Mumaerobics

OK ladies, time to shift some of that winter flab.

Take your child under the arms in both hands and let’s begin. Hold in your tummy aaand, lift – and rest. Lift – and rest. Lift – tickle tickle tickle! – and rest. Now, put your child down. Crouch – and stand. He’s complaining! So, crouch – and stand. Crouch – and stand. Crouch, aaaaand rest. Good... Now your child is probably clutching at your knees and begging for more so let’s repeat that A HUNDRED TIMES!!!!

OK, bingo wings! Lie down with your child on your chest, hold him and lift! Now bring him back down and plant a smacker on his forehead. Up and down, up and down... Eight more… seven… six… good enough.

Stay where you are I DON'T CARE IF YOU HAVE TO WEE, pull your knees up to your chest and rest him on your shins. Hold his hands out like aeroplane wings, straighten your legs as far as you can and make aeroplane noises… Pull your knees back up to your chest! Again! Pause! Again! Pause! Again! OK, ten more… nine… eight… bugger it.

Now, stand up and try to sing a nursery rhyme while waltzing around the livingroom with him on your hip – How about '100 bottles of gin on the wall'? No, you can't stop because he has his fingers up your nose!

Aaaaand, relax. Put him down and let him attach himself to your leg. Walk slowly around your house picking up toys, take them to the toy-box and put them away. A great workout for those abs – and for your temper too!

Now, pry him off your leg and pour yourself that drink. Give him a whole packet of baby carrot wotsits and attach him to the sofa by his reins.

Try to wake up before your other half comes home.

something for the weekend...

I know it’s much too early to be wondering about trivia such as what my darling baby boy is going to be when he grows up but I just can’t trust my Motherhood brain to keep its nose out of anything these days. I found myself on the back of my motorbike today (well, I didn’t just find myself there, I did actually put myself there but you know, some lights are long enough to forget oneself at for a moment…) wondering what sort of brain my little spudlet is going to have , whether or not he’s going to be good at math or… well actually I was indulging in a fantasy where-by he begs us for some money so that he can start trading in stocks on the net and by the time he’s 14 he’s made his first ten million and our stake is worth enough to retire on... anyway, so there I was, mid-fantasy when something he did the other night crept in and my fantasy switched tracks very suddenly to one in which he is Hairdresser to the Stars. Well, you know.

He was in his bath, the bath which is supposed to calm him down and warm him up and leave him all nice and snugly for the Three Bs (Bottle Book and Bed) but which is proving to be a rather more energetic affair involving the throwing of objects full of water and much excitable screaming. He was in his bath and I was kneeling beside it while he tried to feed me various bath-toys when he stopped what he was doing, stood up (forcing me to circle my hands around him to stop him falling and leaving me totally defenceless) and started playing with my hair. First he fluffed up my fringe and posed it one way and then another, just like a hairdresser who has just cut it too short, then he put both hands into my hair and rubbed them up and down vigorously. Finally, he leaned in, one hand on either side of my head and kissed me on the forehead before sitting down.

After I stopped laughing I thought that perhaps this is another form of Daddy-worship, as the frog has such unruly hair that he has to tame it into submission with mousse every morning, no doubt fluffing up his fringe and rubbing his hair vigorously, watched by his adoring offspring who might even get a kiss on his forehead out of it. Then, I thought perhaps that it is a sign that my hair is in such terrible shape that my 1 year old son has decided to take a hand in my coiffure… Just so long as there's no cat sick in it.

I realise that any sort of speculation about the future actions of a child as young as mine is completely futile, however it is pernicious. I've previously imagined him as a young singer-songwriter climbing up the charts; as a young athlete on his way to a gold medal; as a hero of the motorcycle race track and, my favourite, as a lovely middle aged man who comes round to spend weekends with his old Mum just because he misses her sometimes. Yes yes yes, I know, pathetic isn't it? I mean, he can't even talk yet (although he did swoop into the kitchen, grasp me by the knees and plead for 'Bia, bia bia biabiabia bia bia BIA!!! BIA!!!'. I tried him with a tin of Special Brew but apparently that's not what he wanted.)

