pre-school

I will do better

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Last week we went on our first family holiday. We were supposed to go to Penrith last year, but F was still waking up a gazillion times a night and I didn’t think I could cope with doing all the driving (because, between you and me, N is a pretty shabby driver) and being awake most of every night. So that brings us to this year. If you’re interested, we stayed at a beautiful cabin called Larchwood Lodge right on the edge of Greystoke Forest. We were visited every day by red squirrels and great spotted woodpeckers and the path at the bottom of the garden literally led straight into the trees… and if I’m not selling this to you by now then just go ahead and look at the website.

I’m not going to relate the blow-by-blow minutiae of the whole week because, to be frank, you’d be bored shitless by the end of the first paragraph. So I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll include links to the places we visited at the end of this post in case you’re ever in Cumbria and stuck for something to do.

Family holiday

A montage of our week in the Lake District

The thing is, what I really found myself thinking on the last night of our holiday as I watched my children playing at the edge of the forest through the kitchen window was this: They’re never going to be this age again. O turned four while we were away and I couldn’t help but wonder where those four years have gone. I mean, I hate myself for even typing that because how unbearably cliché do I want to be? But it’s true. Four years ago he was a tiny, helpless baby and I was just getting to grips with motherhood, crying a lot and swearing every time he latched onto my chapped, bleeding nipples for a feed. Now he’s answering back and refusing to go to bed and driving me up the fucking wall half the time, but he’s also this amazing, proper little person and it’s hard to imagine that he was ever that tiny.

happy birthday

Happy birthday to my big boy, O

Then I looked at F and I felt that all too familiar tug in my gut that happens every time I remember how much of his babyhood I missed out on due to worry and stress, sleep-deprivation and god awful mental illness. And I thought that as much as I possibly can, I will try to savour these moments. So I stood there at the window and I just watched my babies play with flowerpots and sticks and dirt. I watched them delight in every moment of this simplicity and I forgot that I should be calling them in for a bath because it was already long past bedtime. I forgot that I still had stuff to pack for the journey home. I forgot that anything outside of that little snapshot of time actually mattered at all.

Bear cubs

Bear cubs in their natural habitat

I worry so much about the little things, about their routines and what they’re eating. I worry about keeping the house clean and getting the laundry done. And I worry what people think of me when they walk through my front door and see the detritus of family life strewn throughout every room. And I know that it doesn’t really fucking matter what anybody else thinks, but I worry anyway. So I lose these moments to worry sometimes. I don’t stop for long enough to notice the little things half the time. But this holiday has been good for me, because it has shown me what life could be like with my children if I put my worry aside sometimes. If I let F cuddle me for as long as he wants to instead of freaking out about everything that I need to do. If I read O just one more story before bed rather than panic that it’s half past bedtime and he still needs to brush his teeth. This week I’ve learnt that if I put off my worries for just a few more minutes, the whole world really won’t fall on my head.

These are lessons that I will forget as often as I remember them, I’m sure. But the point is that now I know and I will try. I will try to do and be better, for myself as much as my children. So I won’t regret the moments I missed when my children are grown up.

The day after we came back from our holiday was our 5th wedding anniversary, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the people we used to be and who we are now. When we got married, we had only been together for a couple of years. We were just two kids in love and we thought we had it all figured out. We thought we could conquer the world, just the two of us, with the force of that love. I look back on that boundless optimism now and I realise how naïve we really were. Because the truth is that what has kept us together for the last five years has been hard work and determination. We have been determined not to forget, but sometimes we have anyway. Sometimes we’ve screamed at each other to “just fuck off already!” at the end of a hard day – or the beginning of one after a long night. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to imagine who we were when we first met, but I know that I was a fragile, heartbroken thing. I know that I was a flight risk, and I know that N put up with a lot. I know that it took strength and guts for him to resist every one of my attempts to push him away. I know that he loved me a lot, and I know that I loved him enough in return to let him in. To give him the chance to hurt me. And I’m not going to dress this up; there have been shitty times and yes, he has hurt me. More than once. But that street has gone both ways sometimes and the bottom line is the only one that really matters in the end, which is this:

He is my co-pilot. We navigate this journey together. And, when all is said and done, there isn’t anybody I’d rather have in the cockpit with me when all of the lights start flashing at once.

