Tantrums and Bobble hats

Am I the only person who has a deep seated fear about how their toddler will behave in public? Maybe I don’t mean I have a fear of him, as much as the threat of him unleashing a full on Toddler Scream that makes glasses explode and dogs attack their own feet.

I find my fear of tantrum is directly proportional to the amount I like the people I am meeting, so taking Alfie to the Hertfordshire Home Birth Support Group on Saturday morning was seriously testing the upper limits of my deodorant, which was totally stupid because of all the places I should have felt 100% at ease, it was there.

A room full of supportive women and children of various ages all sharing and laughing and nyoming amazing cake together is just my idea of a fabulous way to spend a Saturday morning, but Alfie has had a battery upgrade from Snoozy Baby to Relentless Toddler and I knew it was going to be a big ask to keep him entertained for 2 hours while trying to hold sensible conversations.

Luckily for me Alfie was able to investigate the world of flapjack for the first time, and let me tell you, he investigated the shit out it. THREE SQUARES he troughed almost without pause for breath.

In flagrant disregard to my terror of tantrum, I made an effort to remove piece number 3 from his chubby little fists. Turns out my son got his cunning from me because he first outwitted me by grabbing a substitute piece with one hand while I was prising his fingers apart on the other, and then when I grabbed both hands he let out the opening notes of a piece he likes to call “I’m going to make your life HELL if you don’t let me go woman”.

He might be cunning, but I’m a woman. One of the other ladies had her adorable toddler with her, who happened to be the same age as Alfie. We managed to pen them into one corner of the room (away from the cake tray) and let them lose on some toys. The little girl picked up a saucepan lid and Alfie picked up a thick pink pen and started banging it.

So many puns about making beautiful music together – except for the fact that it was less beautiful music and more hideous clanging din. But they were happy and it meant we could join in the conversations so it was good enough for me!

After the main meeting had broken up, I ended up having a chat with the mum of Alfie’s new playmate and she got me very excited about turning my old jumpers into hats for Alfie (and possibly me too) by felting, sewing a few seams and then attaching some BOBBLES!!!!

Anyone recognise these from primary school?

 I spent my lunch making these and they have made me nostalgic as hell. So much so next week I might water down some oil paints and marble some paper just for the hell of it. We got to do so many cool things at primary school, and now I get to do them all over again!!

Goodbye L&D

It’s been a busy week of visits to hospital for Alfie.


On Tuesday I took him to have his skin prick tests at the dermatology department, which I really enjoyed. Alfie got to see his favourite nurse, and then got to eat stickle bricks out of tea cups in the waiting area while his tests developed. It was no surprise to find out that he had a reaction to hen’s eggs, although I did have to follow that up with an Awkward Question (TM) when I asked if that meant he would be ok with other types of egg. My thinking was that in the same way Alfie can tolerate goat milk far better than cow’s milk, maybe duck eggs would be easier on him than hen’s eggs. I don’t think there is a textbook answer to that one.

On Thursday Keith took him to see the dietician and Alfie had a great time dishing out a round of his new favourite pastime on the poor lady’s desk. Alfie’s new favourite game is called “I want to unpack all the drawers I can reach before opening and closing them repeatedly”. I can’t remember the last time his trouser drawer actually had a neat pile of clothes in it for more than 10 waking minutes. Anyway, the dietician was very pleased with him, as well she might be seeing as since he has come off milk and onto a proper diet he has jumped 2 (count them one, TWO) percentiles on his weight chart.

My son is officially a heifer. Well maybe not, he’s actually more of a tree frog. Every time I see him in the bath he makes me laugh because he has these teeny tiny spindly limbs, and a big round barrel belly. What makes me laugh though is that he is so proud of it: He loves staring down at it, poking it and sometimes even stroking it as if it were a baby bump. And then he hears me laugh and looks up at me with a big gurny grin on his face still clutching his bump and thinking he’s the funniest little boy in the world.

Both departments have now agreed that we are handling Alfie’s eczema/ allergies so well that he no longer needs to be under their care. Which of course is fabulous news.

