Don't tell him when he's older...

...but the spud has had a slightly over-emotional week this week.

I don't know why I'm using euphemisms like 'slightly over-emotional'... I guess I'm thinking that one day in the far future he may want to read these blurtings and I wish to spare his blushes. This is ridiculous as I am clearly about to spill All The Beans There Are and euphemisms will be out the window in the next paragraph. So, I'll start again.

My Spud has been a teensy bit possessive of me this week. Even my Motherhood brain, which becomes over-stimulated at the slightest movement of the spud's smallest finger, is a little taken aback by it all.

I think it all began when his childminder took on a new child a couple of weeks ago and, while he seems very fond and brotherly towards the new arrival (a nine-month-old girl) the problem is that his minder can no longer come to fetch him from the house and we have to drop him off. This is quite a big move as our spoiled little Prince Edward Island potato has never ever been left behind - people always come to get him. She comes to get him from us, we come to get him from her... in his mind, people love him and keep coming to get him. So this new thing where we take him to hers and desert him has taken him by surprise and we are getting the full-on arms-round-the-ankle-please-Mummy-don't-go hysteric treatment every time we leave him behind.

While this is to be expected, there have been a couple of unexpected side-effects to this and one of them is that he has reverted back nine months and wants to breast-feed again. This sounds very sweet, a little sad and no doubt medically and psychologically understandable but the upshot is that I can no longer pick him up for a cuddle without getting a sneaky little hand down my bra. My boobs, in which he has always maintained a somewhat proprietary interest have once again become His Property, as has everything else in the flat. I read a comedy 'Toddler's Rules' thing the other day which said 'If it's in my hand, it's mine, if I like it, it's mine, if it looks like mine, it's mine; and everything else is mine too' and I think my boobs qualify for at least 3 out of those 4 statements for spuddy boy. The worst part is that we have reached the stage where Mummy must no longer get dressed in the morning in front of her offspring as he stands wide-eyed in front of her pointing at the puppies shouting 'That! That!' or just pointing and jeering, as though I was suddenly 13 and caught naked in the playground.

I say that having to get dressed in the loo is the worst part but I lie again. Firstly, there is nowhere in our flat which is sacred or secret and the trick is to manage one's ablutions while one's partner is In Sole Charge of our offspring or one finds oneself with one leg in and one leg out of one's knickers while the door slowly opens as if directed by Hitchcock.

Secondly, however, there is The Incident which sparked my sudden retreat into the closet, as it were. Imagine, if you will, the telephone ringing while one is getting dressed. It's a call one has been waiting for and therefore one downs tools and rushes to the phone. Now. One, ok bugger it I, was sitting topless in the livingroom armchair hoping my hair would disguise the worst of my sins while happily chatting away when up comes the spud, sweeps away my hair and... latches on. Latches on, I tell you. He latched on! He's not been breastfed for over nine months and yet... all that time he was harbouring a memory. All those little pinches and prods at my boobs which I thought were just vestigial mammaries (sorry) were, in fact, Hopeful Little Hints. He was very cautious, I have to say and after gently and unsuccessfully sampling both of his old friends he looked at me reproachfully and walked away. Perhaps this was a good thing as he seems completely uninterested in my boobs now.

This is not all, however. No, the spud evinced one more possessive bit of behavior this week which I shall refer to simply as his 'Alpha Male' moment and which involved him coming up to the Frog and I during a little huggy moment, breaking us apart with a push to a parental chest, clutching my hand tightly and giving me a big kiss on my cheek while staring reproachfully at his father.

Hopefully all this will die down as he becomes used to being left behind and once again becomes comfortable with his status in the house however meanwhile I will be the one dressing and cuddling my spouse in the loo with the door locked...

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Farming around

I can’t quite believe it’s been this long since my last post – hello hello, anybody out here? Anyway, so we are back from Devon with a much improved little potato.

During the first few days he only wanted to play in the car… I know, but he’s a city boy and he’s never allowed to play in the car because it’s parked in the street. In Brixton. Anyway so there he sat there for hours on end making ‘brmm’ noises, yanking on the steering wheel and honking the milk right out of the cows. This changed however which is a Good Thing for the interior of our car which was getting a tad on the sticky side...

