Because what the internet needs is more wittering about rubbish parenting



Sunday 27 May 2012

The Not-So-Littl'un

I haven't written much about our day-to-day lives lately, and I am not going to do so now, because I still have some friends who are yet to reproduce, so, in the interest of the continuation of the species, I will refrain from telling you how many of the night-time hours I have spent awake, and how many of the daylight hours I have spent scrubbing wee out of my carpet, over the last couple of weeks.

I have decided, instead, to give you a bit of an update on The Littl'un. I feel a bit guilty actually. The first few months of this blog contain many posts about how proud I was that my baby could do a new thing, and how terribly exciting I found it all. With the poor neglected Littl'un, not only do I not have as much time to sit blogging about all her achievements, I don't even seem to pay as much attention. Part of it is that I stress about them less - I know that as they get older, you can't tell who did what and what age, so I'm not sitting waiting and wondering why my child is so rubbish compared to all the child prodigies out there. Another part of it is that I'm just a bit more dozy these days.

So here are some things that The Littl'un does/is/has:

  • She has 6 teeth. Two of which I just found in her mouth one day with no idea when they got there. I think she might be getting two more, but when I put my finger in to check, she tries to eat it.
  • She can stand up on her own. She's been doing this for a while, it's pretty cool to me, especially as The Toddler refused to lift her lazy bum off the floor until she was about 15 months old. The Littl'un likes to stand for a while, before lowering herself carefully back down when she's seen an interesting-looking piece of fluff on the carpet that she wants to eat.
  • She can climb up the stairs. Which she does, at every single opportunity, looking extremely pleased with herself. She also has a seemingly hilarious game in which she climbs on to the first step, then throws herself off it. Must get a new stairgate before she decides to take this, literally, to the next level.
  • She can say "Hiya". I think. Certainly something that sounds like it, and is usually accompanied by a madly waving arm. We also have "mumumumu" and ""DADA", sometimes even directed at the right person. Oh, and something which I think is meant to be "panda". (Not quite as random as it sounds, we read a lot of Maisy Mouse)
  • She can grab a spoon off me and feed herself. What she cannot do, is accept that when a yoghurt pot is empty, that it is empty, and that no amount of screaming will make it have more yoghurt in it.
  • She can walk using her push-along walker, getting extrememly enraged when she pushes it into a wall, and seems to think that if she pushes hard enough and shouts loud enough, the wall will suddenly cease to be there. It won't.
  • She can see right through all my attempts to distract her from playing with whatever The Toddler is not in the mood to share, and will wait until my attention wanders briefly (she never has to wait long) to go and try to play with the forbidden thing. She also, if The Toddler is to believed, discovered a way of communicating to her sister that she wants to go away and play with something else. Erm, I don't think she does, love. I think she wants to stand next to you and annoy you.
  • She likes to give kisses. They're beautiful. How could anyone resist the sight of a baby launching herself towards them with an open mouth, a face full of snot, and a slightly manic look in her eye?
  • She is obsessed with "Wind The Bobbin Up". Obsessed. I know that something is actually wrong with her, and she's not just in a mood, if she has not calmed down by the time we get to "pull, pull, clap clap clap". The Toddler has taken to launching into it the minute The Littl'un cries. It's like a reflex. 
  • She quite likes clapping too.
  • She likes to pull on various bits of faces. Eyes, noses, lips - she's not that fussy. She especially likes to do this at 3am. I especially do not like this.
  • She could do better at sleeping. That is all I can say on the matter without weeping.
  • She is mischievous, far too curious and very good at screaming. But she is also a big bundle of gorgeousness (well, a titchy one, she's only skinny), and I can't believe she is nearly one year old. I should buy her some of those present things.

Sunday 20 May 2012

I Love My Kids..

I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids I love my kids.

Sorry. Just jotting down a helpful little mantra, for the next time I have a day like this one.

Thursday 17 May 2012

Well That Was Fun

Both my children are finally in bed, and if not asleep, then at least happy and relatively quiet, after a spectacularly rubbish bedtime. It's nights like these that make me realise how utterly ineffectual I am sometimes.

It started OK. The Toddler has been horrifically tired all week, after a very busy weekend away in London visiting my sister, which she doesn't seem to have quite recovered from, so I've been hearing "Uuuurrrraaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmnnnnnnuuuuuuuuuiwantthetellyyyyyyyyyyyyyuurrrrrrrr" pretty much all week. But by bedtime she seemed to have perked up a bit, and I was just about to read her second story, when she decided to purposely rip one of the pages of the book she had chosen. To be fair, the book was already broken, and the pages in question came loose long ago, but that is not the point. I let her get away with an awful lot that I probably shouldn't, but I do not take damage to property kindly, and especially not books. And especially not when it's the second page-tearing incident of the day. So I decided to resort to actually doing something about it, which as you may know, is not my strong point, and was possibly not the wisest move when all I really wanted to do was put her in bed and go downstairs and drink tea. Out came my best impression at being a Proper Parent who teaches their child about Consequences and Respect. I told her that if she couldn't look after her stories, then she wouldn't get to listen to them, so we would go straight to the toilet, song and sleep part of her bedtime routine. She thought about it, accepted the wisdom of what I was saying, and calmly proceeded to the bathroom.

Pahahaha.

Of course she didn't. She proceeded to have a massive tantrum, and I then floundered about at a total loss having not a clue how to deal with it. Because I, for reasons which are unclear to me right now, honestly thought that it would play out how I imagined it and described it above. Even though I KNOW my daughter is a stubborn and stroppy little madam who likes to have her own way at all times, I somehow thought that all that would happen would be that she would accept the consequences of her actions and all would be well.

It took me far longer than it should have done to realise why that was ridiculous, and when I did, it was like a mini-epiphany. The whole point of trying to teach her that her actions have consequences is that these actions, and therefore the consequences are Not Good Things. She is not supposed to be happy with the outcome, if she was, it would be a completely pointless exercise. I took away something she liked, and being a wilful, bad-tempered, nearly-three-year-old, she threw a wobbler.

I know, right? I'm a total genius. Seriously though, this has been a bit of a breakthrough for me. It might seem stupidly obvious, but I'm obviously a bit stupid. I've never really looked at it this way before. Well, maybe not NEVER, I'm not a complete moron, I just don't tend to analyse her tantrums in any way at all. I just dread them, because they always seem to come out of almost nowhere and seem completely disproportionate, and I never know how I'm supposed to deal with them, so I tend to do whatever I can to avoid them. But sometimes they're just expressions of rage, and that's really not the end of the world. As she gets older and wiser, she'll learn better ways of behaving in these situations. With any luck, so will I.

Monday 14 May 2012

Soon...

.. I will post something soon, I promise.