Beware Ticker Foot

As blog readers may know we had a few problems with Eddie's growth and development from birth, but were finally given the all clear just over a year ago - and were mightily relieved when he began to walk just shy of his second birthday.  So I was a little worried this week when he announced emphatically that he had 'Ticker Foot'.

I racked my brain. What was this strange affliction? I asked myself.  Might it be infectious?  (Gertie is prone to Athlete's Foot at times.)  Eddie was insistent, hopping about from one foot to the other, yelling.

"Let me have a look," I said, gravely.

At which point he ran to get it.  Apparently it comes with a badge when you go up a level in swimming.

He has also asked for 'Orkshire Puddings' this weekend.  I believe they are a particular delicacy in Middle Earth.

Currently Reading: Skios by Michael Frayn

Sing, King!

It's the season to be jolly and all that.  And to rush around like a lunatic.  And to enjoy youngest son's star performance as a king in the nursery nativity.

I had high hopes.  He sang his king song loudly, confidently and relatively tunefully in the car on the way to the village hall. He was pleased with his costume.  Any resemblance between his royal cloak and our living room curtains is entirely coincidental. I asked him whether he was giving gold, frankincense or myrrh to the baby Jesus.  "Mine's red," he said.  "So that means it's the gold, it's just red." Right.

He had a wobbly moment earlier in the day when he decided that he wanted to abdicate...his kingship and all responsibility for doing the play, but I insisted that we go along anyway just to have a look.  After the sing-song in the car and his delight in his crown he got caught up in the buzz and virtually ran back stage.

I sat in the audience expectantly.  It was the standard nursery production.  Bright, bubbly and exhaustingly enthusiastic helpers narrated, cajoled and over-acted next to unpredictable toddlers, whilst removing screaming children from the stage from time to time.  There were fourteen angels, five donkeys, four stars (yes, I know, that was a new development for me too, but there were also four kings so they kind of had one each to follow), a whole flock of shepherds, one Mary, one Joseph and, thankfully, one baby Jesus.

"Sing, Eddie," I heard the helper next to him implore as they launched in to the first 'number'.  He smiled his cutest smile, waved at me in the audience to make sure that I was looking, and then shook his head like he'd just been asked to tidy his bedroom.  I knew that shake. So I wasn't surprised when he refused to sing any songs for the entire duration of the show, including his special king one.  He did, dutifully, walk over and sling his 'red' at the crib at more or less the allotted time, but then promptly sat himself down again at the front of the stage and proceeded to pick his nose for the rest of the show.

He then had the temerity to demand cake on his return from the stage. Celebrity mindset without the performance, it seems.

And he sang all the way home, too.



Currently reading: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Things That Go Bang In The Night

No blog post in over a month!  Must try harder.

Bonfire night means that fireworks are out in full force.  I'm a big fan of them: I wanted them at my 40th birthday party that never was.  Perhaps I'll get them for my 50th. They are stunning, frivolous and fully deserving of the oohs and aahs they provoke.  Dark history aside they are reminders of childhood and symbols of celebration.

So I found it quite distressing when child after child of mine didn't like them.  Successively they screamed and shouted and crumbled in fear.  We kept trying.  Each year we have attended a number of displays, and taken it in turns to leap for safety.  Hearth-father spent last year's display cuddling tear-streaked cowerers in the cricket changing room at the local sports ground. (My turn to enjoy the rockets and Catherine wheels and bangers.)

Ear defenders, bribery and bullying have all failed in the past, but we persevere nevertheless.

And this year we accidentally hit on the magic formula to make it all work.

We separated them.

Gertie was with a school friend, and accidentally Hearth-father and I got split up in the crowd so that we had one each.  They were transfixed!

Fear is contagious, so this separation, coupled with the peer group pressure that Gertie must have experienced, finally made for a tear-free Guy Fawkes' night.  Hooray!

Smiles all round. Or perhaps they just grew up while we weren't looking.



Currently reading: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

No Fight Left Club

So, tantrums, then.

They are a bit worse, it seems, when I am single-parenting.  Hearth-Father is away in Malta on a cricket tour.

Eddie's tantrum this afternoon was prolonged.  And LOUD.  Insistent.  High-pitched and piercing.  It made me send him to bed without any supper, which I thought only happened in Victorian novels.  This was a meltdown of epic proportions. He was utterly inconsolable.  His eyes, at one point, seemed to roll backwards in his head with the sheer effort of continuing to scream.  And when he could get words out at all, which wasn't often, they mostly involved declamations like, "I...CAN'T....STOP...SCREAMING!" with giant shuddering gulps in between.  Horrible.  It made Eddie Norton's character fighting with himself in Fight Club look rational. It's been a long while since we've had one like that.

So I'm trying to work out what caused it; because, frankly, what escalated it was that I sat his Toy Story Woody toy upright instead of laying him down on the ground flat. Yes, I know.  Call social services.

Since he turned three at the weekend, can I blame 'terrible twos'?  I'm wondering if feeding him rubbish yesterday (birthday cake, chips, ketchup, sweets) was a deciding factor.  Bad if it was, because I seem not to have fed him at all, this evening.  Daddy being away?  The fact that everyone bowed down to his will yesterday because he was the birthday boy - and then didn't today, when he wasn't?  Being exhausted after having a lovely day in glorious late September sunshine at the stoolball, at the park and playing football?E

Who knows?  All I know is that I'm as exhausted as he is.  How does a little body have so much noise and fight in it? The 'expert advice' on www.babycenter.com suggests that the number one coping mechanism during a toddler tantrum is 'not losing your own cool'.  Right.  This is followed by the advice to 'remember that you're the adult'.  Oh.