Five years is wood. We are not going to be wooden.

We are going to be God damn TREES.

Wedding

04.06.2011

Mirehouse & Gardens

Bank Mill Visitor Centre

Brockhole

Whinlatter

Walby Farm Park

Keep Calm and Carry On Linking Sunday

The troubling world of children’s television

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Do you ever watch a kids TV show and feel really troubled by some aspect of it? I do. All the time. Here’s a rundown of the ones that worry me the most.

Sarah and Duck

Now I love Sarah and Duck. I actually watch it sometimes when the boys aren’t around because I think it’s that bloody good. BUT. There’s some really weird shit going down here. For a start… WHERE are Sarah’s parents? I mean, I reckon she’s about, what? Eight years old? And she lives in a house with only a duck for company and NO parental supervision. Except for maybe Scarf Lady, who checks up on Sarah every now and again, appears to have the early signs of dementia and is mostly looked after by her knitting bag (unless she leaves it on the bus, which she has done once or twice). None of Sarah’s friends have parents either. One of them has a flamingo as a pet/companion, another one is weirdly obsessed with plates and there are mostly mute twin girls living in the house next door. And Sarah is pretty chummy with the moon too, FYI. There are adults around, mostly doing jobs (baker, crayon shopkeeper, etc), but none of the kids in the show appear to belong to them. At first I thought I was missing something, like maybe it was a Charlie and Lola kind of set up where there ARE parents, you just don’t ever see them. But no. No parents. And that troubles me.

Bing

While we’re on the subject of absent parents… BING! Where are his bunny family at? Bing is looked after by a brown sack thing called Flop, who has endless patience for all of Bing’s infuriating habits and struggles to reach the front door handle without a stepladder. Some help he’d be in a house fire. Flop basically keeps Bing’s moral compass on track and looks after his equally irritating friends every now and again (when they’re not being looked after by a sack elephant called Ama at playschool). Flop even has baby photos of Bing, but there are no parents anywhere to be seen in any of them. Did Flop snatch Bing from his crib in the night? Who knows?! I suspect he probably wanders around the house swearing a lot after Bing has gone to bed though. And I have to wonder, since there are no adult animals anywhere to be seen and only weird sack creatures doing anything responsible… Is there a rather horrifying transformation in Bing’s future, or is he doomed to live in some kind of perpetual state of toddlerhood forever?

In The Night Garden

God, this show is creepy. For a start, Mr and Mrs Pontipine need to get a handle on their parenting. They never fucking know where their kids are. I mean, I don’t know if there’s some alcoholism going on behind that red door or what, but somebody needs to do something about that. Aside from the troubling parental issues, there’s Makka Pakka and his cleaning OCD, Upsy Daisy and her frankly terrifying singing and possessed bed, and three funky little critters called Tombliboos who play ghastly music and lose their trousers far more often than is strictly necessary. Then there are the Ninky Nonk and Pinky Ponk, both of which regularly try to annihilate all inhabitants of and visitors to the garden with their crazy upside down, head-on collision antics respectively. And then. Then there’s Iggle Piggle, the Night Garden overlord himself. That thing is nightmare fuel. Enough said.

Nelly and Nora

I might be missing something here, but I don’t think these kids go to school. They live on a caravan site and kind of run around doing not very much and most episodes seem to have something to do with the weather. Maybe they’re homeschooled? I don’t know, but I suppose at least these children have parents, even if those parents do abandon them on a hot beach in one episode while they go frolic in the sea. Not that I’m being judgy, but who does that? Pack your kids some fucking flip-flops in the beach bag FFS.

