A week of ailments

I just thought I'd share with you the kind of week I had about a fortnight ago. This is an extract from an email I sent to a friend at the time:

• Friday night: Confirmed Miss Chief has threadworms.
• Saturday: Got medication from pharmacy and treated entire family ('cept Happy One). Washed all bed clothes, sheets and towels. Cleaned toilets. On way home from pharmacy noticed car sounded a bit funny.
  
• Later on Saturday: discovered Miss Chief has ringworm (fungal skin infection, highly contagious).
• Sunday: Back to pharmacy for cream for ringworm. Washed all Chief's sheets, towels and nightwear again.
• Monday: Happy One, who was already under the weather, became very unwell. Couldn't put him down all day. Made good use of the baby sling. Chief was also off colour - possibly due to tiredness, possibly due to worm medication, possibly attention seeking because Happy One wasn't well. At one point I had him in the sling and I was carrying her. A friend rescued me by bringing her kids to meet us at the park and then inviting Chief round for dinner.
  
• Tuesday: Map Man took the car to a mechanic who said it had water damage from the floods last week and he shouldn't really drive it until an auto-electrician could fix it.
• Wednesday: Read that ringworm can come from cats so took both cats to vets. No ringworm but both cats are overweight, especially Monty who also has an ear infection. So I'm now treating him with antibiotic drops and they're both on a diet.
• Thursday: Rode bike to work as no car. Then auto-electrician fixed car. Happy One slowly getting better and ringworm starting to fade. Unfortunately Map Man is now really off-colour.
• Today: Map Man is still sick with a stomach bug. Am thinking things can only get better.

I was wrong. Map Man stayed unwell for another couple of days. He was just starting to brighten up again when I started to feel rotten about four days after writing the above. Around the same time Mother In Law, who stayed with us whilst Map Man was ill, supposedly so he could work but he was so sick he slept and moaned the whole time instead, also became ill. We're both only just becoming right again over a week later.

Meanwhile, our kids have been driving us mad at night so we're sleep training both of them. I guess that's for another post but in the Chief's case we have resorted to bribery. She is progressing so clearly bribery works. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Things That Make Me Smile No. 13: Baby asleep at the breast

I wrote this post about 3 months ago and so this is an old photo but it happened again tonight so I thought it was about time I published it. Actually it happens most nights but it's still lovely. One of the reasons I love breastfeeding is how easily you can get a baby to sleep. Or stop a teething baby from crying. Or comfort a sick baby. Sometimes it can feel like a bind or a chore especially as my lunch hour at work is always spent feeding. But as we don't want any more babies I'm not going to rush this. I'll enjoy it while it lasts because I'm sure I'll miss it when it's gone.

Are we normal?

I need to rant before I explode.

Can someone with a child at least slightly older than 3 years and 2 months please write to me and tell me that it's a crazy age but it does get better. I don't mean someone with a child who had a couple of tantrums aged 2 1/2 but soon grew out of them. You can just get back to your wonderful life with your perfect child, in your no doubt perfectly clean and tidy house and wallow in your own self-smugness, keeping your la-la rose-tinted fairyland opinions to yourself. (I warned you it was a rant.) We don't need to hear from the likes of you, thank you very much. If indeed you do exist. And I very much hope that if you do you are a very rare breed. No, I'm hoping to hear from a vast swathe of almost insane (but not quite) mothers telling me that my children are normal. Or at least as normal as pre-schoolers and babies can ever hope to be.

I had a vague glimmer of hope after catching up with a couple of my mums group friends and being told by one that when her daughter is tired and feral she poos on the garage floor. Then she approaches her mum and says "Guess what, Mummy. I did a poo on the floor." And her mum says, "oh god, you didn't. Where?" and she sniggers and runs off.

See, that's the kind of mum I want to hear from. But preferably one with a slightly older child who has matured beyond this crazy behaviour and can say with reasonable confidence that it was a phase (isn't everything?) but that thankfully it is now over and said child seems quite normal and almost human.

