Advice For a Toddler

After some serious blog posts recently I thought I'd lighten things up with my advice to a toddler:


1. Learn to say 'please'.

Or, even better, some cute mispronunciation.  It may seem like pointing and making a whinging noise will get you everything you want but you're much more likely to get something by putting on a sweet smile and saying 'pleeeease' in your most angelic voice (after all, it's called the 'magic word' for a reason).  Tyger used to pronounce it 'pwez' and Bear - who isn't as big on speaking as Tyger - just says 'eeeeeeeeee' with a cheesy grin and it has worked more often than I care to admit...especially when paired with pleading eyes (Tyger even used to add little supplicant hand gestures for good measure).  Demanding and pointing can just get my hacks up but a super polite and adorable request is very difficult to say no to!


2. Play with the least interesting toy first.

This is advice for any situation involving other children: toddler groups, playing at a friend's house,  being around siblings, nursery, having friends over etc.  As soon as you gravitate towards a toy, other children will also be drawn to it.  It's a rule of toddlerdom.  Other toddlers will be happy to play with a couple of trucks until they see you at the wooden kitchen with the toy toaster and then that toaster will become the most exciting thing in the entire Goram room.  So, play it smart.  Don't go straight to the toaster.  Make your way to the building blocks instead and play with those building blocks like they're the cat's bollocks.  (Wait...that came out wrong.  I do not advocate toddlers playing with cats' bollocks.)  Hopefully, the other little sods will be lured over.  Now, this is the important part: do not give up those building blocks without a fight.  If the other kid(s) don't believe you really want those fracking blocks they'll just follow you to the next toy.  So, grumble, get annoyed, make those annoying and persistent whining noises toddlers are so good at that make adults want to tear their ears off and once your enemy peer is really engrossed in building little towers smeg off to the toaster and toast plastic bread to your heart's content (or, more likely, post small objects into the toaster until it stops working).


3. Try to smile when the camera's out and fall asleep in cute positions.

You may not be thinking ahead further than your next tantrum meal at this age but Future You needs Present You to minimise the number of embarrassing photos your relatives possess to show girlfriends/boyfriends.  You're unlucky in that regard because living in the digital age means your parents can snap away all day every day in the knowledge they can delete all blurry pictures (or just store them all in some folder with the intention of going through and deleting all blurry photos as soon as they have the chance, which will never happen because the longer it's left the more photos there are to go through and the longer the whole thing would take).  There will be photos of you wearing a potty as a hat, crying and screaming because your breadstick snapped in half, dancing around naked, wearing a variety of questionable style of clothes etc.  This is inevitable.  However, you can mitigate the damage by making sure the overwhelming number of photos of you at this age are of your beaming face or endearing sleepy pics of you snuggled into a soft toy, cuddling someone, sleeping in your car seat with that fracking adorable little pouty mouth and squishy face look babies have.

Fewer photos of you slurping water off your highchair tray.

More photos of you asleep in your buggy whilst cuddling your favourite toy.

4. Enjoy all the sleep.

Whilst we're on the subject of sleep, this is important.  You are allowed - nay, encouraged - to spend as much time as possible sleeping.  I know, I know: you hate sleep.  Toddlers like going to bed about as much as I liked Lost in Translation (is there a more overrated film on the planet?) or Wuthering Heights (is there a more overrated book on the planet?) but one day you will miss sleep so much.  If you have children of your own you will almost certainly lament all those times you fought sleep, all those opportunities to drift in and out of consciousness and just relax and...I'm going to start crying at the thought of all those lost chances so we need to move on to the next point.


5. In fact, make the most of it all!

Seriously.  This is the only time in your life when it's totally socially acceptable to stick your fingers in someone else's mouth (unless you become a dentist, I guess, but even then you're only supposed to do it in a specific set of circumstances and can't just say 'ahhhh' to the nearest person then shove your entire hand in there).  This is your chance to demand spaghetti for breakfast and possibly be indulged.  You can spin round and round in the middle of a waiting room without people giving you strange looks (except the miserable types who give all children disapproving looks unless the child is sat silently looking at his or her feet).  You still get carried around when you're tired and all of life's problems can be solved by carrying round a plastic spoon (or is that just Baby Bear?).  Seriously, kid, it's all downhill from here so pick your nose in public and put gravel in your mouth whilst it's still socially acceptable.

Not that I really understand the attraction of gravel...unlike picking your nose...

What advice would you give a toddler?


Thanks to Aspie Sister for helping me come up with five items for the list.  Youngest Sister was not impressed by her boring name in last week's blog post so - after discussion - she will henceforth be known as Colour Blind Sister.  I will also probably blog about her colour blindness at some future point because...it's green - how can she see it as red??

