Spectrumite Dad Looks Forward to A Break. Well, Sort Of.

Spectrumite Dad is gearing up for a very chillaxing Father's Day.

Not.

Let's face it, despite breakfast in bed, which he'll eat whilst indulging in his weekly helping of the Andrew Marr Show, Spectrumite Dad will have to accept that Pinky and Perky (alias Bobby and Alec) are going to be no quieter on Father's Day than they usually are.

He will still be subjected to the familiar strains of a jazzed-up Three Blind Mice from Alec's keyboard roughly a thousand times a day, interspersed with a highly unseasonal Jingle Bells in Hip Hop style.

Alec's whoops and chirps are pretty much a constant feature at our house and Bobby's Pokemon chit-chat stops for noone. Even if there's noone in the room (like now for instance, when Bobby is in the bath), that's not necessarily a reason for Pokemon chat to stop. You don't have to know what's going on in Bobby's mind most of the time as there's a little telephone at the brain end with a wire heading straight to his mouth.

Anyway, Spectrumite Dad is like most dads, all he really wants is a quiet life. But like most dads, his chances of this are about as certain as the chances of England winning the World Cup against Germany after a penalty shoot out.

As I speak, Spectrumite Dad is cajoling Alec into brushing his teeth, a job that feels a bit like trying to tie your shoe laces blindfolded with gloves on. Alec has molars coming through and no way is anyone going anywhere near them. Dad has also given him a little squirt of Old Spice to make him smell nice before bed, a charming feature of the twins' routine although heaven knows why he does it.

Gavin's actual Father's Day will coincide with my actual Mother's Day, when we are  nowhere near the kids on a short visit to Edinburgh at the end of the month.

Here we will switch off the little control rooms in our heads, where decisions are made, forms completed, alerting signs of development or regression considered, jobs juggled.

For one weekend we get to remind ourselves that there was actually life before Bobby and Alec. Shopping trips on a Saturday. Spontaneous pub lunches. Impromptu pub crawls. By the way none of this actually happened, but the rose tinted specs are brilliant at embellishing our carefree past.

Freedom isn't anything fancy but the ability to squander time doing absolutely nothing is one that's certainly valuable when you're used to constantly planning. In my eyes, when bringing up our Spectrumites, it's invaluable.