What's my age again?

I keep having these moments where I realise that I am now properly grown up.  I often forget (not deliberately) exactly how old I am, having settled in my mind simply on early 30s.

They included things like seeing someone who used to be part of my weekly pub quiz team take a role in national politics. The birth of my children.  My tenth wedding anniversary.  My mother's retirement.  Hearing a friend from grad school on the Today Programme as a pundit.  Finding out the title of the book I wanted to read referred to a guy I ate lunch with every day in high school.

It is apparently not a very flattering portrait...

 



I heard about this book ages ago.  And thought it would be a funny read.  Then today, I read a piece in the NY Times that made the startling connection for me.

 

I was a smart kid and sat with other smart kids.  You might even go so far as to say we were the nerd table.  Except that I think there was at least one other table of equally smart kids who probably worked harder in school than we did.  It is, however, hard to reconcile the teenager who drew a lot of muscle-bound superheroes in his notebooks with the author of Average American Male.

 

With added controversy for your reading pleasure!

 

But hey, we all grow up, don't we?  It wasn't even the most surreal of those moments - the prize for which goes to someone who was talking about their polyamoury on facebook.  I had a moment where I thought "he can't be polyamorous, he's only eight years old!" before I realised that the man in question had been eight years old at the same time I had been eight years old and had presumably aged at an identical rate.

 

The weirdest part of the article for me, though, was when they printed his age.  "35?" I thought.  "He can't be 35 because I'm only... aww crap."

The new supervillain in town

All is quiet in the house.  Miss A is having calm quiet time in her room.  Itsyboo, having slept a bit on the school run is resolutely not napping, but cooing away in his room.  I am doing my lesson planning (clever me!).  On the baby monitor, I hear a small crash.  I pick it up to look, and the temperature in Itsyboo's room jumps from a balmy 20 degrees to 27.  The heat alarm starts beeping frantically.

Our central heating is warming the house up, but not that much and not that quickly.  There can be only one explanation.

Itsyboo is eating the baby monitor.  It's only a half hour after lunch, so you'd think he would be satisfied.  Two and a half fish fingers, four sweet potato "chips" and a handful of peas cannot sate the...

...BITINGEST BABY EVER.

Yes, that's how he kisses.  He made another baby cry today while showering him with affection.

 

Don't be fooled by the angelic face - this baby means biting business.

 

Coming soon to a playgroup near you! (If you live near Tonbridge, that is...)



It's my job

When we put the house on the market in August, I got in to some bad habits.  Before then, I had planned activities very carefully for the three days a week I had Miss A.  We had a rota of painting, baking and gardening that we did during Istyboo's morning nap.  Istyboo mostly just needed interesting things to look at, so was pretty easy to keep entertained.

During the whole moving house process, my primary concern was keeping the house in reasonable shape for potential buyers.  We often had viewings every day and evacuated the house at the weekends.  I made the most of the fabulous East Dulwich infrastructure.  We had the fabulous local parks (especially Goose Green, tiny but brilliant), the libraries, and playgroups, all within walking distance and all guaranteed to keep my house sparkling and tidy.

One of the advantages of the new house is the play room.  I finally have a place where all the toys live.  We do lots and lots of free play, so it normally looks like this:

Why, yes, we do tidy up every evening.  Why do you ask?

Now that we are (mostly) settled in, I feel like I should start planning activities again.  I like a plan and find it much easier to make a big mess if I've planned it out and made sure I've got all the necessary stuff.  I have Miss A all but two mornings a week, so there's extra time to fill.  Also, Itsyboo needs more stimulation these days and I'd like to make sure there are some age-appropriate activities for him.

I came to the conclusion that, as a stay-at-home mum, I should really be doing something akin to a weekly lesson plan.  I've done lesson planning before, during the five summers I spent working at the amazing Concordia Language Villages (my kids are so going there when they are older).

Mildly embarrassing photographic evidence here.

 

There are so many fabulous resources, too.  My favourites are Imagination Tree, the Artful Parent, and Rainy Day Mum, but my twitter feed is constantly pointing me towards new ones.

 

So this week, my resolution is to start my weekly lesson planning.  We will have fun!