It's not that I want to be some sort of puppet-master, pulling strings for the spud to mould him into whatever vision I have of him, it's just that I would hate to miss something, to not notice some skill which one day he'll look back on and say 'if only I'd taken dance lessons/extra physics/gardening when I was younger I could have lived my dream.'

So, I'll keep dreaming at red lights and maybe one day he'll let me know what he wants. Until then however he can be whatever I want. Stock tips, anyone?

butting heads

Well, I would have hoped that after such a long break I would have some truly wonderful things to post however I am sitting in the living-room singularly uninspired since my sinuses are full of gloop and my hair, folks, my hair is full of cat sick. Yes, you heard it right, the cat has just thrown up in my hair. OK, yes, so I have washed it out but not really to what I’d call my own satisfaction and so there is a nice steaming bath waiting for me, after I wash it out a third time in the sink.

The reason the cat has just thrown up into my hair is that the frog had a craving for fast food and picked up a carton of chicken on the way home. The fact that this chicken smelled mainly of vinegar didn’t deter our dust-bin of a cat from clambering onto the frog’s chest and getting between him and his own plate so that he could steal what he felt to be rightfully his share, which he then threw up quietly into my hair about ten minutes later. This without even having the grace to make any of those gulping noises that polite cats make to warn one they are about to lose their K-Fry into one’s newly washed locks.

He is now lying peacefully beside me, unlike the spud who has been up twice already demanding a bottle and then demanding to fall asleep curled up in my lap, no mean feat given the size of this child. While he was falling asleep the first time he mumbled a few little things (duguyduguy…ehhhh) and reach sweetly up to run his fingers across my cheek and then through my hair, which, as it was soaking wet and cold from the last washing, woke him up sufficiently to require another 5 minutes to settle him down.

He had a good day today, the spud, starting off with a play-date in the house of a much better-off little boy who has a vertiginous pile of toys that go ‘beep’ and do things and cars one can ride on and numerous other items which can distract 4 little boys for sufficient time for their mothers to drink an entire cup of tea each and eat a cake. Following this triumph he ran wild in Homebase followed around by his tired mother and then had a sound nap followed by a brick-by-brick deconstruction of his abode.

He’s entered what his childminder delicately termed his ‘wrecker’ phase, which basically means that he is deconstructing pretty much everything. He has, for example, a book with a little beeper in it that you press at strategic points in the story and yesterday I entered the nursery to find the book in shreds and the beeper neatly extracted. I’m not sure what’s more annoying, that he tore the book to shreds or that he is now to be found wandering around the flat pressing the damn beeper over and over and over again. He’s getting much more difficult to please and significantly more difficult to placate in times of strife, which are also becoming more frequent.

Where-as a few scant months ago all I had to do was to put on the big ‘no’ face to make him stop doing something awful, now I have to not only make the face, the sound and the gesture but I have to make it several times. When I have finally counted to ‘3’ and gone to remove him bodily from whatever he was doing, he no longer just comes with me and moves on to something else – no, now we have an argument about it which starts with him shouting at me and trying to keep doing whatever it was; continues with him digging in his feet and becoming all elbows and shoulders trying to get rid of me and finishes with him running on the spot with his eyes shut, his fists clenched and his bottom lip out like a plate, all the while grizzling and complaining and, sometimes, shouting. Finally, he sits down and cries and has to be lifted bodily away from whatever it was and then distracted by something new and non-problematic.

Luckily this is not as frequent an occurrence as my head-aches would lead me to believe and we do spend more time laughing then otherwise. Today we discovered that if I butt my head into his tummy and growl, it is an hilarious jape, worthy of falling over helpless with laughter. Oh yes. Even more hilarious when said head is covered in cat sick. And on that note, I leave you for my bath.

Please be seated...

The new year appears to have brought with it a new spud, a vibrant, funny, sleeping-through-the-night sort of a little boy who is definitively no longer a baby (something I must add which I accurately predicted in February) and who is striking out into uncharted waters with a very confident stroke.