I think everything is magnified for me at the moment as I am doing about 70-80% of the care of our children. Which is normal for most mothers. But I'm not most mothers so let's not dwell. And I'm quite sure there are a few of you out there with more, or crazier, or whatever children reading this and thinking "oh my god, hark at her whinging. She doesn't know how easy she's got it." But hold ye tongue and bear with... all is relative, is it not?

So, here are a few of the things that my gorgeously sweet, cute, clever and funny little Miss Chief drove me insane with today.

• Rubbing glitter from a picture all over the floor then sticking her hand in it so she can spread it around elsewhere.
• Refusing to sleep. Or be quiet.
• Asking for a wipe and when asked why admitted it was to wipe up her own wee from the carpet. But it was "just a little bit".
• Drawing all over the outdoor table in (thankfully washable) felt tip pen. (And at some point when I wasn't looking drawing on our very expensive security screen door.)
• Being overly rough with her brother, including pushing him off a little ride-on toy she was pushing him around on and then telling me he fell. And hitting him with a stick. Yesterday she hit him on the head with a garden broom I'd just bought for her for being good in the supermarket. Why do kids do that? You reward them for being good and they take it as a signal to start being naughty again. I'm really not convinced the whole positive reinforcement method of discipline works.
• Gluing the table instead of the bit of cardboard I instructed her to glue whilst we were making a cardboard Easter bunny. Why can't these things just be fun and induce togetherness like they're supposed to?
• Unraveling a roll of toilet paper onto the floor in order to get the cardboard insert, because I wasn't sure where I'd put the one I'd already found for her, when she was supposed to be picking her pens up off the floor whilst I looked for the original roll, or another already used one. And might I also add there was in fact another used one on the floor right behind where she was standing whilst she unraveled the one currently in use.
• Blowing raspberries, not to be funny but to be defiant.
• Shouting.
• Crying.
• Spitting at the dinner table. Isn't it funny how the mind works? See this was the last straw and she was pulled from the table (after a few warnings, I hasten to add), shoved in the shower and taken immediately to bed. We hardly ever do that so she must have been doing some really naughty things before this to induce such a reaction. But I can't remember what they were. Hence, it has just dawned upon me that I will get no replies from almost insane mothers of formerly-crazy-but-now-nearly-normal children because they probably have very little memory of the crazy period and have in fact now placed themselves in the former category of smug parents of perfect kids who had a couple of tantrums but not much else. Ho hum.
• Dangling her feet over my chair at the dinner table. Doesn't sound like much but it's really annoying especially when your husband is simultaneously kicking cats at you.
• Taking Happy One's toys away from him.
• Waking me up.

I suppose her behaviour hasn't really been that bad. In all honesty I'm so tired I can't even remember what it was that got me so irked. That list really isn't that bad. I must have missed something off. I've certainly had much worse days. Just last week my Facebook status referred to my day being like a sit-com. It was a comedy of errors. I can barely remember it now although the standout moment was Chief not wanting to miss a film she was watching so standing up and weeing on her fold-out sofa. There was so much of it that as I carried the sofa onto the tiles to clean it up I ended up with little puddles of wee all over both the carpet and the tiles.

Today she helped me clean up both her wee and her pen marks. I think what really got to me was that it took me so darn long to do anything. If one of them wasn't getting into something then the other was. Happy One found immense interest in any body of stagnant water he could find in the garden, of which there are a few after all the rain we've had. So hanging the washing out took an age as I had to keep running in the house to wash his hands and then figure out how to disperse of said water. Not to mention the fact that he did about 3 poos (in cloth nappies, people).

But the good things that happened today were awesome. In particular Happy One took his first steps with a walker. We almost missed it. I was making the bunny up at the table with Chief and looked up to see him toddling off through the garden. How cool.

And Chief made up a great song on her piano. We'd been playing a game in the garden where she sold rocks and I bought them for leaves, twigs or pegs. A twig was worth 10 leaves and a peg 10 twigs. The rocks started off at 3 leaves each and ended up at 1 peg each. Which is a bit steep but she did give me a discount. And I noticed the quality and size of the rock was considerably improved. Anyway, she made up a groovy little song about playing with the rocks. Of course I'm so sleep deprived I can't remember it now.

