Now Harry’s a bit older, playing with him is a lot more interesting. At the moment, one of his favourite activities is playing with large building blocks – a bit like giant Lego.

In recent weeks, Harry has learned how to put the blocks together and is now creating fairly complicated – and often quite tall – structures.

This isn’t without its hazards, though. I’ve lost count of the number of times Harry has built a tower only to push it over in my direction. He obviously thinks watching me scramble out of the way of falling blocks is entertaining. As I’ve said before, being a dad does nothing for your dignity.

Anyway, there was one particularly exciting moment last week. One evening while playing with Harry, I built an aeroplane (a very basic one, I should add) out of the blocks.

Harry thought this was great and was soon running around the room with the aeroplane making a ‘brrrrr’ noise.
The following morning, Melissa and I were sat having a cup of tea after breakfast while Harry was playing on the floor with the blocks and, much to my surprise and delight, he built his own aeroplane.

I was truly amazed, not to mention very proud, and spent the rest of the day battling with that ‘I want to tell everyone about my brilliant child’ syndrome that bores everybody else silly.

Since then I’ve been busy trying to encourage Harry to build giant castles as well as aeroplanes but he doesn’t seem to share my enthusiasm. Instead he wants to build aeroplanes and then fly them at my head. Melissa says it serves me right.