Flock of Seagulls to Haircut 100

Random musings from a random week.

Time is flying a teensy bit too quickly for me at the moment and I'm not talking about the sudden onset of childhood in my baby but rather the sudden onset of Thursday, which seems to be the only time I have to sit down and think. It's because I sneakily have Friday and most of Monday off every week and trying to cram work into the other three days just makes them melt away.

Unlike my midriff. As I don't have time to exercise (hell, I don't have time to brush my hair most days) I've attempted a sort of cack-handed diet consisting of a big healthy breakfast, a light lunch and then... well then it all falls to bits as firstly I join the spud in his pre-bedtime snack which alternates between fruit and icecream and then after dinner I fill up on dessert, which alternates between icecream and, well, more icecream.

Mmmm ...icecream... I'm surprised that the word hasn't entered the spud's repertoire as he knows EXACTLY what comes out of an icecream van, which cafe's in our area have an icecream counter and that, if he stands in the kitchen and points at the freezer shouting 'tha! tha! tha!' for long enough,I will break down and join him in a bucket of the stuff. He knows my weak spots, does my little spudling.

It's not all ice-cream. Sadly. Recently he's come out with a new word - 'ggeh' for 'egg', which actually means 'soft boiled egg and soldiers please Mummy' (or at least that's what I like to pretend. It probably really means 'Woman! Make me an egg NOW!'). Either way, he has been quite addicted to boiled egg and soldiers since Mum introduced them to him. He can now open the fridge and pretty much reach everything in it and yesterday, in the middle of refusing his dinner, he demanded 'Ggeh! Mummy! Ggeh!' got down from the table, went to the fridge, tiptoed down an egg and, before I could grab it from him with visions of egg all over the flat, he walked to the cupboard, pulled out the small saucepan, put the egg into it and handed it to me to put on the stove. Once it was cooked he ate the entire thing along with TWO slices of toast soldiers and then went on to finish the rest of his dinner, as though I'd made him a dinner deal that he had to honour.

We make deals like that over icecream normally. If he refuses dinner I can get him to eat at least half by promising him icecream - and sometimes he'll eat the lot if I give him a spoonful of icecream in between his peas.

I know that this would make most nutritionists shake their heads in despair but as his main snacks are raw veggies, fruits and seeds I'm not going to worry quite yet. Plus, it's difficult to refuse him when it is such a simple joy to sit next to each other eating our icecreams and giggling together over the drips, or to lie in the grass getting sticky and using our cones to point out planes.

They say childhood is fleeting but I don't know... I've managed to stretch mine out for more than 40 years and thankfully, I have an excuse to drag it out just that little bit longer now.

A snip in time

Well, it's happened. The spud has had a haircut.

The balance of comments on my previous post suggested, or rather, my READING of them suggested that we leave the spud with his curls until such time as they become unmanageable. This tallied with my own desire, which was to never ever ever cut his hair ever ever so he could be strong like Samson to prioritise his comfort above all things. Ahem.

That his hair was reaching critical mass became painfully evident on Tuesday when - and to my chagrin I do not have a picture of this - his childminder delivered him to me with his hair in a perfect little topknot on the top of his head as it had been blowing in his eyes all day. When I say 'perfect little topknot', what I mean is that all his hair, every last bit, was captured in a hair elastic on the top of his head and he looked... like... er... a little girl.

Swiftly, I got the message.

Tuesday night, while the spud was happily playing in his bath, the Frog cut off his lovely locks and, it appears, with them went a whole host of conceptions I had obviously been building up in my twisted little motherhood brain about him being, oh, I don't know, the second coming, the light of the world, you know, All That Stuff. He got out of the bath and suddenly, I was incontrovertably the mother of a small boy. No wonder a good hairdresser costs the earth - if a few curls can turn an ordinary child into an angelic cherub, just imagine what a good haircut could do for the likes of me?

The spud of course doesn't know that a massive, radical change has happened to him. He continues to make the same faces but to be honest, they look a little strange now, as though some other, older child has stepped in to imitate him.

This older child is also amazingly tall. This morning while lying on his changing table having a new nappy installed he casually reached up with his feet and turned on the light, a switch which, the last time I recall, he had to stand on tiptoe on the table just to reach.

Am I nuts? I put his trousers on this morning, a pair which I thought I had to roll up three times and they don't need rolling up at all. They're for 3 years olds. What the hell are those scissors made of anyway?

Going Potty

Hi folks! I'm just online today to crow about two things. Yes yes, that's right, the title gave it away but I'm going to tell you anyway. Ahem.

Firstly, I am as you can see able to access Blogger again -magically my access came back and everything is well, meaning that all my favourite blogs will be getting a vist or two in the next week (there are so many, how can I keep up?!).

