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Posted on 05/08/2010 by Ann

S’bin a while, I know. The matchsticks I’m propping my eyelids open with keep snapping.

Harry, Caesar, Praefectus, Princeps, Imperator, etc, turned three on Monday and was carted by his adoring mother and grandmother to a theme park that was quite ridiculously old for him, but featured Thomas (the Tank Engine) Land. The crowds were monstrous oppressive and Harry did badly in the resulting ride queues – no surprise. We went on one ride, plus a trip on the Actual Real Proper Thomas Himself (shssshh!) that was oddly queueless.

We toured the zoo and the climbing frames twice, and, taken all in all I think he enjoyed himself.

Mother & I, however, walked out of there several decades older. We lost him. Twice.

The first time, we were in a closed soft-play area

with a member of staff on the door, which slightly mitigated my unease when he vanished off the play frame. After a couple of minutes I asked the resident staff member to search the frame for a little boy with a black t-shirt and brown trousers (I have a deliberate policy of putting Harry in primary colours on trips to public places. Planning FAIL.) as parents were verboten. Which wouldn’t have stopped me going on to look for him, as such, but the majority of the frame was fairly visible from the ground. I searched the toilets. Mum searched the toilets. I asked the door guard. I began to fight down the panic and the visions of a small crumpled body at the bottom of a drop… or his neck caught up in a rope net and hanging…

You don’t want an imagination like mine, I assure you. It is not altogether a blessing.

Suddenly, he appeared like the genie of the bloody lamp, waving a cushion from the tiny toddlers area, under which he had evidently happily concealed himself.

Little bugger. Sigh.

The second time was… worse. Oh, so very much worse. He disappeared around a wooden climbing frame to re-climb the steps… and didn’t appear at the top. After a few seconds – 10? 15? – I wheeled the pushchair around the frame, surveyed the surrounding 30 to 40ft and – nothing. Vanished. Total Lord Lucan. 

Of course, black and brown really stand out against a double row of 100-yds of wooden climbing frames,

especially when there are hundreds of galloping, climbing, bouncing kids, skittering about in frenetic Brownian motion in front of you. (This photo was taken much earlier, when the place was virtually deserted.) I started off puzzled, moved swiftly through sinking unease and alarm, and rapidly reached heart-in-mouth stage.

I abandoned the pushchair, stationed Mum at the nominal exit area – horribly aware that if someone had taken him, they could be out and a fair way off, by now – and ran round like a demented hamster looking high and low, but it was chockablock with kids and I could see nothing. I started to scream his name, aware that A) there were probably a dozen or more Harrys looking up at me, B) he wouldn’t hear me if he was concentrating on clambering and C) he wouldn’t respond usefully even if he did.

Eventually – and I couldn’t tell you how long it was after he disappeared, only that I had time to die several times – I caught sight of him crawling into a tunnel. I dived after him like a chubby kingfisher and hauled him unceremoniously off the playframe (how I didn’t actually puke on him in sheer relief, I don’t quite know) before proceeding to give him what was not only the loudest shouty-bollocking of his entire life, but also, the most thoroughly undeserved.

Because I’ve never told him to stay close to me, or to make sure he can see me. He doesn’t know what ‘lost’ means; I’ve never explained the word to him. He doesn’t look behind him, he doesn’t seek reassurance, and he’s overwhelmingly self-assured because he knows I’m always there. Watching. The one place I let him roam out of sight is our local softplay barn because I know he can manage all the equipment – and I’m always between him and the gated exit. He’s growing up confident in his own abilities and secure in the knowledge that he’s never, ever come looking for me and not found me straightaway. Great!

Consequently, I imagine his bollocking came as an incomprehensible and puzzling surprise to him. Poor lad. He’d crumpled sadly into chastened tears by the time I’d returned to Mum and she’d retrieved the pushchair – not quite where I’d left it, I noted, absently; a fact which made sense later when I realised that his lovely, favourite dinosaur sunhat had been stolen off it.

*short pause, while we all wish haemorrhoids with infection complications on the perpetrator*

I had lost the will to slog on after that, and Harry was clearly tired – and upset! – so we left, and it will be some years before anyone gets me back there again. 

Harry’s party, on the other hand was lots of fun, and unmarred by aggravation, although there was a tricky time when New Toys were shown to Harry but he was prevented from actually touching them Immediately, Straight Away, This Minute, SERIOUSLY, LEMME AT ‘EM RIGHT NOW!

All the very best 2 year olds and 0 year olds attended, as well as a very honoured (more in the breach than the observance, as it turned out!) guest who had celebrated a very special birthday a leetle larger than 3 a couple of days previously, and had come all the way from Australia to do so – and had then driven the ball-breaker from Chester and back simply to come to Harry’s party. I’m not quite sure how we would have managed without her, but she tackled Miles Behind Party Prep like a bona fide hero. Harry was, sadly, insensible of the nature of the honour of all these far-flung guests, both toddler and adult – all of whom I managed to converse with not nearly enough, which was rather a pisser – but his mother was supremely touched and happy they were there, nevertheless.

(I had, in fact, done rather better with my bloggy visitors the day before, being able to devote several hours to a door-passing May and H, who are not only always an immense pleasure to see, but whom I now know so well that I no longer feel I have to render myself stressed by cleaning up before they arrive…)

So. I know you want cake photos, yes?

I had a demanding client brief, involving much signing of ‘tractor’, ‘digger’ and audible ‘choo-choo!’s. I couldn’t quite see how to incorporate all of these, initially, until inspiration struck. I was pleased with the end result, although leaving the elaborately-constructed chocolate collars

(designed to conceal the box forming the tunnel) in the fridge at home (along with 2 large cheese & pineapple ‘hedgehogs’, 80 cocktail sausages and 2 pots of houmous)

narked me off, rather.

