Fraught

I haven't had the most relaxing of weekends, not that I want you to feel sorry for me mind. Saturday had more than a few overtones of epic fantasy about it really. We had a bold party of adventures (me, wifey, the boy and fifi), some atrocious weather and a quest. I didn't think the quest itself was going to be that epic but it turned out to be so.

All we really wanted to do on Saturday was get some passport photos done for the kids. I had my worries about how cooperative the boy was going to be, what with being dragged out in the rain and everything but he sat still and compliantly gave the chap at Snappy Snaps his best belligerent look, which just so happened to fit exactly with the passport guidelines of not smiling and looking like going abroad is a real trial you just don't want to do.

Fifi on the other hand just simply didn't want to have her picture taken. Sobbing, shouting and refusing to look at the camera, we had 3 visits to the shop with lunch in between to no avail. in the end, no amount of cajoling or threats of being left at the wrong Nana's house sufficed and it came down to letting her sit on the stool with an open bag of Pom Bah crisps on her lap. 

Needless to say she fell asleep in the car on the way to do some more shopping.

Yesterday should have been easier since I had the two of them indoors for the day whilst wifey went to the Tesco Mum of the year awards to be told by Emma Forbes that she read her Being a Mummy blog and liked it, as well as seeing some inspirational women win awards. Wifey looked radiantly lovely when she set off, no doubt enthused by a day of peace and quiet.

By the end of the day, every single toy that we have ever owned was littering the floor; I had been punched quite hard in the face by an aggravated two year old who didn't want to eat her dinner but wanted to survive on a diet of yoghurt and Ikea biscuits; been repeated told off by the two year olds older brother who sticks up for her no matter what; watched my team lose in the cup final but missed most all the goals due to excessive toilets visits intended to make me miss the football as punishment for putting it on in the first place; and finally failed to get either of them in the bath as they double teamed me.

It would have been easier if we hadn't been up half the night being kicked in the back by the boy who had suffered a nightmare (presumably he'd been dreaming that there was no one for him to annoy).

Still, wifey reappeared during bath time and showed why for our two she'll always be mum of the year. And wife of the year for me!

Enid Blyton: Five don't go mooching round the pedestrianised area

I've been aware that Hodder, in their wisdom, have been updating the language in Enid Blyton's Famous Five books to make it more appropriate to kids today. As if it was appropriate to my generation in the 1980's! Anyway, I read this article on the Guardian's Comment is Free, and my comment went a bit over-sized so I thought I would republish it here.

When I read the Famous Five books in the early 80's the language was already anachronistic; nobody in the playground called each other "fatheads" but the books did appeal to some broad aspects of being a kids, regardless of the era they were either written in or read in.

The freedom the Five had was something to aspire to and the respect Julian got from adults was something I longed for as a kid too. Those things are universal. The books also fostered a great love for the outdoors in me too, which remains to this day.

I don't see well meaning but ultimately misguided editors going back and revising Tintin books, which are after all even older, to add mobile phones, computers and other modern day paraphernalia to the mix, so I don't see why we need our childrens classics updated either.

What's really changed in our society since the early 80's that means this "updating" is really necessary? Computers & video games for kids? Nope, I was playing those in 82 and 83. Kids television? Nope, I was watching poorly dubbed Japanese imports like Starfleet and Science Team Ninja Gatchaman (cut into Battle of the Planets over here) around that time. We had VCR's to watch films on, Nintendo Game and Watch to play games on the move and most of the other "modern" distractions kids have nowadays.

There are two things we didn't have:

1) everything handed to us on a plate- the idea that a teacher infamously voiced of renaming exam failure as "deferred success" back when I was at school would have seen them drummed out of the profession.

2) there wasn't the sort of moral panic we have nowadays about scaring our children or exposing them to anything that might upset them. This is of course hypocritical as a lot of parents will still buy their children 18 certificate video games when they're a couple of years older.

