Dinner time. Daughter Number One is first to approach the table, but does so cautiously. She\u2019s bent at a 45-degree angle and spiders over to her chair, grunting as she does so.<\/p>\n
This is because she is days (or minutes) away from giving birth<\/a>. She\u2019s walking this way because Grandchild Number Two has chosen to ram their head into her cervix: which apparently makes any form of locomotion a little tricky.<\/p>\n She\u2019s followed, eventually, by Granddaughter Number One, who is a little tired and a lot cranky. She also sits at the table, but then gets down and drags her chair away. <\/p>\n Still standing, she folds her arms and declares she doesn\u2019t want to. She refuses to elaborate on what it is she doesn\u2019t want to do, other than to repeat that she doesn\u2019t want to do it. She wants her mammy, but Mammy is firmly wedged into her seat and unable to move anywhere very fast. <\/p>\n The other adults in the room try to intercede. But, rather pointlessly, they attempt to use logic. Three-year-olds are impervious to logic; especially cranky ones. We leave her where she is in the hope she will change her mind.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Daughter Number Four comes into the kitchen. She is going through a phase where she can\u2019t enter any room without springing into some sort of dance routine, all the while talking. Her favourite phrase at the moment is: I have a question. She has a lot of questions.<\/p>\n While she dances and spouts interrogative statements, Herself is dishing out dinner and telling me that she got into the car that morning meaning to drive to one place but found herself heading towards someplace completely different. She fears that the early stages of menopause<\/a> are not just assaulting her body, but now starting to rot her mind.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to,\u201d shouts Granddaughter Number One.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a question,\u201d says Daughter Number Four.<\/p>\n When we, or most of us, finally sit down to eat \u2013 serenaded by the dog begging for food \u2013 I tell Herself that I absent-mindedly do things like that all the time: walk into a room and forget why I went in there. Open the fridge, only to remember that I\u2019m looking for the lawnmower.<\/p>\n She gives me her you\u2019re an idiot look: which in this situation is completely justified. Because I am. I have barely any idea what\u2019s going on for anyone else at the kitchen table because, as everyone else has pointed out to me, I\u2019m the only male in the house. <\/p>\n