The Mummy Reports 6

I am now one year and five days old.  It's time I gave you my final assessment of how my Mummy is doing as a Mummy.

Availability: 5/10

Mummy is now totally chaseable.  I can crawl at extremely high speeds, and when I reach her, I can climb up her legs and hang from her knees with my super limpet skills.  She has quickly learned that there is no point in trying to divert me from doing this, and generally scoops me up by the third high-pitched scream (I got that trick from my big sister - thanks, Abi!)  

I still need to work on Mummy staying with me while I sleep.  She sits with me for the full two hours that it takes me to GET to sleep, but then I'm pretty sure she leaves.  Sometimes it takes her a full 30 seconds to get to my cot when I call her at 3am.  However, she's still letting me sleep in the big bed from then until morning, so she's not doing too badly.

Food: 4/10
I was going to give food a lower rating because of the number of things that Mummy still won't let me eat, but then I remembered that she baked me a chocolate fudge cake for my birthday, so I added an extra point.  She called it 'miracle cake' because it contained no egg, gluten or milk.  She ate a bit too much of it herself, though.  I mean, it wasn't HER birthday.

Physical Care: 3/10
Mummy is still covering me in yucky sticky ointments every night.  I put up with it because I think it stops the itching, but the new shampoo just has to stop.  I don't care what she thinks it achieves, it smells EVIL!  What if one of those nice ladies at church wants to smell my head again?  It'd knock her out cold in the aisle, and then Daddy would be out of a job, and THEN where would we be?

Environment: 9/10
Mummy gave me some cool stuff for my birthday, which was nice of her, as I already have so many toys.  My favourites are the toilet roll, the wine rack in the kitchen, and the shelves full of books that you can pull out to make towers all over the floor.  Oh, and my ball.  I love my ball.  If I can't find it, I throw other things, but none of them bounce quite as well.

Entertainment Value: 10/10
Mummy is still very funny.  At the moment she likes to pretend that she has mislaid my nose.  She keeps asking me to find it for her.  Odd.  I must meet up with another one year old and ask whether this is normal behaviour for mothers, or whether I should be worried.

All in all, Mummy hasn't done too badly.  She still has a little way to go, but I'm confident that she can learn.  I think I'll stick with her.

Spring Harvest

We went to Spring Harvest.  It was held in Butlin's, Skegness.  It wasn't warm.

Each member of the family experienced it rather differently.  TheRev is to Spring Harvest as Scrooge is to Christmas.  He enjoys bumping into people he knows (and there were some people there that we were deliberately bumping into, too, which was great) but he spends the remainder of the time on the sofa in the chalet, flicking apathetically through the programme planner and making little grunting, snorting noises.

To be absolutely fair to him, we both went down with some flu-like thing which the children were only just shaking off, and so spent most of the week feeling dreadful.  I blessed the fact that there was childcare.  I crawled to some seminars, wrote a poem, and through a feverish haze I experienced Abby Guinness's Word of the Wives monologues (marvellous) Footprints Theatre Company's Fishy Tales (great fun, though I missed a lot of it chasing a baby) Doug Horley (my hero of children's songwriting) and Adrian Plass, who still managed to get a laugh out of me even though I felt as if I was hearing his reading through hot cotton wool.  I also bought far too many books, and managed to conduct a meeting with One Way UK's director largely using sign language, as I had absolutely no voice.

For Abigail, the best thing about the entire week was the fact that there was a giant statue of Bob the Builder between our chalet and our breakfast.  New every morning was the sight of him, and each time he appeared on the horizon, she exclaimed with as much surprise and passion as every time before: "Look!  It Bob the Builder!"  Sometimes she also treated us to the theme tune.

Jeremy had a new shape sorter to keep him occupied in the chalet, and became adept at posting the shapes through the right slots.  He seemed to enjoy the nursery sessions, and the fact that everybody made a fuss of him when I carried him around in my long wrap.  He loved Doug Horley.  And he didn't sleep worth beans.

 A poorly Mummy takes two children to the All Age Celebration

Abigail meets the Compassion elephant (we sponsored a child almost exactly her age, and met Wes Stafford)

All in all, it was not Spring Harvest as we have previously known it, but it was a great family holiday.  Perhaps a tad overpriced considering how much - or rather, how little - we were actually able to get to.  I'd go again.  I doubt TheRev will let me, though!

The Mummy Reports 5

My Mummy has now been my Mummy for nearly ten months.   It's time I updated my ratings of her performance as a Mummy.

Availability: 2/10
Mummy has actually started to LEAVE me in places.  As in, for SEVERAL HOURS.  Regularly.  On purpose.  With OTHER PEOPLE.

It's not that I actually mind when it happens.  Mostly, the other people are very nice and have decent toys.  It's the sheer AUDACITY of it that I object to.

Food: 4/10
Unbelievably, Mummy has started to cut things out of my diet.  Just when I thought she was getting somewhere, too.  I haven't tasted cheese for weeks, and the vegetable count is suspiciously high.

