High Calibre Trouble-Makers

If you are yet to know the joys of parenthood and have asked yourself what all the fuss is about and if it's really as hard as parents make out, I've been thinking about the little things you may not have considered.

Tonight as I was getting the kids ready for bed I walked into the bathroom to discover my fancy makeup brush had been dipped into a pot of hair gel and then shoved back into my makeup bag so that everything was covered in a sticky mess. It's those awkward unexpected surprises that makes the more mundane tasks, such as getting the kids in their beds washed and fed, so much more exciting and demanding.

So you have to change your baby's diaper when you are out and about, not too bad you might think. You find a changing table, undress your darling child, and then discover their poop has squirted out of the back of the diaper and covered them all the way up to their shoulders. As you try to stay calm and start wiping and delicately removing the offending articles of clothing, your child, feeling the cool air on their nether regions, proceeds to pee, washing the poop, the wipes and the clothing into a pool of almost unimaginable poopy mayhem. I'm not making this stuff up.

Perhaps while you are waiting to pick your other half up from work, you allow your small children to play in the car to relieve their boredom. If they find your spare change stash and slot it into your cassette deck, the whole thing might need to be replaced. Replacing a fitted stereo is EXTREMELY expensive. It's no longer picking up your husband, it's spending hours trying to get the pennies out in new and imaginative ways, days without the car and never being able to leave any loose change in your car ever again.

Imagine a long haul flight with a child...then imagine there are actually two children...now please imagine you are traveling alone with them. Next I want you to imagine that both of them, after many many hours have finally fallen fast asleep in your lap, aww..little angels, how nice. Now...I want you to imagine that one of them opens her eyes, and a spilt second later with no warning, vomits at least a liter of very foul-smelling liquid into your lap. Imagine, if you will, that you are wearing a dress and that the dress catches the sick like a bowl between your legs. The sick is also seeping in its warm stealthy way around your backside and is soaking into your underwear. A member of the cabin crew passes you a handful of paper towels with a very troubled and sympathetic look on his face. Your children are both crying. You have to get off the plane with all your stuff, a very sick child, and only half an outfit on, having had no choice but to take the dress off, rinse the rest of your clothes off whilst wearing them in that tiny airplane sink, and put your cardigan on backwards to hide the fact that you are not wearing a top.

You move house, you set up your children with something to do and install your beloved cat in one of the bedrooms, you set up her litter box, her food and her water. When your beautiful, relatively well-behaved 3.5 year old girl asks if she can keep the cat company, you of course say yes. When you go to check on her, you discover she has mixed the kitty litter into the water bowl making a slippery cement which she has then thoroughly pasted all over a chest of drawers, that stuff is extraordinarily hard to clean up. Moving house isn't just moving house when you do it with kids.

So when you see a friend frazzled from the demands of parenthood and wonder if looking after a cute little baby is really that hard, after all... you miss out on sleep all the time when you go out at night, bear in mind she may have had to change at the last minute because her baby spit up over her shoulder, it may have run down the back of her top, if she was particularly unlucky, it could have made it's way into her underwear requiring she change every item of clothing except her socks. She may have put her shoes on only to discover food, sand, mud or soap in them. Her babies diaper may have leaked on the way soaking the carseat, she may have had to return home if she didn't have enough changes of clothes and had to line the seat with a plastic bag till she has a chance to launder the seat cover. Washing a carseat cover is very tedious and time-consuming INDEED.

Parents reading this, I would LOVE to hear about the ridiculous messy situations you have had inflicted on you, it will make me feel less alone ;-)

Oh and FYI, even when none of this stuff happens, it's all-consuming and bloody exhausting, but you do get the privilege of helping these incredible beings achieve their potential, that is the most rewarding and terrifying thing of all.