This week it has finally been the use of language which has given his poor Mum something to post about, as he has followed up his use of the word 'nana' for 'banana' by not only employing it regularly but by adding to it the words 'ba ba' for 'bye bye', 'Daddy' for, er, 'Daddy', sod it and 'Mumum' for, I hope, me. Not that I'm in the slightest bit disheartened to come so far down the list of his words it's just that I have to admit that I may be wishing a little too hard for him to actually MEAN me as he has also apparently used 'Mumum' to call his childminder and so 'Mumum' might just mean 'Hey Woman! Come Here!'

He has also said 'Nah nah' for 'Night night' (to his Dad, needless to say), 'ah' for 'Yes' and 'Nuh' followed by a scream for, well, pretty much everything else. 'Would you like some water?' 'Nuh eeeeee!'. 'Would you like some Juice?' 'Ah'. 'Bedtime!' 'Nuh. Eeeeee!'. 'Time to go! 'Nuh EEEEeeeee!'. 'Time to change your nappy' 'Nuh EEEEeeeee!' and you get the rest. All animals are described using the word 'Aow' which is short for 'Miaow'.

This doesn't mean that he's not still being a bucketful of cute as he has learned a few new skills which he is deploying with a self-satisfied smirk at all opportunities (see example, top). Most recently he has mastered the art of pointing and so everything is pointed at, things he wants, things he doesn't want and things which are simply in the way of him experiencing the Joy of Pointing - as in, 'What is it spud? That? You'd like that apple?' 'Nuh EEEeeeee' as he jumps up and down pointing just to the right of the telephone.

His other new favourite thing is 'sitting', particularly if he can back slowly up and lower himself carefully down into a sit. As he is only 2 foot 10, the only things small enough for him to sit down on are things like the bottom step of the stairs or the cat, meaning that he is having to be inventive about sitting and sometimes, this just means bending his legs and leaning against the sofa a little - rather like our old dog who, when asked to 'sit' when in the car, would just shove his butt up against the back of the seat and continue to stand in the way of the rear-view mirror.

Sadly for all, photographs of him sitting on Sammy are not available at time of press, however let's just say that Sammy has taken to lying down on places considerably higher-up than the spud's butt-reach.

Happy New Year!

Here we are at the end of the year and fantastically, we all seem to be well. Following the last bout of nastiness, the spud came down with gastroenteritis for Christmas and didn’t eat for 5 days. I’m not sure why I’m surprised. I guess I should wake up and smell the proverbial – small child + frequent contact with groups of other children = catching everything under the sun. In turn, we’ve had a low dose of the same and so Christmas wasn’t the eat-a-thon that we were expecting it to be.

None the less, here we all are and we appear to be doing very well. The Spud is on good form and eating one meal a day. Now this may alarm some of you out there however let me reassure you that this one meal starts at about 7am and goes on until around 8pm when he falls asleep on his bottle… clearly he’s making up for lost time at the trough. We start with cereal in the morning followed by a banana followed by a brief respite which ends when him and one of his one hundred picky little hands have located something edible on top of a counter that we thought he couldn’t reach. You know, bread, cake, a mince pie. He then trundles around for the rest of the morning snacking on this item and leaving a trail of crumbs.

Just as one would think he has had enough and the last soggy piece has made it’s way either into his mouth or into permanent residence as a new pattern on the carpet he is clutching at one’s knees and uttering his brand new first ever word ‘nana’, short for ‘banana’ and clearly meaning food of any description. He has been seen standing on tiptoe with one hand thrusting around inside the bag attached to the back of his buggy and saying ‘nana nana nana’ over and over until a rice cake is forthcoming.

So, on it goes, through an enormous lunch, a massive dinner and snacks of all descriptions. The downside is that it’s been continuing all night too and he’s been waking up absolutely ravenous two or three times in the night. Hopefully this means that he’ll have topped himself up in a few days and be back to his normal extra-large-fryer self rather than this shoe-string fry we’re getting used to these days.