Anyway, this is a subject close to my heart, I wrote a blog post on it last summer:

Vivid Imagination

Even today and the age of 36 you'll find me day dreaming or world building. I might be constructing a high fantasy world, with its own system of coherent magic in my head while making breakfast, or pondering over being a superhero in a city that doesn't have tightly packed buildings as I walk to work. Heck, I'm the man who has even devised his own zombie survival plan on the off chance.

a dragon for daddy

So it's no real surprise I suppose to see the boy following in my footsteps. While all his little contemporaries at nursery school are dutifully drawing pictures of their houses and family, he's drawing pictures of aliens, monsters, dragons, spaceships or building houses for tigers.

In fact when the lad wouldn't go to sleep last night, he didn't want a story or anything similar. Oh no, he wanted to ask me some questions about superheroes. We started off with where they live and I had to have my wits about me. I wanted to be honest because I'm sure as he grows up he'll read comics so I had to correct him when he told me Spider-man lives in a house made out of spider webs but as far as the rest goes, I was pretty spot on. I promised him one question and when he tried to ask another ("what superheroes got airplanes?") I put him off until the morning, not least of all because I could only manage Wonder Woman's invisible jet and the X-Men's jet plane. I didn't really fancy explaining to him why Wonder Woman had an invisible plane, as it doesn't make much sense to me.

I hope he keeps his imagination and sense of wonder at everything, because it's quite frankly wonderful to talk to him and see him get so excited about it all at the moment.

Hurting

The lads' coming on at such a rate it's often difficult to keep up with him. I couldn't make speech therapy yesterday due to work commitments and was afeared that it would be another sliding off the chair failing to concentrate session that would put a downer on the whole weekend. I got the phone call I was dreading only to hear that he went in all on his own, without me (obviously) or wifey and showed a 60% improvement on testing for progress. Wow!

As his talking is improving, so his his communication and his expression. I was putting some shelves up this afternoon, and I spent longer looking for my sodding power drill than I spent drilling. This is not untypical for me unfortunately.The boy kept on asking me to make some Lego spaceships with him but with all the interruptions and everything, by the time I was finished it was the kids bedtime. The boy got upset and kicked off quite badly- crying, kicking and shouting.

I ended up taking him upstairs in tears and he said "You're hurting me." I wasn't grabbing him hard and said as much, I was just holding him firmly and he replied, "No Dadda, you hurting me with words." It's such a reminder that our children remember things so much. I vividly remember things that my parents said to me when I was 7 or 8. My parents don't and dispute some of the things I remember but I know it's the truth. With little kids you just don't know how they'll interpret something or what they'll remember and what will shape them.

I regret being sharp with him, I was up until 2.30am the previous night shifting a block in the dishwasher and was more than a little grumpy. If I was that level of grumpy all the time the little lad wouldn't have noticed but I think I was bucking against his expectations and that's really what upset him.

Being a dad is tricky at times isn't it?  

A bit of bonding with the football on

oh dear, I think we've annoyed them

I've just finished watching a rather nice match of football on IT of V. Arsenal beat Barcelona 2-1, not enough really as I'm sure Barca will crush my team in the second leg but it was the nature of watching it that I enjoyed.

After a massive rush with hair cuts and the like, the boy was still awake as the match kicked off. I've mentioned in the past that the boy has only a passing interest in footy, and that it's his little sister that clings to me shouting during Match of the Day. This evening however he grabbed his bunnies, some books, some Lego and snuggled next to me to half watch the first half. To be completely honest, there was more Lego playing than football watching but this was an improvement as he normally demands the television be turned over.

At half time he snuggled down next to me and asked to go to sleep. Even though we were losing one nil at the time, I felt like a winner!

Looking back

When I was little there were a couple of things that happened that sort of helped define who I was. I spent my first few years of life in Lowestoft, in Suffolk, famed for being the most easterly town in England. I was born in Hertfordshire though, but my Dad's work took us there when I was little.

