Who's the Daddy: Why our daughters still call us every week
The one thing that I’m most proud of in my entire life is the wonderful relationship me and The Boss have with our adult daughters - put it this way, they call us out of the blue a couple of times a week, even when they don’t want anything.
Daughter #1, now 26, regularly had Alpha Female running battles with her mum from the age of about four (only one winner there, young lady) and still teases her about how strict she thought she was when she was growing up.
It’s like that phrase - train hard, play easy - when your kids are little, the last thing that parents should be is their friend, because that way lies pizza and chips for tea most nights and unlimited internet access leading to Type-2 diabetes by the age of 40.
Thanks to The Boss’ expert child skills (it’s handy having the finest Reception class teacher of her generation on the payroll) our daughters knew who was in charge and quickly learned the boundaries of what was acceptable and what would lead to their favourite clicky pen or novelty eraser being confiscated from their pencil case - sounds petty, but it works.
The Boss had a simple philosophy when it came to raising little kids, and it’s this - treat them like puppies, make instructions short and simple, and learn to click your fingers so hard they sound like an opening batsman smacking a bouncer for six. You’ve no idea how that gets your kids’ immediate and undivided attention until you’ve seen it in action.
What else? Oh yeah. The best cure for a toddler meltdown is a cold, wet flannel to the face.
This trip down memory lane was prompted by a panicky WhatsApp message from Daughter #2, now 24, last weekend from the cruise ship she works on where there’s currently a chicken pox outbreak. She wanted to know if she’d been vaccinated against it when she was very young. We checked her record, and she hadn’t, pretty sure they didn’t jab babies for it in 2002, but we told her she did catch it when she was a couple of months old.
Turns out that’s even better than any jab, according to the ship’s medics, because jabs run out. Actually having chicken pox as a kid doesn’t. And the crisis (or the prospect of spending 21 days in isolation) was averted for Daughter #2. Three weeks on your own in a cabin the size of a bathroom is nobody’s idea of a good time.