The blink of an eye

The Dad Diary
Edwin McGreal

Sometimes a milestone development in your child’s life sneaks up on you unnoticed and takes the wind right out of you.
Frankie is five and now in national school, and while her first day was a huge event – and it was hard to believe the little baby we first held on November 21, 2016, was now in a school uniform – we were certainly forewarned. Calendars are handy that way.
Similarly, Frankie and Éamon’s starts in naíonra were not surprise events. Their first steps were beautiful moments, but it was all part of an expected trajectory. We were psychologically prepared.
And we’ve been well warned; myself and Aisling are both the youngest in our respective families, so siblings have been alerting us to the undeniable reality that ‘they grow up so fast’. Or, as one wise woman in Dooega put it, the days are long but the years are short.
I saw something online a few months ago that stopped me in my tracks though. It stated simply, ‘One day you will lift up your child for the last time and you won’t even know it’.
Frankie might be five but she still loves to be lifted and cuddled from time to time. Éamon would probably list cuddles as one of his favourite things in the world.
We’re a couple of years away from the last of the lifts, but that sentence I read online made me appreciate the fleeting nature of such things more and more.
Then, while I was looking into the future, something changed in the present that knocked me for six.
Éamon and I have had a lovely routine for his bedtime for over a year or so. We bring him down to his bedroom, I turn on the musical mobile on his cot, turn off the light and say, “Lie into my shoulder.” He waits for the command and then just flops in, so content and relaxed.
I’d rock him over and back ten times – no more, no less! – gently put him down in the cot, give him a soother, rub his head five times and say ‘night night’ and he would say the same.
He loved it and never put up a fight at nighttime. He might be as stubborn as a mule when it comes to eating his dinner, but bedtime was a moment of pure contentment for him.
At Christmas, Santa took the soothers in exchange for presents and there was no fuss.  
Then one morning, not long after, he asked, “Daddy, can I have a bed like Frankie?”
As soon as they suggest such a move, you go with it, and so the bed was prepared that day for him to sleep in that night.
For the first few nights, Aisling brought him down. He is less likely to act out with Ash, so for transitions like this it was the safest move.
A few days later, I brought him down to his bed for the first time. I went to pick him up to start the old routine and he demurred. “No Daddy, I’m a big boy now, I can get into bed by myself.”
It was such a well-articulated show of independence – and you’d be proud of it – but I was an emotional wreck. The routine was finished, never to happen again and I had never realised it, or soaked it in the last few times.
Sometimes the kids just pass you by.

In his fortnightly column, Edwin McGreal charts the ups and downs of the biggest wake-up call of his life: parenthood.