Our cousins nearby also have a small farm as well as a very, very Big Dog who thinks she’s a small child. She therefore absolutely loves ‘other’ small children and the sight of this massive Alsatian nosing playfully around my son would have warmed my heart if it hadn’t already been in my mouth getting gnawed around the edges. He thought she was the best thing ever needless to say and after that he gave up on the car and was all about the animals. We would turn around and he would be gone, to be found five seconds later pushing bits of hay through the barn gate at some frankly terrified calves, or standing fearfully as a giant piglet leapt up at him to snort hopefully in his direction.

I think he liked it – most of all I think he liked the sense of freedom which allowed him to run heedlessly away across a field without me following him or swooping him up to drag him back. I don’t think he could believe it to be honest.

Since we’ve been back he’s been a lot more independent. He’s more comfortable playing on his own, he runs less like he’s about to fall over and when he does, he gets back up without much in the way of histrionics. He walks more and the other day he picked up his reins, walked with me to the park, played for a while and then decided all by himself that it was time to leave and we walked happily home together without any of the usual arguments.

So, a week in the country. A Good Thing. Now can someone detail my car, please?

Placecard

This is a very quick illegal post from the depths of a Devon farm... luckily enough we have lovely cousins near to the cottage who have a wifi connection and under the pretense of setting up the laptop for Mum to send some emails I thought I'd put together a quick post.

Not quite the trip we were planning, we ate something very dodgy at a restaurant on the way down and contracted food poisoning which put us under for two days... the spud didn't share in the veggieburger joy and so has been full of beans, not perhaps what one needs when one is ill but at least he was full of beans and not losing them from both ends...

Today has dawned sunny and warm and gastric-upset free and we are resting as much as possible and trying to contact our loved ones to let them know we are still alive and well - with no reliable phone signal here either we've been rather incommunicado. Well, we can get a reliable phone signal but you have to leave the cottage and go and stand by the cow pasture which when one is still in one's pajamas and running a fever is not the greatest option in the world.

Here we are though and today is lovely. We went to a local farmers market and I was suddenly catapaulted back to my childhood - nothing it seems has changed about Devon farmers markets in the last 30 years. The effect was exacerbated by the bookstall, filled with old Enid Blyton books, Paddington bear, Whiskey Galore and various moth-eaten old tomes which haven't seen the light of day for many a year... the sudden intrusion of the South Beach Diet alerted me to the fact that I am in fact over 40 and where is my son again?

Anyway, time to run so that Mum can send some emails and I can go and introduce the spud to the horses. He can reliably say the word 'Cow' now, something which is bound to be very useful up in London.

Hey ho.

A few more things we've learned...

We're off tomorrow, the spud and I and my Mum, who is currently somewhere over the Atlantic trying to cram her 6 foot long legs under the seat in front of her... they ought to make her check those babies in as extra baggage or at least buy them their own aisle. I pick her up in a few hours and tomorrow we drive down to Devon to a little cottage on a farm somewhere near the edge of Dartmoor, leaving the Frog and Sammy to luxuriate in a Spud-free week. No little bear to wreck the stereo or pat an old boy a little too hard on his fuzzy head... or torment the cat at that... I reckon that by the time we get back they'll have changed the locks and be ensconced in front of the telly with a pile of seafood pizzas, happily shedding into the sofa together.

Sammy has recently had some sort of a rejuvenation it seems... just as he was beginning to worry us by sleeping too much and being a little vague he has perked up, packed on another pound and started begging for food, food, more food and the chance to lie on our chests blocking any chance we have of reading a book in bed.

The spud meantime continues as usual however with a few embellishments. One of his favourite things to eat is peas. Take a few out of the freezer, thaw them and put them into a snack pot and he will happily wander around munching them down like sweeties. I have been fondly holding on to the notion that I have a little health nut on my hands however recent events have indicated that peas must swifly come off the menu. Yesterday while pottering about in the kitchen as the spud sat happily forking up fish fingers and fingering up peas, I heard him sneeze. Several times. The Mums among you may have worked this one out already. After a few more hearty sneezes I turned around to see him with a finger up his nose and before I had any time at all to formulate thoughts about what he was doing he sneezed again. And a pea flew out of his nose. And then another one.