Secondly (and how I've managed to keep this as second in line I have no idea) the spud demanded to use his potty last night and then... used it! Hooray! He may not use it again, I screamed so loudly and so happily that he nearly pooed on the floor poor little bear. There he was doing a little wee and then the trumpets went off and his Mum squealed and danced and kissed him on the cheek and shouted for his Dad and there he was, all little and vulnerable looking as though he just might not bother again.

Still, today although he refused the potty, he pointed at the loo and stood all manly beside it but when he realised that he would never clear the rim he got all put off and walked around clutching himself for ages afterwards until he was finally able to let go. In the bath. Well he's not quite two yet.

That's that. I'm off camping for the weekend, wish me well. I'm leaving my spudlet and his frog sire alone together and while most women when leaving their husband and two year old behind for the weekend would expect to come home to a house full of unwashed dishes, smears and trainsets, I'm most likely going to come back to an apartment which has had everything Put Away. The spud will be filthy, snotty and won't have had his face washed since the moment I left... but the house will be frighteningly tidy and in need of a woman's mess touch to bring it back to life.

A slip in time...

**NOTE** I cannot access any Blogger sites at all from home including mine, yours, if you’re on blogger, or my link to your site if it’s on this page... I’ll come by when this gets sorted out but for now am posting via work
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Today was THIS kind of day...

On Mondays the Frog and I split the day and I get the afternoon shift. I pick spud up from the Frog’s studio after lunch and he, the spud, that is (although what my Frog gets up to in his studio without us is anyone’s guess) generally falls asleep on the way home, allowing me an hour or two to potter about. This morning I was up to my elbows in a shirty email to a client when my alarm went off. At this point, sitting in my cellar bunker, I usually have a vivid visual image of being me, only me in a massive underground bunker with a broadcasted, Thunderbirds-style countdown ‘Ten Minutes to pick up the Spud... whoop whoop whoop... Nine Minutes and Fifty seconds...” and so on.

Just indulge me.

Anyway, so I dashed off my shirty email and ran up the stairs, collected my bag, keys, phone and just then, the Frog rang to chivvy me along. And I forgot that the final step in my process was to put on my shoes. Just far enough away from the flat that going back would have meant being late, I thought to myself: ‘Hm’, I thought, ‘My sandals feel comfier than u... oh bugger’.

Yes, sadly, it was that kind of a day...

My next stellar move was to soothe my spud at around three after a nasty wake-up (any wake up is nasty if you're a spud) by lying him on the big bed and stroking his back. We woke up at ten to five. While I thought it was me who had a lot to do, I was sadly misinformed. The spud dashed off while I was straightening my face and he came back lugging the Argos catalogue – no mean feat for those of you who don’t know it, this is 1000 pages and bigger than our local phone book and needs to be dropped at least three times.

He leafed happily through it pointing and making noises until suddenly he had an important phone call. Unbelievable. One second he was pointing at a shaver and going ‘Oh!’ and the next he was clutching his hand to his ear and saying ‘Ohhhh.... ohhhhh... wow.... hmmm... hmmm...’ and he wandered off talking into his hand and completely ignoring me. I cannot think WHERE he gets it from, honestly...

Anyway, after that I got the message that my day had been trying to post through my mental letterbox and we spent the rest of the afternoon blowing bubbles in the garden and cooking his dinner together. No phone calls, no emails, no hard shoes. I think it’s time I cut a few of the urgencies out of my days and started paying a little more attention to the gentler things in life. Like my slippers. And naps. And my spudlet.

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Hair today...

OK, so our son needs a haircut. The thing is, he has an incipient mass of blonde curls and everyone keeps telling us that if we cut them off, they won't grow back. I had a mass of strawberry ringlets when very young however now my hair hangs only just on the curly side of 'wavey' and so I, or rather we, are scissor resistant.

Back in May when Mum was about to arrive, I was all about setting him an appointment at Trotters for one of their special 'first haircuts' where children sit in model cars and have their first curl preserved in a little box. Oh, I was all about that first-curl-in-a-box. Now I am all about the first-curl-still-attached-to-his-head - and so, it appears, is the frog.

Well, you would, wouldn't you?

A few months ago, cutting his hair seemed a pressing issue. 'No no' other Mums would tell their offspring as they pushed their way in front of my little potato 'Let the little girl go first'. Little girl? Little girl? Didn't the pirate tee give him away?

Apparently, in this day and age where modern parents are terrified of imposing gender stereotypes on their little puddings, guessing the sex of anyone under, say, 11 years old, is damn near impossible. I dread being roped into playground conversations with unknown Mums because eventually I'm going to have to take a stab at guessing whether their little darling is 'him' or 'her'. This is because once, despite the fact her pumpkin was wearing blue and had a crew cut, I greatly offended one Mum by not guessing that her pushy little car-clutching nightmare was a girl.

