A Clean Break

As you know, I am a fairly non traditional parent.  I get stressed about things, but not the things most parents seem to get stressed about.  Potty training is a case in point.  My theory was; ‘The easier it is for all involved, the better.’  This meant me waiting until they were ready to do it, rather than setting my own agenda.  We used more nappies, certainly, but all my children transitioned from nappies fairly easily, with only a few hiccups along the way (the less said about Oscar dumping in John Lewis carpet department the better I think).

I employed the same inattention to weaning and dummies and bottles of milk, all with the same kinds of success by and large.  I’m not saying it’s the right way to do things.  I’m saying it’s the lazy person’s way to do things.  And as I’m lazy, this worked for me.

I have however, hit a small snag with his lordship.  His lordship junior that is.

One of the things I have always left until last in the efforts to give my children the skills they need to go to school as independently as possible, is wiping their bottoms after they have evacuated their bowels.

Again, this is entirely down to laziness.  I had much rather wipe it myself, however unpleasant, than spent four hours scraping excreta out of the wallpaper and hosing down my child with a Karcher pressure washer.

I speak from bitter experience.

Oscar’s time has now come.  It is proving an interesting battle ground.

The first issue is his in built arrogance, which is still taking its imperious toll on our relationship.  My friend witnessed him in action the other day and said to me: ‘It’s because he’s so used to having you to himself and you giving him what he wants.’  Now I love my friend dearly, but she is clearly thinking of someone else on the whole ‘you give him what he wants,’ front.  Those of you who have seen my parenting skills in action can testify to this.  I am a bit of a dragon mummy.  Sometimes my children get what they want, but they work hard for it and have to remember their p’s and q’s or they get big, fat nothing.

What is fascinating about Oscar is that despite this, he persists in acting as if he is definitely going to get what he wants.  His tenacity in the face of outright denial is quite amazing to watch.  Where the girls would always give up trying after a couple of wheedling attempts, he will spend a good half hour trying to find ways to crack me.  My mum is convinced he was born with a well developed arrogance gene.  I think the word ‘male’ was popped into that sentence somewhere before the word arrogance.

The second issue is his constant desire both to still be a baby, and to be a big boy.  This is causing him and me both a fair amount of headaches.

With regards to the wiping thing, I mentioned it to him a few months ago, that it was time he started doing it for himself.  He flat out refused, because he wanted to still be a baby.  There was a mutinous look in his eye.  I kept my powder dry.

A few weeks ago I returned to the subject with another weapon.  Bribery.  I explained that if he could do this task by himself, and keep doing it, after a few weeks of proving to me how wonderful he was at it, I would buy him a new Mario game for his D.S.

This has spurred him on to great efforts.  Although only if I remind him.  His default position is to still holler from wherever he is: ‘MA  MAAAAAAAA! I finished my POOOO  OOOOOOOOOHHH!’  Which is my cue.

Yesterday he shouted it to me.  I shouted back that he should remember to try himself first.

He did.

He did great.

As I was being what he calls so charmingly; ‘The pooh judge,’ I said to him; ‘If you keep this up for another week, you will have earned your D.S. game.’

He was utterly thrilled, and was chattering away about it for ages.

After about twenty minute I had a bit of a brainwave.  I turned to him and said:

‘You do know that when you get your D.S. game, you will still have to wipe your bottom every day afterwards, don’t you, or it goes back to the shop?’

He looked at me in total horror.

‘But why?’

‘Because big boys have to wipe their bottom every day for the rest of their lives.’

He was outraged of Broughton Astley:

‘But that is what you are there for, mama!’

I pointed out that dadda did not have someone on hand to wipe his bottom for him at work (I’d like to see them try), and that there was a time when all good men should rally round and wipe their own bottoms.

‘But I don’t like wiping my own bottom.  It’s icky.’

I explained that I did not like wiping his bottom either, and that I had seen enough cacky bottoms in my time, and that I felt that I had done my bit and it was now time to pass on the toilet roll to others.

He was astonished.  Absolutely astonished.  He simply could not believe that I did not like wiping his bottom for him.

He continues to be outraged.  I think it’s going to take some days for this news to sink in.  It’s been a major shift in his world view and he needs time to adjust.

Life can be so shocking sometimes.

Portmeirion

Jason found a lead for my camera. It is not my camera lead. That appears to be somewhere so safe that nobody will ever find it again.  Maybe the Borrowers are using it as a giant washing line.  I know not.

Then came the problem of loading my pictures onto a Mac.  Jason was so intrigued by this that he did it, thus meaning that I will have to learn for myself next time.

