Whether it’s the postman, a dog or babybel cheese, he addresses them as ‘Daddy’. Then came ‘cheese’…
‘Daddy’ was the first word that really stuck around for my son. He was slow to speak and then words would materialise, but fail to catch on. When listening for little words here and there, I realised certain sounds would appear and then retract suddenly, never to be seen again, like a groundhog disappearing into its burrow. ‘All gone’ was there for a while, so too a pleasingly Dublin-esque ‘howiya?’ but neither was reliably present for more than a week or two.
Until Daddy. Daddy, it was clear, was here to stay. Speaking as the daddy in question, it was endlessly validating to be addressed by my proper title, and 8,000 times a day no less. The effect was only slightly cheapened by his habit of addressing every other object, person, concept and place in the exact same fashion.
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