I, however, am not innocent here. I have, bad mother that I am, been known to paint the spud's toenails. In fact if he spots me having a go at my own I am under fairly persistent pressure to paint at least one of his...however, crucially, when someone told me 'your daughter has lovely hair' I was happily un-offended because any mother displaying a child wearing yellow with long blonde curls and blue toenails is clearly asking for it - and it seems, I don't particularly care.

These days however, brushing and drying the spud's locks is taking longer and longer and is incurring increasing levels of toddler impatience, not to mention toddler wrath, toddler screaming and toddler struggling. And, if said toddler goes to bed with wet, un-brushed curls, he wakes up with either a single, massive dreadlock or worse, bad, eighties, Flock of Seagulls hair.

Spot the difference:

So. We have established that we don't care what people think about his hair. We have established that he has truly lovely curls and we have established that maintaining it is causing a breakdown of parent/toddler relations.

What we haven't established is whether or not we are actually going to cut it and this is where you come in, dear reader...s...

Scissors? Or no scissors?

Planes, trains and MORE CAR!

Our little spud is finally venturing into the world of language. While other toddlers his age are conming out with fairly complete, if basic, sentences such as 'I fell out', 'He bit me' (or, in the case of our friend Einstein 'We went to the park to feed the ducks and then we ate our tea') my little pumpkin is still at the stage where he repeats random words and once in a while latches on to their meaning. Thus, everything with wheels is a 'car' including airplanes, trains, buses, motorbikes, suitcases and the wheelie thing we put all the towels into to go to the beach.

We like to think (and are backed up by all sorts of well-meaning folks) that because we are a bilingual household, this is slowing down his speech. Why, only yesterday we stopped in the street to talk to a nice French couple and their dog who informed me, after realising that he was speaking his own, personal language to their pooch, that children with two languages were 'un peux en retard'. Just what I needed to hear merci VERY much...!

This morning he was demonstrating the word 'other' and everything was 'other car'. 'Car, other car, other car, other car, other car, other car, other car, other car' ' Enough to make me go a little Other myself. At least it makes a change from 'More', a word which, once he realised it would get him 'More', the spud has worn so very thin that there is practically no more of anything left in the house whatsoever... my wizard wheeze for fixing the word in his head was that whenever he said 'More' I would say it back to him 'Would you like More?' and then give him more of whatever it was ('More Car' for example...) which led him to think that it was a magic word which would get him anything he wants under its well-known alternate meaning: 'Please feed me'.

Resultantly he is More Potato than ever, as can clearly be seen below.

We're learning 'No More', now.

We've been on the beach nearly every day this week and his love affair with it appears to growing. Today we had surfing. Or rather, we had standing in front of the surf class mimicing them and making them fall off their boards laughing. We also had this:

and this:

Please note the very, very cute little swimming trunks and lack of nappy which makes him look very sweet and grown up but doesn't unfortunately stop him peeing in them.

Ah yes, it was all joy and happiness today except for the moments when he would see a woman sunbathing topless as they do here and he would smile and, despite the fact he has not been breasfed for a year, he would point and say 'More?'.

That, unfortunately, is something which appears to translate into both languages quite successfully.

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

So here we are in Biarritz again and this time, heaven forfend, it's actually sunny and we have been on the beach, which has been amazing. We're on the beach this time with a completely new spud, I have to say. We've been on the beach with a little baby spud who sat on my lap wide-eyed until his gaze fell upon my boobs and lo, he was hungry. We've sat on the beach with a little crawling spud who ate handfuls of sand until lo, his nappies could double as industrial abrasives. We've sat on the beach with a scaredy little spud who didn't want to leave the towel, touch his feet in the water or do anything that involved touching anything other than the grip he had on the back of my neck and, earlier this year, we, or rather I and my Mother were on the beach with a braver spud who was happy to paddle about in rock pools but much much too frightened to go anywhere near that sea stuff.

Today however we were on the beach with a wholly new spud, a spud who could not be restrained from the sea, a spud who could fall face-first into the ocean and come up spluttering and laughing and ready to do it all again. Oh yes. Today, we had buckets and spades and sand castles and moats and paddling and jumping over waves and sandy hands and a sandy bum and sandy peaches and sandy sandwiches and did I say sand? And heat rash... but I digress.

Finally, all my dreams about being able to lie on the beach reading a book while the spud plays sweetly beside me may be about to come true - hallelujah! It does however help that his French cousins are with us for the week and having three mini babysitters and sand-castle builders in his vicinity is a big impetus for him to get busy with a shovel. Having said that, he is definitely over-joyed to be here and after the first day, he greets the sight of the sea by struggling out of his restraints and legging it at top speed to the edge of the surf where he does a sort of vaudeville dance which lacks only a set of spoons and someone singing 'Knees Up Mother Brown' to bring the house down.