On that note, I thought I’d do a short round-up of the year. On Jan 1st 2007, the spud was 4 months old and not able to do much other than hold things and look goggly-eyed around him. He weighed in at around 14 pounds and couldn’t sit up or crawl or, I think, roll over. I weighed an enormous amount, was breast-feeding constantly and was happily not working. On Jan 1st 2008 the spud will be, if today is anything to go by, two foot ten (meaning he is nearly half my height already and in the world of ‘double their height when they’re two to get their adult height’ he is going to be Very Tall indeed). He weighs somewhere in the region of 30 pound and he is walking, using a fork, saying one word, able to open the fridge and all the drawers in the house and will no doubt shortly be creating space-capable rocket ships using only egg cartons and old digital watches.

I on the other hand have succeeded in losing 22 pounds, am putting in three days a week working and have regained my boobs. At least, I think they’re mine, they’re in virtually the same vicinity as my old ones, just a little further south. The Frog is much the same only a little more patient and long-suffering. We can both change a nappy in the dark without waking up and I think we’re still pretty happy with our lot. Roll on 2008 and Happy New Year everyone!

Happy Holidays!

Blogging buddies

Upsettingly, just as I had finished this post, the spud clambered onto my laptop and shut it down, in the process pressing ‘no’ whenever he was asked to save my documents. So. Here we go again and apologies for the long delay...

DJ Kirkby has given me this very twee award for blogging buddies which part of me wanted to scoff at due to the kitten-y nature of the picture. However, after writing the post and having to chose 7 blogging buddies to pass it on to I realised it’s quite cool. It’s kind of a way of saying ‘thanks for hanging in there’ to some of one’s oldest commenters and reading through DJ’s blog I got to meet 4 out of 7 new bloggers. Which was good.




So. Very difficult to pick 7 bloggers out of the bloggers who I read at least weekly (if I was luxuriant in time and massages and having nothing to do I would read everyone daily I swear).

I decided therefore to pick 7 bloggers to whom I’ve never passed on an award. This leaves out my oldest non-family commenter Bossy who I read regularly and who still occasionally pops in for a gander. DJ and Dhor and Lady Macleod who are amazing bloggers I read all the time. It leaves out Jenny and Elsie and Darth who are wonderful writers and I can’t remember all who else, frankly, because it’s nearly midnight and I’m re-writing a carefully researched but sadly deleted post after imbibing a mugful of spirits.

So, in no particular order, here are seven other bloggers who have enlightened my blog and provided me with hours of entertainment on their own.

Self Employed Mum who found me quite early in both of our blogging careers. She’s recently been very patient with wat sounds like a terrible house full of 8 year old girls

Sue from Sunny Days who lives in Calcutta and has a son the same age as the spud – only blogs could have bought us together to read about the similarities and differences of raising sons in different worlds. She’s a great writer however she claims not to be a ‘Mommy blog’. Sue. Do You Read Your Own Blog?!!

Driving with the Brakes On whom I have to confess I read largely on the offchance she is going to have a rant because then I can read while muttering ‘yes’ and ‘me too’ under my breath like a madwoman because I always agree with her.

Jen at Rants and Raves whose son is around the same age as the spud and getting into about the same mischief. If you pop over right now she’s just posted up some of the amazing cards her hubby has made her over the years.

Jennie from Copenhagen Follies is raising two kids while studying and speaking about 100 languages. She’s very funny and clever and I sense she may be able to drink me under the table.

Ilana of Pengelly Pastimes and Deeply Felt Felting Studios. She hasn’t been commenting around here for long but you know what? She’s SUCH an old friend of mine it doesn’t bear repeating and we have found each other again after going on 20 years via the magic of blogs and you know, that deserves a prize. And, her felting is AMAZing.

Suki who is getting a proper education while maintaining no less than 4 of her own blogs and who reminds me what it’s like to be young.