 

What are your favourite at-home activities with your children?  Are there any sources of inspiration that you'd recommend?  I look forward to your tips!

Codebreaking

In any close relationship, you develop a code that lets you communicate politely even when you would like to strangle the other person.  It's a delicate art, but necessary for the long term stability of the pairing.

For the last couple of days, I have had flu with fever, chills, aches and the lot.  I blame the children.  It's the kind of ague that would have kept me out of the office.  Now that I'm at home with the kids, that's not an option.  However, it did spark our first "code" conversation of the morning.

C: "If you're so sick you need me to say home from work, just let me know"
      "Please don't ask"
Me: (sceptical) "You could stay home from work?"
                          "Yeah, right..." 
C: "Not really, I've got this thing and this other thing and a very important lunch."
     "I don't want to stay home"
Me: Nods head
        "I kind of want to die, but you go right on ahead."

Our second code conversation happened as I was trying to get out the door to get Miss A to nursery.

Me on the phone: "Darling, have you seen my keys?"
                             "Can you check your pockets as I'm pretty sure you have both sets of keys?"
C: "I haven't... Oh, wait... They're in my pocket..."
     "Dammit, I'm going to miss my train..."
Me: "Seriously?"
         "This is like the third time you've done this.  Why do you keep taking all the keys?!?"
C: "I'll come home..."
     "Why can't you just magic up a spare set or call a locksmith or something?"
Me: "OK, hurry, please."
        "We are already running late because I've been tearing the house apart looking for my keys.  I may need to kill you."
C: "It was an honest mistake, you shouldn't get mad at me."
     "I refuse to be held accountable for not paying attention to how many sets of keys I have in my pockets."
Me: Deep breath
       "Scratch the 'may'..."
       
I can't wait to see what we find to talk about tonight.

It could be worse...

Friday was not an easy day.  The morning started out like many mornings recently.  Miss A slept in and I had to wake her up to get to nursery on time, which didn't go down well.  Itsyboo is in a rather clingy stage so every time I set him down to try to do something, he wailed.

Mum, how dare you try to make me breakfast?!?

 

I eventually did make it out the door on time.  Miss A's nursery is about a half hour walk for toddler legs.  She wasn't happy about going and wailed nearly the whole way there.  I knew she'd love it when she got there, so I gently cajoled her along.  We were within a few feet of the school gate when I ran into the nursery manager who was dropping her child off at the primary school.

 

"Nursery is closed today, didn't you know?"

 

"No..."

 

"We sent out an e-mail."

 

"I didn't get an e-mail..."

 

"Whoops!  We must have forgotten to add you to the list."

 

So there I was, a half hour from home with a screaming toddler and no chance of stopping somewhere warm.  We had something like a forced march home, which made me wonder how people who actually have to do forced marches, or flee a terrible situation, get their toddlers to cooperate.  Cajoling, bribery, distraction, nothing was working to stop the tears and get feet moving a little more quickly.  I mean, seriously, how do people do it?

 

We finally made it home and had hot chocolate and Winnie the Pooh, and suddenly the cold and snow were beautiful, peaceful, and most importantly on the other side of the window.

 

Our first Kentish snow

 



 



 

Expectations v reality

My to do list:

-put Christmas decorations away (as we lumber towards Valentine's day, they are looking more and more inappropriate)

-put together flatpack bookshelf (I had it rush-delivered two weeks ago - money well spent)

-unpack some boxes (hopefully I will find my nephews' Christmas presents... and our landline phone... and, well, I forget now, but a lot of stuff that would be pretty handy)

-clean house (as the saying goes, cleaning with children is like brushing your teeth with oreos)

-put away washing (C "did the laundry" by putting in the machine, asked me not to touch it because "he is doing it".  I have to come downstairs to get dressed every morning as I have no clean clothes in my bedroom)

What I will actually get done:

-cuddle unhappy baby

-reassure daughter that there is enough room on my lap for her too

-referee elbowing match between children

-put everyone down while I recover from elbow to the nose

-pick up unhappy baby

-repeat

Staving off the cold

There is a fine frost over the adjacent field.  Mist shrouds the farmhouse at the end of our garden.  It is properly cold outside.

