Not Me! Monday

This week I did NOT leave the dishwasher open while I went and attended to some other emergency.

I did NOT return to find Abi Jane climbing about inside the dishwasher.

She was NOT inexplicably covered in yoghurt.



What have you all NOT been doing this week?

Friday Firsts

This week's Friday Firsts are nice and easy!

This week was the first time I ever told stories to two cameras instead of an audience. So it involved all sorts of new experiences, including...

- spending hours in a room with five other people, without EVER looking any of them in the eye
- watching Chip's hilarious stories without ever once laughing (or smiling, or twitching, or coughing or sniffing, or joining in with any of the actions!)
- having to start a story again because my stomach rumbled
- having to start a story again because the cameraman's stomach rumbled
- watching (and smelling) a fly cremate itself on a massive halogen lamp
- allowing a man I'd only just met to powder my nose for me (I know that sounds rather dodgy, but it really did just involve powder...)

Next week is going to be very boring by comparison...

What did you all do for the first time this week?

Not Me "Monday"

Today is NOT really Tuesday.

I was NOT doing my headless chicken act far too much yesterday to write a Not Me Monday post on the right day.

This week, I did NOT send The Rev to London to collect lots of furniture from my parents, who are moving to France. He did NOT arrive back with a van full of things, some of which were more unexpected than others, and not all of which were furniture. I did NOT have nowhere to put anything. I did NOT unpack it all with a rising sense of panic, and I did NOT have a fit of hysterical laughter over a chrome toothbrush holder. I do NOT currently have a double bed in my front hall because it needs to be taken apart before it will fit up the stairs. Abigail and I did NOT bounce on the mattress this morning.

Also this week, I did NOT take Abigail to the summer songs of praise service, even though it started at her usual suppertime and finished well beyond her usual bedtime. I did NOT achieve a quiet baby in each of the readings by repeatedly offering her a packet of blueberries. She did NOT decide she liked blueberries and eat every single one, and she did NOT produce a purple nappy as a result.

Oh yes, and when we left Abigail with some friends overnight so that we could go to the theatre and have a late night out, I did NOT leave my housekey in my car parked outside their house and so did NOT add twenty minutes to our homeward journey by having to go and collect it. I did NOT realise this just as we were pulling up to our front door. IT WASN'T ME!

What have you all not been doing this week?

Friday Firsts

A little while ago, in one of those random, slightly winey evening conversations, somebody asked me to think of one thing that I had done for the very first time that day. At first I scoffed at the idea that I would have done anything new on a perfectly ordinary day, but after a few suggestions I surprised myself by being able to think of quite a few first-time things – not huge events, mind, but still genuine first times.

The conversation has inspired this brand-new 'meme' of Friday Firsts. Each week I will try to think of some things that I have done or experienced for the very first time that week. If you are a blogger and want to join in, just leave a link to your own Friday Firsts in the comments here, and don't forget to put a link to this blog in your entry!

So, this week was the first time I've ever....

• Honked somebody else's car. I'm normally a nervous and fairly bad driver who wouldn't dream of judging anyone else's driving, let alone take my hands off the wheel for long enough to let them know about it. But on this occasion I was on home territory – my own road in fact – so felt entirely justified in honking the dangerous idiot who decided to overtake me when I was already doing just over 30mph in the 30 zone, and then speed off into the distance so that he was out of sight by the time I'd reached the corner.
• Played (rather than just singing) a duet with The Rev, who is learning the guitar. We worked out guitar and ukulele parts for Dinah Washington and Brook Benton's 'You Got What It Takes' and learnt it. It was fun. The ukulele part scrambles my brain, though, so we're not quite at performance stage yet – I can't seem to play it and sing at the same time!
• Performed in the rather scatological Dragon song from A Little Bird Told Me, the show that my very talented business partner is currently touring while I'm doing this stay-at-home mum thing. He kindly let me join in with the song at our business birthday party – four years! - and it was a laugh. I am now doubly jealous of the people who get to do it over and over again in theatres all over the country.

So, what have you all done for the first time this week?

Redistribution

Abigail's latest favourite game is redistributing various parts of the household.