Moving House, The Trilogy - Moving Day Approaches

Monday April 25^th

This morning, despite another sleepless night I made an extra effort with the kids.  G had slept on the sofa because he couldn’t stop coughing but I ended up with Cuddles in bed with me anyway because he was coughing and then had a nightmare. After several hours of wiggling I carried him sound asleep back to his bed. When it was finally time to get up I felt a little like I had been beaten up. Squashing how I was feeling as best I could I “enthusiastically” played with the kids and after breakfast we went to the supermarket, bought donuts, and went to eat them at the park. We had a nice walk, the park is beautiful and overlooks the marina, we played the kids favorite “Sharks and Mermaids” which is a variation of tag using big rocks as safe places, and I showed them how to make daisy chains and upside-down daisies.

When we got home we had some lunch and then I absolutely couldn’t avoid packing anymore. I packed up the two bathrooms, apart from our essentials, and finished off emptying both our wardrobes. I packed some stuff from the kitchen, shudder. It’s really hard to know if I’m making good progress, I suppose I must be because now I have to look for things to put in boxes, but when the contents of your cupboards are outside instead of inside it gets very crowded. Today was complicated by Cuddles pouring a cup of water on our bed, the cat pooing on the carpet, and cuddles both drawing on and spilling juice on the carpet. I am now spending my evening going up and down 2  flights of stairs and crossing a massive car park to the laundry room as we have no unpacked sheets. Perhaps I should just let them all go for it and come to terms with not getting our deposit back. Joke. I think. I can hardly bring myself to be annoyed as I don't feel like the kids are receiving adequate supervision, poor babies.

Cuddles is supposed to be at school in the morning, his rash came on and off in mysterious waves today. At one point he looked like he had been stung on his toes on both feet, then it disappeared.  I don’t think I’ll send him if he has any rash, he didn’t go at all last week. I am missing that brief time when I usually zoom around town doing all my errands. I am also highly aware that with his school on Tues and Thurs mornings that only leaves us Weds to pack the entire day and the rest will be just the afternoons. He doesn’t stay long enough at school for me to drive all the way home and go back, I’d only be home for 30 minutes, NOT worth it. It’s ridiculous I know, wait till we move further away, then it will be even more ridiculous!

Tuesday April 26th

Alright alright this isn’t funny anymore. Was it really so bad for me to mention in a previous blog post that I now GET a goodnight’s sleep? Yet again G’s coughing kept me awake till 1am, then he woke Cuddles up when coughing in the hallway, so Cuddles woke up and had a coughing fit too. I eventually got Cuddles settled and then slammed my finger so hard in his wardrobe door that I sobbed. After finally falling asleep with my very sore finger with adrenaline coursing through me I was awoken again at 5am by a gaggle of extremely drunk men laughing and chanting outside our building for about 30 minutes until a heroic neighbor went and shouted at them. They carried on after he left “on the handlebars on the handlebars” I think they were shouting, but he came back and this time they left. I swear about 5 minutes later a bloody crow started going berserk in the tree outside our bedroom window, ARE YOU KIDDING ME. He eventually flew off, still screaming his tiny head off, the sound got fainter but was still there, he didn’t fly quite far enough away. I’m not sure if I fell back asleep after that, I remember Cuddles coughing at about 6, and then they came in yelling it was time to get up at 7, I maybe slept in-between those two occurrences.

Today, despite feeling extremely hung over (I’m not) I made lots of progress in the kitchen. My pots and pans are all packed and what I’m most happy about is the junk cupboard where we kept batteries, light bulbs, screws etc, that has been thoroughly sorted and packed. Phew.

We are going to take a much-needed breather this afternoon and take a walk to a friend’s lemonade stand by the beach.

Wednesday April 27^th

After an unsurprisingly restless night with the coughing duo, this morning I heard Cuddles’ chest rattling from a foot or two away. I found that a little alarming so I called the doctor’s  office and they asked us to go in later in the afternoon to get his chest listened to. We spent the morning pottering, we did some drawing and I got them both interested in playing some kids games on the computer. Then I went around the apartment and room by room made a “to do” list of all the tasks yet to be done. It gives me great peace of mind to get organized so I was feeling better about things once I had finished, especially after I ticked a few items off and delegated some to G.

