Darkness Falls

And I've been up since 6am with the two wee ones. We've had a pretty awesome day- some gardening, a trip to Waitrose and a 5 mile hike* round the RSPB (must remember the "P" is for "protection of" and not "prevention of") birds HQ in Sandy and a trip to give Grandad his birthday cards.

Its now 10.23pm and I'm on night time feed duty, so why on earth am I still up? Well I'm hitting F5 repeatedly on the Telegraph's fantasy football league, in a vain hope that they'll update it from the Cup final. I was top of our works mini league going into it and as well as the adulation and the trophy, there's 50 quid for the winner. £50 I have marked down for a dinner out with my significant other on 12 June to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. 5 years married to the most wonderful girl in the world, makes me a lucky bugger especially as my mother in law has agreed to babysit. Trouble is my lead wasn't huge and I had no players playing today...

So you'll forgive me if I'm off to hit F5 again :)




*The wee fella managed to walk all of the way, which given the gradient was impressive.

Learning to Fly

"M'laddo, get down off the Berlin Wall, it's not for jumping on!" joins the list of things I'd never thought I'd be saying. And it joins the list pretty close to the top I can tell you.

Sunday saw us load up the battle wagon and head the 41.6 miles to Duxford for a day of fun and excitement running round the hangars looking at airplanes and pointing at things taking off.

We've taken the wee fella to Duxford before, and even though it was a cold windy day, he loved it. How much moreso did he love it on Sunday when the sun was shining and the planes were flying? A lot is the answer.

True, there were some moments of frustration as we told him he couldn't actually fly a plane himself (I'm sure he thinks he could and I blame his burgeoning video game addiction for that) but this soon melted into insignificance when we made it to the American Aircraft Hangar (AKA the Wonderful Awesome Place of Ultimate Running). The great thing about the American Hangar is the gentle ramp down each side, the large enclosed space and the ability to go right under all the planes with little or no cordorning off. This means M'laddo can run around for literally hours on end without escape and its fairly easy to keep an eye on him.

I'm pretty sure he now knows the difference between an F111 and an F4 Phantom, and he knows that they fly too- he was very excited seeing various small aircraft take off (I somehow missed the B52 taking off, which was a shame), he was able to associate the stationary planes to the flying ones, which just made the whole thing more entertaining.

The nipper went on Concorde 3 times, drank too many fruit shoots, and had a jolly spendid time all round, topped off by dinner at Nana's with half a kilo of chicken to fill him up (some of which unfortunately came out in the bath last night- hey ho, you can't have everything).

Needless to say we were both exhausted, me from running around with M'laddo and wifey from pushing the Phil & Ted's round with baby sister in it. The hot sunshine is certainly sapping when you're not used to it.

It's just a shame M'laddo got to sleep in until 9.30 the next morning when his sister had us up at the crack of dawn with her talking and incessant leg jiggling.

Welcome to the Jungle

I don't pity wifey this damp Tuesday morn. I've been off for 3 days and whilst the amount of baby wrangling I've done has been limited to a couple of night times of bottle feeding and some nappy changing, the amount of toddler interactivity I've been up to can only result in tears when M'laddo wakes up and realises I've gone to work.

It was a full on weekend of activities, culminating in M'laddo being so exhausted he slept in until half past nine yesterday. Of course he had spoken to his baby sister beforehand and arranged for her to keep us up from about 5am, so normality was intact in that respect but even so, that was one heck of a lie in for him.

Saturday saw us pick up our new (to us) car, a low mileage 53 plate Vauxhall Zafira. AKA the Battle Wagon. A slight fight ensued as M'laddo realised he wasn't allowed to drive it back from Gravesend (he loves sitting behind the wheel and pretending to drive and I don't think he really realises the car isn't moving or proper driving is a bit more involved) but generally he was wonderfully behaved. Shame his sister cried all the way home but you can't have everything.

Sunday saw a trip to Duxford Museum where M'laddo had the official time of his life for about 5 hours (theres a full post on this to come- I need to get some photos of my wife's camera), followed by a trip to Nana's for dinner.

Bank Holiday saw an epic amount of gardening with the wee fellas new motto, "Dig hole! Dig hole, here!" being uttered an awful lot and some garage tidying. The garage is an ankle snapping death trap of ultimate doom most of the time, with stuff balanced on stuff balanced on things that we have no idea who they belong to, but this once he was allowed to stand in the doorway with wifey watching whilst I pulled out box upon box of stuff to (re)offload on my father in law. The garage floor is now visible in parts, which is progress of a sort.

He was so knackered after that that he was all clingy when we popped round to other Nan's for a cup of tea and to offload some books, typically only getting his strength back when it was time to go.

As for me, I'm knackered and sitting back at my desk, recuperating with a nice cup of black coffee. I fear the day M'laddo has his first caffeinated drink, he seems to have a neverending built in supply of it as it is.

