Toddler Stew

There's a lot of things they don't tell you in parenting books. They're usually packed full of sensible sounding advice, although it is worth checking if the author actually has children of their own. Trust me, the rules are very different between someone who regularly looks after children verses actual parenthood. Now, a lot of childcare experts can look at the situation less emotionally, more scientifically and often can recommend some sensible ideas, but at the end of the day it's you that's the parent and it's you that's feeling emotional. When the frustration is streaking out from you like static electricity and making you feel like your hairstyle has become less "yummy Mummy" and more "crazed dandelion" then all the "sensible" advice in the world is not going to help. Said book of sensible tips is likely to be lobbed across the room to the tune of an over-hormonal woman yelling "what do you know about it anyway????" followed by some untranslatable utterances that can only be put down to hormones.
Seriously, I've come close. Just how do small children work out exactly which day it is that you are at your lowest ebb and then push all your buttons, plus the ones on the remote and the washing machine as well.

And why is it now that he starts to decide he doesn't need his nap any more? I know at 3 he's old for still napping, but he's always seemed to need more sleep than the stated average. He could have picked before I fell pregnant, or later in the year when I hope to be feeling better. At least he was still napping when I was having all the nasty pregnancy sickness, but I'm not exactly well now. I might have the womb of a fertile young woman, but the rest of me feels like it belongs to an eighty year old. I can only hope that the octogenarian who seems to have done an internal body swap with me treats it well and gives it back after I give birth.
And why now does he decide to start having little accidents? It's like we're back at the beginning of potty training again, with damp pants, forgetting to ask and the most irritating of all - the soggy car seat. They might say they come with an easily detachable cover, but they don't, they really don't. Now we have a car that smells of cat pee remover. It does the job all right, removes little boy odours just as well as cats, but it's what you might call pervasive. It doesn't smell of vanilla, it smells of something trying to pretend to be vanilla.

My pensionable hips have been keeping me up at night so I'm short on sleep and today was a little too much. He was ok at his first toddler group of the year, but was a little terror at singing time. He wet the car seat on the way and on the way home was sat on a carrier bag, complaining. He ate his lunch but didn't want to sleep. He wasn't crying, but I could hear him trying to bounce his toys off the wall the whole time. I took a much needed rest anyway and prepared for the afternoon which consisted of constant demands for drinks, TV programs and other incomprehensible items that pushed me to the limit.
I got out a pan and put it on the hob.
I picked up Joseph and asked "Shall we cook you? What would you taste like?" and then in the spirit of not really taking it seriously I turned him upside down and tried to put his head in the pan.
He didn't get the joke. He looked scared and cried out.
"No! Don't roast me, I'm not a cooky boy!"

It took a few minutes to convince him I was being silly. He ended up wearing the pan on his head for a little while and laughing, but kept looking at the cooker, as if somehow it might sneak up on him and cook him anyway.

Btw, he's ok now. He and Daddy are upstairs throwing lego about. Perhaps he'll learn that the cooker is not a toy now.

Cabin Fever

It's been raining a bit round our way. I don't feel I can complain too much, after all we haven't been flooded out of our house or lost power or heating. Plenty of people are suffering quite badly through all of this, all we're having to suffer is a chilly soggy trip back and forth to the car whenever we want to go anywhere.
And that's the problem. We're stuck inside most of the time. It's not as if the weather is just 'a bit nippy' or something similar. When it's not chucking it down, it's howling a gale and when it's not howling a gale it's hailing. When it's not hailing it's doing the other two at the same time. On one occasion, the short walk to the car was accompanied by Joseph's running commentary of "Let's get out of here!" repeated until he was safely stowed in his car seat.
Even the 15 minute walk to the local shopping precinct is out of the question in this weather. If Joseph was still small enough to fit in the buggy and I wasn't suffering from pregnancy exhaustion then I might perhaps chance it.... or not. The only thing on everyones minds right now is - when will this all end?
I'm sick to the back teeth of being cooped up. Andy, understandably, is less than keen on cycling to work at the moment and that leaves me with the choice of walking or chancing the horrific conditions in my battered old citroen. To say that it's seen better days is an understatement. When it got through it's last MOT we were all shocked. She has severe chassis corrosion, peeling paint, mysterious creaks and moss growing in some of her crevices. I have to drive her to work as there's no choice, but I never really fancy carting my precious offspring about in her less than safe insides. I believe she once did have some sort of Euro NCAP safety rating, but I don't think it was very high in the first place and is probably non existent now.

It's nasty out there.

In other news, Joseph has so far rejected all our ideas for baby names. To be fair, we've not been to sure ourselves so we welcomed his input. What name did he pick?

Sainsburys.

