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.

Boys Room Project

My son is obsessed with superheroes, not one in particular but all of them. I'm becoming quite the authority on superheroes and super villains.

One a recent trip to Jo-ann he found this fabric he really liked, for obvious reasons, so I made him some bunting, a pillow case and a cushion cover for his bedroom. I though you might like to see the fruit of one of my current obsessions. I'm not a particularly talented seamstress but I tend not to let a thing like not knowing how to do something properly stop me.

Please excuse the quality of the photos, I used my cell phone camera and sometimes I just can't quite get it to focus :)

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.

Go to Sleep my Baby

I have been avoiding writing this blog post. I want to write it but even as I sit down to begin I feel traumatized by the sleep deprivation I suffered for the first four and a half years as a parent.

When we had our son, 26 months after we had our daughter, I was working on the illogical and highly optimistic assumption that we couldn’t possibly be unlucky with sleep again, that just wouldn’t be fair. Obviously the world is an extremely unfair place and we are pretty damn lucky in almost every aspect of our lives. When you are averaging about 2.5 or 3 hours broken sleep a night it is hard to remember how lucky you are, or in fact what your child’s birthday is or what your husband looks like.

For those four and a half years between my first child being born and my second child turning 2 and a half, sleep deprivation affected my life in plenty of unforeseen ways. I would freeze when someone asked me what I had done the day before completely unable to remember. I never really felt tired, just like I was in another dimension, removed slightly from reality and certainly not “myself”. I would break things and lose things but what bothered me the most was that I lost my sense of humor and to a large extent my ability to socialize with anyone other than close friends. I remember blankly staring at other moms during playdates wanting to make the effort to be upbeat and chatty but not being able to think of a single thing to say.

I’d like to give some background to the circumstances surrounding our children’s arrivals as I think the stories are definitely linked to my choices when it comes to helping my children to go to sleep at night. It may be a little traumatic to read, if you don’t feel up to it, skip a few paragraphs.

Our start as parents, as I have mentioned before, was rocky. Our daughter had to have surgery at 48 hours old and nobody ever reassured us that she would be OK, the day she was released from hospital at just under 4 weeks old with a feeding tube still attached to her tummy was the first indication we really had that she was going to make a recovery. Still to this day at 5.5 years old nobody has ever told us that she will not have any further problems or that she will be OK. It is plainly obvious to us that her problems are all behind us, she is a perfectly normal well functioning little girl with no serious medical issues. It wouldn’t have hurt for someone to put a hand on our shoulders and tell us “hey you know what, we’ve seen this before, she’s doing really well, I can’t make you any promises but I really expect she is going to do just fine”.  What we got was more than we ever dreamed of so I should definitely not be complaining. For a couple of years after she was born it was hard to understand how we could be so lucky.  I try to remind myself regularly of just how lucky we are, it’s easy to forget on those days when the challenges of parenting leave you frustrated, confused and tired.

When we were expecting our second child I had many scans to make sure our baby would have none of the problems our daughter experienced at birth. Statistically it was more likely he would have the same birth defect and statistically it is more likely our daughter will have a child with that birth defect. Something I’m not looking forward to explaining to her, but hey, at least she’s here, at least she should be able to have children should she choose to.  When our son was born by a scheduled repeat c section on a predetermined morning in December it was a very different experience than my first delivery. With my first child I was in labor for 45 hours and finally wheeled into surgery vomiting and in the firm belief I was dying,  that was before we found out our baby was ill, I shall hold on to that story a little longer.

As with my illogical theory on bad sleepers and not being unlucky twice, I also believed that there was no way my second baby could be born with a medical issue because that wouldn’t be fair. We were reassured by all the tests we’d had but I’d actually had extensive scans in my first pregnancy that never picked up any abnormality. When he was shown to me in the operating room I was overcome with the relief of finally meeting my boy and him being so healthy and strong. What I couldn’t hear in my euphoria was his barking rasping breathing. I’ve had it described to me by husband who was there but I was completely unaware of it, I guess I just believed he was healthy. They made light of taking him to be checked out in the NICU as if it really wasn’t a big deal but he ended up being in there for 10 days. Nobody has ever come up with a definite reason for his breathing problems at birth, it could have been pneumonia, it could have just been that his lungs were immature. The most terrifying part of his stay in hospital for me was how slow his progress was. When our daughter was so terribly sick after her surgery, her body swollen up to twice its width, she still made unbelievably fast progress despite the odd setback.  The surgeon who has been performing these operations her whole life told us our daughter was the best outcome and quickest recovery she has ever had. On Christmas eve 2007 I went to visit our little baby boy in the hospital and was so exasperated by how his recovery was crawling along so slowly it occurred to me for the first time that he really might not make it. This quickly turned into despair, and I became more and more convinced he was going to die. Then on Christmas day he started to improve slowly, I went to see him twice before and after dinner. A few short days after Christmas he was fully recovered and released from hospital. Incredible. Never ever underestimate a little baby’s resiliency; they are so much stronger than they look.

So all that background leads up to me explaining that my kids both woke up, from being a couple of months old, every 20 minutes to every hour and a half all through the night, every single night and would never nap for more than 20 minutes. For my daughter this stopped around 2 years old and for my son a few months later. With my first child, I had the dubious luxury of being able to control her sleeping environment. I bought several books that I read over and over, I tried everything. I tried leaving her to cry it out once, I lasted 20 minutes and then went in to check on her and the sight of her tearstained face sitting up in her crib put me off forever. I still feel guilty 5 years on. Suffice to say I am indeed a MAJOR soft touch, so sue me. I would always think back to my daughter’s first month when she slept alone in the hospital every night. With my son the similar sleeping patterns led me to eventually let him cry, but after 90 seconds, that’s seconds not minutes, he vomited. It turns out, and it is still true to this day, that if he gets too upset he will throw up, copiously, all over the place. So that was that. I went back to trying all these different techniques I had read about really to no avail. I think since my children have matured into their sleeping, my endless sleep research has finally benefitted us, but not at first. Now they go to sleep at 7.30 most nights and wake at 7am, regular as clockwork, and we do not hear from them in between unless they are unwell. Now here comes my finest most “groundbreaking” piece of advice learned from many many hours of research and trial and error: PUT THE BOOK DOWN, CHILL THE HELL OUT, YOU CANT FORCE THEM TO SLEEP, IT WILL BE OK, YOU’LL MAKE IT THROUGHT THIS, ASK FOR HELP. I do wish someone had told me this, although I don’t suppose I would have listened, how could you not try when you are getting so little sleep. I was miserable. Those books convinced me that I could change the situation if only I would follow the steps correctly. But it never worked, so I blamed myself for not doing it properly. It makes you wonder, there are a lot of people making a lot of money from desperate mothers just like me. Making us feel like it’s our fault. It’s not your fault. A baby is a person too, you can’t control her, you can only guide her and hope she does what you want. And by the way, nothing lasts forever, and women are strong as Hell when we need to be.

As an afterthought, anyone else who wants to know if we will try for #3, please see above.

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.

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.

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!