Physical Care: 2/10
Our bathroom is starting to look like an extension of the kitchen.  This is because Mummy keeps putting food in my bath.  First it was porridge oats, which made the water all slippy and milky.  Now she's dunking Rooibos tea-bags in there.  Despite this, she still won't let me drink the bathwater.  What's all that about?!

Environment: 8/10
I can stand up!  By myself, without holding on, look, no hands! 

It's a wobbly, short-lived stand, but still!  Everything looks different from up here.  The carpet looks slightly cleaner, and the table top looks slightly grubbier.  I like a bit of variation in my view.

Entertainment Value: 10/10
I've worked out a new way to wind Mummy up.  All I have to do is repeat a word or a sound that she says, and then never say it again.  The results are hilarious to watch.  "Jeremy!  Did you say duck?!  Say it again!  Duck!  Duck!  Duckduckduck! Duck?"  She goes on for hours.  She finds all the ducks in the house, pulls duck faces, makes duck noises - it's classic entertainment, really.  Tomorrow I'm going to say Penguin and see if I can make her waddle.

Sucky Saturday

In general, for a Rev's wife with children, Saturdays tend to suck.

It's not just because TheRev works at the weekend, though of course he does. Nor is it just because he works harder on a Saturday than most other days, preparing for Sunday.; though of course that is true too.  I can accept that a clergy family simply needs to get used to having Daddy home on a different day.

The thing that really makes Saturday so much more sucky than other days is it doesn't afford the same distractions that the other days do.  During the week, I can fill our time with toddler groups, meeting up with people, leaving at least one child at the childminder, errands, shopping and visiting local attractions.  On Saturdays, however, everybody else is having their family time, so there's no-one to go and see; no regular groups are on; shops and local attractions are crowded and sometimes doubly expensive.  So, while everybody else is having fun and relaxing, The Rev's Family tend to have a stay at home day, performing mundane tasks and failing to do any housework that actually shows. The children go mad from containment and over-exposure to their exhausted mother, while I attempt to prepare songs, puppet sketches, performance poetry and visual aids for Sunday, all the time entertaining and feeding the children and clearing up the mess that they are constantly creating.

(Of course, once children are at school, perhaps this is what Saturday is like for everybody?  Except that in plenty of other families, there are two parents, or at least an extra adult somewhere, freed from work and present to deal with the extra demands of the weekend.)

I have a bad cold at the moment too, so I had a feeling that today would turn out to be a train wreck before it even started.  However, there's a technique that I have learned as a parent that keeps me sane.  It's called perspective.

I could easily say that we did nothing and achieved nothing all day and that it was miserable, and from my perspective, that would be true.  After all, we began the day with four back-to-back episodes of Show Me Show Me and we never left the house.  But from the children's perspective, today wasn't so bad.

We had a singing session with Nicky, my puppet, and all the musical instruments.  Abigail made lots of cups of tea in her kitchen.  Jeremy practised standing up by himself, even managing to stand and wave a flag at the same time.  Abigail did some of her Bob The Builder activity magazine and drew her very first person with arms and legs sticking out of the face.
(Just to be clear about this achievement, I drew the round shape under the helmet and she added eyes, mouth, hair, arms, legs and a chin.  She was very particular about the chin.)

We ran round and round the kitchen table for no apparent reason. We danced to loud music.  We built towers and knocked them over.  We tidied away all the toys in the playroom and then got them all out again.  We started to tidy the airing cupboard and got distracted by using old curtains as cloaks and wearing half a shape sorter ball as a crown and then trying to walk without the crown falling off.

My children are fun to be with.  Even though it was Saturday and the pre-child me would have crawled back under the duvet - today was an OK day.

All the same - I'm glad I have a week to recover before next Saturday.

Conversations with Abi

Abigail's stories are getting longer and longer.  Sometimes she tells them with a book in her hand, just as if she's reading, and sometimes she tells them at the dinner table as if it's conversation, but they generally all sound the same: an assortment of what she's heard during the day, including television, nursery rhyme and grown-up speak.  She's like a little tape recorder that turns itself on and off at random, and you never know when she will stop recording and hit play.  You also never know when she is recording, and she has an unnerving habit of doing an exact impression of me saying something like, "Goodness gracious me, look at all the mess in here!" six weeks after I actually said it, or coming out with words like 'watermelon' after hearing them once two months ago.

She scampers into my room in the morning, once Daddy can't restrain her any longer from disturbing my 'lie in' at 7:30am, pokes me in the eye and exclaims happily, "You wake upped!"  Then she clambers into bed and begins: "I'm Abi-gay-wuh.  Hello Abigaywuh, wouldjoo like to play with me, the lady said.  She play lots of toys, she say, and she want a cuddle up the stairs and down the slide and into the balls. I said atishoo atishoo I say, all flellover, in the balls, and we bounce on a trampoline and this is the way the baby say wah, wah, all day long, all fall OFF."