To celebrate (in true Gibraltarian style) we went out to dinner. I chose the sort of pace we haven’t been to for years, and took Alfie to an oriental buffet. Yeah ok, sniff all you like, but it makes perfect sense when you have a child who is still discovering their tastebuds.

Keith and I frowned slightly when the waitress informed us that they would have to charge us £3.70 for Alfie’s meal. The same thought was flashing between us – that’s a bit steep, he might not touch a thing! – but we agreed and went up to walk the aisles of steaming trays.

Turns out that £3.70 was the best value we’ve ever had from a restaurant. At one point, Keith mused that they would be well within their rights to charge us for another adult because Alfie ate for AN HOUR AND A HALF .... SOLIDLY.

Keith is no doubt going to post his video for you on the other blog but I’ll summarise it for you here:

“Mmmmmm spare rib, nyom, nyom, ooooooh nuddle!! Gimme!! *stuff* nyom, water now!, *slurp* spare rib, nyom, nyom ...”

Repeat until small boy explodes, or fall asleep mid chew, whichever comes first.

At one point Alfie did actually lean his head over onto my arm and let out a huge sigh, mid chew, as if to say “mum, this is hard work, but I’ll get there”. What a little soldier, eh? Behaviour like this will make you very popular with your extended family young man.

Needless to say he slept like the dead that night.

Koala, and baked beans (apparently)

I’m going to show you a photo that will make you go “aaaaah” and possibly even wrinkle your nose ...

See.

This was lunchtime yesterday when Alfie fell asleep in this highchair after eating a load of baked beans.

In self defence I want to say that Alfie has had a cold recently, and is possibly also teething (yet again) and so is just pretty much a snot-sneeze of a child at the moment. We don’t make him stay up all night sewing wallets or anything. That would be stupid, he would eat the needles.

I only found out about this little episode later on in the afternoon when my husband told me over the phone. He said something else too, which took a while to sink in so caught up was I in visions of cutes. He said “and then I put him in the buggy to go up to the post office but he woke up”.

.... but then he woke up ... think brain think .... come on work it out .... HOLYSHITYOUMOVEDHIMANDHEWOKEUP?!?!?!?!

History tells me that I should have started scouting for a doorway or park bench on which to spend the night at this point because the second law of Alfie, right behind the one stating that Alfie doesn’t share food, is that Alfie doesn’t appreciate being woken up. That’s the polite version. The proper version involves language that would make your face explode, and he can’t even talk yet! That is how much the kid hates being woken up from naps!!

So by the time I walked in from work, the inevitable had happened and Alfie was in total meltdown. I’m being serious here, it was SCARY.

Not only was he bright red and raging the house down, he was so full of cross, it actually pushed out vital information from his brain. Like how to breathe. I had to resort to blowing sharply in his face to ‘slap’ him out of it. He was like the baby on the Incredibles when Syndrome tries to carry him off. Except actually I would have jumped into the jet engine.

By the time we had sat down to dinner the rage had all but blown itself out and Alfie had admitted that he was in fact a little sleepy. A decision he reached by whinging with his eyes closed for 5 minutes before face planting onto a spoon on soup and falling sound asleep at the table, again.

Needless to say it was the easiest bedtime I’ve had in a while.

Alfies Dream of Cuddly Koala

This weekend Alfie’s room had a bit of a refresh. His cot was taken down, his Ready Bed deflated, his armchair swapped with a smaller one from the lounge and his new bed installed. Yes, a new bed, a proper little boy new bed. With dinosaur bedding.


There were a lot of conversations about replacing the cot vs buying a bed, and we took a chance that the amount of time it took in scooping up escaped toddlers and replacing them in their beds now would pay dividends later. Plus with the cot dismantled there was a spare mattress kicking about which could be pressed into crash mat duty, so at least if Alfie did decide to ooze off the side of his bed he would have a soft - if not untidy - landing.

Was my son grateful and loving to me for all this effort on behalf of his comfort? Was he ‘eck, he was a little swine all weekend.

He had managed to collect a new set of germs at toddler group during the week and like his father, it turns out Alfie is a lousy patient. Worse, he decided to take out all of his frustration on me by causing me as much pain as he physically could. I have rarely had to set him down and walk away, but I had to several times this weekend for fear I might accidentally give him to the dogs to raise with a heartfelt “see what YOU can do with him!!”