I went trundling over to him just as he was shoving another one up there at top speed. I bent his head back gently and there, lurking up his nostril was pea number three, stuck beyond finger reach. A swift go around his face with a damp cloth a gentle administration of mouth-to-mouth and I was rewarded by a snotty pea hitting me in the cheek. Just what I always wanted.

Peas, the snuff of the legume kingdom. Who knew?

Clementines are also good spud-quieters and today he thrilled me to bits by peeling one while standing in front of the open bin throwing away the peel. He also picked up a cloth and started wiping down the table and is obsessing over the broom so this is my second lesson for the week; that while he may not be speaking or particularly solid on his feet, my little darling has all the makings of a certifiable neat-freak.

*******

Later: Mum is here and everyone is asleep so I am heading to bed. Tomorrow the two elder statesmen of the house will breathe joint sighs of relief as I, my Mum, and the Spud, who is a match for both of us put together, head off to the West Country where my brother and I grew up.

Ted Hughes once said (or something like it) 'when you cross the Avon, you're leaving England' and while we may not be taking passports, I believe I may have to leave my sanity at the border.

lessons learned

It's our last night in Biarritz and we're learned a lot this trip. Mainly, we've learned that we need to have big toys over here to take with us when we go out, or the spud will see someone else's toys and we get this:



(* "Calvin & Hobbes" is copywright Bill Watterson and Universal Press Syndicate, view the whole archive here.)


We have also learned not to forget the buggy when it's his nap-time or he wakes up early and we get this:






...especially in restaurants who don't bring toddlers' food out with the starters





That's not all we learned. We, that is the spud, spent time with our French cousins and all of a sudden came out with 'Non', which is actually pronounced 'nonononononono'. Over and over and over. Whenever something unacceptable is placed in front of one as an option. Such as breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. Or anything that doesn't involve ice-cream. Or a croissant.

The Frog and I are very fair when it comes to sleep-ins. We take turns listening out for the spud at night and we take turns getting up with him in the morning, meaning that one or another of us is often to be found in bed around the 9am mark which is heaven.

Yesterday morning it was my turn to sleep in however this was interupted by a small, fast-moving root vegetable who (now he is tall enough to reach the door handles in the French pad, curses) came powering into the room, slapped both hands on the bed in front of my nose and started bouncing up and down on his feet at top speed, whispering loving titbits into his Mummy's ears at the top of his lungs. His hair was practically on end. As the frog entered to remove him I asked what he'd had for breakfast. The frog came all over sheepish and admitted that the spud had been stealing croissant and then... dipping it into the frog's coffee. And eating it.

Can you imagine? Funnily enough, not more than three hours later the spud was having screaming arching tantrums in the restaurant. Now, I wonder what could have happened to cause that? ***cough *** cough *** coffee *** cough ***

'Come on spud, we've walked around this square five times in the rain, let's go back to the restaurant'... 'NONONONONONO'





Finally, we learned that the spud, who has always been a daring sort of a bod, has worked out all of a sudden how to climb things. I mean, really climb them.

Firstly, he managed to climb this (please turn your head sideways for this one, I dozily had my phone the wrong way up):





Which makes it absolutely no surprise that he has now managed to climb out of this:






I know that I keep saying this... but life as we know it must surely be ending.





Over and out.

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and the boy snored on...

Today we managed to paint the kitchen, including taking down all the stuff in the room, painting and putting it all back - while the spud napped. No, it wasn't a long nap. We just have a small kitchen.

Nothing much is happening of bloggable note at the moment and that's largely because I've been outrageously busy for the last two months with another month of events taking me away from my comfortable couch. Luckily for the most part they are not keeping me away from my little potato though as most of them involve holidays. I know, lucky me, however really I need to work and this isn't doing a lot for my bank account. I guess love matters more than money though and the spud certainly has lots of love at the end of his pudgy little fingertips.

