My Daughter, Master Storyteller.

"Once upon a story about a poor penguin called Peppapig. He got found by a big red owl, and they saw the sun in the sky and they saw the stars in the sky and they saw the moon in the sky and they saw the sky in the sky and a flower came out of the ground and they were happy and that was the end of the poor penguin called Peppapig."

Conflicted

Here is a small list of things which gave me a strange feeling. They give my children such joy (or at least, temporary unwhingey-ness), but are very annoying:

Mr Tumble (Shut up)

Soft play (Full of Other People's Children)

Glitter (My house looks like the bedroom of a 90s teenager going to a school disco)

Books that make animal noises (We have a cat one, a duck one, and a sheep one. They all sound the same)

Play-doh (If anyone knows how to get it out of carpet, please do share)

The Little Mermaid II (Yes, they made it, and yes, it's awful)

Cheap nursery rhyme CDs (My child now sings in a weird American accent)

Kids magazines (always an effective bribe, but I've now got about 700 plastic phones)

Rice cakes (They smell weird)

I don't know whether I want to give the inventors of these things a big kiss or a punch in the face.

Dear Sleep.....

It's been so long since we were last together, uninterrupted. Far too long since I used to spend all night, every night, wrapped in your warm embrace. I miss you more than can be said. Life is so hard without you, and my every waking moment is filled with wondering if I will ever see you again.

I was not naive. I knew there would be changes, that our relationship would suffer when they came along. But I truly believed that once they got to know you, they would love you as I do, and we could all live together in peace and harmony. How was I to know that they would shun your company for so long, and drive such a wedge between us?

I took you for granted, I realise that now. All those years when you were right there, waiting for me whenever I needed you, so reliable. If I had known then how things would turn out, I would have held on tighter, I would have made sure I appreciated every single moment I spent with you, and I would have woken each morning knowing exactly how lucky I was to have had you.

Oh, but how could you be so cruel? You never let my hopes die, never let me resign myself to life without you. Just when I think all is lost, you come back to me for one, sweet, stolen night, and it is as if we have never been apart. But then, once more, you are gone from me, and the next night is so hard to bear, knowing what a fool I am for daring to dream that I could have you back in my life.

And yet, fool that I am, I still believe that, one day, you will return. That one day, all will be as it once was, and that you will never desert me again. I can only hope that day comes soon, and when it does, I promise that I will cherish every moment that we share.

Yours yearningly

Bad Mammy

And The Award Goes To....

Serious muso journalist/interviewer-type bod: So, I am here with Bad Mammy, fresh from celebrating her first Ivor Novello award. How does it feel to win such a prestigious accolade?

Bad Mammy: It feels wonderful, serious muso jouranlist/interviewer-type bod. When we create music, we want to be heard, so to know that this song has struck a chord with so many people is really humbling.

SMJB: Can you tell us about the creative process behind this most extraordinary work, "Mashed Potato Baby"?

BM: Well, it was really a very organic thing, born, as so many things are, out of a very everyday situation.

SMJB: The best art usually is

BM: I agree. Anyway, I was bathing my children one night, and feeling very at peace with the world, and feeling very, connected to these little people, you know? And I just looked at The Littl'un and thought "You are COVERED in mashed potato"

SMJB: Which, of course, became the first line of the song .

BM: Yes. And the second. And, indeed, the third. And the reaction that it received was just so visceral. It was really inspiring, and I knew that I just had to share this song with the world.

SMJB: And I think, even just that first part of it would have been an instant hit. But it's what happened next that made it such a revolutionary concept...

BM: And again, it was a very organic process, the collaboration. I really owe this award to my elder daughter, the song literally wouldn't have existed without her. The improvisational quality of the fourth line, where instead of "Mashed Potato Baby", we have "Mashed Potato Teddy", or "Mashed Potato Mammy", or "Mashed Potato Toothbrush", comes completely from her just interacting with her environment, and her completely instinctual response to the things she sees.

SMJB: And that's really what makes the song so special. Are we going to see great things from her in the future?