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I Have a Confession

I have a confession to make.

I'm not a baby person.

I know, I know, that doesn't seem like a big deal and it goes without saying (except this is the internet so I'll say it anyway to ensure there's no misunderstanding (except this is the internet so there's always a chance of a misunderstanding)) I love my boys.  I'd do all the usual clichés parents would do for their kids: I'd die for them, I'd kill for them, I'd fly to Paris to rescue them from human traffickers and murder a load of gangstas on the way.  You know, all the usual parenty stuff.

But - and this is where I feel I deviate from the norm - I don't 'miss' the baby days with Tyger and I don't think Baby Bear is 'growing up too fast'.  All I seem to read in baby groups and from friends with babies is how upset they are their nine-month-olds aren't tiny babies anymore, how they're in tears over the thought of a first birthday, how nostalgic they are about teeny tiny sleepsuits and how morose they are at their baby moving up a nappy size.  I feel bad for them but I'm left wondering if I'm the only person in the world who just doesn't really like the baby stage.

I'm not saying I spend/spent the whole 'baby' part of parenting resenting my children or being indifferent towards them.  Of course, like any mum, I felt an overwhelming sense of love when they fell asleep on me whilst I fed them.  I felt all gooey inside when they started smiling.  I was convinced they were the smartest babies on the planet when they learned how to clap or sit up unaided or move around.  I was elated when they stopped pooping in the house and started doing it in the garden...or was that one the dogs - it's all run into a bit of a blur?  I even thought they looked cute and not like weird bulbous headed, purple, wrinkly aliens.

However, breastfeeding was excruciatingly painful to start with (and for months and months with Tyger) and every time one of the boys fell asleep on me I desperately needed to pee.  The smiling was lovely but the crying happened far more often.  They learned how to do things like clap and move around but got horribly frustrated before they managed (which resulted in more crying).  They may have tricked my hormonal, sleep dprived mind into thinking they were cute but looking back at photos I'm not convinced and they certainly look better once their heads aren't all squishy and bald.  And there's the crying.  Plus: the lack of sleep (oh, God, the lack of sleep), having to carry around a dead weight all day, the crying, the lack of sleep, the stress of starting solids, the crying, the lack of sleep, the crying...

Yeah, I know toddlers cry too.  I know sometimes they cry a lot, too.  Tyger tends to cry at least five times before 8am so I get it.  He can, however, generally let me know why he's crying, even if the reason is all the breadsticks left in the box are broken or one of his toys won't fit in another one or I won't hoover or I take too long hoovering and he wants his 'turn' or he wants to help me with the laundry but I'm making lunch or he wants lunch at 9am.  And, yes, it may be the case that most of my responses to his crying are met with, 'but why??' and more crying but at least I can respond and at least I know what's distressing him, no matter how baffling or bemusing I may find it.

With Baby Bear I have to guess.  Unless I see him fall or see Tyger smack him over the head with a ukulele (yes, that happened and the jury's still out on whether it was an accident or not) I have to assume it's tiredness or trapped wind or teething or...something.  It's incredibly frustrating.  I admit Tyger inexplicably spitting on all his toys/himself/the floor/the sofa/other people is also frustrating.  Tyger asking - several hundred times a day - if I'm going to do the hoovering and trying to dictate to me which hoover I use is frustrating.  Tyger refusing to let anything resembling a vegetable or a full meal or just...food pass his lips is frustrating.  Yeah, the tantrums, throwing things, hitting other people and himself, shouting all time are all really frustrating but not in the same way as Baby Bear's crying.  He cries when you pick him up as if he wants to be down and then cries when you put him down like he wants to be held.  And I can't ask him why or...bribe him with a biscuit (well, I'm sure I could but I'm not quite at the point of giving a baby biscuits to shut him up yet).

Baby Bear has recently started crawling, after weeks of almost but not quite part-crawling-part-rolling-part-commando-crawling-part-flailing where he'd just get himself worked up into a rage because he couldn't quite manage what he wanted.  Far from feeling sad he's now crawling - and by extension growing up - I'm soooo relieved he can finally do it because it's meant he's a little happier and easier to deal with.

The other thing that makes Tyger's behaviour easier to cope with is the fact he may pinch me one minute but he sweetly tells me he loves me the next.  Or I know five minutes before he throws himself on the floor in a rage over his Duplo 'castle' breaking he went around the room pointing at every one of his toys saying 'thank you' (or 'gankoo') for them.  He gives me hugs and kisses, he makes me pretend cups of tea, he says some of the funniest things I've ever heard.  As lovely as it is when Baby Bear gives me a high five or smiles or giggles, I can't wait for him to start talking (more than his current ability to say 'again' and 'Dad').

