Freddy's blog: New Year resolutions

Happy New Year to all you WorkLife Central. It seems a lot of people were back to work after Christmas this week, or maybe it was just that everyone was on the pavement at the same time yesterday thanks to the tube strike.

Christmas turned my 20-month old daughter into a fiend for chocolate. Her advent calendar had two chocolate buttons and a sticker for each day. She put the sticker on her cheek (why?) and ate the buttons as fast as she could. Then for the rest of the day she’d ask for the “ca’nah” about every 10 minutes. At my parent-in-law’s house she’d sniff out chocolate all over the place. My wife caught her standing on piled up boxes of presents reaching for chocolate Christmas tree decorations. And she ransacked another advent calendar only used for when the grandchildren were visiting during December.

In these cold turkey post-chocolate early days of 2017 we’re excusing ourselves for slightly too loose rules on chocolate in December with the fact that the sugar fuelled a leap. Our daughter’s understanding and memory and language and physical abilities rocketed over a couple of weeks. It has been wonderful to watch.

And of course it has also given us something to think about. Chocolate didn’t really cause the leap. Being with Mum and Dad every day for just over two weeks did. Our daughter has one-to-one care every day with her nanny, her grandma or me, and my wife and I don’t spend every waking hour at work (I do a nine-day fortnight and my wife works part-time in a law firm, although with hours that most of the working population would call full-time), but there’s nothing like the three of us being together all day.

So we’re feeling a little guilt, just a little, about not being around more. We’re feeling a little unsure about our bold New Year’s Resolution to move further from London and increase our commuting time for a while until we can work out what else to do. (On the upside, moving further away ought to give us more room for all the stuff we acquired over Christmas. So much stuff. Including a huge easel that would be fit for an Old Master but is currently mainly an obstacle.) And we’re feeling as though we might be limiting our daughter by both being at work anyway.

I bet many parents are feeling the same in the first few weeks of the year. While we wrestle with the big questions the short-term fix is easy enough. We’ve just booked our next holidays!.

Freddy works a nine-day fortnight as a kind of deluxe jack-of-all-trades for a trade association in the City. On his day off he and his bright, happy one-year-old daughter read books about animals, play with animal stickers and go to look at animals!.