It all started last week while I was doing various internetty things after breakfast, putting off tidying while she amused herself.  I became engrossed in something on Facebook, and after a while I was dimly aware of a repeated set of noises going on behind me.  They went: Sliiide...clatter...toddle toddle toddle...rustle...thump...toddle toddle toddle...sliiide (repeat ad infinitum).

I turned around to find that Abigail was very methodically emptying one of the kitchen drawers into the laundry basket across the room, one plastic cup at a time.  She would not be diverted from this: she went back to doing the same thing even after twenty minutes of getting dressed and reading a fascinating story about farm animals.

Over the week it has developed into something of an obsession, and very quickly gone from cute to extremely irritating.  Abigail is utterly convinced that her dinnertime paraphernalia does not belong in the white drawers where it lives.  We can never find a beaker, cup, bib or plastic bowl now except by accident: today I discovered three sections of sippy cup, two bowls, a lid and a bib in the washing machine.  They've also ended up stacked neatly on my coffee table, inside the Noah's Ark, underneath a chair and collecting soot in the fireplace.  One beaker even made its way up into Abigail's bedroom, although how that happened I have no idea as we now have a stairgate.  By the end of each day, the white drawers are completely empty.

Once again I find myself completely baffled by toddlerhood versus evolution.  Strange enough that, as I mentioned several posts ago, toddlers seem instinctively programmed to self-destruct, but what is THIS about?!  I mean, do baby apes spend their days happily moving twigs from one tidy pile into three not-so-tidy piles where their mothers can't find them?  And if they do, why do they?!  What future skill is it honing, or more to the point, what lost-in-the-mists-of-time, vitally-important-for-survival skill of our ancestors is Abigail recalling when she fills my washing machine with beakers?

While I'm working that out, I'm also toying with various solutions.  Put locks on the drawers, and hope that she doesn't turn to the cupboards which contain china?  Give up housework and cooking in order to follow her everywhere she goes and discover where she puts things?    Do my own redistribution, find a new home for feeding equipment and fill the drawers with toys instead?  Attach tracking devices to her bowls and beakers?  Wait until she can talk and then ask her where she's put everything?!  Answers on a postcard please...

Adventures in Housewifery

I have recently decided to Do Something about my appalling lack of organisation and skill when it comes to cooking.

Previously, food in this household has worked gone like this.  I notice that the fridge and freezer are both empty. I panic and buy a vast amount of food on the internet.  Mr Tesco arrives with his van and delivers entire crates of tins of tomato, more bread than I have room for anywhere, several tonnes of meat that happened to be on offer and somebody else's sundried tomatoes squashed underneath the wine.  I remember to cook at about half past five every evening, when Abigail needs to eat at 6.  It's far too late to defrost the meat and I don't have all the ingredients for anything fancy, so I use what I have and invent something.  Sometimes, depending on what happens to be in the fridge, it's successful.

Mostly it's not.  Mostly, Abigail has some frozen delicacy like fish fingers (she throws it all on the floor anyway), The Rev insists on eating whatever his latest diet dictates (soup or salad) and complains if I cook anything containing calories, and I end up eating the vegetables that I have cooked for Abigail even though I know she won't go near them, then making myself some pasta late at night when everything's calmed down and nobody is throwing food at me.  In the meantime, the several tonnes of meat that Mr Tesco bought sits unused in the freezer, the bread goes mouldy and The Rev snacks on the sundried tomatoes that I didn't buy and leaves the empty packet in the cupboard because he's so adorably absent-minded.

The all-shiny New Plan goes like this: I sit down at the beginning of the week with a pile of recipe books and decide on one delicious, nutritious meal per day of the coming week, taking into account the time taken to cook each one and carefully aligning them with our calendar engagements.  I then make a shopping list including only the ingredients needed to create these perfect dishes, plus a reasonable amount of bread etc for lunches.  I then cooly refer to my list as evening approaches, swan gracefully into my kitchen where I have everything I need waiting for me, prepare a magnificent meal and serve it to my loving family, who eat it all together with great appreciation, applause and murmurs of surprise and delight.

