Seán Moncrieff: My daughter has finally moved out, and the house is eerily quiet

After months being convinced that they’d never get a place, they got a place. Sort of. Daughter Number One, the boyfriend and Granddaughter Number One just moved out – for a while. They have a sub-let for the summer, after which they’ll be back for a few weeks, then leave the country. Maybe for a year. Maybe for much more.

Their departure has plunged the house into an odd quiet that will take a while to get used to again. Not that they were particularly noisy. It was the sound of presence. Footsteps, voices from other rooms, the baby’s shrieks of complaint and delight. In the last few weeks, Granddaughter Number One had performed that everyday miracle of realising how her body works, and had gone from wanting to be picked up to demanding to be let on to the floor, where she can crawl around and search for the most dangerous ways to pull herself into a standing position.

On all fours, she’s about the same size as the dog. So, while the dog thinks she’s human, Granddaughter Number One now thinks she’s a dog: she regularly tried to get into the dog’s crate and drink from her water bowl. The dog was a little freaked out by this invasion of her territory, and spent a lot of her time strategically avoiding the baby.

Occasionally, she’d zip past and lick the baby’s face: which, if you’re one of those people who like to anthropomorphise animals, you might interpret as a kiss. In truth, she was just looking for food. There’s usually something stuck to one of her cheeks.

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Everyone else in the house waxed lyrical about how the dog was so gentle with the baby, and so patient: as if the dog was changing nappies or getting up in the middle of the night to feed her. It did look cute, the way the dog seemed to be standing guard whenever Granddaughter Number One was in her high chair. But again, it was all about food. The dog copped that the baby had the highest food droppage rate of any of the humans in the house, while the baby realised that it was great fun to throw her food so the dog could wolf it down before it hit the floor.

The dog will miss the baby. We all will. It’s not as if we’ll never see her again – and no one was suggesting that they didn’t move out – but it will be a shame that we won’t witness the small, daily changes. She’s suddenly gone from being an entirely dependent being to one who wants to explore the world around her. You could almost see the new synapses lighting up in her brain, realising what she could do with her limbs and what new sounds she could make.

[ Seán Moncrieff on birthday party factories: Daughter Number Four is attending the same one as a fortnight ago ]

A significant part of that, as with all babies, had been speculation about what her first word would be (obviously, Mama and Dada don’t count, and she’d already cracked them some weeks ago). Daughter Number Four and I had been in fevered competition on that one, both of us offering our own names, but I think any neutral observer would have to concede that I deserved the prize. I put in the work. Every day, several times a day, I made it my business to whisper “Grandad” into her ear. Her massive eyes would stare back at me, largely baffled, perhaps wondering why my vocabulary was so limited.

[ Seán Moncrieff: A time will come when my daughter won’t hold my hand in public, and that’s okay ]

It wasn’t until a few days before they moved out that the word finally arrived. I could hear her in the kitchen, saying something over and over, and taking obvious joy in it. I could hear my daughter exclaiming Yes! Yes! I rushed in there to accept my reward; only to learn, once again, that we do not live in a just universe.

What was the word? Doggy.