Mama's Boy...

I worry for my son. Every morning I have a coffee and no matter what I drink it from, he covets it. If I ever have trouble getting him to drink fluids I’ll just have to disguise them as a large latte and he’d be soaking his nappies in no time. I don’t know if it’s the smell of coffee he loves, or if it’s just that he sees me with one every morning and just as he covets phones, laptops and remote controls, he believes that coffee will catapult him into the world of walking, talking and avoiding the gas bill. Thus we find him on the 10:55 to Hampton Court Palace Flower Show avidly sucking the air out of my empty cup to the horror of several ladies of the elderly persuasion.

This was nothing compared to what he did on returning home which was to poke one of his one hundred grabby little hands through the flap of the recycling bin, take out last night’s beer can, find the business end and tilt it back like an old pro. What’s funniest about this is that the frog wouldn’t be seen dead drinking from the tin and always decants, meaning that the spud worked this one out on his own.

Much however as I would love him to remain an innocent baby for longer, there is clearly more fun to be had here and the trouble is the accidental nature of this hilarity. My friend’s 3-year old sat on the grass at the flower show drinking apple juice and announced ‘I dinking beer, I on the razzle-dazzle’ and, after I stopped snorting and admiring his father for this piece of genius, I immediately began to wonder what sort of things I could teach the spud in the coming years which would provide that precise level of entertainment.

The one thing I really want to avoid is anything involving the spud requesting boobs in public – it’s bad enough that he rustles around under my shirt out there in the wide world. Given his proximity to his first birthday and the ease of the word ‘boob’ on a baby’s fledgling vocabulary and there’s an hilarious moment on a bus coming my way any day.

I confess that I’m of two minds on this. I know many women who have breastfed up to two years and beyond and I always thought I’d never be one of them. However, once one gets past the six month point, one (and one’s spud) has become habituated. Breast-feeding, so difficult at the start, turns out to be Lazy Mum’s Helper at this point. Baby won’t sleep? Boob him! Baby won’t eat? Boob him! Baby crying? Boob him! Baby doesn’t love his Mum? Who can tell when he loves Boob so much? This perhaps rests at the core of my indecision – I mean, if I’m not breastfeeding him then why would he love me? Anyway, I’ve decided to take him off them before he can negotiate with me because I don’t want him dropping any bon mots that I haven’t planted.

In the meantime, I know my brother is planning many such verbal trickeries on my poor spud and so perhaps I should take it easy on him until then. Tomorrow however, I think I shall drink my coffee from a gin bottle.