I was always a shy little boy and that didn't change when I started school at Northfield Infants school in Lowestoft. I vaguely remember having one friend, a lad called Matthew Spillings but other than that I don't remember a great deal. When I was 7 we moved back to Hertfordshire, to a different school and a different life. I was thrust into a Roman Catholic primary school that had practices completely alien to me. I never found it easy to fit in at the best of times and moving into a school where everyone had been together for nearly two and a half years was very difficult. I was picked on but no more so than a lot of kids are. That's life. The thing that did get me a lot of unwanted attention was my teeth. I'd always sucked my thumb you see and by the time I was 7 I was really goofy (for want of a better word). I had a recessed jaw too, which gave me a terrible overbite that I couldn't even undo temporarily by pushing my bottom jaw forward.

It wasn't long before I picked up the nickname goofy teeth posh-o, which stuck with me through much of primary school. I wasn't posh but given that perhaps 15 people out of my class of 30 either had English as their second language or their parents second language, I must have sounded posh to them. We had a large population of Italians in my town!

And so I carried on, being considerably less popular than my little brother and painfully shy all the way through primary school.

I hope that both our kids are more self confident that I was. I certainly have tried to give them the opportunity to mix from a young age, as has wifey, They both spend a day or two a week at a childminders mixing with other kids away from us, which should help of course but I think already the boy is looking quite shy. I think this is mostly due to his verbal dyspraxia, which at times makes him quite hard to understand. So far at nursery school the kids are young enough not to be horrible to him or make fun of his speech. We've recently enrolled him in junior karate because this is supposed to be good for self confidence. So far he's clung to my leg for the most part of two sessions but he's improving.

He is coming out of himself though, his artwork is suddenly becoming awesome, which shows his is getting better at expressing himself.

Time will tell I guess but at least I can show some empathy and I know what to look for!

Car Lust: Volvo C30 Polestar concept car

Last year I was lucky enough to get a blogger invite to the Volvo S60 Naughty Track Day. I'd always known there were fast Volvo's. Even in my lifetime I'd quietly lusted over the V70 T5 as a result of a Volvo estate being entered in the British touring cars in the 90's. Of course if you look back further in history, the Volvo P1800 was a rather lovely sports car and it's the estate version of this that's widely considered to have inspired the design of the current C30.

I wasn't thinking much of the C30 as I threw the all wheel drive 300bhp S60 T6 round a test track, and I certainly wasn't thinking of anything above keeping my dinner down when GT driver Tommy Erdos hurled me round the Top Gear test track in a S60 D3. The speed was astonishing, not least because we seemed to do most of the 4 laps sideways.

My dad's currently got a C30 1.6D DRIVe, which in terms of performance is a bit of a drop for him after his two previous cars, a Honda Civic Type R and a Mazda MX5 1.8i. Ever since he retired my dad's had a range of fairly quick cars. He started off with a vintage 1300cc MG Midget Mark III, which was light as hell and if it didn't go like stink (a 0-60 of 14 seconds suggests it didn't), it felt like it did as you were about 2 inches off the tarmac. As long as it was dry and you didn't accidently nudge the switch on the dash which turned the fuel pump off, it was great.

He doesn't watch Top Gear because he thinks Clarkson embodies everything that is wrong with the world today but if he did, lordy, the other weeks episode would have had him punching the air in excitement.

Warp factor 6 Mr Sulu

After running a Cosworth tuned Subaru Impreza through it's paces and showing it comprehensively outdone by a Ford Focus RS, they wheeled out the Volvo C30 Polestar concept car. Which comprehensively demolished both of the other cars in a straight line drag. Obviously the 4 wheel drive gave it better traction than the Ford but the turbo lag on the Subaru meant that was a distant last. And neither of these cars are slow, that's the astonishing thing. Volvo really really really know how to make a seriously quick car.

