Leo — the little years

He calls the hospital the hostibul and we have privately agreed, as a family, that the NHS is wrong about this. Animals are aminals. A magazine is a mazagine, which honestly scans better. And the big one: yesterday means any time in the past. "Yesterday, when I was a baby." "Yesterday, before I was born." His entire history is one day deep, and he speaks about it like a very small war veteran.

I've started writing them down because his sister said "hostibul" back to him last week and he corrected her. "It's HOSPITAL, Mabel." So it's already going. Nobody warns you that they fix themselves.

Bedtime is a legal process with three courts of appeal. The first ruling is at seven: pyjamas, teeth, two books. Leo accepts this ruling and then immediately files his first appeal, which is that one of the books "doesn't count" because he's heard it before. This appeal has never once succeeded and is lodged nightly.

Books happen. Lights out happens. Then the second court convenes in the dark: he needs water, but not that cup. Then the water is too cold. Then he has a question, and the questions are the real reason I haven't cracked down on any of this, because the questions in the dark are the best ones. This week: whether worms have birthdays, whether I knew Mummy when I was a boy, and where Tuesday goes.

Final appeal is calling out "Dad. DAD. I love you" at a volume that wakes his sister, which he knows is unanswerable, the little lawyer. Total elapsed time, most nights: fifty-five minutes. I'll miss it like a limb.

Diggers, still, but we've entered a more scholarly phase. It's no longer enough that a digger is present; he now needs to know which digger. There's a laminated poster of construction vehicles on his wall — his choice, over the dinosaurs — and he stands in front of it in the morning like a general reviewing troops.

The man at the site by the school knows him now. Waves the bucket at him, which for Leo is roughly equivalent to being knighted. Best meal: beans on toast, "but stirred". Best book: any digger book, worst luck. Best person, asked at dinner on Sunday: "Mabel, then you, then Granny, then the digger man." His mother took it well.

Dear Leo. You're four, and I want to get some things on the record before your own memory starts and overwrites all of this.

You are, at four, the single most confident person I have ever met. You told a waiter last week that you "come here all the time". We had never been there. You believe you can outrun the dog, and you are wrong, and you have never once let being wrong slow you down, and I hope with everything I have that the world doesn't teach that out of you too thoroughly.

You hold my ear when you're tired. Not my hand — my ear, folded over like a bus ticket, and it must be the left one. Your mother says I'll be sad when you stop and she's right, and I already know I won't be able to say anything about it, because the lasts don't announce themselves. They just quietly happen, and you count them afterwards.

If you're reading this at eighteen: the ear thing was fine. I never minded. Love, Dad.