Posts Tagged "toddlers"

Spring and Scooters and the Boy that Grew

Posted by Josie on Apr 1, 2011 in Kai, Reviews, Sponsored Posts, Videos | 2 comments

(this post mentions a product I was sent for free. If you’re not into that no worries, but it is about other stuff too…)

Spring has definitely sprung here, thank God for that. Kai and I are neither one of us are very sitting at home types and spend most of the winter with our faces pressed up against the window waiting for it to get warm enough to go outside more. Kai’s fairly hardy but at two, little hands still get cold, and wind bites and cold rain makes for miserable outings, however many dinosaur umbrellas and warm pairs of gloves we have.

April 2010

So ironic really, that the first really warm weeks are ones where Kai and then me get struck down with lurgies. No, not ironic, sorry, annoying. Wrong word. Ah well. Better now.

Still, we have managed a few forays none the less (Kai especially as I made sure to pick a nursery that turfs them outside for as much time as possible), and more than anything I have been so struck at how different the end of our winter hibernation is this year. And I don’t just mean the practical, life changes – I have a wholly different little boy! LAST Spring I had a 20 month old, who as a late walker, was just getting really confident on his feet, learning to RUN, even, in that wonderful new-toddler shuffle. We had just stopped breastfeeding and Kai was learning about how to be a separate person, as I was I. He was learning that the tether between us stretched further than he had thought, beginning to learn about exploring, about not holding hands thank you very much, and about things like balls and climbing, and I was learning too, about a new way to see the world as the mum of not a baby any more, but of a boy.

This year I have a nearly three year old, a world away from that tottering 20 month old who loved to ‘walk the line’ – now he runs along them pretending to be a steam train.  Now he can do this!

Many, many thanks to micro-scooters.co.uk for sending Kai his first ever scooter and giving us both a good smile last week. Kai’s blue mini micro scooter has been perfect for him – nice and low to the ground with three wheels so it’s nice and stable and hard to fall off. He’s soon got the hang of it scooting in a straight line, and is just learning how to steer it by leaning on the handlebar in the direction you want to go. It feels a bit more like a surf board than a scooter, super smooth, sturdy and flexible and really light to carry for when Kai’s legs get tired and it’s time to go home. It’s going to do wonders for his balance, which for a boy that’s physically a bit behind is a good thing, and is proving a very helpful way to wear him out a bit before tea-time. He loves it, and I love it too. Thanks so much.

Now, here’s to the Spring and Summer and all the other new adventures it brings my wonderful boy who seems to change and grow by the day. We have a new park nearly finished with sandpits and an adventure playground and fountains that squirt you. I can’t wait to see what he makes of that.

Saying no, saying yes, and other stories

Posted by Josie on Mar 11, 2011 in Art, Kai, Parenting | 18 comments

There’s not been much sleep in these parts lately. Have I mentioned that? You know, that I’m tired? No? Well, not for at least ten minutes anyway. Yes. Tired.

I have learnt that my ability to perceive myself as a good mother is directly proportionate to the amount of sleep I’m getting. Probably because my ability to BE a good mother is directly proportionate to the amount of sleep I’m getting. So, on both counts, I’ve been pretty crap this week.

Three or four hours of sleep a night and long days breeds a particularly snappy, shouty, emotionally fragile kind of mummy that neither me nor Kai are particularly keen on, and there has been a lot of snapping and shouting this week. Added to this, both of us have had to adjust to a new way of being around each other in the last few months. It’s just us now, you see, there’s no one else to help ease the tension. I am having to find ways of staying sane when your main source of company, and for long, solitary days and nights at a time, is two and half, and Kai is having to learn that I can’t provide the same focused attention available to him at the weekends, when he has an army playmates in the form of his Dad and family to help keep him occupied.

All of this is making for some particularly fraught weeks at the moment: lots of fallings-out, and the need for making-back-up-again. Good job we love each other, hey?