Perhaps we could work out some sort of sponsorship deal......

Ugh

When I was pregnant with Joseph I was the picture of health. At the start I had a bit of a run of hormonal headaches which didn't last too long and ironically coincided with the end of the holiday year at work. I'd booked the last remaining weeks off I had in a block before I even fell pregnant. I did not take a single day off sick for the whole pregnancy, but it was a little spoiled by my antenatal classes falling on a day I usually worked. Do you know, that period of time, from about twelve weeks until the last few weeks when I got a bit too bulky to do very much, was probably the healthiest I have ever been. I did not catch any bugs, no colds, no flu-like nasties, no throat infections and no gastric bugs either. All of these I usually get in abundance during the colder parts of the year.
Ah, how I miss that time. I have endured weeks of rotten headaches, which sometimes come back and bug me, months of morning sickness and now I have permanent IBS, indigestion and backache. Now, I did need a bit of gaviscon right at the very end with Joseph, but I'm barely 24 weeks at the moment and have already been taking it regularly for a while.
I had no oedema last time, but now I'm already noticing that sometimes my rings are uncomfortable, my socks are tight and even my bump will dramatically increase in size during the day sometimes. Andy came home from work and put his thumb in his mouth, puffed out his cheeks and asked if I'd been doing the same all day. All I could say was that the nice warm winter coat that still fitted well two days before, no longer did so.
I'm still suffering with a nasty cough from the flu-like thing I caught before Christmas. I used to have a fine soprano voice, now I sound like Marianne Faithful. My back hurts, my hips hurt, my feet hurt.

Ugh.

Even Joseph, as clueless and happy as a three year old usually is, has noticed I'm not quite my usual self. He catches me coughing and says "Are you ok Mummy? Are you ok?" follwed by "You're ok now Mummy." when I stop. He saw a man coughing in the supermarket last week and looked at me and said "He's ok now, Mummy." which did make me laugh, but then made me cough.
He has even told me "You have a rest now Mummy!" and will make me sit on the sofa. However, his attention span is fairly standard for a small boy and I'm usually dragged to my feet only a few minutes later to help scoot cars across the floor, or at least to rescue them from under the sofa.
He did have the best tantrum ever this week. Seriously, it was a good one. I was trying to get him up and dressed and Joseph was in full "I want! I want!" mode.
What did he want?
"I want to make Daddy happy!" repeated over and over, whilst resisting my efforts to get his socks on.

Awww.

A few Christmas Happenings..

There's something about being the proud possessor of a toddler that brings the innocent naivety back to Christmas. I had forgotten just how exciting putting up a plastic Christmas tree can be, but not how many of its fake needles it drops all over the floor. "Look Mummy. bells! Look! Look!"
I also enjoyed his struggle to pronounce the word "baubles" and his insistence on putting the star on the top of the tree, which nearly went so horribly wrong, but thankfully didn't.
I loved his mounting excitement as presents slowly appeared under the tree and his mounting frustration that he couldn't open them all just yet.

We had to get through his birthday first. I think as he gets older he's going to resent having a birthday in December, but it does help keep Christmas at bay for just a little bit. I made him a 3D stegosaurus out of sponge cake and Renshaw fondant icing (if you're reading then I really love your brand and perhaps you could send me some? I'm getting quite a bit of passing traffic on this blog now....)
He he, sorry.
Anyway, though I say it myself, I think it was quite a good cake and by the look on Josephs face when they brought it out after the restaurant meal, all candles blazing, he thought so too. I had a lot of fun making it, and the face did owe a debt to Wallace and Gromit, I have to admit. Definitely something about the eyes....

We have a cardboard plate for Santa. I picked it up cheap one year and now it seems to have stuck. It has a circle for a mince pie, a long triangle for a carrot and a small circle for a glass of sherry. I have to admit, I wasn't going to bother with sherry this year. I quite like it, but as I'm host to an ever expanding passenger at the moment I can't drink it. My other half is the only one about who likes it (even when he's not pretending to be Santa) and he was quite well supplied with some scotch and ginger wine so I thought he didn't mind. Turns out, you can't have a proper Christmas eve ritual without sherry, so we ended up with some anyway. He's happy as he's got a bottle of sweet sherry, which he prefers and I can't stand anyway. I like the dry stuff.
I feel a little bereft, having to have a totally "dry" Christmas. Ok, I'm not the biggest drinker at the best of times, but I do like the odd glass of wine and at this time of year I like to indulge in a little bit of port and lemon of an evening. Sadly all I can do is ask for a sniff of someone elses drink and I did allow myself one very small mouthful of wine after I had gorged a plenty on the big day itself, and I felt a little guilty about that. Joseph just downed pineapple crush like there was no tomorrow and was off playing with his new Thomas the Tank Engine before pudding was even served.