The upside of his snot ridden, strop throwing, drool fest was that he was more eager than usual to take an afternoon nap ... in his new bed. When he dropped off I barely restrained myself from running a lap of the house at the thought of getting an hour or so to myself. Instead I took a photo of the cutes.

True to his weekend form, Alfie was just lulling me into a false sense of security on the sleep front because bedtime was HORRENDOUS. His favourite snugly toy is ‘walla brought all the way from the land down under by Rachy Chums. According to my son, ‘walla is cuddly enough to squish, soft enough to nuzzle, and heavy enough to wrestle.

Yeah, wrestling, that fun game we now play at bedtime apparently.

Bathtime? Happy little boy.

Bedtime milk? Snoozie little boy.

Tuck into bed? Snuffly little boy.

Just about to creep away? BAM eyes wide open, head spins slowly round to where ‘walla is nuzzled into him and it’s – to use sporting parlance - game on.

Back goes the duvet, over goes my boy, furry limbs flapping everywhere as poor ‘walla gets the pounding of his short life. I have no idea what silent transgression occurred but it was being remedied with extreme prejudice. I tried everything I could think of to get Alfie to calm down and go to sleep but he was having none of it, all he wanted in life was to wail on poor ‘walla’s ass.

In the end I got so frustrated I just walked away and left him to it. Keith came back from walking the dogs to find me sitting on the sofa glaring at the TV while a coyote got skinned upstairs. I can understand his look of confusion, because clearly this is not how I usually leave my son at bedtime, but he wisely chose not to question me too closely when I spat the words “he doesn’t want to sleep” up the corridor in his direction.

A few hours later, once the coyote party had been quiet for at least an hour, I snuck upstairs to assess the damage.

And that is when I did a perfect impression of a pair of bagpipes shagging a whoopee cushion.

My son was indeed asleep, snoring in fact, but he wasn’t in his bed. He and ‘walla were on the crash mat, walla lying face up and star shaped, my son curled up face down over him, like for all the world he had finally gotten ‘walla in a wrestling hold and then fallen asleep waiting for the count of 10.

Seeing as it was only 9, I decided to replace Aflie in his bed rather than risk him getting cold later on, so I managed to slide my hands under him and ‘walla and lift them onto the bed in situ. I mention this because that is how I know that ‘walla was absolutely soaking wet. I have no explanation for this, none at all, and the only one who did was fast asleep and also lacking the linguistic skills to explain it to me, so I can only hope that it was the result of prolonged chewing.

It’s at times like these that I miss my little baby boy - the one that couldn’t move, or bite with little rodent teeth, or yank hair out by the roots - but since I am now stuck with a Toddler, I just want to say fair play to you ‘walla, thanks for stepping in and taking some of the abuse this weekend, I appreciate it.

Mother Health International

It occurred to me recently that it’s been a while since I wrote about people who have had a big impact in the world of midwifery – these are the sorts of things I think about when I am out running – and then as if she had somehow tuned into the mêlée of my mind, Rixa posted an article on Mother Health International which made me scurry over to their website.


You can read what they’re about on their blog but essentially these are an international group of midwives providing care to women in Haiti.

What struck me most about these women was how women centric the birth stories were. This is going to sound stupid, but reading them, I found myself wishing I could have access to that level of midwifery care in labour. Which is total madness, because these women are working in a blow up dome in Haiti, and frankly I have stayed at campsites with better facilities than the ones they are having to work in.

Does that makes it more, or less sad that I nevertheless found the idea of birthing in their care more appealing than birthing in this country?

If you read some of the birth stories you get such a strong sense that these midwives, these women (and I’m not sure what order I put those attributes in here) are confident that a baby will find a way to be born. They recently posted a saying recited by the village midwives and elders among the African Yoruba “The goats have no midwives. The sheep have no midwives. When the goat is pregnant she is safely delivered. When the sheep is pregnant she is safely delivered. You, in this state of pregnancy, will be safely delivered.” I really love that.