Stand by for action!

Anything can happen in the next half hour!

A strange phenomenon is occurring at regular intervals in our household. The wee lass has a minor bout of flatulence, goes red in the face and fills her nappy with poo the same colour as mustard. This isn't odd, it's obviously quite normal (even down to the colour). What is odd is that M'laddo takes this as some sort of trigger to do a huge poo himself. Usually within minutes.

A case in point was yesterday. I was happily sitting at my desk at work, safely outside the poo exclusion zone when I got a message saying the wee lass had done 3 days worth of poo in an enormous explosion of yuckiness. Less than 20 minutes later, M'laddo deposited two days worth of manky evilness into his nappy.

M'laddo used to be quite regular, around lunch time, after his food and preferably at home as he doesn't like doing his business whilst out and about (a lad after my own heart), so the whole concept of him going a couple of days without a bowel movement is fairly odd in itself. And to my mind its too much of a coincidence that he let rip right after his sister.

We reckon he's readying himself to be potty trained though- he now shouts "wee wee" between 15 minutes and two seconds before he does his poo. We just need to work on the name for it and the timing and we'll be there.

That's got to be better than chasing him around the house/garden and wrestling him to the floor before he manages to sit down in it and spread it absolutely everywhere hasn't it?

We don't need no education.

And definitely no dark sarcasm in the classroom. Wifey was unable to attend parenting class this week due to a bout of emergency babysitting so it fell on me to spend a couple of hours in the company of about 10 women.

The travails of life eh?

One of them was an spooky lookilikey of my bosses wife but wasn't as her name was different and she had too much lipstick on. Most of the rest of them were quite plummy, with husbands that worked in the city and so on. Quite why they felt the need to tell me this more than once I don't know, perhaps I looked a bit slow. I'm not an evening person at the best of times.

Anyway, I digress as is my habit. The subject of that evenings workshop was encouragement but it soon turned into a strange mixture of neurosis and competitiveness which from a chaps point of view seemed decidedly odd. When one of the ladies proudly announced her sprog now tidied all her toys away and she wasn't even two yet, there was an almost palpable sense of murder underlying the platitudes and cooing noises made. This made me nervous.

So when head plummy mummy decided to voice her major concern that her nipper still doesn't use cutlery at nearly 3, I had to think long and hard about whether to offer some advice*. I did decide to in the end and hope I phrased it tactfully. I asked if she had her dinner with the wee fella, and said that wifey had her dinner with M'laddo, he had his own cutlery, ate off a similar plate to wifey and had the same food. I have mine when I get home. This is a major faff for wifey but we think it's important that M'laddo picks up good dining habits early on. This turned out to be a bit of a revelation- plummy mummy did sit with nipper whilst he had his dinner but he ate his own batch prepared food and she had her dinner with hubby when he got back from his city job at around 8.30pm.

Now as far as I'm aware, little children don't pick up the ability to use their knife and fork through some form of advanced telepathy, and if you never have a sit down meal with them and allow them to mimic what you're doing, I don't see how (outside the realm of Stephen King), the poor mite is going to learn what to do if you don't show him what to do.

Mind you, I managed to hold back telling them all what to do, which was a relief because I don't really have any concept of what it's like to be with M'laddo or his sister 24/7 so I can't really comment. I get it easy, I really do.


*I would like to point out I wasn't offering advice because I am a man and therefore know what to do- M'laddo uses cutlery quite well thank you very much.

Hanging on the telephone

Ring ring ring goes the telephone- I see from the display on my work phone its home so I pick it up, wondering what disaster has befallen the family.

"M'laddo is trying to eat his sisters feet."

Not the most likely opening line of a conversation I'll admit. Normally I'd expect a "hello" or something similar.

"Would you like to talk to him?"

Well, I suppose I should really shouldn't I?

"Hello M'laddo, Dadda here. Are you eating your sisters feet?"

"Yeah"

"Do you think you could not do that? She might need her feet later in life."

"Yeah"

"Okay have a nice day. Can I speak to Mummy please?"

"Yeah"

And then it occurred to me, he was actually attempting to say "yes" instead of "la". This is a major step forward in his language development, I just hope all future developments don't come at the price of cannibalism.

Things they don't tell you about nippers #1

There are many many books out there about being pregnant and the early weeks, months and years of having a baby. But there is one thing that none of these learned tomes mention.

Babies have incredibly sharp finger nails.

There, I've said it and broken the one remaining unspoken rule of parenting.

You'll put your little one to bed (without scratch mittens) and in the morning your baby will look like an extra from a Western- they'll have a huge scratch across their face, which if they're a boy will make them look rugged but if they're a girl will be unfortunate.