Ah, pudding, my one true shame of the season. Hand made stuffing in the bird (paxo is a dirty word in my house), proper gravy (bisto is an even dirtier word), proper roast veg (who's this Aunt Bessie person and why is she so popular???), all the green veg steamed and then doused in cream, cheese and breadcrumbs (it's the only way to make sprouts not taste of nasty) and honey glazed carrots. Not a single packet made item, and not a single healthy thing either! Did I mention there were two types of stuffing?
We even had home made custard for the pudding.... but the pudding was (sob).... bought.
Yes, while I should have been making a pud and leaving it to mature, I was too busy being ill so I just didn't get round to it. I did make a cake, but not a pudding. I'm so ashamed. It was quite a nice pudding though, and two minutes in the microwave after all that had slogging for the main course is something of a relief.

By the way... are you allowed to eat royal icing when you're pregnant? The bought roll out fondant stuff is ok, but home made royal icing is icing sugar and raw egg white. Given that the white is the more dangerous part of the egg, I'm not sure, but I can't help thinking that all that sugar would kill off most stuff.

Funniest memory of the season? The sight of my poor husband being made to be a donkey by my niece and son. Joseph likes the idea, it seems to have stuck.

The Curious Incident of the Vomit in the Night Time

Now I mentioned in my last post that I was unfortunate enough to catch a stomach bug not once but twice. The viral vector for all this horror? Joseph of course, but it's anyone's guess where he picked it up from. Small children, viruses, it's just how it goes.
Many children get sick, and many manage to do the worst in the middle of the night and sit and scream until a poor sleep starved parent gets up and begins the process of clearing up the gross horror. I've heard stories of small children who've been sick over night and because they're still not properly awake have gone back to sleep amidst their eruptions, bringing a not so nice surprise to the luckless soul whose turn it is to go and wake them in the morning.

Joseph seems not to like either of those options. His logic seems to work in a different way. He knows he's Not Allowed Out Of Bed, a fact he uses to its utmost annoyance and does make me worry if we'll ever get him nappy free over night. He knows he's not supposed to wake us up, which is nice too, but he seems to lack the higher level of reasoning that concludes that perhaps Mummy would prefer to know about things like vomit as soon as they happen rather than several hours later.
He also didn't fancy sleeping in a gross puddle. So what does he do? He turns the splattered pillow over and calmly goes to sleep on the other side. He can't have made much noise at all doing any of this, my husband is a very light sleeper.
I went in to his room that morning and thought to myself - "That's an odd smell. What's that stuck to his bed sheet?" and this lead me to the not so nice surprise lurking under the pillow. I have spoken to a number of parents with little ones and not one of them have had their child do this. Perhaps his logic was more like that of the blokey sort of bloke who turns his pants the other way out to get an extra day of wear and to put off doing the washing.
He got over the bug in record time and by the afternoon was his usual bouncy self. I kept him on dry crackers for most of the day to be on the safe side after making the classic mistake of giving him some Shreddies and a glass of Nesquik for breakfast. Not a nice combination to have to mop up off the floor, believe me.

I, however, did not throw off said bugs so easily and had to spend several days in bed with nothing but glasses of water and dry crackers, feeling utterly miserable. Shortly after that I caught the flu and I still have a cough.

Things that go BUMP!

I realise that I have had a significant absence from this blog, but as per usual more people seem to be reading it when I'm not adding posts than when I am so go figure.
It's probably best I explain myself. I have not been lazy, I am pregnant! Woo-hoo!
It started off all right, but just like last time I developed some rather unpleasant hormone induced cluster headaches. Managing a toddler when you're struggling to focus is quite hard, and writing any sort of blog post when you can't concentrate on small print is impossible. Anyway, I got to 12 weeks, had a nice healthy scan picture and thought, oh so naively, that I was on the mend. That's what happened last time anyway.
Not this time. As the headaches waned away, my usually reliable stomach decided that it was feeling rather left out of the whole business and decided to chime in on a depressingly regular basis. What really puzzled me was that I was perfectly capable of keeping down an unhealthy lunch of crackers slathered in butter, but not a nice healthy dinner of chicken and vegetables. All these slightly hippy-type women who blather on about your body "knowing what to do" clearly haven't met people like me. I simply point out that last time, when it came to labour, my body didn't know what to do and this time it seems to have even less of a clue. I keep craving soft boiled eggs, something I'm not supposed to eat. I don't want hard boiled, just soft - or fried. I'm guessing it's something to do with the protein content, but why my system should only be interested in runny yolks is beyond me.
At last the sickness decided to bow out at about 20 weeks and I could stop being told by people that I must be having a girl because the scan was pretty clear. It's a boy, and how sick you are has little to do with it.
One again, in the heights of naivety I decided I must be feeling better and started to enjoy life again only to be hit by two stomach bugs in a row. A few weeks later, when asked, I confidently responded that I was definitely on the mend only to go down with the flu the next day. Now, I even suffered having to have a flu jab which left me with a sore arm and a swollen armpit gland for a whole week. I was not amused to find myself ill with one of the strains it somehow doesn't cover.
Baby seems fine though, but the constant sickness seems to be segwaying neatly into constant indigestion and regular reflux is probably right round the corner.
Still, I've learned my lesson. Don't ask me how I'm feeling, it seems to be something of a loaded question.