Now comes the time for me to get them from the Mac to the page.  Here goes nothing.

These are some random shots I took of Portmeirion in the late afternoon sunshine on Saturday:

Beyond Vajazzling

It appears that after the blog post in which I wrote about the world of Vajazzling your vagina, things have moved on.

Home Office Mum has the latest scoop here. You should definitely pop by and take a look. I have not stopped laughing for the last few minutes.

Bugger ‘em

Oscar and I were driving to see a friend yesterday.  He was very excited. He loves our friend dearly because she spoils him rotten.

He turned to me, and said very solemnly:

‘I love X, but I hope her little girl is not there.’

I said:

‘No. She will be at school, but why don’t you want her there? She always plays with you.’

To which he replied pompously, and as it happens entirely erroneously:

‘Yes. Well.  She does, but she is always buggering me.’

ahem.

I think he meant to say ‘bothering me.’

I hope so.

I really, really hope so.

Tsk…

At granny’s house Oscar and granny were discussing the comings and goings of Geoff, the gardener, who is beavering away like a good ‘un now that spring has sprung.

Granny said:

‘And even though Geoff is really busy Oscar, he has still made time to  fill your sand pit up with clean sand for you, so that you can start playing in it again.’

Oscar said:

‘Well. I hope he does a good job, because last year there was a crab in it.’

 

You are all the shiniest of shiny stars

As you know, I am raising money for FSID in memory of my friend’s baby.

You know this because after my last post, lots of you rushed straight over to my Just Giving page, and gave and gave with all your hearts.

When I made the page I set a target of £50 as my goal.  Times are hard and things are rough for most people, and I thought this was a fair amount to ask for under the circumstances.

People, you have absolutely astounded me with your generosity, your messages and your goodwill.  You are amazing.  After only two days the total on my page reads £370.  I have never raised this much money for anything in the whole of my life.

I have said this before, but it is worth saying again here.  The people who read this blog are far and away the best tonic for any disillusionment I might have with mankind in general.  You stick with me through thick and thin.  You offer help, advice, cake, ideas and support no matter what.  I am touched and deeply honoured by your friendship yet again.

The overwhelming majority of people who have donated so far have been bloggers and blog readers.  It totally vindicates why I blog, and you have given me the perfect answer when people look at me in that sneering way and say; ‘What’s the point of blogging?’

It also answers those critics who think that all bloggers and internet users in general do, is sit around staring blankly at screens and not doing anything with their lives, whilst losing the power to communicate in the ‘real’ world.

You are totally awesome dudes.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Please Sponsor Me

Regular readers will know that seven weeks ago, my friend’s baby son died in her arms, only five weeks after he was born.

His name was Keelan Bambrick-Webster.

He was a beautiful baby boy, who is deeply mourned by everyone who knew him, and his loss is something his mother, Michelle, family and friends, will have to come to terms with in their own way over the months and years that follow.

The doctors have decided that Keelan died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

This basically means that they do not actually know what caused his death.  This diagnosis does not ascribe blame to any party involved. It is just a broad banner under which they include all babies whose deaths are, to the modern medical mind, inexplicable yet natural.

I do not think that this is a huge comfort to my friend.  There are too many what ifs? and if only’s. There are too many unanswered questions, too many things for her to feel bad about, even though, in her heart of hearts, I hope that she realises that she did the very best she could have done, and gave her son the best life he could possibly have had, however short a time he had it for.  I don’t think she does believe this of herself, which is part of the tragedy.  I hope reading it in print makes her start believing, if only for a moment.

After the brief sense of closure the funeral gave her, she is now left with a head full of thoughts and feelings that do not really have anywhere to go in the run of normal, every day life.

She is a very strong woman.  Stronger than I think I could be in the same circumstances.  She gets up every morning and does everything a mother can for her remaining children. She keeps her house tidy. She looks after herself.  She goes through the motions, when all the time she has a weight of grief on her chest the size of a boulder, pressing into her, making it difficult to keep on breathing.

She feels that she is letting her son down, because she has to be here, for her living children, and not there with her dead child.  She is totally torn in two.

Yet she goes on. She endures, because she must.

She has not flinched from every difficult, heart rendingly horrible decision that has had to be made.  She has not shied away from every awful task that has been put before her, and she has kept her dignity in circumstances that would have left me utterly wrecked.  She is a truly brave woman.

I don’t know if she realises this, because to her, this is just how a mother should be.  She feels that she has had to do this for Keelan, so that she was and continues to be the best mother she can be for her son.  She can think of no other way to behave.