I think I need a new label/tag. I'll call it madness. Or "maternal insanity". Or "extreme memory loss caused by sleep deprivation and constant parenting". Or "ug". I'm off to eat a hot cross bun and watch some mind-numbing crime thriller.

What to do in a hostage situation

Write a blog post. (It'll make sense later.)

I'm in Happy One's room giving him his bedtime feed and thought why not put this time to good use and do a quick blog post.

Actually the truth is that Happy One is practically asleep but I'm hiding because I can hear ructions coming from the other room, Miss Chief crying and doors slamming, and I'm trying to avoid either getting involved or being dragged into putting her to bed. This I don't mind in and of itself but by the sounds of things it could take a while and be a bit of a mish.

The thing is that this is a bit of a crazy house at the moment. I went back to work a couple of months ago and a few weeks prior to that Map Man started a full- time 6 month coursework-based post-grad course. He's writing a paper about 'las-ers', cluster computing and finding tall trees. Pretty cool stuff but not really an appropriate subject for this blog.

Miss Chief has been having various sleep issues over the same time period and longer. The latest is that she still occasionally loses the plot at bedtime and often finds it incredibly hard to wind down. But more pertinent is that once asleep she then wakes frequently and gets out of bed. This is happening almost every night and is often after we've gone to bed. She'll wander into our room and wake us up. When we bring her back to her own room she says "but I'll be all by myself". (I hope this isn't all my fault for having a "sleepover" in my bed one night whilst Toby was away - he told me this would happen. It may well have contributed but I don't think it's a direct cause.)

At the same time she is continuing to amaze us with her wit, comprehension, vocabulary, creativity and imagination. Her development in these areas, and more, just isn't slowing. I reckon I'd have trouble sleeping if I had all that going on in my head.

Meanwhile Happy One is just a baby, 9 months old and dealing with all the usual stuff that the little critters have to deal with. The odd Wonder Week here and there. (We made it through Week 36 World of Categories (a horse can be an animal in a field or a picture in a book and is not the same as a large dog) and now we've got Week 44 World of Sequences (put spoon in bowl, scoop cereal onto spoon, move spoon to mouth, open mouth ... and so on, you get the drift) starting this week at 41 weeks.) And all the amazing milestones they bring: he's crawling, cruising round the furniture, standing by himself, playing peekaboo, picking up ever smaller morsels and working on his pincer grip, chatting away in his baby talk, sort of signing, he even clapped his hands but it was a bit of a "blink and you miss it" moment. He's incredibly funny, loves to copy Miss Chief, laughs a lot, gets annoyed if he has to wait too long for a breastfeed or if you take something from him, loves his food, and is generally a lot of fun to be around. He is also getting massive. I bought him a little hoodie for when the weather cools down today. It suggested size 0 for a 10kg baby. He is a little bit under that but I picked up the next size up anyway and was surprised that it fit him. It's a little large but not overly so.

When he's not having a major mental leap or a growth spurt, he's teething. He's not a great teether. He goes off his food and wants extra breastfeeds. Yay for me. (I love breastfeeding but not all the time.) He has 6 teeth now and we're in a teething break which is good. He still loves his sleep but sleep training has gone to poo. I still breastfeed him to sleep at night and when he's not teething he wakes once for a feed around 3 or 4am. During the day we have varying degrees of success in getting him to sleep but it pretty much always results in doing the Cot Dance - pacing round his room with him in our arms, rocking and jiggling him slightly then gradually lowering him into the cot and trying to get our arms out from under him without waking him. I'm going to design a new mother and baby exercise class based upon it. Watch this space.

The thing is at the moment it's all about maximising sleep in this house. Let's worry about bad habits later when things are less crazy. To that end my next step with The Chief is to replace her toddler bed with a single bed. I have a base. I just need to paint it (it's black) and buy a mattress. I would just let her sleep in our bed when she wakes up but Map Man can't sleep with her in the bed. I figure if she has a bigger bed one of us can either get in with her or swap.

