We never got parakeets in our garden when we lived in Archway. I know these don’t belong here, they’re nasty interlopers from a far-off land whose success on these shores can only spell doom for less fortunate native species, but they’re also bright green. Being bright green is a massive positive as far as I’m concerned, and must count as one of the key failures of, say, the starling. I remember going to visit my grandfather in Australia as a boy and marvelling at the birds he got in his back garden: cockatoos, galahs and most memorably the incredible rainbow lorikeet. And here I am, with parrots parading in my back garden, and I only had to move to East Finchley to achieve it.

A flock of these has set up home in Coldfall Woods, directly behind our house, and we see them pretty much every day. Other than the fact that they make a bit of a racket, it’s hard not to be happy about it. Though there’s also a woodpecker who we see much less often, and I’d quickly go without a couple of parakeet visits if I could see a bit more of that.

The picture, incidentally, was taken from my kitchen.

The last couple of winters had been freezing and icy. This visit was warm but wet. Very wet: in my four days there (Rachel and the kids had a couple more) there were perhaps two dry daylight hours.

We spent them walking, the kids loving the swollen stream that flows down the hill from High Dam and most of all the puddles, nearly big enough to qualify as lakes in their own right. At the end of it there was an inch of water in T’s wellies. Near-incessant rain isn’t great, but it’s better than the freezing cold, sure enough.

It’s Halloween, so yesterday the kids carved pumpkins. Well, more honestly the grown-ups carved pumpkins and the kids got their hands messy scooping out the pulp and seeds from inside them. Well, more honestly T got her hands messy, J used a spoon for a bit and then gave up and Zoe, for whom messiness is a cause of great and immediate upset, just let her mum get on with it. Tonight we’re trick or treating in a new neighbourhood. You can tell a lot about a place, and a community, by how it deals with Halloween, I reckon. Whitehall Park, our old neighbourhood, was particularly good. Tonight we’ll see just what kind of place we’ve wound up in.

One of the key issues affecting J’s speech was that he was unable to blow through his mouth, rather than his nose. If he blew, the air would fly out of both equally. Two months ago he couldn’t blow through a straw without an adult holding his nose closed. But a bit of practise has wrought an incredible improvement. Yesterday he started playing a harmonica; today he made noise using this parper – bought from a French hypermarche during the 1998 World Cup and requiring a decent amount of puff. He seemed pretty chuffed about it, as was I.

There will be a lot of small steps between here and normal conversation, but this really does feel like a big one.

I am a disastrous diarist. It has been another, ooh, ages since my last post, and it’s not as if I haven’t had anything worth saying. For a start, we’ve moved house. We’ve been on holiday, twice – once to France, just before the move, and once to the Lake District, a few weeks later, stopping off in the Cotswolds on the way back for a wedding. And T has turned four.

That, at least, happened relatively recently (last Sunday, to be precise). We celebrated first in Birmingham, where we’d spent the previous night (our fifth anniversary, as it happens) at a 60th birthday party for Rachel’s uncle Mark, and then at our house with my parents and sisters and kids. We gave her a bike, very slightly too big as it turned out, scuppering our plan never to let her use stabilisers. So that he wouldn’t feel completely left out, J got a little plastic one to sit on. No stabilisers required for that one.

J’s speech is improving, slowly. He has been diagnosed with verbal dyspraxia, and though we don’t think it’s a particularly extreme case it’s clearly going to be a long, slow and wearisome process before he catches up with his contemporaries. But, for the first time, he’s trying. There are very few consonant sounds as yet (m, b, d), so lots of his words are just vague vowel sounds and glottal stops – ah-uh for apple, air-ay for aeroplane, that kind of thing. He’s started to put words together, so ma ba for my bike, say. It’s not great, for a two-and-a-half-year-old, but it’s very definite progress.

I’ve been waiting to write about J’s discovery of language, but it still hasn’t happened and I can’t let this silence continue forever, or I’ll be as bad as he is. He’s started a course of speech therapy, but there’s no speech to be therapied. But if there’s no action there, there’s plenty elsewhere: most notably the fact that we’re moving house.