So, thanks to you all for having wonderful blogs - and also to those wof you I haven't meantioned here but read regularly - Happy Christmas and a big martini to the lot of you!
x

in the name of peace and quiet...

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that's my excuse...

DJ has given me a blogging buddy award with kittens on it no less... I will post it up and pass it on once I feel well enough to think straight. Kittens and all!

Unbelievably we are sick yet again – and by ‘we’, this time I do mean all of us. Honestly, if I’d known it was going to be this bad I’d never have stopped breast-feeding the spud as for the first year of his life he was sick only rarely. Since we stopped however it’s just been one thing after another. This week it’s a chest infection and after five days of listening to him steadily trying to dislodge his lungs we’ve finally caved in and let the doc put him on an antibiotic. This is both banana flavoured and unsweetened and given that it is penicillin-based you can imagine how foul it is. Very foul. Very, very foul. I know this because being violently allergic to penicillin I naturally had a taste. Once I remembered I was allergic, I gargled with vodka in the hope that vodka out-ranks penicillin in the rock-paper-scissors game of microscopic death-dealing. Since I have yet to swell up or break out in hives I think it’s safe to assume that vodka kills penicillin. In case that’s something you ever needed to know.

Given that we are trying to feed him liquid mould enhanced by benzene rings (and dyed a fetching shade of neon yellow) I’m sure it’s not difficult to imagine the reaction we have gotten from the spud while trying to get his medicine into him. Suffice it to say that we have been fairly comprehensively spackled in the stuff and the microbes in his lungs have been breaking out the champers at a lucky escape three times a day. It takes two of us holding him down to get anything into him and whoever is wielding the spoon has to hold down his tongue to get him to swallow. It’s probably no coincidence that he’s not eating anything else we offer him at the moment either – I mean, would you trust me after I’d put you in a headlock and fed you poison while pressing down your tongue?

We’ve tried hiding it in porridge, milk, sticking it in a syringe and squirting it down the back of his throat to avoid his taste-buds… we’ve tried feeding him yummy yoghurt and then tricking him with a spoonful… it’s worse than trying to get a pill into a cat. I tricked him into swallowing half a spoon in the bath this evening and he was so horrified that he plopped himself face-first into the bathwater in protest and came up crying and looking at me like I had just skinned a puppy in front of him and then pushed him under the water myself.

Anyway, so that’s my excuse for being tardy about posting. It’s a rubbish excuse but we’re all coughing up lungs at the moment and it’s hard to get to the computer amidst all the clouds of flying tissue.

set the controls for the heart of my son...

Today has been exhausting. We’ve been gearing up for this day for a long time, although we probably didn’t quite realise it. I suppose I should have been listening harder to my Mother and to Those Who Have Gone Before, who have all been very clear that at some point you stop having a baby and you start having an individual – a child with its own will and desires who will no longer sit around adoringly letting you do things to it, like dress it or feed it or put teething gel on its sore gums, or cuddle it when you feel like it. A child who would rather starve in charge of its own fork than accept a spoonful from its Mum. A child who will not longer let you simply haul it up for a butt-sniffing but would rather tool around in its own stink than submit to the indignity of a clean bottom. A child who when swooped up for a cuddle after a nasty fall will stop crying and start pushing its parent in the neck to get put down NOW thank you very much rather than receive the Mummy Mantra (“Mummy Make It Better (kiss)”).

Along with this new-found independent streak is an ever-increasing diagnostic ability, massively heightened curiosity and a remarkable ability to reach and grab given the enormous height of this child. This particular child, I mean, as in my child, as in the spud, who is now virtually unstoppable and as willful as a raccoon in a bin full of chicken wings. My child, who suddenly doesn’t give a damn what I think, or say or do and who is only interested in following whatever whim has taken his attention. My child who was recently described by a fellow Mum as ‘a gentle giant, but a giant none-the-less’. On today’s evidence, I think we may have to quietly stow that ‘Gentle’ for a while.