The crane, tractor, digger and battery-driven train were all new, hence his sudden and desperate eagerness to pounce on them.

Waiting until the end of Happy Birthday nearly finished the poor lad off.

And my baby is now 3.

3!

Christ. Stop now, please.

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Can’t I Use My Wit As A Pitchfork?

Posted on 09/07/2010 by Ann

Hello! Anyone still here?

I was last seen making a wedding cake. Happily, the cake itself was munchable, consumed at a gratifying rate, and thus I wasn’t precisely displeased with it… yet vaguely grieved that the finished article had not turned out exactly according to the picture in my head. In my aesthetic defence, not very many wedding cakes are A) constructed to withstand a 100 mile journey in the back of my car and B) made without a single structurally bracing currant/raisin/sultana.

P1070410

The weight of the cakes militated against a trial-stacking of the tiers with all the icing damage risk inherent in that process, so I didn’t realise quite how zigguratty the middle tier was until I actually got there and… yeah. This is interesting to no-one except me, correct? It was edible. Everyone important seemed pleased. Call it a B-minus pass!

Harry and hotels mix badly in our imagination, so  we towed the caravan down and stopped in Wellington Country Park. I’m not much of a one for forest campsites, generally – my primeval lizard hindbrain likes to spy predators coming early – but this was a collection of In The Night Garden-like sunny glades, which was really very pleasant indeed. Our particular pitch boasted a fallen tree, which served Harry as boundary marker, climbing frame, racetrack, horse, garage, and balance beam. Entry to the adjoining park was free to campers, and Harry certainly had our money’s worth out of everything.

Highly recommended for active Smalls, but take either a packed lunch/bank loan for their cafe.

The wedding was lovely. Just lovely, lovely, lovely. I felt so privileged to be there and we had simply the nicest time. Harry was, broadly speaking, quite well-behaved –  although his single episode of screaming, spitting, kicking meltdown, during which he was escorted (‘Mind your backs, folks!’) to the quiet front garden, did manage to rather discombobulate some of the older children, one of whom asked me, wide-eyed,

‘Is he… OK? He looks like he’s about to be…’ she backed away a little, eyeing his retching, lawn-punching little body with barely-suppressed horror, ‘really sick!’

It’s fair to say that Harry’s behaviour has taken a distinct dive again recently; linked uncleverly to some unusually late and disturbed nights. I’d forgotten quite how tricky it is to subdue a small yet resourceful Ultimate Fighting Champion angry toddler into a car seat. My specs were 10ft behind me – in the road – where he’d kicked them off my nose, he had an iron grip on both the door frame and the car, his feet were drumming all over my face and chest and God help me if I strayed within reach of his teeth. I used to get this on an almost daily basis, and while I am enormously thankful that his communication skills – and hence, his temper – are so much improved of late, I was depressed to discover that he’s now 6 months more developed in strength and cleverness. I’m worried that one day soon, I may not actually win.

The school holidays are a mere week away, and I was curled into a tight ball of misery at the thought of EIGHT long weeks of NO School Fabulous. Jesus God. What to do? What to DO??

Answer: bugger off, get a job and let some other poor sap worry about it.

In answer to the prayers of both my husband and the Hairy Exchequer (synonymous), I am going back to work. In what has been termed the laziest career move ever, I am going back to my old job part-time, except it isn’t actually my old job because the original organisation went bust earlier this year (my foreseeing this inevitable event was a core reason for staying on maternity leave forever) and has now been bought by a chap with whom I always got on well. The industry playing field has shifted substantially because of this liquidation, but the goalposts in terms of my role are in the same relative position, so I am hoping it won’t be too much of a shock to my poor 3-years-off-work system.

I am being deliberately vague because A) the (tiny) industry in question is inextricably meshed into local and regional politics as well as B) being a focus of the local media – who, thanks to the MAD awards, know exactly who I am, and that I write this blog. I have no intention of writing anything defamatory about the clients – even in the unlikely event of my wanting to: I have read Dooce, thank you! – but I am a little squeamish of the thought of sitting in a meeting with a bunch of awfully professional suited chaps who have been reading eye-popping details about my undercarriage.

You know how it is.

I am officially Not Sure how the childcare thing will work out this side of September, when Harry settles into 15 hours a week at pre-school. I have pulled him out of the local daycare centre for various cogent reasons, so Mum is having him 2 days a weeks for the short-term and John’s mother is having him for at least one day a week; I can also get work done during the evening when John is home. Of course, that thing called Harvest is rapidly approaching and will trample over absolutely everything time-wise. We’ll figure it out, I expect, and New Work understand very well about Harry and are happy to be flexible.

I am still playing happily with my stationery business, and it keeps me nicely in pin money (unfortunately, I spend great-big-knitting-needle money. Harry has expensive tastes, you know.) although I will likely never set the world alight with it. I am off to a fete tomorrow and spent most of Monday in a Birmingham hotel getting quite ridiculously excited over a preview of my new Christmas stock. Don’t groan!

How does one end blog posts when one hasn’t precisely finished, but one actually wants to go to bed? Ah. A fullstop. Like this>.

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I have less than 3 minutes before I have to go out

Posted on 29/06/2010 by Ann

The tortoise is being a stroppy teen.

The chiropodist who was meant to deal with my hard skin… hasn’t. I am minorly wounded instead.

I had a deeply unpleasant experience with my fridge-freezer delivery men last Friday.

Project Potty has been abandoned, much to the profound relief of all protagonists. We all love Pampers.