Mr Bloom

There isn’t anything wrong with this unless you overthink it. Which, of course, I have. This show is basically about vegetables. Singing vegetables with names and personalities. And that’s sort of where this becomes problematic for me. Because I really want my kids to eat vegetables, but I worry that this show might cause them to empathise with their butternut squash risotto. So far, O has not made the connection between Margaret the cabbage and co and anything he’s seen in the fruit and veg aisles at Sainsbury’s. But O is nothing if not observant and he will make that connection one day. The best part is, I haven’t got a fucking clue what I’m going to say to him. I am prepared for the Peppa Pig/bacon debacle, but anthropomorphised vegetables is another matter entirely.

Tree Fu Tom

Where do Tom’s parents think he goes when he’s actually gadding about in Treetopolis? I’m a little concerned that they let him go raking about in the woods by himself in the first place, if I’m completely honest. But then he pushes the boundaries that bit more by doing his magic shrinky thing and disappearing off to a magical land. What if something happened to him there and he didn’t make it back in time for tea? His poor parents would be doomed to spend the rest of their lives searching for him in vain and making ever more desperate TV appeals whilst cursing themselves for letting him play in the woods by himself to begin with. What a thoroughly depressing series that would be.

What about you? Have I missed any shows that give you the willies? I must confess that we only really watch CBeebies in our house, so there could be all kinds of freaky stuff going on over on Nick Jr that I’m not even aware of! Let me know in the comments or via Twitter/Facebook.

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O & his OCD

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

Is it me or do all children have some degree of OCD? I used to think that O must have some kind of genuine condition because everything had to be done in a certain way or in a particular order. For example, when he first started to take an actual interest in the process of getting dressed – and by “take an interest”, I really mean “decide it was an aspect of his daily routine that he had to have absolute control over” – the entire morning would descend into tantrum-filled chaos at the mere suggestion that he put his pants on before his socks – because, let’s face it, socks before pants is just weird. But if I just got sick of the whole messing about of getting dressed every morning, pinned him down and forced him into his clothes in an order of which he did not approve, I would find him five minutes later standing naked in his room screaming bloody murder. Like, sorry I ruined your day, but we’ve been at this for hours and you’re still only wearing one fucking sock.

Usually these things come and go in phases. We’ve had the “I want to do it!” phase where O threw one of those impressive facedown-on-the-carpet tantrums if I dared to close his curtains for him or put the toothpaste onto the toothbrush without his input. Shortly after that was the aforementioned daily clothing debacle, which meant that getting dressed could, realistically, take about a week. Now we have this thing where he has to win at everything.

If I was late for work in a life before children, I would run like buggery down the stairs and hare out of the front door, throwing myself dramatically behind the wheel of my car and tearing out of the driveway. But these days I have to allow O to go down the stairs in front of me while I work myself up into a state of complete internal panic because if I don’t then he will have an utter fucking meltdown about the fact that he didn’t “win”. This also goes for the following situations:

Finishing a meal first.
Putting F in the bath first.
Walking into any room in the house first.
Getting ready for bed first.

Basically

Doing absolutely anything first.

Seriously. If I sneeze first then I’ve overstepped the boundaries because O wanted to sneeze first. I really fucking hope this phase ends soon. I’d like to win at something in life again someday.

I remember my mother telling me once that my brother went through a stage shortly after potty training when he had to use every toilet he came across, which apparently had something to do with the fact that coloured bathroom suites were A Thing back then. This frankly weird obsession very nearly led to a terribly awkward situation in the bathroom section of B&Q. What a great blog post that would have made, eh? So when O throws me another OCD curveball, I just try to remind myself of that and thank every possible deity out there that nothing that mortifyingly fucking awful has happened to us… Yet.

