Posts Tagged "kids"
Summer Essentials
Today I am taking part in Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop for the first time. Lovely Kat sets up some writing prompts and prompts us to umm…write!
So I’ve chosen #5 - List your 7 most favourite summer items.
Now before I start let me just add how much I have enjoyed other people’s accounts of their favourite summer items. Air conditioning, industrial power fans, sunblock, sexy bathing suits. Feel like rubbing it in some more? For here in the UK our summer for the last month has looked like this…
So now I’ve set the mood and without further ado, here are my top 7 essential items for surviving our pathetic British excuse for a summer:
1. Umbrella-ella-ella OH
Or even better…
…to keep your hands free for frantic power walking around the streets with the pushchair in an effort to get your poor cabin-fevered child to nap, screaming at the lights to change to red in time so you don’t have to stop and inevitably wake him up.
2. Funky Wellies
For puddle splashing and surviving random flash-floods in Sainsbury’s supermarket carpark.
3. At least 10 indoor clothes airers
To dry the mountain of washing accumulating in your bathroom that has been hung outside to dry, got wetter and been brought back in again at least half a dozen times. Usually I’m quite Zen about my washing getting caught in the rain. It began wet…it has returned to wetness… I have lost nothing – that sort of thing. I’d usually just leave it out till it dried again but as using that strategy may mean a single load of washing takes about, oh I don’t know, two months to dry, I’ve had to resort to turning my house into a 1930′s Chinese Laundry.
NOTE: Extremely beautiful new nappies!!! Which thankfully dry very quickly and are absolutely my new favourite thing…ever! Expect a gushing evangelical blog post about them very soon.
4. Laptop
My ultimate surviving rainy days stuck indoors must have item (along with #5). To be kept on to allow ‘tweeting to stay sane’ therapy and sneaky blog writing whenever the baby is distracted (see #6) or temporarily trapped in his ‘den’ under the dining table.
5. Chocolate
‘Nuff said.
6. Toys encouraging obsessive, repetitive and absorbing play
(to allow more time for #4 & 5)
Most notably this toy:
Kai will happily play with this for HOURS. Put the rings on. Take the rings off. Throw rings at mummy. Push rings under sofa and into other irretrievable places while mummy is paying absolute full attention and not nodding off. Honest.
Other rainy day obsessive Kai games include: balancing the pig on the tractor game (don’t ask me why – it’s always the pig), devil jigsaw and Kai’s all time favourite, the take-things-out-of-a-container-and-put-them-back-in-again game.
7. A Watch
To count down the hours until the husband gets home from work and I can meet him at the door with a whiney, peanut butter covered baby…
…and run.
Kai-isms
So I think I’m quite away off being able to make any significant contribution to the fabulous “kids say the funniest things” category of mommy blogging. Which is disappointing really as they are by far my favourite posts to read.
But not to be outdone, and in order to try to prove to you that blogging about babies is JUST as funny and interesting as blogging about toddlers (completely not true by the way – I need Kai to start doing some more interesting things else I fear this blog may die a horrible stagnant death), and in case you meet Kai anytime soon, here is a handy translation guide to all things Kai-speak.
1. “og” and “gat”
Otherwise known as “dog” and “cat”. Used to refer to anything vaguely resembling an animal.
Usually proceeded by frantic pointing and often accompanied by a “ahhhhh” sound and a little beckoning gesture, which translates as “please come here and let me pull out great chunks of your fur stroke you”.
2. The words are a new development but animal noises…pah well we’re an old hand at that one. We of course have “miaow” and “woof” but also “mooooooo” for cow (but think more ghost than bovine) and a new one for today “oooh oooh oooh” for monkey (although thinking about it I have always suspected Kai was more monkey than human so maybe it was just his inner-chimp revealing itself).
3. And while we’re on the subject of noises, well of course I have to include Kai’s party-piece. Following in his father’s footsteps of being able to do the most convincing formula-one car impression I have EVER heard, any mention of the word “car”, or the sight of one will immediately prompt an excited “BRRrrmmmMMMM” from Kai. In fact, so primed as he is to jump in with his impression I only needed to utter the sentance ”I’m just going to write this card” the other day to start him brumming and brrring around the living room. No honey. CarD. Pay attention please.
4. “Book” and “Ball”
To be said beautifully, articulately and perfectly. When absolutely no one is around to bear witness.
5. “Da”
For Daddy. So far not even an inkling of a Mama. Ungrateful child.
6. “Bye Bye” and “Hello”
The former said mournfully as beloved “Da” disappears off to work, and to everything he no longer wants (usually right before it is thrown at me). Accompanied by ultra-cute waving. Seriously. I defer even the most hard-hearted child-hating grump not to melt after one wave from my little fella. The latter said in the best middle class accent I could ever wish for and usually said with a question mark (“hello?”) when holding his toy phone/shoe/pig/dinner/anything in reach up to his ear.