Harry’s birthday card is in the post:

I have until approximately dawn on Thursday to make this lovely Lady & Gent a wedding cake. It currently looks like this.

Eeeep!

Updated to add:

Well played, period! WELL PLAYED!

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Today’s The Day The Teddy Bears Have Their Black Mass

Posted on 02/12/2009 by Ann

*taps microphone uncertainly*

Is this thing on?

*shades eyes and peers out into the dark*

Umm… Hi.

This… blogging thing. It goes like – how?

I left you with rather odd anatomical news (from me! What a … a non surprise!) a fortnight ago and promptly vanished.

Well, I can tell you where I disappeared to, at least. Up my own arse.

Selling – as I do – cards, the run-up to Christmas is the year’s main opportunity to push a hapless fiscal peasant off the Hairy sledge as a temporary sop to the ravening taxman; consequently I have been farming Harry off nearly every day to… whoever puts up least sales resistance to acquiring him, really –  and lugging self and stock around all sorts of Christmas fairs/fayres/markets/bazaars/whatever. In fact, if it has stood still in my vicinity during the month of November, I have attempted to sell it an advent calendar.

Then I had an order for a birthday cake for a friend’s son, which I knew very well would mean giving the midnight oil a bit of stick. And then I had another order, for a baptism cake – which I said Yes to without finding out when they wanted it, and… yeah. The same day. Arsefeck.

Well, everything got done – including my back. The order book looks ok and so did the cakes, despite being created mainly between 10pm and 2am over a number of days.

I did have a pure and priceless double-take at the moment I realised I had unwittingly sat the silver baptism teddy bear smack in the middle of a pentagram.

I think ungluing the top offending white dot in question – they were perfectly aligned – and spinning the bear around 180 to face a less satanic direction was when I eventually decided wine just wasn’t cutting it and went in search of the good whisky to settle nerves/tummy/hysterical giggling.

So… I have been reading – mainly whilst bolting a hastily prepared sandwich at (entirely unwise) speed – but you’ve been tragically deprived of my scintillating pearls of commentation wisdom. waffle. Sorry ’bout that.

Which brings me obliquely to my tummy issues. My GP got so distracted by my different heart that he rather lost sight of the, well, you know, the pain, so I bent the ear of the Delightful GP Next Door instead when he made the grave social mistake of walking to our house, in the dark, through a howling storm, in order to make us a present of a pair of tickets to see Worcester Warriors at home. Because when you are an extremely nice chap and the senior partner with a large practice as well as having an entire rugby team to doctor, you thoroughly enjoy having your leisure time taken up with your neighbour’s health problems.

Anyhow, cutting to the chase, I trialled upping my dose of proton pump inhibitors to Industrial for a fortnight before stopping them completely, working on the hypothesis that the pain is either oesophageal spasms or a flourishing ulcer. I haven’t had a crawl-about-the-floor episode for three weeks, although I have been nauseous, sharply stomach-achey after food, diarrhoeay and generally Not Right. I had cut out my beloved diet coke but succumbed to a can yesterday teatime and this morning, sure enough, I faintly felt That Pain waiting in the wings. I am now suspecting Acid as te culprit.

I had thought that we might kill two birds with one stone there, as the military base guide had recommended a trunk CT scan to see what the hell else isn’t where it should be, but my GP opined that that was a hefty old dose of radiation to subject me to when everything actually appears to be working ok (although I think he and I are working on rather different given values of ‘OK’ currently), and sent me for a chest x-ray yesterday instead. Which I… kind of agree with. If it was someone else, I’d be nodding sagely and concurring that a body CT was overkill. As it’s me, I’ve taken to lying awake and Wondering. I’m pretty fucking hopeless at seeing a string and not giving it a tiiiny wee tug; I don’t know what the blithering hell is abnormal in there and it’s bugging me.

The x-ray – when the NHS gets around to interpreting it – will nail down what form of cardiac weirdness I have, but I’ve taken to thinking that the strange arrangement of veins and arteries might explain why my right uterus seemingly has such a poor blood supply. I am keen to see how my reproductive consultant takes the news that my uterine artery is probably fed from somewhere anatomically peculiar. My counsellor cannily described her as ‘from London. They do things differently there…’ And so they do: she is evidently the active-management type (we like that) and likely to order pre-laparoscopy abdominal investigations on her own account. We shall see.

This little lot’s playing on my mind, people.

And… Harry’s had a miserable cold; I’ve spent the last two nights mostly on the downstairs sofa trying to prop up and placate the poorly little sufferer, and listening to his TB-like cough, although it’s subsided today and I’m desperately hoping for a uninterrupted night. I always know when Harry is feeling horribly unwell: he’s so tetchy and miserable he swats the Calpol spoon out of the air and refuses to entertain the notion of that bloody pink stuff coming anywhere near him. When he’s feeling better – and thus, in no need of it – he swallows it like a lamb.

Yep, that’s another black eye, right enough – acquired at nursery, this time. And note that my tiny potentate has managed, despite his discomfort, to retain a vice-like grip on the remote.

He’s such a total chap.

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A Tiger? In Africa?

Posted on 12/11/2009 by Ann

First things first: a sincere and very humble thank you, thank you, thank you for your wonderful, unexpected, staggeringly generous support. I am truly bowled over by it.

I had thought maybe a handful of you might chuck in a couple of quid for a good cause and I would have been so delighted and appreciative had you done just that. As it was, I kept blinking at the screen in awe as the total kept going up; the fact that so many of you dug deep into your credit-crunched pockets has left me stupefied, touched and grateful beyond words. I cried so many bloody pints, in fact, I couldn’t shift the resulting headache until yesterday. As of this evening, the grand total http://www.justgiving.com/DarthToddler stands at £751, and the gift aid (tax relief) Bliss can reclaim on our direct donation of the £261 raised via the coffee morning, will send the effective value well over £800.