Unlike a lot of other concept cars, it actually still retains a lot of the design looks of the car it's based on. I'm sure a boffin could tell me that it shares x% of body panels with the road car but that's not really the point; it still looks like a C30. Even if the colour is a bit suspect :)

Volvo currently have no plans to turn this into a production model, which is a crying shame in my book. I've always like the quirky retro look of the the C30 and a serious proper (molten) hot hatch version would seriously rock.

Of course, no matter the cost I wouldn't be able to afford it but that's not really the point. Just knowing it exists would be enough.

Daddy's Girl

Looking back over the last few months, most of the blog posts about Fifi have been me complaining about how she doesn't sleep and how naughty she is. I think this gives an untrue impression of how the wee lass and I get on. Let me explain...

I had the day off the other Friday to look after the little people while Wifey went on a course. The Boy went to school in the morning so that left me and Fifi to hang out together for 3 hours. Once she'd calmed down from not being carried all the way back from the nursery school, we set about some serious father and daughter time. At two years old, Fifi is very fun to hang out with, as long as it's just you and her. She gets terribly jealous of her older brother getting attention and doesn't like it if you're doing something else. Remove all those obstacles though and you're in for such a fun time.

Her sense of humour definitely veers towards slapstick, so anybody banging into something or falling over has her in gales of laughter. She's also not adverse to whacking you with something, in her ill-advised attempt at a joke. When she likes something, she literally jumps from foot to foot in excitement, and when she doesn't like something, she'll certainly let you know.

We went supermarket shopping on our morning together as this is apparently one of her favourite hobbies. She sat in the trolley and directed me around the supermarket, instructing me on what to buy, pointing and telling me about things and staring down other children. Unlike her brother, she is so chatty.

Normally the only time I get to spend with her is bedtime when I give her a bath and get her ready for bed. The boy normally spends most of this period cowering under the dining room table, in fear of a hair wash. I like it because I get attention from Fifi because she wants to give it to me and not because she doesn't want to be left out as her brother is getting it.

The day did have it's downside though, she now insists I get her dressed every morning. This can be interesting as I generally have absolutely no idea whatsoever about matching girls clothing. Oh well...

The highs and lows

I had Friday off work to do a bit of child-wrangling whilst wifey went to a course. Over the last three days I've spent about 15 hours playing with Lego and have hardly watched films at all with the boy. Bit of a change here then. Every week that passes sees the boy develop. His drawing is unrecognisable from the unrecognisable scrawls he did at Christmas and he's no longer throwing his pens down in frustration after ten seconds. The same comes with Lego, it's now all about the building and the role playing with the figures and spaceships now rather than sitting there and cajoling me to build things. Things are good, even though sometimes the tantrums are terrible, much worse than they used to be, generally the lad is behaving himself now he's settled a bit more into school.

We went to London this afternoon to see some of the Chinese New Year celebrations. The streets were packed but both the kids were well behaved, Fifi in the pushchair and the boy both in the chair and holding my hand. We got the two of them balloons at Trafalgar Square, which frankly, kids being kids, was probably the best bit of the day for them. It was so crowded, the best we saw Dragon wise was from a distance and with the boy perched on my shoulder. I was dead careful with the balloons too, tied round wrists and held out of the way. I saw so much joy in the boys face, gales of laughter, a skip in his step and a happy chatter to his voice.

Then disaster struck!

After all the care and attention, the string snagged on some railings, dislodging the balloon which drifted off into the distance. Oh no! There was wailing, heartfelt and long. Wifey thought he was overreacting and it was just a balloon and he was overreacting but I think the wailing was something else. To my mind the balloon was a facilitator of joy, that groovy thing that we forget how to experience as we get older and more grown up. I genuinely don't think he was upset by the balloon going but the opportunity to be joyful floating up and away.

Fortunately, a state of equilibrium was restored with chocolate buttons but that was the end of the gleeful capering, and we trudged back to the car, home for more Lego, dinner and bedtime.

