The Thread Bears...

For the last 25 years, 3 raggedy old teds have weathered cold, damp, dust and neglect, stuffed into a box in the well room of my parent's house. Once in a while, I dig around in it, hunting for this or that and I take them out, give them a squeeze and put them back.  Seems a sad fate for the bears I loved best of all.

So, this summer I brought them home.

Children I think have a natural instinct to love the underdog and despite his piles of adored new animals with hypo-allergenic super-soft stuffing, the boy has taken my old bears to heart.  Teddy, Panda, (apparently I was not a particularly imaginative child) and Timmy (originally my Father's and dating from the 1930s) have a place on his pillow at night - and by day, take their turns being allowed to watch him do his homework, play Minecraft, or build Lego.

Recently however, I noticed that Teddy had a particular smell.  Not a bad smell - a sort of sweet, chemical smell and I began to think critically about what a bear made in the 60s might have for stuffing.  The answer, apparently is 'powder'.

I ended up taking them all apart.

Timmy was the best.  Hand made, most likely by a relation, in the 1930s he was originally stuffed with sawdust, (some of which still lingered around the odd paw) however had been re-stuffed, with wool.   Panda had a remarkably sound but very weird moulded rubbery inner - but Teddy was stuffed with foam which had completely broken down.

Anyway, I found the whole thing fascinating.  I opened them, emptied them, turned them inside out and mended them, soaked them and washed them, re-filled them with washable stuffing which should take them through another 40-odd years, put new chamois behind Timmy's nose, bought Teddy some new eyes and stitched them up - and this is how it went.

 Before:

 

Not that tubby or chubby and definitely not stuffed with fluff:

(except for Timmy here...)

 ...and nobody knows (tiddly pom) how cold my toes... etc...*:

...and here they are.  Not quite like new, but as good as it gets for 3 bears with a combined age of 150:

 

And that's about it.  They might not look it, but I think they're pretty happy as teds go. They get cuddled and carted around and dropped on the stairs like real bears and, more importantly, when it drops below freezing in the well room they will be clean, dry and snuggled up underneath a duvet with someone who loves them. 

Sounds like a good winter to me.

 *obvious thanks to AA Milne for this bit

Now we are six

It's been a big year.  It's been an odd year, actually with quite big chunks of stuff thrown in (more another day) - and now my little spud is 6.

He's not so little, as one might guess; at least not when compared with most of his school mates; next to whom he is a veritable tower of legginess.  Get him onto a crowded bus though and suddenly he's all tiny again; perspective matters when you're 6.

We got his first report card back in June; apparently he's a dreamer and doesn't listen to anything he's told.  Academically everything was fine and apparently he's a nice boy... until the day after the report card arrived when he was involved in a punch-up in the playground.  Short term it landed him 'on the wall' (a term I had completely forgotten about) for the rest of the last week of classes.  Long-term it probably gained him a best mate; anyway, luckily the report card came first.

I fretted about the report card for a while, because it's true, he is a dreamer who never listens; but then I went home and picked up all my old report cards... and, er... so anyway we're not so worried about him anymore. 

Although maybe we should be.

Anyway, we did some stuff this summer - stuff with our families, stuff with friends who are practically family.  We travelled, we hung out; er, and we played a lot of minecraft. 

So, after everything, Charlie turned 6 and just to prove it, he managed to crack his head open just like a real boy.  Then, yesterday morning, he took his glue head into his second year of school.  Year one, here we come.

...double standards...

We have reading... not quite actual-in-fact reading but we have some nearly-reading and some pretty good guesswork and it's clear that reading is about to enter the child's world - or more precisely, the child's bedroom, after 'lights out'.

This is, of course, is nothing new.  One of the first clues I had that the Frog might be marriage material was when on an early sleepover he nervously picked up a book and confessed he liked to read a bit in bed; since then we have gaily traded book-lights in many a Christmas stocking.

While I am deeply delighted that my son is taking the first steps to a lifetime of sleeping next to a toppling pile of half-read novels, I am less keen that he has already realised that firstly, reading after he is supposed to be asleep is quiet and therefore he is less likely to be caught and secondly, that we are less likely to kick up a fuss than if we catch him playing Dr. Who and doing all the voices.

And what am I to do?  I have countless memories of being busted with my torch reading under the covers - something my mother was brilliant at working out mainly because that's what she used to do.  It's a family tradition! 

The thing is, I also remember being tired for school every morning and so of course I want to stop him - but the hypocrisy is dreadful.  I have recently purchased what I think is the perfect book light - and what, I ask you, is reading with a book light while ones partner sleeps other than the grown-up version of reading under the covers?  In fact, since we have moved and Charlie has temporary tenure in a double bed, I have been known on particularly insomniac nights to sneak into his room and read in there to avoid waking the Frog.

So... what am I to do?  For the moment we can insist on lights out as he can't really read much anyway... but give it a year or two and he'll be arguing his case - and I won't have leg to stand on.

Giraffes everywhere

So finally it snowed in London; an event my son considers to be so normal that only last week he was whinging about the on-going lack of the white stuff this winter.  Compare this to 1996 when I returned to 2 inches of snow after Christmas and my cabbie told me "It's like there's blinking giraffes in Trafalgar Square".