Bless you, internets.

(BTW, UK readers might like to consider Bliss’s lovely Christmas cards. If you are a knitter, there is something else you can do, too: knit some breasts.)

I’m still not in my usual mental place about cake (deep and fervent desire, generally) and I was fair buggered after it all on Sunday. John, with a forbearance he does not usually exhibit, let me sleep in until 10am without muttering under his breath OR inflicting Harry – a bouncy, morning toddler – on me. He didn’t even moan much when I disappeared, grinning broadly, to the Hobbycraft show at the NEC, although it was absurdly, tiresomely crowded and the queues for coffee were daunting; after an hour or so of employing the wifey Elbow into unyielding backs I was beginning to feel a bit limp about things again. I even fell asleep in front of the TV, which is almost unheard of – and followed it up with a night of insomnia, which isn’t.

And since then my arse has not stopped scurrying dementedly about, because this is, work-wise, the busiest month of my year. I attempted to combine parenting with work this morning: my post natal group (which, for want of a suitable collective noun, I term the Piddle) meet at the local playbarn on Wednesday mornings, and I thought, as Harry generally scuttles about the playframe by himself – much like a hamster on speed – while I latte-up and wave from the ground, that I could arrange a regular stationery-selling gig there, and still take him with me. The playbarn agreed, so this morning I saw him bustle off to play alongside the rest of the Piddle toddlers, and had no sooner begun unpacking my boxes of Christmas cards when a friend appeared at my side.

‘I realise this isn’t what you want to hear right now, but Harry’s filled his nappy. It… errr… reeks!

Ohhhhh. Nice!

Gave friend cash tin to guard. Captured protesting child before he could spread it about any further. Inserted him in arms of another friend who had unwisely strayed too close. Galloped outside and extracted nappy bag from car. Reclaimed child. Carted yammering child to changing rooms. Recoiled in dismay from diarrhoea-y output. Noted glumly that vest was heavily… compromised. Trousers, thankfully, escaped with mere light staining, which I pretended not to notice, due to absence of any alternatives. Changed impatient child. Double-bagged shitty vest. Noted sore bottom. Rummaged through bag for barrier cream, unsuccessfully. Cursed. Unleashed clean child back into main area. Returned to unpacking cards.

A few minutes later I am still head-down, arranging, when a lady I have never seen before in my life approaches, holding Harry by the hand. He is wearing … Christ! … just his nappy and t-shirt, and she is holding his trousers.

‘Excuse me! Is this your son?’

‘Oh God.’

She took this for assent.

‘He was running about happily at the bottom of the big slide, but his trousers were sat half-way up it!’

I managed to splutter something about thanks, made reasonably incoherent by shame. The Piddle were all wetting themselves – ha ha – and Harry was firmly shepherded into the toddler section where they could keep an eye on him for me. Work/Motherhood FAIL. Thankfully he forgot about his trouser-removing mood, but later duly proceeded to have more diarrhoea, necessitating another lengthy trip to the changing room. I was worried about him rubbing his little bottom raw, but repeated enquiries about ‘Home?’ all met with a determined nolle prosequi and it was gone lunchtime before I brought him home for a late nap on the sofa, nappy off, legs sprawled and bum slathered in barrier cream.

His portage visitor is coming in the morning and I am guiltily aware that both cramming in more work than normal and the weekend’s frantic activity have meant that we have not done our piano practice, so to speak. His portage worker is puzzled by Harry, as are we all. He seems such a bright little boy in some respects, yet there are some fundamentals that he still isn’t grasping at all. He can answer a question regarding his own wants easily, but cannot grasp anything more abstract.

For instance: although he can give a firm and clear affirmative to ‘Would you like some grapes?’ he cannot grasp the meaning of ‘Have you finished your grapes? Are the grapes all gone?’ It’s not that he has no personal gain or motivational interest in answering an abstract question per se, or even that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the individual words, because he does – it’s just that there’s no comprehension there at all. He listens to my words, but remains impassive, clueless on how to respond, or even that a response is required. Yet if I ask him to give me one, two or three kisses, he wheel-spins towards me happily to plant the appropriate number of smackers on my lips.

His communication is slowly, imperceptibly improving. His proto-words and phrases are becoming more consistent and although he still does not have a single clear word he is sometimes easy to interpret; one of the playbarn ladies who rescued his trousers (pause to wince and mourn my maternal pride) assured me she had asked him where his Mummy was and understood his response. (I expect she got ‘Daretiss!’ (‘There it is’) with an enthusiastic gesture to back it up.)

His gains are so gradual that I’ve had some panicky days about it again lately. His default babble-noun currently is ‘Tayzass’. Everything is bloody Tayzass, all day long. He  has expanded on the ubiquitous Muuurrrrmmm! and his repertoire of animal sounds now includes piggy-snorts, horsey clip-clops (with jiggly rein hand-gestures), sheep baas (glotteral throat-coughs that sound like a machine gun with a terminal blockage) and tiger, complete with a lovely little RrroOAaaaWWRrr and pouncey-paws. I get regaled with the Snorty-oinks, the Muuurrmmm, the Ack-Ack-Ack-Ack-baaas and the clippety-clop sounds pretty regularly from the back seat as we drive around Warwickshire – and his hawk-eye spots a tiny specimen 4 fields away. Tiger-roars from the back seat are, reassuringly, reasonably infrequent.