M'laddo still has razor sharp fingernails that somehow manage to be flexible at the same time, thus defying most attempts at using the nail scissors on him, whilst still retaining maximum maiming capabilities.

"Oh my God, I think he's ripped you a third nostril!" are words I'll never forget hearing as the blood gushed out of my nose. Moments earlier M'laddo had been doing that exceedingly cute thing that six month olds do of grabbing at my nose with his little hands. Unfortunately on this occasion, he kept his fist clenched, shoved his hand up my nose and then opened it, raking most of the inside of my nose out.

I've broken my arm, my ankle (and ruptured ligaments at the same time), burnt my kneecap on a korean barbecue pit and knocked myself out a couple of times but there's precious little I can remember that hurt more than the wee fella attempting to turn my nose inside out.

But its this sort of thing that they never tell you in a book. They might mention in passing that you might want to use scratch mitts to stop the baby hurting itself but the truth is a lot more scary.

You have been warned- by a chap with a heavily scarred nose!

Jump!

Go ahead and Jump! M'laddo is obviously a huge Van Halen fan, as you can probably see from the picture.

He is wearing what is simultaneously the best and worst purchase it is possible to make for a toddler.He is wearing a Regatta all in one waterproof, which makes it technically possible to go out and play during a monsoon. Which in turn obviously requires an adult (me) to be outside supervising the toddler that's playing in the monsoon.

If no monsoons present themselves, the sort of torrential downpour we had this morning is a reasonable proxy. The sky was pitch dark at around 9 this morning and since the wee nipper had woken up with a mysterious nosebleed I suspect was caused by the insertion of a razor sharp fingernail up a nostril, I'd decided against taking him to soft play on the principle that I wouldn't like another child bleeding over mine, so I shouldn't really let him leak the red stuff all over the play area.

The intrepid outdoors nature of the wee fella reared its head and I was presented with a pair of wellies and his all in one waterproof. Eventually it proved less effort to take him out in the torrential rain than to try and distract him with something else, so I stuck my waterproof on (but stupidly didn't dig out my waterproof trousers) and we ventured forth.

Two and a quarter hours later we returned completely knackered from playing in the park and buying some lunch and an hour subsequent to that I'm still a bit soggy in the trouser department. But we had an ace time out, the only other people we can across in the park we determined dog walkers, all of which M'laddo waved at, and the combination of waterproofs and a wet slide reduced the friction so he went down the slides at about 200mph.

We watched bunnys in the undergrow, robins hunting worms, looked at the rain sploshing off of leaves and jumped in many many puddles. We had wet cuddles and may have leaked a bit of snot everywhere as it was quite hot work in our waterproofs.

I now look forward to the bizarre situation where the nipper will be looking outside at the clear blue sky and tutting terribly.

Don't You Cry Tonight

Or indeed in the morning Mr Axl of Rose. Who'd have thought Radio 2 would be playing Guns and Roses eh?

Today was one of those days where I was a bit muzzy headed by the time I woke up* and mini me was already awake and demanding "Dadda!". Since my hair was lanker than a hermits and my face fuzzier than a teenager trying to grow a beard, there was naff all chance that I was going to be able to slink out the house before he got up.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand its ace to see the wee fella in the morning and the cuddles I get at my unexpected presence are truly special. On the other hand the heart wrenching upset and tears, sobbing, wailing and general gnashing of teeth when I leave for work are something I could really do without. This seems to be getting worse as he gets bigger and I'm going to be really stuffed when he manages to open the stair gate and follow me downstairs.

It's not as if M'laddo seems particularly over joyed come the weekend when I am around either but apparently he is getting into our evening pre bed time kick around with the £2.29 Peppa Pig football with all the zeal a two year old can muster. So much so, he begins getting impatient from around 3 or 4 o'clock. I fear for a future without the £2.29 Peppa Pig football, I really do.

*It was our own fault I suppose, we'd had our third (relatively) late night on the trot. This one wasn't borne of necessity like the previous two, we'd instead decided to watch Baz Luhrmann's wonderfully hammy Australia. We gave up at ten, leaving the second hour until tonight but we were both fairly knackered.

It's good to talk

That's one thing Maureen Lipman and I have in common at least. And to be honest there is precious little I could have in common with a middle aged Jewish lady. Talking is something I've never had a problem with, to anyone, at anyone, and at any time and place.

So when the wee lad gets a bit upset and decides he doesn't want to do something, it falls to me to attempt to talk to him about it. Wifey tries but he clams up and just frowns at her.

This would be all well and good but at just over two, the wee nipper isn't great at talking. He certainly understands an awful lot but is still at the stage of two or three word sentences. Most of which are one or two syllables.

So that brings us to the subject of pre-school. It was in theory a great idea sending M'laddo to pre school as it had everything he loves- slight danger, bigger lads, toys, water and outdoors- and so he should have loved it, even at the tender age of two. Well the theory didn't quite translate to reality and he was very distressed for the few weeks he's been.