BM: Oh definitely. Her lyricism is really astonishing for one so young. She has a way of expressing herself in such a way that it really makes you think, and wonder what deeper message she's trying to convey. Right now, she's developing set of re-workings of "Row, row, row your boat", which includes the lyric "Rock, rock, rock your boat/ Gently down the stream/ If you see a mouse/ Tapping on the wall". She blows my mind.

SMJB: Like mother, like daughter, clearly. Well, I think we'll all be keeping an eye out for her in the future. Thank you, Bad Mammy, and congratulations on getting the recognition you deserve for your musical efforts.

BM: It's been my pleasure, Serious Muso Journalist/Interviewer-type bod.

It Speaks! Kind of.

It appears, that at some point over the last....erm.... some period of time, The Littl'un has learned to talk. Ish. She is definitely saying some things that sound like proper words, and she seems to even mean those words. I have no idea when this happened. Poor little Littl'un. It seems that, as my second child, she has to be practically debating for Oxford before it occurs to me that something is different. With first children, at the first hint of a word, you excitedly spread the word of your offspring's genius -  "She said Mama! She's talking!!!" before realising that she will say "Mama" at you, her father, the checkout operator at Sainsbury's, a sheep, and a crisp packet, and that you have perhaps jumped the gun. But second time around, having got used to holding fully comprehensible, if often frustrating and/or surreal, conversations with a child, I don't seem to have paid much attention to the early burbles.

So now we have some actual semi-words. Admittedly, they are not the most useful of words. She cannot yet, for example, tell me what she is looking for when she tries to stick her head down the toilet, or why exactly she felt that 2am this morning was the perfect time to get her scream on. But she can say "bear" and "ball" and "moo" and "quack" and "baa" and "hiya!" and "bye" (ish, this is still mostly "aye". Maybe that is what she means. Being a proper Geordie and that) and "ta" and "ba-a" (banana) and "ap-ap" (apple) and "gap" (grape. She knows her food) and "keddle" (cuddle) and "pleh" (please) and it's all very cute. I'm very proud. As is she. She claps herself a lot, this girl. No problems with self-esteem there.

I like this talking thing. I especially like the early talking stage. It's great when they have learned enough language to begin to tell you what they want, but not quite enough to argue with everything you say, or announce to everyone that you did a big pump. I shall enjoy it while it lasts.

Why bother....?

A story from the Daily Mail did the rounds on Facebook the other day, and I will confess that I read it. It was about a "new" parenting test they'd come across (apparently it's not new, it's been around for years, but since when did the DM let silly things like "facts" get in the way of what they wanted to say?). This test consisted of 14 exercises that prospective parents should undertake to prepare themselves, including such things as "Dressing Small Children" (trying to stuff a live octopus into a string bag) and "Grocery Shopping (take an unruly goat to the supermarket with you). It was quite funny, and horribly familiar to many of us with small children, but Google it if you want to know more, as that's not what this post is about.

No, this post has come about because of something that I hardly ever do, which is read the comments below a Daily Mail article, and something that I really try and avoid doing under most circumstances, which is read them by "Worst Rated" (I usually don't partake in this kind of activity, because it hurts my head when I smack it off my keyboard in despair). Many of the worst-rated comments went along the lines of "Well this is complete rubbish. My children slept through from 2 days old and have never once run away from me or tried to put crayons in the DVD player. No wonder the world is in the state it's in if people have no standards and this is why we have feral children running round the streets and excusemeletmewipemymouthIappeartobefoamingatit". Good for them and their perfect children, I say. I only hope that sense-of-humour failure isn't hereditary.

The other type of comments seemed to come from people who are not parents, yet find themselves surrounded by them. I have some sympathy with them. Parents can be terribly boring, let's be honest. We have shrunken vocabularies, and an apalling disregard for normal social boundaries when it comes to discussing bodily functions. These commenters had clearly had enough of this kind of talk, and were using this opportunity to have a bit of a rant. "Self-indulgent nonsense! Why do people even bother to have children if they're going to do nothing but whinge about them?!! And why, if I have no interest in hearing people talk about parenting, have I even read this article, let alone commented on it?!"