I have only just now realised (go me! but Yay for the constructive thought-process that is blogging) that his effortless recognition of large numbers of Makaton signs coupled with his indistinct, confused and highly limited use of them, precisely mirrors his difficulties with spoken communication. His understanding of speech is entirely age-appropriate – everyone thinks, bar the reservations over his puzzling comprehension-gaps – but his speech output is currently still fairly banjaxed. He only uses the signs for ‘ice-cream’, ‘more’ and ‘please’ pro-actively, although he uses those plenty and often. Are you getting a cupboard-love theme coming through, here?

I had a fair few people who caught sight of him beetling happily around, a beaming centre of attention, at the coffee morning, later ask me breezily about his speech – in the obvious expectation that I would have news of his suddenly starting to speak in sentences, Just Like Their Neighbour’s Cousin’s Stepbrother’s Friend’s Kid They Cited To Confidently Reassure Me last time I encountered them. And I found myself taking no pains at all to let them down gently – or give them much of a leg-up out of the subsequent conversational hole they found themselves in – when I answered that No, no speech and next stop: Psychology & Brain Scan. Which was undoubtedly uncharacteristically unkind of me, particularly as they had dutifully tipped up to give me some money, but I’ve been feeling rather angst-ridden about Harry’s future lately and its been spilling out around the edges of my Politeness containment field. We saw the little girl who is Harry’s direct contemporary this evening, and she is suddenly three inches taller, spouting huge sentences, jumping with staggering co-ordination and rolling the skittle ball like a bowling pro.

And to think I was revoltingly smug because Harry could sit up and walk first! I know, I know, I know: he’ll probably catch up, and the fact that she’s obviously developmentally surged ahead of him shouldn’t get to me, but it really bloody has. Despite everyone’s best efforts he is still struggling against difficulties with both his body and his brain – and the more I feel like this, the more I feel that I really want that MRI, for the bringing of either reassurance or answers.

And And And And my period is now well into its third sodding week, and getting heavier and more aggravating by the day. My hair needs cutting. My gym membership has run out. I have lost no weight at all. My eyes will no longer accept my contact lenses, and I detest wearing glasses. The gastro thing I kept moaning about so often earlier in the year is still happening, I just got tired of whinging about it continually. I am woken up at erratic intervals, always and without exception between the hours of 2am and 4am, by a 3 or 4 hour bout of debilitating upper abdominal pain. Drs best guess is endometriosis, ulcer or – mostly likely, given the symptoms, but least likely given that prodding my gallbladder doesn’t make me yelp – gallstones. I am currently on anti-acid thingies, with the additional instruction to eat a thoroughly greasy curry and see if it brings on an attack.

I’m too… ummm… chicken to do it.

That is all, as it is nearly 2am and I can think of nothing else to whinge about just at present.

Thank you so very very much, again, for your marvellous support of sick, small and premature babies – and of me.

To borrow the phrase of a dear friend: I appreciate the fuck out of you.

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Overwhelmed

Posted on 07/11/2009 by Ann

…and have just sat down for a little cry.

I’m so very, very deeply grateful for your amazing generosity.

Coffee morning raised well over £500 and still counting.

To say I’m touched is… just… inadequately phrased.

The cakeless internet has raised as much as more than my cake-stuffed friends and family, and you are all invited to tea.

Going away to cry again now.

Updated to add: Still absolutely humbled & blubbering. And my father – ‘Gramps’ – was directed to the website to maximise the value of his donation through gift aid, rather than faff about with paper forms. (This is in addition to selling raffle tickets like a man possessed yesterday AND donating a fabulous planted-up flower tub for the raffle AND putting the topping on my carrot cake for me at the last moment.) He is now awfully curious to know who these generous and wonderful friends of mine are on Just Giving that he’s never met or heard of! Bless you all. And I’m so sorry that Just Giving have obviously chosen this weekend to do site maintenance. Rotters  

CAkes

cakes 2

Cakes 3

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Atonement

Posted on 06/11/2009 by Ann

Calendar tomorrow: Coffee morning for Bliss, the premature baby charity.

State of mind: numb with tiredness.

State of back: screaming in pain. 

State of house: still a pit, albeit with clean carpets. I heart the Rug Doctor.

Portions of cake I have made: about 150. More if I’m stingy with the cutting.

Number of attendees expected tomorrow: anything between 15 and, umm, hundreds. Well, maybe not hundreds. I have put posters up in the two neighbouring villages, and who knows what this will crop. Probably 2 ancient biddies who have only come to steal the silverware and size up the Renoir.*

Amount of work John has done to help me with this: very little.

People I am doing this for: the baby in the neonatal intensive care cot next to Harry whom I watched being unplugged from the ventilator, before being wheeled away to the family room to die. The baby’s parents, who followed the cot out of the ward, holding hands.

Hoping to achieve: A decent donation to Bliss. Amelioration of guilt. Expiation of sins. Exorcism of demons. Etc.

http://www.justgiving.com/DarthToddler 

& apologies to L’eggs’s Tricky for stealing his nickname.

*I don’t have a Renoir.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: , | 15 Comments »

Mucus

Posted on 27/10/2009 by Ann

As usual, I keep mentally drafting a dozen blog posts that never make it anywhere near here, usually because I think of them while I’m driving. Then evening rolls round and by the time I’ve galloped through my blog feeds and mentally bookmarked dozens of sites I want to look at again/in more depth/actually bloody comment on this time – it’s 10pm and it’s too late for me to start writing. I must be the slowest blogger in Christendom: I never seem to get the hang of dashing a quick one off the wrist –  ahem! – every day or so; instead I save it up for you in great indigestible chunks that take me hours to write. I must achieve brevity, for your sanity and mine.

So. Lemme see. What’s happened?