The downside is that he's too excited to sleep meaning that our nights are somewhat less joyous, however he did manage 12 hours in the land of nod yesterday and for that we are ever grateful.

In other news he has been doling out kisses to his french grandparents which trick is wonderful for diverting attention from the other activities he's been getting up to recently, vis a vis stealing enough beer behind the frog's back at our recent barbeque to warrant an actual hangover and potentially a stern warning from social services should they ever find out where we live. He is now to be found lingering about with intent where-ever a recognisable beer can has been spotted and so despite the endless soaking of clothes in seawater, this is proving to be a pretty dry holiday.

More anon.

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Will power

My son and I share a toothbrush. Yes, I know. Yes, yes, I know that too. Mum, we gave him the worm medication already. I know. Yes, I KNOW dammit. It's disgusting. I spend a lot of time washing it before either of us use it. I spend more time, however, charging it up.

The spud's obsession with pressing anything that looks like it might be a button (which means stopping at every car we pass on the street to press the headlamps, the indicators, and, oh yes, try the door handles once or twice) means that eventually, he's gotten around to pressing every button in the house. He started with the obvious ones, exploding the CD player, tearing apart my laptop, sticky fingers all over the telephones... but then he moved on to less obvious things... the bedside lamps, the book light, the buttons on the sofa cushions... finally he resorted to examining anything that came his way and pressing any mark just in case it was a hidden button.

One evening when faced with his little baby 'first toothbrush' he demanded mine and, broken I suspect by a long Battle of the Bath, I gave it to him as a distraction and there in my lap after pressing every part of it at least twice, he turned it on. In an attempt to dissuade him, I brushed my own teeth with in and watched in horror followed by relief as he tried to put it in his own mouth and pulled away in shock. Our son, however, is nothing if not dogged and now, a few months later, he will happily spend five minutes frothing up the bathroom brushing his own teeth with the electrics turned on.

On the list of things we'd like him to imitate in the bathroom, using the electric toothbrush was probably pretty far down the list. What was perched precariously at the top was 'potty training' however we're not having much luck. It's not that he doesn't know what it is he has to do as he's perfectly happy to run naked to the potty, sit down, fart, laugh and then stand up again. It's not, he wants us to know, that he doesn't understand, it's that he just can't be bothered.

We don't mind. Not really. Not specifically. It's just that we have no idea what else he can do that he is simply not bothering about and so whenever he goes quiet for longer than a minute we are running in to see what he's up to and I, frankly, am shattered.

night night...

Rogue Trader

In the land of the very small, possession is not nine tenths of the law, it is, in fact, the whole of the law. This law, the law of childhood possession, is normally referred to simply by it's common name 'Mine!' and its finer points are often argued in open court. One only has to spend a few moments in a crowded playground to hear multiple small constables patrolling around sternly enforcing this edict while parental mediators cite the popular 'sharing' clause and the less popular 'it's not your turn' sub-clause.

The 'mine' law appears hard-wired into the human psyche and while one doesn't necessarily hear the word bandied about in polite society, one only has to watch grown adults circle warily around a newspaper on the tube to understand that there, amidst the suits and briefcases, stand the ghosts of their mothers admonishing 'she was there first, let her read it. You take you turn later. Yes? Later. Not now, later. Later I said. Oh for crying out loud - look, juice, would you like some juice? Shall we go home now? Is that what you want?'

Anyway, the spud amazed me this week by willingly offering up his toys to the youngest son of a good friend. I was sitting beaming in my chair, pride stashed relatively unsuccessfully under my motherly bottom while he presented the boy with a succession of toys when I realised that, rather than any advancement in his human nature, true to form he had a hidden agenda.

Once the smaller child was safely playing with something about which, frankly, the spud doesn't care, he turned on his heel and ran as fast as his piggies could take him into his bedroom and onto his ride-on Thomas (£3 at the local charity shop - mine!) and proceeded to parade around in a particularly satisfied manner, stopping only when my friend's oldest got onto his trike and used the pedals, at which point, inevitably, everything was 'Mine' again.

It's not all legal beagles around here though. The other day he shocked us by doing his very first swapsie with his mate Jake - and no ordinary swapsie either, they traded their very favourite 'Don't Touch It, It's Mine' cars. I thought I had dreamed it but then a few days later he did it again with a different friend and different toys and... well it was all roses for a couple of days until they turned to... er, to worms.

Pinworms, in fact.

Two days later he came home from his minder with a note saying that he had recently traded something rather less savoury with someone and could we take him to the doctor?

Rather embarrassingly we've had to confess all to our swapsie friends and I rather suspect that this is one trade they wish the spud had kept to himself.

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