What to do if your giraffe breaks its leg

I’m not sure how it happened really.  I’m pretty sure I was only tangentially involved, if at all, but it seems like all of my children are growing up.  One day you are standing there with one newborn baby in your arms, thinking that surely things can’t be any better.  Then the next you look around to find that there are 3 of them, and the grown-ups are outnumbered.  The biggest change though, and the one that I thought about when we were having dinner earlier is that suddenly, almost out of the blue, there are three extra people in the house.

My Son's Very Bad, Quite Painful, Unsleepy Night

I was home late from work today.  This really doesn’t have anything to do with the story that I am going to tell but it’s always nice to have all the facts isn’t it?  Anyway, I was late home from work today, which meant that B got two of the children ready for bed by herself.  Which, actually, is probably only the 18^th most amazing thing that she has done today.  But before this turns into a paean to my incredible wife (can you tell she reads all these before I publish them?) let me get back to the story. 

Slip Sliding Away

We’ve been away recently.  A week with around 350 other Christadelphians at a place in Derbyshire.  It is my favourite week of the year and brilliant for the children.  You really know you’ve had a great week when N is bawling her eyes out almost all the way home because she “doesn’t want to go hhhhhome.”  A sure sign of a week filled with fun and friends.

One of the very best features of where we go is that it is relatively enclosed.  We can let N and S have a far greater level of freedom than we would at home because there is so much less that could go wrong.  N is old enough to remember what it was like before and so is not really surprised by this any more.  S, however.  Well, let’s just relive about twenty minutes of his life from last week shall we? 

A Matter of Trust

Babies can be funny.  And by funny I suppose what I really mean is infuriating and unfathomable.  S is now 5 months old and we have tried to get him into a routine of sorts when it comes to bed time.  Usually we put N to bed first, followed immediately by S.  He plays with his big sister a little and then is taken away to be stripped and prepared for the final feed of the day.  This often includes a good amount of play time as he lies on his changing table, naked, and able to waggle his legs around as much as he likes.  Which is a lot of leg waggling.  I mentioned Ian Woan in an earlier blog, and it is times like this that I am able to see the likeness, when he has the freedom to throw his legs around exactly as he likes there’s a definite shape to his left leg that suggests he is just lining up to rifle a free-kick into the top corner of the net.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

He loves this, the whole thing, the playing, the waggling.  We have a giraffe called Sophie, let me introduce you, here's Sophie

Cheerful isn't she?  Probably because she doesn't realise she's about to be chewed by my son.

Probably a common sight for many of you, Sophie is, after all, quite the popular toy.  But no matter how many other homes she has infiltrated, S loves her.  Chewing, pulling, he hasn’t mastered the art of making her squeak, but if it wasn’t for that B and I would be pretty much redundant.  As it is we are marginalised enough as he plays and chuckles and grins away.

A Drive on the Surreal Side

Driving can be dull, though it’s best not to ask B what she thinks.  Judging by how wild her eyes get and how white her knuckles are afterwards, car rides with me are more turbulent than tranquil, more joy-ride than joyful.  I of course think everything is going fine, until there is a little squeak from beside me and my wife’s hands shoot up from the thing they were crushing to cover her mouth.  It’s understandable really.  B learnt to drive at 18 and has therefore been driving for REDACTED years.  I learnt to drive when I was 28, which was a long time after B and so she looks upon my driving the way a mouse might think about a new neighbourhood cat, an unwelcome addition to its life that is likely to kill it one day.  

I've told you before.  I am not getting into a car with you.

A day not Wasted

We all like laughing.  The Best Medicine and all that.  In our house it is especially important, considering the number of ways that I am able to mess up a situation.  Just this evening I thought I would help and ended up destroying the fish fingers we were going to have for tea.  Just the other day B could be heard to wail, “How many times do you have to be told?”  Sadly it was at me rather than the three year old after I had managed to mess up a relatively simple shopping trip.  It has got to the point where one of B and I’s favourite sayings is, “One day we’ll laugh about this.”  Often uttered after I have managed to break something important, like the tea, or one of the children, or managed to pull a cupboard door off its hinges, or rendered something entirely useless just by walking in its general vicinity, also often uttered by me as I try to placate my distinctly unhappy wife.  The time that really engrained it in our lives though was nothing to do with me.  We were on our way down to stay with some friends in Cornwall and had made it about 4 hours into the journey.  At which point our car, which we had purchased 3 days before decided that enough was enough and just ground to a halt.  Nothing would persuade it to go (turns out the timing belt had snapped causing a lot of damage and an immobile car) and in the end we had to wait a good few hours for a tow truck to come and drag us all the way home.  At some point during that wait one of us uttered the words, “One day we’ll laugh about this,” at which we both burst out laughing and stayed that way for a good few minutes.  This may have been the result of the rising hysteria we both felt, but we were both much happier about life afterwards.

