Starting Together

Last night Mr Molar had a party in T's mouth, and he brought his friends. His friends know how to cause pain, and they don't like sleep. As a result we're like a family of zombies this morning, and all slightly sticky. Trying to administer Calpol to a wriggly screaming boy without putting on the big light or spilling any is a feat clearly beyond us. The two new teeth have poked their heads through his sore red gums this morning, and it's clearly uncomfortable to eat. In an attempt to comfort him I let him eat Pain au Chocolat for breakfast. I'm going to Mummy hell!

Thursday is usually one of my work days, but not today! This afternoon our friends B and N, whom we met through our NCT antenatal classes, are getting married. This is my sort of wedding, there will be (count em!) THIRTY babies and children there, so I probably don't have to unduly worry that T will cause chaos and I'll be given the stare of doom by the other beautifully groomed wedding guests as I try to juggle breastfeeding in my wedding frock. Later on we'll load up the car (travel cot, bed guard - he doesn't like sleeping in the travel cot any more than he likes his cot at home, so he'll obviously end up in with us at some point this evening - baby monitor, food, drinks, bibs, toys, highchair - the hotel only has 3 so we've been asked to take our own - spare clothes) and head off to celebrate the new Mr and Mrs M and the new life they're Starting Together.


I'll do my wedding report tomorrow!

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails

I wasn't surprised when my 20 week scan revealed I was having a boy. Despite having a sister, being brought up in an all-female household and having selected a name for my 'daughter' a clear 10 years before meeting a man I'd even consider allowing to become her father, as soon as that second line came up on the pregnancy test I knew we were expecting a son. We travelled to New York when I was 8 weeks pregnant, a long-booked trip for our first wedding anniversary, a break I'd have enjoyed much more without hideous morning sickness and spending much of the week knee-deep in sludge, or clambering over snow drifts baked solid at every curb. We sheltered in shops to avoid the cold, it would have been rude not to, and bought baby items that even at this early stage were obviously for a boy. In the shop at the Museum of Modern Art my husband selected a purple dragon with a rattle and mirrors, a toy that vibrated, the spines on its back lighting up when its neck was stretched away from its body. I just couldn't picture it having a female owner, so it was good that in the early hours of a September morning just over a year ago, T appeared, just as we predicted.

There are so many generalisations about boys though. When I told some people that my bump was hiding my son, they asked 'whether I'd be hoping for a girl next time'. Yes, before my first baby was even born. Whenever he cried well-meaning relatives murmered that boys are 'always difficult', and don't even get me started on the midwife who was surprised we experienced difficulties trying to establish breastfeeding because 'everyone knows men like breasts'.

If you go into a clothes store, or even browse the rails at one of the large supermarkets, you'll notice something in the boys section. Not only are all the items grey, blue or brown but there's a massive amount of camoflage and the slogans, oh the slogans! I'm A Little Monkey, I'm Little But Loud, I Don't Want Anything Except My Own Way, Naughty But Nice. What hope do little boys have to be anything else if this is the message on their chests? And it works, everyone had an opinion on boys and how, in some small way, they're not quite as good as girls. One of the workers at the local Children's Centre told me their play room is closed to all over-4s because 'although the girls are still happy to come and play, by this age the boys just run around breaking things and hitting each other'. I realise it is just as preposterous to lump all little girls in the 'well behaved' category, but at least their generalisation is a positive one. Faced with expectations that he'll be a 'little terror' how could T fail to be anything else? Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

This is an issue I might have a teensy bee in my bonnet about, as you might have noticed. Luckily, T is still obliging my peccadillo. He doesn't mind that his clothes are definitely of the plain primary coloured variety, or even that when I noticed Next were selling a pink jumper in their baby boys' section, I immediately snapped one up for him. My husband is worried I am trying to 'emasculate' T though, and trying to 'turn him into a girl', or even worse 'gay'. Once I had picked myself up from the floor and expressed shock that I had managed to marry anyone quite so ignorant, I did reassure him that a pink jumper didn't immediately indicate he wouldn't one day be a grandfather in the traditional way. When I suggested we buy T a toy buggy to push along, based on the fact he loves the one at the Children's Centre, and indeed using his own buggy as a walker, he refused point blank as buggies are 'for girls'. During last weekend's mammoth trip to the Trafford Centre though, and seeing his son's look of glee when he got his hands on a mini pushchair and took a toy car for a walk around the Early Learning Centre, he relented. Agreeing that perhaps, just a little bit, I might have been right. Being a good wife of course I seized on this admission of guilt and ran with it, managing to bag T a toy washing machine too, based on how much he loves the real one, previously something else that would have been out of bounds as a 'girls toy'.