The thing is though, sometimes I still have absolutely no idea how to deal with these OCD phases. The whole winning thing at the moment is particularly trying because, realistically, I cannot always let him “win”. There are many nights when I’ve given O every possible opportunity to get undressed and into the bath before his brother and he’s still running maniacally around the house, riding his rocking horse naked and generally doing everything he can to evade capture, meanwhile I just want to get both children bathed and into bed so I can collapse on the sofa and stare at the wall for the rest of the night. I also kind of want to explain to him that there will be times when he will not win and that he will find life very disappointing if he believes that winning is everything. And that, in fact, it’s really okay not to win all the time. But I rationalise it by assuming that it’s just a phase and will pass eventually like all the other phases (even though this particular one has been going on forever). Knowing that doesn’t always make it easy to deal with though, and sometimes I am just really fucking late to work and need to get down the stairs first, so I have to leave poor N to deal with the epic tantrum that ensues when the door slams behind me and the screaming is lost in the screech of tyres as I gun the engine out of the gates.

So I’m just kind of wondering… Is it just us, or do you have a small person who insists on turning out the light every night and hates being the last one down the stairs?

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Wicked Wednesday!

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

It’s Wicked Wednesday again and this week we’ve been to the beach. We go to the beach quite often, seeing as it’s only a ten minute drive away, but F is only just starting to appreciate it now that he can walk.

It’s been one of those mornings when I just couldn’t handle the idea of being stuck inside, even with the weather forecast being a little unsettled. So the kids donned their waterproofs and I packed the rain cover for the push chair into the car and off we went.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I never remember to check the tide times before I set off. I just go and hope for the best and have a half-baked alternative lined up just in case there is no sand. Luckily, the tide was all the way out and we had miles of beach to run around on. So I liberated F from the pushchair and he and O promptly ran/staggered off across the sand in search of half-dug holes and abandoned sandcastles (because I also tend to forget buckets and spades and it looked like it might piss it down at any moment).

The boys chased each other around for about an hour, F didn’t eat any sand for once and O managed not to knock him over too many times. They had fun – I think -, but F’s little legs were getting tired and the black clouds were rolling in, so I called them both back and we beat a hasty retreat back to the car. I’d just got both kids, the pushchair and myself inside when the rain started and I was relieved that I hadn’t had to wrestle the rain cover onto the push chair while O refused to have his hood up and then wailed about being wet (this has happened before. More than once).

Anyway, I think this photo sums up our morning at the beach pretty well:

 

“What’s dis, mumma?”

Have a lovely week, everyone!

12 things to do on a rainy Bank Holiday 

Posted on by Motherhood IRL

1. Shout at your kids about not sharing. Punctuate this monotony by occasionally exiling one/both of them to their bedroom.

2. Vaguely consider a baking project before realising that the tub of Stork at the back of the fridge is wildly out of date and there’s only one egg left in the box.

3. Suggest reading stories. Spend 20 minutes trying to read whilst simultaneously fending off the errant blows of your offspring as they attempt to fight with one another across your lap.

4. Start a craft project you saw on a blog/Pinterest/Instagram. Fail miserably.

5. Spend an hour cleaning up the mess from the failed craft project, muttering expletives and promising yourself “never again”.

6. Put some laundry in the washing machine. You might as well.

7. Go through the mandatory list of indoor activities (soft play, aquarium, etc) with your partner and veto all of them with “but everywhere will be packed because it’s pissing it down!”

8. Suggest family nap time to alleviate the boredom for half an hour. Navigate a tantrum thrown by your threenager as a direct result of this erroneous idea.

9. Put on a painfully cheerful movie (Disney or Dreamworks) and pray that it keeps the kids quiet for an hour while you drink coffee and mutter crossly about “fucking shitty Bank Holiday weather”.

10. Pile everyone into the car and go for a drive just to get out of the house. For added fun, throw in some guilt about unnecessary carbon emissions and your contribution to global warming.

11. Think about having a quietly desperate weep.

12. Console yourself with the fact that the kids don’t really know what a Bank Holiday is and that they’re not likely to remember how shitty this one is anyway. And that they’ve got a lifetime of this to live through, probably with kids of their own someday…