I had cause to remember my red onion allergy at the weekend. I hadn’t actually forgotten that the smell of the things makes me ill, it’s rather that I’ve been avoiding them for several years on precisely that basis, without actually being able to recall quite what they do to me. They’re colourful and attractive and I thought, really, I must surely have imagined something so damn silly as an onion-smell allergy, so I bought 3 to put in with my supper-party roast veg on Saturday night. Caution intervened and I only prepared one; I left it in quarters, mid-afternoon, in a large dish of peeled and chopped root veg that I kept meaning to cover over and never did, as I was pathetically behind culinary schedule as usual. I began to feel fairly headache-y after a hour or so, and thought ‘I really MUST cover that bloody onion up’ – and got distracted by something else, and didn’t.

I was concentrating so hard on cooking that it wasn’t until guests turned up at 7.30 that I realised I was verging on a migraine and my sinuses felt as if they had been injected with liquid lead. My tinnitus (a permanent legacy of Castle Donnington 1991 Monsters of Rock festival! Yo! Duuuuuuuudes!) was roaring and I could still hear my pulse pounding in my ears over the top of that. I struggled through the whole evening and went to bed feeling exceptionally shitty. I could see purple auras around objects in the half-light, my neck glands were swollen and my entire nervous system felt dysfunctional and overwrought. Harry yelled for an hour or so, which helped not one jot. It took me more than 24 hours to recover. Judicious googling has revealed that I am not actually quite alone in my freakish allergy, and, like me, other sufferers can encounter white onions and garlic without disturbance; only red onions are the naughty ones. Do bear this in mind when you invite me to lunch!

So. That was boring. What else?

Harry’s physio discharge letter came, and said what we expected it to say: they can see no physical reason for his falls. He ‘certainly appears to have a degree of hyper-flexibility’ and ‘does tend to fall frequently, particularly from furniture, steps, etc’.

Uh-huh. Bouncing horses, too.

crayola shiner

‘He appears to have a high activity level, but does not always appear to be aware of the risk of falling.’ 

You can say that again, lady. Oh… you do!

‘He needed constant attention to avoid injury’.

Sigh. We’re taking Harry – and his shiner (which the photos aren’t doing full justice to; I’ve been looked at like a true pariah by every mother I’ve seen this week) – to see his Paed tomorrow – except it isn’t actually his Paed, because they’ve shifted all the clinics about, so it’s ‘one of the paediatric team’; at least we have the benefit of a second opinion, I suppose.

Harry had a rotten cold the last half of last week, John has lurched from sore throat to sore throat, and I’ve been bunged up with unspeakable and unshiftable mucus for a fortnight or more. Harry was so sad and sorry for himself last Thursday that he ended up sleeping with me for a couple of nights, barking with a hoarse little squeak and smearing me liberally in the night with his mucus-laden features when he came for kisses and cuddly reassurance.

Of course, largely recovered, he is now waking up at midnight and demanding stridently to be brought into bed with us. If he is given-in to, he lies quietly between us in the dark for a few minutes before becoming utterly bored and deciding to par-tay; this takes the form of him launching headbutts randomly into the dark and giggling. I have a sore nose – again – and John suffered a spectacularly fat lip. When Harry is inevitably carted back to his room by a furious and smarting parent, he proceeds to melt down in heartbreaking fashion, pulling every known trick in the tantrum book. He throws himself about the cot so enthusiastically that his sleeping bag poppers and zips generally give up the ghost, freeing his legs for a launch attempt over the recently-heightened fence of his cot bars towards Planet Parent.

I completely comprehend Harry’s frustration and confusion. In cot! Wah! Escape from cot facilitated! Weee! In cot again! Wah! John is annoyed because I had him in bed with me to begin with and started the Cot Protest rot again, but it’s just not in me to leave a miserable, toastie-hot, achey, sneezing, coughing little boy sat mournfully behind his cot bars, clutching his water bottle like it’s his best friend, and wailing sadly. He’s a tough little shoot, but I can see when he’s feeling absolutely rotten and he ends up sleeping with me every time he’s poorly… and every time we have to go through a week’s worth of weaning him back into his own room afterwards, usually just in time for the next virus.

I accept it’s a problem. Hubby also needs to accept that if he starts one more sentence with ‘If you hadn’t…’ at 4am in the morning, when we’ve both been trampled to a bloody pulp by our son’s bony hooves and neither of us have had a wink of sleep yet, his breeding days are o.v.e.r.

By virtue of Harry’s viral woe, I managed to entirely miss the much-hyped BBC Question Time featuring the BNP MEP Nick Griffin. Some of you may not be aware of the British National Party: they are the UK’s far-right political abhorrence and gained 2 European – not British – parliamentary seats in the last election. As elected politicians, I regretfully concede that the BBC does indeed have a moral obligation to occasionally bung them on TV, but… well. I had vaguely planned a bit of a long rant about it here, but I now find I simply can’t be bothered to download it and watch it: apparently he came off badly, which was no surprise.

I have much I could say, but will confine myself to the bald statement that Harry’s life was saved by 3 doctors: all of them coloured, all of them accented, all of them immigrants. I bless them frequently. The BNP delivered a leaflet through our door earlier in the year, and the only reason I didn’t wipe my bottom with it is that I have more respect for my own arse than that.

Harry’s life needing to be saved at all was brought back to me in disturbing detail last week: my long-awaited pregnancy and medical notes arrived. That’s a whole other post – likely an excruciatingly boring one, too (WordPress have just introduced a new, bright-red ‘Move to Trash’ button, and it appears to be affecting my confidence!), but I always think that and mysteriously you keep coming back – so I will try my hardest to write it tomorrow night. 

