The sixth sense

This morning Zac, sweet angel that he isn't, woke up at 4.15.

The reason? His cot toy batteries had run out. This is the machine which plays lullabies and projects soothing images onto his ceiling whenever he cries or presses a button. The same device which he has been actively telling me to leave switched off for the past month, but which Heather put on last night. The same infernal contraption that requires me – bleary-eyed and three-quarters asleep – to unclip it from his bed rails, unscrew the battery compartment cover with my thumbnail, go downstairs to find four replacement batteries, and then reassemble and reattach the whole thing while, in the meantime, my two-year old boy watches on, repeating "Daddy. Toy not working. Fix it, please" ad infinitum.

Yes, that toy.

Of course, by the time I finish the job, the damage is done and Zac is wide awake. Worse still, he won’t let me leave without crying. Not wanting to wake either Heather or Toby up, I stay. At such times, I can normally fob him off with my iPhone and leave him to watch music videos or Angelina Ballerina quietly while I sleep on his floor. But not today. Oh no. Today he wants to play. Thanks for that, kiddo. It’s not like I have an early morning meeting with our MD that I quite fancied being awake for, is it?

How do they know these things? Is it some kind of sixth sense? After all, it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened. You can pretty much guarantee that on the day you are running 20 minutes late for an appointment he will turn round to you with a furrowed brow and say, “Isaac’s done a poo.” Or that he will unerringly do the one thing you absolutely do not want him to do at the precise moment you are distracted by something else.

I am deeply suspicious, and deeply disappointed that he hasn’t turned this talent into something more productive, like picking lottery numbers.

Okay. Rant over.

No longer a mummy's boy

For a child who, before his brother's birth, was the world's biggest mummy's boy, Zac has transformed over the last three months.

Ever since he was first able to state a preference, he has always chosen his mother for just about any activity you could care to mention: feeding, play-time, doing the nursery run - all of these were very much mummy first, with daddy a poor substitute. It's hardly surprising, given that he was breast-fed for his first nine months and indeed spent most of that period with his mother pretty much 24/7, but even so the preference has been very marked.

That's not to say I didn't spend any quality time with him - reading and bed-time, in particular - but until Toby's arrival there was always a clear pecking order, and I sat some way down it. Even so, I have always enjoyed what time I had with him without any resentment on my part.

But since Toby was born things have been much more equitable. Zac has been brilliant at accepting that he can no longer monopolise his mother's time, even to the extent of being genuinely helpful and caring around his brother. And as part of that he has started to embrace me wholeheartedly, rather than 'settling' for daddy. I now do the vast majority of his bed-times (while Heather is putting Toby down), we spend more time playing together, and he is now positively enthusiastic about climbing into my car, whether it is for one of our Sunday morning outings or just to go to nursery.

Perhaps the ultimate endorsement of my new-found status is the fact that, when he wakes up in the morning (typically around 5.30), he will always call specifically for "Daddy!" and greet me with a beaming smile and a cheery "Good morning" when I go to him.

That alone means the world to me. But then it's always the little things that make the biggest difference, isn't it?

Ps and Qs

I have developed a whole new vocabulary over the past couple of years since Isaac was born. Drat, Poppycock. Darnation. Fiddlesticks. You know the sort of thing: those child-friendly words or phrases which replace a tiny but not infrequently used subset of the English language which is best kept away from young but sponge-like minds.

It goes hand-in-hand with drilling all those other basic rules of etiquette into our children, which are frequently referred to as 'minding your Ps and Qs'.

(Incidentally, there is much dispute over the etymology of this particular phrase, with possible explanations ranging from the prosaic - children's pronunciations of "please" and "thank you" or "excuse me" - to the more obscure (for instance, a reminder to innkeepers to keep a tally of the pints and quarts their patrons consumed, or mistakenly transposing lower case p's and q's when typesetting on printing presses). Well, I find it interesting, anyway.)