Anyway today was not an abnormality: - an awful lot of work gets done here while the spud sleeps on a regular basis. He's still taking blissful 2 hour naps in the afternoon and on the days that he's here with me I am becoming adept at timing things to fit into that 2 hour gap. The trouble comes when he wakes a little early and I'm on the phone to a client or having a nap cleaning the house - nothing says 'unprofessional' like the sound of him wailing that he's been cast alone into the void with nothing but Tigger for company. For the most part however he's a safe bet and today was the perfect example. It's a bit like Changing Rooms if anyone remembers that (and what HAS happened to Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen anyway?): two hours to take a room apart, paint it and put it back together. It wouldn't work with any room larger than a cupboard which luckily includes most of the rooms in our flat.

This all started because I flooded the bathroom last week, coming home exhausted, running a bath and forgetting about it. The frog has been very un-froggily forgiving about this, particularly considering that it was such a bad flood that I have curled some of the flooring and caused damp so bad that five inches up, the plaster is leaking salts and all the paint has come off in the bathroom... and in the bedroom... oh, it's bad.

Anyway, when we moved into this place the builders had painted it all in a really impossible-to-match neutral. Years of trying to find a match has left our cellar full of match pots and our walls a peculiarly mottled colour in places where marks have been painted out in the wrong colour. So this weekend while picking a new bathroom colour, the frog managed miraculously to pick the exact right match. With the bathroom plaster still too wet to paint we decided to start on the kitchen and, since the spud was asleep, we figured he would be safe from wet paint problems.

Not so.

The frog, so excited to have finally found the matching paint, spent the rest of the afternoon hunting around the flat brandishing a loaded paintbrush and panting gently with excitement. He painted in the hall, he painted in the livingroom, he painted wall by the changing table as I was approaching it with a dripping-wet spud, he painted the bedroom at spud-level and generally loaded up the place with impossible-to-see wet paint. Resultantly, the spud entered his bath with a full complement of neutral paint on his hands, face, hair and clothes.

Next time I think we'll just get started on the painting without waiting for the spud to nap. Maybe we could just dip him in the paint and rub him directly on the walls, thus cutting out all that brushing.

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better out than in

My son has trucker butt. Here he is, walking into the room in his fabulous little jeans, bending over to pick up a brick and there, peeking over the top of his darling little denim waistband is… not the top of his stylishly coloured cloth nappies, no, but the top of what I will refer delicately to as 'Grand Tushie Canyon'.

Yes folks, the time has come to upgrade those nappies for a larger size because it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what happens when a runny tummy meets a low-hanging nappy, and a runny tummy is what the spud has at the moment.

Far be it from me to gain amusement from my son’s upset however as it doesn’t seem to be bothering him in the slightest, I feel the need to relate today’s incident.

The spud is a button pusher. A geek in making, he can find the ‘on’ switch on pretty much any electronic item; can load the washing machine, open the soap drawer for me, turn it on and set the cycle; has worked out the touch-screen on my phone and is currently experimenting with using the computer mouse. He is, in other words, overly stimulated by technology. The arrival, therefore, of a new CD player into the livingroom has been the cause of many an excited moment for my little boy – excited moments I may add which are not shared by my Frog who shelled out for the new machine after the old one collapsed under repetitive ‘on button’ strain injury.

The Frog unfortunately has been unable to keep the spud’s fingers off the new sound system and is swiftly growing little grey froggy hairs around his ears where all the steam keeps coming out. The spud for his part is not to be deterred and has already worked out how to turn it on, load up a CD and press play. Today however he decided he was going to move on to try out some different buttons and during a particularly dull moment while he had it on ‘Aux’ (and who TF ever uses ‘Aux’ anyway?) he twiddled the volume knob. All The Way Up.

There he was, on his hands and knees, gleefully stabbing away when he hit the ‘mode’ button again and found himself suddenly faced with a massive wall of AM static noise. The effect on him was, not to put to fine a point on it, electric. It all happened at once for my little spud, he backed up, exploded and shrieked pretty much at the same time, then scrambled to his feet, little hands flapping in panic and we had a very sudden need for the off button, some air freshener and a change of clothes. Both of us, as it turned out, because I made the tactical error of picking him up for a cuddle before I realised just exactly what had happened.

Anyway, luckily he was in one of the new, large-sized nappies because it could have been a lot worse than it was. And they are very styley, even though one of them is now a little the worse for wear.