As for me, because surely someone cares how I'm doing, right? Oh good. Well I'm finding it hard to find time to exercise. I do the occasional Zumba workout if I get up before the kids (ha!) or get them both sleeping at the same time (Chief sleeps about every other day now). Sometimes I get to the pool but that's rare. And I had my bike serviced the other week so I could ride to work. Which I've done once. Basically I'm still establishing a routine.

I'm enjoying being back at work. I don't really know where I'm heading with that but it's good to be contributing and feeling like a normal grown up a couple of days a week. A part time working mother is a bit like a person with multiple personality syndrome. It can be hard to switch between the two roles. I often go to work with rusks and spare undies (size 3) in my handbag. But I work really close to the beach and only 5 minutes drive from home in swanky new offices. I feed Happy One once a
day before his lunchtime sleep while Map Man swims in the ocean. Tomorrow if the weather isn't too bad then we're trying a new routine of meeting at the pool. Map Man will swim whilst I feed Happy One and then I'll do some laps. I haven't really been taking all the breaks I'm entitled to as I've been settling back in but I think I'm starting to find my rhythm now. We're hoping to get Happy One into daycare one day a week soon. That'll be interesting as he won't get his daytime feed (he gets 2 on a non workday). As it is he's all over me as soon as I walk through the door and won't leave me alone until I feed him.

[Update: now I'm in Chief's room massaging her feet while she (hopefully, please soon) falls asleep. How did this happen? It's very hard - and slow - typing with left hand while massaging with right (or vice versa for that matter). A bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. I keep getting the two mixed up. Chief's a bit perturbed but my iPhone seems nice and relaxed. At least I had the presence of mind to bring my wine in too.]

Ok where was I? Oh that's right. Me. So yeah. Work good. Two days perfect for now. Breastfeeding and working still not easy but pretty good really. Aside from that I've been baking a lot and getting fat (compared to my wedding photos anyway). And as soon as I get out of here (Chief's room. Currently hostage.) I'm going to sew Alvin's arms on (soft toy I'm making for my nephew's birthday. Which was last week. Yeah. I'm so on the ball and organised.)

Just for fun (and because I'm still captive) I'll close with a summary of Happy One's routine at 9 months. It's very flexible.

3-4am : breastfeed. Takes about 15-20 mins. Unless I fall asleep.
6am : wake
7am : breakfast.
8am : breastfeed
8.30 : sleep for about an hour
11am : breastfeed
12pm : lunch
1pm : sleep for 1.5-2 hours
3pm : breastfeed
5pm : bathtime
5.30 : dinner (usually followed by another quick dunk in the bath)
6.30 : breastfeed
7.00 : sleep

I've no idea whether this is normal. Most 9 month olds are probably down to 3 milk feeds a day but I don't care. If there's one thing I learnt when Chief was a baby it's not to stress about weaning. It'll happen when the time is right. Obviously work days are a bit different. I feed him before I leave. Then around 1130-12ish and again around 5 or 6pm depending on when I get home. He also gets offered morning and afternoon tea if he's awake when Chief has hers. In short he spends about 70% of his waking hours eating or drinking.

Sheesh this is a long post. No one's going to read this far. I could say anything now and no one would ever know.

[And I'm still massaging 3-year old feet. Or feets as Chief would say.]

Blog post in stylee of Facebook status updates

To trim a potentially long story down a wee bit, here's the thing: I have many things to blog about but no time to do it. And I often think of many Facebook status updates at once or in a short time frame but don't post them because I don't want to be Facebook spam. So I thought why not kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and blog my status updates instead? This could take off, I tell ya. Before you know it the entire blogosphere will be made up of collections of mini posts. Postlets perhaps.

So here for the first time ever (maybe) I present to you a blog post in the snippet stylee of Facebook status updates. (Random thought interjection: Smash Hits writers would have hated iPhone auto-correct.)

Meltdown from Miss Chief in the middle of the night. Never had to deal with one of those before. Woke everyone in the house. And probably a fair few of the neighbours too. Not the best timing just hours before a 7am start so I could get to Bris this morning. Ug!

OMG! Had to leave my laptop at work last night so someone else could do my job whilst I went down to Bris for a last minute training course today. My home laptop died a few months ago. I feel naked and exposed. (And besides which it's really hard to write a post on an iPhone. My thumb hurts.)

