A Post That Is Not Not About Being A Dad

It’s the afternoon of Saturday 25th June 2022, as I sit down to write this, and thus attempt to mark the end of a three month sabbatical from blogging. As with many of my previous absences, I had not intended to be away for quite so long but once I lapse into a state of not-blogging, I can find it difficult to revert back to a state of not-not-blogging. Instead I find myself drawn further into a state of non-not-not-blogging. But today I decided to arrest this negativity and to enter into a state of not-not-not-not-blogging.

Mainly because I found myself with a bit of time on my hands, which has been a rare thing in my post-pandemic existence. If indeed we are actually post-pandemic. It could well be that the pandemic is still a thing and it’s just been a while since I’ve noticed it.

This is possibly due to the multitude of other horrors dominating the news, or the fact that I have been quite busy of late. Probably it’s a bit of both. The news has generally been quite horrible but I have certainly been busy too.

Partly my busyness has been work-related, but while my career dominates quite a lot of my waking hours, it has rarely been a barrier to my platitudinous outpourings for any significant period of time in the past.

I have been on something of a fitness kick of late, and I’ve run no less than five half marathons since November 2021, three of which have taken place in the gap between me writing my last post and me writing this one. Now, it should be noted, that I ran these races incredibly slowly and while I achieved my personal goal of ‘not dying’ in all of them I have little else to brag about. Apart from not coming last in any of them. Which is a small achievement. But I was definitely beaten by a man dressed as a dinosaur in one of them, and narrowly lost out to an octogenarian in my last effort. So it’s fair to say I’m not setting the world of long-distance running on fire. Still I’m nothing if not tenacious and I have already entered several more half marathons in the coming autumn in the hope of one day being able to replicate the much quicker (if still largely unimpressive) half-marathon times I achieved in my twenties. I might even try to match twenty-something me and run a whole marathon again in the future, but currently 13.1 miles is proving a more than sufficient challenge for forty-something me. In any case I’m on something of a ‘summer break’ from my running career, because running a half marathon in the summer, even the underwhelming UK summer, would be genuine madness.

But it wasn’t really the running that was stopping me from blogging either, so my current break from running is not why I have time to blog today.

The main reason I have time to blog today is because Little Proclaims is not well. My almost-four-year-old daughter has been a force of nature since she arrived in our world in August 2018, but lately I’ve found every free moment has been dominated by her. I love spending time with her, but it is, quite frankly, exhausting and while it pains me to see her out of sorts, she is, for the first time in a long time, fairly immobile today. She is currently watching Paw Patrol the Movie for the 85th time, as I write this, which in fairness is always a pretty easy way to get her to stop moving, but normally I feel guilty about resorting to such tactics. Today, however, it seems exactly the right activity for her convalescence, and has permitted me the opportunity to write this post, such as it is.

But it would be unfair to blame Little Proclaims entirely for my absence from the blogosphere. She has played her part, no doubt, but is not really any more demanding that she ever was. It’s just that I previously used to share the load with Mrs Proclaims, and she has been a little less available of late. Mainly because she has been spending a fair bit of time with our other daughter.

Our other daughter is the adorable Littler Proclaims, who arrived in early April and has charmed us non-stop ever since. Being a parent of one delightful daughter was never less than time-consuming. Being a parent of two seems to be an acknowledgement that anything that might once have constituted ‘me time’ is now reduced to a tiny window when I am still conscious and neither of my children are. And currently that appears to be roughly twenty minutes of an evening. Which means I haven’t had much time to blog.

But Mrs Proclaims and I are working on finding a better balance as we get used to our new reality. I don’t really want to have to rely on Little Proclaims being unwell to churn out these prosaic posts. That would probably make me quite a bad dad, but, because she usually has the constitution of an ox, it would also be a strategy doomed to failure.

In reality I suspect I will post a little less often than I would like, but hopefully a little more often than I have managed in recent months.

And I will no doubt write more about Littler Proclaims, who seems, already, to be calmer and more serene than her energetic sibling. She also has a fantastic head of hair for an almost-three-month old, which draws acclaim wherever she goes.

It is, however, entirely conceivable, that my next post will be a badly written poem about socks.

Because I’m nothing if not contrary.