We couldn't work out the source of his distress, was he being picked on? Did he miss his Mummy? Or was it something else?

So the task fell to me to have a man to man with the nipper. Of course the best way to do this is whilst playing football in the garden, because if he doesn't end up being a vet then a premiership footballer is the next best thing.

Having a conversation with the nipper is a funny thing. Responses tend to be "La" (yes), "No!", and various other exclamations. It's important to make sure you get a consistent answer too, so its a case of rephrasing the same question so you get a positive and a negative answer that mean the same thing. Of course when you ask him if he was picked on, he says "La", but when you ask him if the dinosaurs bad breath put him off going, you also get a "La". Fortunately if you ask him if he's lying, he also says "La", so that helps a bit.

Once we'd got over the fact he didn't want to go and was willing to blame anything or anyone to not to go to pre-school, progress was made. Eventually I got him to admit he didn't like being away from his Mummy for a couple of hours. I couldn't get him to repeat this to his Mummy of course- he loves her dearly but also refuses to admit this to her a lot of the time in a typical boy fashion.

Yes, he knows Mummy would always come back to collect him but in the end we decided he is probably a bit too little to have his days spoiled by the looming threat of pre-school twice a week.

So when we told him this, boy was he overjoyed. We had lots of cuddles and kisses and endless smiles. I don't think we've given in to him, he is still only just over two and we're going to try again in the autumn when he's more of an age.

Hopefully he'll be able to talk a bit better come the autumn and tell us exactly why he doesn't like stuff and we can tell him why he does.

"My God, it's full of stars!"

That's probably my favourite line from 2001 a Space Odyssey. HAL has some good lines but he's a side point to the main story. Anyway, I saw stars the other day in a big way.

Playing football with M'laddo in the garden is normally pure joy. I get to show my silky skills and beat a two year old with various step overs and dummies and the nipper gets to run around like a loony. He's even getting pretty good at kicking it in a straight line.

I did a particularly good drag back and was well chuffed with myself. The next thing I knew I was laying on the grass all bleary eyed. My head had come into vigorous contact with the whirlybird washing line.

And the next thing I knew after that was the nipper looming over me and then BANG! he threw his football at my head.

The joys of the great outdoors eh?

The Wrench of Work

Not that I'm a mechanic mind, although I do own an adjustable wrench. It was on special offer in Homebase and I thought it would be useful at some point in the future. No, I'm referring to the wrench of going to work in the morning, or escaping from the insanity as wifey calls it.

I do have sympathy because I tend to only have weekends of prolonged exposure to the nippers, it's all some sort of novelty and doesn't tend to wear thin as I can imagine it would after 5 consecutive sleepless nights and 13 hour days of toddler boy entertaining. I know he is lovely but I also know he is extremely hard work- even when he deigns to play on his own, he demands you provide a one person audience to the detriment of everything else.

Toddler boy tends to get distressed when either of us goes somewhere without him. I guess this is separation anxiety but giving it a name doesn't really make it any better. There's still plenty of shrieking and tears, which is a bit of an arse. So what I tend to do is slink out the front door, closing it with the key in the lock as toddler boy has tuned himself in to the clink of it shutting, just before he wakes up in the morning.

Its better to leave at 7ish (and as a result get home for a bit of a play) and avoid the tears than to leave twenty minutes later to a cacophony of sobbing. And getting up time is not something that can easily be predicted- toddler boy often goes from deep sleep to wakefulness with a shout, and then waits all of about 8 seconds because crying "Up!", "Mummy, Dadda!", so some sort of preplanning is required.

Naturally when he has me to himself at the weekend, he feigns disinterest and I feel neglected.

The best laid plans of mice and men

...probably don't both involve cheese. But I digress. Toddler boy has many attributes, tenacity is one of them. At this stage in life this is probably not such a good thing, but I'm sure it'll serve him well later in life.

Tonights tenacity was focused on staying outside. Outside is apparently the latest and greatest thing ever. Perhaps I have erred by making the garden too toddler friendly with the play house, swing and other entertaining items. Or perhaps he knows that come half 6 its the place he shouldn't be. Either way, I ended up attempted to cajoule, then firmly tell and finally (and rather oddly) reason with a two year old as to why coming doors made sense.

Each of my attempts (and I can't really call them anything more than attempts, it would be too generous by far) met with a scowl and the utterance of one of toddler boys favourite words. "MORE!". This was followed by two or three minutes of playing with le toy de jour, a £2.29 Peppa Pig football.

It's rotten really as I'm at work all day and don't get to see the nippers much during the week, so I'm pretty easily led astray by a two year old as a result. At least I got him to bed eventually and it wasn't really past his bed time.