Later on at the doctor’s we discovered that Cuddles has bronchitis. It wasn’t a great surprise as he had taken quite a turn for the worse. We always freak out a little when it comes to his lungs because of his stay in the NICU with pneumonia as a newborn. One extremely badly behaved visit to the pharmacy to drop off the prescription and we were back at home. G went to pick up the prescription near our new home but we didn’t realize there are two within a block of each other so he queued up for 15 minutes at the wrong one. I felt pretty bad about that as he had left work nice and early and ended up getting delayed by 30 minutes. We then spent most of the evening with Cuddles on the sofa trying to find something to watch which would be acceptable for him but not too mind numbing for us, this was difficult. He eventually settled down once I had come back from the laundry room with his boy pajamas. He had gone to bed in his sister’s pajamas because he only has 3 pairs that are not packed and he always manages to get them wet and dirty in the morning. He was not happy about wearing girls’ pajamas at all.

Anyway, all in all, not a terribly productive day, tomorrow I will surely do better out of a sense of urgency. I think we might go and get a donut first again as a treat, shh, its terrible, once you have one, then you want to go back and buy another.

Thursday April 28^th

Today is the last day before we move. The movers are due here tomorrow morning at 8am. Today has gone pretty well, the house now has a sense of calm over it as do I. Unfortunately G has been majorly held up at work and still has several things he needs to get done before tomorrow, I’m not expecting him till at least 9pm. I’m going to have my shower this evening and try to enjoy a little tranquility as there isn’t a whole lot I can do right now.

Polygraph over here please…

We are in the midst of somewhat of a lying epidemic in my household. I’ve heard we are not supposed to call it lying when children are 3 and 5 years old, but it certainly feels like it.

Cuddles just told me he didn’t put his shirt back in his bedroom as I had asked him because daddy (who is at work) told him not to. Littlest Bean went to Disneyland with her friend for her friend’s birthday. According to my friend who took her, she asked throughout the day to get her hair done in the Bippity Boppity  Boutique like last time. It wasn’t part of the plan of activities and one of the party was a 5 year old boy who surely would not have appreciated the experience so they didn’t go. When she came home she told me that she did go and get her hair done but that it had fallen out.  She also tells me more serious “mistruths”, one which even led to me speaking to her teacher. I found out later after much questioning  that none of it was true.  I’m still not totally sure whether that story was true or not.

I think the general consensus is that it is age appropriate and aside from not deliberately setting them up to lie, there is not much you can do about it. It is hard not to worry though when you don’t know if any of the information you get out of them is true.

Littlest Bean had a hula hoop show at school. The kids had dreamt it up and one of the teachers helped them to organize themselves and find music. When I picked her up from school one day and she told me about it I honestly didn’t believe her, although I didn’t say that directly. She said that we had to go straight to Toys R Us and buy her a hula hoop because the next day they were doing a big hula hoop show. I told her we didn’t have time to go and that I was sure if I were required to buy her a hoop I would have received an email. She was very upset. I didn’t receive any messages that day but the following afternoon I received an invitation to the show. It mentioned that they had plenty of loaner hula hoops so not to worry about buying one. I felt quite guilty about not believing her. We went to the show and it was fantastic, about thirty of forty kids simultaneously hula hooping to music, enjoying themselves so much. Her whole class came to watch and she was so proud of herself.

Another time she told me that her teacher had told her that she had to wear her hair in a bun. Again I really didn’t know what to believe, I’d received no memo and it seemed unlikely but it turned out they had just discovered a case of nits and it was true. We eventually received a memo about it. The trouble is she could come home this afternoon and tell me she needs to buy a new skirt for school because her teacher told her they all have to wear the same skirt. This wouldn’t be true but the way she says it, she really believes it. If you don’t know that it couldn’t be true it’s easy to fall for it.

Some of the lying, for example the lie about getting he hair done at Disney Land, I feel like I understand a little. Although I wish she wouldn’t. I suppose her little 5 year old brain feels like if she tells me it happened, it feels more real to her and she can imagine it did.