What's been particularly fascinating - and funny - is to watch the take-up and correct contextual usage of such phrases by Zac as his command of the spoken word increases. Since shortly after Christmas, he has been regularly saying "Oh my God!" - accompanied by the requisite cartoonish inflection and wide-eyed expression - in perfect mimicry of his grandma. This has been followed in recent weeks by the gradual introduction of a number of old-fashioned colloquialisms such  as "Golly gosh!" and "Goodness gracious me!", all of which generate a level of amusement in any adult within earshot that encourages their repeated use.

I dread the day - which I know must inevitably come - when he turns round to us and uses a four-letter word for the first time. It will probably happen far sooner than we would hope for, and it will be one of those milestones which mark the end of innocence on his rapidly accelerating journey into adulthood.

I want my son to grow up in so many ways. This isn't one of them.

I just can't control my feet

While there's no stopping Isaac when it comes to singing, it has to be said his dancing leaves a lot to be desired. (Yes, he has the same two left feet as his father.)

However, it's a real joy listening to him singing along to music on the stereo/radio/TV/iPod, even though I can see we're heading for a spot of serious parental embarrassment in the very near future as he increasingly gets to grips with the lyrics of his all-time favourite, Lily Allen.

If anything, his confidence - and, with that, his enthusiasm - have cranked up a notch over the last week or so. Zac's singing is louder and more frequent; he has rediscovered the microphone we bought him for his birthday and thoroughly embraced it. And he is clearly absorbing dance routines too, even if his attempts to recreate them while singing at the same time are very much of the two-left-feet variety, as this snippet of Alexandra Burke's 'Bad Boys' all too evidently demonstrates. (Ah, the wonders of video cameras.)

I'll never laugh at Girls Aloud again. Well, maybe every now and then. Oh, alright, I'm still laughing. But you know what I mean.

Don't stop the music

Music has always been an important part of my life, but I've never shown any great talent for it (other than being able to identify obscure songs from short snippets of their intros, which has proven lucrative at pub quiz nights). Sure, I'm a big music fan and I did play the flute for several years in school, but - to put it kindly - I'm never going to win X Factor.

Heather would be the first to agree that she is even less talented than I, rarely tackling a stage more public than the shower with her singing.

We will have to wait and see with Toby, but music is certainly an important part of Zac's life already, and has been ever since he was born. He has always responded well to soothing (if somewhat tuneless) singing, belted out nursery rhymes word and pitch-perfect earlier than pretty much any other child I know, and showed an early interest in any musical instrument we cared to thrust towards him - the louder the better, obviously.

He has a real affinity with contemporary pop music too. In the latter months of his first year, he would often wake up in the small hours of the morning, crying inconsolably. After a number of remedies were tried unsuccessfully, I discovered the one thing guaranteed to calm him down and then ease him back to sleep was a recording of a Suzanne Vega concert - 'Live At Montreux' in 2004 - I had lying around. Within minutes, the crying would stop as his eyes fixed on the screen, a small smile would touch his lips, and soon enough the eyelids would start to weigh heavily and close. We went through this routine so many times that I knew which songs he found the most relaxing and would send him off to sleep. ('The Queen and the Soldier', by the way, coincidentally one of my favourite Vega tracks.)

Since then, music has become an integral part of both his daytime and night-time routines. When I am putting him to bed, the last thing we always do is sing 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' together - the 12-inch version with the extra verses (although he does also have his very own Slipknot-inspired thrash version, which has to be heard to be believed). He regularly wanders around the house singing songs from his favourite TV programmes. And he has a well-established pattern of latching on to one song for several weeks at a time, which he will insist on listening to/watching over and over again until he has memorised it to his satisfaction.

So, over the past year or so, he has obsessively listened to the following:
- 'Heart of Glass', Blondie
- 'Not Fair', Lily Allen (he is a huge Lily fan, although less so since the restraining order)
- 'Remedy', Little Boots
- 'Bad Boys', Alexandra Burke
- 'Fireflies', Owl City
- 'Don't Stop The Music', Rihanna (his current favourite)

And when I say obsessive, I really do mean it. There was one Saturday morning recently when we watched the video of the song repeatedly for over an hour - 16 times consecutively - before 8am. When we go out in the car he will ask to play it non-stop. And when he sees my iPhone or iPod, it is the first thing he looks for. You get the idea.

