Jeremy is currently very fond of throwing things. In fact, I'm a little bit worried that I might have given birth to a ball player of some kind. Of course that would be far too stereotypical for my liking - not to mention the fact that I wouldn't know what to do with him - but the child just loves anything spherical. He points at lampshades, no smoking signs and the Firefox icon on the computer screen and chirrups, "Baw! Baw! Baw!" until we are squirming from all the cute.
A less desirable side effect of all this is his dearly held belief that everything bounces. His plate, beaker and spoon end up on the floor at the end of every meal, leading to an inordinate amount of cleaning to be done at the end of every day - it's almost as if he was weaning all over again. And tonight, the habit could easily have landed us in A&E.
Abi had done what I would term an emergency nappy. The kind where scooping her up and dealing with it takes priority over wondering what her brother is up to. I was just washing her hands in the basin of the downstairs toilet when Jeremy appeared at the doorway clutching a glass jar. In the time it took for me to gasp and reprimand myself for not clearing away the painting we'd been doing, he lobbed it at the floor with an unearthly chortle and it shattered into zillions of tiny glistening shards.
Abi and I were stranded on an island consisting of the little toddler step, and the glassy sea around us was nothing like the one in Revelation. On the other shore, and about to take a step towards us, was Jeremy. That's six bare feet and an awful lot of broken glass.
Without moving my feet, I leaned forward, scooped up Jeremy, tucked him under one arm and Abi under the other, and did a sort of striding leap, aiming for the carpet beyond the doorway. I missed. I landed on a needle of glass that went straight into the ball of my foot, at which I took off again and dropped the children in a heap in the middle of the hallway carpet.
When I was explaining all this to TheRev later on, he said thoughtfully, "I would have just scooted the step along, and used it as a stepping-stone to get to into the hall". Yes, of course you would, because you still have a brain. My children have taken my brain hostage, and they won't give it back. I'm not sure what the ransom price is, but I suspect it's something in the region of twenty more years hobbling about picking up shards of glass after bedtime.
A less desirable side effect of all this is his dearly held belief that everything bounces. His plate, beaker and spoon end up on the floor at the end of every meal, leading to an inordinate amount of cleaning to be done at the end of every day - it's almost as if he was weaning all over again. And tonight, the habit could easily have landed us in A&E.
Abi had done what I would term an emergency nappy. The kind where scooping her up and dealing with it takes priority over wondering what her brother is up to. I was just washing her hands in the basin of the downstairs toilet when Jeremy appeared at the doorway clutching a glass jar. In the time it took for me to gasp and reprimand myself for not clearing away the painting we'd been doing, he lobbed it at the floor with an unearthly chortle and it shattered into zillions of tiny glistening shards.
Abi and I were stranded on an island consisting of the little toddler step, and the glassy sea around us was nothing like the one in Revelation. On the other shore, and about to take a step towards us, was Jeremy. That's six bare feet and an awful lot of broken glass.
Without moving my feet, I leaned forward, scooped up Jeremy, tucked him under one arm and Abi under the other, and did a sort of striding leap, aiming for the carpet beyond the doorway. I missed. I landed on a needle of glass that went straight into the ball of my foot, at which I took off again and dropped the children in a heap in the middle of the hallway carpet.
When I was explaining all this to TheRev later on, he said thoughtfully, "I would have just scooted the step along, and used it as a stepping-stone to get to into the hall". Yes, of course you would, because you still have a brain. My children have taken my brain hostage, and they won't give it back. I'm not sure what the ransom price is, but I suspect it's something in the region of twenty more years hobbling about picking up shards of glass after bedtime.
