The Gospel according to Iggle Piggle

Over the last few weeks, Jeremy and Abigail have both become entranced by In the Night Garden on Cbeebies Bedtime Hour.  In fact, it seems to have sidled in to become part of our bedtime routine.  At first I thought it was utter rubbish and that I would go mad if I ever saw another episode, but the more I watch it, the more I see its hidden depths.  You know, if you put your tongue in your cheek and watch it very carefully indeed, In The Night Garden contains a wealth of mythology, theology and symbolism.  I'm sure I have yet to uncover many more layers of meaning, but here's a selection of just a few that I've noticed.

The Night Garden itself, of course, stands for heaven.  Although it has been somewhat clumsily aligned with folk religion in its representation as a place 'up there' in the stars, its various features becoming the constellations of the night sky, plenty of other clues give it a more Biblical grounding.  The mere fact that it is a garden, of course, recalls Eden; the white blossom that parts as we enter it stands for purity, and its inhabitants each take on their own symbolic role:

Iggle Piggle:  The only character who ever seems to enter and leave the garden, Iggle Piggle acts as the visionary or prophet, St John the Divine perhaps, allowing the viewer a peek of eternity.  In his boat, he recalls the ferryman Charon of Greek mythology, accompanying the soul across the dark waters of death to its eternal dwelling.  The red blanket he clutches, which covers him and from which he draws comfort, is an obvious allusion to the blood of Christ, covering sinful humanity to allow passage into the presence of God.

Upsy Daisy: She is the soul.  Traditionally female, she has attained salvation and now dances and sings for joy.  The bed which follows her around symbolises her perpetual state of blissful rest.

The Tombliboos: Although it is tempting to say that Tombliboos Un, Oo and Ee represent the Trinity, this would of course be heresy, as they are three distinct creatures.  I thought that their constant kissing might be a clue, leading me to Psalm 85 verse 10, but if they were Mercy, Truth, Righteousness and Peace there would be four of them; so I think they must be Faith, Hope and Charity, a triad of virtues.  Why they keep losing their trousers is anybody's guess.

The Tittifers: The unique songs of these groups of birds join together in harmony at the end of each episode, calling the garden-dwellers to hear the Story once again.  They symbolise the many tribes and nations perfectly joining together as redeemed souls in harmony with the will of God.

The Pontypines and the Wottingers: Two diminutive families represent unsaved human beings.  Their daily efforts are made to look twittering, pointless and repetitive, recalling Ecclesiastes 1 which bemoans the fate of humanity: "Meaningless, meaningless...there is nothing new under the sun".  The sins of Mr and Mrs Pontypine are visited upon their eight identical children.

The Haa Hoos: May be angels, or may represent the presence of the Holy Spirit, as they are air-filled and gently benevolent.

The Pinky-Ponk and the Ninky-Nonk: two very different ways of getting into and around the garden, these transportations stand for different but equally valid  experiences of conversion, whether chasing and searching for the truth (Ninky-Nonk) or being gently lifted up and led by the spirit (Pinky-Ponk).

Finally, Makka Pakka stands for Christ.  The rocks that are his constant companions symbolise the stones with which he builds his church, as well as the ones which he refused to turn to bread in the wilderness, preferring to embrace his humanity and his task.  Makka Pakka's task is to wash the other garden-dwellers, symbolising forgiveness and baptism, with his special sponge and red soap, a reminder of the sponge of vinegar offered to Jesus on the cross.  This task also reminds us of the washing of the disciples' feet, when Jesus warned Peter, "If I do not wash you, you have no part in me" (John 13:8)  He is the servant of all, smaller than all the rest, as it says in Philippians 2 verses 6 and 7: "He did not count equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant..."  His servitude, though, calls others to humility, as all must bend down to have their faces washed.

So, brothers and sisters, next time that irritatingly catchy music goes 'Ping...ping...ping" and poor Derek Jacobi begins his narration, let us venture rejoicing, with open minds and hearts, into the Garden in the Night.

The Current State of Play

It's been a while since I blogged here.  What with writing a book, keeping another blog, writing a guest blog and running about after two children, it can sometimes be a struggle to get back here!  However, here's a brief update on the current state of play:

Jeremy is walking, and he is at that stage of walking when he behaves like a wind-up toy whose legs move in a walking motion no matter what position he is in.  Pick him up, and his feet paddle in the air until they come back into contact with the ground.  Lie him down for a nappy change, and you get kicked in the face.  He throws himself into new challenges - literally - last week he had two black eyes from accidents involving a high chair and a toy box respectively.  Today he climbed down the stairs backwards (I was creeping down two stairs below with my arms out, terrified, but he made an elegant and swift descent without any need for catching).

Jeremy is also working on his communication by perfecting the classic point-and-squeak beloved of babies.  Except that Jeremy has made this ancient art his own by adding a stage.  It's now the point, squeak and leap.  He points, he squeaks and if you don't fetch whatever it is in under three seconds he leaps out of your arms in an attempt to get it himself by flying.  He can say a few 'words': 'Brrrrrm' for a car, 'duck' 'dada' and 'Aaaah-kuh!' which means Stowmarket (don't ask!)

Abi has suddenly become a preschooler.  She is tall and has a pair of shiny black shoes.  Her idiosyncrasies of language are just as delightful and nearly as incomprehensible as ever, but they are far more frequent and much more detailed.  When I do her hair: "Can I look in the mirror, so I can see how my pretty?"  When I ask her to do something: "No, I don't like to, I'm too busy."  When she sees something broken, shifted or altered in any way: "Oh! What's that happened?"  When she wants to show me something: "What my got?"  Her favourite thing at the moment is to give me presents.  She will wrap up anything in anything, hand it over saying "Look!  A present to you!" and then do a little dance while I open it.  The dance is an Abi trademark, and also happens whenever she is particularly happy, or knows she is about to get 'clocklick'.

Abi's memory for the spoken word or songs is phenomenal.  When she pipes up in the back of the car, you never know whether you're going to get an entire episode of Mr Tumble or all seventeen verses of The Wheels On The Bus (the daddies on the bus say 'Hello, I'm Daddy', apparently.)  Together we enjoy fitting new words into old structures to make endless verses of all her songs.  Her current favourite is The Animal Boogie.  Last week she composed her own song about a train and I had it stuck in my head for ages.

The best thing about the current state of play is that they finally play with each other.  Yes, it might be for only two minutes at a time, but real interaction is happening!  They are able to make each other giggle, and enjoy each others' company!  I live for those moments.  I hope this phase lasts for a while.

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...