It all happened rather quickly. We asked the local estate agent round to value the house, and four days later we were under offer. Our destination is the East Finchley/Muswell Hill border, a rare enclave of decent primary schools and not-abominable transport options already or soon to be populated by several friends. After quite a lot of looking and a fair amount of budget-ripping up, we appear to have found somewhere to move into. The lawyers are in action as we speak. They’ve been in action for a couple of weeks, truth be told. I genuinely can’t remember how long it takes them to actually complete their actions. The new place, other than being a fair amount further away from central London, will hopefully be a bit more family-friendly than our current house, involving significantly fewer stairs and also appreciably more en-suite bathrooms.

Exciting times ahead, then. Right now, though, times are far from exciting. They are quite annoying. They are filled with legal queries, and searches through filing cabinets in search of this or that long-forgotten document. And soon, all being well, there will be sorting and packing and moving and unpacking and resorting. Pretty damn annoying, as times go.

In unrelated news, this weekend Rachel and I went to Glasgow for the wedding of her friend Sara, who in an unlikely coincidence married a Watford fan called Simon. For the first time we left the kids for two nights, with Rachel’s parents, mine being inconveniently on a holiday of their own. We found it blissfully peaceful, and the kids seemed entirely unharmed by the experience. We must do it more again sometime.

He also likes: demanding to do whatever anyone else is doing. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is. If someone says “I’m going to the toilet”, he wants the toilet too. If someone says, “I’m going to have breakfast”, he wants some of it – even if he’s already had his own breakfast, and half of someone else’s. What he likes less is his promotion, last week, from the nursery’s baby room, where he was comfortable, and loved, to the toddler room, where he is the smallest and the least vocal. It could be the making of him…

Of course, loads of stuff has happened since my last post. Sorry ’bout that. Anyway, I was giving the kids dinner today when Rachel, who had been up in our bedroom, came downstairs and pottered into the bathroom. “Who’s that?” asked T, between bites of pizza. “Ooooh, well, I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe it was a monster…”

At that, J – who had been merrily eating his own portion of pizza – became extremely agitated. “No, no!” he cried (still pretty much his only word) as he attempted to scramble out of his high chair to safety. I told him it was his mother really, but he still didn’t calm down, not until he was in my arms, nor did he eat another mouthful of food that mealtime.

And so we discovered that J is afraid of monsters.

A short while later, they were in the bath. “Daddy,” said T, “your elbow is so white!”

I had no idea my elbows were any paler than the rest of my (pallid, winter-depressed) body, but then I don’t spend much time looking at them.

“Oh dear,” I replied. “I’d better go to the doctor…”

At that J, who had been merrily playing with his bubbles and his squidgy plastic turtles, became extremely agitated. “No, no!” he cried, as he attempted to scramble out of the bath to safety. He didn’t calm down until he was in my arms, and that was the end of his bathtime.

And so we discovered that J is afraid of doctors. And monsters. And more to come, I’d wager.

A long time ago, when T started watching the popular children’s television programme In The Night Garden, we bought her toy versions of the two main characters, Igglepiggle and Upsy Daisy. She loved her new toys, and kept on loving them even when she (thankfully) stopped watching their dreary televised adventures. For the best part of three years they were her favourites. Every night, without fail, she clutched them as she went to bed, and they were the first items in the overnight bag if ever we were staying elsewhere. Sleep without them was frankly unthinkable. But a couple of months ago I noticed a certain cooling of relations. Without having any exciting new cuddly toys to replace them, somehow old familiar ones, mostly rabbit-shaped, managed to leap above them in her affections. Occasionally one or indeed both of the ITNG pair would be left outside the bed at night-time, albeit generally still within touching distance.

And then, as we packed to go to the Lake District for new year, we gave T a little bag to fill with whatever toys she wanted to bring. She returned it, duly filled to bulging with assorted cuddly chums. Neither Igglepiggle nor Upsy Daisy made it. Worse, Upsy Daisy was at the time stuffed uncomfortably in a random bag behind a random door. And that, nearly a month later, is where she remains. An unloved ex-favourite.

But all is not lost for Upsy Daisy. Because guess what programme J has just discovered…