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.

Health and Safety

You know, I despair for the evolution of our species.  If it's all supposed to be about survival of the fittest, why are toddlers programmed to self-destruct?

If anything long and bendy falls into Abigail's hands - a skipping rope, a pair of my tights, a pair of her tights, a headband - it goes straight around her neck.  A bag of any description gets put over her head.  Anything exactly the right size and shape to be choked on gets put into her mouth.  Anything climbable gets climbed, even though she can't yet walk on her own; but once she's on a high surface, her instinct tells her to get off it head first (though we have had some success in teaching her to wiggle backwards off the sofa).  Given a room full of fascinating toys, she will make a beeline for the one dangerous thing I've overlooked, and she makes original and innovative use of the most innocuous-looking objects: this morning, she used our tall wheeled vegetable rack as a walker, and when it fell over, instead of letting go she kept hold of the shelf she was clutching and ended up balanced precariously on top of its narrow side, her legs kicking into space as she hung on for dear life.

Everybody knows that this is completely normal for a 16 month old, (although why it should be I have no idea.  Do mother gazelles have to tell their babies not to play with lions?  Do baby zebras have to be taught how to drink from a lake without drowning themselves in it?)  And yet, I have to confess, I haven't really babyproofed my house.

We have a stairgate - it's just not attached to the wall yet.  Neither is any of the furniture, not even bookcases.  Our electric plugs aren't filled in with little bits of plastic and our toilet seat is not locked down.

This is partly because I'm still living in hope.  I'm hoping that it is possible, through a simple strategy of closed doors and constant supervision, to bring up a toddler safely with a healthy respect for the word 'No' and a basic understanding of what not to touch - one that will serve her as well in toddler-free friends' houses as it does in ours.  Another part of it is realism.  In a house as cluttered and disorganised as ours, there will always be something to worry about, especially given that creative use of everyday objects I mentioned earlier.  Probably having an enormous clear-out of excess junk and furniture would do more for Abigail's safety than fixing a stair-gate to the bottom of the stairs in case she manages to climb a significant number of stairs in the ten seconds it takes us to follow her from the kitchen to the front hall.

I do wonder whether any of this will change as Abigail gets more independent and able; already she is happy to spend far longer than you'd expect playing in a room by herself, and I don't want to have my back turned the first time she works out how to remove a screw cap from a bottle of bleach, for example.  It may yet transpire that we have to move into a padded cell until she's 25.  In the meantime, I shall be answering her apparent death wishes with a firm belief that it will take longer for her to do herself damage than it will take for me to work out where she's gone and chase her there.

Sensible girl

Determined not to follow in her mother's footsteps, Abi Jane is getting acquainted with the driving seat nice and early.

A Slice in the Life of The Rev's Wife

Mothering Sunday, 7.40am.  I am standing in a cloud of icing sugar, trying to create buttercream icing for 10:30 club.  This is more than usually difficult since I don't have any butter, having only decided to ice cakes for the children's mums the night before, when I finally abandoned all the complicated origami flowers I found on the internet.  I am hoping that Tesco Olive Spread will do the job.
Abigail is sitting at the kitchen table consuming Weetos.  She has them in her hair, up her sleeves and stuck to her lap.  Thankfully she is still wearing her pyjamas.  I have icing sugar in my hair, down my front and streaked across one eye.  I am not wearing my pyjamas.  I can hear the Rev moving about upstairs.  He probably still is wearing his pyjamas, although he has an 8:30 service to get to, because he has the astonishing ability to go from bed to presentable in under three seconds and he flaunts it mercilessly.
I taste the OliveSpreadCream icing.  It tastes of olive oil.  I add more icing sugar, humming the song I've just written and am now trying to learn in time to sing it with the 10:30 club kids.  I mentally run through the props and items I need to take to church with me: apart from coloured icing pens and sprinkles, I need one floppy fabric doll, two metres of shiny blue fabric, an old stained t-shirt of The Rev's, a spangly white blouse of mine and a basket.  Can you guess the Bible story?!
I taste the icing, which is now horrendously sweet with traces of olive oil.  I have a brainwave and fetch vanilla flavouring.  Abigail sticks her hand in her cereal bowl and spills sticky chocolate milk all over the table.  The Rev appears in the doorway buttoning his shirt and asking whether I've seen a dog collar.  I tell him to try the nursery (Abigail likes to remove his dog collars and chew the ends of them.)
I taste the icing.  It tastes absolutely foul, of very sweet vanilla flavoured olive oil, but I have a suspicion that the children will pile the cakes so high with sprinkles and sweets that nobody will notice; I give up and pack the bowl into a bag with the icing.  It's time to de-Weeto the baby, dress her in something decent, remove as much sugar as I can from my hair, clothes and face, collect together my props, remember all the silly animal actions in my song and go to church.
What better way to celebrate Mothering Sunday?

Not Me Monday

Not Me Mondays are the brainchild of the marvelous MckMama, veteran Mummy blogger.

Ummm...I did NOT completely forget Not Me Monday last week, did I?

Well, over the last two weeks then...

I did NOT attempt to babyproof the kitchen cupboards with the cunning use of elastic bands looping the handles together.  I did NOT fail to point this out to The Rev, who does NOT still have visible bruising on his thumb from where the elastic band snapped.  I did NOT subsequently buy some real cupboard locks, which are NOT still sitting uninstalled on the kitchen counter.

I did NOT buy Abigail yet another pair of baby shoes without her actually being there in the shop with me, just because they were pretty.  They were NOT too small, again.  I do NOT have absolutely no idea what size her feet actually are.  I am NOT putting off having them measured until she starts walking on them, for fear of being coerced into buying unnecessary shoes like the 'crawlers' which are constantly being advertised in my email inbox.

I did NOT resort to Heinz toddler food after another week of Abigail's refusing to eat anything I cooked.  She did NOT eat every last spoonful of it, smacking her lips.  I am NOT seriously considering just feeding her on it until she is no longer a toddler.  I do NOT want to cause injury to health visitors for their insistence that a baby won't do this if you never feed them jar food.  It's not true, people.  They just like the jar food better whether they are used to it or not.

And in non-baby related news, I did NOT take on very enjoyable storytelling job that involved my hiding in bushes and lying down in the mud in a nature reserve for a whole morning, and I do NOT consequently have the worst cold in the history of ever.

What have you all NOT been doing this week?