The Ocelot Oxford and Newbury 121 July 2016 edition | Page 6

For Starters

Facing
defeat by
a three
year old
Doing Life
A column by Jamie Hill
It’s 11pm and I’ve got a three year old using my belly as
a trampoline as I lie on the sofa trying to catch up with
the news.
We had tried to get her in bed on time. We really had.
I first put her in bed at 7.45pm and I dutifully read her
a story.
It’s been ‘Where’s My Cow?’ now every night for four
weeks.
You’d think a month is more than enough time to find
that bloody cow. But apparently it isn’t. So we have to
read the whole book again.
It’s worrying that I now know it off by heart and wake
in the night with farmyard animal noises reverberating in
my head.
Ten minutes later, I’m in the kitchen making a cup of tea
when Amy just saunters in as if I hadn’t put her to bed only
minutes before.
She’s singing a song.
I calmly put her back to bed firmly telling her that she
needs to go to sleep.
Half an hour later I hear tiny feet running around
upstairs.
I find her pretending to be The Hulk. I put her back to
bed again. My voice has now got an angry tone to it.
An hour later at 9.30pm, I’m engrossed in the latest
happenings in Preacher. We’re at a really bloody bit
where Cassidy the vampire is beating someone to death
with their own arm.
I hear a laugh.
She’s standing behind the sofa watching the telly. I
don’t know how long she’s been there. It could have been
20 minutes. She’s grinning like a Cheshire Cat and asks me

‘Why are those men fighting?’.
I quickly pause the telly. (It happens to stop on a frame
of a particularly graphic blood squirt geysering up into
the air).
Using my angriest dad voice, I command her to go to
bed. She quietly says in her most heartbreaking voice ‘but
I want to watch telly with you.’
I say ‘no’ and pick her up, putting her back in bed
upstairs.
She starts crying.
I walk back downstairs leaving her crying in bed. And
for some unfathomable reason I feel bad.
Fifteen minutes later my wife comes back from the gym
and the whole cycle starts again. But this time it’s ‘mummy’
that she wants not ‘daddy’ (who is now public enemy
number one having been so harsh to her).
Fast forward another hour and she’s bouncing on me
a look of victory on her face and abject defeat on mine
and my wife’s.
Not long after that we go to bed with three year old
Amy naturally between us.
As I try to go to sleep, she’s still awake, pulling my hair
and prodding me and occasionally singing.
I think to myself this is something that households up
and down the land face on quite a frequent basis. The
child who simply won’t go to sleep. Luckily for us it’s an
occasional problem and not a frequent one.
But as I drift off I can’t shift the realisation that I am no
longer in control of my own destiny and that a three year
old, who has managed to twist me around her little finger,
is now at the helm.
I awake half an hour later and Amy’s finally asleep
with her feet somehow ending up in my face. As I drift off
again I’m sure I can hear a cow mooing in the distance.

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20/06/2016 19:31