These watchers put faith in the birthing mothers, faith in their attendants, and faith in their own skills. I love the sense of community that just beams out of their blog and knowing that they are volunteering in some really hardcore conditions, and yet barely mention them.

I find women like these really humbling.

Lazy Days

Sometimes the best days can come from the most unpromising starts.

This weekend was FA Cup Weekend – otherwise known as that time of the year when everyone gets excited about a team they have never heard of because they got new brave boots for Christmas and somehow caught a premiership team napping. Being a loving wife, I agreed we could get a few jobs done and then spend lunch in the pub watching the football.

We went to a local pub of the sort that would have made my blood run cold pre-Alfie. It has an indoor soft play area, need I say more.

Except this time the planets aligned and we had the most incredible day. We got a table right near the TV and ate a fantastic lunch. Alfie cleared his entire plate which was nothing short of frightening when you consider it was a proper child’s plateful and he is still a mere scrap. We went and played in the multicoloured room of plastic hell and I even kept up the tradition of soft play areas the country over and evicted some big kids who were just a little too hyped on sugar to play nice.

And then, just as I was thinking it was time to quit on a high and pack ourselves off home, our friends Claire and Sean appeared out of the blue with Alfie’s buddy Jamie. And that, as they say, was the end of that. Larry and Kelly had arrived as well so while Claire, Jamie, Alfie and I spent the afternoon catching up, Keith got to catch up with his friends AND we got to watch the second game, which for once I was all behind for the two reasons that a) it was a local team and b) I had bet money on them winning – which they did.

Alfie even got to practice his solo locomotion – oh yeah did I forget to mention that? My boy is walking!

I’m excited from the point of view that it is SO sweet watching him stamp at the ground like a little toy soldier before setting off for a few paces and falling flat on his well cushioned backside. He doesn’t do it very often though, and would rather maraud around the place with one fingertip dragging behind him for balance, but he’s certainly on his way.

All that excitement took its toll, so yesterday we had a bit of a lazy day involving snuggling on the sofa together.

Did you ever see a squishier mouth?

The Big F

I’ve been going for acupuncture recently for a couple of reasons. First I wanted to get on top of my eczema which has flared since I had Alfie, and secondly, I wanted to make sure that anything still left unhealed from my C-section was finally healed so that Keith and I could move towards having more children knowing that there was nothing standing in our way.

Yesterday I had a really awesome session where my doc "opened my gateway". I'm not entirely sure what gateway that is, or whether it is considered good form to charge entry now that it is open, but I do know that it made me see some craziness while the needles were in. First my sight felt like I had made finger goggles - try it - you can see a flash coloured border can't you? That's what happened to me, except there were no fingers near my face. Then I started getting mad shadows flashing over my eyes, a bit like on a sunny day when there are lots of little clouds moving fast and you see lots of little shadows zooming across the ground. It was mad.

Afterwards I went out for dinner with a good friend of mine who has been trying to conceive for a few years. She has just been to an appointment of her own and we spent a lot of the meal chatting over our respective situations.


It occurred to me driving home what a complicated relationship us women have with our own fertility. I have several friends who for a variety of reasons have/ are/ will struggle to become pregnant. It took Keith and I over a year to conceive Alfie so I had a tiny taste of the utter desperation that comes with that monthly rise and fall of hope. Does that relationship become any easier once you have had a child? Actually not really. On the one hand I will always be a mother. Regardless of whether I ever have another baby, I will always have had Alfie. I suppose on a really basic level, I will always know that my body was able to reproduce. But if I knew now that I would never have another baby, would I feel differently to how I felt when we were trying for Alfie?

Actually I don’t think I would.

For me it’s about expectation rather than a primeval need to seed future generations. My expectation has always been to have a family of more than one child. Hopefully, we will have several more children and the ability to conceive each of those children stands as a discreet need for me. I remember my best friend calling me after we had gone through months of “there’s your no f’ing bunny rabbit” to tell me she had finally passed the pee test. I was over the moon for her but also bitterly disappointed that I wasn’t pregnant too. I couldn’t understand then why she was so worried about getting pregnant when she already had one child, but I get it now.