Not only is she carrying on for her own children, but she has decided that rather than wallowing in personal grief, she will try to make a difference for other people out there who are either in the same boat, or who may one day face the same terrible things she has faced.

As such she is raising funds for the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths. FSID is a charitable organisation which helps people like Michelle by offering support and guidance after the death of a child.  They also support research into the causes of Sudden Infant Death, hoping that this will eventually give parents more concrete reasons for the loss of their child.  They offer advice and support for those parents who have new borns who they are worried about, and do a fantastic job in an area which is woefully under funded by the NHS.

Michelle, her friends, her family, and me and my kids, are doing a sponsored walk on Saturday 14th May this year at Western Park in Leicester to help raise funds for FSID.  It is called a Mile in Memory, and we will walk it for Keelan.

I have set up a Just Giving page, so that if you want to give a donation to FSID in memory of Keelan, whilst enjoying the thought of me, the unfittest woman in the universe, finally shifting off her arse for something other than cake, you can.

Donating through Justgiving is totally safe and secure, and all the money you donate goes directly to the charity in question.   I absolutely honestly and promisedly swear I will not spend it on sweets.

You do not have to give. I shall not come and beat you with sticks if you don’t.  But if you want to help, every penny you can give will benefit someone, somewhere who is currently going through the worst pain a parent can imagine.

Thank you.

ick

Oscar is poorly.

He seems to have some sort of stomach bug.  It started in the middle of the night, two nights ago.  This is one of the unwritten laws of parenting.  Any child’s illness will start either in the middle of the night or on a weekend/public holiday, thus causing you maximum stress and inconvenience if you need to get hold of a GP/hospital appointment.  At these times parents must be reassured that 99.9% of the time, despite your child looking waxy and close to death, and running an unfeasibly high temperature, as soon as you have trekked to the outer Hebrides to find a doctor willing to help you, your child will be pink of cheek, bright of eye and as fit as a flea.  The doctor will look at you in that way, and you will never speak of it again.  This is also the law of children.

Oscar is rather tragic when it comes to being ill. He specialises in talking in a kind of whispery squeak, which makes it almost impossible to hear him, even if you have your mouth glued to his ear.  When asked to speak up so that you can ascertain whether he is moaning about beri beri or a broken arm, he drops his voice to a lower register and continues to whisper.  This is of some use to any moles that may be passing.  Not so useful to parents.

When he is well his normal voice is  a kind of stentorian bellow which makes windows rattle at 100 yards and which deaf pensioners can hear in Spain.

He also likes to be woeful when he is ill.  He uses the power of large, spanielesque eyes and a quivering lip to maximise any sympathy that might be on offer.  He also likes to plunge, dramatically on to you, burying his head wherever he finds a handy crevice about your person. As he invariably has a snotty nose, this is not pleasant at all.

If he is mobile, he trots up to you to offer you the odd symptom or possibly a reason why he might be feeling so awful.  He likes to do this about every ten minutes or so throughout the day, and night.

Last night he was so tired from the efforts of the previous night he only got me up once, at about three in the morning, to tell me in a troubled whisper that he had spotted a cobweb above his bed, and wondered if the spider might have dropped into his bed, thus causing him to have tummy ache.

I was entirely unsympathetic.  I might have been more sympathetic had I not spent the previous two nights sleeping on gravel with a snoring giant of a man, and only been woken an hour previously by Tallulah on the night in question, while she had spectacular night terrors.

He went back to bed to keep his beady eye on the spider web and monitor any arachnid movements.

This morning when he got up he was grouchy, rather like his mother, but seemed physically much better.  He had an appetite and his temperature was down.  He wolfed down his breakfast.  I was feeling optimistic.

Half way to school in an absolute corker of a pea souper, when you could only see ten feet in front of you, and I was driving along with gritted teeth, and gritted hair, the keening began.

Waily waily.

Oh dear.

He decided he was going to be sick.

I could not stop.  The traffic was horrendous.  The fog was horrendous.  Everything was horrendous.

Waily waily.

I cranked all the windows down and we drove along, freezing to death, jollying him on until we got to granny’s house.  Granny’s house is between where I drop Tilly off and where I drop Tallulah off.  As there is a twenty minute gap between the drop offs, we use it as a pit stop, and Oscar and Tallulah generally have their second breakfast of the day.

This morning we hurtled in and deposited Oscar in the loo instead.  It was not a happy time.

By the time we had to go, he had emptied both ends and told me that the reason he was feeling poorly was because a) his seat belt was too tight, b) he isn’t keen on Radio 2 in the mornings and c) he has a small scratch on his hand.

I think he probably needs a few more years of medical training before I unleash him on the general public.