This seems to have driven us to comfort eating, apart from Miss A, who will reliably eat approximately a tablespoon of grated cheese at any given meal.  I'm not stressed - she'll eat when she's hungry.

My ultimate comfort food is a throwback to my university days - cheap, nourishing and cheerful.  I heat up a tin of black beans, drain and mix with cooked rice, coriander leaves and chopped avocado and tomatoes and I've got a little pot of remembered sunshine.  C, on the other hand favours cheese on toast.  I have baked three loaves of bread in the last two days.  Am considering buying some in as my kneading muscles are getting sore.

What are your comfort foods?  What memories do they bring to mind?

Feeding the masses

I recently started following Hattie Garlick's blog about raising kids without spending too much cash.  I love the idea of cutting out processed food aimed at kids, cutting down on the grind of continuous baby and toddler groups and enjoying each others' company more.

In general, I try to cook from scratch for just about everything.  I have even started making my own bread since I discovered that it's easy and produces something much tastier than you can buy in the supermarket (though I still think that Blackbird Bakery makes the best bread in the world, but the Northcross Road market is no longer so accessible for me).

When Itsyboo first started eating, I started to fall into a trap of cooking separately for the baby, for the toddler and for us.  There were several days that I was cooking eight different meals (Miss A ate the same breakfast as us, but from there on it got more complicated.  At that point it was pretty tempting to seek respite and start buying baby food in pouches and frozen toddler meals.

After a few weeks of this, it dawned on me that things didn't have to be so complicated.  It's embarrassing to admit this hadn't occurred to me before, but I felt locked into Annabel Karmel age-appropriate meal-planners and the idea that recipes had an age limit.  Yes, there are ingredients that shouldn't be used at certain ages (eg, salt and honey), but I could work around it.

Based on friends' recommendations, I invested in a couple of cookbooks: the River Cottage Baby and Toddler Cookbook and Fay's Family Food.  Fay's Family Food, particularly, was surprisingly good.  I know Fay as an actress so was pretty sceptical that her cookbook would be worth buying but I use it weekly.

And I got a little creative.  I reinvented my student staples to make them nourishing meals for the whole family - I have become the master of fried rice.  I started using my slow cooker.  I put extra vegetables into everything.  And dude, I bake a lot of snacks.  Something I never thought I would say.

There are still things I have to do a bit extra to for them to be "Istyboo-ready" - pureeing or chopping.  Miss A's food often requires an even coating of grated cheese.  Sometimes she doesn't make it past the cheese layer, but I figure if she's hungry she'll eat more.

And I hardly even notice the lack of salt in my food any more.  When I cook for just C and I, I only add a tiny pinch - almost to say "look, this is not for children."

I still (tiny voice) give the kids fish fingers on Fridays so I can cook something slightly romantic to celebrate the weekend when C gets home, but I totally embrace the "no kid-specific food" philosophy.  Let's all eat like healthy grown-ups!

Soaking in it

"You put what in your hot tub?"

These are not the words I want to hear coming out of the hot tub man's mouth.  I invited him over to give me a lesson on maintaining the hot tub that we acquired with the house

The previous owners left us with a bunch of chemicals that are apparently the worst thing ever in the history of the universe.  They sneak out of the shed at night and kill dreams, that's how bad they are.  But happily this man has come to help.

So, on Monday, I will spend an hour learning to service my hot tub, after which it will be sparking clean and usuable by everyone in the house.  The dream-time puppies and kittens of Hildenborough will be safe.

And I will finally have a substitute for wine o'clock for my dry January.

2013 starts now

So here it is, the end of the holiday.  We've had a fantastic two-week staycation, getting to know the area and settling in to the house.  Most importantly, in our increased proximity over the last two weeks, we have not killed each other!

We have joined the National Trust to take advantage of our local resources - we've especially enjoyed Knole and Chartwell, which are both on our doorstep.  We have repeatedly failed to visit Hever Castle - every time we have gone it has been closed, this time until February!

We are back to our new normal tomorrow, with an all new programme of activities.  Miss A starts school nursery two mornings a week, which is so soon.  We have music, football and swimming lessons.  I am sure there is a playgroup somewhere in there too.

I shall start being Friendliest Mum on Earth.  I shall meet people locally.  It will be done.