Mothers seem to have an instant connection with their children that fathers, in my experience, don’t have. For the mother birth is physical and painful and personal. For the father it’s pretty much wine, flowers and a certain amount of patience followed by a couple hours of pacing and saying “breathe breath” whilst being cursed. (Well, in at least one case.) The children are part of the mother. They are not part of the father.

(Although it should be mentioned that when they were in their misshapen, badly formed lizard looking newborn phase was when my girls most looked like me. Which says a lot about how I look.)

As such, I think fathers eventually have a moment where they fall in love with their kids. A moment when protecting them, killing for them and living for them becomes part of you and not just part of a legally mandated series of responsibilities.

In my case, I fell for my oldest when she was two or so. We’d enrolled her to receive a series of videos and books featuring Shimajiro, a little boy tiger (this makes sense when you realize Hello Kitty is a girl not a cat) who learns a lot of lessons in preschool about manners and study skills, usually accompanied by music. (It is not as annoying as Barney.) The package contains a Shimajiro puppet that remains a must have toy for preschoolers.

When the kit arrived our oldest was excited to the point of hopping up and down. She immediately went for the Shimajiro doll and started playing with it. She started going around and having Shimajiro say hello to all of us. When her friend came over she said an adorable (in Japanese) “Shimajiro came to our house!” It was annoyingly cute and I was smitten, and still am, even though all our internet capable electronics now have to have passwords on them to keep her off the internet.

With our youngest, there was a bit of set up. Our oldest had, over time, acquired change from various places (grandparents) and that meant she had to have a coin purse. Following the code of “Monkey see. Monkey wants her own.” This meant our youngest had to have a coin purse of her own, even though hers only contained slips of paper we called “her money” because we didn’t want her choking on coins (she was still under two). During a trip to a 100 yen shop our oldest bought some sort of trinket from a capsule toy machine and then went to find something else.

I watched our youngest study the machine and then squat down in front of it. She got a serious look on her face as she took out one of the slips of “her money” and tried to put it in the machine. I was smitten. I ended up buying her one of the “less likely to choke on it” toys. I’m still smitten, even though she’s developed an impressive back-talking skill for a nine year old.