Where did that go, now?

It's a fact of life that when you have young children around the house, things go missing all the time. Before my daughter's second birthday party last weekend, for example, I found myself searching the place up and down in an effort to find out where-oh-where the last two years of my life had gone. I didn't find them anywhere; but on the plus side I did locate the TV remote control (without the batteries) and the car-keys, so I reckon I'm ahead for the moment.

But it's a constant battle to stay on top of things when, as is inevitable with babies in the house, you're tired and frazzled so much of the time. It affects your memory; it makes it hard to concentrate on things; and - worst of all, I find - it can even affect your memory. More than anything, though, it just makes time fly, so that the longest years of your child's life seem to be the shortest of yours.

(This doesn't just happen to you, by the way. You can see other parents' lives flying by too. I was talking to a colleague during the week whose wife - I was fairly certain of this - had had a baby between about six and eight months ago. Men are not as good at keeping track of kids' ages as women, admittedly, but even so, I was shocked to learn his daughter was now four-and-a-half. And that was his estimate. The child is probably six, or something.)

A second birthday is not as big a deal as a third birthday, of course. Another friend of mine celebrated his daughter's third recently with a party for 17 of her contemporaries, an event for which you need fairly comprehensive home insurance. There were no serious injuries, thankfully, and when I met him soon afterwards he was starting to let go of the tension, although still not ready to talk about the experience.

But as veteran parents will point out, the second birthday is as much for you as the child, something I tried to remind myself of the day I carried home one half of the birthday present. It was my wife's idea to buy a sand-pit for the back garden, and the half I was carrying was the four bags of sand, as a result of which, while the past two years have been the shortest of my life, at least my arms are slightly longer than they used to be.

The sand-pit was an inspired idea - Roisin spends more time in it now than she spends in the house - but it proves another thing about parenting. That however much you may despair about the clutter of toys and clothes and half-eaten food to which young children reduce your home, you just can't stop yourself adding to it.

It was bad enough before the pit arrived, but now it's like living on the edge of the Sahara. I know for a fact that I only bought four bags of sand, and yet there's already twice that amount down the back of the couch. And it gets everywhere: there was even some in the remote control when I found it (where the batteries used to be).

It's a well-established scientific principle that, given the right weather conditions, sand can grow. But even so, the rate of erosion in our house is startling. The garden is semi-desert already, and the patio is now under serious threat from the encroaching dunes. There could be camels out there by this stage - I'm afraid to look.

Still, the main thing is it keeps the little one busy, and away from other favourite two-year-old activities such as trying to climb into the pram on top of the baby, or pulling all the books out of the bookshelves, or piling all the books into the pram on top of the baby. And it's a present she could enjoy for years to come, provided we can keep some of the sand in the actual pit.

The birthday party itself was a simple but moving affair. There was a little cake, of course, with candles, and while Roisin would have preferred to put them out by using the baby, we persuaded her to blow them out instead. And then after she'd stuck as many fingers as possible into the chocolate icing, I had the job of eating the cake, which was very nice when you'd picked the sand out of it.

That was it, really. As I've said, the second birthday is for you as much as the child. It's an occasion for looking back in wonder, and looking forward in trepidation to the "terrible twos"; a time when, according to hardened parents, your child grows more and more wilful, to the point where trying to tell him or her not to do something is as futile as, say, asking Charlie Haughey to for God's sake stop writing cheques during the 1970s.

On a more general level, veteran or semi-retired parents also tell you to enjoy these early years as the best of your life. And you know what they mean; but when the weeks and months are flying by, and you're constantly short of sleep, and the place is a mess and, on top of everything, the camels are eating your neighbour's hedge, it's not easy to take time out every now and again and remind yourself you're having fun.

So I made a deliberate effort during the week to pause and reflect. And I recalled in particular that magical moment two years ago when I held my daughter in my arms for the first time, and I had a very profound thought. I wish I could remember what it was.