I have the most wonderful husband in the world ever. He drove me down to Bris today so I could attend a training course I only found out about yesterday and brought my baby to me during the lunch break so I could feed him.

My husband may be wonderful, and I love him dearly, but it drives me mad that his idea of tidying up is to collate random objects into random piles and leave them in various random locations around the house (e.g. kitchen bench, garage floor).

Came back from holidays on Monday to find someone had smashed eggs on our garage window at the front of the house. I'm rather excited about this as I have lots of time on my hands and I love cleaning and had, in fact, just been wondering to myself what I was possibly going to do this weekend. Yes you do detect a major note of sarcasm.

Enjoyed a rare glass of Bullmers (cider, on tap) this evening down in a pub in the smoke (well in a beer garden at Southbank) until Happy One (soon to be renamed Grabby One, I think) grabbed my glass and pulled it over. Spilled the lot. Sigh.

Got two mozzie bites in the city. What's all that about? (Actually that was in the beer garden in the park at Southbank too but still...)

Happy One (soon to be renamed Houdini) totally escaped from his pram walking back to the car tonight. We just about managed to contain him in the pram (he has fallen out of it before though) but he broke free of the restraints and was climbing all over.

Noisy teenagers congregating next door. Not really what I need right now.

My ability to write intelligently or humourously has deteriorated significantly since having children. Was fine after the first baby but that last one pushed me over the edge. Couldn't wait to catch up with friends at a wedding last weekend but then couldn't think of anything to say to them. Totally brain dead.

Noisy teenagers taking the piss now with loud music. Only a few weeks since they last had a noisy party which I didn't mind as it doesn't happen often. Totally annoyed now though. And so so tired. Maybe we'll get our own back later if Chief decides to have another (ridiculously) early morning tantrum. (Although it has just occurred to me that maybe this is our payback for this morning's early morning tantrum, which doesn't seem fair really given that I didn't actually have the tantrum and the Chief is sleeping through the row (which is a relief to be honest). Perhaps I will have a tantrum.)

Whatever. I'm tired and my forearm is aching from using the iPhone so I'm going to attempt to go to sleep. (Hope the photos appear in some kind of logical location. I can't work out where they are on this thing.)

My So Called Life

Just once I would like to sleep in until 7am and then get up to enjoy a relaxing breakfast with my children and husband and a hot cup of coffee.

Instead if I'm lucky enough to sleep in until 7 I rise to a tired and hungry baby who wonders where I've been for the last three hours. My cereal goes soggy as I either feed the baby, or make my sandwiches, or get the Chief a drink, or change a dirty nappy. If I'm lucky enough to get a cup of coffee I might grab a sip before I have to take The Bairn to bed. And often the only time Wee Bairn isn't also known as The Happy One is when he's tired. So I can be there for a while consoling and cajoling my little midget and jiggling him to sleep. Then my coffee is cold. And before I know it, if it's a daycare day for Chief, or a work day for me, one or the other of us has to leave the house. And I've barely spent two minutes with her.

And at which point in my life did 7am become a sleep in anyway? I remember the days when I'd walk home from a night club at that time, having danced the entire night to awesome DJs like The Chemical Brothers, Judge Jools and FatBoy Slim. Now the only dancing I get to do is at home in the middle of the afternoon to The Wiggles and Justine Clarke, with a baby in my arms and a pre-schooler at my feet.

Oh how things change. Those of you who knew me Before Children will know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm still the same old me, only I now turn down the opportunity to go to a Full Moon Dance on a rare occasion we have babysitters in town, in favour of just grabbing a walk or a coffee with Other Half so we can actually spend some time talking to one another. Not that I don't want to go dancing. I really really do. I mean really. But I'm so tired I just can't be bothered to get all dressed up and then spend another night not talking to OH about how the hell we're going to get the Chief to go to sleep before 8.30pm every night. I just want to get out of the house as soon as Bairn is asleep and let someone else stress over whether Chief is awake or getting enough sleep or not. I'll probably regret not going, and maybe I'll change my mind. But I doubt it. Full moons happen once a month, right? Next time, then.

