My Diary of Triplet Fatherhood

Possibly the most engaging part of having three young children, I find, is how infectious their curiosity is. For them, the world is brand new. Every object is a mystery to be unravelled; every space is a virgin landscape to explore.

What else, really, is baby-proofing, if not forcing yourself to get down on hands and knees and see a room through the eyes of a voracious hunter of new experiences. And how telling that it’s so hard to see all the dangers, to span the two worldviews, applying grown-up knowledge of consequence and danger to one guided by possibility and fearlessness. In a way it makes me jealous, to know that my mind won’t ever be a blank canvas again.

Tonight, Evie spent a good fifteen minutes poking my front teeth. Over and over again, she applied a single index finger with all the earnest curiosity of someone searching for the kind of secret door commonly found in stately homes, her furrowed brow seeming to say that, sure, the last twenty pokes might have found these things to be merely white and slippery but there’s got to be a hidden catch somewhere… perhaps if I poke… just… here? Nope. Well, perhaps… here? Or… here? And so on. I’ve no idea what she expected might happen but I rather wish I could have done something surprising to reward the effort she put in. Unfortunately I don’t know any tooth tricks.

I should probably count myself lucky that she was only poking, really. The girls’ explorations aren’t always so gentle. With every toy becoming a potential danger in the hands of someone who’s three main means of investigation are the gentle prod, the cautious bite, and whacking her nearest sister with the object at full force, you learn to count yourself lucky when merely prodded. Which is why, incidently, every new gift is now screened in case it needs to be placed in the “supervised play only” box we keep for anything heavy, hard or otherwise dangerous when applied at great speed to the nose.