Motherhood has never come particularly naturally to me. I’m not that well suited to it, needing quiet and having a particularly fundamental need for my own space and to devote time and energy to my own projects and ideas. I have a tolerance level of about three seconds when it comes to the kind of involved, repetitive play that toddlers so enjoy, and Kai has especially intense needs in that department, being a child that never sits still, needing focused concentration to communicate with him and craving stimulation as desperately as I crave the peace to sit and snooze or read. I find I end up saying ‘no’ a lot: “no Kai, that’s enough now”, “no Kai, you’ll have to wait”, “no Kai, mummy’s busy”. We both end up frustrated and fraught, and I end up feeling guilty. It seems like he has the most fun when he’s away from me at the moment. I feel like dull mum, paling in comparison to the excitement and energy he gets from everyone else in his life. I’m not always sure what I’m really giving him most days, aside from fulfilling his basic needs.

But, BUT!

We’re getting there, on the good days at least, we really are. I’m learning to give a bit more, and Kai’s learning to take a bit less and somewhere in the middle we’re starting to find a better balance. I’m a great believer that it’s important for children to learn to play on their own, and NOT need an adult to direct them or play with them the whole time – it gives their imaginations a chance to be really unleashed without adult constraints. When I’ve had enough sleep to think about it properly, I realise that my ‘no’s don’t always have to be a source of guilt – I can view them as  something really positive. And I’m learning to include him more – we’re becoming a little team, me and Kai. We clean together and cook together and wash up together and sort laundry together. When I have errands to run, we make it an adventure. Kai helps remember what we have to buy, where we’re going, and we don’t rush home, spending time dawdling along the pavement seeing what we can see.

What I’m learning is that saying no is okay, as long as they’re are plenty of ‘yes’s too. After a morning of ‘no’s after a long night of little sleep, I’m really trying to set aside some time to say “what do you want to do Kai?” and answering “YES!”. I’m finding that even if I’ve said no a hundred other times that day, it’s the yes’s that define what kind of day we have, even if it’s just the one. It’s giving us, in between the frustration and the fallings out, some real gems of time together.

Every day this week when I’ve asked him what he wants to do he’s signed the same sign: PAINTING! And so that’s what we’ve done. Lots and lots of it. I know I tend to harp on a bit about Kai and his art work, so forgive me my indulgence again. I guess when you have a child where so much is focused around what he’s NOT doing, it becomes extra-important to celebrate the things he DOES do. And this is something that makes Kai special in my eyes just now, not because of any particular extraordinary skill, (although I think for two and half he’s got quite an eye on him), but because it’s something that he enjoys so much, and which gives me so much joy to watch.

This week we’ve been using objects around the house to copy in our paintings, toys mostly, and he’s loved it. We talk about what colours things are, what shape, we mix our paints, I watch Kai daub and splat and dot, and for half an hour I get to feel like maybe I’m doing something right for once.

So here’s Kai’s painting of his toy Noah’s Ark, done all by himself while I did my knitting and we talked about what he was doing. I’m not a believer in the religious meaning, but we like stories, me and Kai, especially ones with animals in, and when you get to a paint a rainbow, and conjour up all the hope and light that that brings with it, well, I think it was just about perfect for us yesterday.

(P.S. The pants were clean, promise – had fallen out the laundry basket. Failed to spot them till after I’d saved the photo. Oh well, cheap thrill for you there. You’re welcome.)

Lost in Translation

Posted by Josie on Feb 14, 2011 in Kai, Parenting | 35 comments

It’s been a while since I talked about Kai’s ‘issues’ here. That’s entirely deliberate. Kai is so much, much more than just his problems and when he’s bigger and gets to read this back the posts written about him one day, I wanted it to be his sense of fun, his imagination and his personality that shone through, not an endless chronicle of his difficulties.

As slightly contrived as it sounds, it IS the things that make Kai different that make him special, and anyone who has met the little dynamo will probably be the first to contest to that. But different is sometimes hard, there’s no getting away from that, and it’s probably time for an update.

On Friday Kai finally had his first proper assessment with his Speech and Language therapist. Kai’s communication has always been a little odd. It’s always been one of the many things that everyone was very keen to dismiss, insisting that boys are often behind and that he’d catch up in his own time, but it was never as simple as the fact that Kai wasn’t talking, it was that he was talking differently – something that was quite hard to get over to people when you talked about it. Kai is probably one of the noisiest children you will ever meet, and ‘talks’, non-stop, for a good twelve hours a day. But it is Kai-speak – a unique mixture of noises, nonsense sounds, gestures and signs. At over two and half Kai is only able to say a tiny handful of words that others could understand, but DOES have a vast, fairly sophisticated vocabulary of his own which he strings into great long sentences and which requires an awful lot of concentration to translate.

