AGAINST THE ODDS:Angie has gone to Castleknock for a night out and a stay-over with her sister and Vinny is left alone with the twins. Let the fun begin

IT WAS near the end of the third quarter when Vinny Fitzpatrick heard the first wail from upstairs, a wail he ignored. It was not a paternal reaction, he knew, but for Vinny, old habits died hard.

Brett Favre, his former Green Bay Packer favourite, now a Viking, was rounding up the Cowboys in the NFC Championship play-offs and it was going to take more than a yelp from a five-week old infant, or two, to shift Vinny’s ample backside from a sofa strewn with cheese puffs.

That he had invested a nifty-fifty on the Vikings at 8 to 1 to win the Super Bowl was another factor in his reluctance to react to the plaintive cry from above.

At 17-3 to the Vikings, he was about to dip fleshy orange-tipped fingers into another large bag of his carbo-loaded snacks when a volley of cries erupted overhead.

Not one, but two, tiny Fitzpatricks were demanding nourishment and it was time for their father, reluctantly, to do a shift.

If truth be told, Vinny had been a touch wary about being left home alone with two sprogs to mind. Sunday nights were usually spent with the lads in Foley’s, an excursion he was missing desperately.

But when Angie had complained of cabin fever and said she fancied a drink with her sister Debs, Vinny had been outwardly supportive. When the night out expanded into a sleep-over, he had done his best to mask his fear of the unknown.

Angie had assured him everything would be fine and that he could only benefit from a bonding session with the kids but Vinny wasn’t so sure.

With military precision, Angie had gone through the itinerary, leaving clear instructions for feeding duties and two separate piles of his and hers nappies, wipes, bibs and clothes.

“It’s not so much double trouble love, as double the fun,” she said, clicking her heels on the cobbles outside the hall door before gunning her sporty red Volkswagen golf in the direction of Castleknock.

Several hours later, Vinny shuffled a tad unenthusiastically upstairs to tend to the needs of his son, Oisín and daughter, Aoife, now both bawling with an ear-splitting shrill.

“Alright, I’m coming, I’m coming,” he said as he pushed open the bedroom door, where he was greeted with a noxious whiff he instantly recognised.

“Aoife, you’re some woman for one woman,” he said wearily, lifting his infant daughter, complete with bulging nappy, out of her cot and placing her on the giant-sized changing table, along with Oisín.

It was a messy business and Vinny had more fumbles in the next few minutes than Favre managed in his entire career as he struggled with wipes and a wriggling nipper.

After an age, he turned a sweaty brow to uimhir a do, Oisín, whose decibel levels were at screaming pitch and pleaded: “Son, will you hould your whisht?” As he removed the sodden nappy and reached down for a replacement, Vinny felt something warm and wet land on his baldy head.

Startled, he looked up, only to be hit firmly in the eye by a fountain of wee.

“Jaypers, it’s a geyser,” he said aloud, as he bore the brunt of a four square projectile pee, his first as a dad. After towelling himself down, and changing his shirt – neither event having the silencer effect on the chisellers – it was time for the next leg of Vinny’s nocturnal adventure: the feed.

Tucking a wailing child under each oxter, Vinny made for the kitchen where there was an array of sterilised bottles, boiled water that had cooled, and a large tin of SMA baby food, complete with Angie’s hand-written set of commands.

Placing the tots, by now empurpled with hunger, in two bouncy chairs, Vinny set about filling the bottles.

Each one required six heaped spoonfuls of feed and Vinny took care to get it right as Angie had warned him that too little, or too much, would knock the kids out of synch.

Having done his sums, the final preparatory act was to give the bottles a good ’ol shake. Vinny imagined he was Favre about to snap a fourth down pass into the end zone for a match-winning touchdown as he reached for the first bottle.

Seconds later, he was covered in a tepid mess of milky goo as the contents exploded all over him – he had failed to ensure the bottle lid was screwed down tightly. “Fitzpatrick, you’re some gombeen,” he hissed.

Crucially, his food supply for the bairns had been halved and it was going to take another 10 minutes, at least, to boil the kettle and let the water cool. Both tots were screaming and he could only feed one.

What would Favre do in a situation like this? Surrounded on all sides, on his own 50-yard line, with the clock running down, one play left, and his team behind? He’d improvise, that’s what.

Stuffing the one good bottle into his pocket, Vinny gathered up the kids and brought them into the living-room. It was now 27-3 to the Vikings, thanks to another touchdown pass from Favre, he noted approvingly, as he put his own emergency game plan into place.

“Here’s the deal, guys,” he said as he reached for the bottle. “Oisín, you get half; then you Aoife, you get half. After a few minutes of weepy time you’ll each get the other half, okay? Negotiation is not an option. Here, Oisín suck on this,” he said thrusting the bottle into his son’s mouth.

Then, a strange thing happened, and it wasn’t a fourth touchdown for 40-year-old Favre and the Vikings, which come to think of it wasn’t strange at all given the one-sided nature of the ball game, there came the sound of silence.

As Oisín suckled hungrily at pace, Aoife slipped off her screaming hat and went quiet. She looked up at her aul fella with her big blue eyes and beamed a gummy smile.

Vinny, who was already besotted with his daughter, couldn’t get over the change. “Can you Adam and Eve that,” he said to himself. “What a girl.”

With that he heard a rumbling noise and felt something deposit into his daughter’s nappy. It was followed by another internal eruption, a whimper, then a banshee wail.

Vinny groaned. Things couldn’t get any worse, could they? With that, Oisín threw up, a screed of hot vomit landing squarely in his father’s lap.

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