A Cry for Help

(This post was originally written last Tuesday, but has been delayed due to excessive busy, as well as lack of sleep and general bad temperedness, read on for the details)

Wit’s End - Where jokes go to die.

It’s a story that will be familiar to many of you, but here is my own version of the old classic, “Help, I’m the parent of a two year old who refuses to sleep and won’t do anything she’s told.”

As with all good stories this one starts with a change in the weather.  The hot weather has really messed us up unfortunately, none more so than the little tyrant.  Although it has been a particularly hard time for my wife who is (I hope I get this right) 28 weeks pregnant, but whose bump, according to the funky little bump chart measurement thingTM (I am available for all your technical term needs) is actually measuring about 3 weeks bigger than it should be.  This,  coupled with the heat (did I mention it was warm?), has made things extra difficult for B looking after the monster.  

Another side effect of the hot weather, which has been really quite warm, is that N has not been going to sleep.  I choose to assume it is the hot weather as then I can lull myself into the, probably foolish, hope that once it cools down a bit this will improve.  I have devoted words on this blog already to the subject of my daughter’s exceptional sleep regime so I won’t rehash that, except to say that things are in no way as bad as they were for the first 10 months of her life, which we affectionately refer to round here as the lost months, and I am very grateful that I have bumped my sleep average up to about 6 hours a night now, positively blissful.  However, gratitude aside, it is getting just a little wearing that whilst N will sleep all the way through now, which sounds great, we need to drill down into those numbers just a little.  Let me especially highlight the Time of First Sleep (TOFS) number which is currently fluctuating between 9 and 10:30pm.  Which when you compare that with the Time of First Awakening (TOFA) number of 5-6am leaves you with an equation which spits out the nightmarish number for Length of Sleep for Two Year Old (LOSFTYO) of around 8 hours.  This may be enough for you and me, it is not enough to prevent my two year old daughter from turning into a whining, exhausted, misbehaving wreck of a little girl.

We have tried a number of things to solve the problem.  From cutting out the afternoon sleep which she has still been having - doesn’t work as she won’t go to sleep much earlier and she becomes impossible to deal with by about 4 o’clock if we try that - to trying to get her to sleep in longer in the mornings - also hasn’t work as she has a built in Daddy’s Going Downstairs, Must Go Down With Him (DGDMGDWH, I think she needs to work on her acronyms) alarm which goes off whenever she hears me creeping downstairs.  Unfortunately she is just at the moment in a cycle where she is not getting enough sleep, is hot and bothered, and is driving us both crazy.

Anyway, this is all a fairly long winded preamble to letting you know that for a while this blog may have to come with a Danger, Lack of Jokes (DLOJ) warning sign while we all wait for things to cool off.  Oh and hopefully this hot weather will stop as well.

Down the Garden Path

It’s got hot.  Very hot.  So hot that the internal combustion engine that keeps me warm in the coldest temperatures in winter is currently squinting at the thermometer and relishing the fact that it has finally found some serious competition.  It has bought itself some training shoes and recruited a personal trainer and is really getting into shape, I think it’s building itself up for the heating Olympics.  This will likely sound familiar to many of you who also feeling the heat a bit, but I say it to try to explain why I am currently struggling to put one word after another in a way that is anything other than arrant gibberish (it may also go someway to explaining why I find the word arrant quite so bewitching.  It clearly means nothing at all, but has the potential to go with pretty much everything to brighten things up, much like salad cream really.

Swinging Doors

We’ve reached that stage with N.  You know the one.  The one where what you thought were innocent doors are actually revealed to be secret playground equipment (which sounds like a great name for an indie band made up entirely of 7 year olds).  You don’t remember that?  Let me refresh your memory/tell you about what my life is like at the moment.

Squeak

Squeak Squeak

“N, stop playing with the gate!”

Squeak Squeak

“I said stop it”

*Looks round to find N swinging wildly on the stair gate with her foot stuck trying to extract it from between the bars.*

This has happened on numerous occasions in the last few days, and it is often followed by plaintive and slightly sheepish cries for help as one of us has to go and pull her out.  