So what am I to do? I have no idea. I just hope we figure it out or she grows out of it because it’s one thing not being able to tell when your 5 year old daughter is telling the truth, but when she is 15 it will be something else entirely.

Four Go Bananas in Orange County

Today we had a long overdue family fun day. We made our now annual pilgrimage to Balboa Island in Orange County for frozen bananas.

Sunday morning things were not looking good, I had my first migraine in ages and a mountain of washing to fold. I luckily managed to get rid of most of the headache with meds but was left with a slurry tongue and an inability to deal with any stress. I asked my husband to plan a trip so we could get some fresh air, I didn’t want to do any thinking.

As soon as we were on our way we all felt in a much better mood. We came off the freeway for lunch at a diner. The waiter had A LOT of trouble understanding what I was saying, which almost never happens to me anymore. My theory on this is that they encounter less British customers down in Orange County,  but I could be wrong. Brits are ten a penny where we live. Anyway, I thought I’d treat myself to a side of seasoned fries with my soup but got fruit. Maybe the guy was just trying to do me a favor, so I ate the fruit.

Once we had wiped the kids’ lunch off their faces, clothes, hands, hair and seats we carried on to Balboa. We brought the kids’ Kickboard scooters along. These scooters are so awesome, and no one is paying me to say this. We resisted buying them for so long and finally after having no luck getting them excited about the scooters we had, and then one of the scooter’s repeatedly throwing the kids off it we tried out a friend’s. It wasn’t long till we bought the new scooters for each of them. Within a week it was like they had been born on them. I am just under the weight limit for my daughter’s  larger Kickboard so I got to try it out and it is so cool. The kids scooted around the boardwalk for a bit, we went up and down the pier and looked at all the people fishing and what they had caught. My son got particularly excited when we reached the end of the pier with that beautiful uninterrupted view out to sea when he noticed a table that had a ketchup bottle on it, “OH!! Ketchup! Look, Ketchup”. His new thing is to yell “OH” extremely loud whenever he sees something interesting or that he likes.

After riding around the park for a while we went for a walk around the other boardwalk on the opposite side of the island, the kids looked at all the photos of whales and big fish outside the fishing rental places and then we went and got our frozen bananas from the regular place. My son managed to eat almost all the chocolate and sprinkles off his banana whilst entirely avoiding eating any banana. He does like bananas, but he has his priorities.

Dirty Messy Scoundrels

If ever there were a great big muddy bog or a huge grungy puddle you could guarantee my kids would be in it, up to their eyeballs. They love mess and dirt and grime more than almost anything.

When my son eats he squeezes his food between his fingers and watches it bulge out the sides of his chubby fist. When my daughter eats yoghurt, she will deliberately trace the spoon around the outside of her mouth to make her brother laugh and then continue to eat leaving mess all over her face. If I ever give them an open container of liquid, a drink for example, they will find something to mix into it, sweet corn, bread crumbs, ketchup maybe. When they play with chalk on the balcony, instead of drawing with it they grind it, add water (if none is available they use spit, ick) and they paint the floor. When I pick up my daughter from school my kids are usually the only ones up to their elbows in earth feeling around in the ground hog holes that litter the grass. I do stop them, I am scared they will get bitten, but they are slippery customers (not the groundhogs) and before I have time to catch my breath they are back in the earth.

On the day we moved into our home my daughter was 3.5 years old. We shut our cat away in one of the bedrooms to keep her out of harms way while the furniture was being moved in. My daughter decided she wanted to go in and keep the cat company, she is a sweet gentle girl and was pretty responsible for her age so we didn’t think anything of it. She was playing very nicely and was ever so quiet, demanding nothing of us and letting us see to our then 1 year old, frighteningly active, boy and the small matter of moving. When I finally went to check how she was doing I couldn’t quite believe my eyes, she had got the (thankfully new) cat litter and mixed it in with the cat’s drinking water till it formed a paste and then smeared it all over (ALL over) a chest of drawers that had just been moved into that room. She did a pretty good job, she was thorough. Cat litter paste is very hard to wash off, it is so slimy and if it dries you are done for.

