DAVID GILES: Henry’s three-year check up proves he’s king of the castle

But no one really tells you what to do with them when you get them home.

I vividly remember getting back from the hospital, having a baby and thinking “crumbs, I have a baby. What do I do with it?”

I think society relies on the fact that because you instinctively love them and because you’re terrified, most children will be OK.

After a couple of weeks, a nice lady comes round and makes sure said baby is OK and the mum’s not going mental. I have Henry’s health book in front of me now. On our first review, one of the questions simply says: “How is the mother?” And the response just says “tired”, which for some reason I find funny.

The reason I’m reminiscing about this is because Henry had a threeyear check up last week.

We got sent a funny questionnaire in the post that we had to fill in.

Naturally this quickly turned into an epic game.

Question 1) “Does your child speak in three or four word sentences? Please give an example.”

Now – Henry has already come up with some zingers since he was born, so this was tricky.

I had to choose between “don’t worry Daddy, the sun still shines behind the clouds” or “oh look, my dinkle is going for a walk” (when describing his first tiny little erection.) However in the end, I went for a new one. “Daddy, my droppings look like a castle.” I liked it because he used the word “droppings” and they did in fact look like a castle.

The questions then moved on to instructions. “Ask your child to put a ball under the sofa.”

Henry quickly dispatched this task. I was about to move on to the next question but he didn’t quite understand the format.

“Daddy – you take this cushion and put it underneath Mummy”.

He realised there was a chance to do some bossing around and didn’t want to miss out.

So we carried on with the questions – can your child jump six inches, can he stand on one leg, can he draw a circle, etc etc.

I’ll spare you the pushy, boastful Dad routine and just say Henry could do most of them.

My only boast will be that he could jump nigh-on two feet. Granted this might not benefit him a huge amount in later life, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.

After we’d filled out the questionairre, we went to our local health centre and a kind lady laughed at our silly jokes and said Henry seemed like a well-rounded lovely boy.

Naturallly, I loved her, and didn’t want to leave. Although she didn’t take me seriously when I asked for the Mensa application forms. (Is Mensa still a thing?) I think the test is more to make sure nothing’s wrong than identifying genius, but even so, it’s always nice to talk about Henry.

And it’s nice to know that even though you get left alone for most of it, there’s still people watching out for us.

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