I’ve had a pretty productive week and one of the things I managed to get done was to sew some snugly bumpers for the spud’s cot. Thinking that he is now old enough to get out of trouble on his own should he find himself nose first in the fabric and that the main reason he wakes up in the night is because he’s bicycled himself head-first into the bars, we figured some padding might help us all get a better night’s sleep. So, I wandered over to the market and bought some soft black fleece and some padding and diligently sewed them up much to his fascination. He tried to turn the machine off while I was sewing, tried to stand on the foot pedal, tried to touch the fly-wheel while it was spinning and desperately begged to sit in my lap while I was feeding fabric underneath a rapidly moving needle.

Surprisingly, it all worked and he is now peacefully sleeping with his head jammed into a corner of his cot, breathing gently and crucially, not waking up with a head injury. The bumpers also serve double duty as they block a sliver of light from underneath the black-out blinds I’ve never managed to sort out. I know, because I have doubled over into his cot and rested my head upside-down on his mattress for a look-see. I quite fancied staying in there for a snooze to be honest but I don’t think I’d fit.

So, he’s getting a good night’s sleep which seems to be giving him an amazing energy boost. He slept until nearly 8 today, played happily in his cot for half an hour after his bottle and cheerfully trundled around the flat most of the morning. Once out of bed and fed his breakfast he rounded up the remote control and handed it to his Dad with the little call of ‘eh eh’ he makes which means ‘please turn on the TV’. I was once a person who swore I would not let my children watch TV however now I am a person who catches myself in the middle of a business meeting with the ‘Finley the Fire Engine’ theme song running through my head. So, anyway, he sat down to watch TV for a moment or two and then he got down and turned his bedroom inside out, tried to open a locked door by fiddling with the key, turned all the electronics he could reach on and then off and then on again, pulled things off the top of the hall table that we didn’t think he could reach and turned on every lamp in the house.

Nothing that we do escapes his attention. One can think that one has pulled the wool over his eyes but a few moments later, when he thinks one isn't looking, he has insinuated himself as close to whatever it was one was doing and is trying manfully to replicate the motions. He is very close to working out the lock on the stair-gate and he can spend long periods of time crouched in front of the front door with my keys thrusting them at the bottom lock in hope. Things go into the washing machine. Books are opened and puzzled at. Watches are looked at hopefully. Glasses are put on his face. Hats are perched precariously on his head. My hair ties are pulled behind his head. PIN entry pads for credit cards are to be stabbed at, but only after the card is pulled out of the machine and then shoved back in again which is great fun for the queue of people behind me in the shop. Tops are screwed onto bottles and off again. Cups are carefully picked up and sipped from before being knocked over on the way to open the fridge.

His natural exuberance is lovely. He can be made to laugh at very simple things, such as watching me fall backwards the length of the flat after he shoves me, or watching me weep in dismay as he knocks down yet another tower of bricks (and, damnit, I get quite possessive over my towers of bricks these days. Who knew bricks were such fun?).

He does, however, hate to be stopped once he’s decided to do something and as a full 50% of the things he decides to do are destructive (eating the phone), dangerous (standing on the coffee table) or both (slamming his fingers in the top drawer while taking out spoons to throw in the bin) he is stopped on a fairly regular basis and this is bringing out the exuberant side of his rage. This takes one of two forms – either he sits down on the floor and slumps his head between his knees (something he does less frequently since he tried it out in the bath) or he lies down and arches his back, a pose he can hold for an impressive amount of time.

There’s no point in going through all the other things he did today, the pens chewed, the food thrown, the tantrums in the supermarket, the kitchen things tossed on the floor, the cat tormented, the suspicious blockage in the loo. There’s no point in going on about how many times he struggled or screamed or flailed around and how many times I was forced to put on my big 'no' face.

Much as he exhausts me, it is an amazing thing to watch one's child become a reasoning individual and hopefully he'll start taking control of a few more useful things such as putting on his shoes and making his own dinner. All we have until then however is one little boy who just wants to be in control of something, to do something all by himself; and, if the bumpers work their magic again tonight, he will be doing it all again tomorrow with just as much gusto.

Sayonara!