Testing Times

Six months pregnant with number three and we have put our house on the market. What have we done?!

With the prospect of a lean maternity leave ahead, do we really need to increase the size of our mortgage? With two pre-schoolers running around, can I really keep this place in a fit state to be viewed by prospective buyers? In the current economic climate, isn't the housing market still decidedly dodgy?

Memories of moving house when Gertie was just six weeks old are surfacing regularly. And did I mention that we actually love the house we are living in? Umm...I ask again, what have we done?

Still, life is always chaotic; just excuse me whilst I try to embrace the madness...

Not Waving but Drowning

It's a highly competitive world on a Wednesday afternoon at our local swimming pool. There are a series of lessons back-to-back for tots to teens, which means that virtually every parent in the village is there at some point.

Now that Gertie has reached the grand old age of four, she has just landed herself in the Level 1 class. This is an exciting new development because it means that we no longer have to get into the pool with her. I collect her early from nursery, where she takes great delight in telling everyone that she is going swimming, 'All by myself!" The nursery workers give me funny looks as she swaggers out of the building with all of her 'I've Just Had My Birthday and am Really Grown-Up' confidence.

But at the swelteringly hot poolside (I haven't quite organised an appropriate wardrobe for swimming supervision and usually end up looking red in the face and uncomfortably hot and sticky at the end of the half an hour) I can't quite believe the level of 'parental support' in evidence.

One Mum, dressed in baseball cap and and sports t-shirt, and looking more like an instructor than the actual swimming teacher, struts around the water's edge literally screaming at her son to correct his stroke/speed up/slow down/breathe differently. Whilst her garb marks her out as taking the whole thing just a wee bit too seriously, she is not alone in her vocalisation. In fact, at times I can barely see what is going on in the lesson for the number of grown-ups anxiously prowling the tiles and barking orders at their offspring.

Another mum, whose son clearly has an aversion to water and has sat on the side refusing entry for the last fortnight, now leaves him to endure this torture on his own, disappearing at the start of the lesson (presumably as she can't deal with the waterside tantrum which is now inflicted upon the rest of us.)

I confess that I want Gertie to do well in there, but mostly just feel relieved that I don't have to go through the rigmarole of getting ready for swimming without having the opportunity to actually 'swim' myself anymore. And any thoughts I might have harboured about wanting to encourage her swimming development are put on hold by the spectre of the super-coaches that surround the pool. I don't want to be one!

Gilby is obviously a long way from this point, and he goes swimming with his daddy on a Thursday morning. Happily, the swimming pool is right next door to where I work, so I try to organise a 'break' for some point during his lesson so that I can pop in and see how he is getting on. I managed to time it to coincide with the end of the lesson this week, so that I could give him big cuddles as he came out. I made the mistake of stripping him down before wrapping him in his towel so that my work clothes didn't get too wet. He rewarded me by weeing down said work clothes.

I handed him back to Daddy through gritted teeth, waving and smiling and wondering at the wisdom of my decision to try and juggle work and motherhood more successfully whilst simultaneously attempting to disguise the piss-stain on my dress.

Magic Mushroom

It is that time of year again. Gertie is four at the weekend.

We have the party and the celebrations sorted. I finally managed to persuade her that the North Pole wasn't great at this time of year. So, she will have eight friends from nursery trailing round the local farm park with her in the morning; a visit that will culminate in a picnic lunch. Then, in the afternoon, we have planned a tea party with all Gertie's cousins and family. Hooray! Not a husky or an arctic explorer in sight.

Now this is all jolly exciting, except that it means I am forced to make my annual trek into the kitchen where I pretend that baking, icing and decorating comes naturally to me, and produce a cake to rival Jane Asher.

Last year's highly successful Peppa Pig appeared to be the pinnacle of my culinary achievement (well, when one's husband has appeared on Masterchef, one doesn't get much opportunity to experiment in the kitchen...) but I feel that I have topped it this year, even though it was fairy tricky:

Number Post

Gilby's vocabulary is increasing exponentially, but some of his pronunciation is causing a few problems in communication.