Much though I think it's a great track, when you've heard it 50 times or more in a single week it does start to grate somewhat. Mind you, it is hilarious when you're driving along and you hear Zac in the back of the car belting out whole phrases of the song with good enough accuracy in terms of words and tune for it to be instantly recognisable to anyone.

I don't know whether he will show an interest in becoming a musician or whether he will, like his uncle Peter (who has a room stuffed full of CDs and typically goes to at least a couple of gigs a week) and I just be a music-lover. Either way, it's good to know he already has an excellent ear - it rarely takes more than the first five or six notes of a song he knows to come on the radio before his head snaps around in recognition and he tells you who the artist is - so if you ever want someone with good musical knowledge to complete your pub quiz team, Zac's your boy.

Toddler 2.0

It never ceases to amaze me just how good a grasp Zac has of modern technology.

There are three factors at play here, I think. Firstly, he is a child of the 21st century, so he is used to being surrounded by all kinds of consumer technology: computers, mobile phones, iPods and other gadgets that require buttons to be pressed. Secondly, his dad is a bit of a geek. And thirdly, comparing him to his mates he does genuinely seem to possess both greater interest in playing with gadgets (conversely, he's not at all interested in football), and then a quite astonishing aptitude for operating them unassisted.

He is exactly two years and three months old today. That is officially scary. (Unofficially, though, I am also hugely proud of him.)

Some examples:

Channel hopping

From around the time of his first birthday Zac has shown a keen interest in our Sky+ remote control. At first, to ward off his grasping attentions, we gave him an old, non-functioning remote to play with. After a couple of days of pointing it at the TV and pressing buttons, he soon realised he'd been sold a duff one. Every time I offered him 'his' remote, he would recognise it, shake his head vigorously, and demand one that actually worked.

That was then, this is now. He has now pretty much worked out how to navigate through the menus to play his favourite programmes. No kidding. I can wander out to the kitchen to get a drink, and return to find that the Arsenal match has been replaced by his favourite episode of Timmy Time. It won't be long until he learns to set the parental controls to lock us out ...

W, W, W, dot, B, down, down, down, enter

To keep Zac from forever venturing into our study to play with our PC - he had an unerring knack of storming in and turning it off while I was in the middle of editing photos or videos - we gave him our old laptop to use instead. He carries it in both hands around the house with almost reverential care - think of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai bearing the tablets with the Ten Commandments and you're not far off - and he certainly seems to appreciate it's more than just another toy to be flung around.

More than that, he already understands how to use it, at least at a basic level. Leave him to his own devices, and he will switch the machine on, fire up Internet Explorer, and utter "W, W, W, dot, B, down, down, down, enter", which is the exact sequence of keystrokes required to load up the CBeebies website.

Once he has arrived at the CBeebies home page, he is increasingly confident in his ability to move the cursor around the screen and make whatever series of clicks he needs to load pages, play games and generally navigate his way around. It's not just that he's memorised where things are on particular pages; take him to a new page and, without prompting, he will quickly identify where the buttons and arrows are that he can click on. It is seriously impressive; Heather and I have been trying, with limited success, to teach one of Zac's grandparents how to do this for over two years, and our boy is already streets ahead of this because it is all so intuitive to him.

Don't stop the music

Zac's favourite gadget of all is my iPhone, which has fascinated him for the past year. He has long since mastered the basic principles of operating the touch-screen to get from A to B. So, for instance, I can hand him the device and he will first unlock it (which requires him to press the 'home' button and then slide a bar on the screen), then press the 'iPod' and 'videos' buttons, and finally scroll down the list to select his favourite video (currently Rihanna's 'Don't Stop The Music'). He will then crank up the volume and, if desired, bring up the 'back' button to restart the video.

To him, using technology is the most natural and comfortable thing in the world which, combined with his innate curiosity, means he is already far better equipped to cope with the future than his parents ever will be. I doubt it will be long before the shoe is on the other foot and it is Zac who has to show me how to do things.

Our tech-savvy, web-enabled Toddler 2.0 will never be Wayne Rooney. But I bet he'll be great playing FIFA 2010. I'll take that.