And… it seems that my blogroll is being shat on, particularly and horribly hard lately.

Pru is down, Womb is down, L’eggs is down, Twangy is down, Thalia is down, Belgian Waffle is down.

Everyday Stranger is having a dreadfully hard bloody time.

May is spending tonight in hospital with a suspected ectopic pregnancy. In her single remaining ovary + tube.  is miscarrying, and having a shockingly shitty reproductive nightmare.

These ladies need bloggy love, even if it’s the silent in-your-head sort.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Yummy Mummy

Posted on 08/10/2009 by Ann

Some of you have occasionally been kind enough to comment on my better culinary productions, so I thought I’d sift through my photos and see if I could offer any useful advice for the kitchen amateur.

I think I’ve covered all the basics. 

1) Don’t slope off to read blogs and forget that you are actually cooking something.

sausages

2) Don’t slope off to read blogs and forget that you are actually cooking something.

Beef casserole

3) Several weeks later, really don’t slope off to read blogs and forget that you are actually cooking something.

beef caserole incineration

4) Remember, when you have oh-so-carefully rolled and shaped some delectably light and tasty chocolate pastry, that chocolate pastry is a card-carrying bitch and will fall apart the moment you attempt to slide her fragile deliciousness onto your rolling pin. When the texture eventually resembles that of left-out-in-the-frost playdough, you have beaten it into submission. Shape, bake and serve.

chocolate pastry

5) Remember that Yorkshire Puddings often taste nicer on your plate than welded solid to the tin.

yorkshires

6) Sponge cakes obtain their light fluffy texture from incorporated air. If you must randomly lose your temper and kick an inanimate object, a good choice of object would be one that does not contain impact-sensitive air-incorporation chemistry in progress. The oven door is an excellent example of a poor choice.

pan-cakes

7) Do not cook while intoxicated. It is possible to become Confused regarding raising agent quanties.

sunken cake

8) Do not cook while intoxicated. It is possible to become Confused regarding raising agent quanties.

Overflowing cake

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: | 18 Comments »

Rock, meet Hard Place.

Posted on 05/10/2009 by Ann

It’s not been a cheery day, so let’s start things off with a nice little photo. John was Harry’s whipping boy Nominated Parent on Sunday, so I kicked back and relaxed by re-arranging my kitchen cupboards. This is almost everything I found that was out of date, often by an impressive 4 or 5 years. (Feel quite free to be Topper and comfort me, BTW.)

cupboard contents

We will now take a brief moment, in which everyone who has ever eaten a meal in my house, bloggers among them, can quietly disappear to throw up absolutely everything they have ever consumed.

Better?

The predominance of seeds is as a result of John’s brief fad of being a baker: we have been married 6 years in March and received a bread maker as a wedding present. Hubby got all keen and baked a number of really quite edible loaves, buying in large stocks of pumpkin, poppy and sesame seeds. Then he lost all interest; the packets have been gathering dust ever since.

Our garden birds did very nicely out of it all on Sunday, particularly as I also found a pack of lard (out of sight and mind at the top of the fridge) with a date of January 2009. Yum.

If Harry survives his childhood without falling victim to Campylobacter, E-coli or Salmonella, then he will one day look back on his formative years – these years – and form an opinion on whether I make a bad or good decision this week, and I’m wriggling uncomfortably on the pointy horns of a daycare dilemma. If you have clever advice – or amusing assvice – for me, I will give it my close attention and gratitude.

Harry currently receives Portage, a weekly home-visiting education service for pre-schoolers with additional support needs. Harry’s home visitor has undoubtedly assisted him: by following her suggestions and games, Harry has certainly come to understand the concept of taking turns, after only a handful of visits. Putting the theory into practice outside a controlled home environment has been uphill work for the lad, but she has helped improve his communication. She’s the closest thing he has to a key worker, and liaises – theoretically – with:

Physiotherapy: his Wobbles assessment is – finally – Thursday morning. I am grimly prepared to get Harry drunk and suddenly stick my foot out in front of him if he refuses to fall over for her.

Speech and Language Therapy: achingly slow progress. ‘Djess’ has, depressingly, sunk slowly back into the formless quicksand of his babble, and Harry, at 26 months and 82cms, is once again officially Wordless. He is progressing with his language; his eye contact is significantly better and his signing is coming along nicely this week – he has learnt to sign ‘hand it over now, woman’ ‘please’ – but he’s still desperately behind, and I sometimes get twisted up inside with panic and anger and OMFG I CAN’T UNDERSTAND A SINGLE DAMN THING YOU’RE BABBLING ABOUT AND I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT YOU’RE POINTING AT AND YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME LIKE I’M THE KNOWER OF ALL THINGS OR YOUR BLOODY MOTHER OR SOMETHING  BUT YOU DON’T REALISE I SIMPLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE FIRST THING YOU’RE SAYING AND I CAN’T HELP YOU I CAN’T HELP YOU BECAUSE IT’S ALL JUST RANDOM SOUNDS AND MY HEART IS BREAKING.

And… yeah. That’s generally the time you’ll find me howling in a corner. Even the most determinedly awful mother would find it hard to purposefully not intelligently respond to any single word her child said to her for an entire year – but that’s exactly what I’ve done, in effect. I worry about the damage to his personality this incomprehension causes; Harry doesn’t know that he isn’t intelligible.

Harry’s behaviour, unsurprisingly, is heading downhill quicker than the shares I bought for him with his child trust fund and they’re pretty damned precipitous. The baby groups we go to are beginning to fall silent when he launches into one of his Specials – particularly when I’ve just stopped him hitting another child, so he starts violently attacking himself instead. Eventually, when I’ve either restored some sort of calm, or simply clamped his raging form hard under my arm and announced our departure, one of them will carefully clear their throat, blinking and ask ‘Bad day? Is he really tired?’