Being a Dad and being a Bloke

I love being a Dad. I'm not brilliant at it by any stretch, I spend too much time down at their level and too much time trying ineffectively bossing them around. Recently I have rather complicit in the pass time of moving the IKEA ladybird to a position where it's possible to jump off the sofa on to it and bounce on to me. This was great fun but rather naughty and not exactly behaviour that's becoming of a father. I can't imagine my dad doing something like that when I was younger. Mind you he did have a beard. Perhaps beards instil a sense of  gravitas that I lack.

I wouldn't not be a dad for anything now I've got kids, the idea of waking up and not seeing the boy or Fifi is decidedly odd and I don't think I've spent more than two consecutive nights away from them since they were born. Or hearing them. Yes, hearing them is the first part of the day and in the case of Fifi often what wakes me up. It has at the moment seen a suspension of the kind of stuff I used to get up to to a greater or lesser degree though. Most of it's down to tiredness, I'm partly surprised that I've got the energy to type this now after the usual early Fifi start and a full day at work but it's more the knowledge that it will be another early start that stops me pulling late nights to read books, watch films or play video games. In many ways it's a hiatus on adult life but I don't begrudge it because the kids are only going to be young once. I don't want to be the sort of dad that packs the kids off to uni, only to realise I've avoided the best parts of their childhood.

I don't know if when the kids are a bit older and sleep longer and do there own thing a bit more that I'm going to have the same interests anyway. I've always liked writing, I even have my own writing blog, but the sort of thing I write has changed since I started blogging. Some times now days I even feel like I've wasted an evening when I haven't created something. I'm beginning to resent watching telly as a passive non-constructive pass time because my time sans le petit moi is precious and not to be wasted. Even if relaxing is necessary, I resent the time spent doing it on occasion, despite the constant background of tiredness and minor irritability.

I still like watching football but for the minute at least this isn't a pass time the boy shares with me. Fifi on the other hand absolutely loves it and the Sunday morning repeat of Match of the Day is our father/daughter bonding session, and it gives an insight into some of the activities that the future has to offer. At the moment too many of my other interests aren't suitable for kids- even Star Wars is a bit violent for a 3 year old, whilst at the same time not being busy enough for them- but sooner or later they'll both start either showing a valid interest or poo-pooing my interests. I sort of look forward to that day in a strange way.

Slendertone System Abs 30 Day Challenge Review

free chest waxing not included

The first thing you notice when you take the Slendertone System Abs out of the large jiffy bag it arrives in is the general buff-ness of the models wearing the device on the packaging. Crikey, you think, why or earth is that chap wearing a Slendertone, it looks like his six pack has a six pack.

Obviously showing a chubby fellow like myself on the box art would hardly be inspirational but celeb keep fit DVD's often show a before and an after and that's the short of thing that would be motivational here.

Yes, I'm quibbling over the box art. That's probably because I can't find anything else to really fault this device over.

Lets go back a step though. I'm not an enormously sporty person at the moment. With two kids under 4 years old I don't get much free time, what with work and standing on stickle bricks to keep me honest during the hours of daylight. I do walk around 5 or 6 miles a day though, to and from work with a 40 minute brisk walk at lunch time. I wouldn't say this makes me an athlete but I'm not unfit.

What I've never had, even when I was cycling for hours and playing 5 or 11 a side football, is a flat stomach. I can't pinch much flab, it's not like I have a rubber ring round my middle or anything, I just have absolutely naff all muscle tone in that area. I've never been that fond of sit ups either, since they tend to give me lower back ache after too many and lets face it they're a bit tedious.

When the opportunity came up to try a Slendertone System Abs, I decided what the heck, lets give it a go. I must admit I'd always slightly derided people who felt the need to repeatedly electrocute themselves in pursuit of a flatter stomach but I'm not getting any younger and I thought it might be the spark I needed to get going.