Meanwhile I'm going to have the Valentine's evening we never had (because it's all about the Chief in our house now) and an early night where I dream that when I wake up in the morning (no earlier than 7) to the smell of freshly brewed coffee I will go to the dining room to find well rested, happy children eating their breakfast. And I'll sit down and join them with my crunchy cereal and hot coffee and we'll plan our day together.

Things That Make Me Smile No. 12: Miss Chief's 3rd Birthday and Favourite Toys

It was Miss Chief's 3rd birthday yesterday. I found many things to smile about throughout the day despite having two children who wouldn't sleep (I didn't even try with the Chief but felt like I spent most of the day in the Bairn's room trying to coerce him into sleep); and despite having been up until midnight the night before (frosting heart-shaped cakes that no one ate, that I'd made in addition to the HUGE main cake because I was so convinced it wasn't going to be big enough to go around; even though we were having a small mid-week morning tea with only about 7 of Miss Chief's friends and their mothers; and in the end we still have half the main cake left and all of the heart-shaped mini cakes, which have been bundled off to daycare with the Chief in the hope that they can make them go around the 17 or so kids they'll have there today).

So here are a few of those things that made me smile:

• I asked Miss Chief, who'd been opening presents all day and had the most amazing birthday cake (if I do say so myself) that she'd helped to choose, what her favourite part of the day was and she answered "playing with my friends". I asked her this question a few times and got a different answer each time but this was my favourite one.



Amazing cake

• The big smile on the Chief's face when we all sang Happy Birthday to her.

• The fact that the Wee Bairn, having only had two 20 minute naps throughout the day, remained happy, smiley and social. What an amazing child he is.
• That the kids are now at an age where they can play together for hours with minimal interruptions to us mums and few tantrums, tears and fights.
• Eddie supposedly filling up the pool but actually watering everything else in sight, including the table where all the mums and babies were sitting. For context, I should mention that Eddie is Miss Chief's peer and is turning 3 next week. We also have an adult friend called Eddie. I'm not sure whether it would be funnier or more annoying had it been grown-up Eddie doing it.
• Chief wearing her new (reversible) Disney Princess dress (Aurora a.k.a Sleeping Beauty on one side, Belle - Chief's favourite - on the other) and Belle tiara. She is such a girl. Funny how that happens. I remember my sister-in-law saying she believes that you're either born a tomboy or a girly girl and that upbringing has little effect - I'm assuming so long as you're a parent that neither encourages nor discourages either behaviour. I'm inclined to believe that she's right about that, although Chief is heavily influenced by her girly big cousins. And she likes trains and cars too and is physical and boisterous like a boy. The theme of this birthday was definitely princesses and fairies though.



Chief in her Belle dress and tiara - taken with her new Princess camera that can add fun borders

• The fact that I totally managed to save a cake with a huge hole in it by filling it with a chocolate sour cream ganache (because we only had sour cream in the house and thank god! Other Half had returned home from shopping with a rare block of chocolate for me). It didn't even look like it wasn't supposed to be like that. Genius.

• Chief fell asleep on our bed last night and as Toby carried her off to her own room I looked at my now big 3 year old and how tiny she looked in his arms and thought "ah! She's still little, really. "What a relief.

And now for my absolute favourite moment of the whole day. Chief had had some wonderful presents which she'd spent the whole day playing with happily. I'd felt bad to have spent so much time with the Bairn trying to get him to sleep but she didn't really seem to mind. She played with her Barbies, looked at her new books, stuck some stickers and cuddled her gorgeous new Mary Poppins doll (thank you Nana Joan and Dekka) but at the end of the day, as I was getting the Bairn ready for bed, which were the two toys she brought into his room to play with? Frazzle and Dorothy, a sock toy I made for her first Christmas, and the giraffe I made for her last year. Priceless!

Dorothy and Frazzle chilling together.

(Update: Just had a funny thought that made me giggle. Chief doesn't have a middle name, making her initials PC, somewhat appropriate for the daughter of two I.T. professionals. I just thought that we could have given her a middle name of Valentina, considering when she was born. It has a really nice ring to it, except her initials would be PVC!)