You have to love some of the cliche Dad things. I’ll admit to feeling really sleepy on a Sunday afternoon about 2:30. Peej was so looking forward to fatherhood that he was practicing Dad jokes before his wife was even pregnant.

One thing that I didn’t even realise was a Dad thing is the pile of broken toys and bits at our house that just need a bit of superglue or a screw or something. There’s the odd household object, but they are mostly the kids’ things, shoddily constructed or well loved, that they come to Dad all upset and say “this came off can you fix it?” You don’t have time to fix it right there, and it probably isn’t even worth fixing, but you love your kids too much to say “nah, just chuck it”. So it goes on top of the microwave or in the shed with a bunch of similar stuff that you never get around to.

Talking to a friend of Mark D’s before his wedding, I learned that this is, in fact, another Dad thing. Suddenly a load of guilt at unfixed things is off my shoulders, I’m not a bad father and husband for never getting around to this stuff, because all good Dad’s have a “Fixin’ Pile”!

“Daddy, the flux capacitor fell of my Delorean!”

“No worries, chuck it on the fixin’ pile.”

The truth is that the fixin’ pile is an oubliette, where things go to be forgotten, because a lot of the things that break we really do have no intention of fixing. Every now and then, you can go through the fixin’ pile without the kids around, and get rid of the Happy Meal toys and other crap that they’ve forgotten, and just fix the stuff that’s worth fixing.

It’s also not technically a pile. Items on my fixing pile at the moment include several leaky taps, the back door, the mailbox AGAIN, and the armrests in my car. Unfortunately, these aren’t things I can just leave until Monique forgets about them and then throw out!