I'm painting my husband as a real neanderthal here, but he's genuinely not. He does do the washing, using the machine, and I assume one day he'll show T how to put his own clothes in there and magically make them clean. I just really believe that the line that 'divides' boys and girls, blue and pink, dinosaurs and fairies, is so deeply entrenched it can take real effort to step back and see that actually, it's not a real line, just one hovering in the air, imagined by people who probably don't have a lot of imagination! Our friend Lily, two, loves T's purple vibrating dinosaur, and her mum has requested Thomas the Tank Engine presents for her birthday. The three year old twin boys we know have a beautiful wooden toy kitchen, and spend hours making their mum cups of 'tea' as she reclines on the sofa (well, as much as you can sit down at all when you have three year old boys to keep an eye on).

The pushchair and washer have been sent to the attic until Christmas. I can't wait to get them out!

The Big Draw

I'm a firm believer in use it or lose it. I realise how amazingly lucky I am to be bringing up my son in such a fantastic cosmopolitan city, full of wonderful things to see and do and magical places to go to, many of which are completely free. Despite comments from friends and family that I spend more time out and about than at home, I'm not hanging up my pram wheels just yet, especially not when there's so much fun to be had!

We've been to the Manchester Art Gallery today for their Big Draw event, aimed at engaging families and their littlies with drawing. T was nonplussed as we walked through town, mainly because we'd forgotten the raincover for the pushchair (although he was wearing an anorak) and the drizzle was persistent. He was still sulking as we carried him up the front steps (there is a ramp but my husband refused to walk the extra distance!) and collected our map from the main entrance.

He perked up a little as we passed through the shop into the wide bright museum atrium and spotted attraction one though, fluorescent face paint. There was a big sign reassuring parents it was non-toxic. I'm not sure exactly how they make non-toxic luminous pink, yellow and lurid green paint, they're not exactly colours from nature, but my curiosity didn't stop me handing T a brush and allowing him to attack his own face, using another toddler as a 'mirror' to see what to do. Much splodging later, and whilst I celebrated the fact he'd managed to avoid his eyes although obviously not his mouth, my husband declared the resulting decoration 'made T look stupid' and demanded we baby wipe it off to be replaced by a design of his own choosing (!!) Cue a pink tiger (they'd run out of orange paint by this point, so long had we been applying, scrubbing and debating how to reapply) who seemed much cheered.

We went through the atrium to the disco room, where T was given a glow stick and crawled around surrounded by disco lights to music I remember I wasn't cool enough for in my youth. From there into the shadow room, plastered from floor to ceiling in white paper, with piles of pencils and Berol felt-tipped pens all over the floor for children to use as they wished. T wouldn't sit still long enough to have his hand drawn round, but he did find a tasty purple marker and seemed content to suck it for a while whilst I exchanged harrassed glances with other parents and expressed relief that he probably wasn't old enough to want to replicate the 'drawing on the walls' experience at home!

The giant cardboard maze, also available for colouring-in, was being hastily mended by a member of staff wielding a giant roll of parcel tape as we played. Over excited toddlers scrapping over the last few inches of virgin card had pulled sections to the ground. T's latest 'trick' is to roar like a lion. Or a tiger. Or an elephant or hippo (the other animals in his set). Clearly authenticity isn't his strong point. My husband tried to attract his interest by drawing a giraffe on one wall. Half way through I asked why he was carefully outlining an offshore oil rig. Look at the purple thing in the middle of this pic. Those were legs apparently. T was also confused by it obviously as he didn't even attempt to roar.



We rounded off a succesful afternoon by completely failing to buy 'only the essentials' at Sainsbury's and having a nap on the way home (T). He went to bed happily at 6.55 pm, which doesn't bode well for a settled night. Tomorrow we're back at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital to see the specialist about his nose (more to follow). I'm not sure what he'll make of the purple streaks under his chin, in his hair, down the side of his nose and in one ear. Apparently non-toxic bright pink tiger paint washes off. Felt pen does not.

Congestion

I know most of what Alanis Morissette sang about was just bloody annoying rather than ironic (black fly in your chardonnay, anyone?) but that's the thing about irony, most of the time you don't sit there, smirking to yourself about how incongruous it all is, you start to seethe, frustrated by the whole 'just not right'-ness of it all, and the desire to just get out of the situation and on with something else. This was me yesterday, sitting in the World's Worst Traffic Jam.