I guess what I'm trying to say is: whilst I love my baby, I don't look longingly at tiny babies in the supermarket, I don't sniff babies' heads (I think my two must have been faulty because I still don't get that whole thing), I don't well up over little blankets.  I'm not a baby person.

Sleep (or a Lack Thereof)

We’re stuck without internet because my parents are upgrading to fibre optic and...well BT/useless calls centres/stupid bureaucracy.  Do I need to say more?  Three days without internet so far and an engineer out today who doesn’t seem optimistic.  My teenage sisters are thrilled.  So, I’m writing this in MS Word and will put it on the blog once I have access to the world again at some point.  I thought I’d write about sleep because people obsess over things they can’t have so – other than internet access – sleep is something I fantasise about a lot right now.

Whenever you complain about being pregnant, everyone tells you, ‘this is the easy part; just wait ‘til you have the baby and don’t get any sleep for months and months.’  The funny thing is, once you have the baby everyone starts asking if they’re sleeping through yet.  So, after being warned babies and sleep are like...two things that don’t go well together (look, I’m not good with similes and metaphors) you suddenly feel like a failure if your tiny baby who has only been in the big bad world for a few weeks and needs to feed all the time because they have a really teeny tummy isn’t sleeping 8pm-8am every night.

Babies and sleep are chalk and cheese...no too much of a cliché (and also, what’s that about?  Why chalk and cheese?  Just because they’re alliterative?  I don’t know).

Tyger was not a good sleeper.  Well, to start with he was because he was jaundiced and not getting much milk due to a tongue tie and...that’s probably a future blog post.  But in the longer term he was – and I think this is the technical term – a little bugger when it came to sleep.  For a few months the Wolf got me to express milk through the day so he could feed Tyger in the evening whilst I got a couple of hours of precious sleep (oh yeah, if you don’t have kids yet: sleep becomes a commodity that can be traded and gifted when you have a baby).  But then the Wolf’s night shifts started (his old job sucked) and I had to largely go it alone.  The night was along the lines of putting Tyger to bed and him sleeping for an hour or so and then around the time I’d go to bed he’d wake up screaming and I’d be stuck in a loop of feeding and trying to get him down in his cot with the occasional break where he’d sleep for anything from a few minutes to maybe an hour if I was lucky until around 4am when I’d break and take him into bed with me so I could get a little sleep and to stop me from doing anything Social Services would disapprove of (although, let’s face it, they probably disapprove of co-sleeping as well because everyone seems to).

Hmm...babies and sleep are like oil and water?  I thought I was being slightly original there but a quick google has assured me this is a cliché as well.

At a little over nine months it was like someone flipped a switch on Tyger (why oh why could I not find that switch myself??) and his sleep dramatically improved to the point where within a few weeks he was sleeping through every night.  Basically, he was suffering from trapped wind every night until his stomach matured enough for him to deal with it without the, I'm assuming, agonising pain.

Baby Bear is – I’m hoping – just starting to improve with his sleep.  Maybe he has less of a switch and more one of those dials like a dimmer switch.  He’s still far worse than most babies his age but bad is an improvement on terrible so I’m still happy.  I have also been much more relaxed about the whole sleep thing this time round.  I deliberately co-slept for the first few months, knowing it would make my life easier and actually wouldn't mean Baby Bear was still sleeping in the marital bed when he was 35 with a family of his own.  I stopped when it got to the point where I was waking up feeling like an 80 year old every morning because of the amount of hip pain I had from contorting myself into bizarre shapes every night (Baby Bear is a BIG baby) and when Baby Bear got so rolly polly he rolled right off the bed one day (not when we were sleeping but I was still rather paranoid after that) but I was willing to give it a go for a while this time.

Anyway, for the time being I'm still getting a very broken sleep every night but I am keeping faith this will stop soon.  But if these blog posts are ever a little incoherent you can go ahead and blame that on sleep deprivation.

Babies and sleep go together as well as Tiny Tyger and vegetables.  Yeah, that's probably a little specific.  I'll try to work on the whole imagery thing for future posts, okay?

Not on Vegetarianism (Does Tyger Have Asperger's?)

Tyger is already moaning at me for not paying attention to him so we'll see how far through this I actually get before giving up and posting it unfinished (I know there's a 'save' button but if I kept working on posts until I liked them, I'd never post anything anywhere right now).

So, for one thing, the Gro Clock is still working really well.  For a child we very much suspect has Asperger's, it is the perfect visual prompt for bedtime and getting up time.  I'd highly recommend it.