It’s not just the stair gates though (although those pieces of apparatus are probably the most worrying considering they are the only hinged items in our house that I put up, and whilst my DIY skills are cosmically great, it turns out stair gates are tricky things to get right. At least she doesn’t swing on the gate which is across the arch into the kitchen, mostly because my wife had to take it down because I put it up so badly that N could basically walk underneath it).  Anything with a hinge, it turns out, is fair game for a bit of fun.  The doors are swung on wildly, seemingly in an attempt to cause a draft ferocious enough to cool down the vicious heat of the British summer.  Even the door on the little play oven that sits in the lounge has been receiving the treatment.  Not so much with the swinging, but it has been clattered into the wall on a number of occasions.

What I need to know then is this: Which will come first, N growing out of this phase, or me having to purchase and hang new doors? With my level of skill I may need some practice.

Answers on a postcard please to

The House With No Doors

Squeaky Lane

Trapped

SW1 1NG

Or you could just pop it in the comments, whichever you think is easier.

A Close Shave

Wimbledon is in crisis.  No, don’t panic, they still have strawberries and I believe the cream situation is also under control.  No, this is, if you can believe it, a problem for the well-manicured lawns of SW19.  For, you see, a number of players seem to have grown rather too fond of the grass.  So fond in fact that they have developed a habit of throwing themselves at it rather hard in an effort to make an imprint of their body in it.  This extreme act has, understandably, caused a startling number of injuries and withdrawals from ‘The Championships.’  At current count there have been twelve retirements through injury (though not all of them can be attributed to the grass mania which is sweeping the tournament) and one player is currently in the midst of a medical timeout, (he’s up and about now.  I bet you weren’t expecting a live tennis blog when you came were you?)

Mystery not-injured-anymore player has just gone 2-1 up in the first set on serve.   

It is becoming pretty clear now that this is my year, I have never had a better chance to win Wimbledon than this year. As long as I don’t get struck down by the mysterious grass malady, I think I could go far.

I’m joking of course, I’ll have a much better chance next year when they turn the whole complex into one big soft play to avoid injuries, and decree that the only competition that will be played is mixed doubles where one of the competitors must be 3 years old or younger.  I’d take me and my daughter against any of them in a game which took place in the revamped Centre Court, otherwise known as the biggest indoor ball pool in the world.  Remember when you see the announcements in the press that you heard it here first.  It really is a fool-proof idea which has the added benefit of giving at least some of the players an excuse for squealing and whining like toddlers.

Uninjured player now at 1 set all and is 3-2, on serve, in the third set, he is looking very sprightly as well

Anyway, back to grass.  You see I had a slight run-in with the grass in my own garden just this week,  and when I say a run-in with the grass what I mean is a run-in with my lawn-mower.  And when I say run-in with my lawn-mower what I really mean is that I ran over the wire powering my lawn-mower which meant that having mowed a neat little patch, and then a running track down one edge, progress was halted for quite a while as I attempted to patch up my mess.  This was a relatively simple job for one of my undoubted DIY ability.  All I had to do was get a terminal block and connect the wires up in it and Bob would, in fact, be your Uncle.  This was accomplished with little hassle and I was soon on my way mowing like a champion.  Until there was a massive bang, followed by another explosion, at which point the lawn-mower, understandably I’m sure you’ll agree, decided that discretion was the better part of valour and refused to play its, fairly crucial, part in the mowing of the lawn.

Having established, through the medium of sparks flying everywhere, that the green wire and the blue wire shouldn’t be able to come into contact (although I would like to offer, in my defence, the mitigation that I am colour blind.  I realise that this is not much mitigation as they are the only two wires in there, but I feel something needs to be said in my defence) I then spent the better part of half an hour trying to strip the wires back enough so that they would fit into the terminal block, but not so much that they would be dangling out and therefore at risk of causing my entire garden to go up in flames.  I’m afraid to tell you that my natural talent and flair for all things practical failed me at this crucial juncture and even though I thought I had managed to get the wires just right I still couldn’t make the lawn-mower do any actual mowing, instead it just stood in the middle of the patch it had just mowed sulking and muttering something under its breath about health and safety.

It eventually dawned on me that perhaps, amidst all the pyrotechnics, a fuse may have possibly blown.  Unfortunately, the time now being somewhere in the region of getting up and going to work time, such a thing was unobtainable and thus the adventure with the lawn-mower came to a rather premature end.

The Garden in better days.

I have decided though that this may, in fact, serve a greater purpose.  All we need to do is to get the players at Wimbledon to pop up here for the weekend and spend some time in my garden.  There’s so much grass here they’d be cured of their grass infatuation in minutes.

Final update on unidentified, totally fine man: 8-9 down in the final set, play has been suspended due to slight sog.

Potty Coaching

Job interviews are a phenomenon I am fairly sure only Dr Who can fully get his head around.  With his comprehensive knowledge of timey wimey stuff I eagerly await the episode where he gives a full and convincing explanation about how time can be so quick during the inevitable ‘write nonsense about a hypothetical totally unrealistic and unrelated to the job you are applying for’ test element of the selection process and yet slow down to such an extent that it is always a surprise when you leave an interview and people are still not taking the intergalactic express to commute to work.  Surely that sort of time-bending shenanigans is just begging to be tackled in an episode of Dr Who.

All Grown Up

Your chips will never be the same again

Let me talk to you about hot sauce.  Oh go on.  A really good hot sauce is a transcendent experience.  You see a really good hot sauce has the potential to completely ruin your meal because:

a) You will not be able to taste anything else for the rest of the day

and

b) Why would you want to?  

This is a really good hot sauce remember, which, when done properly is just the most sublime of tastes that there is (except for maybe a raspberry which is just the greatest flavour of them all).

It is not just hot sauce that is like this though, sometimes you experience something which just spoils you for everything else.  Something which is so far and above your ordinary experience that it leaves everything else lacking in lustre just a little, something which is of a quality that it seems as though it will never be matched, even though you keep trying to recreate the moment.  

Rearing 'The Whirlwind'

Last week my wife was ill.  This is a distressing event at the best of times, but as she was also pregnant, experiencing stomach pains, unable to sleep and not desirous of food we were a little more worried than perhaps we needed to have been.  She is well on the way to being better now but for a week she couldn’t really get out of bed.  This meant that I had to take some time off work to look after N while she was incapacitated.

o_O

In the end I spent 4 whole days with her and came away with a renewed appreciation for my wife and a hearty dread of ever having to look after my daughter for an extended period of time without proper adult supervision ever again.  It was a grueling four days of playdough, crayons, playdough and crayons, stickers, stickers being unpeeled from crayons, stickers being unpeeled from walls and tables, playdough being scraped from the table, quick run in the garden, lunch, sleep, playdough, Ivor the Engine, tea, bath, all of which took us to about 2 in the afternoon.  I’m pretty sure when she grows up N’s wrestling nickname will be ‘The Whirlwind.’

The illness was the reason why I was dispensed to do the shopping with N which led to the joyous incident that I wrote about in this post.  It was also the reason why nothing domestic seemed to get done in our house for pretty much the entirety of last week.  I just about kept on top of the washing up, but if you are expecting me to have managed to tidy up after each day’s wrecking ball type activities, or done those jobs which are mysteriously being added to the kitchen notice board, I’m afraid we need to have a little chat about your expectation levels.

Each evening after ‘The Whirlwind’TM  had finally been put to bed (which is a blogpost all of its own) I would curl myself into a little ball wondering how much mileage there was in calling in a storm chaser to supervise my daughter for a day.  

And yet my wife somehow makes it all look very effortless, like the moment of complete stillness achieved by Pele in the build up to That Goal, or the moment of time-slowing brilliance exhibited by Joe Montana for The Catch.  She is the area of effortless yet effective calm in the middle of my daughter’s daily imitation of El Nino.

It just so happens to be our anniversary today and there’s really only one thing I want to say.  Thank-you.

Water, Water, Everywhere

In the year 480 BC Athens was in trouble.  Xerxes I had defeated the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and had turned his attention to the next obstacle, the men of Athens.  In response to this threat the Athenians did the only thing a Classical Greek person would do.  No, not run, or fly the white flag, they turned to the Oracle at Delphi.  When the envoys had arrived and as they walked in, they would have read the words inscribed in the wall of the fore court, ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν,’ gnothi seauton, which would have commanded them, before they went in, to ‘Know yourself.’    

This phrase was debated endlessly by men in antiquity, even Socrates weighed in on what he thought it meant, but basically it seems to have been an injunction to understand your own limitations in the face of the god Apollo, the god who was the power behind the Delphic oracle, and to accept his words without question.  Those of you who have read any of this blog before, particularly the DIY parts, or who have read the ‘About me’ page (go and have a quick look now if you want, I won’t go anywhere), will know that I am quite familiar with a number of my limitations, mostly because they are illuminated on a daily basis by my wife and my daughter, mostly my daughter.  Such an illumination took place today when N and I went shopping.

Much A-Doing About nothing

My life currently feels like it is a television show being hosted by David Dimbleby, and not one of those nice ones where people are driven around in horse-drawn carriages to open parliament or get married at Westminster Abbey.  No, my life currently feels like David Dimbleby is hosting and moderating a debate in which members of the audience get to fire questions at me non-stop until either I crack or they fall asleep.  So far it has been rather more of the former than the latter unfortunately.

Holidaying

Holidays change everything.  Routines are out of the window.  Cosy little rituals which you have developed with your child for months are out of the question.  The comfort of knowing where everything is and needs to be out back is just rendered totally out of the realms of possibility.  OK, maybe the last one is a little over the top, but I had to make it fit with the others.  Things definitely get harder when you’re on holiday, even just down to the fact that the rooms are laid out differently so you now can’t creep past the child’s bedroom door to get to your own room without the child immediately being aware of you and its eyes, like piercing lasers, suddenly locking onto you while you have the sinking feeling of knowing that the supremely tired child is not going to go back to sleep for another hour. 

Don't Toy with Me

For a while now I have had a suspicion that has been growing.  I think that children’s toys must be infused with something which makes them irresistibly attractive to people over the age of twenty five and completely unattractive to little girls who are almost two.  This suspicion has been confirmed to me by the visit of two friends this afternoon.

Our little girl has been singularly uninterested in her toys from a very early age.  She will give them barely a glance whilst on her way to a book, or something that she isn’t allowed.  It doesn’t matter how colourful, how much noise or how many moving parts a thing has, she will just totally snub it.  Every now and then a toy will be picked up and examined, as though she has decided that today she is going to learn all about colourful xylophones, and then, once all the information has been sucked out of it, it will be discarded again, cast aside like yesterday’s news.

The only time that she is interested in getting her toys out is when time is running short to get the house tidy for guests.  At that point she will be desperate to get everything out, and sit and play with them as it gathers in a pile around her ruining the effect of serene tidiness that you are trying to portray.

This means that when people come round it tends to be that there are a few toys still out which, having been put away three times already, manage to evade the final sweep and sit, sparklingly tempting, in the middle of the floor.  At which point the guest will, almost inevitably, as demonstrated wonderfully this afternoon, swoop upon the toy, turn it over in their hand a few times and then fall to playing with it.

This applies to guests who are in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties or seventies.  It turns out that, in the end, we are all just children.  Drawn to the bright lights and exciting sounds of children’s toys no matter how old we are.  Unless, of course, we are their intended audience, in which case just point me in the direction of the shelves where all the ornaments are.        

Leading Her Astray

So, it’s the first week in which I am working full time and the schedule has broken down already.  Which is bad when we look forward to the next few weeks.  I am going to be getting used to a new schedule and timetable for quite a while, which means that the blog may well hit a few road blocks on its journey to worldwide fame.  Sorry about this, once I know how things are going to work, I will establish a new routine and there will once more be regular issues of the tales of super girl and her clumsy, doomed to make every parenting mistake there is, father.

Speaking of examples.  I try to be a good example to my daughter.  She is, and has been for a while, capable of watching me and wanting to copy me.  In fact she has seemed to have been aware of what we were doing from much earlier than I had expected.  But now she is just like an eagle.  She doesn’t miss anything.  Which means that you have to be on your guard constantly in case you happen to do something that you might not want her to emulate.  Which, I’m sure, for most of you is simple, but as I have mentioned in the past, I’m not entirely confident that I am responsible enough to be looking after a child, which can lead to some awkward situations.

Match of the Day

I want to tell you about my day so far.  But I’m a bit embarrassed to really, and I don’t think that you’d actually believe me.  Well, here goes, please enjoy my recounting of the first 6 hours of my day.

I woke up at 7ish.  I had been inspired to go for a run this morning by my brother who was here last night so I did.  This, however, meant trying to get out of bed and downstairs without waking my wife or disturbing the sleeping daughter.  Not disturbing my wife proved impossible.  I’m sure she could be in the deepest possible sleep but will still wake at the slightest change of my breathing as I wake up.  Or perhaps she’s just got a bit of string tied round her little toe which makes her twitch whenever I wake up.  Whatever it is she was awake as I thought about getting up. 

Off Topic

As you will all have noticed my daughter is the major player in this blog.  It is driven by her actions and words, and our tired, muddled reactions to them. She is Hamlet to our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Doctor to our Companions, DangerMouse to our Penfold (please say I am not the only person who still, on a fairly regular basis, says ‘Good Grief Penfold’ when things go wrong or someone says something ludicrous, or the only one to say ‘Crumbs Chief’ when it has all gone wrong?).  Basically she is the main character.  So when she comes up with a topic which she would like to see addressed on the blog who am I to refuse?

Gotta love a super hero with an eye patch