I'm not one for hyperbole (honest!) and believe me, I'm used to jams, much of my daily Manchester to Leeds commute being one long one. This was something else though. Around 3 pm, my husband turned to me and muttered the immortal words 'shall we just nip to the Trafford Centre?'

Ah, well, let me tell you there was no nipping involved. First it was raining, and everyone knows it's impossible to drive well in the rain. Then the M60, problems around Bolton meant a 30 minute delay. We took a short-cut, a scenic tour around Swinton and Eccles before cutting through to Trafford Park, the wide open roads and generous roundabouts free of their usual HGV traffic. Then we stopped. And stopped. And stopped some more. And just when we thought we might move, just a little, just a few yards, yup, we stopped again.

The irony I mentioned? That would be Peel Holdings' 'No' campaign, urging us Greater Manchester residents to vote against the Congestion Charge, part of the city's bid to the government's Transport Improvement Fund and subject of an upcoming referendum. Yes, there we were, stationary, in a giant traffic jam, the very definition of congestion, surrounded by little black signs urging us, cajoling us to vote against the proposal when our ballot papers drop through the door.

I know of course that the CC wouldn't do anything about Trafford Centre traffic on a Saturday evening. Charges would only apply during peak times, and in the run-up to Christmas routes surrounding the North West's own shopping mecca have always been packed solid. It was the placing of the signs, the way in which I noticed them, which caused me to raise a wry smile.

Actually, I lie. There was no smiling involved, my husband and I were doing what all good couples do in such situations, blaming each other for the decision to come, shouting at missed opportunities to change lanes and perhaps be in with the chance of moving a couple of car lengths, sulking and trying to distract the baby from screaming one of the windows out.

In other toast spread news (jam, geddit, do you see what I did there?!) I am now outnumbered two to one. T loves Marmite, the food of the devil also so beloved by my husband. I can smell it now, and see it sticking to the knife, leaving trails all over the chopping board. Ewwww, I'm definitely a hater!

Bring me sunshine ....

Given our experience with the World's Coldest Picnic a couple of weeks ago, I was understandably nervous when my Mum suggested we go to Morecambe for a day out whilst she's on half term. Still, never one to turn down an adventure, I dressed both T and I in lots of layers and packed hats, scarves and gloves for both. As an aside, getting a toddler to wear gloves (well, in this case it's mittens) is blimmin hard work, he just doesn't get putting his fingers in one section and his thumb in the other, and bites them off as soon as possible. I need to craft some sort of 'through the back of his coat' string contraption so he doesn't lose them.

Anyway, we parked up and walked to the beautiful art deco Midland Hotel an iceberg of loveliness in a sea of boarded up tea-shops and long gone seafront thrill rides. T was entranced by the shiny shiny floor in the lobby, complete with original seahorse mosaic, which he sat on, poking the jewel-like pieces with his fingers, trying to pull them up to suck. Shiny tastes so wonderful! Not as wonderful as proper chips cooked in dripping though, evidently. We went to the Rotunda, the hotel bar which serves food, based on our asessment that lunch in the restaurant would bankrupt us. We picked a table by the panoramic glass windows overlooking the bay - don't look too far to the right, that boarded up tea-shop really spoils the view ;-) We ordered Lancastrian Tapas, a posh way of saying ploughman's lunch, and T was beyond excited with the ham, sausage, pie (it was a bit of a pork fest!) and local goats cheese which arrived on a big wooden board. And those chips of course. Once he'd eaten his fill he spent the next half an hour with his nose pressed up to that glass, steaming lip-shaped marks onto the view of the bay, but it kept him quiet and the staff didn't seem to mind.

Stuffed full of lunch we walked along the front, following a trail of bird art, part of the Tern Project. T fell asleep of course, buried in his coat up to his eyebrows, with only an inch or so of head exposed to the elements. It was a good job, although the sun shone the wind was biting. His nap allowed Mum and I to explore an Aladdin's Cave second-hand bookshop and have a good gossip as we walked the mile or so to what was once a beautiful Victorian pier, and which now only exists in paint form on the sign of the pub (The Pier, of course) on the other side of the prom, and back. Even Eric Morecambe, mid song, couldn't rouse a sleeping babe.


Standing on the seafront, we could see the little houses of Grange over Sands on the Cumbrian coast across the bay (well, obviously the houses themselves aren't small. I wrote that with the Father Ted sketch playing in my head 'Dougal, these cows are small ...') and it almost looked as if, at a fair pace, you could walk there.

On the way back to the car I looked up. Not at the blue sky, clouds scudding past at a rate of knots, but at the tops of the buildings. Above Woolworth's, what was obviously once a cinema, a triumph of art deco. Above the arcades, more beautiful facades, rich in detail and colour. Almost more beautiful because you have to look that little bit harder for them.

