Dan started a new job in mid February, he’s been working late a lot of nights and doing a great deal of overtime on the weekend, he loves the job and was nominated by his colleagues last week as “Employee Of The Month”, but the official title is much better than that and makes it sound a lot less like he works in a fast food joint, but I’m pregnant so obviously the brain cells that contained that bit of information leaked out of my ears last night as I slept.

Now I expected me to turn into a babbling mess over being alone so much, what I didn’t expect is just how badly Declan would react to it. Declan loves his Dad, absolutely adores him, and previously Dan worked from home so they spent a great deal of time together, I figured it would be a week of adjustment and then he’d just come around to the idea of only seeing Daddy in the mornings and at weekends.

Apparently my son is far more sensitive than I thought, and instead of getting better he’s getting worse each week about Dan leaving. He’s hysterical when Dan leaves in the morning, the moment the door shuts he’ll start screaming, all he has to see is Dan putting on his shoes and he’ll latch onto his leg and follow him around like a puppy. Then in the second week it became refusing to let Dan out of his sight ever, the poor bloke can’t shut the toilet door or take the rubbish out without the baby sitting on the other side of the door sobbing. Now he’s started waking up constantly through the night - originally from his molars coming through, but now I think more out of habit, we’ll calm him down and lay him back down to go to sleep, but the moment he sees the door shutting he’ll start crying uncontrolably again, we’ve tried leaving the lights on, we’ve tried leaving the door open, but as soon as one of us walks away then all hell breaks lose.

Last night, after almost three hours of this Dan had a brain wave and gave me his watch, the numbers and hands glow in the dark and Declan loves to watch it if Dan’s holding onto him trying to get him to sleep. So I strapped the watch onto one of his soft toys in the crib, put him down, walked out and actually managed to shut the door behind me, after two weeks of him waking up anything up to five times a night, he slept right through till morning. My big nancy boy just misses his Daddy, if it wasn’t so sweet I would be mocking him considerably right now.

I hope this gets better soon, I just can’t work out how to explain to someone who’s vocabulary consists of “Mum”, “Dada”, “Hello” and “Oh Dear” that Dad doesn’t disappear forever when he shuts the door.

I know I’ve said it a million times, but a puppy would have been much easier.