And...I have an upset Tiny Tyger on my lap (I had the audacity to tell him off for spitting his milk out) asking for 'Piggle Piggle' and 'Uh Dezzy' (Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy are two characters from the TV show In the Night Garden, which is like The Magic Roundabout of today.  It's like crack for kids and annoys the hell out of me because of it's weird problems with perspective and...anyway...).

And so the post has been derailed.  I was going to write about vegetarianism and the ethics of bringing up Tyger and Baby Bear as vegetarians (and whether, as parents, the Wolf and I are imposing our lifestyle on them etc.) but my focus on that has been somewhat shifted and I imagine Baby Bear will be awake soon so...

ASD.

One of my sisters was recently diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (AS).  This is a label no longer used in the US but is often still used here in the UK.  Some people might know it as 'High Functioning Autism', or simply Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but it probably doesn't matter too much since it is all part of a spectrum, anyway, and one of those labels really tells you what - specifically - my sister has problems with.  A very, very brief overview would be to say she has problems with change or transitions, she has high levels of anxiety - especially about social interactions, she has 'meltdowns' (which mean as a 15 year old she will still occasionally get to the point where she rolls around on the ground or bangs her head off things or can't stop wailing or some combination) when she is overwhelmed, she needs a predictable routine in place and all sorts of other things.  Of course, that doesn't tell you much and there's so much more to it but...Baby Bear awake soon etc. (also, I have to put a chicken in a Fire Engine).

What I was getting at is it runs in our family (my dad also has AS but has never been formally diagnosed and there are diagnoses of Autism on both my mum and dad's sides of the family) and I have a reasonablish knowledge of AS.

So, we're pretty sure Tyger is an Aspie.  Maybe next time or the time after (if I actually write that veggie one next time) I'll actually run through some of the reasons for this.  The health visitors who did his two year check said it was too early to tell (and, hey, he makes eye contact and has a good grasp of language so that's a good sign, right? - nevermind that these are irrelevant when it comes to AS) and will get in touch again in four to six months to reassess and possibly refer him.  And that's fine because you might only get one shot at a diagnosis and right now a lot of his possible 'traits' might just be normal for his age so waiting until he's older and should have outgrown these things really does make sense.

But it feels dishonest to say he has Asperger's when he doesn't have a diagnosis yet and might not for years.  Yet it feels just as dishonest to say he doesn't.

I don't know.  Best wishes.

Fracking Gro Clock

I decided recently it was time to stop using a baby monitor for Tyger for several reasons, one which being we'll need the monitor for Baby Bear soon as he's getting far too big for the set up we have in our bedroom so will have to go into his own room (sob) in the near future.

Anyway, I bought Tyger a Gro Clock to help with this transition (and largely to help me with it, too).  For those of you who haven't come across these devices before it's basically a digital clock that displays a big star with twelve little stars around it through the night and as the night progresses the stars disappear until it gets to the time you have programmed in as your 'getting up time' when a yellow sun takes the place of the stars (it also glows blue through the night so doubles as a night light).

Well, it was a massive hit.  He loves clocks (or, as he unfortunately pronounces it 'cocks') and generally anything electrical/lit up etc. and particularly likes stars right now (which he calls - are you ready for the Goram cuteness - 'twinkles').  I had some problems setting it up because when your five month old decides there's really no need for sleep before midnight most nights (and still wakes up for at least one feed in the night) and your two year old thinks 5.30 onward is an acceptable time to get up your brain turns to mush.  So, for the first night I did little better than bash the - only three - buttons with my fingers and hope for the best.  I was sort of under the impression you needed to set a bedtime as well as a getting up time (you don't) and actually set the nap time instead and...not-that-long-but-too-long-to-bother-with-here story short the stars stayed on until 7.30 pm.

Anyway, I fixed that last night and Tyger just loves his new cLock.  It actually helps him to stay in bed (before he was fine whilst he got his bedtime story but as soon as you left the room he'd get out of bed, go to the door and scream) because he just lies there and watches the clock until he goes to sleep.  I think he also stayed in bed this morning until the 'sun' came out (6am).

The down side is the same down side we have with anything Tyger likes: he's very obsessive.  It's hard to do anything nice with him because he screams when it's time to stop and it's hard to buy him anything he can't have with him all the time because...well, he wants it with him all the time.  So, all morning he's been telling me he wants me to show him this fracking clock.  He's not the sort of toddler who can be trusted with a run of the whole house (even in a bungalow) so this would involve me taking him through the two separate baby gates and then lifting him up to see the clock (it's on a set of drawers).  Fine, except then he'd scream as soon as I took him away again.  He'd scream if I left him in there by himself.  And he'd even eventually scream if I just let him look at it and didn't make the 'stars' come out and re-enact 'bedtime' again and again and again.

So, it's easier to do nothing and let him get upset about that.