Gertie and Gilby are both fond of Numberjacks, a Cbeebies special that I tolerate because it purports to be vaguely educational. The numberjacks are sort of animated superhero numbers who solve mathematical problems.

So when Gilby started putting 'number' as a kind of prefix to virtually everything he said, I thought it must be a side effect of bad parenting in the form of too much television. But I tried to answer him each time.

So, for example, outside the swimming pool on Thursday, 'Number bin?' a little voice said. The uplift at the end suggested a question. There were two recycling bins outside the leisure centre. 'Um, well, there are two bins.'

As we approached the car, he pointed at one on the other side of the car park. 'Number car.' The tone of this one sounded more like a statement, but one which needed some kind of response. 'Well, let me see. My eyesight's not really good enough, but it looks like a the registration is 'HY47 XXP'. It seemed to satisfy him.

A few minutes later, as we were driving along, he pointed towards the sky. 'Number plane?' He was really quite excited now.
'Gosh, I don't really know much about planes. Probably a 737...' I trailed off, slightly defeated, thinking that CBeebies had a lot to answer for.

It was only as I re-analysed those exchanges (which continued all day long, I might add) that I realised that he was in fact attempting to say 'another' each time, and pleased with himself for making connections between the objects - another bin, another car, another plane. Gertie used 'ummer' to represent this adjective when she was learning to talk, so I was temporarily flummoxed.

Still, we are going to have to ask Grumps for a 'Number pound', as it seems he took one from his eldest grandchild when he was looking after her on Thursday afternoon. She had one in her pocket that was no longer there by the end of the afternoon. He has admitted his guilt. Stealing from a three year old? He should be ashamed of himself!

It's Such a Perfect Day Until...

Let me paint a picture of the Easter harmony and domestic bliss that issued forth from our home yesterday.

The sun is shining and we are in a kind of paradise, our very own walled garden. The children are having fun and their shrieks and laughter drown out the noise of the traffic from the A29 rushing past, so that you could almost imagine you were really in the countryside.

Both children had a sleep simultaneously following their morning swim, so that I have been able to get lots of housework done and do some of the enormous pile of Easter marking that I have brought home with me, so that I don't have The Guilt, and am actually able to sit outside and enjoy the afternoon.

I am on a sun lounger with a book. And although at 20 weeks I already resemble a beach ball with protruding limbs, my children are not judgemental. They are both smothered in enough factor-bastard suncream to last the England cricket team on an entire tour of Australia, so I don't have to worry about sunburn. Gertie is alternating between bouncing on her trampoline and splashing in the paddling pool with her little brother. We had the foresight to fill it up early this morning, so it is now sun-warmed and a very pleasant temperature. Gilby is content to sit in the two inches of water and steadily empty it out using a variety of plastic cups and containers onto the lawn (recently mown and not entirely overgrown). The bare patches of grass are covered with strips of turf, which, whilst not yet properly laid, at least give the impression of an expanse of green instead of a sea of mud.

The three vines we planted in a fit of optimism are still standing upright in their respective places rather than having been uprooted and dragged across the garden by the puppy as they have been most mornings this week. In fact, Kempton is uncharacteristically restrained, and none of the children's toys have yet been chewed today. She is not bothering the chickens, and the cat, in turn, is not bothering Kempton. The new garden furniture is fully assembled and in a shady part of the garden ready for when we all get too hot later on. It is 'rattan effect' and not the rattan itself that we thought we were buying, but we are over that now.

Peace reigns.

In my head, I hear the strains of Lou Reed: It's such a perfect day/I'm glad I spent it with you....

Gilby decides that he wants to strip off and be a 'nunga punga', and so his sister joins him. Together they run around the garden playing happily and cool off in the water from time to time.

And then, I suddenly hear, "Naughty Kempton, naughty Kempton!" I look up from my book. Something is wrong with the paddling pool. It has gone a funny colour. Strange things are floating in it. What on earth could Kempton have done? And then the truth reveals itself.