It has been raining a lot in Southern California recently. At the weekend we went for a hike in Malibu with some friends. After having to remove our shoes to wade over what had been a meandering stream and was now a rushing torrent of water we were able to begin the hike. The kids enjoyed being carried over the water by the adults so much they just wanted to keep doing it. Once we had dragged them away and put our wet feet back in our socks and shoes we were ready to start. The hike started beautifully, it was overcast with a sea breeze, perfect, the climb was gentle, just right, and there were hundreds of roly-polies (those woodlice that curl up in balls). To a group of 3, 4, 5 and 6 year old children the roly-polies were very significant. I had to eventually make my daughter put her fist full of bugs down as she was walking too slowly and we were lagging behind everyone. As we ascended the hill and took in the beautiful views of Santa Monica Bay the terrain started to get more and more muddy. By the time we had gone inland a little way and the climb became steeper it was beginning to get pretty slippery. On the first sharp bend all Hell broke loose. Now, we would have been OK if the group of 5 young kids had paid any attention to our advice on how to avoid the mud, ‘stay on the edge, walk on the grass” etc. but it was mud and they are kids. On that bend 2 of the kids lost a shoe (one of them my daughter, she was DELIGHTED) and one of them fell face first into it and had to be helped up, somehow her mum ended up with much more mud on her than her daughter did…weird. Skip to a few short minutes later and the TICKS were discovered, yes you read me right, TICKS. I had never seen or knowingly been in the presence of ticks before. There is something about them that just makes my skin absolutely crawl. Actually it’s not just one thing, the way they crawl, the way they look, oh yeah and that part where they bury their heads in your flesh, suck your blood and give you some random disease.  My daughter’s best friend had about 20 on the seat of her pants, about 20 more were found at diferent times during the rest of the hike on various people. They didn’t come near me, thank God, I would have not reacted in a positive or dignified manner. I walked slap bang in the middle of the path the rest of the way down and adopted what I like to think was a snowboarder’s stance (goofy I imagine) and slid. Anyone who knows me can easily imagine my reaction to ticks. By the time we had finished we all had mud up to at least our knees and went to get some very well-deserved fish tacos.

I should have known when we arrived at the playground this afternoon and I saw the big hole that had been dug in the sand box and filled with water, exactly what would happen. I should have taken a picture of just my two kids dancing bare foot in the sandy mud, it would have been a perfect photo. By the time we arrived at the playground this afternoon my son already had his second pair of pants on after having experimentally poured his bottle of water on himself in the car, it makes red turn darker you know. He also had dribbles of frozen yogurt all down the front of his t-shirt to which I was not giving a second thought. Like a moth to a flame he immediately went to play in the wet sandy hole, it was actually one of the most pleasant afternoons in the park I have had, because he didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t lose sight of him at all, in fact he was as happy as a pig in….,.. and so was I. He did eventually go a little too far, as they always do, with sandy water soaked well through his underpants and I had to wrap him in my clean cardigan and take them both home for a good scrub. I don’t own a washing machine much to my dismay, which makes all this slightly less fun and a heck of a lot more complicated.

Beautiful grubby happy children.

3 Year Check Up

Today I took my son for his 3 year check up at a new pediatrician. We are on a quest to contain our lives to only about 5 square miles to reduce our petrol consumption and increase my sanity. The new office is really close to my daughter’s school and right in the area we want to move to soon, also there’s free parking instead of the $6-$9 I had to pay to park at the previous doctors’ office or face trawling the streets searching for a meter.

The waiting room was a little small but very bright and airy with some nice toys, unfortunately it stank of poo, hopefully this was just left over from a recent situation rather than the way it smells all the time.  One thing I might have changed was the paint handprints all over the walls, I get what they are going for, but they used large adult hands, so instead of “cute” what I got from it was more  “CSI”.

We had to wait about 45 minutes to be seen which wasn’t a great first impression.  The nurse introduced herself, “Nurse Jackie”, this really tickled me, she was very nice and didn’t seem high at all so that was good. After my son had seen and charmed the doctor he had to have 3 shots. Oh my God my poor baby, he was trembling and shaking afterwards, sobbing so hard I could hardly hold it together.

