My Sister is a Plague Bearer

My sister is a plague bearer.  She always seems to get ill and pass it on to everyone else in the house.  Because of her plague bearing the Wolf, Tyger, Baby Bear and I have all had a cold this week.  Add to that the stomach bug she passed on to Tyger, who spent the early morning of Thursday puking, and it hasn't been a very fun week.

Tuesday was a hard day involving Tyger hitting and pushing Baby Bear even more than usual, throwing toys, shouting, crying...all the normal stuff, actually, but just more.  So much more.  The day - finally - ended with a bath.  Tyger was playing with his bath drum, Baby Bear with another bath toy and things actually seemed pretty calm.  Tyger mumbled something I didn't quite catch so I asked him to repeat it and he looked at me sweetly and said, 'I love you.'

Aww.  These are the moments, you know?  I said, 'I love you too.'  We'd had such a tough day and I'd been so frustrated and angry for so much of it but that moment just totally made up for...and then he stabbed me in the eye with the drumstick.  What.  The.  Smeg??

Wednesday was no better (possibly worse, actually, despite the fact it involved no drumsticks whatsoever) and Thursday was the sicky day, which was actually the best day of the week because - firstly - it's much easier to overlook bad behaviour and generally feel more sympathetic towards a child who's been sick and looks all tired and drained and - secondly - I think Tyger was just too tired to be a pain.  After the initial frenzy of cleaning up sofas, the floor, Tyger, his blanket and a towel the day calmed down significantly and mostly involved Tyger demanding food.  Constantly.

On Friday, in between lots of screaming, Tyger managed to get his hands on a tube of my dad's muscle pain cream and a little pot of my lip butter and smear them all over the sofa, table and himself.  I knew something was wrong when I walked into the living room to him saying, 'I dried my hands.'  When I put my cardigan on later in the day it became apparent what he'd 'dried' his hands on...

Baby Bear has also been ill (just a cold - no sick as of yet) and so has been a bit on the clingy/grumpy side.  As well as this, he has been waking up between 3.30-4am every morning and pretty much refusing to go back to sleep or - possibly worse - only going back to sleep about 20 minutes before Tyger wakes up.  After about three hours sleep last night I'm running on tea and chocolate today.  And maybe cake.  Hang on...definitely cake.

Soooo, to remind myself I don't really want to put my boys up for adoption I'm just going to write about a couple of things that are cute but not really worthy of a full blog post.  Let's start with Tyger.

I love when toddlers get to the point where you can have real conversations with them.  They say some funny stuff.  You know that.  There are whole programmes and internet pages devoted to it.  That funny stuff is largely what gets me through the day (you know, other than tea, chocolate and cake...and Peppa Pig and Thomas the Tank Engine).  Tyger's at that point where he can talk in full sentences and have reasonably in depth conversations with you but still trips over some of the pit falls of the English language.  For instance, I was singing the zoo version of 'Happy Birthday to You' a couple of weeks ago.  I assume everyone hears this at some point in their school life but just in case I'm wrong it goes:

Happy Birthday to you.
You live in a zoo.
You look like a monkey,
and you smell like one, too.

Sophisticated stuff, I know.  Every time I sang it, Tyger added 'three!' to the end and I could figure out why until my mum pointed out he obviously heard the last couple of words as 'one, two...' and was just carrying on the random counting.  I don't know what 'one, two, three' smells like but it's probably better than a monkey.

Along a similar line, Tyger has an interactive book with a puppet monster built in to each page.  On one page the reader is instructed to encourage the puppet to open his mouth for cleaning his teeth.  The suggestions for how to go about this end with something along the lines of, 'Or you could try telling him off.'

We have dogs.  One of the commands we use with them is 'off' for when they're on something they shouldn't be (meaning, when the demon husky is on the sofa) or when they jump up.  Tyger hears 'tell him off' as 'tell him, 'off''' and shouts 'Off!' every time we get to that page.  Why he thinks the best way to get a purple monster to open his mouth is to tell him to get off the sofa isn't clear but it makes me laugh all the same.

The last example is when we were eating lunch one day and I asked Tyger if he was going to eat his hot cross bun.  He got very angry with me...because it wasn't a hot cross bun.  I was perplexed by this until he told me it wasn't hot.  I guess it was just a cross bun.  He probably thinks those things have anger issues or something.

On to Baby Bear.  Baby Bear seems to have finally decided on a favourite toy/comforter.  Tyger never really was one for having a favourite toy as such (other than his hoover - which isn't really something that can be taken to bed and cuddled and unfortunately he's not that fussed by the cuddly hoover I got him for that very reason!).  He likes whatever he has received most recently but then moves on to the next thing.  He's very obsessive but - again, other than the hoover - that hasn't really extended to toys in any long term way.

My sisters both had comforter type toys - the older one in particular needed her bunny to get to sleep every night and had to take Bunny everywhere (often resulting in the Gorram thing being lost or misplaced).  It was inconvenient in some ways but also very sweet and helped her to get to sleep at night, which was a huge relief to my mum since my sister pretty much wasn't put down for the first nine months of her life (and still spent most of that time screaming).  So, I was hopeful Baby Bear might develop an attachment to a toy that would help his terrible sleep but after he'd had his first birthday it seemed unlikely...until a few days ago when he started snuggling up to a toy dog every time he went down for a nap.  It was bought by my mum when he was first born and is called Fergus (because I got Baby Bear to hit the keyboard on my laptop and 'F' was the first letter he typed so I went with an 'F' name).  He turns his head so his face is pressed into Fergus, cuddles him and smiles.  As if that weren't enough to make me produce all those soothing 'aw, look at the baby' hormones, he was upset when I got him up from his nap the other day until I handed him Fergus, when he immediately calmed down and spent the next hour snuggled up with the dog on my lap.

He may still be waking at some ungodly time in the morning but Baby Bear is slowly improving with his sleep...and hopefully I'll get lots of cute photos of him and Fergus in the years to come.

Okay.  That should be enough to get me through the next week without calling an adoption agency.  Hopefully, next week's post will be a little more coherent and structured and a little less like the ramblings of a sleep deprived crazy person.