We had to drop Tallulah off and then carry on for another twenty minutes in the fog before we reached home.  We are still in the rental car, as my own car is still the subject of much heated debate.  I did not want to spend the rest of the morning scrubbing sick out of it in the fog.  We borrowed a large bowl from granny, and went on our way.

Oscar retched his way home, and kept tying to poke the bowl under my nose for inspection, blithely disregarding the fact that I was navigating my way through the foggy landscape.

‘Is this what the germs in my tummy look like mama?’

‘What is this stuff here?’

‘Why won’t you look at this properly mama?’

I bet Dr. Robert Winston doesn’t start his days like this.

Canute

The children had an absolute ball on the beach on Saturday, despite the fact that Aberystwyth is mostly shingle and grit, and the fact that even though the sun was shining, there was a fierce nip in the air.  It put them off not one jot.

Tallulah spent her time digging Dying Holes, a la Madagascar 2.  When Oscar kicked in the sides of her Dying Hole, in a kind of run by shooting, they had a funeral for it.  It was most surreal, but they were jolly happy, making headstones out of bits of slate, and festooning them with bladder wrack.

Oscar kept bringing me sticks that had been bleached and smoothed by the waves.  At one stage I said: ‘Oh! That’s a lovely piece of driftwood Oscar, thank you.’  He looked at me sternly and said: ‘It is not driftwood mama.  It is a dinosaur bone.  I am collecting a skeleton.’

Right.

Just before we had to go, he came running up to tell me he needed a wee.  I suggested that he nip down to the water’s edge and have a sneaky widdle.  I knew he wouldn’t make it back to the hotel in time.  Drying small children’s sandy feet is a time consuming affair at the best of times, even when they’re not wriggling around with a full bladder and the patience of a irritable wasp.

He staggered off purposefully down the beach.  Half way down he started to remove his underpants, but realised he didn’t want to hold them, so merely waddled forward with them round his calves.  This hampered his already painful progress, which had been considerably slowed anyway by the sharp stones he was walking over.

He got to the water’s edge and prepared to do battle.  The waves rolled in.

He jumped backwards.

The waves receded.

He went forwards.

Just as he was about to commence piddling, the waves had the temerity to roll in again.

He jumped backwards.

This continued for a good five minutes.

His bare, pink bum cheeks, shone in the midday sun, as he hopped and waddled back and forth like a constipated penguin.

Jason and I were breathless with laughter. As was half the beach.

At this point, Oscar got utterly cheesed off.  He turned his back on the waves, moved further up the beach, turned sideways in full view of everyone, and did the most spectacular piddle.  It arced up into the sunlight.  He looked like a small, grubby version of the Mannekin Pis.

After this he carefully hitched his pants up, leaned forwards and buried the wee with sand that he scooped up with his hands, just like a cat would do.

He turned to face us, beaming with satisfaction, and proceeded up the beach.

Job done.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Jason bought himself a pipe this weekend.

We were passing an old fashioned tobacconist’s in Aberystwyth, where they still sell pipes, and about fifty different types of tobacco, all in those round jars like in old fashioned sweet shops.  He confessed that he had always wanted to smoke a pipe, went in, conferred for a long time with the man behind the counter, and came out brandishing a pipe and some tobacco.

This is slightly baffling, especially as he gave up smoking last week, and the ensuing days have been extremely difficult and troubling for all of us.

He bought a fairly boring looking one.  Apparently he was initially going to go for the classic, Sherlock Holmesian Meerschaum pipe, but they were too expensive. He considered one of those wizardy ones, with the long stems, but they were difficult to manoeuvre, and not possible to smoke out of car windows, so he just went for a beginner’s model with no fancy twiddles or embellishments. I suppose I should be grateful for this.

We were sitting on the beach, watching the children frisking about, and he proceeded to light the wretched thing.

It took about half an hour to get it going.  Once he nearly set fire to his coat in the process.

Even after he had successfully lit it, it went out about half a dozen times.  In the hour we were on the beach he smoked for about two and a half minutes.  It was exhausting to watch, let alone to do.

He has carried it about all weekend, failing to light it in ever more picturesque places.  In the meantime, as he has absolutely nowhere to put it, I have had to carry it about in my handbag for him.  It now smells like an old gentleman’s sitting room.  I am not terribly impressed.

I am not quite sure what has inspired this purchase, but I am hoping it is a temporary attack of insanity which will pass shortly, never to be revisited again.  I was worrying when he bought it, that it would be worse for him than smoking cigarettes, but as he has, over the last forty eight hours, still only managed to smoke for about five minutes, I am willing to let him indulge himself for a while longer.