I'd tried a similar product a couple of years ago but to be honest you get what you pay for. That other device had been about £30 and painful to use at any intensity (and it pretty much decided what intensity it was going to give you all on it's own. Perhaps it was in line with the phases of the moon or something, I certainly never twigged it and the manual wasn't much help), so I binned it before it ended up hurting me.

the belts a great fit for 40+inch waists

The Slendertone System Abs isn't cheap in itself, the RRP is £119.99. Looked at objectively, that's £120 that you can't spend on cake, beer or take away, so even before you use the thing, it's already made you stop putting on weight. I suppose it's about the same cost as a couple of months sitting on your sofa feeling smug because you've paid a fortune to join a gym so you can get fit by osmosis or the simple act of carrying your membership card in your wallet and your gym kit in the boot of your car. Joking aside though, what you do get for your money is very well built and durable. The package contains a belt that fits all but the fattest of chaps (and I'm talking here as a bloke who couldn't get a babysling on because it wasn't big enough), a set of four pads, a mains adapter, a storage pouch and the swanky plug in computer thingy that controls the who shebang. I'm not entirely sure for that price Slendertone shouldn't be chucking in a spare pair of pads, even my wifes TENS machine came with a spare pair of pads and that was a third of the price but that's a minor quibble.

Slendertone say that their products work using EMS, electronic muscle stimulation, in other words electronic impluses stimulate nerves that cause muscles to contract. It's sort of a more advanced application of wiring the legs of a dead frog to a battery and stimulating the muscles with electricity. But much more advanced and obviously rigorously safety tested by proper scientists and not 14 years olds in science classes. So not much like it at all really. Do kids even do that to frogs in biology at school any more? The technology has been safely used for over 40 years and is used extensively in the medical profession, so it's safe and I wouldn't want you to think my glib comments about electrocution are anything other than glib comments. I wouldn't attach anything to me that isn't safe, my body whilst not being a temple, is the cornershop just round the corner from the temple, with a take away next door- it's in line of sight of the temple so guilt stops me doing anything too outrageous.

Slendertone had asked me to have a go at the 30 day challenge. This is basically a programme in the rather detailed manual that you follow for noticeable results in a month. I had a slight hiccup in following this in as much as I didn't RTFM before slapping it on and using it. A bit of twitter conversation with Yuri just lead us to a macho game of who-can-have-the-highest-intensity which while fun, meant that ten days in I had to have a two day break and actually restart it all properly. That was entirely my fault since I never read instruction manuals (it was 3 days before I realised that the two buttons on each side did the intensity for that side of your stomach).

So once I overcame the inherent stupidity of men*, I was away. The 30 day challenge programme is well designed, even for someone with absolutely naff all stomach muscle definition to start with. It never felt like I was being pushed past the point of comfort. I did occasionally look ahead to 3 or 4 days time and think, "oooh, that's going to hurt" but by the time I got there my muscles were ready for it. To me this suggests that the Slendertone System Abs is doing an admirable job. If I'd set the intensity to 70 on day one I think I would have been on the floor having some kind of fit of involuntary twitching but by the allotted point I was strutting around the house manfully in my pants (you can wear it with trousers but I was in full pants strutting mode myself) commenting on how awesome my abs were becoming.

I think I might have even mentioned on twitter that I was eating a bowl of popcorn and swigging a can of Fosters, while watching the footy, with the Slendertone switched on at one point. Beats doing sit ups.

So after a month do I feel any different? The answer is yes. Of course I don't have either the fake tan or the definition that the chap on the box does but it is nice to be able to relax your stomach muscles and let everything hang out, without actually realising you were tensing them in the first place. The Slendertone System Abs doesn't claim to be the be all and end all of stomach toning and of course this sort of thing works best in conjunction with a regular exercise regime but as a device to kickstart the revolution and speed it along in a really noticable manner, it definitely gets my thumbs up. I'm off to order some more pads for it, the last ones have so much stomach hair on them that they've lost their stickiness!


*talking of the inherent stupidity of men, one of the first things I was asked at work by the chaps I work with when I said I was using a Slendertone was "have you attached it to your willy yet?". Understanding men perfectly, Slendertone actually say in their manual that the device should not be attached to your genitals.