Huh?

Ok, I'm getting confused now. How is it that my little boy is bright enough to work out that he can open the big door on the cupboard in his bedroom, push one of his little chairs up to it and reach up and get out his pot of crayons with no help whatsoever. It's lucky I went back into his room when I did as he was just getting bored of drawing on paper and was looking for other surfaces to unleash his creative side upon.
So, as I began to mention earlier, if he's bright enough to do that, they why can't he work out how to pull his own pants down to go to the potty? It's not as if it's particularly difficult, I bought one size up on purpose so they'd be a bit loose and easy to get up and down. He wont even properly try. I told him this morning that he'd get a sweetie if he pulled his own pants down and pulled them back. He tugged a couple of times, couldn't do it and gave up. I told him - no sweetie - and he didn't seem to care, until afterwards and he got a bit upset.
We've changed the rules, you see. He doesn't get a sweetie or any treat like it until the end of the day and he has to have been dry all day, no accidents, no weeing in the nappy (nap times don't count yet). Monday and Tuesday went well, today he has failed.
We popped out for a bit - you can't do much in the way of out and about when you're potty training, but you can't be hermits either. We went out, he had a bit of a play and we stopped in a cafe. I gave him the option of using the cafe toilet and then staying to play longer or going straight home. He wouldn't use the toilet so we came home. We were out for less than an hour, but he'd wet the nappy.
He doesn't seem to get it yet. I told him I was disappointed, but it didn't sink in. Not long after we got home, he used the potty.
It doesn't help he's not been well this week. We were making some good progress when he went down with a head cold that almost sent him right back to square one. He's getting over it now, but he still has a runny nose that nothing short of a couple of corks can abate.
Yesterday he dribbled on the sofa. The blocked nose has made him dribbly. I sighed and said that I'd need to get a tissue. Joseph beat me to it, got the tissue and then wiped up his dribble. He then marched into the kitchen and threw the tissue away. We sat there in stunned silence, although I did tell him he was a very good boy and well done just as soon as I'd got over the shock. So if he's bright enough to do that, why is potty training so hard?

"Joseph made a mess."
Oh, I hear that a lot. I tell him not to, sometimes he listens and sometimes he doesn't. This morning he didn't listen. I got him mostly dressed (pants, no trousers as I live in hope he might get the idea of taking himself to the potty) and told him to stay in his room while I got dressed. It's the same routine we have every morning and I creep downstairs quietly enough I can get a little quiet time before he twigs that Mummy isn't quite that slow at putting her clothes on.
When I'd had my little sit down, I got the vacuum cleaner out and got ready to clean the floors upstairs. I have never found vacuum cleaner that isn't evil. They all harbour hatred inside their fluff filled innards and it's all directed at me. We have a Dyson and it's tried to kill me more than once, usually by toppling over, but it's standard trick is to fall to bits while I'm trying to manoeuvre it up and down the stairs. Just why are the only handles on the bits that come off?
I've taken to using a Miele now, which is much less evil than the Dyson, but still seems to actively resent the job it's been designed to do. It's always catching on doorways and items of furniture, pulling me up short and then dramatically freeing itself and cracking me in the achillies tendon. Ouch. At least it has a cord retract, which the Dyson doesn't (seriously, it's the 21st century, and you can't put a cord retract on your machines Mr Dyson???) but even that has it's perils. When using one of my Mums vacuum cleaners some time ago, I pressed the cord retract button with my foot, only to discover that it was a bit more powerful than expected and right at the end the plug swung round and hit me on the foot, leaving me bleeding and bruised. They're evil, I tell you, all evil.
I digress. Joseph had made a mess. He always made a mess. Having vacuumed the hallway and the bathroom I moved on to his room and the noise had persuaded him to play downstairs. I tidied up, finished the cleaning and was about to move on to our bedroom when he came back in.
"Where are all the things?" he asked. He seemed genuinely confused.
Tidied up. I doubt they'll stay that way for long.