Which brings me, finally, and clunkingly, to the point of this post. It occurred to me that the test was pretty similar to a lot of my posts on here. So perhaps some of you lot are wondering why I bothered having kids if all I was going to do was complain about them. And if you are, well, here's why:

1. Because kids are freaking awesome.

No, really, they are. Especially mine. You might not believe it from everything I write about them, but they are, absolutely, without a doubt, the most delicious, fantastic, cleverest, wittiest, cutest, funniest, adorablest things in the whole entire wide world. The Littl'un opens her whole face to give kisses. The Big'un, if you look sad, comes over and says "Do you need a cuddle? Give me a smiley face." These kind of things make my heart scrunch up. I am prouder that The Littl'un knows what noise a sheep makes, and that The Big'un can recognise and sometimes write the letter 'L', than I am of anything I have ever achieved on my own. But no-one wants to read that, really, do they? The things they can do are of no interest to anyone who is not related to them.  And it is really, really hard to write well about the nice stuff. This love is bigger than words. If you try to find the words, they come out corny and sickening and will put people off their lunch. And I'm a feeder, the thought of causing other people to not eat is very concerning for me. Far easier, and far funnier, to focus on the more trying stuff. There is a certain amount of surreal comedy to life with small people that I, for one, find quite easy to write about.

2. Because kids do this weird thing called "growing".

Yep, you heard it here first, folks. Babies do not stay babies. Toddlers do not stay toddlers. There may well be people who actually don't particularly agree with my first statement, and are not that fond of having "kids". But perhaps, the years of arguing about how to eat sandwiches and singing "The Wheels on the Bus" are not the whole reason that people enter into parenthood. You don't just have a baby, you have a whole person. I am still my mother's daughter at 31 years old. And she probably gets more out of our relationship now that I can hold a semi-intelligent conversation and go shopping with her, than she did when I would do nothing but scream in her face (that was when I was a baby/toddler, by the way, it wasn't last week or anything). Unfortunately, even if they're not your thing, these early years have to be done, but I am not aware of any law that says they have to be enjoyed.

There are other good reasons to have children, such as getting to play with Lego, and being off work for a while, and being able to park in parent and child spaces at the supermarket. But despite all of these undeniably attractive perks, life with small children is bloody hard work. It is messy, and frustrating, and veers wildly from being quite boring to unbelievably eventful. It contains many things that are downright not fun. So you will have to forgive us if, every now and again, a little bit of complaining slips out. Or maybe a big bit. Because, while there may be people out there who get bored of the whingeing, there are also people out there who NEED the whingeing. They need to know that there are children out there who aren't perfect. That they are not the only people who are struggling. That they are not the only people who constantly worry that they are doing it all wrong. The blog posts that have described your own hellish day to a T. The Facebook statuses that we could have written ourselves. The sympathetic wry smile from a stranger who's been there, dealt with that tantrum. All these things make us feel a little less alone.

Rumbled

Ah.

The Big'un appears to have noticed something. Namely, that during this evening's bedtime story, I skipped a page. Actually, I skipped two. The story in question is "Love You Forever", that beloved American story made especially famous by Joey out of Friends. In case you are unfamiliar with this story, it is about a mother who sings to her baby a little song: "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be". She then continues to go into his room when he is two, and eight, and a teenager, to sing him the song. But then, but THEN, he grows up and gets a flat on the other side of town. And in my version of the story, she respects her son's privacy and space, and sees him twice a week for dinner, and that is that until the mother is very old and sick and the story heads towards its touching conclusion. I have been refusing to read the pages wherein she gets a bus across town, lets herself into her grown son's apartment and sits next to his bed and sings him the song, as I feel this mother may have some boundary issues.

But the beady-eyed Big'un is clearly not going to be fooled by this approach much longer, so it may be that I have to swallow my disapproval of such shennanigans and read the whole thing. Or bury the book at the back of the shelf, and stick to other stories, such as the story of Crumpet the Dragon, or The Gruffalo. Much more realistic.