Yes, all of them currently, and No, he’s just woken up.  And I’ve cried every day this week because when he headbutts me and I don’t dodge in time it really bloody hurts and my nose bleeds and I bruise and I’m tired of fighting my poor angry child and looking useless.

Cough. I was supposed to be telling you about daycare. Yes. Daycare!

Harry is no longer Cool with his 2 mornings at Local nursery. I don’t entirely blame him: last time he went, Mummy didn’t come home for 2 days. I took him Friday morning and he kicked off in such spectacular fashion at the gate that I eventually had to take him home again. John cycled past it yesterday and asked Harry if he liked the place: he shook his head. Ahhh. Bugger.

A friend in the local village runs a playgroup called, let’s say, Abacus – albeit the parents leave the children there – for children with special needs. I am only just coming around to the fact that Harry is, in fact, one of those children. The labelled, different ones. Special Needs. Statemented. Exceptional. Struggling. I know we didn’t get off the plane in Italy, but I’ve never been entirely convinced we were really making a stop in Holland, either, until – well, today, I suppose. I suppose I was thinking of us as being more… western Germany?

But we toddled along this morning, as it was a friend and she’d invited us to come take a look. (Harry promptly lost his mind with anxiety as soon as he saw it was a daycare centre, which bodes badly for me and his usual Local drop-off tomorrow.) There were 7 kids and 6 adults: the ratio is usually about one to one, sometimes even more adults than children, depending on the need. (The staff at Local daycare take Harry’s difficulties seriously and are keen to help him, but the ratio is 1:4 kids.) There was a ducky little lad with what appeared to be mild Downs, and another kid who was using a mobility frame, although he could also wobble along unassisted. The remaining children were all language impaired to a greater or lesser degree, but no other issues that I could see. I’m told there are usually between 6 and 10 children attending a session, a couple of whom are very severely functionally impaired, but the majority are simply language delayed.

It wasn’t the most inviting-looking building in the world, dark and old (in a bad way; we’re not talking Tudor here) although with a lovely garden attached, turfed throughout, with no hard edges and a smallish selection of nice toys.

They asked me, in the course of finding out about our history, if I had ever applied for disability living allowance for Harry. I sprayed my coffee in most ecumenial fashion over everyone in the vicinity, near and far. Say WHAT, now? *Splutters* He’s cognitively spot-on, people! Even a little ahead of his age! But… yes. Apparently, the level of agency involvement with Harry is a fair indicator that we could quite likely qualify for the lower level of state disability payment. It’s about £18 a week and would cover the lion’s share of his daycare costs but… there’s that D word again. It does insist on cropping up and I am never, ever suitably prepared for it.

The activities were fabulously well-aimed for kids like Harry in… Holland. They used makaton and visual aids for absolutely everything and kept the kids’ attention beautifully. (Harry blatantly thinks circle time at Local daycare sucks a clown’s balls and it’s generally his cue to slope off outside on his own.) A speech therapist comes nearly every week and they have regular physio, occupational therapy and paediatrician input too. Although Harry was actually climbing determinedly up the fire doors for most of the activity-time in a frantic effort to get outside and play, I know that once he settled in he would derive infinite benefit from their one-on-one approach. It’s run by a superlatively trustworthy friend, it’s breathtakingly cheap, it’s exactly what Harry needs – and of course, there are mighty snags.

Abacus is probably 10 miles away, in a town and on an estate I used to live in and have darkly unhappy memories of. The sessions are only 2.5 hours long, and even though it’s only a piddling £3 an hour, it’d barely be worth, in fuel and time, me coming back home.

Harry’ Local daycare is 2 miles away, attached to the primary school that Harry will – I am currently assuming – attend. John went to school there. They have more toys and are the Italy to Abacus’s Holland.  We really wanted Harry to become accustomed to Local place this year, so that pre-school in a year’s time did not come as a shock – if he actually ends up attending Italian mainstream pre-school. I like Local place, and so does Harry when he’s not in the throes of major separation anxiety.

Simple! I hear you cry, bored and desperate for coffee stimulation by now. Send him to both! 2 sessions at Local, 2 sessions at Abacus. Blow the budget and you’re sorted!

Yeah. If Harry exceeds 2 daycare sessions a week, he loses Portage services. Sending him for one session in both places is half-arsed and not considered a good idea by Local, Abacus OR Portage – who are unhappy and apologetic about the recent reduction in the cutoff level from 5 sessions to 3. We have to choose between the three of them.

If I cut Local out and instead spend 2 or 3 mornings marooned in a random coffee shop near Abacus… I’m not only sad on my own account, because I like Harry going to Local but it also means that I’m taking several steps backwards organisationally and will be more behind and stressed than ever; Housework: Nil, Business: Nil, Time To Self: Nil.

If I don’t send him to Abacus, then… well, I can’t do that. I have to send him to Abacus. As it’s just over the county border, I am considering asking them to keep Harry’s presence there a Big Administrative Secret, but I think in practical terms it’d be like concealing a secret airbase: people do tend to notice the odd jet flying in and out. Plus there’s paperwork and stuff.

If I send him to both Local and Abacus and lose Portage, then we’ve lost a weekly visitor to our home – no fuel! no travel! no stress! fun games! all positives! – who has demonstrably done Harry some good. I value her input a good deal.

Crap. Arse. It’s got to be Local for the choppy-chop, hasn’t it?

Bloody rules. We are not amused.

Filed under: Parenting | Tagged: , , , , | 23 Comments »

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