In fact Charlie has been begging me to visit his grandparents 'because it's always snowing in Canada'; (an imbalance of expectation which my Mother has made me promise to rectify by taking him out in the summer).

Needless to say he was delighted yesterday and here's the mandatory cute picture of boy-in-the-snow to prove it.

Thankfully it's all melting now - it was lovely while it lasted but that's all the snow I can handle - 24 hours and gone, brilliant.

In other news... well I have no other news.  These are the sorry facts of my life; my child is in the 'didn't he say something cute' phase which never fails to fill me with tedium when I read it on someone else's blog and I am working full time with barely a moment for a nice satisfying sneeze.

I will however pass on something which the child of a friend of mine did the other day.  She wrote, in her own spelling (she is 5) the words to The Gingerbread Man and managed to write 'Run, run you cunt' on a single line, which frankly made my day when her mother related it to me.  I hope it's enlivened yours.

I don't wanna grow up...

We moved just before Christmas.  I may have said this before.  Anyway, we are in temporary digs while we look for somewhere else to live and this is proving tricky.  Firstly, half the things I need are in storage; secondly, the place is somewhat, shall we say, 'dignified'.  Meaning, because it might need spelling out, that it is beautiful but decrepit - and utterly impractical.  It needs wiring, plumbing, insulating, flooring, heating, plastering, damp-proofing and, er, modernising.

That said, it turns out that we are brilliantly happy here, all except for the Frog who is finding the volume of doors that need closing, drafts that need excluding and lights that need turning out to be vaguely overwhelming, particularly given that I am not very good at most of the above and Charlie is rubbish at all of them.

I am used to a small kitchen - our last flat was bijou all round - however the kitchen here contracts the meaning of 'small' to the point where one might logically ask 'what kitchen?'; however it has one unexpected joy: the stove and all 2 feet of counterspace face a small breakfast bar with two stools.  Every evening Charlie sits at it, at eye-level with me, doing his homework while I cook his dinner. 

Turns out that this arrangement is brilliant, I am surprisingly even hoping to be able to mimic something like it, (yet magically larger), when we move.  Charlie and I spend this hour laughing and talking and fooling around together and he talks to me - properly talks to me - about his day, his friends and sometimes about the things that frighten him.

One of the most heart-breaking things that he says to me is that he doesn't want to grow up.  I mean, he wants to be in Year One at school, but he doesn't want to be six, he doesn't want to learn to read or to get taller or to to go school.  This doesn't stand up to much scrutiny as he wants to marry his girlfriend and have babies and live in a castle, but he really, really, really right now, doesn't want to grow up. 

Who knows what this is about.  I suspect it's because in the last four months he's started school, buried his cat, left his house and put half his toys in storage... I guess growing up hasn't been much cop recently.  He also talks about his dreams; they are often bad, filled with fire and loss; or sometimes good, filled, surprisingly, with cats - the same dreams I had when I was little and had just moved house and started school and left my cat in another country. 

Mainly though we make stupid jokes and invent rhymes and laugh. It's good.  It's good that we can talk about things with more depth than wondering where Dalek poo comes out;  I really do think there's something in being able to talk to one's child at eye level that makes conversation really flow.

We may not live here for long; Charlie will continue to grow up, Daleks will continue to have secretive poos and things will carry on changing but perhaps this is something that can stay the same, this conversation.


At least, until he becomes a teenager and stops acknowledging my existence completely....

And another year enters...

This year has been quick out of the gates let me tell you.  It's twelfth night already and I feel like January is nearly over.

The whole thing started with a bona-fide New Year hangover, the like of which I've not seen for some time - we invited 'a few neighbours' around for 'afternoon drinks'... in the end I think the count was 17 adults, 12 children and possibly, although I may be wrong, nearly two dozen empty bottles of fizz by 2:30 in the morning... It turns out that I am too middle-aged for all this.

We moved house a few days before Christmas, something I don't recommend to anyone.  Most of our things are in storage and we are ensconced in temporary digs  which was all well and good when we were 'on holiday'; however now that the year is losing its glow, we are beginning to realise that we packed a great number of things we actually use every day and so the debate begins... replace it?  Or live without it?  I whisked egg whites with a slotted spoon this evening.  Most of them went down my front.

Charlie is adapting very well, due largely to the arrival of Santa Claus and various items of desire which are helping him to forget that we accidentally packed two of his favourite train books. Our favourite of the new toys is a remote control Dalek which can be made to follow you around the house shouting Dalek obcenities and making the boy shriek. "I'm your fwend!" he tries to tell it; "You Are An Enemy Of The Daleks" it dictates back, implacably.

We had a wonderful existential debate while I was making him and his mate some dinner this evening, discussing whether we would prefer to be Daleks or Cybermen and which of them have the better lives.  We were doing really well on the imagination front until the conversation degenerated completely as we started saying things like "Give Me Some Jelly" and "I Need a Poo" in Dalek voices.

A new year and a new baby cousin yesterday - almost exactly 3 years after another of my cousins had a baby girl.  Welcome Amelie Violet, happy birthday Ruby and happy new year, one and all.