Sybil Winnifred Parker: 1st February 1908 - 12th April 2008

The day she turned 100 years old



Now go here to Hoto's Blog

not sure what to put here

Well, a few short months after her 100th birthday my very beloved Grandmother has left us. This morning at 5:10am GMT she passed quietly on in bed with her youngest son and daughter-in-law, my Uncle and Aunt who have been looking after her these past two years, in attendance. My Dad had just left, my brother had been there earlier. I had rung in hope of talking to her but she was already on her way and all he could do was talk to her for both of us and hope she could hear.

Today I’m exhausted, as though her passing has taken all the energy I had, sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic. I don't know why this is, I have done nothing more energetic than think of her. If anyone should feel drained now it would be my family in Canada who have been looking after her for years and who have been with her all the way – and by that, I mean their own childhoods through to her retirement, the death of my Grandfather through the last decades of her life to today, visiting her, clearing her property of brush and overgrowth, checking her fridge, talking to her doctors, fixing the boat, helping her down to the lake, spending the most valuable of all their commodities, time.

It's not easy to think that she is finally gone. I’ve been saying goodbye to her as though it might be final every time I’ve seen her for a decade or more. Every time I see her she says ‘This could be the last time, I won’t live forever you know’ and I give her a little squeeze and think secretly that she will never die. So, somehow, although I know she is dead I also know that she’s still here the way she’s always been here, with her deft fingers in my fingers and her stubborn streak shoring up my own. I can picture her clearly, clearing her throat and saying something offhand and her voice will always be in my head. She’ll always be here and so in some way I will never miss her.

Today has been emotional but not sad. The quiet, peaceful passing amongst family of a woman of more than 100 years who was ready to go is not a sad occasion but it is one for reflection. Farewell Sybil, happy passing. And I was lying. I do miss you.

variable conditions

Back in the UK and you can’t believe the weather… OK, I know it’s a cliché that the English talk about the weather all the time but there’s a reason for it. An anthropologist has described it as ‘grooming talk’ which basically means that if I as a total stranger speak about the weather and you agree with me, what has effectively happened is that I have said ‘I would be happy to interact with you as a human, what do you think?’ and you have said ‘I too would be happy to interact with you’. I think there’s another reason though, which is that when you live in a place where the weather changes all the time you’re always looking for clues about what it’s going to do next. Hence, in Alberta, Canada, people also talk about the weather a lot. If it’s dry, everyone’s hoping to hear that there’s going to be another two feet of snow, if it’s cold everyone’s hoping for a Chinook. In London at the moment everyone is just hoping for someone else to say ‘yes but I’ve heard it’s going to settle down soon and we’re in for a really hot summer’.

When we got back from France we took an unexpected route home via Greenwich and Blackheath. You have to understand here that our drive to the airport normally emcompasses London at rush hour and we are always looking for our own NorthWest Passage to Stansted to take us around the chaos Anyway, Blackheath was littered with the melting bottom parts of snowmen – twenty or thirty of them, little rounds of snow clotting the heath like wintery memorials to the plague dead beneath them. While we were away, in other words, London had proper snow – and in April, too. And we missed it.

Never mind, I’m sure there will be more snow in our lives. The worst weather we have at the moment is that of my little pudgeball who is suffering from proper hysterics these days, big, bad crying fits that come out of nowhere where he can’t control his arms and legs and doesn’t want to be held or to be left alone. We sit on the sofa, him arching and straining and me holding tight and muttering gently at him until he calms down and is pretty immediately back to his sunny self, busily dismantling our lives one cable at a time. I gather this is a normal phase and several parents I know are suffering from the same weather but it doesn’t make it any easier to watch him go through it.

The rest of the time he is hotwired for fun and games and general destruction. He can now take down a CD, open it up, take it out, turn on the CD player, put in the CD and press play. What he cannot do however is wait for it to finish before he puts it away and so we are being treated to the same four bars of the same first track of the same CD pretty much ad nauseum at the moment which is making my own internal weather patterns a little on the rough side.

Today we are babysitting a friend of his the same age and we are in for an afternoon of running around and battling for possession of various toys. Hopefully this will not encompass another tantrum however it is entirely possible.

The great news of course is that there is a clear forecast for this which is that he will grow out of it and in to other things and all we can do is to grab a drink, sit back on our deck-chairs and watch.