“Good morning, Abi” I respond. What else can I say? I have absolutely no idea what she's talking about. It's tricky, because she could actually be relating something that happened yesterday at a playgroup while I wasn't there: in which case, this would be the first evidence that she has an awareness of sequence or narrative. It's entirely possible that she played with a lady in the ball pit, that she was helped up and down the slide and that they went on to sing nursery rhymes about falling down while bouncing on the trampoline and jumping into the ball pit. On the other hand, this lengthy speech could be a stream-of-consciousness style combination of nonsense and echolalia, and Abi might be just as clueless as I am about its meaning. I suspect that was true of this evening's offering, however much it sounded like a conversation:

“Glory, glory, gloooory, God is there 'cause he is everywhere. Jesus is hungry he say.”

“Jesus? He's hungry?”

“Yes, Jesus want a cuddle and he eat a biscuit biscuit.”

“Right. Jesus is eating a breakfast biscuit.”

“God want a biscuit. The crocodile not want a biscuit biscuit.”

“No, I don't expect crocodiles eat breakfast biscuits.”

“There a spider coming.”

“Is there? Do spiders eat biscuits?”

...and on, and on, and on. My replies are futile attempts to shed some light on what actually goes on inside her head, and to prevent myself from going completely crazy. As far as I can tell, the landscape of Abigail's mind looks like a sort of infantile painting by Salvador Dali, where all the eggs are Humpty Dumpty and everybody keeps giving each other cuddles.

No, wait. That's oddly familiar...

...I think I've just worked out why In the Night Garden is such a popular television show for toddlers...

The Potty Training One

Disclaimer: Ok.  I promise you, this will be the only time that I talk about potty training on my blog.  It's a subject that no non-parent really wants to read about.  It's a prerequisite of every parenting blog, though, isn't it?  And it was mildly amusing.  Well, it was if you were there at the time.

We're not really potty training yet.  It's taken several months to persuade Abigail to sit on the wretched thing - it used to scare her.  Perhaps she thought it was going to swallow her, bottom first.  Anyway, she now sits on it and counts to 10, before and after her bath.  This does marvels for her counting ability,but so far not much for actually using the potty.

A couple of nights ago, TheRev had the foresight to get her on the potty just as she was starting to, ah, bear down.  So for the first time, something actually went into the potty that wasn't a book, a teddy or a stolen piece of my jewellery.  As a result, I did a little dance and song and fed her chocolate.  Apparently this conventional first-potty-success ceremony was a mistake.  This evening:

Me: Abi, ready to sit on the potty?

Abi: (sitting down) Chocolate.

Me: Oh.  Um, no, that's for when you do a poo on the potty.  Not just for sitting.

Abi: Chocolate?

Me: (Realising that we've never actually discussed this with her) No sweetie, you have to do a poo, like before, remember?  That's why I gave...

Abi: *grunting noises* No poo.  Chocolate?

Me: (Abandoning all plans and principles) Or a wee?  I'll give you chocolate for a wee too.

Abi: I finished.  Chocolate?

Me: But there still isn't actually anything in the potty, darling.  Do you want your nappy back on?

Abi: No. Chocolate.

Me: (At this point I am mentally scrabbling through the kitchen cupboard to work out whether I have anything that even slightly resembles chocolate, and drawing a blank, because shopping day is tomorrow) But...you have to do a poo first. Or a wee.

Abi: (sitting back down, sweetly) Go and find some chocolate to me, and I do a wee.

(She didn't)

Marvellous. Pretty much her first use of a conditional clause, and it's to bribe Mummy for chocolate.  What an excellent job I'm doing of this whole parenting thing.

The Mummy Reports 4

My Mummy has now been my Mummy for eight and a something-I've-lost-count months.  It's time I updated my ratings of her performance as a Mummy.


Availability: 9/10
I've done it!  I can crawl!  I can chase Mummy!  Although now that I can go wherever I want to go, chasing Mummy suddenly seems less interesting to me.  Do you know what's just on the other side of Mummy and Daddy's bedroom door?  THE STAIRS!  Who knew those were right there?!  They look like a fun place to play.  Sadly, my attempts to get to them have been repeatedly thwarted by Mummy scooping me up and replacing me on the bedroom side of the door.  The same goes for all the dusty grey stuff in the fireplace, the pretty colourful beads that my sister dropped all over the floor, yesterday's breakfast underneath my highchair...Yes, in fact I think I would prefer Mummy to be somewhat less available at the moment...
Food: 5/10
Mummy continues to have no imagination when it comes to food.  She should let me do the cooking.

Physical Care: 3/10
Mummy, that nasty sticky cream does not stop my neck itching.  Please stop slathering it all over me and use magic instead.  Also, I have had cereal in my left eyebrow all morning, have you noticed?

Environment: 10/10
Just loving how my world is full of ledges, shelves, handles and other peoples' legs that I can pull myself to standing on and use to get around.  Every new surface that I attain has something different on it as a sort of prize, like this really fascinating pointy shiny poky thing...hey, give that back!

Entertainment Value: 10/10
Do you know how to play peepo?  You pull a towel over your head, and everything goes black and Mummy disappears.  Then you drop the towel, and Mummy's THERE AGAIN and she says hello!  Funniest thing EVER.