‘My daughter is finally three. She eyes her new possessions with the capitalistic gleam of an old-timey gold prospector’

Mornings go like this: I emerge from sleep to the sound of bells. Not from an alarm but from my daughter singing the words “Ding-a-ling-a-ling” while playfully slapping her gummy little hands on my face. As usual, she has clambered out of bed in the last few minutes and sidled in between her mum and me.

My wife sleeps so lightly she is regularly woken by the shifting of socks in drawers four houses away, so she is awake by the time our daughter crosses our threshold. I sleep, at all times, like a runaway hippo that’s been shot with one of those fuzz-tipped tranquilliser darts. As such, slapping me awake is not quite necessary, but it is at least efficient, and I love it. Her face, which beams, suggests she’s not yet bored of it either.

I cuddle her tiny frame and pretend to chomp down on her more chunky appendages, before getting her dressed, leading her to brush her teeth, taking her down for breakfast.

Breakfast goes like this: I offer her pancakes or Weetabix and she decides which one she prefers in that moment, before changing her mind at the precise moment its opposite has been prepared. Thus I ready both options for eating, pausing before the point of no return – toasting and adding milk respectively – so that we get through this pantomime with as little food waste as possible.

Today, however, all that falls by the wayside for we must reroute her to the living room where the floor in front of the mantelpiece is festooned with presents and cards. My daughter is finally three years old and package-bought pancakes and fibrous wheat biscuits must wait as she eyes her shiny new possessions with the capitalistic gleam of an old-timey gold prospector.

Presents go like this: she circles them like a predator before attempting to open the biggest first, resisting any attempts at help with the unwrapping. She is a modern, independent woman whose supreme confidence in her own abilities is matched only by her lack of the motor skills necessary to perform 90% of desired tasks.

Finally she relents, allowing me, her mum or her older brother to make enough entry rips into the paper that she can bat us away and carry on. It’s a doll’s house and she is euphoric, setting to its interiors with great élan and clomping its slightly oversized dolls – bought from another, cheaper company, which clearly had a larger dolls’ house in mind – around its shiny floors.

She screams and laughs into her PAW Patrol phone. She blabbers hectic thank yous to absent cousins and grandparents on a real phone. All of this takes so long that no choice of breakfast is offered. Her pancake is to go. We are marching off to start the day.

The walk to nursery goes like this: she, pushing her little pink pram and baby, stopping every few yards to make sure it sits just so in its seat and is wearing its cloth cardigan correctly to fend off the morning chill, shows a motherly commitment that turns a five-minute walk of two streets into a 20-minute ambulation.

Throughout, she babbles cheerfully about her new doll’s house and what her friends will make of it, a crescent moon of pancake in her left hand, my index finger in her right. I listen to the flow of her thoughts, once so inchoate and mysterious, now growing more fluent with every passing day. We salute the dogs and cats we pass – “Big”, “Red One”, “Fluffy” – whose given names she will not countenance, lest they supplant her own, better creations.

At the turn for her nursery, we encounter roadworks. She waves at the men in diggers and we know this is going to be a good day because they wave back. She stands with her hands clasped behind her back in the manner of a retired Italian man and shouts that today is her birthday. She informs them, helpfully, that they are in diggers and that they are doing work.

She has lost her pancake but she does not mind because nursery is in sight and she has begun chanting the holy mantra of the friends she’s about to see. Valentina, April, Audrey, Roscoe. They will hear all about the presents and the pancakes and the cats and the diggers. She is old enough now to have strong premonitions of cake in her near future, and she is glad.

But, in every other way, this is a normal day of normal joys, the kind which normally take a deliberate effort from me to savour. And on each of these normal days, I’ll wonder what twist I can add to any such description of their contents, to stop such mundane joy seeming sickly sweet.

Until one day I’ll look down and see the hand that held my finger this morning is holding my entire hand, and one day won’t even do that.

So, I shall pause and take the risk of saying how much I love this wonderful normal boring perfect day, because it goes like this: my daughter is three and she is a marvel. She is busy, and I am happy, for all is right with the world.