomed in on her massive brown eyes.

After that, Daughter #2’s first bathtime, where she screamed the place down for a few seconds, then quite liked it, then screamed the place down again when it was time to get dried off.

Two questions. How were they ever that young? And where the hell did the last 24 years go?

The Boss took some screenshots and put them on our family WhatsApp, and within a few minutes Daughter #1 FaceTimed us from her flat in Manchester, where she lives with The Boyfriend, and she joined in the watchalong where she tried to blow wet paint across a sheet of A4 with a handful of straws as our dearly departed dog Ashton (in his prime aged four) did his best to join in.

At the time this was a standard, chaotic day at home with a baby and a toddler in the house. In the dystopian world of 2026 it is nothing short of magical. I could happily spend the rest of my days watching these tapes, but would gladly swap every penny I have for just one afternoon with them in the summer of 2002.

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