Come back, Daddy!



Currently Reading: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

For Sale Signs and Errant Pants

So we've made the decision to try and sell the house.  Again.

There is no more money in the pot, but we need more room.  When we moved here, Gertie was just a few months old, not yet on the move.  For two adults and a tiny baby it was positively palatial.  We bounced around in our big house, and once she did start crawling, I might even lose Gertie for a few moments. These days finding five minutes alone in the bathroom is an unlikely proposition.  Now there are the three little people.  And they are not so little.  They have this habit of just growing bigger.  And bigger.  By the day. Moving towards a time when they will want to spend increasingly long times alone in the one bathroom.

I can remember all the empty rooms when we first moved in and wondering how I'd ever have enough furniture to fill them.  Ha. Now every corner is crammed full of stuff.  Each inch of wall space is covered in pictures and photographs.  There are thousands of books.  Everywhere.  And that count might go up to tens of thousands if you include the boxes in the loft. There are plastic toys in places where toys simply shouldn't be. Like in my shoes. And behind the washing machine. It is impossible to keep tidy. And therein lies the first paradox.  Because in order to sell your house you need to be able to keep it very tidy.  So that it can be viewed at a moment's notice.  Well, we had our first viewing today.  It took me four hours to get things straight.  That's not happening every time, I can tell you. And when we came home there was a pair of toddler pants smiling up welcomingly from the utility room floor, that I must have missed in my final tidy-check.  That subsequently looked like they'd just walked there themselves.  Which I guess they might have done, being Eddie's.

So now I follow the children around hawk-like, beady eyes scanning for any potential mess-making hazard. They will be the first to tell you that this is not fun.

And the house we have our eye on is...'in need of modernisation'.  In other words, a wreck.  And a smaller wreck than our current abode at that.  And it costs more money.  But it is a wreck with the potential to be bigger.  At some point, when the childcare costs stop sucking the lifeblood from our very veins.

We tried to do a similar thing a few years ago, but the wreck of a house we wanted then sold almost before we'd got ours on the market and it felt like a blessing in disguise.

So I've got my eye on the estate agents' window these days.  Today I was drawn to an attractive property in the top right hand corner.  It took me a second to register that it was the one I already own. ( I say 'own'.  I think we might own approximately a square metre of the floor space, by now.  But another paradox:  It looks lovely in the pictures, all tidied up and de-cluttered.  Like somewhere I might actually want to live.

When Honesty is Not the Best Policy

After working on manners over the holiday, I think I need to move on to lessons in diplomacy.

My children are...too honest, it seems.  The latest example came in the confines of the family changing cubicle at our local swimming pool.

"Mummy's tummy is very wobbly!" pronounced one, to the general giggles and chortlement of the others as I was busy getting changed.  Chortlement, of course, isn't actually a word, but should be, since it so accurately describes the atmosphere within the cubicle.  Though Mummy, it has to be said, was not feeling it.

Particularly not as she had spent the summer determined to get into shape, swimming 30-50 lengths three times a week (and every day on holiday), not to mention occasionally bypassing the camembert and brie.

"Yes," she snapped.  Notice I do this third person thing when I don't come out of a situation glowingly. "And her tummy is mostly wobbly because it's had you three in it!"

There.  That really told them.

It was on a par with them discussing the fact that Daddy could never have head-lice because his hairs weren't close enough together.  Must admit that caused me a small amount of chortlement.

Or when they decided that Nano looked exactly like Mummy only one hundred times wrinklier.

So, I look forward to turning into a wobblier, wrinklier version of myself as the years pass by; and for it not to be acknowledged openly by my children as they gradually become more diplomatic versions of themselves.  (Or possibly not, in Eddie's case.)



Currently Reading: A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

On Manners

Eddie's favourite word is, and has been since he first began to utter human sounds, 'no'!

It is usually delivered as a short bark and accompanied by a frown and a pout that would give a blob fish a run for it's money:

And he is incredibly demanding.  The phrase you are most likely to hear after, 'No!' is, 'I want...' with the emphasis on 'want' and usually in relation to some ridiculous request. 'Spoiled brat' might have been too kind an epithet. In fact, I hadn't realised how bad it had got until we were on holiday with friends and relatives and I was suddenly finding his behaviour very difficult to deal with. Worse than simply terrible twos because there seemed to be no let up.  (Though I do look back over posts from a couple of years ago when Gilby was the same age and the tone is remarkably similar...)

So with time off together I have spent much of the summer working on his manners.  We have been practising how you ask for things and appropriate responses.  It has taken a good deal of will power on my part, but having been at home with them all for five weeks now I have got used to ignoring anything that isn't accompanied by at least a 'please'.

And, success, of sorts: Eddie has perfected the art of an elongated 'plee-ease' accompanied by an irresistibly cute grin, which, whilst irritating, is much more palatable than what came previously. It's significantly more successful than his previous modus operandi, and I think he's managed to work that out for himself. Could you say no to this?

I'm going to ignore the grammar though, because he now begins most requests with 'Please MAY CAN I have...' which his siblings find highly amusing. Again, not right, but much more preferable than what came before and I'm just not sure he's quite ready for a lesson on modal auxiliary verbs yet.

Currently reading: A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly