Dance the Night Away

You may know that my musical and performative abilities have been rudely critiqued on this blog in the past.  If not then please cast a glance over this post and have a quick chuckle at my expense. 

That was my eldest daughter’s opinion, however, it turns out she is not the only critic in my family.  L, who was 2 in August, is following in her older sister’s footsteps.  This evening I happened to be dancing in the kitchen while I was getting the children’s bedtime drinks ready.  This caused much hilarity amongst the children, who seemed to think I was trying to be funny.  That was enough to be a little hurtful, I will admit, but nothing compared to what came next.

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 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.

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

You Wait Two Weeks for One

On Sunday the London 2012 Olympic Games, otherwise known as the games of the 30th Olympiad if your name is Jacques Rogge and your sole aim in life is to appear at major sporting events and look solemn and sound portentous, came to an end.  This was a sad moment for those of us who had been engrossed (read obsessed) by the sport that had been happening for the last fortnight, and life post Olympics is going to take some getting used to.  It was also a fairly major event.  On the same day Prime Minister David Cameron, otherwise known as the Prime Minister of the 25th Olympiad (if not, why not, someone should really get on to adding that to his job title. I think it could only be surpassed by the woman we were introduced to in the Olympics opening ceremony as Champion of the Earth, whose name is, Maria Osmarina Marina Silva Vaz de Lima. Surely it’s not really fair for one person to have the most awesome title and the coolest name?)  

Sorry, we seem to have lost our way a bit there, back to the point now.  Sunday was also the day when David Cameron announced his government’s extension of funding for elite sports (by which I think he means specifically the ones that the UK is good at) until the Rio Olympics in 2016.  This is also a fairly major piece of news which commits the government to around £40 million a year for the next 4 years. 

Pseudocrime

He had a suspect.  No evidence yet but he was sure that he knew who it was, it was just a matter of proof and he knew that that would only be possible if he caught her red handed.  So he waited.  She’d be back.

It was the quiet that had first tipped him off.  He’d heard it before, and it always meant trouble, less like the calm before the storm, more like that moment of complete silence at a demolition just before the building crumbles in on itself and all that is left is a pile of rubble.  A worrying lack of noise then, but not enough to get him out of bed.  It had been a rough night, and that was just his throat, these late nights and early mornings were not agreeing with him, but he knew it was what he had signed up for, and that it would not last forever.  Would it?

A Moment of Praise

You know how people can just get singularly obsessive and boring over holiday photos.  Even if you haven’t experienced it you can imagine it, sitting on a settee whilst photo after photo is passed before your eyes and a story unfolds which, though you may try as hard as you can, you cannot be interested.  Well this post may be a bit like that, I am about to talk about how great my daughter is.  Just thought I should give you all fair warning.

My daughter is amazing.  I know that as her daddy I am not really entitled to pass judgement, after all, if it was up to me she would have been awarded a Nobel prize in some shape or form by now, if Barack Obama can win it after barely enough to draw breath in the Oval Office, why not N?

I’m biased is what I’m saying, and therefore my analysis in this area is not really to be trusted, however, she really is pretty awesome, despite the impression that you may have been given by reading what I have already written.  So let me try to redress the balance just a little with this, very short, but incredibly positive, post about my little girl.  Perhaps I’m going soft?

We read together quite a lot.  We have been incredibly blessed to have received many many children’s books from some very generous people.  I love books (which has led to some quarrels with my wife as I desperately and jealously try to guard the book shelf space that I have against incursions by other things.  I think I must have lost the battle when the exercise bike ended up in the study though.)  I really, really love books, which seems to have rubbed off onto N because she also really loves them.  Her attention span is sometimes not quite as long as mine, although Lord of the Rings was probably the wrong place to start her off, and so we do occasionally find ourselves, despite the one book off one book back rule, surrounded by a pile of discarded books as she tries to work her way through all the books one by one. 

At least I thought it was her attention span.  Until recently when I discovered that she could just be getting bored with the selection.  You see, we have a bit of a game with a particular set of books.  The Usborne Farmyard Tales books, (fabulous, entertaining, colourful, just right for our little girl.  It also turns out, I found out tonight, that you can follow the little yellow duck, who is hidden on every page of the books, on Twitter, brilliant.)  With these books, as we read I will pause as we come up to the people’s names at the beginning of the books, which all start the same, and N will fill in the blanks.  We do this because the first page is always the same and she really enjoys shouting the names, especially Rusty the dog.  It was only these books though, I had never even thought to try it with any of the others we read. 

But then, one evening last week, Nana came round.  Which was great as it took the pressure off me and she got to read N books all evening instead.  And suddenly, N was filling in all sorts of words for her.  Nana would get to the end of a line and leave off the last word which N would dutifully and fairly consistently supply.  Both my wife and I were stunned, which led to a round of testing to find out just how many books N had committed to memory, it turns out a fair chunk of the library is now stored securely in our little girl’s brain.  Incredible.  I’m sure it’s a fairly commonplace sort of a thing which is unlikely to garner international press attention, especially not during the Olympics, but it impressed me.

You see, clearly destined for great things, even if I do say so myself.  Now I will probably go back to writing about the infuriating, maddening, impossibly difficult things that she does to drive both me and my wife mad, but just for a little while it has been nice to be able to bore you all with how great my daughter is, perhaps you’d like to stick around?  I’m sure there are some holiday photos here somewhere I can talk to you about, there was this really great one of a caterpillar I just know you’d love.

Polar Peril

Special Extra post time!!

It’s Sunday, but here is a blog post.  I know, I’m excited too!  And in keeping with the theme of last week it is full of charming self deprecation, or something.

I tend to be quite exuberant about sports, and hurling myself around in general.  I have managed to break a bed in one of our old flats by diving onto it whilst practising my penalty saves.  That was quite the experience, although it was capped off by B laughing hysterically whilst filming my attempts to fix the bed which went progressively from bad to really quite bad to total failure.  In the end the bed was held up by me piling books underneath it.  Probably not quite conforming to manufacturer’s instructions, but a solution nonetheless.  Oh and that film, it vanished mysteriously and will never, ever, be seen by anyone.

Poorly Hair

I have a constant battle with my hair.  There is a sweet spot of about a day and a half after my hair has been cut when I am happy with it.  For the rest of the time, it is just a nightmare.  Which wouldn’t really bother me too much, after all I don’t have to look at it for the majority of the time, except that it doesn’t just not look good, it looks like a total mess.  I have hair which is very similar to a guinea pig’s, all swirls and sticky up bits.  Unfortunately for me there aren’t any rosettes available for humans who have wild hair.

What my hair looks like in the morning, and afternoon, and evening.