And that’s it. So actually not very funny OR very interesting now it comes down to it.
But still enough to make me the proudest mama on the face of this earth.
You can go back to reading the funnier blogs now. Just check back here in another 12 months because given the way the baby bear already won’t shut up, I have a feeling he’s going to come out with some great one-liners.
On talking bread people and loosing my mind
Apologies in advance for the rather odd, inevitably disjointed post today. I have had, approximately, 7 hours broken sleep over the last 2 days leaving me in a rather strange, slightly hysterical ohh look there’s a monkey holding my brain type mood.
For those of you that missed my frantic, endless tweeting in attempts to stay sane over the last few days, here’s the deal. I recovered from my throat infection just in time for Kai to start crying. Something he has continued to do, on and off (though mostly on it seems), for the last 48 or so hours.
It started witha bit of a fever Tuesday morning. By evening every time he moved his mouth, or coughed or yawned he would yelp in pain. Trying to eat made him wail. He refused ALL breastfeeds AND banana. Those of you that know Kai well will know that these two things just.do.not.happen and are my two ‘time to sound the alarm my son must be dying’ indicators. ESPECIALLY the refusal to feed. Even lovely snuggly under the duvet just before bed type feeds. Something must be very, very wrong.
At first I thought, generous mother that I am, that I had given him my throat infection but a trip to the doctors confirmed that his throat is fine and that it is, in fact, our old friends the Evil Torturous Tooth Army, specifically the Diabolical Molar Division, in their unrelenting campaign to force their huge blunt edges through my poor child’s gums.
I cannot begin to describe the extent of his agony the last couple days. He has moaned, he has wailed, he has sobbed, he has hysterically screamed. He has NOT slept, except very lightly and for the first night only if being carried around in the dark in his sling. He has NOT eaten more than a few teeny mouthfuls and NOT fed apart from the odd very ginger little nuzzle. So consequently I am left in an almost catatonic state of exhaustion with a very sore back and boobs like frickin’ boulders.
Now I don’t know whether you, dear reader, are familiar with sleep deprivation (and no I don’t mean you with your child who wakes up a whole ONCE in the night who then moans to everyone about how they may just drop dead from exhaustion – you can go jump off a cliff) but SERIOUS sleep deprivation. I mean the kind of ‘being woken up at least every two hours and then getting up at the crack of dawn every single blessed day for over a year’ variety. Because after a while THAT kind of sleep deprivation starts doing some seriously messed up things to your mind.
Take last night for example. Kai had woken up again for probably the 8th time that night and having tried all other tactics to get him back to sleep (including my tried-trusted using breastmilk as a legal baby tranquillizer – I’m lost without that one), I was now pacing my little route round the bedroom that I must have done 10 gazillion times before. And as happens when exisiting on such little sleep and pure adrenaline I found myself in a kind of waking dream having a conversation in my head with a loaf of bread. I don’t remember what was said. All I can remember is that it was the loaf of plain white Hovis I had brought that day and that it had arms and legs and a face and that in my mind we talked quite seriously for several minutes before I realised what I was doing.
This sort of thing happens to me quite a lot.
(I had also obviously been spending too much time on Twitter that day too because I distinctly remember later on in the night Kai waking up crying AGAIN and me absent mindedly looking for his ‘unfollow’ button so I could ignore him and go back to sleep. If only hey!)
It’s such a weird feeling. You’re awake, wide awake, with every sense on hyper-alert and yet you’re asleep at the same time, the barrier between your rational mind and your unconscious completely broken down. It’s exactly what I imagine being on some very heavy, trippy drugs must feel like. And you have to picture it too. It’s dark, completely pitch black apart from the eerie green glow of the digital clock. The only sound is either Kai moaning and crying, or if I’ve managed to settle him, the soft sound of his breathing or the little snuffling sound of him nursing, all accompanied by my lovely husband’s rolling rhythmic snore. Nothing but me and the thoughts in my head. For hours and hours and hours.
It’s no wonder I go a little nutso.
Sometimes it’s conversations with imaginary bread people, sometimes it’s a line from a song in my head going round and round and round. Once it was thinking that the top of my head had come off and worrying my thinking might be too noisy and wake Kai up. One particularly bad night some months back I realised I had been muttering “I want to go home” over and over. I was home, obviously. Occasionally the crying, clawing, writhing thing in my arms in the dark has taken on monstrous proportions in my mind and I’ve had to switch the light on only to have a poor, confused Kai blinking up at me, reminding me there’s no monster at all but just an exhausted little boy who can’t get back to sleep.
All in all it’s not been a good year for my mental health.
Anyway I should go. The mother-in-law has returned from taking Kai for a nap and he’s looking distinctly grumpy.
Oh look he’s starting to cry again.
And here, right on schedule, is the giant purple rabbit come to take me to a happy, silent place with white walls.
Thank god for that.
