My daughter's so vain. (I bet she thinks this column's about her.) However, as this weekend marks the seventh birthday of the little girl who never misses a chance to look at herself in our dressing-table mirror, or to catch sight of her reflection in the TV screen, I feel that I ought to try and find something nice to say about her for a change.

As I write this she's upstairs asleep. Her main birthday present this year has been a new bed, and although we ordered it months ago it only actually arrived last week, which was quite a neat bit of timing. Obviously she's had to sleep on the floor for the past week, until it's time for her to unwrap her new bed (despite the seventeen yards of wrapping paper, I think she's guessed what it is that's taking up most of the available floor space in her bedroom) but I'm sure she'll soon forgive us for that. The new bed is what I believe is called 'a cabin bed', by which I mean that the actual sleeping part is raised above the floor to around about the level of my shoulders. A ladder at one end and a slide at the other allow the bed to be got up to and down from, and the covered space underneath serves as a useful store for the Devonshire part of the EC soft-toy mountain.

In some ways it seems impossible that it can be seven years since she decided to put in an appearance. She was actually born at 3:24 am, showing an appalling lack of consideration for the fact that some people were trying to sleep. Mind you, that was pretty much the pattern for the next few months, so maybe she was just starting as she meant to go on. This pre-dawn arrival of course means that much of the business of deciding whether those were real contractions or just indigestion, and of actually getting to the hospital, occurred the day before. Although most TV shows portray it as a short, intense period of red-faced sweating and a lot of screaming, the reality was much more gradual. Put another way, although she was certain that she was in labour, my wife certainly had enough time for us to pop into our local pub for a light lunch and a game of pool (I won, by the way) before making the journey to the hospital.

As it happened, we had an ultrascan appointment booked for that afternoon, but in light of the being in labour and all we thought we might as well skip that and just go straight to the labour ward. It would be wrong of me to say that the entire process is etched on my memory, and even if it was an awful lot of it was just sitting around waiting, so I won't bore you all with the details. Suffice to say that at some point there was suddenly a baby. The midwife was a tiny little thing, who only looked about twelve, and who was called Andrea, but pronounced as in San Andreas fault. And having produced the rabbit from the hat (that's only a metaphor of course - she actually produced a baby from... well, from the place babies are normally produced from) she handed me a pair of scissors to cut the cord. I would love to regale you at this point with the anecdote that I said, "God bless her and all who sail in her" or something similarly amusing, but alas I didn't. I will, on the other hand, disconcert you with the slightly grisly detail that umbilical cords are a lot tougher to cut through than they look (or maybe the NHS have a line of very blunt scissors, I don't know). Before moving on from that can I also add, for those of you with strong stomachs, that the stub of umbilical cord that remains attached to the baby withers and drops off within about a week; but until it does that it reeks! Never mind the inexplicable contents of a hundred soiled nappies - stump of cord is where the real stench lies!!!

Anyway, that was pretty much that. After we took delivery, I rang our respective parents (who became grandparents obviously) and then after a while my other half and my new other, other half were relocated to the maternity unit as opposed to the delivery unit, and I went home. Later on I went back, and then WE went home. Various other things in no particular order also occurred during this time - obviously they did occur in a particular order at the time, but I mean that I can't now remember it. I went to the pub to celebrate with my brother (who had become an uncle obviously). I also rang up my grandparents (who had become great-grandparents obviously). I told at least one set that the wee lady in question looked like Winston Churchill without the cigar, a description my wife still occasionally brings up, but one that I stand by as being a fair assessment.

Ah yes, the appearance... I don't much go in for this "she's got Auntie Mabel's chin" or "she's the spitting image of your sister" sort of thing. Nevertheless I do recall hoping in an idle moment, prior to the Eagle landing, that she would be one of those pretty-looking babies, as opposed to (and we've all seen photos so let's not pretend) a right ugly bulldog-like thing. I was pleased, albeit one could argue rather shallow, to see that when she arrived she was quite beautiful, and not a close relative of Quasimodo at all. Of course, at this distance, I now realise the irony of those thoughts - looking at photos of the time, she's no more or less pretty than a lot of other babies. The difference was that I was looking at her, because she was ours, and that made her seem so very beautiful. There is a professional photograph taken in the hospital (and therefore by a simple calculation, when she was no more than fourteen hours old) which at the time I thought showed an objectively radiant baby - seven years on and it's still a lovely photo, but mainly by association and recollection, not necessarily because she's the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. The photo shows her with one fist raised above her head in what I like to think of as her 'Free Nelson Mandela' pose - yes, I know he was freed long before 1997, but she was only little and I didn't have the heart to tell her.

Lots of other things have happened since then. I remember more in the general than the detail the varying periods of changing nappies, of feeding, of burping, then of toddling and walking, of teething and of speaking. There are anecdotes and incidents of course, but none especially relevant at the moment. I sometimes hear people say, as though it were a reason to worry, that they had forgotten what it was like to be getting up at nights, or to be looking after a motionless little bundle. I always find this rather strange - at the moment she's seven, and if there's anything we need to know about it's how to help with her reading, or her sums, or getting her to ballet class, or making sure her lunch is packed and her uniform clean, and making sure she's happy and healthy... I no longer need to know the exact sequence of wiping and powdering and creaming and re-covering a dirty bottom. In seven years time we will be worrying about boyfriends and puberty and what the rational argument against piercing your nipple is, and by that time knowing how to explain the pronunciation of 'drive' or 'nice' or 'could', or knowing how to explain long division to her, will have become rather useless skills. If children are constantly changing (and the fact that some of her clothes are now inexplicably too small, and the fact that she can now see over the counter in our local library suggest that at the very least our child is) then as parents we also need to adapt to keep up with the game. If the question is, "How's the parenting going?" then the answer can surely only ever be that given by the man falling off the top of the Empire State Building: "OK so far!"

We have our ups and downs, and we have arguments and fights (verbally) and tantrums and the occasional door slam, and cheek and rudeness and pouting and tears and all the range of aggravations and infuriating stubbornness that can be imagined. (I leave it to you dear reader to decide which of those are her, which are me, and which we both do.) But equally, if my daughter is resigned to the fact that the first thing she hears in the mornings, in answer to her request to go downstairs for breakfast, is a dull "Ten more minutes" from under the parental duvet; she can also be confident that the last thing she will hear at night is being told we love her. Anything other than that is less certain, and we will just have to deal with it as it arises. For tonight I can only breathe a sigh of relief and report, OK so far.

Happy Birthday Miss Curnow.