The appointment on Friday confirmed what Kai’s Dad and I had already figured out – we’re not dealing with a simple developmental delay here, Kai has something interfering with the speech process, usually called a speech processing disorder. And there we come to a full-stop for now. SOMETHING is interfering with the words going in, and the right sounds coming out, but quite what that is we don’t know. It could be lots of things. And so we go from here, beginning with  a gradual set of assessments and then moving into more longer-term formal speech therapy sessions. First of all we’ll have his hearing re-checked, although it was fine at tests 18 months ago it’s probably still worth ruling out. And secondly, we’re going to start really establishing consistent sign language as a way for him to communicate and be understood by others. Whatever the reasons for his speech difficulties, chances are communication is going to be an issue for him for quite some time and he’s going to need a back-up to support him as starts school etc. Kai knows and uses a few signs, but has a habit of insisting on his own versions that others find hard to interpret. So we’ll be doing lots and lots of work with him on that, gently trying to encourage him to use a signing system that nursery and his friends and family can use too.

There were lots more positives to come out of Friday too. Kai’s speech therapist assessed his comprehension as considerably beyond what she would expect of his age, and praised the creative ways he used to express himself. He was an absolute star, quite frankly. The most fundamentally reassuring thing of all is that Kai wants to communicate, in fact he’s desperate to. And that gives us a lot to work with.

And as for the rest of it? Well, we’re beginning to think that it’s just Kai. The ground-quivering temper tantrums are because he’s a bright kid with an intense amount of energy who has lots to say and can’t say it, and because he’s highly-strung and stubborn and with a VERY specific way of deciding How Things Should Be Done. And because he’s two and half!

He doesn’t make friends easily or socialise well in larger groups because he is sensitive and seems to react especially badly to things that he doesn’t understand, or that are out of his control, or that are a bit stimulation-heavy.

And he doesn’t sleep because, well, he never has. An expectation that he might sleep well is like an expectation he’s going to sprout feathers one day and fly.

Sometimes a + b + c + d  just equals a and b and c and d, not autism, or another composite diagnosis.

Conversely though, even without a formal diagnosis, it doesn’t make dealing with a, b, c and d any easier to deal with it. The long and short of it is that life with Kai is tough. A picture of my life that places my emotional situation within a context of endless before 6am wake-ups, and long days trying to understand a hyperactive, temperamental child while trying to carve out some space for myself, might help to explain my fragility some days. It certainly explains my tiredness.

It helps that he’s bloody brilliant, of course.

Thanks for listening.

Writing Workshop: Rocket Man

Posted by Josie on Dec 2, 2010 in Kai, Writing, Writing Workshop | 12 comments

He crouches low, with hands poised, counting down numbers in his head that he doesn’t yet know.  Pursed lips start the rumble, louder louder. Until, it’s time. And pointed fingers lead the way to blast off, up and up, with feet following to shoot their way around the room to land on Planet Sofa or Meteorite Mum for brief refuelling, until it’s time to fly again.

He’s a Rocket Man,

no, a pirate…

…climbing his was to the top of his crow’s nest chair to stand with eyes curled round an invisible telescope, reporting back to the captain that there’s a DRAGON on the horizon, the captain who stands looking on with arms crossed and a rue smile at her ignored orders to sit and eat your dinner please. But there’s no time for that when monsters lurk,

cause he’s a Rocket Man,

no, a train…

…chuffing his way along lines in the pavements with locomotive arms circling round and round, picking up speed round corners and stopping for the red man signal with a high whistle, before green green means go go and we’re off again, head down, with his driver frantically steering him out the path of approaching freight-train mobility scooters and pushchairs. But he can’t stop, he has places to be,

cause he’s a Rocket Man,

no, a ROBOT…

… stiff arms and legs marching with squeaks and peeps and whistles loud. Until, of course, his power runs out and he slowly folds himself down, arms hanging limp, in need of an engineer to replace batteries and wind the crank on his back but who will make him wait, despite whispered robot mum mum mum until she’s finished this row and put her knitting needles down with a smile, wondering what she will find next in her living room – racing car, monster, postman, shop keeper, lion, helicopter…

cause he’s a Rocket Man,

stars in his eyes and the whole world in his sights.

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Now it’s your turn. What song or lyric did you use to inspire your writing this week?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.