I mentally change the words of the song in my head: It's such a perfect day/Until Gilby does a poo...

I'm not sure which was worse; the fact that he did it, or the fact that he tried to blame it on the dog!

Gumps' Ossage

I often write about Gertie because at Nearly-Four-Going-on-Forty, practically everything she says or does is inherently funny to me.

But my little man is now beginning to come in to his own. He won't be two until late in the summer, but the pair of them will now sit at the kitchen table together, falling about helplessly with giggles at something only they are complicit in, and being Actually-Not-Far-Off-Forty myself, I don't have a hope of understanding.

Gilby now has a bedtime ritual to rival Her Ladyship's: placing all his 'people' one by one in the cot (Iggle Piggle, Macca Pacca, Alien, a dinosaur, a crotcheted blanket and a stuffed bee with crackly wings) then gathering them beneath him mother-hen style to sleep on top of them all. They all have poky, uncomfortable looking bits, especially the dinosaur, but this doesn't seem to bother him in the slightest. I'm not entirely sure how the blanket constitutes one of the 'people', but it is at least soft. World War III breaks out if one of them is missing but as long as they are all in position, a simple, "Night, night Mummy," is followed by thumb in the mouth and lights out. This will inevitably be repeated when he still wakes for another bottle of milk somewhere between 1am and 3am.

He is exceptionally, at times, comically, polite, with an exaggerated, "No thank you Mummy," accompanying any food or activity offering not entirely to his taste. When playing he is regularly heard to insist, "My turn..." which he just looks far too little to be saying. At first this is cute and endearing, but when you realise that it is his turn straight away, always, it becomes less so. Other Mums smile at me in a congratulatory fashion the first time it happens over a disputed toy, then frown at me the next fifteen. Particularly when it is then accompanied by tears and a tantrum.

"Where's Gumps' Ossage?" is an oft-heard cry in our house too. Well, 'Gumps' only has himself to blame for this one. It has become Grumps' new nickname since their grandfather often arrives with a cling-filmed cooked sausage for each of them when he comes to visit. It may stick long beyond toddlerhood. I rather like it.

But my current favourite catchphrase and behaviour, clearly adapted from a well-known television quiz show with a distinctive presenter, is where he runs in to the room and without any preamble tells me, "You are weak! Bye!" before disappearing again.

I'm recording all this because I now know that it will change within a matter of weeks, and then I will probably forget, but I wonder about other parents' most remembered phrase and fable?

On Poultry, Politics, au Pairs and Picked Flowers

I'm rather glad it's Sunday as it's been a helluva week so far. Kempton's still in her first season which seems to have been going on forever, and despite multiple websites suggesting that there won't be much mess: there is.

We discovered that Gilby's illness was caused by Campylobacter; I'd never heard of it before, but we will be looking at the storage and preparation of raw poultry in our kitchen from now on. A call from the doctor was quite apologetic since they had fobbed us off twice before taking a sample from him.

Gertie got in to our second-choice school, which in 1066 And All That fashion may actually be a good thing. Daddy's spin is that it was his first choice anyway, so I don't think that we will be going through the appeal procedure. And we have just calculated that I will be on maternity leave just after she begins in September, which, though unplanned will mean that I won't miss out on those precious school gate moments.

Possibly most dramatic of all is that Brenda left us on Thursday after fifteen months. She was our au pair/nanny from Australia. We are trying to adjust. She is in Las Vegas, at a Celine Dion concert in Caesar's Palace as I write this!

And Gertie presented me with a broken Gerbera plant for Mothering Sunday. Orange is my favourite colour, and it was clever of Daddy because we had these flowers at our wedding. I'm quite impressed that he knew and remembered that. It could be a lucky fluke, but he is claiming prior planning. Anyway, there were three flowers on the plant, but Gertie appears to have 'picked' one for me already, so that leaves two and a broken stem. Gilby made me a card at nursery which he carefully destroyed in the car on the way home on Friday.

Happy Mother's Day!