Number Two

This is not a post about poo. It could be though, I seem to have become, in the last 13 months, some sort of poo expert. A poospert maybe? I always swore I wouldn't be one of those mothers who discussed their offspring's erm, outputs, as casually in company as what was on TV last night, but it's almost as if once the baby arrives, the ability to talk about it in all sorts of social situations is aquired by osmosis, and before you know it you're sitting on the sofa in your boss's office talking about having to cut off a vest because the nappy leaked and poo reached your son's neck.

I think as a cloth nappy user I am probably faced with rather more poo than I would be if I just had to remove a dirty nappy, wrap it and put it in the bin. Flicking the disposable liners into the loo isn't hard work, believe me we'd be in Pampers if it were, but I baulk at putting fully formed toddler poo in my washing machine, and sometimes the liner shifts or just doesn't quite hold it all in, meaning I have to get a bit nearer than perhaps I would like to! Still, it's a fascinating insight into the human digestive system. Recognising what's gone in and how it's come out, only possible because lots of things seem not to touch the side. A friend swears she once found a whole grape in her son's nappy. Not squashed, not just the skin but as if it had been picked from the bunch and placed there. Once that would have disgusted me, but now it's become an anecdote I tell to anyone within earshot. That poo osmosis again!

Anyway, I said this was not a post about poo and in my anxiety not to talk about it I seem to have talked about nothing else!

Actually number two refers to our plans for (eeeek!) a second baby. I'd always assumed I'd like a two year age gap, the difference between my sister and I. I don't know why this seems so appealing, for a number of years we did nothing but pull each others hair and steal each others toys, but still my husband and I have discussed 'thinking about it' after Christmas. I'm not sure I'm ready for a second baby, how could I love anything, anyone as much as I love T? I'd have to give birth again. I'm still breastfeeding, would T have given up by then, would I end up tandem feeding? Can you even get pregnant whilst breastfeeding (I know the answer to this question is yes by the way, I just don't know how it might affect my fertility). Can I cope with more sleepless nights? OK, T doesn't sleep through, but still, a toddler waking in the night is very different to a newborn waking every 2 hours to feed for 45 minutes! But I'd love another year of maternity leave, and have lots of beautifully folded tiny baby clothes, worn just once or twice in most cases, just crying out for a new owner. Thinking about it is taking up more and more of my time, it's always at the back of my mind, that longing for the 'my secret' feeling which came from carrying a tiny bundle of cells, nuzzling in and growing and changing in the first few weeks of pregnancy.

How you go about getting pregnant when you share your bed with a wakeful toddler though I have no idea.

Poorly boys

Both of the male members of the household are poorly tonight. T has been ill on and off for a couple of weeks now, a chest infection, tonsilitis, stinky cold and teething thrown in and it's obviously caught up with him. During his bath with Daddy T snuggled into his tummy, closed his eyes and started to snore. You know it's serious when even the beloved Teletubby Bath Island, its inhabitants carried around the house, can't rescue him from the land of nod. A quick dry and feed and he went straight to sleep. At 6.45 pm. This is unheard of. I have no idea what sort of night awaits me. I'm taking bets on him waking up at 10.30 pm, just as I go to bed (it's a school night you know) and refusing to go back to sleep, or having his usual disturbed night but rousing for the day at 4.30 am.

My husband has a dicky tummy. It must be bad as not only has he gone to bed with T, he's called in sick for tomorrow. Having an anti-social job, starting his day a clear couple of hours before most people's alarms go off, he doesn't have the luxury of being able to wake up and pull a sickie. Sometimes this works in his advantage, having been at death's door at 7 pm but much better the following morning once his shift has already been covered. Being much more conscientious than I however, in those circumstances he'd usually rock in anyway, providing an extra pair of hands. Sickening eh?

So left alone since 6.50 pm, I have no idea what to do with myself! Where is the little hand pulling the charger out of the Macbook ('don't put that in your mouth!') or the person arguing that he wants to watch the football rather than last nights Lipstick Jungle on Sky+? In the circumstances I have gone for the only options available to me. Eating a whole tube of stinky cheese and onion Pringles, internet shopping (the husband would have vetoed the cute dinosaur bobble hat, even if it is for T rather than him!) and that old episode of Property Ladder on More4. You know the one, where the sisters go haywire and spend thousands on a pastel kitchen and extortionate psychedelic tiles for the downstairs loo in the gorgeous Art Deco house? Brilliant!