There is a saying in the markets – Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Shares, babies, same difference.

To me, Alfie is only part of the story. An incredible part, but a part nonetheless. There has always been something about him that says that he needs to be part of a bigger whole. He has a personality (not unlike my own) that will expand to fill whatever size void is available and the makings of a pretty fierce attitude, which will make him an excellent big brother, but a lousy only child.

And aside from him there’s me, and my needs (yes, I do still have my own needs, I haven’t subjugated them to the greater good just yet) and I’m not finished with the process of birthing babies. I have a deep seated belief that my story as a mother is still only half told. I have more births stories left to tell, and more pregnancies to huff and puff my way through.

I feel guilty saying that in the presence of those who have yet to who have yet to become pregnant. I know in this age of atheism it isn’t easy to sell the concept of faith, but I do advocate it as the cornerstone of trying to conceive. Regardless of what becomes before and after, that’s really all you have when it comes to thinking those sticky thoughts.

Festive Season Roundup

Today is a very blue day for me because I’m back at work after 10 whole days of Alfie goodness. I miss him. LOTS.

The festive season was kind to us, and we spent loads and loads of time together playing, and snuggling and, well, just being. I love his smell, the faces he pulls, the way he wants me all the time. Staring at his photo is a very poor substitute.

I’m not sorry I was AWOL from blogging over the festive season, and I promise I won’t bore you with a tome describing everything we got up to – I don’t think I could if I wanted to because there aren’t the words to describe those millions of lovely moments you have together when you finally have the time and space to just ... breathe.

Instead, here are some photos from the last few weeks.

Alfie is currently sleeping in a sort-of-bed. Keith managed to smash the catch on his cot by accidentally losing the ability to throw a mini football against a wall so we were left with a bit of a dilemma. We decided to try an inflatable ready bed out because we were hoping it would simultaneously sort out the issue of the broken cot, and also the fact that we were going away lots over the festive season and just couldn’t face the trauma of making Alfie sleep in his travel cot.

It worked, but as an added bonus it has given us a daily dose of funnies. First there was The Claw – that nasty plastic orange thing you can see – which Alfie is so obsessed with, he woke up on the first night, realised he could get access to his toys and set about digging it out for the next 10 minutes. All we knew was there was a lot of lights flashing and electronic noises as if we had spawned some kind of mini mad professor.

In the morning we snuck into his room and found him curled up with it hugged to his side.

We’ve done a lot of sneaking over the last week or so - every morning in fact - to see where on the floor our son has ended up. He has yet to finish a night fully on his bed, but at least he has learned that the carpet leaves a very unhealthy waffle print on your forehead and now has the good sense to roll onto his back. Now that I am back at work I’m going to try and sneak him back onto his mattress when I leave in the morning. If I fail, Keith will have to get up and deal with the woes, but it means I get to cheat a sneaky morning squish, which I think is worth the risk. Then again I would, wouldn’t I?

We met up with Keith’s mum in London at Winter Wonderland and mooched. They took Alfie on a few rides, we ate mondo nyom at Jamie Oliver’s stall and mooched for most of the day.

There were loads of old stalls and rides and because the fair was German in origin, the folk in charge of the rides were of the very healthy opinion that parents should be able to decide on the health and safety of their children. So Keith took Alfie on a death slide.

Alfie was entirely unimpressed – and I don’t mean in a lip wobbling way – I mean his face was deadpan. You could almost hear him sighing in boredom which I think upset his dad a little. I think Keith was at least hoping for a bit of an arm flap, maybe even a chuckle, anything really.

Batsford family meal at a local eatery. Alfie shared my curry and rice with a flagrant disregard for the laws of etiquette and cutlery. I feel sorry for whoever had to pick the rice from the carpet but frankly, if you are going to advertise as child friendly, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Keith on our new Playstation Move. We spent ages deciding between the PS and Xbox, both of which have anti-blubber facilities these days (important in the post Christmas and post baby phases) but the Xbox needed a room bigger than our whole house, so it seemed pointless getting one when the only thing that would get fit would be my groin. I can think of more interesting ways to tackle that particular area of my body.