Well, we're two days into the first week of the New Plan, and so far it hasn't been...quite like that.  On day 1 I had planned a recipe that I already know how to cook, you know, just to start off safely and easily.  It was pork and prunes in a cream sauce.  Only somehow, in my brilliantly organised weekly shop I somehow managed to forget the prunes, even though they were there in black and white on the shopping list.  This may have had something to do with the fact that while I was doing the shopping, a grumpy toddler was sitting in my trolley ripping pieces off my shopping list and sprinkling them on the floor.  So I improvised for day 1, and we had pork and caramelised apples.  I say we had it; Abigail wouldn't touch it and The Rev only wanted a little bit, so I had some of it, and the bin had most of it.  And now there's a pot of cream sitting in the fridge which is not in my List.

Today was day 2.  For day 2, I am ashamed to admit, I had turned to - oh, I can feel myself blushing - the student cookbook.  I was going for simple and fast.  Well, it's no wonder I never used this stupid book when I was a student; I only had one hob between an entire corridor of people, whereas this recipe finished by requiring an oven for 40 minutes!  Having not read the recipe properly, this occasioned a cry of dismay followed by several bad words as I attempted to get the preparation part done in minus time with a screeching toddler attached to one leg and The Rev, inexplicably and quite obliviously, crooning and playing my guitar in the background.

Nonetheless, only ten minutes later than planned, I served this:

Now the recipe may call it Courgette and Bacon Bake, giving the impression of a healthy and adventurous meal, but that thing is basically an omelette.  An omelette that took nearly an hour to prepare and caused an unreasonable amount of washing up.

Having said that - we did eat it together.  The Rev stopped singing long enough to appreciate the vegetable content, and Abigail ate five mouthfuls (I was counting) before throwing the rest on the floor and demanding banana.

Tomorrow it's Basque Sardines.  Heaven help us all.

Motherhood and God

A while ago, when Abigail was nearly a year old, a good friend asked me what becoming a mother had taught me about God.  I had to tell him to wait for the answer, as it was going to take me several days to think about a question like that!

After a good deal of thought (and gentle nagging from my friend who wanted his answer!) I eventually replied that most of all, motherhood had taught me about how utterly uncompromising God must be, how demanding of perfection.  It was a reply that surprised even me slightly, but try as I might I couldn't truthfully say anything slushier or gentler.  My experience of motherhood so far had shown me how fiercely and instinctively protective I was of my child, to the extent that I didn't want anything bad to happen to her at all - from pain and illness right down to not quite being fed on time, my desire for her experience of life was absolute perfection.  

Of course it's something that no parent can provide, and of course in this world every negative experience is a necessary character-building mountain to scale and all the rest of it, but for the first time I fully understood why God demands the impossible - perfection - in his world, and why He was prepared to go to such extraordinary lengths to achieve it.  I really think that I would take any pain in Abigail's place if I could.  I don't feel that way about The Rev or any other of my family or friends - I can say that I hope that I would, ideally, be self-sacrificial for them, but with my daughter it's different - a deep, instinctual knowledge that yes, I would.  

At the time, I couldn't think of anything else significant that I'd learned from the great Theological College of Motherhood, but more recently Abigail has been producing plenty of sermon-filling incidents.  It must be something to do with becoming a toddler.  I don't doubt that The Rev is keeping a catalogue to bring out on future occasions (poor girl...)  One that I noticed tonight was about communication and prayer.  

Abigail was having her supper when suddenly, she started asking for the cheese grater.  No, she doesn't speak yet, but I knew she was asking for the cheese grater: she was reaching towards it and doing her "uh uh uh uh" noise with which she usually makes herself understood.  So I said, as you'd expect a responsible mother to say, "No, dear, you can't have the cheese grater".

Now, I have no idea whether Abigail understands exactly what I say, but as she continued her escalating frustrated squeals, it occurred to me that she probably has no idea whether I understand what she is saying either.  How can she tell the difference between my incomprehension of what she wants and my answer being "No"?  The only way that Abigail can be sure I've heard her is if she gets what she wants.  If she doesn't, then naturally she simply continues to ask, getting louder and more tearful all the time.  Which describes my relationship with God more or less perfectly.  Is it any wonder that a "No" or a "Not yet" from heaven simply sounds like resounding silence?  But until I know for sure that I've been heard, I'll just keep going!

Dear God, uh uh uh uh uh UH UH UH UH!!!! Amen.