He had recovered after about 10 minutes; my daughter was with us as she was having a sick day and was looking after him and sharing with him and trying everything she could think of to cheer him up. I have to take him back in a couple of months for 2 more shots, ugh, I shall dread it.

Party Time

Like many busy families, we don’t get to see a lot of each other during the week. Well… I see plenty of the kids but there’s little to no time spent as a family unit of 4. Our weekends are  extremely precious to us, when the children don’t get to spend enough time with their dad they act out, my son will give him the cold shoulder and not let him anywhere near him and my daughter will find other ways to test him such as being more than usually demanding. I miss his companionship and start to feel depressed if we don’t get to hang out together.

Although my daughter enjoys the Saturday parties she is regularly invited to, when they are clustered together one weekend after another it gets frustrating for the rest of us. Today was the fourth weekend in a row we had an “outside the family” Saturday commitment and I came very close to bailing on the party altogether. In the end I felt too guilty to the family whose invitation we had accepted and to my daughter. So we came up with the plan of driving up together and my husband taking my son out for lunch for quality boy time while us girls partied. It worked pretty well, my daughter’s friends were very pleased to see her and it was a cool party. She got to drive a motorized go-cart, float around in a paddleboat and play in this sort of human version of a hamster run.

In the future I think I need to schedule weekends on the calendar where we are spending time as a family so I am ready when my daughter asks me instead of being blindsided and saying yes to every single party. It’s getting expensive too with all those presents.

Biting...ouch

A few evenings ago I was busy tidying the kids’ room for bedtime whilst they played together in the front of our apartment in their heady after-bath excitement. Out of the contented chatter I could barely hear suddenly came the most sickening scream. I thought my 3 year-old had trapped a finger or otherwise gravely injured himself so I dropped what I was doing and sprinted to where the kids were playing. To my surprise it was my 5 year-old daughter screaming and in such agony but I couldn’t work out why. Eventually when she had collected herself enough to make herself understood she showed me her back where my son had sunk his teeth into her. Ouch, it looked so painful. I received the odd nip from my children when they were teething babies so I know how painful it can be but thankfully until this point biting hadn’t really been an issue for us.

I recently read an amazing book: Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. A friend sent the book to me, she had finished with it and wanted to pass on the love. Well, to date I have read it twice and I am sure I will read it again soon as I want every bit of information to remain in my poor forgetful brain.

I saw the situation in front of me as a very important learning experience for all three of us. I realized my response to what happened might be vitally important. I quickly dragged to the forefront of my brain what I had learnt in Faber and Mazlish’s book and went first to my poor daughter. My son tried to come in for a cuddle but I gently pushed him away without looking at him and hugged my daughter and talked to her about how much the bite must hurt and how I imagine she had also had her feelings hurt. We talked about how her brother needed to find another way of getting her attention without addressing him directly. I carried her to the sofa where I inspected the bite, gave her a colorful bandage and helped her to put her pajamas on. Only when she was settled did I turn my attention to my son. He was sad and shocked. I believe he has no idea, as it should be, how much it hurts to be bitten. I explained to him how very much he had hurt his sister and asked him to apologize, which he willingly did. Then I kindly told him he would be going to bed now before his sister and with no story. He protested a little but quickly settled down. Then I had time to comfort my daughter alone and she was feeling important and cared for by the time she went to bed.

My son explained to me that he had been trying to talk to his sister and she was ignoring him and that is why he bit her. I was pleased he was able to articulate what had happened and it gave me the opportunity to talk to him without anger about finding another way to get her attention. To date the situation has not reoccurred.  I was so relieved to have been able to find a way to deal with a horrible situation without relying on anger and raised voices.

Faber, A. and Mazlish, E. (1987). Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

hi thanks for reading...

I want to write about my parenting experiences, the ups and the downs, in a non-judgemental way that informs, supports and amuses parents and non-parents alike. This is NOT advice!