I've hit 32: so where does the time go?

It seems like only yesterday I was Christmas shopping and singing along to Slade.

Now I’m seeing Easter Eggs on the supermarket shelves and I’m looking forward to the lighter evenings and the warmer weather that spring brings.

How did that happen?

These days, time seems to fly by at an alarming rate.

But does time really speed up as we get older or is something else to blame?

When I was a child it was all so different.

The future wasn’t the next weeks, months or years but simply just the next few hours.

Tomorrow didn’t matter as it was today that was important.

The biggest decision back then was whether to knock on my friend’s front door to play on the pavement or to stay indoors to try to complete one of the games on my brother’s Sega Mega Drive.

What was happening tomorrow? I didn’t know and I didn’t care.

I’d often hear friends of the family and relatives tell me how much I’d grown since they had last seen me.

I didn’t take much notice because I had very little awareness of time and in my mind I looked exactly the same as I did the last time they saw me.

Nowadays any holiday seems to be over before it has begun, but back when I was a child the summer holidays would stretch on forever.

So what has changed? Time clearly hasn’t.

There are still 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour and except in a leap year there are 365 days in a year. So is it me?

Well, a few days ago, on February 6, I celebrated my 32nd birthday.

I’m not old but I am getting older so maybe that is why my clock seems to tick faster than it used to. But I direct the blame in a different direction.

It seems to me that since I became a father in 2009 and again in 2011 time really does fly.

Months seems to gather speed like a rollercoaster and I look at my daughters and I wonder where the baby and toddler years went.

The best advice I was given was to enjoy every moment of being a parent and in hindsight I realise how great that advice was.

But as time speeds up for me I must realise that all that matters to my daughters is the day we are in right now. I’ve found that occasionally it’s fun to enter their world and enjoy today, have fun and not worry too much about tomorrow because before we know it today will be tomorrow and this month will be the next.

LATEST RUSE TO CON DAUGHTERS

Are you a tidy person? Well I think you either are or you aren’t.

But then again, I also think you can change from one to the other.

In my teen years my bedroom would often be messy and I’m ashamed to say the odd cup with mould growing from its base might’ve been found under my bed.

But then I met my girlfriend Serena who is very tidy – think Monica from the hit TV show Friends – and over the years she has changed me and I am a reformed tidy man.

Well, there certainly aren’t any cups growing mould in our bedroom, I wouldn’t dare.

But it seems my four and six-year-old daughters haven’t learnt the art of being tidy yet so I’ve had to think of creative ways to keep their bedrooms tidy without getting my own hands dirty.

It’s simple. We play the exciting ‘tidy-up challenge’. Whoever tidies their bedroom the quickest wins. Currently, they think it’s just a game and haven’t realised it’s a clever ploy by their dad and as long as it works, I’ll keep doing it.